Credit: Found On Internet

Cut from the grey, mediocre East Midlands cloth of which I am also born, the band have enrobed themselves in a fantastic fabric of musical technicolour.

Take the London leg of their headline Levi’s Ones To Watch tour for example. In the midst of a hot-and-bothered Barfly, the band plonked a Maypole and urged bemused gig-goers to pick up ribbons and dance around it, while they conjured a fizzy brew of psychedelic electro-pop.

“A noble effort, you could be pagans yet,” keyboardist Sam Potter bellowed at the crowd. I stood, pressed against the back wall, away from the dizzying mayhem. What on earth was going on?

“Our gigs can be confusing,” admits singer Sam Eastlake. “But it’s like when you meet someone for the first time, you never really understand them straight away, it takes a long time to get used to who they are.

“We are quite unorthodox on stage but we want people to be intrigued and to want more.

“All of us are so detached from whatever normal bands are. The idea of being rock n’ roll is so bewildering. I don’t know if that makes us more cool or less cool - it might just make us really geeky.”

Geeks or not, Late Of The Pier – the two Sams, along with Andrew Faley and Ross Dawson - are a band of fascinating contradictions; nostalgic forward-thinkers, homespun adventurers and sound visionaries, who are on a mission to tear apart and save the music industry too.

The band grew up in Donington, home of the Monsters of Rock festival, and trundled off to school together in the commuterville backwater of my own East Midlands hometown. But rather than run far, far away to the bright lights at the first opportunity, Late Of The Pier stayed put, setting up a ramshackle house near Nottingham as their musical hub.

“There's this weird thing about the East Midlands where it's perceived to be a very middleish,” says Sam. “But we can't really find a fault with the place.