When you're young you have friends who you look back later and think, 'Why was I friends with that person? I never liked him. We never had anything in common?' Ir's just a phase. My best friend Philip and I had a friend who had a car and would drive us on breathless runs from Kew into the heart of the city to films and venues where he would try not to stop at the lights. You would peel your fingers from the back of the front seats on arrival. He was a dreadful person really. But he had a car.
There was a guy at college in my History and Politics A Levels groups who I spent a lot of time with over a couple of years without ever caring for at all. I went on a college trip to the Soviet Union in December of my second year which was a turning point of my life in some ways. I fell for a girl on the trip on a drunken evening of revellry on the first night in the hotel bar. She ended up with him before the end of the trip. Bitter. You bet I was. Barbara's biggest mistake! Paul had better teeth. I had a personality.
Paul was was a big Van Halen fan. He'd catalogued his entire record collection for some reason in a well kept file which he showed me one time I went round to his. Not many of the records listed appealed to me tr all. It was a ghastly AOR vision of mediocrity, I realise I'm being mean. Paul ended up becoming a policeman. I had no idea why anyone would do that. Why would you want to have your life organised for you when you could make your own choices? . In my defence I did give him my copy of Murmur when I felt I'd worn it down after a couple of years of heavy rotational play and needed another copy. I felt it might be of more use to him than all that Van Halen.
Van Halen were everywhere in 1984. Particularly Jump. Particularly its video. David Lee Roth. His smug expression. They seemed like the kind of guys who woud have made your lives misery at High School. I was glad to get to University and begin to find my people. None of them seemed to like Van Halen much.
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