Saturday 5 September

The Lively Postcards make their Manchester debut at Oldham Street’s 24 Hour Protection Bar. The eagle-eyed reader, coincidentally blessed with an elephant’s memory and a lonely moose’s lack of anything better to fill one’s head with, will recall my dreams of music management, and their beginnings at the Periscope’s end of season shindig. Barton’s band have a new promoter tonight and while the venue is infamous I can’t help feeling he could have promoted the evening a little better and, once onstage, given them at least some promotional candlelight with which to highlight their obvious talents. Luckily, the assembled friends do a good job of generating their own primitive electricity; that lustfully directed at Postcard’s singer Tobias Wolfhead of a less superior type than that crackling between Sally and I, I like to think. Which makes it all the harder to explain that she is required to attend at least one date with the notorious Byron Badger (to whose lair I must thereby gain access or risk the wrath of my Russian master, here downing margaritas at the bar). Still dealing with a world so recently defrosted it is lucky your dapper narrator is keeping up with such well-worn narrative threads…