Gutterbreakz returns....back to the grind. To be honest, I'm not that bothered about holidays. Sure, I enjoy myself when I'm there, but if I didn't have friends and family arranging my vacation time for me and dragging me off to enjoy myself in some distant location, I probably wouldn't ever go anywhere. This year we decided to holiday in the UK, mainly because we couldn't face the hassle of taking an eight-month old baby and all the accompanying paraphernalia on a plane. So that's now two years of avoiding the rest of the world, as last summer the wife was pregnant and didn't want to risk flying.

Some holiday experiences relating to music...

Hearing Busted's "Year 3000" at surprisingly high volume through a PA at a kiddie's disco was a strangely exhilarating experience. It made me appreciate what a cool noise these boys can make. The sort of music I generally listen to tends to focus on the highs and lows of the frequency spectrum, so its quite refreshing to occasionally have one's ears pinned-back by a good blast of midrange wall-of-guitars rawk. In terms of sheer pile-driving power, it wasn't that different to the effect of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" back in the day. Cleared out my system nicely. Now back to the serious stuff...

Spent quite a lot of time in a particular restaurant and became morbidly fascinated by the piped muzak constantly buzzing away in the background. The worst ones were the zombie-like assassinations of the old classics ("Light my Fire", "Hotel California", even "Alone Again Or") but some of the jazz-funk instrumentals kept gnawing away at my subconscious, ultimately drawing me into a contemplative reverie, from which I wouldn't surface until one of my kids dropped a spoon on the floor, or something. I'd find myself ruminating on the effectiveness of an electric piano line or the curious counter melody of a brass part. The best track was this faux-dub reggae thing, which featured some outrageously liberal use of echo effects -so heavy at one point, it was verging on subversive. You could tell the engineer had some fun with that one. I couldn't help wondering if I was the only person in the place actually paying attention to the muzak. Were all the other diners cheerfully ignorant of it's occasional charms? Or does my life revolve around music so much that I'll listen to anything, even worthless crap like this, when there's no other options available? I felt like a heroin addict getting by on morphine prescriptions. Speaking of addiction...

My plan to quit smoking on holiday failed dismally. Worst thing was that I cracked during an extended stay at a Centre Parcs resort, because its a self-contained environment where the only place you can buy fags is from the vending machines, at an extortionate £5.00 for a pack of sixteen! I'd already made an instinctive mental note of where all the machines were located (one in the supermarket entrance, one in the hotel foyer, one in the Sports bar etc etc) and quickly got into a routine of collecting pound coins to ensure I'd have enough dosh for the following day's fix (I average between 10-15 fags a day). I felt like a character in Bill Burrough's "Junkie". Pathetic, or what?

Listened to an awful lot of reggae on the i-Pod during the hols (and no, I wasn't in the Caribbean - I was in Suffolk, mainly). A change of scene often requires a change of soundtrack. Seventies roots 'n' dub stuff like Ja-Man Allstars "In The Dub Zone" and The Chantells and Friends "Children Of Jah" was on the menu, along with some '80s Digi-Dancehall like Winston Riley's "Dancehall Techniques". Yum!

I've always been partial to a bit of reggae, but its only in the last few years that I've really begun to explore it in any depth. Though, if I'm honest, virtually all my knowledge of the genre is gleaned from my mate Aaron. He does all the research and buys the CDs. I'm just a bloated vulture who gorges on his rasta-informed carcass.