I’M JUST back from a wonderful mini tour of the north (well, Yorkshire and Stockport) with my band Barnstormer 1649 and hand-picked supports Blyth Power and Indignation Meeting, celebrating Barnstormer’s 30th anniversary.
 
I have loved Blyth Power’s, lyrical, history-sodden songs for more than 40 years and waxed lyrical about them in these pages many times. They were absolutely brilliant on this tour and I was proud to join them on violin for a few songs, as I have done more or less from the start of our long musical friendship.
 
Recently I’ve become very fond of Indignation Meeting
 too. Ancient readers familiar with crap American ’70s pop TV programmes may understand the comparison if I say they’re the UK’s answer to the Partridge Family, only about a hundred million times more listenable.

Their David Cassidy is a 15-year-old punky singer/drummer/songwriter called Peter, an astonishing talent who somehow also manages to play the trumpet while keeping time on the kit. Dad Michael plays guitar, mum Sally and sister Heather provide backing vocals and Hugo, Joseph and Annie from Blyth Power’s teenage son, is on bass.
 
Indignation Meeting’s melodies are catchy and powerful, their live show hugely entertaining and nearly all Peter’s lyrics are about trains, train tracks and train numbers. Astonishingly, it works. Peter is the John Wesley of trainspotting, a youthful messianic genius whose passionate advocacy transforms what is surely the very definition of an utterly pointless waste of time into a quasi-religious quest for numerical Nirvana.