So goodbye 2002, Wasn’t it good? We’ll have to wait a few months to find out, but maybe by summer we’ll be having a 2002 revival and be pulling out our Polyphonic Spree, Datsuns, Interpol and Thrills CDs and casting our minds back to a time when Jamie Theakston, Ulrika Jonsson, Edwina Currie and Angus Deayton were spread across the newspapers like the seeping goo spreading from the gaping would left in a queen bee after a vicious probing attack from a beetle.

Years ago a bloke called David Quantick suggested that one day pop would eat itself and it seems it probably has. Watch the telly and it will appear as if we are all living in a musical Groundhog Day. Postmodernism, in Sandman’s eyes, is simply the moment when we go fuck it, it’s all been done before; why even bother believing we can do anything new? And, to an extent, we’re right. Everything has been done before. So fuck it, let’s stop right here. It would be crap if we really thought that, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t bother, so we wouldn’t bother. There’s always something – not new necessarily – but new to us.

We’re waving goodbye to the office we’ve been squatting in and moving in to an office which has a sofa, plentiful biscuits and lots of nice people to talk to. This will make a change because it can get bit lonely and isolated banging this thing out surrounded by demos and coffee cups. Maybe some company will bring us out of ourselves and we’ll become better socially adjusted. In which case we’ll stop doing this and go and get real jobs. Ones where they pay you.

We’re gigged out at the moment. One Sandman last month saw: Loscoe State Opera, Mouse, The Water Monkeys, Pink Grease, Idlewild (lucky the Foundry and the Octagon are so close), Champion Kickboxer, Rough Kutz, Catch-it Kebabs, Chicken Legs Weaver, Tegi Roberts, Justin Lewis, Beachbuggy, Texas Pete, roughly half of AUTO, Mike Sanchez, The Lollies Half Devoured and Harvey. Between the whole Sandman crew we caught about 80% of all the gigs in the city. This means, at some point, we’ll catch up with you and write about whatever you are up to.

Good Things: AUTO, of course. Chicken Legs Weaver’s own beer at their own gig. An NME photographer turning up at a Rumpus gig (they really are very good you know). The Invisible Spies.

Bad Things: Fruit beer at AUTO. The sort of snotty colds that leave you wondering how much gunky fluid the head can hold. Live autopsy on telly (what the fuck?). Only 20 pages of Sandman. Bloody Christmas.

G’night.