As announced last week, entries for the 2013 AIM Independent Music Awards are now open.

You can submit entries until June 13, before the shortlist is announced on August 6 and the winners on September 3.

This year, the Awards are staging a series of warm-up gigs, with the first announced to be Little Comets and Dexters at The Borderline on June 14 (get tickets here) and Scritti Politti, with support from Butcher Boy and Trapped Mice, on July 4 at the 229 on Great Portland Street.

Pete Paphides, one of this year's judges alongside tQ's Luke Turner, has penned an exclusive short introduction to Scritti Politti's gig for us; have a read below and get hold of tickets here:

"No band embodied the questing autodidacticism of early independent music as well as Scritti Politti did. From the 'scratchy-collapsy' experiments of the group's first EPs to the all-out embrace of pop intimated by 1981's The Sweetest Girl, Scritti forged a way into the mainstream – not just for themselves but for any band who believed that big and clever needn't be mutually exclusive. Then, in 2006, when pop stardom must have seemed like a distant dream, Green returned to his spiritual home Rough Trade and made the most eye-mistingly affecting album of his life (White Bread Black Beer). When I was asked to curate a show for AIM, Scritti were top of my list. I'm so privileged that they agreed to appear.

"Anyone drawn to Scritti's literate pop intimacies will find something equally special afoot in the music of Butcher Boy and Trapped Mice. With frontmen who come from a long line of great Scottish pop poets (Orange Juice, Belle & Sebastian, Trashcan Sinatras, Delgados) both bands have made some of the most arrestingly beautiful music of the recent years. In such straitened times, Butcher Boy and Trapped Mice don't often get the chance to show London audiences what they can do. Having them both on this bill with Scritti Politti is a dream come true."