South East London Song Contest

The band are now playing at full pelt, brass section giving it oomph, Telecasters are chopping and bass syncopating with snare. But the enthusiastic dancers have given the floor over to someone who is clearly having it larger than they are. The shape thrower in question, who looks like a combination of the foreman from Auf Widersehen Pet and Little Krankie, has now stripped off his polo shirt and is doing bare-chested press-ups on the pub floor. Ah, it's good to be back in South East London on a Saturday night.

The patrons of the Ladywell Tavern must be the only people in the entire country who aren't watching the final of Britain's Got Talent. Why am I missing this televisual feast? Don't I want to see how SuBo is going to fare? Am I, as my good friend Andy suggests, "a bit weird"? Why would I want to miss the ultimate bit of communal A&R? After all, I couldn't resist sitting down with my five year-old daughter and watching a generous slice of Eurovision this year. No one can accuse me of being some elitist twat who only accepts music that has been blessed by hipsters as you will know if you've been reading this for any length of time. I am, in fact, the polar opposite of this; far more likely to embrace a Girls Aloud album than one by Bon Iver - how many tunes does Bon have per song? Answer: two at best; how many do Xenomania give Girls Aloud? Five per song. Fah. Eye. Vah! Count 'em.

Eurovision had the usual pitiful selection of tunes but some unforgettable performances - Dita Van Tease's appearance with Germany's appalling entry was so popular with Maddy that she forced me to sit through it a second time the moment it finished. How I cursed the Sky+. At least she showed a modicum of taste when half way through Norway's inexplicably winning entry, referring to an earlier Graham Norton quip, she said, "Daddy, I agree with what that man said before, I want to give him a slap too."

But why watch talent on the telly when you can go out and see some of it in real life? We were off to see the band - The Grey Cats - that a friend of mine plays in. The clue of course is in the name - these men are not young. Some of them are even older than me. By day they are all mortgaged, parenting, reliable pillars of society but every now and then they put on some black clothes, pick up horns, guitars and sticks and practice some Clash songs. They've all got their own hair and most of them are slim enough to have tucked-in shirts without looking like cabbies. In short: for a bunch of old fellas singing London Calling they don't look too ridiculous.

The pub is packed for their performance, mostly friends and family of course - but how brilliant does this feel? It's like I suppose it was before entertainment was provided so easily on recordings - when, as the cliche goes, you had to make your own entertainment. To a certain extent I go along with Bill Drummond who believes that 'all recorded music has run its course' and that we should ditch it all and 'start again'. Clearly The Grey Cats are not out to produce anything quite so radical as Drummond's choir - you can't imagine The 17 doing a version of Stray Cat Strut with as much gusto as The Grey Cats - but the fact that we have all come to watch some blokes playing for fun, who have no worries about playing a few bum notes or wonky time signatures, says something.

Perhaps it's what all of us who never really liked sport are destined to do - instead of golf or fishing or watching the cricket we dust down our guitars, buy some new plectrums and get on the phone to some cheap rehearsal rooms. I'm playing music again for the first time in 20 years, as are many of my friends. I've yet to do any gigs (and boy, if I do, am I going to keep that one quiet) but I'm in a minority - one bunch of 40-something friends are in a band called Mass Data Storage (I love this band name) - who, despite having a jazz-obsessed bass player with the brain the size of a planet, only play three chord new wave covers.

The beauty of pop music being so old is that we are now all mature enough to recognise it as something which we shouldn't feel bad about maintaining a passion for until we die. Why should we put childish things away as we puff up, lose brain cells and develop ear hair? Most of us had some sort of aspiration to play rock when we were young but it's only recently become acceptable for normal middle aged guys, who aren't Stephen King or Simon Armitage to get up and play just as badly as they did when they were teenagers.

And talking of teenagers, last week I also got some first hand experience of another phenomenon at the other end of the age spectrum: the pop music school. I was asked to talk to a bunch of students at a North London music school about their Myspace pages .

The idea of going to school to learn about pop music still seems slightly bizarre to me. After all, School of Rock was only a handful of years ago. But these schools are a massive growth area in the UK and seemingly there is no end to the amount of kids who want to formalise their pop music knowledge so they can earn a living from it. Come to think of it, my mate from The Grey Cats has a daughter who goes to the BRITs school in Croydon.

This was the first time I'd ever spoken to students about the music business and frankly I was a little alarmed. Not just at the prospect of standing up in front of a class who might take anything I said as undisputed truth but also at what you say to kids who want to get into the music business when no one really knows what this business is any more.

Of course, the usual thing happened before any of the kids arrived - no one could work out how to make the overhead projector connect to the laptop. It's always the same, whether you are organising a surprise birthday party for your wife or an international A&R conference: whenever more than 6 people gather together in a conference room, all AV gear will stop working for as long as it takes for everyone from Post Room staff to Prada-sporting CEOs to be on their hands and knees under furniture shouting "Is it working now? Can you press AUX? No? Well, press PHONO, see if that works!"

Eventually we got it working (one of the students saved the day, of course) and in the blink of an eye the two hours I was booked to talk to them disappeared. In that time I found myself spouting all sorts of music industry lore I never even knew existed. I've heard this is what happens to lecturers and teachers - you are seduced by the sound of your voice - hey, I'm making these guys laugh... I AM A GOLDEN GOD.

This was a very smart bunch of kids and most of what I was saying was simple common sense - about logos, images and blogs - but they still seemed to something from it. We didn't speak much about songwriting and the music each Myspace was promoting but in preparing for the lecture I'd come across some notes I'd made back in the 90s when I was at Indolent and listening to far too many demos. I decided to close on this just to give them a little hint at the depths of my cynicism - it's a list of the most common lyrical cliches I found on demo tapes. Believe me, these blunders are so common if you have ever written a song you will have used one. So here as a little bonus are the Top Ten Lyrics To Be Avoided

10 Deep inside (combined either with "I've got a feeling..." or "Make you feel good...")
9 How much you mean to me
8 I hope and I pray
7 Don't matter what I do (plus optional) just can't get over you
6 Change... rearrange
5 You can't run, you can't hide
4 Just can't go on (and yet somehow, they manage to...)
3 Should have seen those lies in your eyes (plus optional) made me realise
2 Never thought it could be this way
1 Till the break of dawn.

The Grey Cats have a couple of their own songs which avoid any of the above - something I think we must thank the punk rock idiom for is the absence of navel gazing love lyrics. And talking of navel gazing, I find myself staring at the naked torso of Mr Krankie who is now being escorted from the pub by the landlord. He is clearly no stranger to White Ace and has a face which tells a thousand stories - most of them ending in being escorted from the building. "He comes to all our shows" announces Grey Cats singer Jac, and there is a ripple of mirth before the floor fills again to the strains of a Message to You Rudie and I start worrying about the babysitter.

"Back in the garage with my bullshit detector."

I'm standing in the Purple Turtle in Camden. Outside it's raining and the wind is blowing copies of London Lite across the streets. Inside there is a small audience, most of whom seem to be industry types - I see a ageing manager I recognise from the early 90s, an A&R man whose name escapes me, a dusty old radio promotions guy who I see at every gig I go to... There is an atmosphere of treadmillery in the room. Or maybe it's just me. I'm here, as ever, as a spectator. I'm sitting in the A&Rmchair, commenting from the sidelines, not having to invest money or time in whoever it is on stage. Phew.

Tonight's support band plug in and almost the moment the singer opens his mouth I know it's time to leave. It's not that he's got a bad voice, or that the band are exceptionally awful either. In fact, if they were exceptionally awful I'd be more inclined to stay. They are young and clean and play with energy and determination but it's a heart-sinking spectacle - imagine all the rehearsals, all the intense discussions about the name, the lyrics and the 'look'. As it is I can't tell you what they sounded like or even what they looked like - apart from the fact that they are a three piece and the bassist has nice hair. At one point the guitarist/singer plays a clanging Wellerish riff and my 40-something synapses liven up. But then he starts singing in his dreary voice and the band lose me again.

Me and my gig mate leave after 3 songs and return to the pub over the road. We've both done this many many times. He still does A&R for his own label. Over drinks we have a conversation that maybe everyone in the music business is having this January:

-- Where are the exciting new bands?
-- Is trying to get a major record deal as an indie band now a pointless exercise?
-- Are we too old to be going to gigs?
-- What else could we do instead?
-- Just a half? Why not a pint? I'm having a pint!
-- Will the White Lies album keep its midweek of 1? (It did)
-- Are they any good?
-- Preferred Fear of Flying (WL's previous incarnation)
-- Me too
-- Is that why we're in this pub and not drinking fine wine at The Ivy?

OK, so maybe some of the topics covered aren't entirely universal, but I'm not going to relay the whole thing because it would be an episode of Last Of The Britpop Wine. Compo and whatever the others were called.

Talking of age - and let's face it, that's what I talk about here - one interesting development in music seems to be happening in the life of the older music fan: Playing it.

You may recall that a few weeks before Christmas I went into a studio with my brother to record a demo. Well, since then me and Russell - the Guardian-reading Sly 'n' Robbie, the riddim section with the mostest ear hair etc - we've been lending our 'talents' to another singer.

So far we've had two rehearsals with our new singer, Jess. She's got a proper bluesy voice, writes a robust song and miraculously hasn't fallen down in hysterics the moment we get our groove 'on'. Frankly, I've not had as much fun in a small room with two other people since well, the days of hanging out in the loos at Smashing. The weird thing is, I can't understand why I've not played music for fun for such a long time. It's not as if I'm a particularly adept bass player, but pulling a tune together in 20 minutes, experimenting a bit with arrangments (obviously Russell and I go for a reggae beat every single time then usually end up admitting that it doesn't quite gel with songs that sound like early Van Morrison and slip into a shufflely skiffle thing) well, that's all you need to have a good time.

I suppose it must be like going for a kickabout on a Sunday, or fishing, or playing golf. I don't know, I've never been interested in sport so I may be wrong. The one big difference is that there is normally a competitive edge with sport - it's all maths and size and who's better than who. With us at the moment, the only competition is who out of me or Russell can get away with saying the filthiest thing in front of Jess. How mature. Of course it turns out that Jess can outfilth us both without batting an eyelid. She even suggested we should call our band the Japanese word for getting an erection on public transport. I can't remember it, I'm afraid, perhaps you know. I want us to be called Younger Model.

At the last rehearsal there was a proper band in the room adjacent to ours. When I say proper, I mean young and taking it seriously. It's a great place where we rehearse (I'm not going to tell you where it is otherwise you'll all go and book it) but the one downside is that that you hear others rehearsing when you stop playing. You can see them too. From where I was standing with my wife's bass, slung sexy Simonon-style over me, I could see through the window in our door over to the adjacent room where a bass player half my age and with four times as much hair was giving it the full-on Kasabian. In a flash it became apparent that other bands were at it and could arguably be better. "We'll have their guitarist by spring" I told Jess with mock bravado,
"Are we going to play live?" asked Russell
"Of course, when we've got a name and six songs rehearsed," Jess said confidently.
Russell and I looked at each other - this woman really means it. So we do actually have to take this seriously. Bollocks.

Back at the pub opposite the Purple Turtle, my gig mate and I decide not to bother going back to the venue. We call it a night and walk back to his car. The headliners are on now and we can hear them through the wall as we walk past the venue. I can tell that I don't like them even through the wall. And that's probably what the lustrous-haired bass player in the adjacent rehearsal room said about us.

Why I never got my hands on a Hirst

It was Joe Strummer who told me the news that they were going to wind up the company: "It's not working out - none of us can agree on anything - apart from that smoking's really good." Fair play to them though, it was the best redundancy I've ever had - being let go by the lead singer of the Clash. All the directors and myself had just consumed a massive kebab lunch at Efe's on Great Titchfield St ("These are my people!" Joe had said, referring to his childhood spent in Turkey) - it was clearly a planned coup.

I'm reminded of that time - the time, as I think I have mentioned here before, when I briefly ran a label for Damien Hirst and rock pals Alex James and Joe Strummer - because the artist is of course in the news again this week for being £111 million richer. Not so much Golden Calf as golden goose. I'm also doing some work at another music web site based not far from the offices where the label was based, so I get reminded of the sandwich bars I used to go to, where I used to sit and wonder what the hell I was doing with my life. What?! I hear you say. Surely running a label for the world's most groundbreaking and successful living artist, your childhood hero from the Clash and the extremely personable bass player from Blur must have been a dream job! And initially it did seem like that was how it was going to be. But despite all the complicated stuff that I won't bore you with, the basic problem was that, as Joe rightly pointed out, they couldn't agree on anything - basic things like what type of music to sign, for example, were swept under a BonViveur's carpet with the oft repeated call of "Get on board!" An expression I heard Hirst use in a interview with Mark Lawson only the other day. I duly got on board but it was more Titantic than Double Deckers.

My job initially, was of course A&R but very quickly it became apparent that the job was everything but that; the A&R part, i.e. the deciding on what music we were going to put out, was up to the directors. And the director with the most in-your-face charisma was not Joe or Alex or even Damien - although they clearly put up some stiff competition No, the man who had that in spades was Lily Allen's dad, Keith.

Keith of course, had fronted the hugely successful Fat Les record Vindaloo which Telstar had released earlier that year to tie in with the 1998 World Cup. Now Keith had another event-related idea for Fat Les and the event this time was Christmas. Now the label name Turtleneck was actually going to become a real label. Of course I blame myself for everything that went wrong - you should know by now that I'm that sort of person. Clearly, the record was not a patch on Vindaloo in terms of pop simplicity or conceptual appeal but somehow I got swept along on the tide of Keith's enthusiasm. We all did. Well, actually, no, not all of us. Damien, didn't like it and said so. But he was outvoted. And very quickly, Keith's sketchy idea, written with Roland Rivron was fleshed out with Strummer on guitar, Alex on bass, Bryan Ferry and The The producer Bruce Lampcov behind the desk at Air Studios - and soon after Paul Kaye, David Walliams and Matt Lucas and a host of other soon-be-famous faces appeared in the meticulously directed (by Keith) video.

Naughty Christmas (Goblin In The Office) was no one's finest hour, it must be said. But we were all so wrapped up in it at the time that it felt like it could easily emulate Vindaloo and be embraced by a nation obsessed with the idea of cheesy Christmas past: Mary & Joseph and Morecombe & Wise as Squeeze once sang. After all, everyone can identify with making a fool of oneself at the office party. Actually, if the record had contained a fraction of the ideas contained in the video (which you must have a look at if you haven't yet - the quality on the above link is terrible but you'll get the idea) we would have been away. But even though you could hardly accuse Vindaloo of being lyrically verbose, Naughty Christmas went so far as to actually swerve the use of the word Christmas. Yes, that's right, we released a Christmas single which didn't actually mention the word Christmas. It's amazing we even got Woolworth's to stock it.

By the time Christmas arrived it was all over. We'd actually sold quite a few records - about 40,000 or something - a huge amount by today's standards and Keith's tireless self-promotion had done more than any amount of creative pr could do and made us a weeky fixture on LWT's chart show. But compared to the curry record which had sold a quarter of a million and of course, it also didn't have the cache of being connected with football. As a proud football ignoramus, I am always amazed at how much crassness is accepted in the name of the 'beautiful game' - do you really enjoy wearing all those synthetic fibres advertising airlines you've never flown or travel companies who leave you stranded?

At Damien Hirst's own office Christmas party - a relaxed affair at a lovely restaurant on the Farringdon Road, it was clear that we - the record label - were the runt of the Hirst litter. Everyone at Damien's company, Science, obviously thought he was wasting his money but actually he displayed a canny commercial nous that no one I've ever met in the music business had. At the marketing meeting I put together to discuss the campaign for Naughty Christmas, as distributer, plugger, PR and record company sat round the table discussing how many copies we thought we should manufacture and where we should stock them, Damien said, "Why don't we just make one fucking record and sell it for a million quid?" At the time everyone laughed indulgently: yes, very funny, Mr Hirst, you may not know much about music but you know what you like... Stick to your formaldehyde, sonny, let us professionals handle the campaign. What fools we were! Had we done exactly what he said we would have made a load of money and probably still got played on Radio 1. As it was, in the words of, oh probably Alex James, Naughty Christmas was "No Vindaloo".

Sitting gobbling quality chops at that Christmas party, with our record already a certified disappointment, I looked around the room and my eye alighted on a table of young, hipsterish folk who were about 15 years younger than all the alleged 30-somethings in the room. "Who are they?" I asked Damien's wife,"Them? Oh they're the spot-painters." Up until then I hadn't realised what almost everyone now knows now about Hirst's production line approach: he mass produces art in a way that record companies once made singles, whilst advocating making one copy of a record and selling it like an old master. Talk about being ahead of his time. And that's why last week, on exactly the same day that the know-it-all financial markets went tits up and all those people in their safe, proper jobs were made redundant, Damien added a quiet £111 million to his fortune.

If only he'd shown as much genius in choosing the music. That was supposed to be my job and, as I say. I blame myself for not putting my foot down and saying - "listen, what about the bubbly-haired singer we saw at the Bull & Gate? - he's good, a bit rubbish looking, I grant you, but he's got a great voice!" No, we never signed Coldplay. You can take a Hirst to water but you can't make it drink. And I did take the guys to shows - Damien was keen on Welsh indie janglers Murray The Hump and Keith came along to see them at the now defunct Falcon in Camden. Within two songs, he'd managed, via semi-complementary heckling, to divert attention from the band to himself. Murray the Hump didn't stand a chance after that. Keith just wanted to sign himself. Strummer had a huge musical knowledge but seemed pretty wrapped up with getting the Mescaleros together and never brought anything to the table other than a noble world music yen - he wanted us to sign something unusual. Alex, like me, wanted to get a cool indie band on the label - partly because that was his taste I think, and partly because he knew me best and was confident that that was what I could deliver. And Damien? Damien wanted to sign his mate Bez. I know, it sounds really prosaic, doesn't it - somehow you hope he would have had some ideas involving wild animals braying mixed with the sound of an organ transplant, all produced by Eno and the Aphex Twin. But no, Hirst plumped for the Freaky Dancer.

We once all went up to see Bez's band BMW (not sure how he planned on convincing the Bavarian car giant that they should share the name with him) in Manchester and they were more akin to a Skoda. After the gig we ended up in some house in Chorlton Cum Hardy, surrounded by some very frightening looking Mancunians who were overly keen on establishing exactly how much we going to sign BMW for. The next morning, the bloke I ran the label with, Alan, who had brought an disturbing amount of drugs with him, was getting no reply when he tried to phone Damien's room in the Britannia so he got the lift down to Hirst's floor to see if the great man was up yet - after all we had a train to catch. When he got to the room the door was ajar."Damien?" he tentatively asked before pushing it open. Instead of Hirst, there in the middle of the room was Bez - doing the Bez Dance! IN TOTAL SILENCE. Alan stood watching him for a moment before the Happy Monday noticed him. He stopped, gave him a a psychotic smile and said, "Alright mate... hey - you got any more of that stuff you ad last night?"

After Christmas , Alan and I returned to the Turtleneck office but it was obvious things weren't going to last much longer. Frankly, I couldn't wait for them to end. Working with hedonistic celebrities was like being a parent waiting in the car outside a party while your kids are inside having a great time. Actually, come to think of it I did wait outside the Groucho club several times. As I said earlier, I heard Damien being interviewed on the Front Row last week and he sounds a lot more mellow than he did in those days. Back then I remember thinking that if he hadn't done art he surely would have gone into some branch of entertainment, he had a wit quicker than most and an uncanny perceptiveness. On looking through a bunch of Polaroids that some of us had taken in the office, he paused on one of me standing on a table pouting into the camera. He looked up and said to me,"how old were you when your dad left home?"

I don't have many regrets in life but I must say, I do wish I'd left Turtleneck with some hard evidence that I'd worked for those guys. The obvious and most sensible thing would have been one of Damien's numerous sketches or doodlings that he did on postcards. I remember Alan nabbed one at the time and I think I may have mocked him for it. It's probably worth a few quid now. But actually what I really regret not saving, is nothing Hirst created at all. All I wish I had was a fax. I wrote the directors' biographies for the Turtleneck website (yes, we were cutting edge in 1998!) and everyone was fine with what I wrote. Everyone except Joe - he sent me a beautifully written three page fax. I say beautifully written in the sense that it was the same characterful handwriting you remember from various Clash books which reproduce it. But it was also beautiful in the sense that he managed to tell me he didn't like what I'd written about him (for example he objected to being cited for influencing U2, "I hate those guys") whilst being charming and complementary. And it was full of musical opinion too.

After Strummer told me that Turtleneck was all over, he suggested we go to the pub. And over several pints of fighting lager, presumably because he thought he owed it to me, Joe regaled me with war stories from the early days of the Clash. I went home with one less career opportunity but happier than I'd been in months. Yes, I wish I'd kept that fax more than any Hirst work.