Tonight’s event was another of Matt Chapman’s ‘Tertium Quid’ nights. This time it was billed as a ‘Night of Eclectic Music’. Matt is a friendly man who can be found in Truck Store on the Cowley Road during the day. Seek him out and ask him for advice on guitar pedals. He KNOWS.

Jordan O’Shea is a singer-songwriter who performs mellow/dark music in a high voice. It’s not really my cup of tea. There are lots of nice people who like his stuff, though, so what do I know?

Toliesel were tight; I would say they’re probably the kings of soft-rock in Oxford at the moment. That may sound like an insult, but it was meant kindly. The dude with the Les Paul was cracking out some insanely smooth Clapton-esque licks, which I appreciated in an objective way; I sit firmly in the Steve Albini/Glenn Branca/Lee Ranaldo camp of guitar soloing. The band had a couple of good noisy moments as well, with everyone hacking away at their instruments almost as hard as they could.

There was a fairly decent crowd by this point. As well as the usual rag-tag assortment of older dudes in band shirts, mates, music fans and heroin addicts, the crowd included a few disgruntled Japanese teenagers. Apparently they’d flown all the way from Nagasaki hoping to see Tulisa.

I really dug the sound of The Diamond Family Archive. Frenetic, all-over-the-kit drumming, meaty bass and layered, intricate-sounding guitar. They all had beards, too, which is pretty awesome. The drummer also made good use of a horribly bent cymbal. Sadly, I think the vocals were a bit weak. They sounded a lot better when the drummer (beard rating: 2/5) and vocalist/guitarist (beard rating: 6/5) were singing together. During a short chat with the band (while having a cigarette outside) they told me about their enormous back catalogue: they’ve self-released a mental number of albums – something like six a year. Despite this, their set was a little same-y, although the instrumental stuff was sa-weet.