The live record: every documented date, 2007 to 2011

Bands of this size are remembered by the people who were in the room, and the rooms get knocked down. What follows is every date that can still be checked against a published listing or a printed poster, grouped by year, with the venue and the city as they were given at the time.

2007: festival stages and one cancelled night

The earliest dates that survive in a listing are from May 2007, when the debut album was about a year old and the band were on the festival circuit that existed to move new British guitar acts around: the Great Escape in Brighton, on the Artrocker stage at Sumo, and Dot to Dot in Bristol nine days later. In between came a free show at the Old Blue Last in London for the launch of a Das Wanderlust single. A support slot at ULU with yourcodenameis:milo was advertised for 23 May and cancelled. June finished with a university summer ball in Durham, which is the kind of booking that pays for a van.

2009: eleven nights in August

Nothing between those dates and the summer of 2009 is documented here, and the gap matters less than it looks — that is the stretch when the second album was being made. Touring restarts in July 2009 with two shows built around the Parrot single, at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff and The Lexington in London, and then opens out into eleven dates through August.

That August run is the clearest picture of what the band's live year actually looked like: The Ruby Lounge in Manchester, Cabaret Voltaire in Edinburgh, King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow, Fibbers in York, The Cluny in Newcastle, The Moles Club in Bath, the Flapper and Firkin in Birmingham, the Buffalo Bar in London, Concorde 2 in Brighton. Rooms between a hundred and five hundred capacity, four or five hundred miles between some of them, and We Are The Physics along for the two Scottish nights.

October 2009: the first European run

Six dates in eight days: Clubkeller in Frankfurt, AMP in Münster, Glocksee in Hannover, Minnemeers in Gent with Sophia, Magnet in Berlin, Cul de Sac in Tilburg. It is a small run by any measure, and it is also the point at which a Cardiff three-piece became a band that toured mainland Europe, which is the pattern the rest of their career followed.

2010: four dates and a lorry in the snow

The Bored In Belgium single was launched at Buffalo in Cardiff on 3 February 2010, a week later than planned because the pressing had been stuck in snow near Sheffield. Around it sat Exeter in late January, Oporto in Leeds, and The Moles Club in Bath again. The only other date recorded for the year is the Astra-Stube in Hamburg that June.

Winter Lake Swimmers, autumn 2011

The last long run is the one that is properly documented, because it was printed on a poster. Seventeen dates between 21 October and 12 November 2011, opening at Swn in Cardiff and closing at the Audioscope festival in Oxford, with Switzerland taking four of the first five nights: Treibhaus in Luzern, Amalgame in Yverdon-les-Bains, the Reitschule festival in Bern, L'Usine in Geneva with TV Buddhas. Then Paris, Gent, Amsterdam, and six German dates in a row before a last Swiss night in Olten.

The Cardiff opener stands six days clear of the rest; from Luzern onwards no gap runs longer than two days. Bag of Meat had come out ahead of it, and the tour was the last sustained thing the band did.

What this list does not have

It has nothing from 2005, 2006, 2008 or 2012, and it is certainly missing dates from the years it does cover — support slots, one-offs and festival appearances that were never in a listing that survived. Live footage from Milan and Padova in 2007 exists, which puts the band in Italy that year, but no Italian date appears in any listing that can be checked, so none is entered here. The rule for this page is the same as for the discography: a date is in if there is something to check it against, and out if there is not.