There is no “I know what I like” any more. No mods or rockers. To quote Ringo in A Hard Day’s Night, we have all become mockers. Far from gingerly confessing our tastes at parties, fearful of ridicule, we bring iPods, stick them in strange docks and wait to be congratulated.

Considering how neatly they dovetail into such times, the two albums already recorded by the Bees ought to have conferred a higher profile upon them. But perhaps that’s the price the Isle of Wight sextet are paying for camouflaging themselves in record collections heavy on Os Mutantes, the Byrds and Lee “Scratch” Perry. What it means is that you might like the Bees without necessarily having a clue who they are. Those are their songs you’ve heard in TV advertisements for Citroën, Sainsbury’s and Sure deodorant.

Indeed, unless you’re Naomi Klein, part of the fun with Octopus is guessing which ads this lot might land up in. As the sort of lithe blues fantasia that Gomez looked like supplying for two minutes in 1996, it’s surely a matter of time before Who Knows What The Question Is?is a dead cert for fish-oil supplements. Visions of summer merriment – adidas footballs being kicked about on Brazilian beaches, then – flood the hippy skiffle of The Ocularist, although, if Nike are interested, the twinkling freak-folk of Love in the Harbour also fits the brief.

Manufacturers of MP3 players will no doubt imagine that their desired demograph might be flattered to see themselves in Listening Man– five minutes of langorous, dub-wise confirmation that the Bees are the only British band of the past two decades who know how to use a horn section. That is to say, they deploy it like everything in their inventory – with a stoned, contagious chemistry that few bands manage to retain beyond their debut album.

Next time any of these songs appear on an ad, then, it would be nice if it was one drawing attention to the lovely record that contains them.

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