1.2.22 We've been here once before

Right. Third time round for this.

First version was miserable. Just a litany of complaints. 

Second time was a fresh start on my phone in the optician's waiting room (lasered years ago, now need reading glasses and a set of distance for the match - the middle bit's great though and it was a life changer for a decade so all good), curtailed by the optician appearing. 

So, third time round. Third version, third subject, third approach.

It's 1986 again. July 86. I met this girl a couple of weeks ago, saw her properly for the first time last Monday and now we're in work mode.

I don't work for HMV yet. Not directly. I'm working in Revolver Records on Lord Street, opposite BHS (still got a couple of Revolver carrier bags somewhere in the house, a throwback to the days when we'd play 'spot the Revolver bag' in the bus queues over the road. We;'re owned by HMNV but nobody really talks about that. We're a different thing.

Pete McGrath is in charge. I don't hear anything of him after about 1990. There's a lad called Chris as Assistant Manager, most noted for answering the door after we'd shut to a couple of teenage girls (obviously now in their fifties) who demanded to be let in and asked if he knew who they were. "No" he replied, "Do you know who I am?" "No." "Right, then fuck off then." 

Stole that line and used it for Val to throw Chuck Berry's manager offstage in Girls Don't Play Guitars. Think Val may have simply said, "fuck off". So I took some poetic licence. And I think we'll all agree it's quite poetic. Think he moved to Hong Kong. Could be making that up.

There was Chris Taylor, recently a YTS (or maybe a YOP) in the big shop in Church Street (the one over Burger King, not yet as big as it'd be a few years later), later to be a regional manager for HMV, in charge of Scotland. There was a girl called Jeanette, no idea what her surname was, knew Chris Layhe from The Icicle Works, her boyfriend was a cameraman. For Brookside I think. Saw her once in the late eighties, she'd become a flight attendant and was living what appeared to be a glamorous life. There was a lad called Paddy. Paddy Allen. Not a clue what Paddy did after 1988. Good lad, liked him. Great hair. And I think that might have been the entirety of the staff. If there's anyone else then they've vanished from my mind.

And there was all this music.

There was the music you knew you'd sell and the music you never thought would be big. 

Working in a record shop in Liverpool city centre highlighted the acts that you didn't know where big locally: Genesis, Marillion, Iron Maiden impressively huge, painful when Pete decided that the release of Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son meant we should play the album all day. The. Whole. Bloody. Day.

Chris De Burgh. Weirdly big. I mean, Lady In Red was number one but the real cognoscenti were buying Don't Pay The Ferryman and Spanish Train, Chris Rea. John Martyn. Peter Gabriel.

And Supertramp.

This is why I bought 'Crisis? What Crisis?' the other day for the princely sum of a quid. 

It was always there. It always sold. And we never played it. I never heard it, was never tempted to buy it. Had no idea what it sounded like. Until now.

I know Supertramp. Obviously. I know Dreamer and The Logical Song like everyone does. Like them as much as the next person. But didn't really need anything else by the lads. It was post sixties and pre-punk, who needs that era? Unless it's Bowie/Bolan/Mott etc. Unless it's cool, basically. I was, am and always will be, governed by the idea of being cool.

I'm playing it now. And I don't know what it is. It's all over the place. There's musicianship, there's melody, there's lyricism. There are pianos, strings, harmonies, changing time signatures. It sounds like it could be a musical. It's not prog. It's not rock. So what the hell is it?

I have no idea. It is what it is.

And do you know what? I like it.

Maybe I'm growing.