Credit: voltom

In retrospect it seems so obvious. It started as a text message telling fans to be at Tottenham Court Road tube station for 2pm. Then another, telling them to go to the Moon & sixpence pub on Wardour Street and wait for further instructions.

Except the Moon & Sixpence was sold, refurbished and re-named as the Nanobite Bar. No matter, we act the journalist – we should be good at investigating.

The new album is called “Ten New Messages”. They’re gonna lead us to the final venue with ten text messages. Of course, at the time this was too oblique – or we just were too drunk from hours on the sauce - for Music Towers, who got on with the task of a seven-hour pub crawl in the face of this bad text-message research.

It’s gone full-circle. One of my “audition” pieces for Music Towers was a review of a secret Rakes gig in a kebab shop in Dalston. A year later, and the final location for their secret album launch at another tiny venue, The Social. It’s harder to imagine a narrower venue – it squeezes the fans into a narrow fissure that’s as if we’re the filling inside an indie-rock cream icing blower. Styled with drainpipe jeans on.

But when the band bursts open with “On a Mission”, all is forgiven. It’s the weekend, we’ve been in the pub all day (a basis for a Rakes song if ever there was one) and forgetting all the stress and misery of London weekdays is why we’re here. A hundred pairs of arms reach for the ceiling and people start to dance like there’s a competition to see who can pour the most sweat out of their shoes after sixty minutes.