I guess the Word has a higher than average proportion of music makers amongst its readers than, say, Hello or Horse & Hound, and I imagine this also means many of us sometimes suffer from musical overload. I tend to take a while reading my Word each month, often just a couple of pages at a time and I save the reviews section until I'm in a mood to consider what I might actually want to buy, in the unlikely event of having a bugdet.

With the amount of coverage the future of radio gets in the magazine, I wondered how many of you share my tendency only to listen to talk radio - particularly Radio 4? I've thought that I was doing this to get some light relief from the deep self-analysis and anal retention that grips me whenever listening to music, and makes me thoroughly boring to anyone around me who just likes to sing along to 'RubyrubyrubyRUBY!'

But now I've realised, after one of my forays into 6Music, that there is an unspoken problem which may be the more underlying reason for my fear of music radio. It is that, as a music maker, listening to recent music played alongside some older tunes like, for example, Mr Bowie's Life on Mars, makes me feel as though it's all been done before - better - and my attempts to make interesting music are essential futile. So talk radio is a comforting world in which you know you're not trying to compete.

Muso in fragile ego shock! Eddie Mair as therapist?

.....has had the dubious honour, thanks to Word, of becoming my nomination for the sexiest woman in music, taking the top spot from Tori Amos who has held my heart in her hands (or possibly squashed under her as she straddles the piano stool like Boadicea would have done if she'd played the piano) for many years.

I'm as good as married and yes, I do have feelings too.

A friend emailed me complaining about the road tax on his 6 year old Alfa Romeo going up BY over 200 quid for dubious environmental reasons. As an environmentalist (and also a bit of an old car nut) I felt I should respond to him, and I thought you good people might as well be a party to it, because you are all highly intelligent and enlightened people who might like to have a bit of an argument with me while I'm in an idealist mood. I'm afraid there's nothing about music in it, though my friend is a big fan of Dr Feelgood and also a very good trombonist, so there's a tenuous connection...

...........

Hello Fred,

You know that the Association of Motor Manafacturers and Traders has been lobbying for this kind of thing (tax hikes, mandatory scrapping etc) for years, in order to support the market for new vehicles? So imagine you're the government: the car industry is lobbying you to penalise drivers of old cars, and the green lobby is nagging you to penalise drivers of thirsty cars: Bingo! We'll tax old cars, thirsty cars and ESPECIALLY old, thirsty cars, and both sides will be happy.

I agree wholeheartedly about the embodied impact of buying a new car compared to keeping an old one running (with the slight exception that new cars are largely recyclable, whereas old ones just tend to get crushed).

What really bugs me is that I've always thought owning an old, thirsty car is a disincentive to use it too much, so your overall footprint might be lower. Furthermore, the higher the fixed costs of owning a car (finance, depreciation, tax, insurance, servicing) the more you want to use it to spread those fixed costs, and the less chance of you using public transport for many journeys. So whilst an old car generally has much lower fixed costs than a new one, raising the fixed costs through road tax, and increasing depreciation through built-in obsolescence, actually create an incentive to use your car more, while you have it. Buying an expensive new car (even, or perhaps especially, a hybrid one) is the biggest incentive to drive everywhere I can think of.

The real answer, and one which every right-minded environmentalist AND car driver should be lobbying for, is to abolish road tax altogether, rack up the cost of fuel to well above what it is now (I would say doubling it might be getting somewhere) and providing a fuel duty rebate scheme for essential users eg disabled, people caring for disabled, women working nightshifts, that kind of thing, and a cheaper rate of duty for farmers and road freight compared to private cars. And the additional tax revenue should be ploughed into actually making the transport network work. This would reverse the trend for people just to drive more and further, it would make people think about combining journeys, car sharing, all that sort of thing, it would reduce the grip of supermarkets and out-of-town retailers over people's lives and help revitalise town centres and public transport. It would help to reduce the number of life-sapping hours we spend in traffic jams. It would help to put an end to that most ridiculous of modern phenomena, the oversized chavmobile and its ugly sister - the school jeep-run.

And perhaps most usefully, it would give us a simple calculation for how much it costs us to drive somewhere.

The reasons this doesn't happen are that the government is scared, the media is reactionary and the road lobby is dominated by companies with vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

Happy weekend!

A.

As a drummer, I have learned the importance of carrying a pocketful of plectrums/plectra for the emergency which seems to afflict guitarists before the beginning of pretty much every tune - the loss of the pick. The pick has become the drummer's responsibility.

This also allows me to link tenuously to a question about frankly the most important Pick of all, Pick Withers, the original Dire Straits drummer (later replaced by 80s muscle-and-chewing-gum type Terry Williams). I often have to defend my unfashionable (some would say unfathomable) liking of early Dire Straits - I promise you their first (eponymous) album is a truly wonderful piece of work.

But if you cut through the various layers of Knopfler and listen with finely tuned ears, you will notice that the rhythm section is second to none, and the drumming is some of the most inventive and yet most light-touch, understated playing you will ever hear in rock or, indeed, roll. Pick Withers is my hero.

But where the hell did he go after 1982? That's 26 years ago, folks. How could one so good become so unheard? I think he did some stuff with Bob Dylan, but then so have most people. Other than that he seems to have gone into obscurity (and not a Syd Barrett/Adam Ant-type reclusiveness, just a 'getting an allotment and growing prize leeks' obscurity). This is most unfair.

Please, World of Word, help me where Mr Google has failed. Help me find the lost works of Pick Withers.

I thank you.

Greetings - this is my first blog. I wrote this a while back but, being a bit slow off the mark, it has taken me until now to actually bloggify it, so it is a couple of Word issues behind the incessant march of time, but here goes....

Synchronicity. Was this word invented by Gordon Sumner, the world famous tantric milkman? Or, more likely, by one of the verbose philosophers he revered for a few years, before the full force of his success extruded his soul into the shape of a phallus? [I checked later - it was Carl Jung.]

Without seeking out my dictionary (it hides away at times like this) I shall define it as a phenomenon where apparently unconnected events coincide and lead to a new and unexpected outcome. An easy example: I am sitting outside a café, talking to an old work friend….

Friend: ‘We need someone who knows how to schmooze politicians.'
Me: ‘How about Francesca Harbinger?'
Friend: ‘Yes! She'd be perfect.'
Me: ‘Well, bugger me. There she is now, walking towards us.'

Some altogether more elaborate and unsettling synchronicity occurred reading February's 'Word'. The first 77 pages passed without event. Then along came a piece by Tom Whitwell on the homogenising influence of modern recording, mixing and mastering techniques, and of polishing songs for radio. This article formed the bottom slice of a bizarre sandwich, filled with the unstably flavoursome Nick Cave, and topped with an advert for Late Night Tales, with Groove Armada: "An amazingly seamless sonic journey taking in classics from Marvin Gaye, Depeche Mode and The Cure….All re-edited and re-mixed in the guys [sic] Lovebox blender….'. No polishing there, then.

So far, you're thinking, a curious juxtaposition for sure, but where's the synchronicity? Follow me back to 1990. I am in the final year of school. I develop an interest in playing drums, and seek some tuition from the school's most prolific multi-instrumentalist. Let's call him Fred. We jam occasionally, play together at a party and once, in the brief moment between school and university, get horrendously drunk at a rural lock-in where Fred entertains the rusty old men with an impressive, if blurry, repertoire of honky-tonk piano singalongs.

Time now passes rapidly. By 2000 I am a passable drummer with 3 bands under my belt, all immortalised in a tottering stack of unlabelled cassette tapes, that patiently awaits the day in 2012 when it is tipped unceremoniously into a recycling crate and the cassettes are reincarnated as a kitchen worktop. Meanwhile I see Fred gurning at me from the pages of a music magazine, and discover that these days he is half of Groove Armada who, it seems, have their music immortalised in lots of other people's CD collections - usually filed under ‘Dinner Party (with friends who claim to like dance)'.

2003, now, and in the same few months I fall in love with no less than four things: the future Mrs theWood; Nick Cave's Murder Ballads; the lonely art of writing songs on an acoustic guitar; and the writings of Will Self (starting with How the Dead Live). By now you are, I can tell, both fashioning an accurate pigeon-hole for me to inhabit, and fearing for the fate of my future wife.

So here we are, in 2008, the moment when our paths cross on this page. I have progressed from an L-plate drummer to a band I actually believe to be ‘any good'. I can write songs and words, inspired by the twisted, gentlemanly darkness of Nick Cave, the nauseous parallel worlds that live inside Will Self, and the fading memories of my early 90s musical journey that was fuelled by a religious attachment to ‘Later….with Jools Holland'. I am running up debts to set up a little recording studio with an old-school ethic of live performance and lo-fi treatments, believing this to be the path to salvation. I am smug in my worthy poverty, because Fred sold his soul to make his fortune in one of the most boring, homogenising cook-chill acts the world has ever seen, while I am true to myself: behind, learning, wide-eyed. Excited by possibility. Safe in obscurity.

And look! Here's an article about how all music is engineered to sound the same. Not in my studio it won't be. And look! Here's my hero Nick Cave - he'll never be homogenised. I can do this. I can feel my powers rising. I am even thinking in exclamation marks. And look again! Here are those numpties Groove Armada, actually advertising that they are homogenising the classics. What soulless fools! What commercial whores!

Then comes the body blow. "Late Night Tales ends with a Late Night Tale written and narrated by arch satirist Will Self." I am stunned to my bones. My hero endorsing homogeny? Am I suddenly lost in one his parallel Londons, where all this could make sense? My eyes glaze. My head falls heavily into my hands. I can see Fred's gently mocking eyes. Has he known all along? Are Fred, and Nick, and Will, all in on the joke? Co-conspirators in my delusion? Are Groove Armada actually just taking the piss? Look who's homogenised now……..

And synchronicity has spun my world over. I need a shot of pop anaesthetic to sedate me. ‘Mrs theWood? Shall we have a dinner party?'

EPILOGUE: The Groove Armada CD achieved a pretty good review in the following month's 'Word'....