Signs of Summer

1) A homeless guy in Covent Garden just asked me to marry him. Well, at least someone wants to!

2) I start the seasonal transition from Goth to Hippie.

Now a big part of this transition involves digging out The Pink Floyd. Except, bah! I dug through my CD collection and realised that I no longer had a copy of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn in this country. Which is absurd - I've no idea how many copies of this album I've gone through. My first was home taped (!) off a friend, with Relics on the back. My second was a proper, storebought cassette. My third was a brand spanking new shiny LP, when I got my first turntable. My fourth was a second hand copy I bought at an indie record store after a squabble with my then housemate about whose copy was which. This one got a "K" worked into the paisley of their shirts.

Which makes this my fifth. £16.99 at HMV. Crikey! Does Roger Waters need another wing on his mansion or something?

There are few albums I've had to buy this many times. Most of them are replaced through format changes. A few (Psycho Candy, Laser Guided Melodies) just got played until they wore out. Others (Isn't Anything, Dandys Rule, OK) got lent to friends and never returned.

Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is special. I spent most of my teenage years *hating* Pink Floyd. It was what the Kids Who Used To Beat Me Up In High School listened to. Once, when the local high school was vandalised, the New Scotland sheriffs hauled me down to the police station to interrogate me. "What kind of music do you listen to?" Good Cop asked, conversationally. "Stuff you've never heard of!" I scowled back. "Sonic Youth, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Husker Du..." Bad Cop cut in, "So not Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, then?" The look I gave him must have frozen his blood, not just aesthetic disdain, but realising that they'd thought that *I* had daubed these logos on the locker room walls.

It wasn't until a bit later that the cool kids - the stoner kids - discovered a use for me. I was straight edge - I barely even drank, let alone smoked or took drugs - but they would always ask me to come hang out with them. Why? Because I was the ultimate trip toy! They'd stick me in a corner of the room, and I'd start spouting nonsense about astronomy or bawdy tales from Suetonius' Twelve Caesars, or explain the roots of The Lord of the Rings in Scandinavian Mythology, and they'd sit there and go "DUDE!!! That is SOOOO far out!"

...and then someone stuck on Interstellar Overdrive or Astronomy Domine or something. I was mesmerised. It was the same dissonant, hazy psychedelia that I was loving in bands like JAMC and Love & Rockets. The a-ha moment of "so *that's* where they got it!"

I've never been without it since.