Music Arcades: Indigo Moss: Indigo Moss

We love Indigo Moss in this house. Or should that be loved? When we moved to East Dulwich, I thought we were coming to a cultural desert (I don't count organic food as culture), but in our very first week here Guy and Annie took me off to Andy Hankdog's regular Easycome night at The Ivy House — a great stage that it's rumoured The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd played in their early days. No one can find any evidence of that, but it's beyond reasonable doubt that Ian Dury, Dr Feelgood and Elvis Costello played there. Here's Indigo Moss on that very stage (plus Andy Hankdog in his usual hat).

The first few acts were kind of OK, and you could still enjoy a cigarette in a pub then. Indigo Moss's performance was one of those that keeps going up a gear, starting in that "kind of OK" vein, then really quite good, and finally, blimey, my new favourite band! Guy and I went and found Hannah-Lou, of the band, immediately afterwards and bought a CD each. The album had been out less than ten days. I never saw them play as a full five-piece band again.

I did see them four more times, though. I told Lucy she'd like them, but I had no idea how I right I would turn out to be. She saw them first at the Museum of Garden History in July. I think she bought her own copy of the CD then — but this wasn't a hint (like Patti Smith's Land) that our collections might no longer be colocated; this was patronage to show support for the band. You can see some of the pictures I took of their performance at 2007's Green Man Festival in the Flickr collection.

It looked for a while that Indigo Moss might pick up the mantle that The Eighteenth Day of May had dropped by splitting at the start of 2007. Indigo Moss were by no means a carbon copy, but each of the two bands were playing around with folk rock traditions that had a bit of both sides of the Atlantic in them.

Then in 2008, as you've anticipated by now, Indigo Moss followed very directly in the footsteps of The Eighteenth Day of May by announcing their split on their MySpace: "we had reached an energy sapping impasse with factors outside the band".

Front man Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou have continued since, billed as… Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou. Lucy has their album, and she likes it, but doesn't feel it's up to the standard of this album. From the handful of listens I've given it, I agree.

Meanwhile, aside from the remarkable oases of a couple of visits by Alasdair Roberts and a few others to The Goose is Out, desertification continues. There's no one left to romanticise Forest Hill Road like this any more.