Prologue: Welcome To The Terrordome

If she'd known the course that VCR would send me on, I suspect my grandmother would have chosen a different present.

It was Christmas 1986, and there was a very specific reason why I wanted a video recorder. At this point, I was a weekly boarder at a local private school. This arrangement meant that I boarded between Monday and Saturday, but could go home every weekend (apart from the first and last of term, presumably for the sort of arcane, lost-to-the-mists-of-time reason which fuels most such boarding school traditions). Television consumption was strictly rationed to set times at the weekend; I remember being allowed to watch Casualty on a Saturday night, but only the first half, enabling us to play the classic game of guessing which characters were going to get electrocuted/impaled through the shoulder/lose a limb without finding out whether they ultimately pulled through. This is almost certainly why I now put so little value on human life. (N.B. If there was a "humour" font, I would have used it for that last sentence, OK?)

Lack of medical drama closure aside, it seemed to me entirely unacceptable that I should be denied access to the many wonders of weekday television. With the video recorder set up in my bedroom, I was able to leave for the new term in January 1987 safe in the knowledge that my Dad now had a list of all the unmissable programmes I wanted him to record in my absence. I recall that this included Lenny Henry's show, which I was pretty sure was the funniest entertainment imaginable, this being a long time before he started advertising mid-price hotel chains.

I also asked for Top Of The Pops to be recorded. Now, I'd shown a little bit of interest in music before this. Like any early-'80s schoolboy, I'd been devoted to Madness and Adam & The Ants - although, for "devoted to", you should probably read "knew up to two of their songs and found the accompanying videos rather entertaining". Subsequently, I'd request volumes of the 'Now That's What I Call Music' series, on satisfyingly chunky double cassette, for birthday and Christmas presents, which my folks would often supplement with service station-type cassettes along the lines of 'The Boston Pops Orchestra Play The Hits Of Stevie Wonder'. In truth, it would be years before I heard the arguably superior original versions of, say, 'Masterblaster' or 'He's Misstra Know It All'.

But, more recently, somebody had smuggled a copy of 'Smash Hits' into school - magazines being dangerous contraband and strictly forbidden in such an environment, with the exception of more educational tomes of the 'National Geographic' variety - and it offered a curious glimpse of another world. On the cusp of my teens, I had an inkling that there might be difficult and confusing times to come, and figured that a working knowledge of pop music might come in rather handy. This opinion may well have been formed a couple of years earlier, when, while staying with my godparents in Essex, I went to a house party being held by older kids where I saw actual teenagers actually getting off, while somebody asked me my opinion on Scritti Politti, a band name they managed to pronounce without any hint of the letter T. (I should probably point out that this was around the time of hits like 'The Word Girl', rather than their earlier, agit-prop period, which I suspect hadn't made much of a splash in Saffron Walden.) Something else which had piqued my interest were the Iron Maiden albums an older kid at school had in the junior common room; my most significant interest at this point was American comic books, and the gatefold LP sleeves of 'Live After Death' and 'Somewhere In Time' were tailor-made to reel in anyone reared on Marvel and DC Comics.

Watching Top Of The Pops became a weekly ritual, with my brain initially absorbing the rhythms of the charts, with their new entries and non-movers, highest-climbers and rapid fallers, like the changing allegiances and rewritten continuities of characters in the comic book universes I was still reading obsessively. The poppiest tunes made the initial impact - it wasn't until August that I actively disliked a Number 1 single (Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up'). But over time, it became apparent that the songs I initially found disconcertingly hard to understand, perhaps even slightly frightening, were the ones I kept rewinding to (gotta love the period detail, right?). Depeche Mode, The Cure, Sisters Of Mercy, Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Jesus & Mary Chain and The Mission all had hit singles in 1987, and they were all covered in 'Smash Hits' (which I was now getting my folks to buy me every fortnight) that year, a surprisingly large number of them as cover stars, which shows how inclusive pop music could be in the days before boy bands and girl groups came to dominate the medium. Years later, I would be accosted by a youth on a Southampton street accusing me of being a goth. At the time, I felt this was a groundless claim, but looking at that list I can concede that there's certainly a degree of gothery in my musical DNA...

It wasn't all back-combed hair and kohl eyeliner, though. In parallel to the aforementioned bat-friendly hordes, I was being exposed to all sorts of other stuff. The Smiths and New Order would lead to the world of indie, a phrase I didn't really understand for ages, but developed a sort of instinctive taste for. House music was having some pretty serious hits, like Steve 'Silk' Hurley's 'Jack Your Body', which 'Smash Hits' hilariously and dutifully transcribed in its regular song lyrics feature, like it would any other chart smash ("J-j-j-j-j-j-j-j-jack your body", anyone?). Hip hop was beginning to make its claim as pop music's dominant strain with chart appearances from the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, LL Cool J, Eric B & Rakim and, by the end of the year, Public Enemy. And, perhaps most significantly, The Cult and Def Leppard introduced me to heavy metal, the latter's 'Hysteria' becoming the first album I bought with my own money. As my taste in metal progressed into heavier territories, I would sometimes feel a little ashamed of this, but I found myself thoroughly enjoying their set at Download in 2009 - even the point where a man lumbered out of the crowd to point at my Napalm Death t-shirt and exclaim, "You shouldn't be enjoying this!"

Throughout the rest of my time at this school, music rapidly replaced comic books as my priority obsession, to the point where I would spend mealtimes "treating" my friend Charlie Minogue (no relation - he checked in '88) to constant pop quizzes. Overhearing this led my headmaster to fear that I was seriously odd, apparently lamenting that I was more interested in the pop charts than anything more sensible like, say, cricket. My only regret about all of this would be if Charlie now has some sort of phobia about pub quizzes.

As I draw this episode to a close, you'll note that I still haven't got to my first gig. Technically, I did see The Yetties in this period, a sub-Wurzels outfit who once played at my school and who were probably considered a dangerous compromise for a headmaster who was once heard to opine, when faced with a Sunday supplement article about David Gilmour, Roger Waters, et al, "Who is this Pink Floyd? Is he some sort of drug dealer?" You'll forgive me for not considering this a proper first gig, given that attendance was mandatory, it was in my school's assembly hall, and, look it was the bloody Yetties, OK?

We'll get to New Model Army next time.