The discography: every record, with its catalogue number and tracklisting

This is the full release list, in the order it happened, with the label, the catalogue number, the format and the tracklisting for each record. Where a value was never published, the line is simply absent. Nothing here has been reconstructed from memory or filled in to make the table look complete.

The singles years, 2005 to 2007

Fantastic Plastic signed the band on the strength of the live show and put out four records in fourteen months. The Tales Of Hermit Mark came first, in August 2005: a seven-inch, FP7051, with My Son Spells Backwards on the reverse. Both songs turned up again on the album a year later, which was standard practice for a label building an audience one single at a time.

Amateur Man / Ban The Gin followed in April 2006 as FP7058, on CD and seven-inch. The self-titled debut album arrived that August — FPCD016, eleven tracks, under half an hour. Impossible Sightings Over Shelton came out a month after the album with two different B-sides depending on format: Train on the clear seven-inch, 42 Boxes on the CD. A shared seven-inch with the Canadian band You Say Party! We Say Die! closed 2006, carrying a demo version of Pedestrian that appeared nowhere else.

La Mer / Stupid As Wood, FP7076, in July 2007, was the last Fantastic Plastic release. The A-side is sung partly in French; a French version of it turned up the following year on the shared single with This Is Pop, LSM001, alongside Ban The Gin.

Three years, two labels and a yellow seven-inch

Nothing appeared in 2008 beyond that shared single. The second album was recorded and then sat, and when it moved it moved quickly: Parrot was announced in June 2009 as the first single from a record called Love On An Oil Rig, given away free as a download from 6 July, and pressed as a limited heavyweight yellow seven-inch on This Is Fake DIY Records with the catalogue number TIFD0030.

The Parrot seven-inch carries three tracks — the single, Make You Not a Man, and a slowed, wrecked rework listed as Parrot (Death of the Parrot Version). The video, directed by Casey Raymond and Ewan Jones Morris, went up on NME's site that June and did more for the record than the vinyl did. Love On An Oil Rig followed, and the band spent the rest of 2009 playing it in Britain and then across Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Bored In Belgium opened 2010. It was announced for 25 January and came out on 1 February instead, because the pressing was stuck on a lorry in the snow near Sheffield. The B-side holds two tracks (Bored to Death in Belgium and Death on an Oil Rig) from a slowed, blackened version of the second album that the band had been working on separately.

Bag of Meat, and then nothing

The third album came out in 2011 with a sleeve made of sliced meat arranged into the band's initials, and took the best reviews of the three: four out of five in Uncut, seven out of ten in NME, five out of five in Artrocker. It was released ahead of the seventeen-date Winter Lake Swimmers tour of October and November that year.

After that the release list stops. No fourth album, no farewell single, no compilation. The record ends where the touring ended.

How to read the catalogue numbers

Fantastic Plastic used a transparent scheme, which makes the gaps easy to see. FP followed by four digits is a seven-inch (FP7051, FP7058, FP7063, FP7076) and the numbers run roughly in release order across the whole label, not just this band, so the jump from 7063 to 7076 is thirteen other records rather than a missing one here. FPCD016 is the sixteenth CD release. The same single pressed on CD took a separate number: the CD of Impossible Sightings Over Shelton was FPS063 against the seven-inch's FP7063.

LSM001 is exactly what it looks like — the first release on a label that was starting out. TIFD0030 belongs to This Is Fake DIY Records, the label arm of the music site of the same name, which is why a 2009 single by a Cardiff band sits in the same sequence as English indie releases that sound nothing like it.