He reminded me of 'back in the day' when my band would take a break from practice, and our drummer would borrow my guitar and sit in font of my amp with it. He couldn't play a lick to save his soul, but he made some really interesting sounds. The thing is, without structure, even the most carefully crafted sound is just noise. This discussion follows the same path as the debate about the crap that 'artistes' fob off on a gullible public as 'art'.

I used to have an old magazine clipping of an interview that was given by Pablo Picasso in his later years. He explained that he was simply a performer, who played upon the vanities of the idle rich, and shamelessly duped them into paying ludicrous amounts of money for paintings they wanted because they wanted them, not because they had any artistic merit. Its sad, really, because the man had real talent, in that he was able to capture expressive, recognisable images with a few deft brush-stokes. But there was no money for such 'photographic' artistry... he had to resort to buffoonery to make a living with his paintings. Cubism was, to the visual arts, as a carny sideshow is to Olympic-class gymanstics.