I have a spare ticket for the John Grant/Midlake show at the Festival Hall on 7th Sept - available at face value (£15) for anyone who wants it. You will have to sit next to me but that aside it should be a great night.

Reply to this message if you're interested and I'll try to work out some means of getting in touch direct.

And I don't mean just the first track. I mean the first three tracks - bang, bang, bang - each one superb.

Purely by chance the last three albums I played were:

John Grant's Queen of Denmark
Dare by The Human League
The first Stone Roses album

Each one has a trio of opening tracks -

TC & Honeybear, I Wanna Go To Marz, Where the Dreams Go To Die
The Things That Dreams Are Made Of, Open Your Heart, The Sound Of The Crowd
I Wanna Be Adored, She Bangs The Drums, Waterfall

- that make you wonder if there's any point in listening to the rest of the album as things can only go downhill (although to be fair each record makes a noble effort to sustain the early brilliance).

What other albums start with three stone-cold classics (I'm not counting greatest hits)?

Apologies for dragging the debate away from the Brits and back to the occasionally fertile land of football, but I have just read this and couldn't let it pass.

'Sepp Blatter is allowed to move through airports with no need to show a passport or for any of the usual customs and immigration procedures to apply, a privilege he shares only with the UN secretary-general.'

And people say the world of football has lost touch with reality...