Eat - 'Sell Me A God'

I love this record so much. It's not just that it's a great record - and it is - but this is one of those records that I looked for for years before I found it. It seems impossible now, in the age of the internet and immediate downloads, but once upon a time, you actually had to hunt out music. You had to go to big cities to find better record shops, or visit record fairs on the offchance of them having what you wanted. Crazy times.

Musically, this is a proto-Britpop record, marking a time between the guitar-scrubbing of Ned's Atomic Dustbin and the swooning, swooping hysteria of Suede. If you've never heard it, you should check it out - you can probably download it for pennies.

This reminds me so much of a friend from Salisbury, Robert, who I worked with in catering for a few years, on and off. He was a rabid Eat fan, and was also one of the funniest guys I've ever known - really clever, capable and sharp, with a great eye for the absurd. He could also play air guitar and drums like no-one I've ever met. We did the adult access course together at Salisbury College, and went our seperate ways at the end of it. I hope he's OK - like many clever, funny people, he had a sort of underlying malaise that suggested he was never comfortable with himself. Maybe education helped him find his niche.

The Cure - 'Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me'

It's easy to forget what an awesome, world-conquering band The Cure once were. And although they are styled as being a none-more-Goth act, on their later albums, they are closer to vaudeville storytellers than adolescent doom-mongers.

I'm pretty sure I got this when it came out in 1987. It reminds be of being the sort of obnoxious, self-assured Goth-haired teenager that only gets produced in small towns. It's something to do with being so cocooned from the rest of the world that your home town becomes the entire universe. Wanting to be a big fish in a small pond, unaware that you will eventually be released into the ocean. And the ocean is big, cold, and full of things that, as pond life, you can't begin to understand. I think I might have stretched that aquatic metaphor to near-breaking point.

It was unfortunate that Salisbury was a garrison town, because my particular blend of sartorial statement (printed velvet trousers, huge white tail shirt) didn't go down well with the squaaddies in town on R&R - mostly Paras, unfortunately. A shove in the back, and a shaven-headed face asking 'does your mum know you've got her clothes on?' tends to focus the mind.

Happy days.