As most “critically acclaimed” artists will tell you, it’s a drag being famous. Why can’t you be left alone to just, like, create? Away from all the unwanted paraphernalia of the day job? Once in a while though, along with the paraphernalia of the job, come some almighty ego-primping perks – and, arguably, none greater than a phone call from the South Bank Centre asking you if you want to curate your own Meltdown Festival.

Of course, the business of emptying out the contents of your mind all over an arts complex, can’t just be entrusted to anyone. And even if you suspect that Abba, Duran Duran or Britney Spears (Britney’s Meltdown has a nice intertextual ring about it) would put together a far more tolerable Meltdown than, say, Laurie Anderson (1997) or Scott Walker (2000), many aspiring Meltdown curators – sorry, Mika – were disappointed to find, yesterday, that this was not to be their year. Instead, Massive Attack got the call. The pioneering Bristolians have yet to reveal their plans for the Festival. So before they do so, let me take the opportunity to address Robert Del Naja and Daddy G with a few pointers.

By all means, ring your friends

They’ll be delighted to hear you’re curating an arts festival, but that doesn’t mean you have to ask them if they want to play at it.

Morrissey did it with his desperately uninteresting Mancunian peers Linder and James Maker – formerly of the dreadful Raymonde; Laurie Anderson invited her husband Lou Reed to mither semi-musically on about New York; Elvis Costello, responding to the wave of unpopular demand that greeted The Juliet Letters, recommenced his acquaintance with The Brodsky Quartet. Tip, then, for Massive Attack: if you really don’t want to risk offending your chums, offer them a free spot in the Purcell Room foyer.

Full-length renditions of all your albums is a good thing

Who wouldn’t be unspeakably excited by beginning-to-end performances of albums one and two – Blue Lines and Protection – complete with all the guest vocalists?

Take a leaf out of Radiohead’s book

Stream the whole thing live online – with a concurrent live forum.

Just remember not to read the comments of fans when you get around to playing the songs from paint-warpingly dull albums three and four – Mezzanine and 100th Window.

Some artists have probably appeared quite enough times at the South Bank, thank you

What’s that you say, Scott Walker? You have a vacancy this June? To perform your challenging sound-exploration The Drift? The album described by one reviewer as “an exploration of the shell game as existential metaphor coupled with the motif of dermatological malady”? Thank you. No, really… Scott, do you mind if I just take this other call first? Oh, Patti Smith! Hello there! You say you might be around to put on some sort of Dionysian tour de force of punk poetry? Let me just call you right back…

Locate the small insecure 14-year-old boy inside your head – the one who wants to reach out to the world by putting on every obscure act he loves – now lock him up in a box and throw away the key

Now go and book Erasure and tell them to play all their hits in chronological order.

Finally, give the fans what they really, really want

Nothing big, just a star-studded trip-Hop all-stars revue show featuring Tricky, Portishead and Massive Attack unleashing fully-orchestrated versions of all those musical mainstays that made every dinner party in 1995 so chillaxing. As for the consultancy fee, boys – remember, here in London, we like to be paid in cash – as opposed to, um, a Sunblest bag full of “bifter fuel”. Cheers.

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