Christ. When did this happen? One day I was in my twenties, and these guys were everywhere. I saw them all the time (In fact, tonight makes it, the * gulp * 48th Wonder Stuff gig I’ve got to). And I used to be able to go all night : Jump up and down for hours on end, losing it to the music, losing it to the beat.

I don’t remember it being like this. I don’t remember ever having to stop. The last time I did this I was 29 years and seven months : Now I’m thirty years and five months. And in those ten months, everything seems to have changed. Muscles atrophied with a complete lack of exercise, lungs shrinking with age.

I’m either getting too old for this, or the world is too young. And there’s too many of us : All the same. Somewhere between twenty six and forty, our hair shorter, our waistbands bigger, and instead of getting together and splitting up, these days we get married and divorced. It is not life that changes, we change.

So here we are again, on the fourth nostalgia tour, paying through the nose with £3.95 ‘transaction fees’ and £4.70 ‘postal fees’ and £25 tickets, packing out these suburban hellholes, supported by other, lesser bands of the same age, equally reformed, now, also, fat, forty and back.

I blame the Sex Pistols. Before them, once a band split it stayed split. Now, everyone is reforming. Everyone’s doing it. Even the death of a band is a career move : a way of buying yourself a quick holiday, restating your importance before you go off and pre-empt the fall of your popularity, and guaranteeing a quick buck when the time comes to cash in your chips, take the money and run.

And here we are ten years later. Sure, the songs still sound fabulous : witty, funny, spiky things. And this is just a temporary reformation : but isn’t life itself temporary? And three years into this temporary, cash-cow reformation, playing not one note that’s under a decade old, it suddenly hits me. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t live in the past. It’s like going to see bloody ELO, or Yes, or something. There’s no relevance today : watching The Wonder Stuff is like a time machine. In touch with your inner goth, or your inner indie snob maybe, but there’s nothing here that speaks to the world now.

Yes, I’ve waxed lyrical about The Wonder Stuff before. And in their time they were great. Hell, tonight they’re great, but I just don’t see the point : it’s like watching an old episode of a really good TV show. You know what’s coming next – every darn time. A clutch of classic singles written when Thatcher was in power, and a few old album songs resurrected by a bunch of divorcee thirty somethings.

Oh god yes, I went. And it was fantastic. Like a much needed holiday in a place you really loved being : in my case, the autumn of 1992 - but I don’t want to live here : I still want to put on a song I’ve never heard before and be excited, enthralled, in love. I still want, no, I need that in my life. I won’t find it here in a bunch of ancient, excellent songs exhumed from The Great Indie Musuem, I won’t.

Show me the future, not the past. And I will be singing your praises. Show me your past, and I will pout and preen like a ho and ask the pertinent question “What have you done for me lately?”. Well. Daddy, what did you do in the Great Indie Wars of 2003?

I reformed my old band, took ‘em round the country for a few thousand quid every few months, took the money, and ran. No new songs, no new big ideas, no alarms, no surprises. It’s Yer Money I’m After, Baby.

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