My concept of authenticity in music was different to that of the journalist or DJ whose preoccupation might be to identify the latest hip thing. Theirs is music understood partly as a species of fashion (or anti-fashion as the case may be).

My take was more about musicianship at an applied level, at the level of the individual, the virtuoso or maestro, or more romantically, the solitary artist who created something extraordinary from pure talent, something ultimately that people wanted to know about.

Now my kind of romantic authenticity is pretty much dead within mainstream culture where the emphasis is almost entirely on recognition. If an artist’s work isn’t commodified and recognised it doesn’t exist. It has to be contrived and manufactured with this in mind.

And in any case, my authenticity was probably always a dubious concept in that art, any type, has always been a self-conscious activity and highly contrived. The people who manufactured it were always very aware of what they were doing and had some, at least instinctive, feeling for what was going on around them.

So when the contemporary tastemakers complain about manufactured music they too should have a think about the validity of what they say. In some ways it’s all about the context and being relevant to it and probably always was.