"Oh look at those clothes, now look at that face - it's so old..."

It was the rictus, dead eyed grin of the violently disappointed. And the fact that the bearers of it were wearing their now ubiquitous riot of colour and hand-made braiding and epaulets only heightened the insincerity.

For those of you who may erroneously think I was on a table adjacent to Coldplay and Elbow when the latter won Best Band at the BRITs, you are wrong. I haven't been since... 2006, I think. The year Prince blew everyone offstage. This year, I decided I'd like to watch it and indeed got to see about half of it before our toaster decided to fuse all the sockets in the house. I was making a snack while Kings of Leon were on.

The camera is cruel at awards ceremonies, lingering like a rubbernecker at a traffic accident as the losers do their best 'really happy for you' face. When I was interviewing people for that Times piece last week, I spoke to a friend of mine at EMI who attended the awards with one of his artists a few years back. Sadly, the artist didn't win the award they were nominated for and later, no doubt at one of the free-booze-laden aftershows where the real entertainment occurs, they confessed that they had had to work hard on achieving their 'not at all UPSET I HAVEN'T WON' face. Kirsten Scott Thomas who was quoted in the press in the run up to the BAFTAs complaining that it was unfair for Kate Winslet to win both Actress and Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes, didn't bother with The Happy Face - she kept her ice cool, insouciance - some would say, snooty look intact when the inevitable happened and Winslet won again and mounted the stage to gush. I applaud her and anyone honest enough to concur with the title of this week's first line - We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.

I've been thinking a bit about professional jealously recently. Not just because of the BRITs or because Morrissey has another bilious album out this week, but also because it seems to me that as this recession deepens, and with it expectations on what is realistic and achievable get 'adjusted' in everyone's lives - including my own - I wonder if the spectre of a colleague doing very much better than you gets easier or harder to bear.

I found myself in meetings in various offices in West London last week, each one with a friend I have known for many years and during each one I stepped out of myself and watched the two of us talking and our body language. Is Ben showing signs of jealously that this person has a nice office and a secure job? Is he being over-deferential? Does the person he is in the meeting with behave in a different way to Ben, knowing that he is now a freelance writer in a recession rather than either a) a mate with a job and no agenda or b) a mate still working within the industry?

I'll be honest, the green-eyed monster did leap out and happy slap me a couple of times during these meetings. Incidentally, a massive aside: I saw Othello for the first time last week (I was reviewing it for thelondonpaper) and the green-eyed monster cliche originates there. Ditto the beast with two backs.

So yes, when I was sitting in Universal Records' subsidised Dean & Deluca style coffee bar, the sunlight dappling onto the lavishly presented promotional posters, I can't deny feeling a frisson of envy that several of my pals are safely ensconced here. And waiting to see a very dear friend in the London offices of CAA, the perfect air-conditioned silence in the meeting room, complete with its cinema-sized widescreen television and designer chairs, made me hanker after the sort of AirMile-rich lifestyle that these office furnishings clearly denoted.

But I didn't hate my friends in a Morrissey way - even if some of them are actually Northern. That same morning I had breakfast with my two Scared Hitless colleagues. Regular readers will know that we've been meeting every Christmas for 14 years since we first had a dabble at running our own indie label. We always have such a good time at these meetings that we've decided to have monthly breakfasts - my other two friends are now so successful, particularly the Northern one, that they don't really have time for lunches. We also decided, credit crunch style, to avoid having power breakfasts in poncy hotels but to meet in proper cafes. This time, because we all had things going on in West London, we decided to meet in Georges cafe behind Olympia. I used to come here a lot when I worked at AOL and I hadn't been there since I visited old AOL-ers when was working in the V2 office in Holland Park.

So to get there in time for breakfast I took the familiar tube route that I'd done for getting on for six years - all the way to Barons' Court then across the appalling Talgarth Road past the University of Hip Hop (I assume that's what they all study there, given the students' strict dress code) and down the fig tree-lined Gliddon Road. This journey, particularly the walk at the end brought back memories of having regular, reasonably normal employment and I had expected to feel a nostalgic yearning for more secure times. Guess what? I felt absolutely overjoyed not to be heading for that terrible black glass building. All the horror of AOL's petty bureaucracy, the passive aggressive bullying and general bad times of that part of my 'career' came flooding back and, like a patient undergoing Jungian therapy I almost broke down on Hammersmith Road and pounded the pavement with my bare fists.

And at breakfast with my two former music business colleagues I felt no jealousy - I am fortunate that they are doing well because they are friends and quite frankly in these times you need all the successful friends you can get.

In Toby Young's column in the Guardian,(always a good read) he uses the Anvil film (directed by a friend of his) to talk about just this sort of professional jealously and comes to the conclusion that as you get older you accept your friends' success much more gracefully. But he also points out that happiness in life is U shaped - you're happy when you're young and again happy when you're older but the most miserable years are your 30s and 40s when you realise the dreams you have are unrealistic and you start to face the reality that you won't perhaps be a pop star, or, I dunno, an international banker.

I'm not sure men ever give up on dreams like these - a mate of mine came up with the theory that this is why old women are generally a lot more sane than old men - because they frequently achieved fulfilment through childbirth and motherhood. Men carry on collecting coins, toy cars or - bit close to home this one - records, and harbouring dreams of becoming international playboys or Internet poker tycoons. That's why grandma is so adorable and wise, while grandpa sits growling in his chair holding a magnifying glass over the Telegraph crossword.

Which takes us back to Coldplay - do you think they really cared about losing out to Elbow? Maybe I was projecting my own suppressed jealousies onto their sweet angelic, internationally successful faces. No, I think they are young and ambitious enough to care. And there is nothing wrong with it; jealously and competitiveness is what drives ambition: no one is successful without it. From lifetime achievement BRIT winner Neil Tenant, who famously admitted putting Pet Shop Boys CDs to the front of record shop racks whenever he had the opportunity, to Paul McCartney who, despite all he has achieved, is still trying to be cool. Even someone you would think was above such pettiness, Franz Kafka, wrote in his diary about his close friend Oscar Baum, another writer in Prague at the time:

Envy of the apparent success of Baum whom I like so much. With this, the feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that quickly winds itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of my body to itself.

Yes, that ball of wool was present at the BRITs and if I'm honest, is present whenever I see other writers getting features, or indeed getting their calls returned by editors. I'm getting out that Morrissey CD right now in fact ...

"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!

"Did you ever feel a strange vibration in here?"

Roll up, roll up! Stickers, badges, posters, T-shirts! I have entered the world of merchandise. OK, so it's not like there are queues around the block yet, but there's something life-affirming about making objects and sticking the name of your group on them, isn't there? Of course, it just means you're spending money you don't have but rather like wearing a suit to a job interview you somehow feel a bit naked turning up at shows without some merch. After briefly entertaining the idea of doing hip skinny shirts for girls and stylish polo shirts for boys, I was enlightened by Geoff, my business partner. A man seasoned with much more managerial experience than me, Geoff let me have it straight: "Ben, don't bother, it's only fat lads who buy band T-shirts - I've got an attic full of Mediums and Smalls."

So we're doing badges now instead - and maybe stickers too. I've always been a big fan of the band sticker. I remember buying a handful of Buzzcocks stickers at the first gig I went to when I was 12. Onto the school rough book they went, everyone in class was intrigued what this slightly sexy sounding thing was with its colliding ZZs. Bless Malcolm Garrett, for a brief moment I was the coolest person I knew. I've always striven to recreate this excitement with artists I've worked with. We did some amazing stickers for 60Ft Dolls, which featured the band's name using the Happy Shopper logo and font - a very clever trick considering the band had a song of that name. The marketing guy who did those for us is still around so I phoned him to ask his advice on stickers. Why was a quote I'd been given for stickers so much? - "Ah, that'll be the blades they have to make up - go for anything other than square, oblong or oval and it's really expensive." "Cat shape?" "There's your answer."

Still, it's exhilarating to see designs you've helped put together appear on walls or lapels. I look forward to seeing Glasgow's most fashionable swanning around the band's single launch this Friday sporting little cats on their thrift shop V necks. I've not got anything against making 'indie tent' T-shirts but given the sales upside of T-shirts in a band's early days (in my experience so far, about one per gig) I'd prefer to have something small, affordable and cute on sale rather than a large piece of fabric gaffa-taped hopefully to a felt board.

Talking of menswear and felt boards, I had a bizarre experience last week. The meetings I described in the last blog continued and on Thursday I found myself going over to see someone at PIAS distribution. I've known the lovely people there for many years, in the past they've distributed a lot of the records I've been most proud of: Indolent releases like Sleeper, the aforementioned Dolls, Wannadies, and Stephen Duffy as well as my own label Scared Hitless including the first Verruca Salt single. PIAS have recently moved to new offices, situated in a building which until recently were occupied by the kindly gentle folk of V2.

So here I am getting off the tube at Fulham Broadway and walking past the nasty TGI Fridays and the misshapen BMG Music tower towards Farm Lane, just as I did for most of 2007. The old V2 building was in many ways like the older V2 Building in Holland Park - a throwback to the glory days of record companies: a compact, warren-filled, converted older building, filled with enthusiastic young women, cynical youngish men and cardboard boxes filled with 'stock'. If you wander down Kensington High St towards Putney and take a look at Warners, EMI, Universal or SonyBMG you will see that each building is large and new and if there are boxes, then they are hidden away so that guests like me won't syphon off any Duffy stock to take to Record And Tape Exchange. If any further proof were needed that the industry's glory days are over, then look no further than the Universal building, which, like a massive, living iPod, has compressed virtually all of that is left of the UK record business into its shell.

Inside the old V2 building I am greeted by the jolly PIAS receptionist. The hand-carved-by-slaves V2-logo reception is still there, as is the inexplicable enormous Cuban artwork over the bar area, but the atmosphere, with emphasis on the third syllable, is gone; the building seems to have gained a joie de vivre that was missing by the time we limped out last year. It feels weird to be back, especially as I'm the one waiting in reception; I almost expect to see my old self sneaking out of the side door in its false beard trying to avoid a meeting with me. My host, Ian, comes down to greet me and we make small-to-medium talk as we skip up the gantry steps to what was the old marketing department. Blimey, they've kept the old rollerblinds covered in rock icons (Hendrix, Jagger, Strummer, etc - I always wondered idly in meetings how they would have looked if they'd stuck to a strictly V2 palette - Isabelle Campbell, Mark Lanegan, Alan from the Rakes, Lethal Bizzle - surely that would have been cooler, wouldn't it?).

As we walk past the old chairman's suite (now split into two more conservatively proportioned offices) I want to ask where we're going. Surely not! Is this a joke? He's not taking me back to the old V2 A&R department is he?

"And here's my office..." says Ian, ushering me into a room I am all too familiar with. "Nooooooo!" I feel like Charlton Heston's character at the end of Planet of The Apes. Yes, Ian has inherited my old office - what are the chances? etc. We spend the first five minutes, just laughing and comparing notes on the room. He has a framed Peter Tosh poster waiting to be hung, probably in the space where I my Clash poster was - plus ca change. On the felt pin board, is no oversized band T-shirt but a small Fred Perry sticker I had stuck up on the day I bought my current favourite shirt. I comment on it and we realise we are both wearing Fred Perrys.
"Hey let me ask you one thing, though, Ben - did you ever feel a strange vibration in here?"
"Yes!"
"Me too - it's weird isn't it? Where's it coming from?"
"No one could get to the bottom of it at V2 - Facilities just said it was the AC"
"But it's there even when the AC's not on"
"And sometimes not at all - then it comes back..."
"Your whole keyboard vibrates when you're typing."
"What can I say, I've been there..."

And so on. We did actually have a proper meeting after all the room-bonding, it transpired that there was not much for my bolt-on A&R company but possibly potential things for the Scottish band at a later date. A partial result then, if you're a glass-half-full man. Which, of course I'm not. But you know what was strangest about the meeting in my ex-office? - It felt amazing to be back but on the other side of the desk! Absolute tantamount proof of what I was saying in the last blog - to be able to walk out of that building, after a smile, a handshake and a 'see you soon'. Away from the strange inexplicable vibration, back into the world of badges, stickers and booking hotels. Single launch party tomorrow in Glasgow, I'll keep you posted how we do...

A Cruel and Shallow Money Trench

Everyone is telling me that I have to read Kill Your Friends by John Niven. Well, when I say everyone, I mean a disproportionate amount of music business folk I’ve spoken to recently have mentioned it. Thinly-veiled real record company types make enough appearances to prompt those that recognise them into playing Spot The Mate. It’s a book about an A&R man written by an ex-A&R man and is set in the music business of the late 90s. It’s a book that I tried to write myself a few times and didn’t get much beyond the title, Scared Hitless.

I never knew John Niven – in fact, and this is weird, I’d never even heard of him until my friend Keith who runs an indie label and also writes fiction, mentioned that Niven had written this book. Now, clearly part of me is jealous and childish and wishes abject failure on someone who has not only succeeded in writing a book about the music business but has also managed to get it published, get a bit of a profile and get a 3 For 2 in Waterstones. But mainly, I really think the book on A&R needed to be written, a book that does justice to the madness and the idiocy of that part of the business which everyone thinks they know about – and now more than ever since the entire country thinks they are doing A&R when they watch The X-Factor.

So I was disappointed when I picked up a copy in Waterstones a couple of weeks ago and read the first five pages. I really wanted to find myself laughing or nodding in recognition and … well, I’m not going to unleash a torrent of scorn because I have yet to read the thing in full. This weekend, I was planning on doing just that but the Amazon package is locked away in some depot waiting for me to pick it up. Why didn’t I just buy it in Waterstones that day? Well, partly because I baulked at the tower of cliché in the first thousand words, I just couldn’t bring myself to part with cash for something so disappointing. It read like my fiction about the music business reads - like it was written by someone who is basing it on second hand accounts – the drugs, the laziness, the hopelessly untalented artists and the idiot managers. Normally when I write myself, I read back what I’ve written and think a large part of it is worthless but there are one or two good things which I’ll keep. But every time I’ve written about the music business it’s ALL junk; not a shard of originality or interesting thought. Normally the advice is to write about what you know but in my case it’s write about what you don’t know – the more into the dark I go, the better the fiction. Or so I’ve discovered, anyway.

The bloke who’s looking after the book I’ve written (not about the music business, but it does take its title from the Wire album, Pink Flag) initially read a chapter from my first novel and said he wasn’t interested in it; he had no belief in representing fiction about the music business. Funnily enough, the novel wasn’t actually about the music biz at all but it made enough references to it to bring him out in hives. “There’s no point in writing fiction about the music business,” he said, “because the fact is always going to be more interesting.”

And he’s right. Why make up stuff about how shocking and sordid and brutal the industry is when the facts are already brilliantly and hilariously in print in Hammer Of The Gods or The Dirt? Why tell a rags-to-riches story or vice versa about how it all went right or wrong, when you’ve got genius accounts like Black Vinyl, White Powder or Feel or Crazy From The Heat or Stoned?

Also, if I read that bloody Hunter S Thompson quotation about the music industry again I’ll shoot myself – everyone now seems to be using it in their email signature as if to say that, like Les McQueen, “it’s a shit business” but they’re wise to it.

Anyway, you can see where this is going can’t you? Bitter writer has a pop at successful writer in a futile attempt at claiming moral high ground. Notice though, that I haven’t even bloody read it. That’s like an NME writer saying he hates somebody’s record on principle because he objects to their trousers. Mind you, I think that’s pretty fair in pop – it is largely about the trousers.

But, listen, I promise to have read Kill Your Friends by next time, then I’ll either release a torrent of vitriol or tuck into my own words.