Rough Trade's Geoff Travis doesn't have any regrets about discovering and signing The Smiths. He has no regrets about nurturing the careers and releasing records by The Fall, Scritti Politti, The Raincoats, The Go-Betweens, Lucinda Williams and Belle and Sebastian. He's most regret-less these days given that he's the man behind Arcade Fire, The Strokes, Sufjan Stevens and Antony and The Johnsons.

He does have one regret, though: Stephen Ryan.

Up there with Paul Cleary as one of the great Irish songwriters, Ryan accomplished magnificent work with The Stars of Heaven and The Revenants, but never made the commercial breakthrough that his talent deserved. He may be known to only a fraction of today's music fans, but that fraction remain effusive in their praise.

Travis, who speaks at the Music Ireland 'O7 event in Dublin's RDS this Sunday at 4pm, still talks of Ryan's "staggering literacy" and hears echoes of him in the work of Sufjan Stevens.

"I really regret Stephen not getting what he deserved. He's an incredible songwriter. Looking back, the only thing I think that got in the way of The Stars of Heaven was that they simply didn't do themselves justice as a live band. It's a very unforgiving world out there, and if you play one bad gig to the wrong people it will be held against you for a very long time. When I go to a Sufjan Stevens gig now I can hear every syllable; The Stars of Heaven never really had that. It's a big Rough Trade regret."

Criminally overlooked by the majors at a time when Dublin was the "City of 1,000 bands" (98 per cent of them crap), The Stars were a country-tinged rock outfit long before the term "new country" had been blue-skied by a marketing department. It's not too much of a stretch to position them somewhere in between The Replacements and The Go-Betweens - they had the ramshackle style of the former and the beautifully poignant songs of the latter.

John Peel was one of the many to be beguiled by their fragile rootsy sound and, for many an Irish music fan, the mid-to-late 1980s is still defined by the release of Sacred Heart Hotel, a mini-album, and the debut proper, Speak Slowly.

A none too happy European tour did for The Stars of Heaven, but Ryan went on to form the underrated The Revenants and released Horse of a Different Colour (1999). Songs such as William Byrd, Speak Slowly and Capercailye are simply stunning in their compostion and execution.

It's difficult to know why REM, who are not that dissimilar musically to The Stars of Heaven and also worked away in the margins for many a year, made such a huge breakthrough while Ryan didn't.

You can point the finger at record company/management/internal band tensions, but all you can conclude is that The Stars of Heaven fell through the cracks.

If you've never come across Stephen Ryan's work, it's not too late to atone for the sins of the music industry. You can get both Stars of Heaven and Revenants albums on amazon.com, and Dublin's Road Records should have everything ever released.

I don't know Stephen Ryan and I have no idea what he's doing now. But when I see some of these bloody awful Irish bands reforming for one-off gigs, I wonder how much would it hurt him to just strap on his guitar and play a few tunes for us.