I soon worked out that most of these guys were shy or plain awkward about the audition process, and that if I chatted to them about other things, they’d become a lot more relaxed. That’s when I’d pick up all kinds of useful info: where the interesting clubs were, or the names of other bands in need of a guitarist. Or sometimes it was just a tip about a new act to check out. As I say, I never came away empty-handed.

On the whole, people really liked my guitar-playing, and a lot of them said my vocals would come in handy for harmonies. But it quickly emerged there were two factors going against me. The first was that I didn’t have equipment. A lot of bands were wanting someone with electric guitar, amps, speakers, preferably transport, ready to slot right into their gigging schedule. I was on foot with a fairly crappy acoustic. So no matter how much they liked my rhythm work or my voice, they’d no choice but to turn me away. This was fair enough.

Much harder to accept was the other main obstacle-and I have to say, I was completely surprised by this one. There was actually a problem about me writing my own songs. I couldn’t believe it. There I’d be, in some dingy apartment, playing to a circle of blank faces, then at the end, after a silence that could go on for fifteen, thirty seconds, one of them would ask suspiciously: “So whose number was that?” And when I said it was one of my own, you’d see the shutters coming down. There’d be little shrugs, shakes of the head, sly smiles exchanged, then they’d be giving me their rejection patter.

The umpteenth time this happened, I got so exasperated, I said: “Look, I don’t get this. Are you wanting to be a covers band for ever? And even if that’s what you want to be, where do you think those songs come from in the first place? Yeah, that’s right. Someone writes them!”

But the guy I was talking to stared at me vacantly, then said: “No offence, mate. It’s just that there are so many wankers going around writing songs.”

The stupidity of this position, which seemed to extend right across the London scene, was key to persuading me there was something if not utterly rotten, then at least extremely shallow and inauthentic about what was going down here, right at the grass-roots level, and that this was undoubtedly a reflection of what was happening in the music industry all the way up the ladder.

It was this realisation, and the fact that as the summer came closer I was running out of floors to sleep on, that made me feel for all the fascination of London-my university days looked grey by comparison-it would be good to take a break from the city. So I called up my sister, Maggie, who runs a cafe with her husband up in the Malvern Hills, and that’s how it came to be decided I’d spend the summer with them.

MAGGIE’S FOUR YEARS OLDER and is always worrying about me, so I knew she’d be all for my coming up. In fact, I could tell she was glad to be getting the extra help. When I say her cafe is in the Malvern Hills, I don’t mean it’s in Great Malvern or down on the A road, but literally up there in the hills. It’s an old Victorian house standing by itself facing the west side, so when the weather’s nice, you can have your tea and cake out on the cafe terrace with a sweeping view over Herefordshire. Maggie and Geoff have to close the place in the winter, but in the summer it’s always busy, mainly with the locals-who park their cars in the West of England car park a hundred yards below and come panting up the path in sandals and floral dresses-or else the walking brigade with their maps and serious gear.

Maggie said she and Geoff couldn’t afford to pay me, which suited me just fine because it meant I couldn’t be expected to work too hard for them. All the same, since I was getting bed and board, the understanding seemed to be that I’d be a third member of staff. It was all a bit unclear, and at the start, Geoff, in particular, seemed torn between giving me a kick up the arse for not doing enough, and apologising for asking me to do anything at all, like I was a guest. But things soon settled down to a pattern. The work was easy enough-I was especially good at making sandwiches-and I sometimes had to keep reminding myself of my main objective in coming out to the country in the first place: that’s to say, I was going to write a brand-new batch of songs ready for my return to London in the autumn.

I’m naturally an early riser, but I quickly discovered that breakfast at the cafe was a nightmare, with customers wanting eggs done this way, toast like that, everything getting overcooked. So I made a point of never appearing until around eleven. While all the clatter was going on downstairs, I’d open the big bay window in my room, sit on the broad window sill and play my guitar looking out over miles and miles of countryside. There was a run of really clear mornings just after I arrived, and it was a glorious feeling, like I could see forever, and when I strummed my chords, they were ringing out across the whole nation. Only when I turned and stuck my head right out of the window would I get an aerial view of the cafe terrace below, and become aware of the people coming and going with their dogs and pushchairs.

I wasn’t a stranger to this area. Maggie and I had grown up only a few miles away in Pershore and our parents had often brought us for walks on the hills. But I’d never been much up for it in those days, and as soon as I was old enough, I’d refused to go with them. That summer though, I felt this was the most beautiful place in the world; that in many ways I’d come from and belonged to the hills. Maybe it was something to do with our parents having split up, the fact that for some time now, that little grey house opposite the hairdresser was no longer “our” house. Whatever it was, this time round, instead of the claustrophobia I remembered from my childhood, I felt affection, even nostalgia, about the area.

I found myself wandering in the hills practically every day, sometimes with my guitar if I was sure it wouldn’t rain. I liked in particular Table Hill and End Hill, at the north end of the range, which tend to get neglected by day-trippers. There I’d sometimes be lost in my thoughts for hours at a time without seeing a soul. It was like I was discovering the hills for the first time, and I could almost taste the ideas for new songs welling up in my mind.

Working at the cafe, though, was another matter. I’d catch a voice, or see a face coming up to the counter while I was preparing a salad, that would jerk me back to an earlier part of my life. Old friends of my parents would come up and grill me about what I was up to, and I’d have to bluff until they decided to leave me in peace. Usually they’d sign off with something like: “Well at least you’re keeping busy,” nodding towards the sliced bread and tomatoes, before waddling back to their table with their cup and saucer. Or someone I’d known at school would come in and start talking to me in their new “university” voice, maybe dissecting the latest Batman film in clever-clever language, or else starting on about the real causes of world poverty.

I didn’t really mind any of this. In fact, some of these people I was genuinely quite glad to see. But there was one person who came into the cafe that summer, the instant I saw her, I felt myself freezing up, and by the time it occurred to me to escape into the kitchen, she’d already seen me.

This was Mrs. Fraser-or Hag Fraser, as we used to call her. I recognised her as soon as she came in with a muddy little bulldog. I felt like telling her she couldn’t bring the dog inside, though people always did that when they came to get things. Hag Fraser had been one of my teachers at school in Pershore. Thankfully she retired before I went into the sixth form, but in my memory her shadow falls over my entire school career. Her aside, school hadn’t been that bad, but she’d had it in for me from the start, and when you’re just eleven years old, there’s nothing you can do to defend yourself from someone like her. Her tricks were the usual ones twisted teachers have, like asking me in lessons exactly the questions she sensed I wouldn’t be able to answer, then making me stand up and getting the class to laugh at me. Later, it got more subtle. I remember once, when I was fourteen, a new teacher, a Mr. Travis, had exchanged jokes with me in class. Not jokes against me, but like we were equals, and the class had laughed, and I’d felt good about it. But a couple of days later, I was going down the corridor and Mr. Travis was coming the other way, talking with her, and as I came by she stopped me and gave me a complete bollocking about late homework or something. The point is she’d done this just to let Mr. Travis know I was a “troublemaker;” that if he’d thought for one moment I was one of the boys worthy of his respect, he was making a big mistake. Maybe it was because she was old, I don’t know, but the other teachers never seemed to see through her. They all took whatever she said as gospel.