FIRST Led Zeppelin, then The Police, now Steps and the Stone Roses... maybe now the time is right to get my old college band together.

I'll admit there hasn't been a huge clamour for my band to play again - any clamour at all, for that matter - but in an age when Take That and Ian Brown and John Squire can put aside their differences to reform, maybe we can make a comeback too.

Comprising a core line-up of me (vocals) and a skinny bloke from Somerset called Ian (guitar), with occasional help from a violinist who I think was called Arthur, my group was one of the big draws if you were a student at York University between 1991 and 1992.

We played our first concert at a pub folk night, bottling it at the last minute and deciding to sing a song by The Pogues because the crowd - largely drunken Irish ex-pats - lapped up that sort of thing.

After duly going down a storm, we expanded our repertoire to include a few Billy Bragg songs and one or two by Elvis Costello.

We played at the folk night a few more times, then once in our college bar, and then split up just at the moment that fame, fortune and hordes of voluptuous groupies were tantalisingly within our grasp.

Actually, being not so much a band as two people, our "break-up" was, technically speaking, two people falling out over the fact that Ian didn't do the washing up.

It was my second year at university and I was sharing a house with Ian and two other friends, but our initially close relationship fell apart as his innate untidiness clashed with my desire not to live in a midden.

My housemates and I decided to leave all the washing up until Ian took his turn, even when this led to every item of crockery and cutlery we owned being balanced on the kitchen counter waiting for him to wash them, with us cleaning only what we needed and then returning it to the pile.

Eventually - after about six weeks, to be fair - he cracked and washed up. It seemed like a victory, but our band would never be the same again.

It's not exactly your classic rock'n'roll tale, but I like to imagine it was something fairly similar that once drove apart Lennon and McCartney, Morrissey and Marr, or even Daphne and Celeste.

Now rock stars can forgive anything and go back to their old bands with the promise of nothing more than multi- million pound fortunes as a salve to swallowing their pride.

Given that sort of incentive, maybe even I can put the Washing-Up War of 1992 behind me and rock again.