There is not one band, no solitary collection of hirsute blokes or decorous girls, doing anything as remotely rock'n'roll as the students on the streets of London right now. If Joe Strummer was still with us (God rest his soul), he'd be on BBC News 24 cheering with a Telecaster slung around his neck.

What's happening today is the Elvis-debut-album of protests. It is Paul Simonon smashing that bass. I hope to God we've got Pennie Smith types on the streets grabbing the iconic shots to record it.

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“I like that Ellie Goulding song,” my mother said to me today. Now this should have come as a surprise – my mother’s musical tastes extend as far as Take That and Rod Stewart – but in exasperating reality, it wasn’t.

Of course my mother has heard of Ellie Goulding. And not due to the hype surrounding her at the end of last year, or her winning the BBC Sound of 2010 and this year’s BRITs Critics' Choice. Nope, it’s down to her cover of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ which has climbed steadily toward the top of the charts (at time of writing it was number 2) and been slapped on a John Lewis advert, to batter our subconscious in every ad break on the run up to Christmas.

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Don’t get me wrong, I love the internet, but when Hype Machine declares an MP3 “dead” after 72 hours on the interweb and whole PR campaigns are planned around getting on that wretched BBC Sound Of 2011 list, it’s hard to find trace of anyone planning for bands with a shelf life longer than Altered Zones’ attention span.

It’s a disheartening thought, especially when you think about the slow-burning acts that might have missed their chance had they come to the fore now – take The National. They’ve been going for over eleven years, but it’s only this year, with their fifth album, that they’ve truly started getting the kind of praise they deserve.

They’re presently in the middle of a sold-out UK jaunt that calls in Manchester tomorrow, Glasgow on Saturday and culminates in three sold-out nights at Brixton early next week.

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For those of us who were unlucky not to be at the Reading and Leeds Festivals this year, next week can’t come soon enough. After their triumphant, euphoric headline sets at those events (which this writer watched, fighting back tears of utter frustration, via the BBC’s red button), Arcade Fire will arrive on these shores for their first extensive UK tour since the winter of 2007.

Although the 'Neon Bible’ shows back then were great, they were slightly gloomy and, like the album, gave off an air of edgy uncertainty rather than joyous celebration. This year’s multiple chart-topper 'The Suburbs’ saw the band swap the apocalyptic for the personal, nightmare for nostalgia.

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I hate to pooh-pooh the artistic process, but you’ve got to raise a quizzical eyebrow when a successful band puts a casting notice on Craigslist, calling for extras who are "unattractive," "rough around the edges", and even "a little slow,” for a video set in “a dockside bar in New England, where life has been hard.”

How hard? This hard: “scars, pockmarked skin, physical abnormalities or deformities are welcomed!!!!”

I dunno about you, but those exclamation marks frighten me. Can you imagine what facial expression is represented by four exclamation marks? It’d look like someone has grabbed a fistful of skin at the back of your head and yanked hard. Coincidentally, that’s exactly what I’d like to do to the person who wrote that ad.

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With Suede and Pulp gigging again, there are very few bands left to jump on the reformation bandwagon (though it seems Morrissey would rather eat bleeding sirloin than play with Johnny Marr again). But while those shows have whipped up some serious anticipation, not everyone's so happy about bands revisiting past glories.

Just look at Smashing Pumpkins’ frontman Billy Corgan. For a change it’s not his own fans or apparently inept bandmates who are at the receiving end of the smooth-headed, frock-wearing one’s vitriol, but newly reformed US alt-wonkers Pavement.

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