The afternoon of my big 30th birthday celebration, I head to Rough Trade with Mahoney and Christie for an instore performance from CMAT in support of her excellent new album. It’s not my favourite room - if you’re not at the front, you’re not seeing anything, much like the last time I saw her at The Louisiana last April. As has to be expected at this kind of gig, the tallest girl on earth stands in front of me, and I spend a good while craning my neck side to side. But it’s worth it. Armed with only a guitar and the charm of an instinctively funny artist who’s not meant to be awake at 1pm (and an unused omnichord, to be fair), CMAT burns her way through three off the new album, and three off the old. She is deftly funny, has an excellent voice live, and I mean the songs are so well constructed and written that they, if anything, excel at times stripped back. Two stepping back and forth to near-obligatory closer I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby! captures even me, the most stubborn of shoegazers for the first half of almost any gig. She concedes that my misheard lyric is better than the real thing whilst signing my album - concerts aren’t a competition, but I’m winning.