I want to see the name of the African child my donation is going to ...

I'm pacing through tents, swerving round campfires and trying to keep the swearing at a reasonable volume. It's just after 1 in the afternoon, the sun is beating down on me, Maddy, is sitting on my shoulders and I'm late.
"Why are they liars, daddy?"
"Because they said the car park was near the main stage..."
"Why did they lie?"
"Er... because they wanted me to drive somewhere else..."
"Why?"
"Why do you think?"

Turn the questioning round - always works that one, always gets her thinking and sometimes keeps her quiet.

"Was the other man a liar?"
"Which other man?"

I'm now beginning to wish I hadn't verbalised my feelings towards the Secret Garden Party festival staff who had directed us to the 'Guest Car Park'. If I'd kept quiet I wouldn't be having to deal with all these questions. The sweat is now beginning to dribble from the sides of my sunhat and into my eyes, whilst Maddy clings on tightly to my ears and my manbag starts chafing my leg.

"The man who told us to come here!"

"You mean the man who told us the stage was fifteen minutes away?"
"Yes!" Maddy's tone of voice is indicating that she's beginning to think I'm a bit of an idiot.
"No, he wasn't lying, he was telling us the truth. That's why daddy's cross..."
"Why are you cross with him?"

I ponder the options open to me and decide against going into a portaloo to unleash a barrowful of swearing.

We're trying to get to the main stage of Secret Garden , a low-key festival set on a beautiful Cambridgeshire estate, which has been quietly growing every year. I feel like I have a bit of an IN with it because a manager who I used to work with is one the organisers. If I bump into her, she has promised Mead. Whatever that may be. I've come this year to see Olafur Arnalds, the artist I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, who I publish. I've brought the whole family, as well as Geoff from the management company, but Maddy and I have left them at the main gate, whilst we we were told to drive round to the guest car park, which apparently is "round the back of the main stage." After driving for about 15 minutes through various counties, looking out for the occasional teenager in a high-visibility tabard who would casually gesture us onwards, we finally found the car park, tucked away in a area just outside Poland. Oli is now on stage, or certainly his time slot is for now. A very familiar feeling comes over me as I pace bad-temperedly through numerous camping enclosures, past sun-reddened, relaxed people, drinking warm cider: why am I the only person in a hurry?

This festival sensation can only be familiar to people who are involved in the music business in some way. For the proper festival attendees, the overriding emotion is one of: finally I am somewhere where I no longer have to worry about real life and I can relax in my felt jester's hat with impunity. I am not speculating here, I can testify to having this feeling three years ago at Glastonbury. I was working in new media at the time and had absolutely no work connections to the event, I bought my tickets online like everyone else, took my two year old daughter and in the end, although it wasn't planned, I ended up camping. I even smoked a joint for the first time in about 400 years. As far as I can remember, I saw a bit of Chas & Dave, a smidgen of the Kaiser Chiefs and a couple of Go Team songs; the rest of the time there we just wandered around enjoying the atmosphere, and you know what? It was the best festival time I've ever had. And don't worry, I didn't so much as think about buying a jester's hat.

Every other festival I've attended has had a work atmosphere - you go to the backstage enclosure for starters, which is comparable to getting off the tube at Old Street or Camden - lots of overdressed biz folk, crowing over NME-sponsored cups of lager, a few people you like who sympathise with the terror of such gatherings and an atmosphere rife with jealously and competitiveness. One quote I remember from a mid-90s Glastonbury was from the Echobelly drummer: "We are going to blow them off stage!" He was of course talking about Oasis. Both bands were playing the second stage that year.

Actually I feel a bit of a fraud talking about festivals because I don't think I ever went to a festival before I worked for a record company. Unbelievable, I know, considering how obsessive I've always been about music but they just didn't have the attraction for me. I went to see the Clash play the Victoria Park Rock Against Racism show in 1978 when I was 12 but I couldn't see over people's heads. I think this may have tainted the outdoor stage thing for me. My brother did the whole 80s Glastonbury thing, where Elvis Costello, Echo and The Bunnymen and Van Morrison seemingly used to play every year. I just don't think I ever had the spare cash or desire to sleep in a tent surrounded by drunk people. One of the first Reading Festivals I went to was in the early 90s and I planned to sleep in my car, not having the expense account to qualify me to get a room at the Ramada Inn where all the successful A&R folk were ensconced. I got so drunk I lost my bag (even in those days I had a manbag, oh yes) which of course contained my car keys. I had to resort to finding a tent with the friends who were planning on sharing the car with me. We eventually found an unused two-man Millets number and the four of us attempted to squeeze in. I was at the top of a steep moaning curve at this point, lamenting losing my bag, lamenting the impending hangover and probably lamenting the fact that the band that I had signed, Five Thirty, had not been chosen to be on that year's bill. As we lay in the tent on the soggy Berkshire turf, I continued ranting until someone walking past, no doubt on the way back to their pitch, muttered, "Oh shut up and get your head down." I did just that. Found my bag the next day too, you'll be pleased to hear although Five Thirty never made it big.

One thing that didn't used to happen at Festivals was guest list charity donations. If you've ever been on the guest list for a festival and you arrive, thinking you're all prepared, to be asked to cough up a surprise £20 can throw everything out of whack. OK, so it's for charity, but whose charity? As Geoff said, whilst we were struggling to find a spare £60 in cash at the gates of Secret Garden, "I'd like to see the name of the poor African child this money is going too." Of course, guest list is a privilege but not everyone on the list is a senior record company executive with the requisite expensive account. And now it seems to be mandatory at all Mean Fiddler organised festivals too. We managed to stump up the cash - well almost all of it, they let us off the last £1.50 which only took about 5 minutes negotiation. How big hearted of them. But of course, once inside we had no money and the cash point was having its lunch break. Or so the very Un-Secret Gardenish security guard told me, who stood, FBI style, outside the black silk enclosure where the machines were.

But I'm carping, the festival was, as ever, great fun once we got in the spirit - for starters there is no sponsorship anywhere so you aren't constantly tempted into the Golden Grahams Tent or plied with Innocent products. No, it's all circus skills, mud baths, and girls dressed as princesses. Maddy - dressed as a princess, natch - and I made it to see Oli, only missing one song. The blazing sun and bucolic atmosphere wasn't quite right for his brand of glacial string-laden tropes but it still went down well.

We ended up learning how to do hula-hooping and and climbed up to the top of haybales to survey the land. We even braved the queue at the cash point and Robyn and I guzzled pints of beer like there was no tomorrow. Summer had finally arrived.

I'll probably be back writing more of this in a less than a week because there are many things to tell you all about, not least my first glimpse of the new SonyBMG building, my trip to see Dragon's Den 'indie' band Hamfatter and last but not least getting propositioned in Hackney whilst dressed as Freddie Mercury. But these, as they say, are other stories!

Here's me and the girls at the festival

I'll be on my mobile!

"Ben, it's someone called Brian from Dandelion Radio, he wants to interview the band and he's asking what time they're onstage?"
"Tell him I'll call him back"
"OK. Brian, he'll call you back, he's just driving right now..."
"Daddy, can you put on Jungle Book?"

Five minutes pass. Esther starts crying from behind us. Clearly the pointy bit of croissant we'd tried to placate her with hasn't done the trick.
"Daddy, I'm thirsty," says Maddy.
The mobile rings again. Robyn answers like last time.
"It's Kev from Radio 1, he wants to interview the band too."
"Daddy, I'M THIRSTY!"
Esther's crying gets more like The Great Gig in The Sky.
"Hang on, I'll pull over..."

The Scottish Band are at T In The Park and I'm doing my job; fielding calls, hooking people up, making things happen. But of course, I'm nowhere near Balado, Kinross. To be precise I'm now parked up in a lay-by somewhere outside Nantes, on my way to a campsite in Brittany. After this my small family car full of sweaty people, toys, and boulangerie products will finally be heading to Calais and home.

I'm actually writing this having been back in London for several days. We made it back in one piece, despite the A13 not living up to the Billy Bragg song. We sat on this infamous East London access road for what seemed like days, listening to the CDs I wrote about in the last blog entry, as four lanes of traffic squeezed unhappily into one. Never had Elbow's plaintive balladry seemed more appropriate.

And on returning home and finally looking at Email, catching up on calls and doing all the re-acclimatisation you do after a two week break it became apparent that some really exciting things had happened to the Sb while I was away. Admittedly I knew about some of them already - some more plays on Radio 1, including Zane Lowe, our first NME piece - but looking at the Glastonbury BBC footage and getting emails from people telling me they'd seen the video on T in The Park coverage on BBC 1 and BBC 3 made me realise how quickly things change in the music business

When I left England, our girl band from Swindon were a five piece, on my return they are a four piece. OK, it's easy to lose a band member but that change has resulted in new songs, a new look, a Myspace redesign and frankly, a massive improvement. All that in two weeks. Blimey, all I did was lie in the sun reading John Cheever stories.

I've also come back to discover Black Kids being everywhere. Their album went in at 5 this week and the reviews appear to be largely favourable despite what the temptation must be to lead the backlash. Musically, to me at least, they play a rather pedestrian yelpy boy/girl indie pop not dissimilar to a band called Semifinalists, who I looked after when I was at V2. The latter had already released 2 EPs before I inherited them and were about to put out a third and an album. Their press person told me how the NME had lavished praise on them, singling out band member Ferry as a genius. The album did OK and then we began the long process of making the follow-up. I was still A&Ring it when V2 got sold to Universal and the record finally came out a couple of months ago. I bet you probably never even noticed, right? Exactly. Thus are the breaks of rock and pop: one minute you're at the top ... Good luck, Black Kids.

Going on holiday when you work in music is hard but let's be honest, these days, going on holiday during the tenure of any job is hard - there is so much competition, back-biting and overcrowding in all business, that 'taking a vacation' is treated with similar sniffiness as taking a sick day. Come in even if you feel like you're about to die; you should always be contactable on your Blackberry or mobile; you never know when you might be needed. I can remember holidays in the music business before the days of ubiquitous electronic connectivity and there was only stress the day before you left: had you spoken to everyone? Had you delegated to people? Were all the artists clear on what they were doing? But once you were out of there, you were on holiday: it was like going to bed - goodnight, see you all in the morning!

Now, there isn't much stress on the eve of departure because if you've forgotten anything, or not informed anyone of your whereabouts, your mobile is assumed to be on all the time. You're never quite fully on holiday. It's like meeting friends: I used to be very organised when I went out: I'll meet you in Pollo on Old Compton Street at 7.30pm, next Thursday. Now everything is much more fluid: we'll meet in Soho next week, I'll text you on the day or you call me, OK, bye!

This is all fine of course, and frankly for those of us who tend toward vagueness, it's a massive step forward. But sometimes, this reliance on technology backfires. Particularly where there's no mobile phone signal. I'm not sure whether mobile phone culture was the problem for the Sb at Glastonbury, but no one quite knew where anything was when they arrived on Friday afternoon in Pilton; a smile and a shrug seemed to be the main body language on show. Where was the guest parking for example? They eventually got directed to a field where they could park the van, but quickly learnt that it was the wrong one and miles away from guest camping. Then the van sank into the mud. The rest of Friday night was spent waiting someone to come and winch them out. After making the call - they got through on the mobile - they waited five hours. Imagine it: FIVE HOURS of sitting in a muddy field hearing the distant sound of Franz Ferdinand wafting over from the main stage. The chasm of difference between life at the top and life at the bottom of the bill can never have seemed so apparent. I never asked them, but I wonder if the onboard PC came in handy while they were waiting. Let's hope they had something to do other than sit there cursing Michael Eavis. When the rescue truck finally did arrive, the driver said he'd only got the mayday call ten minutes beforehand. Hmm, let's blame it on Somerset's bad mobile connectivity shall we?

Hearing about this ordeal two weeks after the event makes me even more proud about the band's triumphant performance on the following Sunday. There's even footage of them handing out those triangles to the crowd. And two weeks later, they drove up to Kinross and did it all again, getting the whole tent singing along to their tunes at T In The Park. And they did both those interviews too - I sorted it out with Brian and Kev, employing the wonders of mobile phone technology, while Robyn fed Esther and Maddy listened to the Jungle Book in the back of the car.

A night in, please God, a night in ...

Gigs, gigs, gigs. So many gigs. And I'm not even on tour. Here I am at 1.30am, half drunk, sitting on my third night bus home, listening to the Fleet Foxes album on my iPod and wondering if there's dad-related activity to do once I get home.

Frankly by the end of last week, I almost hugged the television. A night in! Come Friday, mouthful of After Eights, caning the Sky Plus, I would have been in heaven, had I not had to balance my screaming five month old on my knee. At the moment it appears that Esther is auditioning to be the next Clare Torry. A friend of mine who is now horribly senior at Sony BMG had his first child before me and I remember him telling me, when she was first born, how he'd had to go through the pain barrier of exhaustion: you come home from a night of gigs, you get ready for bed and just as you hit the pillow, the weeping starts. Your wife, who is annoyed at you being out all the time having fun at gigs ("But it's work!" "Work?! You're standing around drinking and watching bands. Call that work? Don't make me laugh!"), expects you to deal with it so you're up in your pajamas, walking like a zombie around and around and around, muttering consoling words and trying not to fall over with exhaustion. Eventually, the child will go to sleep but you will be wide awake and probably feeling a bit peckish. Before you know it, it's 5 AM and you're on the sofa, eating Marmite on toast and watching The Sopranos on DVD. Multiply that by five days a week and it's no wonder pop music is so full of broken marriages.

Still, I must say, the gigs have been great. If you read last week's blog you'll know about the Glasgow shows - oh yes, by the way here's a bit of film of that punch up I wrote about - even watching it back, I still find it surreal.



Anyway, the band headed South after this. They played in Liverpool, Stoke and Manchester. In Manchester somewhat inevitably, they met Mancunian comedy institution Frank Sidebottom - William said he caught a glimpse of skin and hair through the famous paper mache head and "he was really old". Reminded me of Julian Cope's story of seeing The Residents live and catching a glimpse of hair poking out from under the mask - he could never take them seriously after that.

By the end of the week the Scottish band were properly South - in leafy, quaint, stockbrokerish Guildford, no less. As far as I can remember I think I've only been to a couple of shows in Guildford. I think we once drove Elastica there when Michael (now the exhausted father/Sony exec I wrote about in the paragraph above) and I were hoping to release their first record on our label Scared Hitless and we were playing at being tour managers. They was already a buzz about them for obvious Suede and Blur reasons and we wanted them to play some shows out of the spotlight. It was decided that the best way to do this was to book them as another band - a band with a really off-putting name. Someone, I can't remember who but probably Justine, came up with 'Onk'. Amazingly, we still got plenty of A&R people prepared to have a sniff around Onk.

The Scottish band don't have a big A&R buzz around them yet - although people are beginning to come out of the woodwork. In Manchester, they had their first meeting with a scout. Interestingly, they were surprised at how little was actually on the agenda for this meeting. They didn't fully understand the reason scouts want to meet bands: scouts are not going to do anything - not unless there is already an almighty buzz. No, they are chatting you up, making friends, forging relationships. Then when it's important to sign the band, when the rest of the company is galvanised, the scout is at the vanguard with his or her own special relationship. That's why so many A&R people are so charming - they have spent a long time honing the skill of making you feel like you are the most important musician they have ever met.

It sounds like I'm being cynical about A&R folk but of course I count myself in this camp - I'm a bit rusty but on a good day I can still just about find the necessary charm when I have to win people over. But the relationship between A&R scout and unsigned band is mutually beneficial, because it's just what you need when you're a musician playing to an audience of three disinterested, drunk people - a sparky young A&R person comparing you to the bands that you've always thought you were inspired by. Most bands will recognise the deal that is going down prior to signing - it is a courtship, a romance. And once the deal is struck and the marriage starts, very often it all ends in tears, recriminations, mutual lack of respect. BUT, maybe, just occasionally, lovely beautiful children are born.

The Scottish band - I wonder, shall I start calling them by their name? If you have any thoughts on this add a comment - in fact, while I'm here talking about comments, if you have any stuff to say about the blog please put a comment below. I get so many mails and Facebook messages about it but not that many folk leave comments here. It would be good if you did because that would of course make me look really popular... Anyway where was I? Ah yes, The Sb at the Guildford Boileroom.

The Sb play a show to an audience of about twenty. I sense the crowd are not fully in the mood for indie rock though. Not when members of the opposite sex are drinking for Surrey outside the venue. This massive crowd of 18-year old girls in oversized heels is in the beer garden due to the balmy weather. The Boileroom is situated at the end of a cobbled street, flanked with pretty cottages. Because of the residential area, the venue has a bizarre traffic light entry/exit system to stop noise leaking from the bar/venue into the beer garden. This took some working out for me and is clearly a rite of passage for all young Guildford residents. When the light is green outside you can pull the door open. Once inside, you find yourself in a small lobby - like a decompression chamber - looking up at a red light over a second door. Once this is green, or indeed the door opens up, you can enter the bar. Simple enough, but try adding three or four people to every decompression wait, any two of whom might have consumed one too many Bacadi Breezers. It certainly breaks the ice.

After the show, we drank the rider in the dressing room which is situated above the venue and appears to double as the kitchen for the hapless student residents who live above the venue. True to the name of the venue, there was indeed a very large old boiler smack bang in the middle of it. We were in the epicentre of The Boileroom. This cannot be ideal for the residents and indeed we met several of them as they were heading upstairs. They were all Chinese - the first, a smiley man whom we asked if it was OK that we were sitting in his kitchen. It didn't look like he understood so we asked again. "Ah..." he said, the light of comprehension in his eyes, "twenty past eleven." He showed us his watch with a flourish.

After doing Southampton and Coventry, the band arrived in London. They had never played in the capital before and despite being booked second on the bill on a Tuesday night, this was the most important night of the tour. The gig where influential people and industry types who can make a difference can see them. It was in every way THE BIG ONE.

I'd booked them into a hotel near to the Buffalo Bar where they were playing - the temptingly-named Costello Palace. Like me, the band rate Elvis' early work so this seemed appropriate. But when I met with them at the soundcheck they were less than enthusiastic - apparently the bedrooms were not exactly Imperial, each being furnished with its own condoms and 'lube'.
"And there's not even that much lube left in my room," deadpanned William, the keyboard player.
"You should send down for some more, bro." suggested Andrew on bass.

I had a bite to eat with the band, then popped out to get some money out of the cashpoint, leaving my mobile phone on the table of the cafe. While I was outside, my mobile went off. William saw 'Lamacq Mobile' flashing on the screen but didn't answer it. When I came back he said to me whilst raising an eyebrow, "Steve Lamacq called".
"Great - told you he was coming tonight!" I said triumphantly.
"Odd that he calls you just as you're out at the cashpoint - bit of a coincidence," William makes inverted commas around the 'out at the cashpoint' bit.

He's joking but it would have been an excellent managerial ruse to appear important in front of my band: to pop out on a vague pretext and phone myself from a prearranged number that comes up as a famous DJ, thereby making myself look like a hero - the great Radio 1 indie champion himself is phoning me personally. I am indeed friends with both movers and shakers!

Of course the truth is far more prosaic, as you know. I've known Steve for a long long time - I once guested on his pirate radio show back in the 1780s on a station called Q103. I still have a tape of this somewhere. He was interviewing me about being an A&R scout and I described it as being like a traffic warden - everyone hates you but you're just doing your job... Bit of work needed on that analogy I think.

Despite being, as everyone knows, married to his music, Steve is an incredibly loyal friend. He will come and see friends' bands and crucially - and this is what friends don't do normally - he won't tell you he loves it when he doesn't. We had gone to see his friend Simon 'Fierce Panda' Williams' band the week before who were being primed by Simon for rock stardom. Incidentally, Simon's band Capital were on the same bill at the Dublin Castle as a band called Ham Sandwich, which surely must be evidence that the world has finally run out of band names. Anyway, Steve will be frank with both myself and Simon, I'm sure. Obviously, I hope he likes both but COME ON - my band are far better!

And indeed in London, they didn't disappoint. Alongside Steve there were radio, press and other members of the PR and radio team and the show was absolute proof that a couple of weeks on the road really sharpens up a band. There were even a couple of posh St Trinian's type girls down at the front who apparently Myspaced the band the following day with obscene promises for the next time the band come to the capital.

By the end of the evening I was on a high, made sweeter by Artrocker promoter Paul telling me that he wasn't going to charge me for the extra guest list. Again I've known Paul for years. Don't get me wrong, when I say I know people I don't always mean they've been coming round for Christmas or we share amusing anecdotes over bottles of Merlot, it just means that we have met occasionally and said hello during the eons we've been in the business. And when I say a long time... well, I'm old enough to remember Paul Cox coming into my office at East West with a cassette of PJ Harvey, Too Pure Records a mere twinkle in his eye.

As I stood at the bar drinking with the band, a short grey-haired man came up to them
"Are you XXXXXXXXX?"
"Aye."
"I thought you were great! I'm Andy Gill from Gang Of Four..."

It was a lovely end to the evening and one that consoled me as I sat swaying side to side on the nightbus as it weaved along the Lee Bridge Road. Now for that night in.

Camden Leisure Pirates

Blimey, a whole week has gone since the last entry. That's how time goes when you leave your thirties behind. And as you know I left mine behind years ago. It's what everyone talks about when they get old - how the time flies. Strangely, you never hear about this when you're young, no one ever mentions it. Maybe they do talk about it but you just don't ever listen, it's just a noise in the background like classical music, advice about pensions and invigorating walks in the country. No, the only occasion time flies when you're young is when you're having fun - which clearly, you never are as much as they tell you.

Anyway I've been thinking about age a lot this week. It's to do with Esther turning a month old last Friday, I think - my years are beginning to weigh. It started on Tuesday as I was getting off the tube. I'd been catching up on the weekend paper - the curse of the slow-reader/father combo - and had just finished a really interesting Hilary Mantel review of two books about depresssion. As I got out of the tube station I was thinking about what the article had said - largely semi-praise of the first book, a study of how people too often get fobbed off with anti-depressants instead of dealing with route causes; and a pithy put-down of the second, some fashion jounalist's navel-gazing study of how she dealt with her own depression. She read every book she could get her hands on, she claims, citing Kierkegaard (died 1855) 'who lived a few hundred years ago" as inspiration and having a go at her therapist's dress sense.

So, out of the station I come and bounding towards me comes a really attractive young girl in a Samaritans T-shirt. "Hello, have you got a couple of minutes?" comes the gambit. It is, of course, a charity rep who wants my sort code and bank account details, I believe the common term is Chugger (charity mugger). Normally I would have smiled apologetically and muttered "terribly late, sorry ..." in Guardian reader style. But this time, partly down to her attractiveness but also because I was thinking about depression, I stopped. She was elated and smoothered me with gratefulness. I later learnt that it was her first day as a Samaritans rep and I was the first person who'd stopped for her. In her excitement about this she said, "You know, you really remind me ..." and here, time stood still as I imagined what would come next; who would I remind her of? A mystery guy she'd met on holiday who she'd never seen again, a celebrity? an ex-boyfriend? No. "You really remind me of my best mate's dad!" she squealed. My face must have said it all. "Oh not in a bad way or anything! ... he wasn't old," she back-peddled furiously, fearing the loss of a potential customer, "he was good looking and everything ..."

So this is what the Samaritans have come to, I thought, actively going out and randomly depressing strangers on the street in an attempt to drum up business. The thing is, I do look older than I did. I think I was blessed for quite a while with looking younger than I was and now suddenly age has caught up with me. It doesn't help managing such young, attractive musicians. When we were out with the girl band before Christmas, for example, the digital photography was coming thick and fast and I inevitably ended up with a bunch of pictures on my phone, full of the sort of drunken revelry you'd expect when you go to Christmas parties and the booze is free and you happen to be in your twenties. I showed them to my wife and it was all going well until we reached one featuring me. I am looming up towards the camera, clearly thinking the 22 year-old female guitarist's prettiness is reflecting well on me. This is not the case: I look like a fat, balding regional DJ. "Christ, do I really look like that?" I asked. My wife, who is from the Bronx and doesn't really muck about when it comes to straight-talking, was uncharacteristically reassuring, "You just look a bit drunk, that's all."

"But… but … it's worse than that! All my features have been moved around - I look like a Picasso picture!" Etc etc. In my defence, I was very hungover and beginning to get The Fear.

"Honeybaby," said my wife, upping the longsuffering tone, "you've taken photgraphs of me which are much worse and I AM good-looking."

Incidentally, my wife is not arrogant or an airhead and doesn't have any of the negative traits that you would normally associate with people who proclaim themselves attractive. No, she just knows that she is good looking – and she is. How brilliant must that be! To KNOW you are attractive? I have good days and bad days and I bet that's pretty much the same for most people. I still have days when, to quote Joe Jackson, "I kid myself I look real cool" And as you get older you have more bad than good days, until, I suppose you just don't think about it anymore. It stops bothering you because you become invisible to the opposite sex.

My friend Andy, whose office I share, admits to having been through his midlife crisis already. Last week he told me that he had sat on the sofa the Saturday before, flanked by his wife on one side and his 5 year old daughter on the other, eating apple crumble and watching The One And Only. It crossed his mind that his younger self (the one which once shouted to me at the Reading Festival "Let's do all the speed we've got left and pretend we're the Clash!") would have pointed and laughed. Now the crumble/sofa interface is the height of sensual pleasure for him. Me, I'm still undecided.

At least the age thing hasn't hit the heights of my mate Russell, who whilst always having been the most eccentric man I've ever known managed to top even himself when I saw him on Thursday. I was talking about booking a recording studio for our Scottish band and how much it would cost per day (about £200 if you're interested, A&R-spotters). Russell said to me, "Imagine the peace you'd get in there - no noise from neighbours, no phones ringing, perfect air-conditioned silence - I'd pay 200 quid for that."

On the other end of the scale, I got a call from David, the man who cuts the remainder of my hair. He's a very well adjusted 40 something who after having given his flat to an ex-girlfriend finds himself flat-sharing in Camden with another guy his age. He's loving it and leading the life most of my generation only witness vicariously on Skins, Mistresses or sometimes it must be said, Scarface ... His flatmate phoned him up last week and asked if he could borrow his camera. "Sure," said David, "it's in my room - but why do you need it, you never take pictures?" "I'll show you when I get back!" he replied. When David did get back, his flatmate, who'd been up for two days with no sleep and, as we dads say, watching a bit too much Charlie And Lola, presented David with his camera. It contained a large collection of images of his girlfriend in various states of undress on David's pool table. After having phoned me up to tell me this story, he later texted me asking me if he should keep the images on his camera as his flatmate hadn't erased them ...

I was in Camden myself earlier in the week (not far from the Hawley Arms as it goes, which I have to admit, I never knew was a celeb hangout until the news reports about the fire started describing it as such; I'd always assumed it was a no-go tourist trap on the one way system, but that's what eulogy does, eh?) Anyway, I was in the Lock Tavern meeting a friend of mine, Phil, who manages bands too. He's been managing bands successfully for several years and I was hoping a bit of his luck would rub off on me. Anyway, we drank pints and talked about the changes in the music business - a typical Camden conversation - and then he went for a wee. I sat by the bar and having just had a pint was feeling expansive so started a conversation with the twenty-something guy behind the bar who was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt. Here's how it went:
Me: I saw them live when I was 13
Him (Seriously unimpressed) Yeah?
Me: Yeah, it was by accident, supporting the Buzzcocks - I didn't think they were that good to be honest - all that elbow-waggling and stuff ...
Him: (laughing out of politeness) Right
Me: (Now almost without the will to live) Funny, how they're seen as so brilliant isn't it ...

I realised half way through this that I was this old bloke sitting at the bar recounting war stories that the dudes still fighting don't really want to hear. I felt a fool - like Howard Moon talking to Vince Noir about jazz when all Vince wants to hear about is the Human League.

Still, at least I'm still trying. I'm not - in the words of The Mighty Boosh's Howard Moon again - dressing like a "Camden leisure pirate", or pretending to like bands that do nothing for me. But you know what, I can't help liking a lot of stuff that only young people are supposed to like and if that makes me look like someone's best friend's dad then so be it.

So anyway, the questions still remains, did I sign up for the Samaritans? The answer, I'm sure you'll be glad to hear, is yes. And strangely, just as I was putting pen to paper I heard a voice say, "Hello Ben!" and it turned out to be my old school friend Luke, whom I hadn't seen for ages. And that, I suppose, is one of the benefits of getting old, you amass friends who turn up at moments when you need them most. The girl tried to get Luke to sign up too but I don't think she was his type ...