The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself. Selection, order, the lettering you used for the tracklist, how much technical detail you went into, whether or not you added artwork or offered only artwork and no tracklist at all, these choices were as codified as a Victorian bouquet.

We also made tapes from each other’s records because records were expensive. What music we owned was limited by what we could find and what we could afford. I saved up for records, read about them, dreamt about them, waited for them to come out. When I really wanted an album or single, I wanted it properly, which meant on vinyl and in a sleeve. An LP was something of substance and vision. It was not a pocket-sized rectangle containing a small brown coil wrapped in shrunken graphics.

We lived in each other’s bedrooms because it was there we could play music. We went to what gigs we could, and watched television and listened to the radio, waiting to hear something we loved or for something new to thrill us. Only with records and tapes could we control what we listened to and when. Outside of our bedrooms, we had to take what we could get, when it came into earshot: a song on a car radio or being played in a shop.

Records meant even more to me than the books I cherished, but I was careless with both. They were to be used rather than looked after and so the books got creased, torn and stained, the records scratched. A scratch on a record is not something you can get used to. You know exactly where it will come and if the stylus will stick. This was annoying but, to me, records were an admixture of music and vinyl: I expected to hear both.

With my old box gramophone I could stack up singles, which would drop one after the other onto the deck. Disco was all about singles whereas rock was the album, the double album, the concept album, the triple concept album and not songs but “tracks”.

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