Herbert is constantly in panicked retreat before the onslaught of the Golden Horde, grabbing up a few of his favourite things and running, dropping the rest which they idly pick up and get their sticky fingers all over. He will claim to have been into anything years before it became popular, and will back reluctantly away from any of his gewgaws which have made that awkward transition into the public eye. Examples include Irvine Welsh's appropriation of Iggy Pop, or the seizing to the Art World's bosom of Kurt Schwitters and his Merzbau, that dusty wall formerly admired by the happy few in Newcastle University's Hatton Gallery.

A few icons to survive the smashing hooves so far include:

Who needs opera when hairy men will throw tantrums weekly? And play gracious football into the bargain. Pompous billionaire bosses, despairing wily coaches, elegant Renaissance hairstyles (no mullet-topped fishboys on the Peninsula). OK so sopranos are omitted but learn to cope. What you were hoping to see as you clutched that gristly half-eaten pie in the stands at Arbroath and wondered if it could get any chillier.(It could.)

Here we can offer some Quality Control: a poem about the Italian national team which was actually published by The Times and translated for Lo Gazzetto del Sport.

Eheu! The Vandals have arrived in Carthage! Due to circumstances beyond human and indeed cetacean comprehension, Channel Four axed Football Italia entirely from their schedules. As with sumo wrestling and the second series of Six Feet Under , as soon as these perverse monsters get the slightest glimpse that anyone is actually interested in their programmes, they are hacked off with a handknife like the limb of a fisherman caught in a cable, or consigned to E4. Which is possibly on a cable.

(Speaking from the disturbed digital shell of 2007, I know this was a fond neanderthal hope, but I leave its poignant naivety intact.)

Bereft and bewildered tifosi wander the weekend streets enquiring of drug dealers and policemen alike: do you know the Bologna score? A response.

Laurel & Hardy Holy fools of the silent realm, whose loud yelpings and Billy Bunter noises ushered in the era of sound more poignantly than Jolson, L & H are the modern Quixote & Panza. When you add the great alcoholic Stoneface, Buster Keaton, you end up with a cinematic triumvirate that anticipates in all innocence most of the isms of the century: Beckett? Bunuel? Barthes? Queue neatly behind the boys. Herbert has written copiously about both units: click with caution.

Since a teenage skiing holiday in the Italian alps, where Radioactivity was on the hotel jukebox, Herbert has been hooked by the hypnotic minimalist deadpan robotniks. Despite having his beloved 70s recordings ripped off him by stupid anarchists when the world finally caught up in 88, he continues to admire Kraftwerk's lack of productivity and effortless preservation of their enigmatic image. Florian Schneider is Dietrich.

Captain Beefheart Herbert's earliest memories of John Peel are back in the dust-spangled 70s, hearing a strange clicking noise and a throaty gent intoning 'The Dust Blows Forward & The Dust Blows Back'. In later life a gentleman wearing a wooden clothes peg as a fashion item whilst standing in a desert explained how much ice cream a crow requires. He had always known America was for something but then he got it down. You got that down?

Where do we start? On holiday (again) in Grantown-on-Spey, sitting by a bowling green having been to see the ospreys, this being the late 70s, Herbert perused an NME and read a review of an early Fall gig. The name intoxicated, saving him from reading Camus for another whole year. He ran off and bought Bingo Master's Breakout (no, not in Grantown, in Dundee -- he ran far, he ran long, he ran like a McGonagall). This, then, was his drab aesthetic: the regionality of the accent, the refusal to dress up the way or indeed down, the fact that the music patently didn't give a fuck, it just let the vision through, and the fact you worked -- you didn't sit on your bahookie being ironic -- you just did the work. And the language, the recasting of English into something more deranged and sardonic than most contemporary poets could manage, something baroque and direct at the same time. He knew, he knew in his brain.

Where do we go from there? Double-drummed Hex Enduction Gigs where everyone staggered out, slightly puzzled that the world appeared to be continuing? Touching moments of irrational telepathic terror shared with his mate Jamie during No Bulbs? The personal inability to stop yelping "Jew on a motorbike!" (Garden, from Perverted by Language) or a collective need amongst his acquaintance to perform the riff to Bremen Nacht (The Frenz Experiment) in a Whisky Galore-type deedling session that went on and off for weeks? The fact that on meeting anyone called Michael (including a priest), he has had to suppress the call "Michael! Michael!" in a duff Manc accent (I am Curious Orange)? The intense melancholy identification with Shift-Work as poetic recognition continued to pass Herbert by in favour of one-trick ponies and funambulist mutts? Sitting in a Brixton pub gaping at Scanlon, Hanley and Co. as if they were mythic beings instead of a rhythm section? Staggering around Manchester University mumbling "Beefmen to go!" for reasons too tedious to explain involving the Situationists. Rolling about and bashing his ribs as he witnessed Adam & Joe being beaten up by MES in suburbia?

Alas, the idolatry of it depresses yet consoles, then repels yet invigorates.