Standing Where The Point Used to Be

I am standing on Mount Stuart Square, about five hundred yards from the waters of Cardiff Bay. It is a warm and sunny April evening - the busiest part of the day is over, and aside from a few stray pedestrians and the odd seagull, the street is more or less deserted.

Before me looms the spire of St Stephen's, a Gothic-style church and Grade II listed building that has stood on this corner for more than a hundred years. Back in the noughties, this place was a 500-capacity music venue called The Point; I can still remember spilling out onto this very pavement, exhausted and ecstatic, in the middle of a sticky August night in 2006. Broken Social Scene had just finished a gargantuan two-hour set, plus multiple encores, and I (a shaggy-haired GCSE student, just barely fifteen years old) had been in the thick of the crowd for the whole thing, jumping around and sweating buckets and shouting for them to play I'm Still Your Fag. That show at The Point remains one of the best gigs I've ever attended - The Rolling Stones were also in town that night for a concert at the Millennium Stadium, and I must say that I feel a little sorry for the thousands of people who spent the evening with Keith and Mick instead of with Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning and goodness knows how many others.

The First Time Ever I Saw Los Camps!

One of the best gigs I ever went to was the time Broken Social Scene played at The Point, a former church in Cardiff Bay that was one of the city's best venues back in 2006 but - infuriatingly - has since been closed down due to noise complaints from the neighbours.

Broken Social Scene are a phenomenal live act. It's rare to attend a sold-out show and see the stage as crowded with people as the dancefloor itself, but it wasn't just a case of strength in numbers: every person on that stage was giving it their all, creating a euphoric racket that we in the audience didn't tire of even after a marathon two-hour set plus encores.

But I'm not here today to talk about Broken Social Scene, or their two relentlessly awesome drummers, or how pleased I was when I and the guy next to me simultaneously shouted for I'm Still Your Fag and they actually played it. I'm here today to talk about the support act who kicked off that magical night at The Point.

Little My's Last Beeps

For a brief period in the mid-to-late noughties, it seemed like the surest route to indie acclaim was simply to form a band consisting of as many members as you could find. Groups like Los Campesinos! (7 people), Architecture in Helsinki (8 people), and Broken Social Scene (goodness knows) proved that more sometimes is better, with albums like Hold on Now, Youngster... and In Case We Die racking up high scores with the likes of Pitchfork, Stylus et al.

My experiences with these artists (all of whom are still active, although both AiH and Los Camps have fewer members nowadays so perhaps there's been a bit of streamlining in recent years) could be mapped into a kind of family tree: I first discovered Los Campesinos! when they supported Broken Social Scene at The Point in Cardiff, and in turn, it was a support slot at a Los Camps show that first brought Little My to my attention. They were another band with a larger-than-average list of members; according to their Wikipedia entry, Little My consisted of "nine core members, with up to 21 additional satellite members at any given performance". In fact, it wasn't so much a band as it was a collective of musically-inclined people from around Cardiff, kind of like the Welsh capital's very own answer to Broken Social Scene.

'But Joel,' I hear you cry, 'why are you referring to Little My in the past tense? Didn't they release a new album, like, less than a month ago?'

They did indeed, reader - it's called Beeps. and that's the album cover up there. Here's one of its tracks, entitled It Was Christmas When I Fell Apart: