MOST provincial journalists of my generation were put to the plough at what nowadays would be considered to be an impossibly young age.

This was a time when the idea of keeping youngsters in cotton wool had yet to be devised by a health and safety industry, which is why I saw my first road crash complete with mangled bodies and screaming injured just two months after my 16th birthday.

There were no government quangos of retired social workers and other assorted professional meddlers to cottonwool likely lads in those days.

However, when not viewing the sickening carnage of a pre-seats belts law road wreck or arriving with the fire brigade at a fatal house blaze, I could be found hanging out with the local pop groups, intent on getting whatever snippets I could glean for my Teens and Twenties column in the local paper.

Who was leaving who and joining a new group, what gigs were coming up, must check out whether the Beat Preachers were going on tour with the Pretty Things… this was the stuff that filled my broadsheet page every week.

But the greatest coup for all concerned would be the record deal. This meant that a group had paid its dues, played as tight as a duck’s bottom, and was ready for stardom should it come knocking on the Transit’s door. Cue slightly bigger headlines and prepare the linotype operators for the son of War and Peace.

How circumstances change. Today, every band and solo singer appear to be making records within a short time of learning their instruments. Musicians seem to go from tennis racquet in front of the mirror to recording studio in an indecently short time, with just a few gigs performed in front of friends and followers by way of justification.

Each band member coughs up a couple of hundred quid and there we go, job done. Hey, we’ve cut an album.

But there’s no substitute for going on the road and getting gig-hardened, like the old-timers. These days, there is too much vanity publishing, with an end product that is invariably inferior because it has never been honed, polished or subjected to proper scrutiny.

Sadly, it’s a reality lost on most modern musicians.