Courtney Marie Andrews Nowhere Man and a Whiskey Girl (Phoenix, Arizona) They were an eccentric duo from Arizona, and they travelled around in a beat-up station wagon – I ended up playing shows with them a lot in my teens. I was about 15 when I first saw them. Amy Ross could hear a song on the radio while they drove to the show and play it that night – she had an incredible ear for songs. They were spontaneous and playful and serious and there was a real humanity to them that resonated with me. They didn’t have much besides acoustic guitars and a piano but the way they could play with so little was really inspiring to me. I must have seen them 20 or 30 times. Luckily, in Phoenix there was a great DIY scene and so it was pretty easy to see live shows – there were all-age art spaces that musicians under 21 could play at, so I was really lucky in that way. Tjinder Singh, Cornershop Bhujhangy Group (Leicester) For me, there was only one group that was worth recording consistently, hence lugging about a massive ghetto blaster that lit up like the Golden Temple. That group was Bhujhangy Group, from rural workers of the Punjab that had transferred their music into an award-winning package in Birmingham’s Soho Road. Punjabi folk music was one thing but with their added percussion and multiple synthesisers you were led into a devotional music experience that was worth the believing. Justin Young, the Vaccines Jets Vs Sharks (Southampton) There was a really healthy hardcore scene in Southampton and on the south coast. It was incredibly welcoming and inclusive and I remember really looking up to a lot of the local bands, like Disposable Heroes, Pilger, Parade of Enemies, and especially Jets Vs Sharks. I still have all their 7in records. I thought they were all rock stars, but they’d be playing to 20 people a night. With the exception of Delays, no rock bands came out of Southampton, so there was no one to really look up to locally on a larger scale. Real success felt completely alien and unattainable. London was 80 miles away but it may as well have been another planet. Emily Haines, Metric Blue Planet (Toronto, Ontario) When I was a kid in high school, my friends and I weren’t into drinking alcohol, we were into psychedelics. There was this place called the Theatre in a neglected building on a sketchy street in Toronto that we would frequent every weekend. It was run by a well-intentioned, long-bearded man whose name sadly escapes me now. The place was all ages, and no weird geez were ever there, it was just kids. Entry was free, but you needed to donate a can of food to a local food bank to get in. As I recall, we always showed up screaming-high with cans of beans in our purses. They didn’t serve any booze, only water. The band playing there was called Blue Planet, a kind of Jefferson Airplane/Grateful Dead hybrid. It was just a bunch of sweet stoned kids trying to dance but mostly hugging. Telling you about it now makes me realise it was utopian. Pierce Jordan, Soul Glo Rise from Ruin (Huntingtown, Maryland) In Calvert County, MD, around 2005 and 2006, there was a well-loved deathcore band in the area called Rise from Ruin. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to shed light on this band, but to be honest I don’t know when exactly they stopped playing – I think it might’ve been around 2007. When I learned about them, I was deeply in my metal bag. They had two vocalists, and they took a lot of influence from bands like Job for a Cowboy and As Blood Runs Black. A little later in life I was playing county youth basketball and their bassist Mitch was coaching one of the teams I played against. They ruled. Nakhane The Joy of Africa (Gqeberha, South Africa) My mum and her sisters sang in a choir called the Joy of Africa, and my dad was president, but the reason I chose them is that when I was growing up I didn’t really know what a band was. My mum raised me on the O’Jays and the Temptations, but I didn’t know they were bands – they were singers. Not until late adolescence did I realise bands existed, when I saw Myspace. I only knew choirs or orchestras or steel drum collectives because that was the world I was in. I loved the Joy of Africa – it wasn’t just a choir for the sake of singing but almost outreach. My mum helped the women with their lives – she would organise sanitation pads and so on. When I started writing and recording music, the first thing I wanted to do was stack my vocals to sound like a choir – because that was my staple food. Stuart Braithwaite, Mogwai The Yummy Fur (Lanark) The Yummy Fur had been going a couple of years before Mogwai started, so they were established in the Glasgow scene – Paul Thomson and Alex Kapranos went on to Franz Ferdinand – but I’m from Lanarkshire, which is where they came from originally, too. Their records are among the best that came out of Scotland – very funny songs, very witty and acerbic. It was almost cartoonish music, influenced by early Roxy Music and the Fall – quite angular and wonky. They played a lot around Glasgow and they had the same people going to see them show after show. It takes a bit of investment to break out internationally – you need PR and pluggers – and they were almost too indie. But in Glasgow they were filling smaller rooms and it’s really good to have that kind of band around whom people coalesce. Nabihah Iqbal Capdown (Milton Keynes) They had two albums that came out on a British punk label called Household Name. When I saw them for the first time they blew my mind – and then every time they played I would go. I found my gig scrapbook recently and I had stuck all their tickets in. There was such energy on the stage, and those kinds of gigs with lots of moshing and stagediving were amazing when I was 13. Even at a daytime show you knew you would get that same intense energy. That was my introduction to gigs, and I made friends by getting there early and seeing the same people over and over again in the queue. The act of queueing up was a ritual itself. Hannah Jadagu Fishing in Japan (Dallas, Texas) One of the bands I loved in high school was the Dallas four-piece Fishing in Japan. They were an indie-pop band who began making music around 2018. My now friend and collaborator Wolfgang Hunter founded the band while still in high school – the same high school as my sister. It was a performing arts school in Dallas – being in a band was sort of a natural activity for anyone who went there but they were definitely everyone’s favourite. A core memory is sitting in my sister’s car on the way to school and hearing their shimmering blend of pop and rock for the first time. It was one of those “Wait … this is so cool!” moments that has stuck with me. Who was the best act from your home town who never made it? Let us know in the comments