CD Shopping down Memory Lane

I needed some exercise yesterday and a break around lunch from working on this site, so I decided to cycle down to Fopp at Cambridge Circus to buy a replacement birthday present for my mate; turns out it was the second time I had chosen to give him the River Cottage book on Fish, which was a bit embarrassing. I love Fopp because I get a kick out of bargains - always have. Why pay eleven quid for a CD, when you can pay three? No doubt it stems from all those years as a musician on the dole in my twenties and shopping at Kwik Save with a tenner . Anyway, I love that section on the left as you enter Fopp, where all the CDs are three-quid. It’s a mixed bag but I usually find myself picking up an album that I already have on vinyl but that I don’t own on CD. Today’s CD-case in point, contains Script For A Jester’s Tear by Marillion. I know it’s not cool but I love that album. Forgotten Sons, the last track of six-lengthy songs on Script, gets me every time. Especially at the end when the kids are singing "a ring, a ring a roses (x3), we all fall down". I remember buying it from Woolworths in Godalming High Street and bringing it home to scrutinise and caress it in all its dark glossy gatefold beauty. Script reminds me of a time at secondary school when there had developed a split amongst the rapidly growing group of budding musicians (mostly guitarists - which caused its own problems). There were those who wanted to make pop music and those that didn’t. My passion for popular music was stoked on a mixture of punk rock and The Doors so, at that point, I opted out of the ‘pop’ group. I remember though at the time using Marillion’s then recent performance of Forgotten Sons on the Old Grey Whistle Test or Riverside or whatever, as proof that the dark theatre and drama of The Doors was still cool and could also bring us success without us having to sell out. What was I thinking? I now might as well admit that I also own their second album ‘Fugazi’ on vinyl. I just thank God that I never got into that too. I’m too frightened to listen to it now, in case I do like it. Ironically, and against the grain of my punk and psychedelic musical genesis (to use a prog-appropriate term), I was rescued from Marillion and Genesis et al, by a sudden youthful change of musical direction which transported me into a world of New Romanticism. How fickle we are in our youth, and confused. But more about that, and the copy of Gentlemen Take Polaroids that I also picked up, another time.