From California Dreaming...to this Achnasheen nightmare.

...O.k. I'm exaggerating

I mean, albeit in a damp and chilly way, it's a nice place - but you should see the place where I'm staying which at the moment also happens to be my office. It feels that in travelling the 5000 miles from L.A. I've wound up travelling back 50 years.

Oh Christ-has it really been 50 years?

It was 50 years ago that I started in this business-hanging out with Tommy and the Cavemen and Cliff and the rest in Soho at the Two I's Coffee Bar. I had my office just round the corner, a tiny room sandwiched between a barber's shop and a knocking shop. It was there that I first began to manage bands, it was the heart of my fledgling empire where I was always on the phone, always trying to hustle gigs – blistering my dialling finger trying to get my singers and bands into the cold, bleak holiday camps that sat stationed all along the Essex and Kent coast.

And what has that got to do with Achnasheen in 2007?

Because the bleedin' phone in my bedroom/office is the same phone. I mean not literally- but I swear it's the same model- black, heavy and bakelite. Talk into it and you can hear the distance echo back at you- it's even got one of those old numbers-which aptly is Achnasheen 1958.

Everything in the place where I'm staying seems about 50 years behind the rest of the world - even the trappings of modernity seem old - I swear I saw one of the other guests with a bakelite ipod the other day ...and as for Wi-Fi – not likely seeing as Hi-Fi is still well-away in the future of this guesthouse.

Anyway it's only where I'm staying that hasn't quite given up on rationing – the rest of the town is pleasant and is fully aware that the Beatles have split (or indeed ever existed). Which is fortunate because I need to be connected to the world if this festival is going to happen. A bakelite phone was ok in the fifties- in the seventies I worked my telex 'til it squeaked like a Thai hooker on amphetamine. And in the eighties I fired off faxes like the machine was a Gatling Gun- but if Otterfest is going to be as big as some people think it might - well - we ain't going to get there with Bakelite.

So I need a proper office.