Professor Tim Wall is a good friend and colleague at Birmingham City University. We met at a conference in Madison, WI in 2003. He presented a paper called ‘The Political Economy of Internet Radio’ and I followed it with one called ‘There’s No Such Thing As Internet Radio’. He brought me to the UK to take on some of his more onerous work so that he could go off to conferences and have interesting meetings with music industry people. Kinda worked out the other way around.

We have a great deal in common — particularly in terms of our tastes in jazz and our observations about how music business and consumption works — but we are very different types of people with what we like to think of as ’significant areas of complementarity’.

Tim has a blog called Wall of Sound, but he doesn’t approach blogging in the manner that us ordinary human beings do. Nothing so trivial or mundane as ‘I went to the shops’ or ‘I like this record’. Tim posts his academic writings and journal articles in progress, under the conviction that the knowledge that universities create should be publicly accessible — a belief with which I have a great deal of sympathy.

We work extremely well together, rely on each other for skills and strengths we don’t personally possess, and think that the other is wrong about most things.

Culinary preferences seem to pull in Italian directions, and he is very good on wine.