So that’s why I want to change my stage name to “The Hedge.” I told them. The record company people couldn’t quite see the funny side. Music business people can be surprisingly poker-faced at times. No sense of irony.

In fact I’m sure that many of them think that irony is an adjective, like coppery, steely or tinny – rather than a noun, like “pathos”. It was the late 1980s. We’d had an album out. It had received good reviews and reasonable sales. But, as was the way of these things, so far as we musicians were concerned there was a bit of a cash-flow problem. I did what I always did. I came home to Essex and took on some gardening work: mainly jungle bashing and hedgery.

Now, I stood there, feeling all tanned and sinewy next to the pallid, unhealthy-looking London office staff. “But the guitarist in U2 is called The Edge,” I said. “Why not ‘The Hedge?’” Then the punchline: “Because that’s mostly all I’ve been doing lately.”

Confucius said: “If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a year, get married. But if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, become a gardener.”

The London music world, a place which contains more fairy castles, chimeras and pots of gold at rainbow-ends than the whole of Narnia and Middle Earth, put together, swallows pop wannabes whole. A while later it spits them back out, often quite bent out of shape. They become motorcycle messengers, waitresses, tax-clerks and IT programmers. Tough. Can’t take a joke? Shouldn’t have joined.

I was once in the studio helping Captain Sensible to make a record. We needed to hire a bit of outboard kit: a self-tuning microphone, a talent-booster pedal or somesuch. The hire firm biked it over to Soho by courier. The rider came into the studio. He and the Captain, who seemed to know each other, had a bit of a chat. As the former drummer of Kajagoogoo, he’d been on Top of the Pops only a year earlier. The moral? Get a trade. “Something you can fall back on,” as our mums all used to say. They were right.

If I could impart one piece of my homespun wisdom to anyone to whom music is currently being a cruel mistress, it is this: “Walk away. Take on work as a jobbing gardener.” There is a very good reason why those old mental hospitals used to send their patients out into the grounds to do gardening. Gardening is good for you. It’s good for your body and soul. But it is especially good for your mind. Not that trendy decking and pea-shingle nonsense featured in all the TV programmes. I’m talking about heads down, no-nonsense mindless gardening: clearing, hacking, digging and mowing. Oh, and having a big burn-up on a still autumn day – that’s not to be underestimated either.

Cutting hedges seemed to be my own speciality. I was quite happy to be up on a ladder or a trestle for hours – days even. As those owld buoys used to say, “You can see where yer’ve bin at the end o’ the day.”

Well, I’ve recently been back up the ladder again, with the shears, secateurs, the bow saw and the long-reach pruner. Her Outdoors, is good at gardening, although she’s not one for hedges, really. What with one thing and another, I’ve spent rather too much time at my desk lately. I’d forgotten how good it made me feel. I also refamiliarised myself with the aches, pains and scratches.

In earlier days I worked part-time for a few years, with Wivenhoe’s retired village doctor, Dr William Dean. I’d spend days on his hedges. He’d created a competition standard croquet lawn in front of the old rectory where he lived. At one end of it were some high yew hedges cut into the shape of eclesiastical arches. He liked them to be in “apple pie order” for the crocquet season.

After supervising me for the first year, he let me loose on them solo, a thing which I became rather proud of. I had to use plumb-line and level. It usually took me a few days to complete. At the end of it all, the whole scene, with its stripey lawn and immaculate yew arches, was redolent of an old Genesis album cover. I loved the work; so much so, that at times it didn’t seem like work. There was another garden I did too, belonging to an eccentric old maths professor. Here I’d cut the privet hedge into the shape of a cat. It’s still there and the current owners still keep it pruned.

All good things come to an end, however. Eventually I’d return to London, and bolstered by a few weeks of gardening, feel much more able to cope with all the music biz rubbish.

On sunny weekends lately I’ve been back up a ladder again. I have a theory about established gardens. I believe that they actually already know what shape they’re meant to be. So that when one has become overgrown or neglected, it soon becomes apparent to the experienced gardener which bits to trim in order to restore it to its correct shape. Quite mystical that, isn’t it? Shall I shut up now?