We're shit-hot because we've got the combined age of 150

"Can either of you sing?"
"No, not me" says Russell.
"Yeah, I can do backing vocals," I pipe up.
"Ok, let's try it," says the engineer.

So there I am in the booth, with a pair of what we are now calling 'cans' on my head. And if they weren't slipping about on my balding head, I could kid myself that I was in a proper band with a record deal, a manager, and a big future.

In reality I'm in a studio in Willesden that my brother has booked to record some of his songs. He's doing it for fun. OK, so maybe like everyone who loves pop music, he's harbouring some delusion about suddenly being discovered, despite being in his late thirties - like those guys in Fever Pitch saying they could have played for the England squad if they had the breaks - and, as they later point out, "if it wasn't for the crapness."

Me, my brother and my rhythm buddy Russell (he's on drums, I'm on bass - like a Guardian-reading Sly and Robbie, or, if you like, a younger, slicker Bruce and Rick) - we're here to have fun and the studio engineer seems to understand this. What's strange about this for me is that it feels massively unfamiliar - I've been to studios hundreds of times in the past twenty years, demo studios in old warehouses, which gradually found themselves in upmarket areas, rehearsal rooms in worrying backstreets in Liverpool and Manchester, home studios and pre-production suites, top flight studios like Olympic and Townhouse (RIP) and Metropolis with plush loos that you could imagine Madonna or Clapton having a poo in, residential studios all over the country (many of which no longer exist), studios high up in skyscrapers in New York, and studios tucked away in the most unexpected places (did you know there was one round the back of Hammersmith Apollo?) and studios I have idealised for years like Eden (RIP) where Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe recorded This Years Model and of course, Abbey Road.

But for all this experience of being the organiser, the one who was either paying for the session or visiting the artist at work to hear their stuff, the feeling of going to the studio to play something myself is completely different. This is the first time I've done this since, well, blimey it must be late mid to late 80s. Scary. And equally, I haven't played bass for a lifetime. I've borrowed my wife's bass guitar for the day - a beautiful white Fender Precision that she used to play in her alt-country bands in New York. I remember when I met her for the first time in the Luna Lounge on Ludlow St and she told me she played bass. It was precisely then I knew I had to marry her.

Actually, judging its immaculate condition I'd say that she spent less time playing the bass and more time using various snazzy cleaning fluids on it. There is not a scratch or blemish - like our house before we had children. Most bloke's guitars get that lived-in look that our home has taken on since Esther arrived and Maddy started practicing her murals - our front room, for example, looks like Joe Strummer's guitar.

Recently I've been playing a bit of guitar again myself. I bought some new strings for my old Sigma and cracked open some old songbooks, you know, the usual ones, Bowie, Beatles, Dylan, Costello. It's been lovely. I've never noticed how adaptable John Lennon makes Dm7 - it's in both Girl and Strawberry Fields, but sounding completely different in each. When I used to write songs, using a minor chord was essential but I couldn't stretch to anything more complex. Those Beatles guys, they made it look easy.

I wish I'd played more of other people's songs when I was in my teens and 20s. Instead, I would strum chords whilst singing and come up with 'songs' that we would play in my bands. I never had the discipline to play other people's songs apart from the Clash or course, whose songs it was really easy to play and whose chords patterns I now realise I copied for all my 'own' tunes.

This was all happening before I got my first scouting job and I remember my mindset at the time: out there, in the music business, there were all the successful artists and there was me. I never thought that there would have been thousands of me's all over the world, all writing their three chord plodders and playing in rehearsal rooms. The moment I started scouting and took a look at the mounting pile of demos which I had to trawl through, I gave up making my own music. Clearly I was in it for the glory and not for the pleasure of playing. Now it's different.

The only time I let my former hobby of playing guitar cross over into A&R, was when I once lent my Sigma to the guitarist from Sleeper - an exceptional player called Jon Stewart, who like the rest of the guys in the band had to suffer the ignominy of being known as a Sleeperbloke. Anyway, he was quite fond of the rock and roll lifestyle at the time and when he returned my guitar, it was in two pieces. He eventually repaired it for me but I'm still not convinced that supergluing the headstock ever brought it back to its former glory. That'll teach me to mix pleasure and business.

And this separation of private and professional mindset was still in evidence as we travelled to Willesden to record the tracks.

"We've got five hours," said my brother,"That's way too much time to record three songs. I mean, each song is only about 3 minutes so we should have loads of time..."
"Yes," I absent mindedly said, "We should probably record ourselves live - you know, get a live feel, so it sounds like a real band playing together - don't want to do too many overdubs."

I think what my brain was attempting to rationalise was the fact that five hours is nowhere near enough time to do even one song properly - particularly if, like us, you had never played together before and in Russell and my cases, barely knew the songs. OK, there are all those stories about 60s bands recording their records in three mnutes - like the Animals recording their entire debut album in one night off during a tour - but that was then; a different planet. In all my experience of putting bands in studios to record, it's been a two to three day booking for two to three songs, with sometimes a further day added on to look at mixes which invariably always need a recall.

So there we were, four and a half hours later. The incredibly patient and gracious engineer Sean, had gently suggested we try two instead of three songs and we'd just about managed it. Russell and I had pulled a couple of good grooves out of the bag and only ballsed it up about eight times before we got a decent take.
"For never having played together before, you guys are good," Sean said generously.
"We'll we've got a combined age of a hundred and fifty so we know our shit." suggested Russell.

I then managed some backing vocals and they came out pretty well - my voice not sounding too strangled and just about working alongside my brother's. It was certainly a highlight for me. As Sean attempted a mixdown in - I kid you not - the last 20 minutes, I found myself slipping into musicianly, rather than A&R mode. Sure, I coudn't break a lifetime's habits so like an A&R man I stood directly between the monitors and nodded along sagely. But it took all the self control I could muster not to sally forth with, "I can't hear the bass, can you turn the bass up?! - and the backing vocals are too quiet! - more of me Me ME!!"

You can get out anytime you want, but you can never leave

A friend of mine just ran into Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle of The Buzzcocks outside his local pub off the Camden Road. "Hello guys, " he said - he's quite forward, my friend, he's a hairdresser and hugely adept at making people feel at ease, even when, like me, they don't have a lot of hair to cut, "Hello guys," he said,"just wanted to say that I've always been a big fan of your stuff, ever since I saw you at Eric's in Liverpool in 1977..."

Diggle looked at him and supped his pint,"Thanks mate," he said, then he gestured over to Shelley who was in conversation with someone else; he shook his head disbelievingly and slightly regretfully, "thirty two fucking years..."

We've all been at it years though haven't we? Well, I have. And it's funny, after a while it feels like I've been in it as long as people I used to look up to or buy records by. I just had another meeting with the 80s pop star and he just seemed the same age as me. Possibly younger. And yesterday I had a meeting with the guy who was my first boss. He's been in the music business, he said "for over 20 years..." Actually, I felt like saying to him - it's me that's been in it for about 20 years (20 years this autumn to be precise) you, sir, have been in it almost 30. But there he is still looking like I remember him 20 years before, a few more 'laughter lines' (on second thoughts, to paraphrase George Melly's remark to Mick Jagger, nothing's that funny) but he's looks young. Younger than me, I'd wager. And he's sitting in an office surrounded by tight-trousered boys and girls, a man in his fifth decade, still wearing Converse and having an opinion about Foals and Jo Lean And The Jing Jang Jong. Which is what you do in the music business - what else are you going to do?

I say this because I've always thought this way: what else am I going to do? What do musicians do who used to be in bands who have to go off and do something else? Well, increasingly, they reform the same bands and go off and make more money than they made first time round by carefully planned nostalgia shows - whether you're Shed Seven or The Love Affair, you can be your own tribute band at the drop of a hat these days and no one cares how old you are. In fact it's probably reassuring for the stooping, bespectacled audience to see how ancient everyone is on stage while the music makes them feel young again. When the Sex Pistols reformed in the mid-nineties, there was a purists' outcry at the terrible sacrilege and you know what? that Finsbury Park show was fucking amazing - it was, and you can tell I really mean it man, because I'm using a swear word. After Lydon came on and announced, "Fat, Forty and Back!" the context was set, every song was played pitch perfect and it was hugely entertaining. Alan McGee agreed, I remember, and published a full page NME advert declaring how great it was to gainsay the critical consensus. At the time I was running Indolent - a much smaller operation than Creation - and we published a quarter page ad saying how we felt the same way but didn't have as much cash as McGee.

The point is that now, no one cares and indeed, the Pistols are considered one of the more reliable nights out in a growing genre. Soon, we'll have bands performing the work of the greats with no attendant tribute-band irony - it's already happening with Ron Geesin having performed the Atom Heart Mother suite a couple of weeks ago and joined onstage by Dave Gilmour. My prediction is that pop records will become like classical pieces and be performed in various ways either in musicals with Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan upping the ante or increasingly in much more highbrow productions, involving new musicians interpreting them .

But what else do ex-music business people do if they give it up altogether? Of course, if they've earned a lot of money then clearly they don't have to do anything - they can go the way of the Ridgely, who must be the luckiest man in pop - a parting gift from George of half the publishing on his best song and bingo, he can surf the rest of his life or John Deacon, who lives in Putney, enjoys a round of golf, and is the proud owner of 65 million pounds. But the rest of them... us, what do we do? Here are some examples from the past:

Press PR person - Opened a cattery in Cornwall.
Record Producer - Took a new media job and never again produced a record by Bryan Ferry
A&R man - Signed James then did a joinery degree and became a carpenter
A&R woman - Left after signing the Charlatans and studied psychology
Guitarist of Haircut 100 - Became a tree surgeon
Founder of Deceptive Records - Became a secondary school teacher
Guitarist of Echobelly - Got a job in second hand record shop (OK, so she stayed in the music business...)

But you know what, writing that list took a while - and I had help. There must be loads more ex-music industry folk who jumped ship but most of them, well, they're still there as far as I know. I left music and worked for six years in new media, but on my return, I was astonished at how little had changed - I mean, the same producer managers, the same studio managers, the same mastering engineers, and so many of the same faces in publishing and record companies, albeit many of those faces jowlier and more florid. Despite the massive changes brought about by the Internet nothing, it seemed, had changed - indeed, the top studios were still charging the same daily rate that they had been charging in the mid-90s. But strangely enough, within a few months of my return, quite possibly because of my return, things began to unravel. First, the singles chart started accepting downloads without a physical format which recognised how little meaning was left in it. Then as if to concur with this, Top Of The Pops got axed, after which the legendary Townhouse Studios closed down, followed by a whole load of residential studios (including the fantastic Jacobs in Farnham) Even Eden, where I managed to record some of the second Rakes album, closed down shortly after I used it. I found this particularly sad as my favourite album of all time was recorded there. Tales of Bay City Rollers fans camping outside in the 70s will make a nice story for whichever property developer turns it into luxury flats.

Eventually, as we all know, the very record company where I was working became a victim too and everyone was made redundant. I recently went to a reunion of sorts and many of the old V2 staff were there. I didn't do an actual straw poll of which of them was still working in music but I'm fairly sure most of them are. Unless their Facebooks are fiction, they've all gone on to work in what remains of the record industry - Domino, XL, Universal, SonyBMG... So still nothing really has changed. And maybe nothing will. Just like the Buzzcocks still going steady, in twenty more years we'll all be supping pints, raising our eyebrows and shaking our heads in disbelief at where all the time went.