IRON Maiden’s singer, most of the Stereo MCs and The Tindersticks.

Until recently, the list of musicians to emerge from the flat hills of Nottingham were a running local joke. Even Leicester had Kasabian and Mark Morrison.

Evening up the provincial bragging rights of late have been Sleaford Mods, whose new EP TCR contains the not especially complimentary You’re a Nottshead.

If you’ve not seen or heard the Sleafords, they’re a pretty unusual duo.

Imagine a guy standing near a laptop playing a pretty minimalist set of beats, one hand in his pocket and the other clutching a can of lager as he shuffles and nods along.

Now imagine the other guy ranting and rapping compellingly into a microphone about the banality of modern British existence — dole boredom, futile job-seeking, drinking, brutal futility.

There’s wit and there’s anger and there’s absolutely nothing like it in the charts. In fact, given the state of contemporary music, it’s a shock that there’s any kind of market for this at all. But I’m glad there is.

Jason Williamson, the ranter in question, gave up his job as a benefits adviser in Nottingham to pursue all this.

TCR — Total Control Racing — doesn’t see a massive alteration to their musical palette. There’s something of The Streets and PiL in the music, something of The Fall in the delivery, but the song beats both for focus and claustrophobia.

Over four minutes, not much happens. A man bored of drinking at home goes to the pub. He regrets getting an all-day bus ticket. He thinks old people need to move on sartorially. He orders a glass of wine. It’s not very good.

He concludes: “I hate going out. Going out is for young people.”

How better to prepare for the return of film director David Lynch than to watch one of his biggest disasters? This week saw a celebration of the 1984 opus Dune, Lynch’s film version of the unfilmable Frank Herbert SF classic.

Seeing it in a cinema, full of enthusiasts who treat it with unexpected reverence, Dune is a hot mess. In its attempt to truncate a sweeping, opulent space epic involving pompous, mystical intergalactic royalty, witchcraft, assorted belief systems and tribes, human computers, mutants and giant space worms, it fails utterly.

The dialogue veers from the pointless to the profound, with the constant “internal monologue” gambit mined in order to let people know what the hell is going on.

Also, for no particular reason, Sting is in it.

But, as a visual spectacle, it gets in your dreams. The effects range from beautiful matte paintings and enormous, exquisitely designed sets, to very dodgy model work and half-hearted attempts at creating that crucial suspension of disbelief.

I may still be unsure why Kyle MacLachlan’s outrageously chinned Paul Atreidi was the chosen one or how exactly spice, the crucial substance mined on only one planet in the universe, is used as a resource.

But I will never forget Kenneth McMillan’s raging, flying, fat baron or the scene in which an underling is made to milk a cat for the antidote to the poison currently making its way through his body.

The film ended up as one of the most infamous flops of all time. But there’s something noble in this level of failure and it seems a miracle the thing was even filmed given there was so much to fit in and so much to go wrong.

And, in a time of studio triangulation, with every blockbuster desperate to break the Chinese market with ever-blander action films, heroic disasters like Dune are something to be celebrated.