London. Oooooh. The big city. The centre of everything. They’ve got everything there, haven’t they? Well, no. They haven’t got the vibrancy of a music scene like we’ve got here in rural little backwater Oxford. That’s why Minor Coles member Mark Stephenson is kicking off a series of gigs in London, with the plan to expose some of Oxford’s music to our friends down the M40.

Oxford Aboard The Good Ship, as the gigs will be known, start on 9 December at Kilburn’s The Good Ship venue, with a most excellent line-up of We Aeronauts, Minor Coles, King Of Cats and Dead Jerichos. The gig only costs four pounds, which is anybody who knows London will tell you, is less than the cost of a flat white in that town. (Or indeed, whatever coffee-based fad is currently gripping the London coffeeklatch at present).

There’s something of a national eye pointing at Oxford at the moment, not least because of the NME-fuelled ‘buzz’ surrounding the shadowy Blessing Force cult/movement/labradoodle – Pet Moon, Jonquil et al. But as Mark Stephenson puts it, even in such a climate “it’s not enough to just sit on your hands and hope someone comes to you. It’s good for us to go out there ourselves.” Referencing the iffy nature of many London gigs that get offered to up-and-coming-bands, he goes on: “It’s also a rejection of pay-to-play promoters in London. We don’t seem to have that in Oxford, which is great (probably because it’s not as expensive to book a place). There are a lot of great promoters in London, but a fair number of cut-throat ones, who like to load the risk onto young, poor bands. So if you’re fed up of them, then why not show them that we don’t need them, we can do things ourselves.”

All sounds like a good plan, no? What do you think – can Oxford kick London’s skinny-jean-clad ass?