Albert Hammond Jr: 101

Cool’s out! For! Summmahhhh! Unseasonable as it may be, imagine The Strokes ditching the leather and scowling, breaking out the Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops, hiring a pink convertible and some surfboards and piling down to South Beach to twat about in the sand like The Monkees whacked up on Haribo Amphetimix. Congrats! You’ve just imagined ‘101’, the Tom Petty-goes-East Village stand-out from Albert’s fabbo solo mojo, with its freewheeling freeway chug, Fountains Of Wayne-ish dollops of pop riffery and the adorability factor of a kitten with ice cream on its ickle wickle nosey being tickled by the bassist out of The Like in her Spiderman jim-jams. The ‘101’ in question, apparently, is the very first class of college in the US, which for Albert was presumably entitled ‘Advanced Showing Up Your Other Band’.