Londoners The Faculty were played on Alan McGee’s Radio 1 show at the end of last year and he compared them to The Sound, “the missing link between Joy Division and Echo And The Bunnymen,” I was helpfully informed. (In a very strange set of coincidences, one chap asked me last night for no apparent reason, “have you heard of The Sound?”).

There’s less of the Joy Division experimentation here and more moments prone to dropping in spiky Will Sergeant guitar lines, not too far from the Bunnymen’s ‘All That Jazz’, for example. DiS even detects – gasp! – bits of early Simple Minds. There are a few songs which either start off promisingly then suddenly finish, or there are a few instrumental sections which sound like half-ideas slotted in as filler material. And it’s this which is The Faculty’s particular stumbling block at the moment. Perhaps they could spend less time doing the toilet circuit and more time in the rehearsal room for a few months.

They definitely have it in them to develop what they’ve got. ‘Sombre Honeymoon’ is a brooding, tremolo-laden beast just waiting to be worked on in the studio (ex-Only Ones bassist Alan Mair is keen to produce it for them). Whether it’ll remain as stripped down as it was live, or given The Stills 40-guitar-tracks treatment remains to be seen (it’ll probably sound great either way), but DiS will be watching this lot with keen interest.