Please don't put the radio one

On those terrible occasions when the front falls off the radio while I'm at the wheel of the knackered old Padmobile and I find myself trapped listening to BBC Radio One, I'm provided with a glimpse into the unsavoury psyche of the general public. This can be a most disheartening experience, and not one I'd wish on anybody. It's not just the insufferably cretinous Radio One disc jockeys and their propensity to be utter, utter gobshites that makes these episodes so grim, but also the music. If popular alternative music is best represented by the likes of The Fratellis, The View, The Pigeon Detectives and The Wombats, then these are very dark days indeed. There seems to be some kind of consensus that we're witnessing a Renaissance-like purple patch of great guitar bands at the moment, and I find this very confusing: mainly because there are just as many diabolical so-called 'indie' bands around as there always have been.

When I was a teenager in the late 1990s, lying alone in my darkened bedroom drinking Dandelion and Burdock and scrawling notes on my Manics album sleeves (imagine that: a shirt with The Holy Bible album artwork on its sleeves. I was the envy of town), I was being at once educated and inspired to change the world. Or at least think about changing it. I can't imagine what any of the aforementioned present-day bands could inspire anyone to do, or think about doing, other than to repeatedly pump a fist in the air and dive headfirst into a rosebush. Their assortment of terminally laddish ditties are designed for beer-hoying monkeys and truly represent the arse-end of British guitar music.

I'm even more perplexed by this obsession with the 'talented, creative and innovative New York-based DJ and producer' Mark Ronson, who I happen to think should be assassinated. It is neither creative nor innovative to take established songs and simply add different beats and an excess of brass instruments, making them slightly different from the originals. Who buys this stuff? Derivation is not creation, it's an abomination. See, this torturous Radio One experience has affected me so much I'm rhyming in triplets now. The likes of incestuous London types Lilly Allen, Kate Nash and Jack blooming Penate top off this deadly musical cake with a particularly awful and poisonous layer of mockney icing. The increasing trend of these failed stage-school students switching to music for the easy bucks is possibly the most depressing phenomenon of all. These people do not love music - not even their own (so at least they've got something right). Furthermore, the overwhelmingly irritating Nash sees her main selling point as being that she 'keeps it real'. Quite why anyone would be interested in her stage-school-didn't-quite-work-out-for-me reality is beyond me. I want my pop stars putting on a show, hamming it up and being so overtly pretentious and spectacular that they remove me as far from reality as is humanely possible.

Thankfully, my impeccably cultured taste in music means I never listen to any of these people anyway - so I never get worked up about it, as you can tell. Mind you, all this is nearly enough to make me feel 'leftfield'. And I don't want to be leftfield. I want to be... the field.