DECADE or How One Thing Led To Another

Manchester - New York - Brighton - Athens - Llandudno - Hamburg - Northampton - Northenden - Everywhere

My decade began on 3rd June 2000.

As the clocks chimed for the new millennium I had been at a friend's house in Gatley helping her decide if we should lock her brother in the shed or not as he'd got to a level of drunkenness where he was starting to turn psychotic. Not an unusual occurrence for him, unfortunately. We'd all been pretty wild in our younger days but we were in our mid to late 20s now and most of us had settled down, got grown-up jobs and mortgages and pension plans; I'd recently passed a diploma in management and was thinking about doing a higher degree in engineering. Tom, my student-days housemate, was talking about starting his own business, a music production studio. Our mate's brother was still going out getting wasted all the time like he was still 19. There was probably one of those conversations in the early hours where we thought about what we'd be doing in ten years' time; we probably worried, even if we never said as much, that his excesses might have taken him by then, whilst I doubt I ever considered that I would be in the same relatively low level job. Ten years down the line, Airtight Studios is pretty well known although Tom largely works on the video production side now. My mate's brother is happily married with two children and rarely drinks. And me? Well, I kind of went backwards.

On 3rd June 2000 something changed: The Chameleons headlined a sold-out Manchester Academy. It remains one of the greatest gigs I have ever been to, and there have been quite a few since then. I don't know how many. 1600 maybe. Something like that. But without that single event one rainy summer Saturday it's possible none of this would have happened at all. I might have stuck at that higher degree, might have been in a £40k job, although I've no idea what I'd have been spending it on. I'd been driving home from work sometime that February or March when I spotted the poster on Travis Street bridge under Piccadilly Station: The Chameleons. Playing at Ashton Witchwood sometime in May. They'd been my favourite band for as long as I could remember but they'd split before I got to see them (I was only about 15) - were they back together? Couldn't be. They hated each other, didn't they? Must be one or two of them playing on the name. By the time we found out that yes, it was the whole band, all the gigs had sold out. Ah well. When the Academy 1 was confirmed I bought tickets immediately - and there I felt that buzz again. That wash of emotion, that feeling you only get when completely absorbed in the whole experience of watching great live music. And obviously there could never be a band as good as The Chameleons (could there?) but it was definitely time to start going out watching more bands again. Had to be better than telly. Sure, I went to the odd gig in the late 90s and early 2000. Not many. Mostly old bands, or new bands with a distinct appeal to people who mostly liked old bands, such as Doves or I Am Kloot. Ten years on I still go and see Doves and I Am Kloot whenever possible; that much hasn't changed. Everything else did.

Radio Space had started broadcasting in the late 90s, just for four weeks twice a year. Based in the emerging Northern Quarter they played a lot of local bands, many of them unsigned. It had been there, on ex-Inspiral Carpet Graham Lambert's show, that I'd first heard Doves and actually started getting back into new guitar music after spending much of the decade listening to my old 80s indie records or going to techno, trance and acid/rave clubs. I blame Britpop for that, and the long hangover which cast a shadow over Manchester's music scene following the heady days of 1988-90. One day a work colleague told me her mate was in a band, Red Vinyl Fur. I'd heard them on Space and went to see them with her. They were great, and so were the other bands on the bill, Monomania and Moco. I started going to see them all. Mostly they seemed to play at a club night called Chairsmissing at the Roadhouse which was co-ordinated by the local music website manchestermusic.co.uk and I was soon a Chairsmissing regular. And started thinking about getting a computer - mostly for my coursework, obviously, although this new internet thing looked like it could be interesting.

We knew the Chameleons' Academy gig was being filmed for a video. Video? Yeah, a great big VHS spool tape in a box. They look weird, now, don't they? One day a few months after the gig I asked about it in Piccadilly Records. They said it wasn't out yet, but had I seen the new album? I hadn't. It turned out to be a collection of acoustic versions of the band's old tunes plus one newly written one, so I bought it, and on the back it said www.thechameleons.com . We'd just got the internet enabled on desk PCs at work, and the next couple of weeks' worth of dinner times were spent reading Mik Foggin's extremely comprehensive fan site, which had become the band's official site when they reformed and is still going now. It had a guestbook on it where people would write "Great site!" a lot. Occasionally someone would write something a little more substantial, and I noticed sometimes they replied to each other. There was "PEDRO" (his capitalisation) from Barcelona whose English swearing was exemplary; "arse" whom I presumed was a bloke and was very dry-humoured, "gaztop" whom I wondered if it was the 80s TV presenter of that name (it wasn't), "ekko" AKA Ernst who was Dutch but lived in Norway, and "Diana" who sometimes posted up dirty jokes. I replied to one of her posts. I can't remember the details, or if she emailed me or I emailed her, but it was probably the most important email I ever sent: I was "chatting" to a "friend" I had "met" on the internet. Within months Foggin had installed a "forum" on the website and we were all "talking" to each other. And planning to meet up at gigs. Which meant - going to more than one gig on a tour?

I'd done it in my younger days, of course; awaydaying (the same derivation as Kevin Sampson's book and the recent film - a cheap train ticket) was a Manchester habit since The Stone Roses had Pied Pipered half the city's teenagers to Blackpool in 1989; I'd spent much of 1991 and 1992 hitch-hiking around the country and sleeping in car parks in the vicinity of gigs by ex-Spacemen 3 bands Spectrum and Spiritualized, but this was different. This was... organised. We'd meet up, 10 or 20 or 30 of us in a pub nominated by a local or simply because it was there. It was weird - did you introduce yourself by internet name or real name? By mid 2001 I had a computer - and the internet - at home. In a pub in Leeds before a gig, a large bloke with glasses and sideburns came over to me, and said "Didn't you used to be Cath Aubergine?" I recognised him as Alex Staszko, legendary Mancunian gig-goer and bootlegger, we'd hung around with the same crew back in '89-'90 (just the other week on a drive over to Sheffield for a gig we spent some time trying to work out exactly which hill we'd managed to get a large coach stuck up when he diverted an away trip towards a cheap off-licence he knew; the first time we met) but I was surprised he remembered me and my old fanzine-writing name. By late 2002 I had seen The Chameleons live 35 times and made a load of friends doing so. Some turned out to be transient mates, of course. Diana actually ended up going out with drummer John Lever for a while but drifted away after the relationship and the band broke up. But Ernst, Gaz and Pedro remain amongst my best friends and we see each other quite often, and I last met up with Rob at a gig in Bristol in October; he doesn't seem to call himself "arse" any more, and lives with his Dutch girlfriend whom he first met via the forum.

The most important month of the decade, and that which defined pretty much everything that followed, was October 2002.

Something very weird was happening: growing up, the bands we loved were untouchable; on the internet, though, things were different. Members of The Chameleons posted on their own message board, and gradually we got to know each other. The first significant occurrence of this crazy month (October always is, if you love music) was the night Mark Burgess ended up crashing on my sofa after a gig at Jillys: no more heroes, anymore. The second was the demented idea hatched by me, Gaz and a few other "Chameleons" mates sometime that summer to go and watch the band in New York. Gradually the idea took shape and we ended up actually doing it. The first sight of the Manhattan skyline from our taxi is something I will never forget; we met up with a load of the US fans and crammed so many new experiences into one week we came home feeling we'd experienced a parallel universe. The gigs were something else, too - the buzz of being in new and far-flung places, watching a band you love play to a different crowd; the incredulous questioning - "what, you came all the way from England?" - and the sound of unfamiliar accents calling for familiar songs. It was my first foreign away trip - the first of a great many.

I wrote extensive travel reports on the band's forum. People there seemed to like stuff I wrote; a couple of them guessed that I had a long-lost past as a fanzine writer. Never had any formal training; I could just always write. Fuck knows why I ended up studying sciences - I think I thought English was a wussy girly subject and I was never into all the old literary books you were meant to read. I could write about music, though. There was a section on the forum where members could write about other bands they liked, and I started reviewing local gigs I had been to. I don't know why, but it led me to the third and - although I didn't know it at the time - most significant of October 2002's milestone events. The week after I got back from America I went to the Roadhouse to see a new band I'd recently got into called Interpol, and with nothing better to do the night after I headed down to Brighton to see them again with one of my "Chameleons" mates Brett and his Belgian girlfriend Carine, another couple who met via the forum (and married this summer just gone). I'd been having a difficult time for various reasons, but as soon as I stepped off the train in Brighton I just felt calm and happy, as if everything was going to be OK. Seven years on I frequently refer to Brighton as my Second City - I feel at home there, and whatever's going on in my head the walk down Queens Road from the station to the sea has an uncanny way of sorting it out. I've spent a lot of time there, and it's arguably largely thanks to a tall slim girl who pushed a flyer into my hand as we left the Interpol gig.

The flyer said "British Sea Power - All You Will Need This Winter" and it didn't look like any flyer I had ever seen. A couple of people had mentioned the band to me; they were based in Brighton but originally from the north, and were about to embark on a headline tour which was visiting Night & Day in Manchester a couple of days later. I went, they were absolutely amazing, and I wrote about it on the Chameleons forum. Up the road near Whitefield, Jon, the editor of manchestermusic.co.uk - a Chameleons fan himself - chanced upon my writing there. He got in touch via a mutual friend to see if I wanted to do the odd live review. In January 2003 I filed my first copy, a review of local electro-punks Nylon Pylon who were one of my favourite up-and-coming bands. He published it unedited - it was a while before I found out he rarely did this. Wary of work finding out what I was up to when I wasn't there, I had it credited to my old fanzine name Cath Aubergine and it stuck. I didn't know I was going to end up writing so much, and that people would eventually know who I was. It is a daft name, but it does I suppose afford me some privacy. Most people at work now know what I do, to an extent: it was only a matter of time before the lives crossed and when in 2008 one of our shift operators walked onstage at Dry Bar with his band and I found myself having to write a review of someone I more usually saw in the canteen, a line was crossed. Maybe it doesn't matter so much, now - although the occasional threatening message I get from bitter going-nowhere bands about whom I have written less than glowing appraisals reminds me there's a more important reason for keeping my parents' rather uncommon surname quiet.

I wrote a couple more reviews for MM. It seemed like a handy way of reducing my gig-going expenditure.

The least successful awayday of the decade occurred in early April 2003 when The Chameleons splintered on the eve of a gig in Athens to which me and a bunch of mates were already on our way. Manchestermusic.co.uk asked if I wanted to do a news story about it, but I was too close to it all. We still don't know if The Chameleons were actually the first band to split up "live" on their own internet forum, tearing strips off each other in a public display of bile that made for harrowing reading for fans and friends, but Jon reported it as such when he broke the news. It was quite definitely the 21st century by now, but the new rules of engagement in this cyberworld were still under construction. Meanwhile, sad that we may never see our new American friends again without this common purpose, a smaller number of us returned to New York and New Jersey in July of that year when Mark Burgess played some solo dates. One of these people was Frazer, from Leeds - one of the people whose enthusiasm for British Sea Power had pricked my interest in them. I'd seen them once since that Night & Day gig, and by this point their debut album had been released; it was incredible, and they'd sort of become my favourite band by default. British Sea Power were playing a gig a couple of nights after we got home, in Kendal, Cumbria, where three of the band had grown up. Not far, really - we should go. But Frazer hadn't yet got a mobile phone, and when we stepped bleary-eyed off the plane we forgot to make any plans. As I drove out of work that evening I felt a pull, a calling, to turn right towards the motorway, but I was tired, still jetlagged, I turned left towards home. By eight o'clock I was regretting the decision, but it was too late - and in a way, this gig I did not attend was arguably as significant in defining my decade as any I actually did. I made a pact with myself that night that in future I would follow my heart where such things were concerned. Which is how I ended up a couple of months later standing in a breezeblock shed on the outskirts of Hamburg with tears streaming down my face.

I wasn't about to stop doing daft away trips just because The Chameleons had gone. August bank holiday 2003, Nick and Alex and I planned one of the daftest - the Five Nations, as it became known. Interpol were playing Edinburgh, Belfast, Dublin and Manchester on four consecutive nights and it was that golden age, the brief window between Ryanair et al decreasing the cost or air travel to less than the price of a day-saver bus ticket, and the words "carbon footprint" and climate guilt impinging on the general consciousness. Had to be done, really. Five nations? Yep, Doves were playing in Llandudno the night before. We largely went because the idea of doing the five nations amused us - and you don't get that many chances to clock up Llandudno on the gig calendar. I've never been since. It wasn't one of their greatest gigs, although the sound of the traditional "Manchester, la la la" chant rendered in strong Welsh accents is something I'll never forget, and yet again it proved to be significant for other reasons: I'd recently bitten the bullet and joined another forum - British Sea Power's - and in a tatty seafront bar I exchanged a few words with a tall blonde girl called Zoe from Nottingham who was one of the forum's regulars as well as a massive Doves fan; she seemed really nice and encouraged me to post a bit more on there and within weeks I was getting to know the so-called Third Battalion, BSP's hardcore fan crew, and arranging to meet some of them at forthcoming gigs. I liked British Sea Power, Doves and Interpol but not in the way I did The Chameleons - and it didn't actually matter. The buzz of the awayday is as much a part of it all as the gigs themselves, although I maintain that Interpol's performance at Belfast Limelight that weekend was one of the best I ever saw them. And somewhere along the way we acquired another favourite new band.

It had been cheaper to fly to Scotland the day before the Interpol gig and spend an extra night in a cheap B&B in Leith than to fly up on the day. It was Edinburgh Festival time, and the organisers of T In The Park were in charge of the music side of things. We'd heard a track or two by a new band called Hope Of The States, and discovered they were supporting Grandaddy (a band none of us were particularly interested in) at the Liquid Rooms. It was well sold out, but we had nothing to lose by trying, did we? The lad on the door was from Manchester, a Chameleons fan and a City fan, and he said he would see what he could do. Came back minutes later and said as it was an early show we could go in for HOTS so long as we promised to leave straight afterwards; he banked on some people not turning up til the main act were due on so we wouldn't be infringing fire regulations. We were good as our word, and Hope Of The States were incredible: I knew I'd be going to see them again and clocked up 15 gigs across Britain before their unexpected split in 2006. Another reason why I rarely regret a gig I have been to and often regret those I didn't manage, and never take a band's existence for granted: you never know when you might never see them again.

Just two weeks after that came the awayday that changed everything: 15th September 2003. A day I remember almost photographically; I'd say "as if it were yesterday" but to be honest I remember it far better than I remember yesterday or last week. The Chameleons were history, but there would be one final gathering of those of us they had brought together. A wake for our beloved band and one last night together before our lives all diverged again. Mark Burgess would play a special gig for friends and fans in the unremarkable German town of Duisburg. One gig expanded to a week-long tour; and British Sea Power were playing in Germany around the same time. An initial plan for a three day trip to Duisburg and Köln somehow expanded into a couple of BSP gigs, a few days' holiday then a few of Mark's gigs. Mark was living in Hamburg at this point and had kindly offered to put us up for the night of BSP's gig there. The train ride from Berlin took us through endless forest, and I began to get a picture of just how big this country actually was. I remember us walking up to the concrete warehouse which showed no sign of a gig or indeed life. Inside the warehouse the walls were bare grey breezeblock and the bar a plank of wood balanced on two fridges, but there were tables - and every table, and the bar itself, had been sprinkled with leaves; all five varieties from the band's recent debut album cover seemed to be there. In the live room the towering PA had been bedecked with trails of ivy, at the front some small shrub cuttings, this was the fourth time I had seen British Sea Power and I was familiar with their foliage stage decoration, I'd also seen lots of pictures of other gigs, but I had never seen anything like this. A couple of strings of fairy lights were draped across the back of the stage and a small smoke machine puffed weakly; it was like some sort of magical grotto.

There were about 50 people there in total, although only 20 seemed really interested in the band. Even the 20 who seemed to care stood well back, and didn't move. I walked up to the front and stood there on my own, and when they played "Blackout" something happened inside me. The rest of the world stopped turning; other people further back ceased to exist, and I felt there was nothing in the world except me and this music. Some sort of calm descended on me. I felt lighter than air, and when the song finished I realised I had tears all down my face. I turned round to where Mark was standing, the singer of my lifelong and sorely missed favourite band, and he was clapping wildly and I realised this band, these strange little wide-eyed boys in thick woollen socks ("the bastard sons of Michael Palin", Mark said later), were quite simply the greatest band I had ever seen. What, even more than... yeah, I think so. Bloody hell.

The next day I walked out into the city and suddenly realised I was outside the venue where I had last seen the Chameleons ten months before. It was closed down now, and I knew one part of my life had ended and another begun. I walked up the road to the street corner where the tour bus had been parked, where Ernst and I had shaken John Lever's hand, still bloodied from the intensity of his drumming, and headed off into the freezing fog of the night half knowing, although reluctant to admit to each other or even ourselves, that we would probably never see the band play together again. On the corner the cybercafe where we'd had strong espressos before that last gig was still open; I went in, logged on and looked where British Sea Power were playing the next day, cancelled our planned trip to Berlin, called on my then quite reasonable grasp of German and made a couple of phone calls, and got on a train to Munich because I had to see them again and it couldn't wait until next week. The last two gigs of the tour, in Köln and Wurzburg, remain among my favourites - and by the time we rejoined Mark's own tour something had changed. The old Chameleons songs suddenly seemed like history. I sat in an internet cafe in Berlin and calmly bought tickets to every one of British Sea Power's forthcoming UK dates which I could conceivably get to that I hadn't got tickets for yet. Over the next four years I would never again miss a gig by the band on European soil that it was practically and financially possible for me to get to. And further afield, too: within weeks of hooking up with the hardcore away crew I was using my prior awayday experience and Chameleons-hewn Stateside connections convincing a few of them that it was perfectly reasonable to fly to Washington and New York for the weekend for two gigs, a weekend so high in the awayday surreal events factor (an internet cafe that was also a Chinese hospital? A crackhead scenester with a car stacked top to bottom with mysterious cardboard boxes? An Amtrak train service delayed slightly because its wheels were on fire? A lunar eclipse over Frank Sinatra Park in Hoboken?) that none of us will ever forget it. The bits we actually remember...

In between all this, I was still doing live reviews for manchestermusic and in August 2004 I agreed to cover the early shift at D:Percussion, a rather wonderful multi-stage multi-genre free music festival down in Castlefield Arena which ran from 1997 until 2007 and is still very much missed in Manchester's live calendar. There were maybe fifty or a hundred early arrivals soaking up the blistering sun as the first band walked out onto the main stage and I couldn't believe what I was watching. They were kids - literally, aged fourteen to sixteen I later found out, and managed by Blowout promoter and that year's main stage curator Graham Thomas, who'd figured it'd be good to give them a runout in the quiet early stages: their name was Fear Of Music, they sounded like Muse and the Manics and Sonic Youth, their songwriting and playing was in a league well beyond their years - why hadn't I heard of them? The answer was it was only their fifth gig, and first in the city centre. I phoned Jon, we were onto something here, and went off to watch some other bands. And then I collapsed. I'd been having what I called "blackouts" for a couple of years, as my extremely low blood pressure left me more prone to rapid dehydration than most people, and the midsummer heat and a couple of smuggled-in cans of lager and my firing adrenaline had combined to do just that; this was the most severe and prolonged one I'd had to date. Completely blind apart from coloured flashes I lay on the amphitheatre steps; in the background the sound of The Longcut, another up-and-coming local act and the band I had actually come down to see that afternoon. By the time my friends had got enough water inside me for me to see and sit up again they'd finished. Bugger.

Within weeks of my Fear of Music review being published they were all over the Evening News, Granada Reports, you name it, and soon the NME and record labels were onto them. I've never been arrogant enough to think these things wouldn't have happened anyway, but the buzz of being there from the start, of helping a band to their first big break, was a rush. Their debut EP was the first time I've ever had a credit on a band's sleevenotes, and remains one of my proudest moments. And suddenly people around town were asking me who my next tips were. Fuck, I have no idea. But you don't find the jewels without digging, so I was just going to have to start going to a hell of a lot more gigs: trawling the local unsigned nights, always watching supports. I eventually got to see The Longcut a couple of weeks later and on discovering they were probably the best band Manchester had produced in years I kicked myself for not making the effort earlier (and missing them when I finally did). This was never going to happen again - from now on nothing would happen in Manchester's music scene without my knowing about it. I was becoming known to the local promoters, so I rarely had to pay to get in anywhere when I was on scouting and reviewing duty - Manchester was my playground and this was my calling. Rustling out exciting new bands at the earliest stage and writing about them in such a way that people would take notice. I was too late to get a press pass for In The City that year so I spent the weekend dashing around the free entry stuff or blagging the individual event promoters. I rushed home between bands to type up my discoveries. In subsequent years, of course, they gave me a press pass: I held an unbroken record from 2004 to 2008 for the most bands reviewed at the event by an individual. This year my MM colleague Jon finally beat me into a close second place, but then he did all four days of the event and I only did three, having been away the first night watching The Longcut for the 26th time, along with another artist who won't turn up in this story for a couple more years yet: my best friend, he calls me "a machine"; means it in a nice way. In The City 2004 was where the machine really started, prior to that was just warm-ups.

I took my reviewing seriously. If a promoter had been good enough to stick me on the list for a night I'd make the effort to watch all the bands. A fleeting and not very good band-of-the-moment called The Bravery were headlining High Voltage one night in November 2004 and when MM's reviewer pulled out at the last minute I agreed to cover it. There were maybe 20 people in the Roadhouse when the first band went on: at first glance another exponent of the spiky-spiky sound of the day, but they had more secret weapons than your average terror-cell. The drummer, a pretty young blonde girl who barely looked old enough to be in the venue, blew my mind with a relentless battery of split beats and twisting time signatures, playing so hard her drumkit started to disintegrate, whilst the singer was this feral creature, hurling his scrawny little body into every line with wild hair and wilder eyes. They were Forward Russia from Leeds, this was their first gig outside of West Yorkshire, and I remember little about The Bravery because they didn't stand a chance after that. It's amazing that Forward Russia did, to be honest: three days earlier I'd been standing in some rough cafe bar further into the Northern Quarter, again with about 20 people, watching 65daysofstatic for the first time: I had picked up their recently released debut album "The Fall Of Math" in Piccadilly Records a few weeks earlier, drawn to it simply by the name and the song titles and figuring £7.99 was a worthwhile gamble. It became, and remains, one of my all-time favourite albums and live they did not disappoint. I would go on to see both bands rather a lot of times...

My level of British Sea Power gig attendance, meanwhile, was becoming legendary: I'd just seen them for the 50th time (I'd thought my 35 Chameleons gigs was quite a lot) and on 11th September 2004 (weird isn't it how if you do anything on "September 11th", any year, you never forget the date, even now) I sat in the tattoo shop, next door to Night & Day where just under two years earlier I had seen them for the first time, and had the five leaves from the "Decline Of..." artwork inked around my shoulder. As I've tried to explain a few times, it's not just about British Sea Power, it's a symbol of a life lived increasingly through the music that surrounded me; I was never a one-band person, and these were exciting times. Looking back over my list of gigs attended this century, I've highlighted when I first saw the bands who became important to me - and it's interesting to note that they often come in clusters; the summer to autumn of 2004 being a pretty heavy one. One afternoon during In The City I found an escape from the increasingly samey indie sounds of the time when local space-rockers The Second Floor shared a bill with Barnsley psychedelics Lycasleep. I'd seen both bands once before, but this time they were both spectacular and something clicked: sounds of a long-past youth, and the dirty word shoegazing. Time for a revival, I reckoned. Somewhere down south a man called Nathaniel Cramp was thinking the same thing and started a shoegaze / dreampop / spacerock club night called Sonic Cathedral, although it would be some years yet before our paths would cross.

In 2005 I broke a personal record, which I suspect will stand for the rest of my life: number of times I've seen any one band in any one calendar year. In 2005 I saw British Sea Power 48 times. Three years of foreign awayday practice and I'd got ambitious - that year's holiday involved following the route of the band's tour up the east coast of North America, from Atlanta to Washington DC; Philadelphia and New York; Boston and Toronto, catching the gigs in each city as well as visiting friends (many of the old Chameleons crew) and sightseeing. And back home Manchester had hit a real golden age, with the local scene as healthy as I could remember it. Various weeknights had their own Default Settings: a night you could go to and be guaranteed quality bands from Manchester and beyond; the spiritual descendents of Jon's Chairsmissing sessions. Tuesdays were FictionNonFiction at Tiger Lounge, a ramshackle session run by the slightly deranged duo behind local electro-punks TVH3 where anything could happen, albeit rarely before about 10pm. Thursdays were High Voltage, by now established at Music Box, with four bands for a fiver between 8pm and 11pm and no messing about. And Friday night was Blowout, best described as a welcome-to-the-weekend drinking session in Piccadilly's Bierkeller (complete with long Bavarian-style dark wood tables and a painted-on "window" to a daft mountain scene on the far wall - it closed its doors in late 2007 and is still sorely missed) where you might well just catch the next big thing or watch a triumphant beer-soaked home-run by The Longcut or The Whip - the latter being the promising new electro band who'd risen from the ashes of Nylon Pylon. My appetite for new music was almost insatiable. In 2005 I cracked the 200-gigs-in-a-year barrier for the first time - 202 to be precise - and thought that was a lot. But something was about to change, again.

In February 2006 I went down to watch The Longcut at Cargo in London, scene of what's now generally regarded as one of British Sea Power's greatest early gigs a couple of years earlier and a place that will always have special significance for those of us who were there. This particular night wasn't one of the all time great Longcut gigs - at this point they could fill Manchester Academy 3 with sweaty bouncing bodies but struggled to impress Shoreditch's haircut brigade - but the evening turned out to be another unexpected milestone. One of our mates didn't show up, but for some reason we had his hat, and to wind him up we photographed it on the stage, on the bar, in the bogs, you name it. "Let's make the hat its own Myspace page" said my friend Cindy, at whose flat I was staying. I'd heard of Myspace, but I wasn't really sure what it could do for me. Back at hers she showed me her page, and how it linked to her favourite bands' pages. I looked up a couple of my local unsigned favourites and everything was there - gig dates, background information, a few tunes. This was a resource I very much needed, and on the train home ideas came to me as to how I could use it. I went home and tentatively signed up, sending friend requests to every band I could think of (and a few people, too). The blog function looked useful: I could use it to collate weekly all the gig reviews I'd done for MM, like a sort of online portfolio. And what about the other gigs I went to, the ones where I wasn't "working"? The awayday reports people always loved on bands' forums? My rants about this and that in the music industry? It could all go here! Wouldn't take too long, would it? A couple of hours each Sunday? (I kind of underestimated that bit). In early March 2006 I published my first Myspace blog. Two days later I got my first friend request and message from a band I didn't know: Amida. Would I come and review their gig this week? I clicked through to their page and pressed Play; liked what I heard. Went to the gig. Reviewed it. The page had already started to take on a life of its own, and in some ways take over mine...

May 2006 saw another cluster. I'd met Pete, co-promoter of the fledgling PopCult night and fanzine, through watching British Sea Power although he was much more of a Hope Of The States fan; either way I considered his taste pretty reliable, so when he excitedly told me he'd bagged the Manchester date of the Tired Irie / Cats+Cats+Cats double-header tour I agreed to help publicise and indeed review it, even though neither band name meant a thing to me. Opening the night, in the draughty blackness of the Star & Garter, was a local band called Air Cav whose name I'd seen on listings for a while and never got round to checking out. They sounded like the missing link between HOTS and Spiritualized. The touring bands were good, too, but it was Air Cav I just had to go and see again. Which I did, the following week. In between times High Voltage finally afforded me a chance to see another band whose name had been on my list for a while (there's never actually been a physical list) largely thanks to the enthusiasm of HOTS fans: iLiKETRAiNS. I'd missed them at In The City 05 because I was the wrong end of town; they'd pulled out of their next Manchester fixture (an event which provided me with one of my favourite ever lines of a review I've written: "After a last minute cancellation from I Like Trains, who clearly don’t like trains enough to pop over the Pennines tonight, we’ve got The Pedestrians, who presumably walked here") but finally they were coming to High Voltage. I thought they were right miserable bastards, but in a good way. Both bands were quickly in my repeat-viewing league. And at that year's In The City, The Second Floor - who had become another of my regular favourites - once again shared a bill with some space-dreamers from Barnsley. Reports of Lycasleep's split had, it seems, been slightly exaggerated: yes, they had parted ways with their singer, found a replacement, ditched their entire set, written a load of new songs and changed their name - but the hypnotic interplay between Rob Marshall's atmopsheric guitar sounds and Simon Lindley's dub-rolled bass was still present and correct in Exit Calm.

I never thought it could happen, but by the end of 2006 I was getting bored with British Sea Power. I hadn't intended to do their full 20-date autumn tour, it just kind of happened. Rather than taking one support band along for the ride, they had a few bands doing four or five dates each, and iLiKETRAiNS were mostly doing the nights I'd thought about missing: I ended up doing the lot. Towards the end I realised BSP no longer thrilled me the way they had; my fault, I suppose, for having seen them about 130 times by this point. It wasn't just that, though; I'd heard nothing in the new material they'd been testing out which really blew me away. I needed something new. Could it be Air Cav, iLiKETRAiNS, The Second Floor, Exit Calm? After all, British Sea Power didn't actually blow my head off til the fourth time I saw them. Maybe I was just looking too hard, the way I had been when The Chameleons imploded and Interpol turned out not to be my new favourite band but a necessary step on the way. If there was something else out there, it would find me.

Meanwhile the away trips were getting crazier. In 2006 we'd done three dates of Forward Russia around Ireland, and they remain to this day the only band I have ever seen in Galway and Limerick. I actually know music fans who live in Ireland who have never been to a gig in Limerick. And discovering that a couple of my "second tier" favourites Brakes (featuring an ex-member of British Sea Power, but a brilliant live band in their own right) and The Killers (yes, as in the international pop act - I'd first seen them supporting BSP, and up until they got to arena level we used to go watching them everywhere too) were on tour in Europe at the same time in early 07 we did a ridiculous five date three country long weekend trip. By this time I was starting to be affected by "carbon guilt", but that's why the gods gave us Eurostar... no stupid two-hour check-ins, either, and straight off the train into the centre of Paris. Domestic awaydays were getting equally ridiculous: me, Nick, Alex and other regular gig-going mates Liam and Barry went to watch I Am Kloot in Scunthorpe just because we could. Liam and I would pore over bands' tour dates looking for the stupidest places we could go; we were both pretty disappointed when Art Brut (not even a band I'm that much of a fan of, although Liam was) cancelled a gig in Tamworth because we'd never been to a gig in Tamworth, and still haven't. British Sea Power seemed to actively encourage this, by scheduling gigs in Yeovil and Bradford on consecutive nights (check it on a map or train timetable). We had decided between us that 2007 was going to be the daftest year of gig-going ever, and we weren't far wrong. I broke another personal record which will almost certainly never be equalled: I went to 280 gigs in one year. Liam was probably with me for a good hundred of them, as well as doing some spectacular country-hopping awaydays of his own.

Now seems like as good a time as any for a little diversion: there's one band who have been a consistent repeat fixture throughout the decade but whom I haven't mentioned yet. They've never been my Absolute Favourite Band, yet somehow I've managed to see them more times than anyone bar BSP - 56 and counting. A year after The Chameleons' triumphant Academy 1 gig they returned to do it again with a collection of local supports in tow, one of which was Puressence. A name about town since the early 90s I had never paid them much attention; I'd seen them once in about 1993 and they didn't do much for me. This time they were on fire, though, and I soon bought their two existing albums from Vinyl Exchange. Bassist Kev and singer Jimmy were often about when we went out, just part of the gang really, and soon a lot of the Chameleons crowd started going along to their gigs too. When the Chameleons split, Puressence gigs became almost a social event: a drinking session with a band on. A really bloody good band, though. I wouldn't have gone to see them 56 times if they weren't. I wouldn't have gone to see them in bloody Wolverhampton on a snowy night in February 2007 if I didn't really like them.

Manchester was literally freezing when we got back and the last thing on earth I wanted to do was to go out again - but after months of my hoping they would, Sonic Cathedral had finally decided to put on a Manchester session, and my beloved Second Floor were opening. I was less enthusiastic about headliners Long-view, but in between them was Maps. Maps had been on that mythical list since he - apparently it was just one bloke, but with a band for live appearances - did a mutual remix CD with The Longcut, who'd mentioned it on their Myspace in January saying they had a few copies up for grabs. I'd messaged them and told them it was my birthday - which it was - and duly received a copy: I didn't know who this crazy fucker was, but he'd basically turned "Holy Funk" inside out and reshaped it into exactly what The Longcut should sound like, although at this point hadn't quite achieved for themselves. I'd arrived at Night & Day to discover I'd forgotten to put the memory card in my camera, but I'd promised The Second Floor I would take some photos, so I ran home in the snow to get it and arrived back just as they came onstage to play a brilliant set. Exhausted, I stayed at the front and was still there when Maps started. Now this was something special: all the euphoric swirl of the (by now almost overground) shoegaze revival but infused with flickering, pulsing electronics; intricate and beautiful and... I was snapped out of my dreamstate by the contents of the keyboard player's maracas hitting me full in the face. If you've ever wondered what's inside maracas (you haven't? Why not?) it sort of looks like plastic Sugar Puffs, and I was finding it in my bag and clothes for days. Definitely worth going out in sub-zero weather for, though, unlike Long-view, during whose set I somewhat legendarily fell asleep on a sofa near the back.

When I discovered Maps' releases to date were all on ten inch vinyl I was delighted, you'd have to be a certain sort of person to know where I'm coming from there. The next single was called "It Will Find You", and it felt like it had. The band were supporting The Longcut on their March tour - although not on the Manchester date. So I didn't go, and went to Lancaster instead where they were. OK, so the historical truth is that I was committed to reviewing elsewhere that night, but the myth (and what I pointedly told promoters High Voltage) was that I wasn't coming because Maps weren't supporting, so damn well book them for the stage they (HV) were scheduling for that summer's D:Percussion. Or else. They did. I suspect they were probably going to anyway, but I did have a little laugh when I saw the listings. And fortuitously they were booked to play on the same bill as British Sea Power at May 2007's Great Escape festival. I might have got bored with BSP in 2006 but it had been six months and I couldn't wait to see them again. It was sometime the day before when a contact in the BSP camp texted one of our crew and told us the band weren't happy with the venue they'd been assigned - an inflatable tent shaped like an upside-down purple cow - and were in talks to transfer to another bill. My mood darkened. If they got their way, I wouldn't be able to see both bands. On the morning of the gig I went for a walk on the beach. There's something about Brighton beach - as I said before, it's where I go to get my head together, and this was no exception. The answer, when it came to me, actually surprised me: "I'm pissed off I can't go and see both bands" was actually "I'm pissed off I can't go and see Maps". So... what if I did? People would talk, sure, but I remembered the promise I made myself way back in 2003: always follow your heart.

BSP never did manage to swap venues; they'd been right to be wary though. The list of things that were awful about the "venue" would probably double the length of this entire article. Both Maps and British Sea Power played brilliant if slightly curtailed sets, though, and I still hadn't missed a British Sea Power UK headline gig in almost four years. But all that was about to change. A string of dates were announced for October and November - all but the last five coinciding with a long-booked trip to South Africa for some of our oldest friends' wedding. I surprised myself again by being absolutely gutted - I'd thought I'd got bored with the band but gigs had been very thin on the ground in 07. Ah well. Thing is by the time October came, it wasn't BSP's gigs I was gutted about missing.

My fifth Maps gig was in the ancient Church Of The Holy Sepulchre in Northampton. The date was 25th July 2007, it had rained for what felt like weeks, roads were flooded and some of the previous weekend's festivals had been postponed. I stuck my ticket in my bag and went to work, figuring I'd decide later if it was actually feasible to get there. Leaving work I felt a pull, a calling, towards the motorway, just like I had in 2003 with British Sea Power. The rain was torrential, but this time nothing was going to keep me from where I had to be. I was just past Stoke on an M6 so quiet it was almost creepy when the sun broke through, and as I swept round a curve somewhere around Wolverhampton I found myself driving into a rainbow, and another, and another. Onto the M1 and off at Northampton, at which point I realised I had no idea where I was going as in my panic about the weather conditions I'd completely forgotten to print a Multimap off. I know: phone Alex. I knew he wasn't going out that night, so I could ask him to look on the internet and get me directions. I pulled up a quiet side street and stopped - and there was the church right in front of me in the warm evening sunshine. "It will find you". I was already feeling very peaceful: here, unlike Manchester or British Sea Power gigs or Longcut gigs or whatever I knew nobody, I could sit right at the front and enjoy anonymity. The sound was amazing as the band played the album in order: when they got to "It Will Find You" the little electronic flourishes seemed to be channelling right through me then dancing off the inside of the round tower and out to the stars. Just like that fateful night in Hamburg I found my face wet with tears; it had happened again, and afterwards all the colours in the world seemed brighter. I wrote about it in my blog, as I did every gig; somewhere out there in cyberspace, or at least Northampton, Maps AKA James Chapman read it.

Somewhere closer to home but equally unknown to me, legendary Hacienda DJ Dave Haslam had also been reading my writing. And now he wanted my opinion. He was going to start a new club night in Paris in November and wanted to take the hottest Manchester bands over to play there, who did I think would be suitable? I was flattered beyond words that my opinion was valued in this way, and there was only one answer: Air Cav. They were duly booked. And I wanted to be there myself - my first ever foreign awayday for an unsigned band. They were worth it, though. I'd been watching them on an almost weekly basis throughout the year and they were getting better and better. We knew each other vaguely in the way people around town do, and it was sometime around September, I think, when they asked me to go for a drink as they wanted to ask me something. We sat in Fuel in Withington, and I told them I would have little idea how to manage a band because I had never done it before, but I would be honoured to help them out where I could.

Looking back at the list of what I apparently did in October 2007 now, I largely wonder when I had time to sleep - with a week away for the South African trip at the end of the month I couldn't do my perennial trick of simply booking half of October off to accommodate my somewhat unusual idea of what a holiday constitutes. So my by-now-expected level of In The City coverage fitted in between the day job, doing odds and ends for Air Cav, a few dates of a Puressence tour, a bizarre stint with Liam doing Brakes' merch in Hull for reasons that I never worked out, the usual local stuff, and seven dates of the Maps tour. I'd arranged to interview James Chapman for MM at a gig in Stoke, but heavy traffic on the M6 meant I didn't make the soundcheck; I felt terrible about this, and introduced myself afterwards to apologise. I left a couple of hours later without my interview but with a new friend who told me he loved my writing as much as I loved his music. Not everyone was as positive about my efforts, though: a few days further along the tour I was somewhere on an A-road between Nottingham and Colchester when my phone started going crazy. Apparently an innocuous (I'd thought) comment in my blog regarding the departure of a guitarist from a local band had been taken badly by one of the remaining members, who had taken it upon himself to send me strings of abuse and threats. In the space of a few weeks my blog had gone from being something I tossed into cyberspace without much of a thought for what happened next (and never really thought anyone outside of people I knew read, anyway) to something interactive, supplying me with friends, enemies and band management positions. I was on a roll, though, it was all good, wasn't it?

In actual fact my life was spiralling way out of control. Alongside the hedonism which had reached new and (if I think about it now) potentially damaging levels, I was also a senior union rep at work by this point; a position I had somewhat unwittingly inherited after a predecessor collapsed and died of a heart attack in the factory break room. That should have been a warning, really. The Paris gig was a triumph, a show Air Cav still regard as one of their best; a crew had come out from Manchester but the Parisian kids were the ones going wild for them. The crash back into reality two days later was like nothing I had ever experienced. I returned to work to find the place in turmoil; the improbably good pay deal we'd somehow pulled off in between October's wild days had fallen though, the place was on the brink of industrial action and the next year or so of my life was spent desperately trying to balance the various positions of responsibility I'd found myself in.

Air Cav released their debut single in February 2008 with a euphoric, packed gig at Manchester's Roadhouse. I'd booked and promoted the gig myself and it should have been the proudest day of my life - but on the same day things had happened at work which all but destroyed me. I wasn't actually sure who I was any more, and there are large parts of 2008 I barely remember. I'd spent most of the decade doing exactly what the hell I liked with little consideration of the consequences, and now it was time to pay the price. Outwardly it was business as usual, but inside I was hanging onto my sanity by my fingernails. Forward Russia released their second album, a beautiful, sprawling, cathartic piece of work which clicked instantly with the mess in my head, but a lot of those who transiently liked their short, fast, spiky-spiky "number" songs were seriously turned off by its mass of ten minute epics and weirdly evocative song titles. There are few bands I can think of who progressed so far in such a short space of time and it effectively decimated their fanbase whilst not gathering enough of a new one. Had they stuck around, they might have seen a shift in their audiences and a new beginning, but their drummer had a difficult choice to make between sticking with a band that felt like it could be on a downhill slope and accepting a university place; other members were starting to tire of it all, and it seemed like a good time to call an indefinite break. And however much the Roundhouse in October of that year remains one of my top ten per cent of British Sea Power gigs, and however much money I would have wasted had I not used the train and gig tickets and hotel I had booked, there'll always be a part of me that regrets not being in Leeds that night to see them off to the end. The worst gig clash of the decade, no contest.

I Like Trains' record label decided their services were no longer required. My former sort-of-proteges Fear Of Music split, whilst my previously beloved Interpol's third album was, frankly, rubbish. There were occasional lights in the darkness: British Sea Power released their third album, the tracks which hadn't done much for me in 2006 sounded excellent in their eventual form, and it went Top Ten - recognition at last, and a richly deserved Mercury nomination followed. But I was tired and disillusioned, and trudging around the local unsigned nights trying to care about anything felt more like a chore than a pleasure. Some of the bands I was watching, and about half the crowds I was finding myself in, were so young they probably weren't even born when I had my first legal drink. Suddenly I felt old, something I'd never felt before. Too old for this. I'd had a good run, my "youth" extended by a few more years than most people manage - maybe it was time to give it all up. This might well have happened, had it not been for a strange night out in a hitherto unknown-to-me suburb down the end of the 41 bus route. The last thing on earth I was looking for at this point in my life was a new favourite band, but if I had been, the last place on earth I'd have been looking for it would have been Northenden.

Doves wrote a song about Northenden once and it was not especially flattering. They did it a bit of a disservice. Turn off the main street past the world's smallest village green and you could be going back in time: Northenden was listed in the Domesday Book and a thousand years on it may have been swallowed by Manchester and Wythenshawe but there's still something very village-y about it: a church, a little police station, a pub, and an 18th century cottage. In the front room of the cottage, sometime in late 2007, an aspiring musician spotted a post I had made on the Myspace page of German ambient/electronica artist Ulrich Schnauss about his brilliant support slots on the recent Maps tour. And like many before him, the musician wrote to me and asked me to come to his band's gig at the Roadhouse in January 2008. I had nothing better to do that night so I did, and I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing - it was like Slowdive and The Cocteau Twins and "What Does Anything Mean Basically" era Chameleons and My Bloody Valentine all rolled into one. Their name was Daniel Land And The Modern Painters. I saw them a couple more times, at Dry Bar and the Star & Garter and supporting Ulrich Schnauss himself at Salford Sacred Trinity Church - they were good and they were getting better. So when they announced a special "hometown" gig at The Crown, the pub next to the cottage opposite the church, it had to be done, didn't it? I don't think the band expected anyone to turn up except their friends and the not-remotely-shoegazey locals. The landlady laid on a massive bowl of stew and dumplings. It looked outwardly like the sort of Live Music Night that features a fiftysomething couple and a karaoke track, but what Northenden actually got was a good hour of sonically intense brilliance.

I can't remember exactly how me and Richard Foster came up with The Mad Idea. I'd met Foster through watching British Sea Power although which particular occasion it was escapes me, and I was doing odd features and interviews for Incendiary, the rather irreverent music webzine he and a fellow Brit ex-pat ran from a shed in their adopted hometown of Leiden, The Netherlands. I'd asked him to see if he could get Air Cav some dates in Holland for spring 2009 and he came back to me with two dates and the suggestion that we ran it as a Manchester package, with another band on the bill. I put the idea to Daniel Land and he said yes. So we had the bands, we had the venues, all I had to do was the logistics. All I had to do was get nine band members, Danny's mate who helped out, myself, and two bands' gear to Leiden and Groningen with a minimum of cost and time off work required. How hard could it be? I procrastinated through the winter, which in retrospect was the best thing I could have done. Things were going from bad to worse in the day job and by the time I snapped and resigned as a union rep it was too late, my mind was broken and my self-confidence in shreds. I thought about cancelling the Dutch tour, but the bands were already so excited about it and the guys at Incendiary and Subroutine Records had put so much effort in already, how could I let them down? Focus. And the truth is, that's exactly what I needed: focus. I had a splitter van, ferry crossings and a complete itinerary with full driving directions booked with four weeks to spare: all those awaydays watching bands had paid off, tour-managing them was just the next step.

April 2009. Two days before we were due to sail, a group of French fishermen decided to blockade as much of the Channel as they physically could. Kent became a lorry park and Northern France likewise. We could go, but there was no guarantee we'd get there. My dreams were shattering, but - no, there has to be a way. In a flash of desperate inspiration I re-routed the trip via Hull and Zeebrugge; it cost a bit more, but as members of the two bands started to bond on the long outward overnight ferry I figured it was worth it. Danny's mate John Evans did a brilliant job as my second-in-command making sure everyone was where they should be when they should be. Daniel Land And The Modern Painters headlined in Leiden and Air Cav in Groningen, both bands playing out of their skins to packed and enthusiastic crowds in both places. We got paid real money plus as much food and beer and, um, local delicacies as we could handle. Sod playing to four men and a dog in Wakefield, this is where it's at. Everyone arrived home saying it was the best weekend ever, and my life was back on track.

I'm still trying to get my head round the fact that people recognise me and know who I am: a leading light of DrownedInSound approached me at a recent Exit Calm gig and told me Nat from Sonic Cathedral had been talking about my work, whilst my dear friend James Chapman wrote a Myspace blog about me which was so flattering as to be almost embarrassing, but made me smile for days. (A few bits of the next paragraph actually first appeared in a response I wrote to that piece, but they seem to fit in here pretty well so forgive me a little recycling). I wish I could devote more time to the work these people and many more appreciate, but sadly I still have to earn a crust. In a way people like MM and Drownedinsound and Incendiary and many more across the globe who do it primarily for the love of music have usurped the traditional music press; NME is a shameful shadow of its former self, employing fashionistas who seem to know little about music and appreciate it even less, and most of the rest of them have gone under. As I write this I've just heard that Observer Music Monthly, a freebie with the Sunday paper but a far more insightful and intelligent read than most of the ones you'd pay four quid for, and somewhere I'd hoped to target for possible freelance work, is being wound up. I'm probably never going to make a bean writing about music - it's a crowded market, almost as much as music itself these days.

The internet has changed everything. Understatement of the year, I know. Britain has just experienced a Christmas number one hit single which had no physical release and was put there entirely by a viral campaign on a social netowrking site. Had the phrases "viral campaign" and "social networking site" even been invented this time ten years ago? I don't think so. Nor had the concept of TV "reality" show karaoke pop. Yes, there was always manufactured pop, and it could be argued that the shows were at least displaying honesty about the fact that what they were selling was a product as opposed to any pretensions towards artistic value. The vote of confidence in real music over this rubbish is encouraging, but it remains to be seen whether those awakened by the campaign will continue to take action in support of musicians. To overcome the popular antipathy towards paying musicians for their work, and to pile into the draughty upstairs rooms of pubs where real musicians make their first attempts to get off the starting blocks. I've seen some truly awful bands cranking out cliches completely unworthy of public airing but it's been worth it for the diamonds you find in the dust.

And it's true that these days anyone can put their music out there without needing someone to do it for them, but what happens next is still a bit of a lottery. An artist can have thousands of Myspace fans, but to make the step up still needs the existing music industry infrastructure. Booking agents, radio pluggers, distributors, PR. Anyone who says it can be done without these things - at present - has either never tried, or has been extremely lucky. At this year's In The City conference there were considerably fewer A&R knocking about than usual as the recession scythes its way through record company budgets, and every last one of them was sniffing around the same artists, the ones they'd been preconditioned towards. Established bands with a critical-mass fanbase who have found themselves label-less are finding this is no longer the death-knell it once was, but for a new upcoming artist one could argue that the increased level of "background noise" arising from the internet free-for-all means attaining said critical mass from scratch can be very difficult. I have great hope that one day "the good will out", but whilst the industry staggers around this transition period trying to find its place in the new world it's at least as much a minefield as it ever was, and I'll continue picking through it for as long as it gives me a buzz to do so.

I haven't found any more new favourite bands in 2009. I didn't really need any. As the decade drew to a close, most of the bands whose music has shaped it were flying as high as they ever had. At May's Great Escape festival Maps made a live comeback with a brand new all-electronic sound, whilst British Sea Power unveiled some exciting Krautrock influences. They weren't on the same bill, but thankfully no choice between them was required - and no cow-shaped tent in sight. I spent most of the summer weekends watching one or the other or both at a string of gigs and festivals around the country. Sometime in the next year or so I'll probably hit my 200th British Sea Power gig, and they still take me to a level few other bands can manage. Maps' second album came out in September and even setting aside the fact that I'd lived through its creation to a certain extent it was still one of the greatest things I'd heard; a string of live dates in October saw them on brilliant form and there'll be plenty more in 2010. European dates, too, apparently - maybe I'll finally make it back to Germany, it's been far too long.

Elsewhere, The Longcut's second album appeared suddenly and blew the first out of the water, whilst I Like Trains defied their unsigned status and return to day jobs by writing their best material yet. Doves reappeared after four years' absence (and a third album, mid-decade, which I never really got into at the time although it's aged well) with a brilliant fourth album and some of the best live shows of their long career. They finally got to headline GMex (as it's no longer called in reality, but to anyone in Manchester always will be) a couple of weeks before the tenth birthday of their still stunning debut album, released when the decade was just a few freezing days old. Jo Rose from Fear Of Music returned as an alt-country/Americana singer/songwriter; not usually a genre a 21-year-old can attack with much conviction, but Jo's lived through stuff most 21-year-olds haven't and does it very well. Sam Herlihy from Hope Of The States has a new band, The Northwestern, who are a lot more "indie" than HOTS but have some absolutely cracking tunes. The Killers' third album did nothing for me, sadly, but whatever you may have read about the band being arrogant twats is completely untrue: a good four or five years since I last actually spoke to them they never forget those of us who were there in their early days, and they always save us decent seats in the best guest area for their annual-ish visits to the MEN Arena. Brakes, meanwhile, still make me smile more than most bands and in November became the fifth band to equal that Chameleons gig-count of 35 which I once thought unassailable.

In November 2009 manchestermusic.co.uk celebrated its tenth anniversary, which is effectively a lifetime in this modern age. We desperately need to update the scripts and the front-end design, but despite a few hacker attacks we're still here. Red Vinyl Fur went through numerous line-up changes throughout the decade and eventually played their last gig on 10th January 2009; Moco still exist but rarely seem to play outside of their Wigan hometown these days; whilst Monomania split, reformed and split again - singer Rick is still active, and when he needed a drummer I introduced him to one I happened to know who was looking for a band - they seem to be getting on fine and sounding good too. A rejuvenated Second Floor came back to reclaim their place in the space-rock revival, and when Jon decided to revive the old Chairsmissing brand for three nights only to celebrate the tenth anniversary MM they were our first choice to headline the first night. Exit Calm went from strength to strength, gathering fans with a series of high profile support slots and putting the finishing touches to what should be one of the first great albums of the next decade. Daniel Land And The Modern Painters released the last great album of this decade, self-produced and on their own label with a little help from Sonic Cathedral. They launched it with a full national tour, with John Evans at the helm: I'd showed him the ropes in Holland and he was already far exceeding my capabilities. Made me proud, as did seeing my name at the top of the album's credits list. Air Cav may end up doing something similar - the music industry having changed beyond recognition over the past ten years. Watch this space.

And what of the band who started it all, without whom none of this might have even happened? I'd love to say that as the decade drew to a close their differences were set aside for one last triumphant gig, with 80s and reunion era and newer fans crowding a sold-out GMex - but it was never going to happen. John Lever and Mark Burgess started playing together again, sets full of old Chameleons tunes with John's band Bushart filling the guitar parts: a nostalgia show, sure, but it's not for me to criticise the great many people who wanted that and enjoyed it. Me I've moved on, and whilst I'd have gone just for the memories I never made it because all their gigs seemed to clash with prior arrangements involving my 21st century favourite bands - until a the very last week of the decade. It was a great night out with loads of my friends including some of those old regular crew I don't see half often enough, watching the football and drinking; the performance itself did little for me. The forum where I'd cut my reviewing teeth had long since descended into a nest of petty bickering as fans took sides according to which ex-members of the band they'd been talking to. I'd long since stopped visiting when finally, and without warning, on 14th November 2009 someone pulled the plug following one altercation too many between a former band member's girlfriend and the resident troll. A rather sorry end to what had been a formative factor in a lot of lives.

And this is the chance you take - the internet has made those who create the music we love accessible to us in a way that was unimaginable just a few years ago, and when you send that first message you are opening a window which can never be closed. We all love to dream of a chance to see the bands we missed first time round, but like rekindling a long past love affair soon enough the differences and problems will raise their heads again. Heroes with feet of clay: been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.

I look back over what's happened this past ten years and it all seems to have happened organically, a series of small events and decisions - but then that's anyone's life, isn't it? An email sent to a girl I'd never met because I had nothing better to do one dinnertime; a Saturday when I might have had plans with friends in Manchester but didn't so went to Brighton on a whim; whether or not Kendal or Llandudno or Northampton seems like a reasonable place to decide to go for a night out; a joke about a mate's hat that led me to hitherto undiscovered parts of the internet; getting to the Roadhouse or the Star & Garter in time for the unknown opening support band; a quick and quickly forgotten comment left on a German musician's Myspace page. A message left on Facebook a couple of weeks back from an old college mate I haven't seen for a good ten years kind of summed it up: "I'm confused. Last time I saw you I could have sworn you said you were a lab technician. Now you're like Tony Wilson or something..." I'm not, of course, but I was immensely flattered - and if you're reading this, Cherry, I hope it answers your question...

Back in my friend's living room in Gatley as the bells rang out 1999 and rang in 2000, I couldn't even have imagined any of this. So don't ask me where I'll be in ten years' time. In my late 40s, which is a sobering thought - although quite a few of the people I go watching gigs with are already there. We celebrated the first couple of fiftieth birthdays amongst my extended awayday crew in 2009, and a handful of the British Sea Power regulars were hovering around the 40 mark when they got into the band in 02 and 03. I'm still not exactly happy about being closer to 40 than 30 but I suppose I'm getting used to it. So long as the spirit's still there, I will be. So I'm going to finish with a story I have published before, a story about a person I met only briefly, and never even caught her name, but whose words to me one night in London have echoed through this decade.

I only spoke to her once; a few words while we queued for the cloakroom at Highbury Garage. We'd noticed her the first time The Chameleons played there in 2001; we were in the Famous Cock pub over the road by the tube station and she was standing at the bar. I was always one of the youngest of the Chameleons crew - just fifteen and still only just getting into the band when they split for the first time I was one of the few original fans still not yet thirty when they came back. But she was a generation older still than most of them, fiftysomething maybe, and cool looking even before she spoke. Her hair was grey streaked with white and the odd strand still almost black, long and unkempt, framing a face whose signs of ageing enhanced as opposed to detracted from her striking looks. The barman came to her. "A pint of red wine, please". Me and my mate couldn't fail to be impressed, and sometimes mentioned her as we talked about how we weren't getting any younger. Pint Of Red Wine Woman was already a bit of an inspiration.

She was at the next London Chameleons gig as well in Camden, and the one after that back at the Garage in spring 2002, and it was here that the effects of a full afternoon session in the Cock followed by a brilliant and euphoric gig got the better of me as we waited to reclaim our bags. I always see you at the London gigs, I said, and I have to tell you me and my mate were so impressed when you ordered a pint of red wine that time... you a big fan then? Yeah, she said, been watching them pretty much since the start. She'd been well into music as a late-sixties teenager but the seventies did little for her, she thought her gig going days were over and settled into some kind of growing up, but then by chance she saw the young Chameleons in the very early 80s and amazingly at the age of thirty found herself passionate about a new band again. I said I'd just turned thirty myself, and that my twenties too had largely been a time where me and current music had parted ways; and that I, too, had got the spirit back - but I couldn't see myself becoming passionate about any new, young bands at my age; she'd been pretty lucky. We'd reached the front of the queue now. She smiled at me and said "Ah, you will", took her bag and disappeared into the night.

As the clocks chimed for the new decade I found myself once again in the southern suburbs of the city, less than a mile as the crow flies from where I was ten years earlier, in that front room of the cottage in Northenden with one of the great friends I have met purely because he made some music and I wrote some words about it. I guess we'll carry on doing it for a while yet.

Cath Aubergine 01/01/10

Photos used in title bars are all my own except:

(1) Official press shot

(2) by Chris & Karen Brokenwindows

(11) by Clare Neilson

(13) pilfered off somewhere on the internet

(15) by August Jakobsen