The Post Bowie Vacuum Finally Begins to Fill

Of course, the first thing you'd expect here would be a nice picture of The Dame.

I don't think you need to see another one, do you? You've already got your own best image of him in your head.

Like almost everyone who has already written things far better than I ever could, I never met David Bowie. And yet... and yet. He was personally important in ways which I  - and the rest of the world - are only now really realising.

I missed the one opportunity of meeting him when I was working at RCA/BMG and he signed to us for the Earthling album. He came into the building at Putney Bridge and by all accounts hung out for a bit and was very friendly. I was out that day; probably in a studio pretending to be important or maybe sitting in traffic on the M56 in an attempt to find a group in Manchester. I have no idea. I just remember that "guess who you missed meeting?" crowing on my return. Ah well.

Anyway, since I last wrote this on my return from all those US and Canadian record shops, where have I been? What have I been doing?

Well, for starters, although it seems like a lifetime ago, there was this:

Yes, that's me, gesticulating wildly whilst doing a lecture. I was explaining What's the Point of A&R?  to a hall of students studying Popular Music. Who would've thought that would be a course? It is, though. I wonder if I'd gone on it, I would have ended up signing more successful bands?

I also wrote a text version of it a couple of weeks ago for Music Business Worldwide and was astonished how many friends and colleagues got back to me agreeing with my 3 Commandments of A&R. After all, it's been a very long time since I actually did the job. It appears, however, despite massively decreased sales, that not much has changed about the actual job. And its necessity.

Then Christmas happened, Lemmy died, then Bowie and it we were suddenly beached into a whole new year where everything seemed different.

Since then, my bearings have been steadied by a number of things. Firstly, the new Mystery Jets album Curve Of The Earth. A friend of mine gave me an advance copy of it before Christmas and I've been living with it since then. To be perfectly honest, I don't often get excited about new records: last year I enjoyed Courtney Barnett, Ezra Furman and Slaves but I'm not sure I'll be continuing to listen to them much this year. This new Mystery Jets elpee is staying with me; it's about as good as it gets: opaque intriguing lyrics, brilliantly sung by a singer who's really got the chops and most important - the thing that gets underestimated or simply taken for granted - great soaring tunes that twist in unexpected yet entirely satisfying ways. These are songs that somehow always existed yet here they are for the first time! Listen to Bombay Blues if you don't believe me. If you want a glib, quick reference it's The Shins meets Arctic Monkeys. I've read a couple of miserly reviews in The Guardian and Mojo already. Ignore them, go and listen to it, then tell me I'm wrong if you must. I met two of them a few days ago for the podcast and they as good company as their music.

Another surprise and bearings-steadier in the post Bowie vacuum was discovering that Micky Gegus, co-founder and guitarist of West Ham hard case punks Cockney Rejects is a total gent.

I interviewed him ahead of a screening of Richard England's wonderful film about the band, East End Babylon and I suspect like a lot of people, I hadn't really properly listened to the Cockney Rejects during their heyday. They were too firmly aligned with football,which I have never been interested in, and the songs I heard on the radio (I've Forever Blowing Bubbles and Greatest Cockney Rip Off) seemed too lumpen and dull to warrant investigation of any album. Now giving their tunes a bit of time (in both senses: distance from the release date as well as my own listening time), whilst they're never going to compete with, say, The Clash or The Jam,  I was overwhelmed by their musicality and freshness. Tracks like East End or Oi Oi Oi are genuinely great. They were so young at the time too. And who can argue with a band who spent their advance on fireworks and treats from the school tuckshop?

I'm wasn't going to go about rock deaths today but after losing two originals like Lemmy and Bowie within weeks, I fear, we're going to have to start getting used to losing old friends over the next few years. Rock's first great wave are now that age: getting ready to leave the planet,  It's the pitiful cry of a 50 something white westerner but we're not going to see their like again; once they're gone, will we be charting the fascinating courses taken by Bieber, Swift and Kanye? Well, I'm sure some people will be, but not me.

Just before he died, Lemmy made an advertisement for a well know brand of Finnish milk. If you haven't seen it, have a look; it's the only advert I've ever seen where the product is actively spurned by the person promoting it. Anyway, it provided me with the inspiration to write a column for BBC Radio 4's Front Row about how products use wild men of rock to promote their stuff.

And if you like the sound of my voice banging on, try this one I did on charity shops being the new record shops - it was broadcast just tonight (Thursday 28th January) but I recorded it before Christmas as a timeless piece they could use to fill space. They added it so last minute that I don't even get billed on the website - it's about 20 minutes into the show.

A lovely thing appeared online towards the end of last week which for me, put an end to the unexpected period of Bowie mourning. It was the release of a bit of studio japery by the Bo-man recorded during the Langer & Winstanley sessions for Absolute Beginners. In it he impersonates Springsteen, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Anthony Newley and several others. It's both funny and also touching; a snapshot of the great man taking a break at work. I love the fact that he was capable of being a highbrow bonafide artist whilst simultaneously being a South East London piss taker. OK, so there are far less Laughing Gnomes than Beauty And The Beasts (and a good thing too) but there is also a catalogue of evidence, which points to Bowie being able to laugh at himself and others. To be perfectly honest, when I hear a band like, say, this week, Savages, talk earnestly about their art, I just want to reach for the eject button. When Ricky Gervais suggested Bowie finally got a proper job as he turned 60, the Dame apparently replied he had one and it was 'Rock God'. This is the man who talked in the unique scatalogical manner of Derek to Brian Eno's Clive whilst the two of them recorded Heroes and Low.

And of course his last TV appearance on Extras. Is it too much to ask for Little Fat Man to be released as a charity record?

A Trip to The Thing: About Secondhand Record Hunting.

I'm sitting in reception at BBC's New Broadcasting House. I'm reasonably familiar with it as I have a few friends here, but this is the first time in ages that I'm doing a job. In a few minutes I'm going to go through the revolving door and into a recording studio where I'm going to read an article I've written.

Regular readers may be wondering what the big gaps have been between posts. I know, it's not a great way to run a blog but hey, it's the only way I know how right now. I've been in the States again. This time not for work but for pleasure, accompanying my dad on a trip to celebrate the 100th birthday of a friend of his. Here's a picture of me and dad 'having it large' in New York.

I think both of us need a little work on selfie technique

The 100th birthday party turned out to be a, well, a gig - held at a venue called the Town Hall. The birthday boy, Eric Bentley is the man responsible for bringing  the English speaking world's attention to the works of Bertolt Brecht. He didn't make the show but watched his party on a video stream. He's well known (to those of us who had to study Brecht at school and then went and did German at University) as being the translator and editor of a lot of Brecht's work including the songs Brecht wrote with Kurt Weil. Bowie fans may remember this, although the translation here is by John Willett. Bentley also recorded a lot of Brecht's stuff himself which makes him possibly the only scholar and critic who has his own page on Discogs.

Anyway, that's why we were there. But while dad went off to see Eric the day after the show, I did what I most like to do. I think you can probably guess what that is and it also pertains to why I am now sitting in the BBC lobby...

Just a handful of years ago, Manhattan used to be quite the place to buy records: there was a massive Tower on Broadway, Virgin Megastore on Times Square, Bleaker Bobs in the Village and loads of  smaller stores. Now all that's left seems to be Other Music. No, in order to complete my quest, I had to go to Brooklyn. Greenpoint, to be precise. I'd read about a legendary shop called The Thing which has endless crates of albums all of which are priced at $2. As ever, I'm looking for a facsimile of that charity shop experience of serendipity and bargain. I found it; here's what the inside of The Thing looks like:

Believe it or not, this is one aisle out of many - and this is just the basement!

Some of you may have seen a tweet I posted suggesting that this might be what is behind the pearly gates. It's hard to imagine anything better with the possible exception of a dinner with Harold Pinter, Jean Seberg and Kenneth Williams.

I dived in and began the trawl. At first I thought I was going to be the boy in the candy store but it soon became apparent that this was hard work. Not only were the records tightly packed into the shelves, each section requiring some manoevering before rack-flicking could commence, but also the condition of many of them was poor - dust and cardboard shards flew everywhere and soon I was covered in a thin layer of powder. It wasn't until about half an hour in, after looking at hundreds of unwantable dance 12"s that I began to find some good stuff: an early Grace Jones album complete with the original Island press pack including a glossy pic of the great lady; the debut Graham Central Station album Release Yourself still in its shrinkwrap, a sealed copy of the Bravery's album (yes, I know they're not hip anymore but it's a good album - and quite pricey on vinyl, pop pickers!)

With these and other gems, I made my way up Manhattan Avenue towards my next vinyl stop, Co Op 87. But before that I chanced upon a store which specialised in fishing tackle but had recently branched out into vinyl. There, I discovered more Grace Jones, an original of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing and the Bee Gee's Idea with its amazing Klaus Voorman cover:

Each part of the composite face is either Barry, Maurice or Robin. There's a handy guide on the back cover.

By now, I suspect you're thinking that I have a bit of a vinyl problem. And you would in part be right. The issue I have is akin to the one Henry Rollins describes in the LA Times:

You can read the whole article here

Rollins "self medicates" on vinyl, he says. And this is what I do too. The problem for me is not so much that I am desparate to hear the music but that I love the artwork: it's the presentation of the music that has always seduced me. I found myself buying a Buzzcocks T-shirt at their recent show in Stroud partly because I love those songs and they were the first group I ever saw, but mainly because Malcolm Garrett's logo is a beautiful piece of art. It's criminal that Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures (designed by fellow Mancunion Peter Saville) should beat Buzzcocks in 6 Music's T-shirt Day last month.

So given how much I love the presentation of music, imagine how excited I was to chance upon this when my dad and I were in MOMA:

Oooh! Look at the lovely Barney Bubbleses

Our trip then continued to Canada. Even writing that sentence makes me wince with the expense. I simply don't earn enough to be doing this trip, but boy, am I glad I did it. I know this blog is about music but allow me to step outside the brief for a moment and say that real, quality time spent with your parents as they get older is just the most rewarding thing. I just hope my own children see it that way too.

Anyway back to the records... In Toronto, where we were visiting my uncle, it transpired that no one had shared the news that record shops were over; the place was brimming with them. The biggest - and possibly best, although I sadly didn't have time to visit them all, is Sonic Boom. A whole floor of secondhand vinyl in the basement which is organised and curated by proper music fans and reasonably priced. Dare I say that it was better than The Thing? Mind you, there was still No Parler for Paul Young in the bargain bins:

Sonic Boom reminded me of Amoeba in L.A. with slightly lower ceilings.

Amongst other things, I snaffled a sealed copy of Fingerprinz' debut The Very Dab, Julian Cope's debut World Shut Your Mouth and Stevie Winwood's cowritten with Viv Stanshall album Arc Of A Diver. I also treated myself to a brand new 10th anniversary double vinyl version of Spoon's Gimme Fiction. If you've not heard of Spoon they really deserve a blog all of their own because they're brilliant. Listen to Sister Jack from that album. Great artwork too.

The following day I also found time to visit one of Toronto's oldest secondhand record shops, Vortex. It was situated on Eglington and Yonge Street in a squat row of red brick buildings of the sort that presumably used to be quite common in Toronto but which are now clearly fighting a losing battle with glass and steel high-rise structures. If Pixar were making a movie of it, this small row of shops would be cowering and whimpering while the rangy skyscrapers kicked sand in their faces.

Somewhat inevitably, Vortex was having a closing down sale.

Sentimentality over, I'd managed to time it perfectly. Combined with this and the fact that sterling is currently much stronger than the Canadian dollar, I emerged from the Vortex half an hour later holding a brace of albums I'd been looking for for ages but had never found at a reasonable price - Stephen Duffy's wonderful debut Lilac Time album, Squeeze's US release on red vinyl, Marianne Faithfull's Broken English, Julian Cope's St Julian... Let me pause for breath...'

Frankly, I don't know how I managed to get them all home. But you'll be happy to hear there were no breakages during the return flight. It occurred to me during the journey home that you simply don't get this vinyl hunting experience in the UK. There are not many used record shops which have such massive stock as Sonic Boom or even others I visited but haven't had time to mention like Rotate This or Gimme Gimme in L.A. And the ones in the UK, I won't mention their names in case they get cross, but they're a bit unexciting and almost always overpriced.

The experience of finding records you never knew you wanted and not paying much for them - that's the thing. Or indeed, The Thing.

The Thing, last week before I bought all their stock.

And that article I presented for BBC Radio? Well, the recording went OK, I think. I'll put a link up to it when it goes live. I won't say what exactly it's about now but it does go some way towards answering the question of where to find record shops where you can have the experience above.

Right now, I'm floating in vinyl heaven. 

"See her picture in a thousand places, cos she's this year's girl..."

So the White Lies album is released this week. Relax, I'm not going to fall into the trap of giving it a review here. Besides, I haven't listened to yet. But those of you who've been reading this for a while will already know my thoughts on their live show and what I thought of Fear of Flying, so I won't repeat myself. Besides, you are probably sick to the teeth of reading about them on those New Bands For 2009 lists where people described as 'industry movers and shakers' (IMSs) pick their tips for the forthcoming year.

I mention White Lies because in another week of industry changes (Apple dropping its DRM, the Astoria closing, my local Asda no longer selling CDs), it's nice to cling on to good old fashioned highly-anticipated albums.

I was out with one of those IMSs last week. Tellingly, we actually went to the London Art Fair instead of seeing a band. It was fantastic, by the way, particulary the amount of Terry Frost stuff which, if I had a spare £20K, I would sooner invest in than a bank.

Afterwards over a bowl of noodles, the IMS lamented the lack of anything genuinely exciting out there. Now, this may sound like the usual jaded A&R whinge of cliche. Not so. Well, not so with this chap anyway, he's normally ludicrously positive about everything - there's generally a silver lining for him, even in acts which I can't imagine getting beyond their first single. With him, they get to the album and more often than not end up on the cover of NME. Sometimes they even sell loads of records. Not that I'm jealous of him or anything, you understand.

He actually has a lot of time for White Lies but beyond that - looking at the landscape of unsigned and newly-signed artists - he claimed that there really wasn't anything sure-fire exciting out there in the way that there is most Januarys.

But from all those IMS lists you wouldn't think that there was a dearth of new stuff, would you? How many times have you read the names Little Boots, Empire of the Sun, Florence And the Machine and La Roux? They were all present and correct on BBC's Sound of 2009 list, a list which has become such an institution since it tipped Duffy and Adele that news of Little Boots' top nomination ended up making the national TV news. They were also there in the Guardian, The Times, the NME and then were repeated ad infinitum down the chain of lesser titles who always follow suit with their 'picks'. I remember when I was an editor at AOL Music and we did our inevitable image gallery of annual music tips. Despite my loathing of many of the choices, like a coward I would always include tips from other media's lists because I didn't want to be seen missing anything. Remember when you couldn't move for accolades for The Bravery or Holly Valance? Incidentally, you really should click on that Bravery link and read it, then read this year's BBC tips - it will make you smile and nod sagely.

In yesterday's Observer Music Monthly list, there had clearly been an effort to swerve away from some of the more obvious choices and well done them for trying. The interesting thing about all the tipping this year is that with the record business in freefall, there is less and less chance of any of these tipped bands actually amounting to very much more than hot tips. Both Duffy and Adele were heavily invested in - certainly Duffy had to happen, the financial consequences would have just been too dreadful to contemplate if it hadn't worked. If the tipster's goal of 'getting it right' of being able to say at the beginning of the following year,"Yeah, we spotted Duffy ages ago" then the safest bet is to tip the artist who you know the record company is backing. Yes, that's why we all backed The Bravery in 2004.

Press expectation and the marketing budgets for White Lies are of a level that we now see less and less of; there simply isn't enough cash to do it on every new act. So aside from their Joy Division-meets-Duran Duran sound, there is something heart-warmingly old-fashioned about the whole White Lies vehicle, with its press ubiquity, its TV advertising and universal approval. That's with a small 'u' by the way. Even reviews where quite clearly the critic does not get it have been positive. Let's be honest, it is noveau goth music of the sort that teeenage boys can't get enough of; it's not made for 30-something critics who would rather be listening to Bon Iver (there, got a reference in this week, high five!). So critics have to judge it whilst wearing short trousers to avoid sounding dad-like.

In a similar way, I reviewed Graham Norton's debut in La Cage Aux Folles last night - except instead of short trousers, I had to review it in drag. I don't find camp funny of itself and most of the humour in La Cage is derived out of the assumption that men in glittery dresses and wigs is hilarious. But once I got into the spirit - and Norton, despite a limited vocal range, does a fairly good job - I found myself humming along to I Am What I Am along with the middle aged ladies and male couples sharing M&Ms.

Damn, this week, I wanted to go through the critics' picks of acts for 2009 and give you my informed and unbiased opinion on all of them. Instead, I've told you I like Sir Terry Frost and caberet. But would you really be interested to know what I think of Little Boots? Perhaps if I'd seen her live I would tell you but you don't need me to tell you what I think of her recordings - go and listen yourself. My one thought on her is this - and it probably applies to all the other lucky tipped artists too: in her Guardian Magazine feature two weeks ago, the interview ended with the usual bold copy where tradtionally, information pertaining to the release date of her record would be. But instead of these details it merely stated that we could hear her music on Myspace. Let's hope Atlantic are saving up a White Lies-sized budget for her campaign.

How to really upset people

'There's a column we'd like you to write... oh yes and also there's a woman who wants to get in touch with you about something you wrote, which really upset her..."

The momentary pleasure at being asked to write another column for The Guardian is tempered with wondering what it is I've written that can possibly upset someone. After all, I'm adorable, right? Maybe it's someone who's taken umbrage at something I wrote in the A&R Disasters piece - possibly someone once involved with An Emotional Fish phoning up to tell me that they were actually very successful in Italy or something.

But no, it's nothing I've written for The Guardian, it's actually something on this blog that has done it. Back in June I wrote an entry about my A&R scouting days and the concept of going to see a band specifically so I could definitively pass on them - so I could close the book on the band or singer who was phoning me daily and making my life hell. So I could say, quite plainly: "I travelled to Stoke... The Bull & Gate... Stuttgart etc and saw your show and I can honestly say that it's not for me. Good luck in the future."

I told a story about how this concept was named - for it is a experience familiar to all A&R folk - and the artist whose name was adopted to name it. The person I offended turned out to be the sister of this artist; she was seething with rage because - as I had flippantly mentioned at the end of the column - the artist in question had died of cancer some years later.

Now, this was of course a small matter between two people, no big corporations were involved, and the readership of this column is minuscule compared to national radio BUT - and you can see where I'm going here, can't you? - I wonder whether Ross and Brand felt a similar guilt and remorse to mine.

I bet you're probably bored of hearing or reading about the Brandgate thing so if you are, skip down a few paragraphs to where I'll probably be talking about the death of the record business or something. But for the record, here are my thoughts on it: Firstly, if you haven't listened to the show, it's worth doing so because it seems to me that what is being debated is not so much if innocent members of the public or indeed actors should be able to come home without finding a whole bunch of tittering schoolboy abuse on their answerphones, but more that here were two huge celebrities killing time at the license payers' and Andrew Sach's expense. You could take the view - as the Daily Mail have - that they were sitting there, making it up as they went along and getting paid a fortune. As with the Brass Eye paedophilia episode, those who are complaining have probably got their information on the show secondhand.

Radio 2, as anyone who listens to it regularly will know, is a strange beast. It's not the sort of radio station that you can turn on - like say, pretty much every other commercial station - and know exactly what you'll get. Turn it on on a weekday evening after supper and you could happily think it was Radio 1 as Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie play a whole bunch of new releases - but if you leave it on after 10, you're suddenly thrown back into a parallel universe of The Organist Entertains or Big Band Special. If you're listening late at night you can find Steve Lamacq, Trevor Nelson and Mark Lamarr but if you find yourself tuning in on a Sunday then it's Alan Titchmarsh, Michael Ball and Elaine Page. Each, very much, to his or her own.

In fact when I think about it, Radio 2 is like flicking through the vinyl in a charity shop, it's the same feeling of excitement that you never know what you might find; fairly regularly it will be a Mantovani or a Jim Reeves but just as often you find a classic old Stephen Stills album or something by Lee Perry you never knew existed.

So Radio 2's listeners are inevitably going to be just as mixed. And crucially, they are going to be familiar with the schedules and when it is they like to hear their favorite shows. OK, so some of them are embracing the iPlayer and many are subscribing to the Podcasts but inevitably because of the older demographic they are a little behind Radio 1 in terms of adopting them. So when Russell Brand's programme went out on 18 October at nine o'clock in the evening it was probably not not Aled Jones fans or Elaine Page devotees who tuned in. And as we all know, out of the 400,000 listeners, two, that's 2, people were recorded as having complained - and they were upset about the swearing not about any invasion of privacy.

Now, many listeners who tune into the Organist Entertains or other more traditional Radio 2 fayre like Aled Jones and Elaine Page will no doubt also be Daily Mail readers who perhaps may not have even been aware that Russell Brand had a weekly show on their station on Saturday nights. So once the paper had done the job it does best and whipped them up into a self righteous frenzy, of course it was time to get on their computers and make their feelings known.

So what's my point? My point is that everyone has different tastes - and if you try and homogenise what you create so that it is acceptable to all you end up producing bland, boring radio - just try listening to Heart or Capital or frankly, even XFM. I'm not condoning entertainers making comedy at the expense of innocent parties or even the sort of broadcasting where smut and innuendo are substitutes for genuine wit - have you listened to Chris Moyles' show recently?

No, what I'm saying is - if you haven't already, listen to the whole of the Brand show and then tell me if it is not two incredibly talented performers involved in a high-wire improvisation act which, whilst occasionally sinking into Derek & Clive-style mutual abuse, is a tour de force of creative juices flowing. And forgive me, Andrew Sachs, but it is really funny.

Noel Gallagher, with his typical blunt genius, stated that all you need to do to appreciate how brilliant the BBC is, is to do a bit of travelling - go anyway in the world and you'll soon realise how spoilt we are, everyone else's media is sea of commercially-driven lowest common denominator fodder. It's easy to knock the BBC and there are always things that you can pull it apart over (Noel cited the removal of Top Of The Pops from the BBC schedule as being the reason we have a knife crime epidemic, er... right) but if the Daily Mail-supported campaign to do away with the licence fee is successful then I suspect that their constant fear of Broken Britain might stand more chance of becoming reality.

Blimey, bit serious this week. And you thought I didn't feel strongly about anything didn't you?

To return to my own story of upsetting the public, I took the offending post down the moment I read the sister's email. I realised how, having discovered that he had died of cancer after I'd written the blog, I really shouldn't have posted it up - or at the very least I shouldn't have mentioned his name. I have lived and learned.

That's it for this week. There's lots of stuff going on with me and my life in music at the moment which I promise to tell you about soon but for now I have to leave my desk and drive to a farm with my kids. I might even listen to Radio 2 on the way.

Whoops, I'm on Radio 4...

"Maybe it's because everything else is really loud now. In bars, or a car, or on headphones when you travel by tube - you're just never going to notice Charlie Watts' hi-hat or Joe Strummer's delicate fretwork. Record companies think: if I leave any quiet bits in, I'll lose the public's attention!"

"Can you start again from 'In bars'?"

"OK." I clear my throat and unwittingly make a effeminate squeak.

"In bars" my voice has now taken on a desperate tone, "I'll do that again.."
"Whenever you're ready"
"In bars OR in a car... oh bollocks... excuse me."
"That's OK, take your time..."
Christ, who wrote this shit anyway? For a moment, I feel like Orson Wells in those infamous frozen fish adverts, then I realise, it was me, I wrote this shit. It's all my fault.

I'm in a plush studio in BBC Broadcasting House, recording a 'column' for the arts programme Front Row. A&Rmchair has caught the attention of some people there and they've suggested I do one of their spoken columns on some aspect of the music business. I pitched a load of things and the thing they've gone for is Remasters. If you've ever attempted to get any of your writing accepted by radio or newspapers, you'll know how it's actually the pitch that is most of the work: the persuading, the levering of call returns, the attempts at constant politeness when you want to scream: WHY AREN'T YOU GETTING BACK TO ME? In this case they were astonishing swift and the pitch was the easiest thing.

But of course, as every glass-half-empty person knows: nothing is ever easy. What occasionally happens and happened in the case of this column, is that once the pitch is accepted you discover that the point you wanted to make is not as straightforward as you thought and it's consequently much harder to write than you originally envisaged.

It turned out that my argument - about remasters being effectively the same record only a bit louder - was not quite right. Earlier in the week, the Guardian had asked me to write something about the EU's findings on the health risks of having your personal stereo volume up too loud, so I was getting into volume quite deeply. And the more research I did, the more I discovered about the 'Loudness War' that's going on in the music mastering industry. Mastering has always been about making Everything As Loud As Possible but with the increasingly sophisticated digital compression available, there seems to be a demand to make every album release like a TV ad - IE something which cuts through any background noise.

This means that if it's an old record (and by old, I mean pretty much anything before the mid-nineties) it won't bear any relation to how it sounded when it first came out, because every light brush stroke, every whisper and every cough is brought up to the levels of a kick drum or powerchord so that rather like this sentence there is no light and shade, no nuance or subtlety and eventually after a while it just becomes an unfocused background noise which anyone over the age of 16 finds they need to turn off to preserve their sanity.

So back to my 'column'. Just as I am punching the air with joy that I might be on Radio 4, I start getting the fear that what I've proposed this isn't a brief, pithy column where I can pretend that I'm as funny as David Quantick, no, it's actually a lengthy, detailed article where I should talk about Metallica and Elbow and the the Loudness War and get quotes from mastering engineers from the US and the UK and I bring in loads of my own experience of cutting records... and you know what, suddenly I find my prose becoming a bit laboured and worthy and I realise that I'm writing something for a trade magazine. Bugger.

In the I end, I think I manage what I think is a fairly acceptable balance between facts and a bit of observational humour. Something like this blog, I hope. Except I don't anticipate - blimey, you'd think by now I'd start planning ahead wouldn't you? - that the tweaks and rewrites I make should actually be typed into the script I'm reading from. As it is, I am now sitting facing the microphone surrounded by sheets of A4; some are print-outs of my original piece emailed to the producer, some have her suggestions on in blue, some are my hastily-written-on-the-tube notes which, like all my handwriting (even the the variant of it where I use a quill and vellum), are completely illegible.

As I read off my A4 spread, my head is bobbing about like Bruce Foxton as I look for the relevant sheet. It's no wonder I'm talking bollocks. Fortunately, the producer is a total pro, she makes me feel as if I'm actually quite important to the programme and even sends another producer away who wants to use the studio we're in. The fact that we've been in here for days and the actual presenters now want to come in and record tonight's programme is kept from me.

I quite like it though - being in a studio when it's me doing the recording. All my life has been about going to studios where someone else is doing the recording - I'm the just the person whose organised it, just the person who's putting the cash up for it. There've only been a couple of times I've actually appeared on recordings myself and then they were brief. The first was when Neil Hannon was making his second Divine Comedy album in The Church in Crouch End - incidentally, I'm not counting the first DC album as it is indie rock and not really part of the cannon.

I was friendly with him at that point, having tried to sign him but ultimately leaving it to his very capable label Setanta. The album, Promenade, features a track called The Booklovers and Neil had an idea to overlay the lyricless verse parts with the imagined voices of famous writers saying things they might have said. Everyone who popped by the studio was asked the same thing: pick a couple of writers from Neil's list and say something appropriate to them. I picked Mark Twain because he wrote my favourite book Huckleberry Finn and JG Ballard because I had just read Crash at the time (by the way, if you haven't read it don't be put off, it's much better than the film). So I did a terrible Southern accent for Twain and said "but I can't even spell Mississippi" and for Ballard I uttered the expression for dashboard which Ballard uses time and time again in Crash - normally when someone is having sex on one - "Instrument Binnacle". It is worth tracking down the album for the track Tonight We Fly which is the sort of song which continues to work on your body even after all the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up. Hannon's an underrated genius, who will eventually be recognised as such - I bumped into him several years after my recording experience with him. He was in John Lewis looking at fridges with his wife and I was still so star struck I didn't know what to say - no white goods gag came to me in my moment of need. But despte being proud to share an album with that song, I have to say Booklovers is probably one of its weaker tracks.

The second time I feature on an album is on Stephen Duffy's I Love My Friends, the second record he made for my label Indolent. He asked me to shout 'Oi!' on the track Something Good, so he could mix it in with his own lyric 'shouts'. I really went for it with every ounce of South East London yobbo I could muster, hoping my vocal prowess would possibly lead to more invitations from him. Sadly it wasn't to be, largely because, we never made another record together. You see, I was required to drop him by BMG (Indolent's paymaster) before that album was even released, a tragic story which most A&R people probably have some variation of. On the CD booklet of the few copies we originally manufactured, Stephen had dedicated the album to me but when Cooking Vinyl finally released it six months later, my name was inevitably missing from the label copy. Still, do try and hear this album (it still sounds amazing 12 years later) and you can hear my attempt at being a yob - albeit fairly low in the mix

I haven't heard the finished Front Row column yet. The producer has to edit it together and insert all the music I talk about - let's hope those remasters do actually sound different from the original otherwise we're all buggered. And let's hope I get invited back into a studio soon, I think I've finally got the taste for it.

NB: The piece was broadcast last night (Monday 27 Oct) so if you want to listen to it, go to the Front Row website, click on the Listen Again button for Monday's show and you'll find me about two thirds of the way through.