They’re reissuing Paper Planes by M.I.A. There was a big story in Music Week, about it featuring in some film in the USA. They reckon it’ll sell a million over there off the back of it, and I’d really really like it if it did the same here. Probably won’t, of course: Radio One won’t play it this time round either - there’s rarely any pop justice these days. If there were we'd have had MGMT, Santogold and Fleet Foxes at number 1 instead of the Script and Katy Perry and Coldplay ho hum.

Paper Planes was my favourite song of last year and - I’m pretty sure - of the past decade. It’s even made it into my Top Ten of all time now (we had to do it for work), right up there with Sound And Vision and Rag Doll and Manchild and 2,000 Light Years From Home. It’s as good as anything I’ve ever heard really – as good as Chic, Roxy Music, Talking Heads, The Supremes, Joy Div, Sylvester, Velvets, Pet Shops… Even though it must be a year old now I’m still not sick of it either. It came on randomly at work last week and Andrew and me just stopped - and that almost never happens. What is it about this verse that makes it so downright boo-hoo?

”No one on the corner has swagger like us
Hit me on my Burner, prepaid wireless
We pack and deliver like UPS trucks
Already going to hell just pumping that gas”

Gets me right there that lyric does, just like ”Be someone else for a night, maybe someone else will love you” from Manchild or ”I’d change her sad rags into glad rags if I could” from Rag Doll. All the best songs are sad, aren’t they? I mean, even Sound And Vision and 2000 Light Years From Home are about loneliness. From this all-time top ten of mine, only Hot Love by T.Rex and Sylvester's Mighty Real are not officially boo-hoo. And even then they’re slightly sad on account of them both no longer being with us.

Anyway, I like Paper Planes so much I’ve decided to collect remixes of it. There’s one with Jim Jones rapping all over the track which is alright I suppose and a really fast squeaky electro one by Starters which makes you feel like you’ve taken drugs. There are a couple of others. The best by far, (so far) however is the D.F.A. version which totally transforms the song into a massive, chunky, sweaty Blaxploitation film theme, which, given the lyric, is a massively brainy good call, don’t you think?

People like autumn but I don’t much care for it, especially as I get older. Flowers dying and leaves everywhere making a mess and never knowing what to wear to work. Everyone at work is ill or getting ill. And tired - why is everybody so tired? The nights drawing in is too depressing for words, daylight leaking away bit by bit like the cosmos is stealing time off you. Funnily enough I don’t mind full-blown winter at all and wish we could just fast forward to Bonfire Night. No, not Bonfire Night, to our much-looked-forward-to trip to Paris with Wavey to see Eskimolimon.

Yesterday. At work we were dispatched on a coach in small groups to Olympic Studios in Barnes to listen to our labels’ Christmas releases. The journey took us by the crematorium where we had the service six years ago for my uncle who (probably) committed suicide. It brought it all back and made me feel a bit miserable, really. Glad our route didn't take us through the Common and past The Bolan Tree - that just might have pushed me over the edge. I thought, “Hmmm, I’m on a coach going through a suburb past a crematorium and the rain is lashing against the windows. How much more British does it get?” Mike Leigh couldn’t have set up it up better.

Once there, however, I perked up. Our MD told us we were sitting in the actual room where the Stones recorded Sticky Fingers, and it made my soul smile, imagining Mick in that white blouson, shaking his maracas. They also had these nice Coronation Chicken wraps – my whole life I’ve imagined I didn’t like Coronation Chicken but I really, really do - and so I wolfed two of them and, drunk on the atmosphere, knocked back a can of Tango for the first time in about a hundred years. I could have had any drink on offer and yet I chose Tango, which gave me heartburn.

Heard some new signings which won’t really happen till 2009 and new pre-Xmas stuff from Kaisers, Killers, Keane, Snow Patrol, Duffy, Razorlight, Sugababes, James Morrison etc., I’ve never been a fan of her music but Anastacia, who recently defected to us from Sony, was one of the artists there in person and she got up and spoke to us all - ”Hi there! So this is my new family!” and she was, surprisingly perhaps, hilarious and massively winning.

So, too, was little, shy, pretty Hayley Westenra and I found myself actually enjoying her Ave Maria, a tune I know is one of the most famous of all time but which to me sounds different every time I hear it. I still couldn’t hum it to you, though, un-Catholic spawn of Satan I most certainly am. It’s always, always the way – the artists you don’t care much for turn out to be the nicest human beings. Last week, I met Jason Donovan, who we’ve also just signed, and he was so charming and funny – a right dirty bastard, too. The biggest cheer of the afternoon, however, went once again to the VT showing of Status Quo Vs. Scooter’s hardcore rave version of Whatever You Want. It’s so audaciously beyond good or bad, that one, you really have to hear it to believe it.

They dropped us back at work towards the end of the day and when we got in there was quite a commotion around my desk. While we were out I.T. had delivered my new iMac and there it stood, towering iconically among the detritus of CDs and reports and Post-It notes. Absolutely enormous, like a giant Chav's telly or something. Embarrassingly big. It’s not connected up to the network yet but, desperate to do something with the new toy, we all sat round and watched a Carpenters DVD until the end of the day - that Please Mr Postman vid where they're in Disneyland and Calling Occupants and Rainy Days And Mondays. More sad songs. Karen C never sounded so good nor looked so BIG OF FACE.

Good news about Elbow winning the Mercury. It's an album that improves with every listen so there is pop justice after all, perhaps. I'd have been happy with Burial or Plant & Krauss or The Last Shadow Puppets or Neon Neon but Elbow's one of ours, being on Polydor / Fiction. I imagine our Wednesday morning Polydor Label Meeting will be especially good-humoured today. Kerching.