I didn’t enjoy being thirty.

My friend Phil Woolas, who is now MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, explained it to me at the time.

“It’s like this John,” he said, adopting as wise a tone as his Mancunian brogue would allow, “When you’re thirty most blokes have to come to terms with their own mortality. It’s not because you have to stop playing football. It’s because most blokes realise that you’re Dad is probably going to die fairly soon.”

Whether it was the perception of mortality that encouraged the frantic nesting, breeding and career building that seemed to preoccupy many of my contemporaries during the nineties I can’t say, but I can remember that my thirties were a busy time of 14 hour working days, new projects, intense campaigning and some worthwhile rewards.

But one of the best things about moving through my thirties was moving out of a particularly dark tunnel that I now refer to as ‘post-Smiths, pre-Blur’. Music is the 80’s had become unremittingly dreadful, the nadirs of which remain Lady in Red and Come on Eileen. The latter also marked the unwelcome emergence of dungarees as a fashion item. Haircut 100 were bad enough, but there is nothing more catastrophically devoid of style than dungarees made worse by their association with shrill man-hating feminism.

Having driven endlessly around the South East to the bland accompaniment of Radio 1, I retreated into a personal rut, made worse by living in the cultural wasteland that is Basingstoke. My interests became limited to artists I followed for some time. I remember my parents musical tastes being cast in stone - rock and roll and the sixties were threatening to them. The Beatles were nice boys while they wore their cute suits, the Stones and Kinks were appalling dangerous people - in my eyes that made them all the more interesting. But by 1985 I could feel myself going the same way, sliding dangerously towards jazz.

The Stone Roses’ brilliant debut was the light at the end of the tunnel, but 1994s Parklife was the real re-awakening for me. I remember exactly where and when I first heard it. Like other key musical moments - the Top of the Pops appearances of Roxy Music doing Virginia Plain and David Bowie performing Starman, first hearing Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side on the Radio 1 afternoon show - I didn’t know what the lyrics meant but Lou’s voice just sounded so dirty, hearing Anarchy in the UK on John Peel, the opening patters of Disorder, my introduction to Joy Division or the D minor arpeggio that opens REM’s Automatic for the People.

I ended up liking Definitely Maybe, the other ‘94 landmark, just as much as Parklife and it still endures. But music is so often about a place and a time. ‘Pings’ on the radar screen of your life. And even though I was too busy earning a living and running campaigns to have really notice the ’second summer of love’, in moving to Reading I had come to a town where music mattered. Later I discovered House

Of course there was decent music around ‘post-Smiths, pre Blur’ - I was just too lazy really to find it. And that’s the thing about your thirties. All the ‘get serious, get promotion, get children’ stuff all too often amounts to ‘get old, get complacent, get boring’.

I refuse to listen to Radio 2 or wear slippers.