Hello and welcome to the TIFO Football Podcast. I'm Joe Devine. And today we've got a special episode in which I spoke to Paul Smith, the frontman lead singer extraordinaire of the English band, Maximo Park. Now, many of you who are my age will be familiar with

Maximo Park. They're a great band of the indie genre, I suppose you would call, but with

wide-ranging influences, I think, fantastic music. They have a new album out in February

called Nature Always Wins, which they were kind enough to send me, and I've been

listening to it pretty much nonstop for the last few weeks. It's great. It's really, really good.

So if you're a fan of Maximo Park, or if you're a fan of indie music, then you should

probably listen to this album.

It's really, really, yeah, it's really fantastic.

So we talk about that a little bit, but Paul is also a huge, great big football fan.

It was a striker as a player in his youth, and I think that he still plays seven aside occasionally now as well.

So we talk about that relationship between

football and music, something we've touched on in a few other recent episodes. We talk about his

dad, who wasn't really a huge football fan, but did attend games with him, his experiences as a

young person attending football games, and the, now between football and finance as well.

Paul, as a Middlesbrough fan, describes himself as an easygoing neutral as it relates to

Premier League games and sounds like he watches a game a day. So he's a bit of a fanatic, which is

which is great. And I found it to be a delightful conversation. So thanks to Paul for participating.

I know we've done a couple of music ones recently. This is sort of a third and final one for now as part of a small little mini series.

And you'll probably notice we've been on a bit of a break from talking about the football.

That's largely because lots of people have been on holiday.

Christmas is coming up. The festive calendar is a little too chaotic for us to be able to cover

in any depth or be able to keep up with basically. By the time we are able to record an episode,

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