“Hi, I’m calling from the Cherwell newspaper.  I haven’t got you at a bad time have I?” I get through to Dom Ganderton, lead singer of hot new Birmingham band Superfood as he is running for the train. “No no not at all – actually I’ll be on the train in a second.” A rocky start, you might say, not helped by the fact that his manager just ominously told him to expect a call at 5 o’clock, leading to further confusion over who exactly I am. However, sporadic Oxford signal aside, soon we’re happily conversing about the Oxford music scene – The Mystics and Supergrass.

I begin by asking him about the origin of name (eponymous with one of their early songs). “It sort of came about after me and Ryan had been playing for months and months and finally decided to record something, and we recorded that song after the first three hour session we had”. He reminisces on their previous monikers of Junk and Baby 100 but says the name “Superfood gave off this cool image – you search the term in google images, and you get stuff that is bright, fresh and colourful. That’s what we want to be.”

And when describing their mesmerising music video for their new single TV, put up earlier on in the day, those adjectives come up again. A bizarre mixture of panning shots zooming in and out of objects juxtaposed with eerie generic consumerist adverts from the 90s and images of the band singing, dancing and chucking around something resembling fruit loops. “Oh did you like it?” He laughs, passing it off as a bit of an experiment, but admits that the frequent use of pop culture, and early MTVesque shots seem to be the cool and edgy thing to do on a low budget. 

I ask him if there’s anything profound about his lyrics or if a statement’s being made: “Not really to be honest… it was really just about getting down and writing some songs and getting some good riffs together – putting out what comes into your head rather than putting too much thought into it and being too clever with lyrics.”

The story behind how these b’town rockers got together is a pretty laid back one.  “We’ve all just met in the last three or so years, we’ve all gone out drinking and clubbing together.” But it’s on the back of a boom in the Birmingham music scene, following the success of Splashh, Swim Deep and Peace. He mentions the significance of the latter in getting the band members with their similar tastes acquainted. “We only really started playing together as a full band properly in October last year”. Since then, they’ve certainly come a long way, landing slots supporting Peace on tour. I ask his opinion on the B-town scene in general. “I  think it’s just the fact that other bands have done well, and people have thought f*** it, I’d like to do that too!”

We’re momentarily interrupted.“Hang on mate, I forgot to buy a train ticket. Naughty.” he chuckles. Very rock-n-roll. During this escapade, he tells me about Superfood’s influences. “In terms of rhythm and drums, what we want is a bit of that Motown glam, and as songwriting goes, a bit of ELO (fellow Brummies), The Isley Brothers, Earth Wind and Fire. It’s the kind of stuff we like to stick on the record player after a night out.” While their sound fits in well that of the 90s he states that “it’s important to keep your head clear and not rip anything off  from the likes of Blur and Oasis. We like to start by making songs about just hanging out in Birmingham, and see where it goes from there.

I ask about their eclectic live performances, which secured their core fan base at the start. “We kind of focus on live and recorded performances as completely separate to each other” he says, “and with drums we never use any sample pads live or anything, because that’s not what we’ll actually sound like – and it lets us do a lot more in the studio”. We are briefly cut off again as the train goes through a tunnel. “We tend to use loops and distortion for demos and to try and get that the balance between the hip-hoppy sound and actually using a real drum kit.”

I never asked him where the train was going. But one hopes somewhere down the line, Superfood, with their unpretentious attitude to laying down riffs and channelling good music taste will find themselves in the subculture  spotlight.  

If you’ve ever self-consciously done a google search for a Glee re-make, this is the album for you.

New York duo A Great Big World’s debut album Is Anybody Out There is a crippingly cringey, poptastic assembly of piano ballads and up-beat, big chorus numbers. And yet, like Glee revisions of pop classics, it’s annoyingly enjoyable.

It’s got violin quivers, outstanding voices and harmonies, and songs about coming home and being with the people you care about. It’s made for end of school graduation videos, camp fires and the X Factor finals. Yuck. I want so much to turn it off and hate it, but it’s difficult.

And I’m not the only one enjoying it. Their up-tempo, piano driven single ‘This is the New Year’, was the theme song for ‘I Used to Be Fat’ on MTV, played on One Tree Hill and Good Morning America, and was performed on a certain high-school drama about teenagers who like to sing and dance. I’ll let you guess which. But the talent of A Great Big World is most present on heartwrenching piano ballad ‘Say Something’. It’s simple, but classic, and incredibly beautiful.

This is not an original, clever or especially interesting debut. Actually, it’s pretty boring and incredibly repetitive, safe and inoffensive. But I can’t help but think that it is, well, nice.

Having eagerly pinned it down at Manchester’s Vinyl Exchange, the opening track alone made this LP worth my investment. For any who have yet to encounter Outstanding by the Gap Band (otherwise known for their magnum opus Oops Upside Your Head, and whose lead vox Charlie Wilson can be appreciated in Kanye’s Bound 2), be forewarned that its riff will circulate your subconscious on that endless conveyor belt usually reserved for the Call Me Maybe du jour. Fortunately, this offering comes guilt-free for any stalwart of funk and soul music, and has since been sampled by Biggie, Ashanti and Ice Cube among others. It fits into a 9-track compilation from British record label StreetSounds, purveyor of urban club and dance music for a mighty six years between 1982-8. Its impressive output featured staples of the 80s scene, from Luther Vandross to Cheryl Lynn, Janet Jackson to Zapp. As for Edition 3, gems that surface under the needle include Richard Jon Smith’s Baby’s Got Another, Kashif’s I Just Gotta Have You and the B-Side finale Steve Arrington’s You Meet my Approval. Yet the real triumph of the StreetSounds compilation series lay in its knack for collating tracks that, in a pre-playlist epoch, transition as seamlessly as a concept album; you’ll be hard-pressed to leave before the full duration is over.

The first thing that hits you when you hear the new mixtape from Pearls Negras is their furious energy. This trio of 15 year-old girls comes from one of the toughest and roughest slums in the world – Vidigal in Rio de Janeiro – and their punchy lyrics combined with insistent rhythms speak to a restless emerging audience in Brazil. The fusion rap/hip-hop/baile funk tracks spring from the growing social unrest in the city soon to host the Olympics; a city famed for its violence, poverty, social inequality, and cultural blaze.

But this mixtape’s lyrics, sound and video stand apart from Rio’s mainstream. The video to ‘Pensando em Você’ was shot in the square of the slum where they all grew up, and features their friends breakdancing in the background. Their lyrics jump from drug trafficking and gun violence to one night stands and adolescent crushes, to messages of social disaffection directed at the Brazilian President herself in ‘Mr President’. The sound is one of seething anger, rebelling against the misogyny so typical in Brazilian baile funk. This is paired with tribal rhythms, overlaid with samba percussion, and thrown over driving hip-hop beats by British producers David Alexander and Jan Blumentrath, working for British label Bolabo. The new mixtape ‘Biggie Apple’ is a delirious 21-minute blast of energy, representing the ignored voices of the favela. “Tu não quer saber de nada, tu só sabe de você” they accuse – “you don’t want to know, you just care about yourself” – in one of their strongest tracks, ‘Bata Dois.’  

The sound is remarkably strong, and even if you don´t understand the rapid-fire Portuguese lyrics, you can feel the frustration of Brazil’s disaffected youth. The tracks definitely come bursting with all the energy of a generation wanting change. Change has come pretty quickly for this trio though – in May they will be leaving their hometown for the first time to board a plane to come to the UK. They’re certainly getting their voices heard now.

Wild Beasts’ fourth (that’s right, fourth!) album opens with a burst of dramatic choir singing, with Hayden Thorpe’s voice breaking the exciting yet dreamlike synth background with his usual astonishing vocal range. Thorpe’s vocals are a key part of any Wild Beasts record, and he goes from strength to strength across the album, veering from thoughtful on lead single ‘Wanderlust’ to lascivious on ‘Nature Boy’ to gentle on ‘Mecca’ and mournful on ‘Dog’s Life’.

Synths shimmer and gleam in instrumental patches, illuminating the dreamscape of Wild Beasts’ active imagination. This glittering brilliance is most obvious on ‘Dog’s Life’, one of the highlights of the album. Beginning softly, it suddenly flickers into life about halfway through with a space-age riff to make Buzz Aldrin weep.

The album is their longest yet, which in itself is a statement about the band’s attempts at maturity. There was a time for ‘Brace Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants’, and it was a great time, but a 12-year-old band needs to be a bit less silly. In fact, the album’s few weak moments come when Wild Beasts take it all a bit too far. The synths in ‘Palace’ are a bit too 80s, and the song tends towards the over-the-top, camp dramatics that let them down on 2011’s Smother.

The range of emotions present in the lyrics is impressive as well. While meaning is deliberately and carefully made difficult to discern, ‘Nature Boy’ appears to be the story of a man whose wife is sleeping with someone else – “your lady wife around his lips”. ‘Daughters’ is a fine feminist anthem if a little condescending, with Thorpe telling us all about how “Jesus was a woman”. The indescribably tender ‘Mecca’ is the best song on the album, and is completely open to interpretation. It’s a toss-up as to whether it’s love (“we move in desire”), alcohol (“just a drop on the lips/and we’re more than equipped”) or something harder (“we didn’t reach a high/it was always inside”) being moved into a religious context as Thorpe croons that “we’ve a Mecca now”. Maybe it’s all three. Maybe it’s none.

It’s been five years since we’ve had a good album from this lot, but I’m pleased to say they’re back out of the wilderness.

In order to maintain a secure phone connection with Rae on the other side of the world, I’ve had to scour my entire college for the best signal. I have settled, at 10 on a Friday morning, in a lonely, unfurnished prayer room- myself now anxiously praying that no one intends to use it for the next hour.

As soon as I’m put through to Rae, though, my worries pretty much evaporate. As she answers the phone, she informs me between hysterical laughter and audible wretches that I’ve caught her in the middle of a “potato related catastrophe”. In the sweltering Tasmanian heat, a tin of potatoes has split and started rotting from the bottom up. 

We get down to business despite this, and in the heat of the moment, I admit to her that I started writing to Channel 4 when the series first aired. I wanted to thank them for showing the teenage audience a funny, likeable character whose mental illness did not define them. Ironically enough, I tell Rae, I didn’t send it for fear of people thinking I was being obsessive or overly keen.

“When I hear that I think, ‘Yes!’. That’s exactly what we wanted to achieve.” Rae practically beams at me down the phone, apparently not judging my enthusiasm. “It gives me so much real pleasure that that’s been my contribution to the cannon, as it were, that people felt they could say ‘I felt a bit like that’.”

“I get it from all generations.” She continues, “Up until recently, my mum worked at the lottery counter at Morrison’s. She had a really old woman as a regular, who once day came up to her saying ‘Your daughter’s series…’  My mum immediately thought- Oh shit! Given that the series is about masturbation, drugs, raving, self harm and all that. And then the old lady says, ‘It’s brilliant, it happened in our day and nobody talked about it! We need to talk about it!’”

Clearly Rae appreciates that people can identify with her work. I ask why she thinks her story is so relatable. An anorexic person feels the same kind of thing as someone who is very overweight- the emotions are very similar. Someone with OCD can relate to somebody with depression. The point is they are living with something that eats into their joy, eats into their lives, and eats into their time.”

Witty and very much with it, despite it being pretty late where she is, Rae jokingly points out her Freudian repetition of the word “eat”, saying that if she noticed it, I definitely should have.

The book My Mad Fat Teenage Diary is, ultimately, nonfiction, and its sequel My Madder, Fatter Diary has just been released, with the second TV series to air on Channel 4 this month. Readers can expect a different feel from this book however, Rae tells me.

“I underestimated the task in hand emotionally in writing this one. It’s a lot, lot darker, but still very funny. I talk about quite deep serious stuff and go into detail more, things that are only alluded to in the first book. Non fictional characters that are still in my life, I have to think about quite deeply. Ones that are not in my life but I still care about quite dearly are also a task.”

The TV series, however, is generally a more fictionalised version of events.

“Apart from me and my mum, all characters in TV series are fictional- you can’t stick to reality. If the real Battered Sausage [a character’s nickname in the book] did something in TV that he didn’t do in real life, he’d be very angry at me!” Rae tells me. “The fictional TV Rae does stuff that I’ve done and stuff that I haven’t done, but never anything that wouldn’t do.”

One of the more notable inventions of the series compared to the books is the addition of a closeted gay character, Archie.

“I gave Tom Bidwell [TV series writer] the bare bones and he ran with it,” Rae explains. “Archie was important, because it’s less difficult to be gay these days, but you still need to come out to your friends. It’s about exploring labels, exploring how we see people after we have information about them that we didn’t previously know. Does it change what we think about them? Should it?”

Speaking of the stigma faced by people who, for whatever reason, have ever had trouble “fitting in”, Rae bursts out, “I just want to throw a bomb into everything and say ‘Fuck this! Fuck your labels!’”

Among other things to be bombed in Rae’s world is body prejudice. Discussing the story of an overweight teenage girl, Rae states, “Let’s not delude ourselves that people aren’t nasty to fat people- they bloody are. There are different standards of beauty around the world. And if you don’t ‘fit in’, you’re not ‘healthy’ in the mind. Actually, not fitting in can be an absolute sign of your absolute mental health.”

The issue of fitting in was a big enough one during Rae’s 20th century teenage years – but how has that changed since the arrival of technology?

“I think the internet is one of these insane things that can be an enormous comfort and a dreadful curse. Bullies can follow you everywhere. I knew physically where my bullies were, I could work out routes to avoid them. I knew where they were, most of the time. These days, that’s gone.”

We soon divulge from such serious considerations, and end up bonding about how medieval literature makes us both feel sad inside and a mutual love of Caitlin Moran. Rae’s been incredibly warm and welcoming, and I can certainly see consistencies in her humour and that of her on-screen persona.

At the end of our conversation, Rae confirms beyond any doubt her awesomeness as a person. “My mum always said I wasn’t allowed to try for Cambridge… But Oxford, that’d be fine. After this, I can see why she said it!”

Naww, how sweet. After having such an entertaining hour with Rae and getting stuck into the new book, I can’t wait to see what her new series will bring.