Maybe he'd seen me on the telly, maybe he was somebody I was at school with, maybe he just thought I looked like his Uncle Dennis, the one with the handsome profile and the rugged good looks.

That's rugged in the sense that his face looked like a rug that many people had tramped on over many decades – threadbare and almost devoid of features.

I was in the queue behind a bloke who was buying enough bags of crisps to feed a small country and I noticed that he was turning round and glancing at me, too. Was my fly open? Had I got beans on my face?

Then I noticed that he was looking not at me but at the magazine I was clutching.

He looked a bit shocked, a little bit as though the earth was shaking on its axis and the normal pattern of things was being disturbed. I
didn't see the problem. I wasn't buying one of those daft lads'
mags or a top-shelf publication or a magazine for young girls; I
was buying the New Musical Express, the NME.

Well, I like modern music and I enjoy keeping up with what's happening in the world of bands with names like An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump or Frightened Rabbit or Cheeky Cheeky and the Nosebleeds. You're right, even if the music is no good, the names are like a symphony.

The people in the newsagent's were staring because they were amazed
at the sight of a middle-aged grandad, in a sensible jacket and with the hair the colour of a grey, grey cloud with specks of grey paint in it, buying a magazine about cutting-edge music.

Maybe they rationalised it with the thought that I was buying it for one of my kids or that I was a mature student doing a thesis on "The Influence of Post-Avant Rock on 21st-Century Shoe Fashion".

Well, let me tell them: I was buying it because I like loud and noisy stuff and even though I'm 52, in my heart I'm still that boy who used to listen to punk music in the refectory at North Staffordshire Polytechnic on a Friday night in the mid-to-late Seventies.

We booked cheap punk bands and we bounced around in front of the stage, us kids from small provincial towns who didn't get the right grades to go to university but were determined to have a student experience any way, while in the corner, Alf the Barman shook his head and said, in his delicious Stafford accent: "I dinner wanner gunner goo into that lot ter collect my glasses!"

I wish I'd taped Alf, because his accent was monumental. And Alf
the Barman is a great name for a band, isn't it?

Mind you, these days I listen to my music in a middle-aged way,
it's true: I've not been to a gig, apart from one of my own, for years. I sit on the settee and listen to my radio with the headphones on while
my wife is watching Columbo; I plunder the wilder shores of the
more obscure radio stations and I find new bands on MySpace and listen and listen, and then I look up briefly and my coffee has gone cold. Not only that, it's gone mouldy. Not only that, the cup has been sold to an antique dealer.

What amazes me about what some people call rock music and some people call pop music is that it's constantly capable of reinventing itself, that it splits into splinter groups and mini-trends that last
half-an-hour and then fade away like a lovely sunset over Rotherham.

I guess you could call it an attempt to recapture lost youth, and maybe that's part of it, but I think it's really just that I like newness. I like songs I've not heard before, little tunes that stick in your head for a day or two and then go to wherever it is that those tunes go.

I'm not that keen on the old stuff, on those radio stations that
endlessly play the same tracks over and over again, even though, like everybody else, I find them squirming into my brain and suddenly I'm whistling Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, but I wish I wasn't; if it's pop music, I always reckon it has to happen in a kind of continual present, not a rose-tinted past.

Anyway, I can't stay: I've got to go and listen to I'm From Barcelona and The Chemists and School of Seven Bells and Team Waterpolo.