I wasn’t invited to take part in the Nottingham leg of the Dot to Dot festival, mainly because of my outsider status preventing the likes of DHP (who don’t employ an email answerer) from asking me to get involved. It is this policy that means that bands and artists managed by DHP don’t get that all important American airplay, which to my mind is poor management. My outsider status, more to do with the incestuous nature of a large section of the Nottingham music scene, is also the reason why I won’t ever be asked to judge the Future Sound of Nottingham competition despite being far more qualified than some of the people who do get asked every year (the only time they get to go to a gig). You can see the Nottingham artists for free most of the time, and of course I can do the same with the none-Nottingham bands on the bill. I certainly seem to get more respect outside Nottingham for The Sunday Alternative than I do in Nottingham for giving musicians their first overseas airplay.

If I had been invited, in my capacity as one of the music scene’s more active champions, then I would have missed out on a lovely Sunday lunch with my family. We did the same as last weekend and showered Jack before leaving the house in order to let him dry in the sunshine. I had taken my laptop, memory sticks, and a pile of blank CDs and DVDs to my dad’s house to do a bit more saving of radio shows and podcasts into physical format for my archive. Mandi took Jack home and left me to get on with it, before long I had filled ten CDs each with an edition of The Sound of Nottingham UK and two DVDs full of songs. I’m a bit closer to getting everything off my laptop and USB sticks as I think it is safer on disc. Some poor unfortunate is going to inherit my work archive when I’m dead, so I am at least doing them a favour by indexing things so they don’t have to.

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