For those who don't know me, and at risk of sounding like I'm attending an AA meeting (how they manage to fix your car and fit in all that drinking I don't know!), my name is Mike. I'm 29, I hold down a responsible job, and I live in the North of England with my wife, a rabbit and a cat. I also play in a band.

I've been in bands for as long as I can remember, always part time, almost always playing our own, original material, and always seeking that elusive record deal so I can go and live in St. Tropez and drink myself to an early grave.

I started off, as everyone does, with visions of being a lead guitarist. I dutifully locked myself in my room and learned to play Wish You Were Here and Streets of London; bought a capo so I could play Wonderwall and quickly learned I was not cut out to be a singer.

Myself and some schoolmates founded a band - I still play with two of them to this say - and we called ourselves still life, after a Suede song. Not so much because we loved Suede - I was the only one who had even heard of them - but I was the one with the biggest mouth.

I loved Suede, to the extent I bought a guitar like Bernard Butler's, adopted a foppish lopsided haircut, and became ambivalent about my sexuality.

Like most bands at the time we cut our teeth on Oasis, Ocean Colour Scene and the Beatles (at least the ones we could play) and we were, to all intents and purposes quite appalling. But we had caught the bug and I soon started writing dreadful bedroom ballads and trying to persuade the band to play them. Needless to say, it took some work.

Fast forward to today and, give or take a few peaks, I'm still in pretty much the same place, but with a lot of lessons learned the hard way.

What I hope to do with this "blog" is pass on some of those lessons for those just starting out in this world; to share anecdotes with those who have been in my position; and to give those of you who think that just because your mate's band recorded a song that sounds like it should be in the charts, it's not all cocaine and hookers in the world of unsigned original local bands.