It might be heresy, it might be a dangerous thing to admit, but I am not much of a music fan.

There are acts I like. I’m always going to want to hear the new King Crimson, or Iron Maiden, or whoever. If concert tickets for acts like that were still sensibly priced I’d go see them as well, but I don’t regret missing them.

I also don’t feel the need to own every CD, or DVD. I don’t own any band t-shirts.The CDs I do have are poorly treated, the vast majority still in boxes since I moved house more than a year ago.

I have no desire to collect artefacts related to my favourite acts. I don’t care about their biographies or whether I’ve got everything they ever released.

(The exception is those independent musicians who I follow. I have the latest Matt Stevens, Simon Godfrey, Mike Kershaw albums, to name a few, but that’s me supporting an indie artist and it feels different to being a ‘fan’ – though I’m not sure why or how)

So do I not listen to music? I listen to it all the time, and I try to make it music I don’t know as often as it is work I’m familiar with. But I listen like a musician. What works and why? How can I take these ideas and incorporate them into my own work?

When I see a live act, it makes me itch to get on stage myself, and so can be a frustrating experience at the same time as entertaining.

There’s no such thing as background music – if I can hear music it becomes the foreground. There’s always a tune in my head,and it’s usually a tune I’m halfway through composing. Music isn’t something you collect, or listen to, or watch, or write about, or discuss.

Music isn’t something I listen to. Music is something I do.