18-19. Elton John - Your Song, Madness - It Must be Love

So, Dalboy visited me at university shortly after the Greyhound pub /embarrassing coming together of ex-girlfriends debacle and no doubt I updated him on all that nonsense as we shared a few beers at the student union on the last Friday night of the Autumn term.  Dal is a good listener and patiently tolerant of someone talking far too much about their women triumphs (few) and woes (many).  That list of names really tested his factual recall, but he coped well and even remembered a broad-smiling flame-haired girl called Jenny, who I'd mentioned to him in a letter about a month before, when she turned up and said hello.  Consistently generous, he insisted on going for a wander - even though he didn't know anyone there - so that I could talk to her and even chance my arm and ask her out (though not to the Greyhound).  She said 'absolutely', Dal came back and congratulated me and on the Sunday we (me and Jen that is, not Dal) had our first date at the Boozy Blues Bar next to the Turk's.

There was a duo of guitarist-singers playing that night, doing a range of covers, most memorably Your Song by Elton John and Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks.  The second date was the Coutts Bank (for whom I worked out of term time) Christmas Party.  And the third get-together was for New Year's Eve at her sister's in Peterborough.  By this point, I'd surpassed my record of 2 consecutive weeks, so I asked her to be my girlfriend, kind of formally, which she found amusing as she assumed that she already was.  I think I just needed the reassurance, given such a poor track record.

So, for a while Your Song was our song.  It proved to be a rare overlap in our musical taste, though.  Fortunately (and perhaps healthily) our relationship hasn't relied on a shared taste in music - although that in itself has brought no small degree of compromise in terms of what I play at home.  Dylan tends to get an outing on the turntable when Jen is out of the house.  The damage had been done when she accompanied me to see him in concert in just the 2nd month of going out together.  This was February 1991 and Bob was shit that night.  Incoherently nasally, possibly pissed, indifferent and sloppy.  Jen wasn't won over and it was testament to our relationship that it didn't all collapse there and then, especially as I let her pay for her own ticket (she says 'made' when she recounts the tale, but I prefer 'let').  I've since read that the series of gigs Bob did in London at this time are generally regarded as his absolute worst ever.  And given that he has toured for 56 years at the time of writing and has consistently played 80-100 dates every year since I took Jen to see him, the timing of this gig really does suggest a statistical freak of nature.

For some couples, a shared taste in music is important.  Even Phil, who unashamedly and unfashionably listened to little else at university other than Jethro Tull and other folk or prog rock, once said of himself and his wife Lynda, 'We like Abba.'  For me, my love of music is not something I share often with Jen.  Since those two early gigs to the Boozy Blues and to Bob, we have probably seen no more than half a dozen more concerts together over 27 years.  Two of those times was to see Madness.  Once at Finsbury Park in 1992 for Madstock, their first reunion after splitting in 1986.  The second was about 5 years ago with both of our children.  Madness have remained the longest constant in the last 37 years of obsessing about music and I'm still planning a tattoo at some stage. So it was to no one's surprise when the first dance song at our wedding was It Must Be Love.

It was never going to be Bob, was it?