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Andy Crofts is the singer, songwriter and guitarist in The Moons, a Northampton and Kettering five piece founded in 2007. The Moons are known for heading a return to classic songwriting, mixing Beatleish melodies with Kinksy guitars on their smashing March 2010 debut album "Life On Earth", an indie Top 30 hit that spawned the four contagious singles 'Torn Between Two', 'Nightmare Day', 'Let It Go and Everyday Heroes'. Other influences include Brian Wilson, The Coral, Joe Meek, The Doors and Buzzcocks. The group are currently in Edwyn Collins’ West Heath Yard studio recording their second record. Fans of the band already include Paul Weller, The Kinks’ Dave Davies, The Bees, Richard Hawley and The Coral. Andy also plays keyboards in Paul Weller’s band.

Sand and deliver!

With the temperatures rising and the juke box blowin’ a fuse, the Ace sun seekers have packed away our double-fleece duffle coats and winter wellies for another month and assembled a shiny summer collection to keep the clouds away.

We’ve got bright ‘n’ breezy tees, sunshine pop, sweet 'sol' music, hot rhythm & blues, factor 9 folk, beach boys, beach girls and every other kind of Pet Sounds to help you top up your tune tan while the weather is on our side.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice to add to your Ace collection? God Only Knows we appreciate your interest…

Whether you want to dip your toes in our cool musical pool, or make a splash with the full-on belly flop, there’s plenty of great stuff to keep you groovin’ from now until the rainclouds come back.

You won’t need your sunglasses to see that we’ve got plenty of audio heat for the feet, and a woody full of attractive seasonal T-shirts that will both wow the honeys and impress beach bullies enough for them not to kick sand in your face.

You can be assured that our generous prices won’t ‘Wipe Out’ your bank account. You will still have enough money to ‘Get Around’ in at the pub later on, or our name’s not Brian.

Why bother with sun cream, ice cream or any other kind of cream when you have the cream of the Ace catalogue at your disposal? Surf our selection today and Catch A Wave of sonic sunshine… 

Comedy writer Ian Martin stumbles through our back catalogue, making random observations and proposing a toast to Ace Records’ eclectic avenue of dreams.

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What’s a “guilty pleasure”? I’ll tell you what it isn’t. A guilty pleasure is NOT just a really good pop song some dickhead likes.

You know the sort. Pop-up celebrity, crowdsourced personality, cultural smartarse. “My tastes are so eclectic it almost physically hurts me…” he murmurs to himself in some frictionless Sunday supplement profile, making you want to physically hurt him. “Oh I listen to everything, from Run The Jewels to Baroque opera. From cool jazz on my beloved collection of 78s to the really impenetrable bits of Penderecki delivered directly via neural implant into my hippocampus…”

Here he will perhaps allow a coquettish smile to fall like dappled light across his facial ladygarden. “And you know what? It’s cheesy I know but I confess I have a soft spot for Tamla Motown. Especially anything by Marvin Gaye. OK sure, it’s a guilty pleasure. But sometimes you just need something sweet and frothy, right?” Shit off, you snobgoblin.

FACT: guilt is an internalised emotion, pop-pickers. The concept of musical guilty pleasures only makes sense if the person judging you, making you feel guilty, is YOU. In the privacy of your own kitchen, why would you feel guilty if nobody’s there to mock you? Because YOU’RE always there to mock you. Example: Now You loves that old ELO track. Yeah, that awful, peppy knock-off Beatles track which was so comprehensively despised by Then You. Now You distinctly remembers Then You and your Then Mates being pretty nasty about Jeff Lynne And His Mulleted Hommage. Then You sneers at Now You still. Look at him, the little bastard, with his acne and his backcombed hair and his insufferable pretension and by the way terrible clothes. 

Nor should guilty pleasures be confused with musical differences. You should see my wife’s face when she returns unexpectedly to the house to find me alone in it, doing what a lot of blokes do while alone in the house - listening to the Beatles. I love them, she hates them. I suppose there is sort-of guilt. She feels sort-of guilty if I switch off the Beatles, I feel sort-of guilty if she has to listen to them. Oh, and please don’t make that citrus face at me and suggest I “use headphones” either. That’s not how 20th Century People listen to music. We like our music to gush and tumble through several cubic feet of air, painting the floating molecules with sound, thanks very much.

And on the subject of being a 20th Century Person, allow me to suggest that the “guilty pleasure” has been reinvented by 21st Century People as a shaming device. Fifty years ago it was OK for me to like blues music. Like a lot of white boys, I came to Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker and the rest via rock and roll and white boy R&B. Fleetwood Mac, all that lovely Blue Horizon stuff…

But try telling Twitter you like blues and watch the revisionists recoil in disgust, as if you’d just said you like golliwogs, segregated education and plantation minstrels. Well I’m so sorry, humourless Roundheads of New Puritania, I can’t unlike what I liked then and still like now. I won’t be guilt-tripped into discarding my musical youth as colonialism and misogyny. I’m old now but still white, and I like hip-hop too which infuriatingly may contain racial allusions and bitches and whatnot and I am bored stiff by my own argument so HERE ARE MY RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THE CATALOGUE OF ACE RECORDS MY MOST FAVOURITE RECORD COMPANY EVER. Not really recommendations, actually. I don’t know what you like, do I? But this is what I like.

Stuart Braithwaite is a Scottish guitarist, bassist, drummer, singer and songwriter. He is best known as the guitarist of post rock band Mogwai, with whom he has recorded eight studio albums.

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Jon Savage is an author, filmmaker, journalist and broadcaster. His books include England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, and 1966: The Year The Decade Exploded. His film credits – as writer and consultant – include The Brian Epstein Story, Joy Division and Teenage. He writes regularly for the Guardian and Mojo and has released several compilations including “Meridian 1970”, “Dreams Come True: Classic First Wave Electro 1982-7”, “Black Hole: Californian Punk 1977-1980”, “The Shadows Of Love: Jon Savage’s Intense Tamla 1966-68” and “Perfect Motion: Jon Savage’s Secret History Of Second Wave Psychedelia 1988-93”.

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