Pop music is often thought to be a rehearsal for adult experience – a space in which teenagers explore the complicated shades of romantic feeling they haven’t yet met in the world. I think it can be something else, though – a form of regressive longing, taking you back to your earliest feelings of love. It is part of an adolescent’s job to regress like this – to seek some rejuvenating return to childhood feelings amid all the new experience. Music is the quickest route to it, offering a kind of direct line to the soul.
I say all this in order to justify my extraordinarily neurotic relationship with pop growing up – how desperately I wanted my parents to love the songs I loved, how my heart would thud so loud in my ears, when I pressed play, that I couldn’t hear a thing. If my music wasn’t received as I wanted it to be, was met with indifference or even worse, talked over, I’d fall into a secret – always secret! – rage, taking refuge in the fields outside our house in Norfolk. I’d leap angrily from one ploughed furrow to the next with my dog following behind me, trying not to jog the CD on my Discman, which was invariably something by Queen.
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