10-12. Marillion - Cinderella Search, Jethro Tull - Aqualung, Genesis - The Music Box

Prog rock attracts a particular type of person and when I started at university I was drawn into a group of people who to an extent fitted that type.  Only to some extent though, because let's face it, Prog rock is the last refuge of the socially uncool.  Which we were.  Defiantly and proudly so.  I'm not quite sure who WAS cool there, the land managers and rugby fraternity in their cords, smart jumpers and starched collar shirts or the ripped jeans, floppy haired, sit-on-the-floor studenty students, indulgently parading a plethora of affectations including recently self-appointed nicknames. We weren't cool, but we were pretty far from the sort of social misfits whose introversion was a defence against an unforgiving outside world as opposed to our introversion, which was a lifestyle choice borne out of contempt for the attention-seekers and fun fascists.

Certain types of music appeal to certain types of people.  There's a brashness and arrogance to Hip Hop and RnB that means that your average introspective, introverted wallflowers who might like folk and prog rock would be highly unlikely to make the musical cross-over.  I mean, how many times does a car drive down your road with Jethro Tull blaring out of its windows, while the driver hangs a limp arm arrogantly over the door and slides so far down in his seat that only the top of his baseball cap be seen?

Phil's room in hall was the focal point for our social life in the first year.  Phil was into Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention and early Genesis.  Nick Buckingham liked some of that, plus Marillion.  As did Geoff.  All three drank scrumpy from The Grog Shop.  My liking for these bands - which had started before I arrived, thanks to John doing me a copy of Misplaced Childhood and my cousins in New York evangelising about Tull to me - grew as I sat in Phil's room listening to albums that were never going to entice the girls to come knocking, hopeful of a party going on.  (I couldn't get into scrumpy though, as it smelled of fart, so I never got it close enough to my mouth to taste.)  Thanks to these chaps (only someone who likes prog rock would say chaps) I found that strange and ever-changing time signatures, flute solos, overly-erudite lyrics, syncopated rhythms and harpsichords could actually sound good.  And album covers featuring Victorian children playing croquet with decapitated heads were so much more interesting than George Michael smelling his own arm pit.

Given my boys' school education and general lack of exposure to girls as a teenager - and perhaps just some inexcusable crapness - the song that best encapsulated my first year at university was Marillion's Cinderella Search.  Like a musician in a prog rock band, I was trying a bit too hard and consequently repelled rather than attracted interest.  Some of the choices I made at the time certainly edged me closer to the prog rock community for the terminally uncool, like wearing cowboy boots on nights out and sitting with the other saddos in my group for 3 hours beneath an increasingly lofty tower of plastic pint glasses drained of bitter before feeling drunk and therefore courageous enough to approach girls with dismally contrived chat up lines.