Neil McCormick's Needle Time on Vintage TV Kids venerate bands who broke up before they were born, wearing Led Zeppelin t-shirts and Ramones sneakers, hanging posters of dead icons such as Hendrix, Lennon and Marley, remixing tunes by Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, and salivating over the opportunity to catch the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury, a bunch of 60-year-old men hailed as the hottest live ticket of the summer. There was a time when I used to worry whether I would be able to be a rock critic at 40, just like Jagger & co once fretted about what they would do for a living after they hit the venerable old age of 30. But so-called youth culture grew up just like everything else, and it turned out that music is for all of us, young and old and in-between, as it always has been, because music is for life. I believe that our ability to sing and play and appreciate music is an innate part of what it means to be a human being, and has been since time immemorial. So I hope everyone will find something to enjoy about Needle Time. Early guests include Sandie Shaw, Lloyd Cole, Ron Sexsmith, David Essex, KT Tunstall, Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres in The Dark and Mark Owen of Take That, which is a pretty eclectic selection, united only by the fact that they are all articulate and passionate about music. And we will be introducing viewers to some of the best contemporary music too, with "future vintage" episodes featuring intimate live performances from current artists whose class and appeal should stretch across the generations, such as passionate one man band David Ford, YouTube singer-songwriter queen Gabrielle Aplin, raw US garage duo Shovels & Rope and breakout country pop siblings The Band Perry. The idea is to do something involving proper music journalism, which you don't exactly get a lot of on TV. I have the privilege in my job of spending a lot of time with many of my own favourite musicians, asking them all the questions that spring into my mind when I listen to their songs. As a print journalist, your task is to write about your impressions, contextualise their work, interpret their ideas and personalities and try to give a sense of what makes them tick and why we should care. Television is a very different medium, with the potential for being very direct and intimate, more focused on the artist as they represent themselves with less sense of journalist interpretation. In too many cases, however, music TV shows suffer from a short-attention span ethic driven by a fear of channel hopping, which leads to rushed, shallow sound-bite interviews, quick-fire bullet points before the next song. Even on Later..., arguably the best music TV show there has ever been, screen time is a luxury and interviews tend to be very rushed. In a print interview, I would expect to spend at least an hour with the artist, to explore lots of different areas of conversation and really form a strong impression. But on TV, you are generally lucky if you get five minutes. Because Vintage is a dedicated music channel, I hope we can assume a greater degree of genuine interest in whoever tunes in, and not worry too much about casual viewers. Because when musicians can relax and discuss their work at length and in depth, you really get to see and hear and feel their passion for what they do. The crucial difference is that viewers get to form their own impression, with me as a kind of intermediary rather than interpreter. The job of a television interviewer is really to stimulate conversation then get out of the way. From the few shows I have already filmed, the most immediately obvious difference is the way TV allows humour and musicality to flourish. It is very hard to make conversational humour really work in print. Irony, sarcasm or deadpan wit tend to be complete disasters in the black-and-white world of a newspaper. I often find myself telling readers that somebody is funny with little evidence in the article to back it up. And the other thing that musicians do, quite often, is use music to illustrate a point, perhaps drumming out a groove or humming a riff. You can describe this in print but you can never really capture the thrill of the moment, when a great singing star suddenly bursts into song, a capella, and you hear not just the real quality of their voice but the importance of music in their own sense of who they are. Well, I'll be encouraging plenty of that on Needle Time. The aim is to have a show that takes music seriously, without being too serious itself. A place to really let music breathe. And in contrast to the approach of my first guest, I promise not to accompany my interview subjects on the piano. Neil McCormick's Needle Time, Vintage TV 10pm, Tuesday May 7th (SKY channel 369, Virgin 343 and Freesat 515)