Owl City: Shy, retiring and No 1 everywhere. Adam Young, aka Owl City, has made the journey from the basement of a Minnesota farmhouse to the top of the charts all over the world. Here he tells the story of his success.

(Guardian Film & Music, Friday 29 January 2010)

Like many people with a strong creative streak, Adam Young has difficulty sleeping at night. While others might battle fretfully against the condition, he has learned to embrace its more positive aspects.

“The creative juices start flowing most when I’m lying awake with nothing to do,” he explains to me, a few hours ahead of a sell-out gig in Oklahoma City. “My mind is quiet, and my thoughts are collected, and that’s when I find that the ideas really start happening.”

In 2007, a 21-year-old Young was working in a warehouse in his hometown of Owatonna, an hour’s drive south of ­Minneapolis in the midwestern state of Minnesota. He still lived with his parents – a mechanic and a school teacher – in a late-Victorian farmhouse, spending much of his time in its unkempt, windowless basement. One weekend in June, alone in the house for a couple of days, and motivated as much by boredom as ­anything else, he began to channel his insomniac energies into music, piecing together melodies and lyrics in his ­subterranean den.

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Give pub rock another chance: Fans were quick to turn their back on Dr Feelgood et al once punk hit, but they weren’t so different really.

(Guardian Film & Music, Friday 22 January 2010)

In the autumn of 1976, a poll was ­published in our school’s self-styled “underground” magazine, in which more than 300 of us had voted for our favourite bands of the day. Although dominated by the usual slew of ­superstar proggers, the act in second place – just behind Santana – stood in ­incongruous contrast to their contemporaries. Riding high with their live ­album Stupidity, which had topped the charts for a week in October, Canvey ­Island’s Dr Feelgood were, albeit briefly, the biggest band in the UK.

Although they were routinely lauded in the weekly music press, the standard critical line on the Feelgoods was that they were an astonishing live band who could never quite recapture their essence in the studio. Still, there was a lot of goodwill towards then, and a faith that the band would one day make good on their promise.

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