30 songs

I first got into pop music properly, as in contemporary chart music, in the Spring of 1981, thanks to Robert Hutchinson who brought his copy of Adam and the Ants' Kings of the Wild Frontier to our primary school trip to Somerset.  On the last night in the hotel, we had an 'Entertainment Evening'.  Each room had to perform something.  I was in a room with Robert, Gerard Lynch and some other 'cool' people.  I'd decided that they were cool, because they wore Harringtons and Crombies and the girls liked them.  So I abandoned my old friends for a while, friends I'd shared a room with on previous trips, friends who actually returned to be life-long best friends (John and Darren), in order to attempt to be cool for a little while.  We mimed to Adam and the Ants in front of everyone.  I thought we were cooler than John and Darren who mimed to the Beatles (how wrong I was) and by then I had ceased liking the Beatles, because they were OLD and for OLD PEOPLE....

What is this? Started on a half-drunken and mildly euphoric Friday evening, listening to Tom Petty and to Paul McCartney and to Kate Bush, and thinking to myself that I love music and I love writing and sometimes, just sometimes, a friend or family member reads something that I write and says they enjoyed it.  That's enough incentive on top of the self-satisfaction.  So here's what this is... Nick Hornby, fellow working class roots turned educated lower middle class Arsenal obsessive (ok, for me, 'former' obsessive) once wrote a book called '31 Songs' in which he described the autobiographical context of 31 songs that he associated with certain points in his life.  It's definitely my sort of book. So that's my inspiration.  I worked out that I have 30 such songs, so it won't quite test your patience as much.  Really, it's because I enjoy writing it, but if you get any satisfaction out of any it, then all the better. So, to begin at the begi...