"You say you want a resolution..."

We're seven miles up in the air somewhere over the Atlantic when Maddy asks me, "Daddy, what's 'meaning'?"

I've just read her the synopsis of the film Wall-E from the tiny screen in front of us and the final line says words to the effect of: '... and at last the lonely robot finds some meaning in life.' As questions go from five-year olds go - or indeed from anyone at all, "What is meaning?" is the big one. And to get it at 35 thousand feet up in the air on New Year's Day makes it seem all the more poignant. How do I answer a question like that?

We're coming back from a ten day trip to the US to visit Robyn's folks in Virginia. Yes, for those of you wondering what had happened to me since the last blog entry three weeks ago, that's where I've been. And now the holiday and indeed the Holidays are over. Interesting that the American catch-all term for Christmas is being increasingly used over here - I got a number of heartfelt corporate festive greeting texts from friends on my return, none of them mentioning the word Christmas. No doubt if any clients of a non-Christian faith received a greeting containing the word Christ during their hard-won Holiday, they would immediately declare a business fatwa on the offending well-wisher.

Yes, Holiday is over and I didn't even get the chance to wish everyone a Merry Christmas or a Happy New Year but I do hope you all had a good one and didn't spend the time between crackers and Auld Lang Syne worrying about what how terrible 2009 is going to be financially, ecologically and of course for the record business. I spent the time in Virginia in the middle of what they call 'The Boondocks' (trans. 'the back and beyond') not once looking at the Internet, the news on TV, a newspaper or even turning on my mobile phone. Instead I cooked, helped my daughters invent games with the dolls and dug deep into the iPod shuffle for Christmas greats (Hark The Herald Angels Swing by The World's Greatest Jazzband Of Yank Lawson & Bob Haggart got a lot of love) as well as returning to my favourite CDs of the year and of course plenty of Maddy's - incidentally, if you have kids under 10 and haven't heard the Carrie and David's Pop Shop album yet you're in for a treat - it keeps your children off the streets, gives an ex member of Linx some well-deserved earnings and you get the fun of spotting the musical references as they plunder every genre to bring pop alive for kids. More fun than listening to Bon Iver, I Grant you.

I must stop going on about Bon Iver, I'm sure he's a very talented and likable guy. I actually did try and have another go at the album over Christmas. I figured I was in the middle of a forest, in a log cabin-style house, it was frosty outside with the nearest town, Scottsville, a twenty-minute drive away; aside from the fact that I wasn't on my own with only my beard for company, surely the atmosphere was identical to the one allegedly endured by broken hearted Justin Vernon when he made For Emma? But no, the thing passed me by again. I love simple voice and guitar music, from Iron and Wine and Elliot Smith to Jake Thackray and Bert Jansch but, for me, there is something missing about For Emma, Ever Ago. I just don't like the fella's singing, it sounds like he's putting on mannerisms, as if his voice isn't his own. And it's double tracked a lot too (e.g on The Wolves) which is always suspicious. And of course, my hackles are always raised when something is universally praised by music critics - every one of them falling for the dubious mythology of the tortured artist doing it for love and making it all my himself in a shed. I'm sure he did, but that doesn't automatically make it 'haunting' and 'beautiful'. I'll give it this though, I do quite like the final track Re: Stacks. But what an annoying indie song-title...

Consensus terrorism as Douglas Coupland calls it, is always rife in the press. I've mentioned it here before, it's when a couple of leading critics set an opinion , which is then followed by all the lesser journalists out of laziness or fear of getting it wrong, then the public follows suit and before you know it, people are either afraid to admit to liking Coldplay or fearful of saying they don't think Pet Sounds is the greatest album ever made. Given that I had time to reflect over things during my holiday in Les Boondocks, I concluded that this is one of the things that obsessess me and is perhaps the underlying motivation in everything I write.

I was angry about consensus terrorism as an A&R man, finding myself quite often very against whatever artists who were getting other A&R folk in a lather, and looking for inspiration elsewhere. Often I was wrong, and whoever it was I didn't care for (e.g. recently The Klaxons, or years ago, Suede) became huge and I actually ended up quite liking their stuff but just as often I was right (Where are The Twang now? And I'll be surprised if we'll hear much more of the Courteeners in 2009).

But why should I care about what 15-year olds listen to? I feel like I'm already father to a teenager as Maddy now wanders round the house singing Fabulous like Sharpay in High School Musical 2. When I started this blog a year ago (yes, amazingly it's been 12 months! I would hold some sort of event for its birthday, invite all of you and bathe in glory if I was the sort of person I dislike . Incidentally, I have to admit the popularity of A&Rmchair is one of the most pleasing things about 2008 for me and, as the risk of sounding like Halle Berry at the Oscars thank you all for reading it in such numbers with such regularity.

But I am digressing again. What I was about to say was that a year ago one of the first entries here was about me getting stopped by a beautiful girl who was collecting for The Samaritans outside Farringdon station. After having done the usual bloke thing of assuming that she had collared me because she found my rather splendid looks beguiling, was told that I reminded her of one of her dad's mates. Since then, I have rebuilt my confidence back to being convinced of my adorability. I've done this by means of growing a beard (see, me and that Bon Iver, we've got more in common than you might think).

The beard happened over the summer by accident really; we were on holiday and I just didn't shave for a week. Then, on being complemented by my wife, I kept growing it until, in her words, it 'got a bit Mick Fleetwood' whereupon I trimmed it rather than the usual post-holiday clean shave. Now six months on and I have embraced being a beardy. I never thought I'd be one - my dad has always had a beard and I whilst I always thought it looked good on him, I was on the side of Roald Dahl who disliked them so much he included a whole chapter on them in The Twits. I wear the beard now with pride. But with it come all sorts of new responsibilities - like the wiping away of toothpaste after brushing, or the disentangling of toasty crumbs. Also, I now have to think about the way I dress because it makes me look grown up. I've been to the Old Blue Last many times and stood at the bar next to lots of bearded-up Hoxtonites, but I am aware that if I went now, I could not pass for one of the Mystery Jets unless I was the dad. The beard is not some facial equivalent of a leather jacket and girlfriend 20 years my junior.

This notion crystallised while we were in America. We were doing a shop for kids' clothes at a store called Old Navy which is like a kind of low rent Gap. I wandered off to have a look at the Men's section and found a whole load of T-shirts for $7 each (American T-shirts are always a bargain, it's almost as if they are subsidised along with the petrol). These shirts were individually designed, some had messages, others hand drawn Mo-Wax-style creatures or line drawings, here's one I really liked and tried on. It was then that it hit me: I realised that while I am still fortunate enough to have a waist and reasonably broad shoulders, I just can't pull off the logo T-shirt anymore with the beard (PB). In fact, I'm now not sure if I could even pre-beard (BB) It was a big revelation, to be honest, as I am a huge fan of graphic design on T-shirts, but right there and then I made the decision that I was no longer going to wear shirts like that anymore. I may not be mutton, but I'm damn sure not going to sink into some ignoble middle youth. So there's a New Year's resolution - along with all the others that I'm not going to share here. If you do see me out in a T-shirt, it won't have a graphic design on it. If it does, I hereby give you the right to say, "Oi, grandad! Get yourself something nice from Marks & Spencers instead!"

So what about meaning in life? What did I say to Maddy, who wanted to know about meaning all those feet up in the air? I said this: meaning is your friends, it's knowing that you're not alone - just like Wall-E in the film, which we watched about five minutes of before Maddy got too scared. I told her we were finally going to see her friend Katie who lives next door to us in Walthamstow. Katie, whose name Maddy had mentioned almost every day of the trip, normally in the sentence: "I'm bored, I want to go home, I want to see Katie!" It's about me going out with for the annual Scared Hitless Christmas lunch with two of my oldest mates both of whom are now hugely successful in the music business and being able to talk and laugh as equals for three hours and not notice the time pass or indeed the time that has passed between us - we realised that we'd been having these Christmas lunches for 14 years. So if meaning in life equals friendship, there's another resolution for all of us in 2009: think less about your office desk, your inbox and making money, and see more of your friends. Happy new year!

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.