In 2006, I moved to Newcastle to have a year out after university. I hadn’t really planned it; I was too late in applying for teacher training and going up to live in Newcastle for a year seemed like a laugh and more interesting than staying at home. It was a hard 12 months. I worked as a debt collector for an energy company, setting up payment plans for people who told me they couldn’t afford them and would have to stop the next week. It was depressing.

The house I lived in had mushrooms growing out of the floor, it was cold and the power, which came from a capricious, evil, prepay power meter, was supplied by the company I worked for. One of the saving graces was the music I heard that year.

I was lucky enough to share the house with Richard Dawson, who is now getting the recognition he was always obviously destined to get. The first night we moved there, our housemates took us to a gig at the Cumberland Arms. A local noise duo called Jazzfinger were playing. They had three Marshall amps and two guitars laid on the floor, and proceeded to produce one long, drawn-out reverb and drone track. My girlfriend at the time got through about 10 minutes before asking: “Is this it?” I didn’t really have an answer. It wasn’t music as I understood it. Where were the songs? Why didn’t they have lyrics and daft pork pie hats like Maxïmo Park? The headliners were Sunburned Hand of the Man, a band that featured a guitarist who wore a plastic horse head and a drummer who was shrouded in a golden blanket. My mind was blown.

Most evenings featured some musical discovery: an impromptu primer on Frank Zappa, Albert Kuvezin and Yat-Kha, or Bonnie Prince Billy while we played FIFA 05, or local singers and groups such as John Edgell or Trev Gibb, who came to the house for sessions on the internet radio show we ran. Gigs at the Star and Shadow, the Cumberland, the Cluny, the Head of Steam and the Morden Tower opened up music to me I would never otherwise have heard.

Ben Jones – who is one half of Jazzfinger – and Richard worked at Alt Vinyl along with the owner, Graham. There you’d hear them opine about the magic of Anne Briggs or the potency of grime producers such as Milanese, and I’d pick up records by Don Caballero, Lightning Bolt and Crass. Just being in that atmosphere changed the way I thought about music. Once you hear or see a band like Sunburned Hand of the Man, it’s hard to pick up NME and genuinely be impressed by a run-of-the-mill indie group who have a carefully orchestrated PR campaign and some catchy ephemeral material that they call songs. There’s nothing wrong with ephemeral material, it just meant that I could never take it seriously again. The whole thing felt pointless.

But the song that meant the most to me during that period wasn’t something that esoteric or even especially challenging. It was Love’s You Set the Scene. It’s a strange song, starting out with a ponderous opening accompanied by strings and Arthur Lee singing some abstract nonsense about walking down the same path multiple times. From there it continues, before finding its way into a triumphant chorus with the lyrics: “This is the time and place that I am living/ and I’ll face each day with a smile.” Whenever I’d had a bad day collecting money from people who didn’t have it to give and had got on the bus back from Gateshead to Newcastle, that song would always come on at the worst moment. It happened about half a dozen times and reminded me to not get bogged down in my own self-pity.