Looking around at the music news of this week left me quite uninspired; the only thing of interest is that the news of who's playing which festivals are slowly trickling down to us hungry pigeons ready to grab the golden tickets. The Maccabees' new album Given to the Wild, released this week is set to top the album charts, no doubt they will be making a few appearances at festivals this summer, I anticipate this to be wonderful.

At end of this month, the city of Cannes is set to host Midem Festival, the first ever festival to go along with an industry conference that happens annually. The line-up is predominantly French and Belgium apart from the Ting Tings which are headlining on the second night. Up until now, I haven’t heard of most of these European bands, this struck me as kind of surprising. Everyone is always talking about how the world is shrinking in the digital age, and how close together we're all becoming, but our radio and live gigs around the UK don’t reflect this at all. Our festival line-ups are filled with predominantly UK and American artists year after year, and mainstream radio rarely plays anything other than that either. Does this mean that there aren’t any other talented musicians anywhere else but in our little Anglo-American bubble? Listen to a few tracks from the line-up of Midem Festival and you'll see what I mean. There’s a whole world of quality bands out there that are being seriously under appreciated in the UK scene, check out Skip The Use for example, they would easily fit into the UK scene, they've been going for years so why aren’t they touring in the UK please? Let me know what you think.