Sudden Community

Twelve flights a year with one airline, in a good year more. Kiel to Vienna in a bus with Michael Cosgrave and Kevin Foster and a tour manager whose name i have never once spelled correctly in print. Fourteen nights in a row, Solingen, Dortmund, Frankfurt, Thun, Zürich, Ingolstadt, Stuttgart, Halle, Berlin, Singwitz, Erfurt, Hannover, Hamburg, Kiel - and then a ferry or a flight and Norway, where they listen the way people listen when the winter is long.

Norway is like an extreme version of Scotland. i have said that in print and every Norwegian i have met since has agreed with it, which for a nation that agrees with almost nothing is worth something.

Home, meanwhile, was a folk club above a pub in Colne on a Tuesday.

So that is the shape of it, and i have never resented the shape, because the German and Scandinavian audiences did something for me that the British never quite managed: they treated the songs as literature and me as a man doing a job. In England there is always somebody at the bar telling his mate that i used to be in a punk band, and both things are true, and only one of them ever filled a room.

The business was run out of Hamburg by an agency called A.S.S. whose boss, Michael Bisping, would sit me down once a year and talk about my career in the way a Scottish farmer talks about a field - long view, no sentiment, what did we learn. In Scandinavia it was Frank, who ran a festival and also, usefully, everything else. In Britain it was Harry Farmer, whose name i put on my own website for a decade with the instruction that if you wanted me, you rang him.

Nobody ever does the money, so. One quarter my performing rights cheque came in at twenty-two pounds and forty-three pence, at a time when i needed six hundred, and i kept the envelope. On a good tour i could take a thousand pounds a night in merchandising, twenty nights in a row, and that - not the records, not the royalties, the T-shirts and the CDs in a box in the back of the van - is what paid for the horses' hay.

And yet the festivals.

A festival is a village that exists for three days, and everybody living in it knows the date it comes down. i started calling that the regenerative power of sudden community, and i stand by the phrase, pompous as it is, because i have watched it work on people who had come in on their own with a rucksack and left on the Sunday as somebody's cousin.

At Larmer Tree there is a whole tribe of mine. Mikki Rain has been its chieftain since Dorset, since her father's kitchen, and holds the office by never once having asked for it. Joe Shaw plays guitar thirty years after the band and it sounds as though nothing whatever has happened in between. John Ralph carries the relics about and does the seeing, a post he never applied for either.

At Trowbridge i once played three sets in a day with a band assembled an hour earlier in a Portakabin so hot that the tuning went with every song, and it was one of the best things i have ever been part of.

At Southsea, on the pier, i looked out from the stage across the water to Hill Head, where my mother died in a nursing home, and did the second half of the set with that in my eyeline, which i had not planned and would not recommend.

And in Canada, at a festival in Manitoba in a place called Beausejour, i sat in a motel next to a funeral home called Sobering - that is genuinely its name, i could not do better - recovering from swine flu and jet lag, finishing a song i had begun years earlier on the plains near Calgary. Three shows in three days. Musicians who helped each other. i wrote at the time that in Europe we have stopped doing that and only network now, and there is a melancholy to it.

The cost of all this was a set of small, precise neuroses which i catalogued in public for anyone who cared to read.

i have hysterics if i dislike my hotel room. i developed, over the years, an increasing and inexplicable dread of arriving by train in a strange city after dark - i have had it for years but it is getting worse, i wrote, and then went on to describe a pie shop, because that is how i handle these things. i cannot sleep on trains because i snore, and the shame of snoring in front of strangers outweighs the exhaustion, which tells you everything about the man.

And once every year, in December, we did the Milford Social Club in Derbyshire, which was the Haunted Valley's parish church. In the round, if the room allowed. Joe Shaw one year, Kevin Hewick another, the Stornoway Girls the year before that. Tickets eight pounds through Mick. A room touched very little by time, five minutes from Mick's front door, and the most unlikely venue in Britain for anything.

One year i sang there with a bottle of my own whisky on the piano. Leven's Lament. My record company boss has since gone on the record calling the whisky a complete scam, and i am not going to argue with a man who paid for so many of my mistakes. i will only say: there was a bottle, i have a photograph of it, and on a January night in Glasgow we poured it all night for free to an audience who believed it was a marketing campaign.

Perhaps it was. Perhaps a marketing campaign that gives away everything it has and costs the company nothing is simply a party with a label on.

The job is vans and hotel foyers and a thousand pounds of T-shirts in the back and twenty-two pounds and forty-three pence in a brown envelope and a village that exists for three days.

i find my job endlessly hard. And one of the great things about it is being able to pick up, easily, with people i really like, all over the world. In the blog they were a single sentence, and i have never worked out which half of it to take with me to the airport….