Like many men of his age and persuasion, Darren's earliest years were soundtracked by the electropop of the Pet Shop Boys, Erasure and Depeche Mode; and he maintains a passion for all things bleepy to this day. His teenage years were spent studiously avoiding the grubby inelegancies of baggy and grunge, obsessing instead over squeaky-clean oddballs like Talking Heads, Kraftwerk and Devo. Through fair weather and foul, his greatest musical love is The Fall. Although the quality of their recent output makes this position largely untenable, he's in for the long haul. The highlight of this masochistic odyssey may or may not have been holding a very confusing conversation with Mark E Smith next to - and about - a portable air conditioning unit. Inexorably drawn to curmudgeonly old gits, he patches up any lulls in the quality of current releases by defaulting back to the grumpy comforts of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and Steely Dan. And Scott Walker: anyone who uses meat as a percussion instrument and sings about punching donkeys on the streets of Galway deserves to be taken very seriously indeed, he believes. Thankfully, though, he finds there's quite a lot to be excited about right now. Current squeezes include These New Puritans, Foals, Joanna Newsom, and the miraculous recent renaissance of Sparks. In his remaining spare time, Darren makes stained glass windows, and is waiting for Chartres cathedral to have a re-think and commission one of his funny designs.

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