A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single dancestep

I'm only half an hour away from the Indietracks site, but sometimes I wish it was more. Whilst I quite like going home at the end of each day and kipping in my own bed and changing my undercracks without fear of flashing a poor, unsuspecting passer-by, there's something of the adventure lost. You can easily lose yourself at Butterley - switch your mobile off and dislocate every day life whilst you get drunk and dance on a train platform to some wonderful pop music.

And then there's the actual getting there. It takes me thirty minutes to get there, but often I wish it took longer. There's no fourteen-change train journey to take, no lugging heavy rucksacks onto sweaty, overcrowed buses, no getting hopelessly lost down a remote country lane. Actually, that last one did happen in 2008, but that's a long story involving the pestering of a worryingly Tony Martin-alike deep in the Amber Valley.

I'd love, for example, to make a CD or two to play in the car on the way to Indietracks, but we can just about get through five or six songs before we're there. That's an EP. I want a double box set experience, and then some.

Still, I'm moaning about something that doesn't warrant moaning about, because I'm dead lucky to live next door to The Best Pop Festival in the World. And all this brings me round to mentioning the now obligatory, official Indietracks compilation album, which is being released again by Make Do And Mend. It's due out on 28 June, but MDAM are taking pre-orders from a week earlier than that.

As ever, there are some classics from the last 12 months there, but there's also some stuff that you'll have never heard and will almost definitely fall in love with on your journey to Derbyshire. And I sort of envy you for that. Safe journey.