Albums influenced by therapy, therapists and psychology. No 1: Dory Previn - On My Way to Where

So far we’ve seen people who’ve dallied with therapy, flirted with it, had it forced upon them, or rejected it in favour of chemicals. The American singer Dory Previn, though - she was the real deal. She had psychoanalysis for decades (she called it ‘a beautiful odyssey’), and was into Gestalt therapy too. If you’d wanted to make Freud: the Musical in the 70s (and why didn’t you? Hmm?) then you’re basically gonna hit up Dory for the score. So she wins.

Let’s do the story though, because it’s a good one. Because before Dory Previn there was Dory Langdon, jazz singer and lyricist, and she was a different proposition entirely. And before her there was Dorothy Langan, born in New Jersey in 1925. It was a rough childhood. Her father, who suffered from paranoid delusions, told her when she was three that she wasn’t his. A few years later her mother had her sister, and her father denied she was his. Then he barricaded the family in the dining room, at gunpoint, for four and a half months.

A surname tweak later, Dory Langdon spent years hustling in the business, singing in dive bars, trying to make a name for herself. Finally, in 1958, she convinced a record company to let her make a record, and they hooked her up with a bunch of songwriters, including Andre Previn. OK, the record didn’t do much business, but Dory’s whip-smart lyrics got her noticed all right and she was suddenly in demand. Oh, and Dory and Andre got married.

In the 60s the two made a fabulously successful songwriting pair, and from appearances life must have looked sweet. Three oscar noms in the bag. Andre’s career going stratospheric. Big house in Bev Hills, Mia Farrow always popping round with little gifts, all like ‘You guys are so cute!’ and ‘I love what you’ve done with the place!’ (How do I know that? Aha. Stick around to find out.)

But appearances were deceptive. She was zoned out on pills half the time, dealing with the pressures of the present and the burden of the past. On top of that, a total fear of flying meant she couldn’t travel with Andre to wherever his work was. Check out Dory’s words to Control Yourself, sung by Cleo Laine - it’s an (ironic) rallying call to reining in your emotions. ‘Control yourself, contain yourself, restrict yourself, restrain yourself, and always let tranquility be your goal’. In reality she was struggling to hold it together and it’s like something was going to give.

And in 1969 everything did fall apart. Dory discovered that Andre was having an affair with - yup - Mia Farrow while working away in London. She got on a plane to try to save her marriage, despite her phobia. She completely freaked out - screaming, tearing at her clothes - got taken off the plane, hospitalised and given ECT. She was institutionalised for months, during which time a psychiatrist suggested she record memories and emotions, which she did in the form of poems.

She tried to find someone to put her words to music - no luck. So she did it herself, despite never having written music before. She was on the way to making On My Way to Where, her first album in 12 years, but things were different now. The piano was replaced by acoustic guitar; sophistication by feeling; ‘control yourself’ by screaming at the night. Her marriage was over but she had reinvented herself as Dory Previn, brave and brilliant singer songwriter. She was 45 years old.

What she wrote was quite a collection. Eye popping, heart melting stories of childhood neglect, of abuse, with a seemingly neverending cast of sleazy, exploiting men. In Ain’t His Child she recounts the time her father told her that she wasn’t his, reeling off a list of possible biological fathers. And then: ‘Hey anybody I might have missed, would you care to state that I exist?’

And has any song ever been so raw and revealing as ‘Beware of Young Girls’? It’s the story of Andre and Mia Farrow’s affair, with the latter portrayed as a wistful and pale seducer and homewrecker, and Andre (‘my own sweet man’) as a passive, innocent party, powerless to resist. Not much of a feminist reading, perhaps, but seriously, are you going to argue with her? Good luck to you. And if do you want to know about that affair, just listen to the song. It’s all there, laid out, including the gifts and the compliments. ‘What a rare and happy pair, she inevitably said - as she glanced at my unmade bed.’ Whoa.

It’s not all childhood memories. There’s 20 Mile Zone - maybe the ultimate musical therapy session - which sees Dory driving around ‘screaming at the night, screaming at the dark, screaming at fright.’ And getting pulled over and arrested because she was ‘doin’ it alone’ - not to mention in a 20 mile zone. It’s all very New York, very 70s, and very funny.

If you’re thinking it must make for a bleak and depressing listen - it doesn’t; there are stories, empathy and laughs alongside the shock and the tears. And you know, I don’t think anybody else was writing like this in 1970. You could admire, say, Joni Mitchell, or Leonard Cohen - love them even - but they were distant figures, lyrical and enigmatic. Dory made you feel like you were in her life, going through it all with her. And there’s a rich musicality about these ten songs - lovely, woozy melodies that belie the fact that this was her first time writing music.

So what happened next? For Dory it was releasing a series of records throughout the 70s, some great, some not so much, before abruptly deciding to quit and doing so on her own terms. She also found long-term happiness with her husband, the artist Joby Baker. For Andre - ah who cares, he was on Morecambe and Wise, waved his stick around, whatever. For Mia Farrow, though, there was a horrible sting in the tail of the Beware of Young Girls story, authored by man a so sleazy he could have sat comfortably among the cast of characters on On My Way to Where. Men never change, I expect the lesson is.

Albums influenced by therapy, therapists and psychology. No 2 - Brian Wilson, Brian Wilson

There are many villains (not so many heroes) in the life story of Brian Wilson. Obviously there’s Mike Love. Next there’s the disciplinarian father, Murry. Then, of course, there’s the daddy who took her t-bird away. But perhaps trumping them all is the disgraced psychiatrist Eugene Landy - after all, a mere mention of his name is usually enough to get most BB fans frothing at the mouth. Yet it not always thus. Once upon a time Landy was portrayed as Brian’s saviour, who performed a miracle in transforming the bloated, drug addled non-surfer into tip top physical condition - saving his life, essentially.

Now we all know that Brian just wasn’t made for these times, or in fact any other times. He was a restless soul; in the 60s he had tried to find inner peace, using an array of spiritual techniques without perhaps nailing the spirit of it (‘I meditated my ass off’, he recalls). His very real mental health problems, meanwhile, are too often treated as amusing rock anecdotes. Like, ha! He had paranoid delusions while he was making Smile! Hilarious.

But perhaps repeated most gleefully and most often is the story that he spent three entire years in bed in the early 70s, existing on a diet of cocaine, booze and fast food. It’s not entirely true; it was partly manufactured to promote the idea of Landy as saviour, and old footage shows Brian surprisingly lucid during those years. But he was undeniably a mess, and in a state bad enough for his wife to hire Dr Landy.

Landy’s technique was something he called 24 hour therapy. In his own words it involved ‘gaining complete control over every aspect of a person’s life - physical, personal, social and sexual environments.' Nothing sinister about that then. So he moved into Wilson's home, along with his bodyguards. And while he kept Wilson off the coke, he loaded him up with sedatives and psychotropics until he'd become a kind of bewildered, helpless man-child. By then Landy had got himself named in Wilson’s will, and was due to collect a cool 70%. Hey, give the guy a break, perhaps he was off sick the day they had professional boundaries training.

Which all explains how it was that Landy and his wife turned up as credited writers on Wilson’s 1988 self-titled comeback album. Time has not been kind to this record, but back then it was (laughably) trumpeted as an extension of Pet Sounds, both musically and thematically. Revisited now it sounds facile, its elaborately produced nursery rhymes a tragically pale imitation of Brian’s past glories.

And what was Landy’s actual contribution? Other people in the sessions remember him as disruptive, bribing Brian to change lyrics on the promise of a milkshake. Landy told it differently, unsurprisingly. ‘When we would write, Brian, Alexandra and I would sit around and have these extraordinary philosophical conversations.’ Right. Perhaps it was one of these extraordinary philosophical conversations that led to the following lines:

Night time is delight time
It's starlight time
And it's the right time for me

Fortunately it wasn’t long before Landy was shown the door and Brian’s people found more talented people to exploit him. And if you care one tiny shred about Brian Wilson, believe in his soul, his talent, forgive him his flaws, then do yourself a favour and avoid this album. If you want to hear him at the very best he could be - reflective, open hearted and downright beautiful - no problem. Go listen to Pet Sounds.

Albums influenced by therapy, therapists and psychology. No 3: Tears for Fears, The Hurting

You'll remember our friend Arthur Janov, who wrote the bestselling psychology book The Primal Scream. Well, it turns out that it was his book that gave a well known band its name. Guessed it yet? Yes that’s right, it was Tears for Fears. The name - which actually comes from Janov’s book Prisoners of Pain - comes from the idea that when you relive the traumas of childhood the tears that follow will work to banish fear (anxiety, neurosis). It’s their album, The Hurting, that is probably the purest of these choices - a whole album of synth pop directly inspired by Janov’s primal therapy. And although it covers much the same ground as Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band 13 years earlier, this was a far more appealing collection of songs.

The story goes like this. Way back in 1980 there was a band from Bath called Graduate, a five piece with a tiggerish young frontman called Roland Orzabel. They traded in bouncy new wave/mod/power pop - think pound shop Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, XTC. Now, I’m not saying they weren’t serious artists, but their first single, Mad One, was commissioned by a local car number plate trader and named in honour of his own plate (MAD 1). Nothing like getting your selling out in early, I guess.

They were doing OK - they had a top ten hit in Spain, and embarked on long tours across Europe. But Orzabel and his bud, bass player Curt Smith, weren’t happy. Both were products of tough childhoods and broken families, both were into psychology. They got to thinking that they’d like to make music about something a bit more substantial than, you know, number plates.

They noticed that a bunch of bands were breaking through using new technology, making strange and haunting electronic sounds. They thought, hey, why don’t we quit the band and make a synth album about child psychology? So they called the the record company who were like, yeah, OK. But then you could do that sort of thing in 1981. Back then singles that reached no 68 in the charts still sold two million copies, so people were more chill.

If there were any doubts the first single put them to bed. Suffer the Children was a revelation - both catchy and emotionally affecting, it was a million miles from Graduate. It wasn't a hit, but they didn't have to wait long for one. Curiously, Orzabel said he wrote Mad World after hearing Duran Duran’s Girls on Film and thinking ‘I’ll have a go at something like that’. The images of worn out faces 'going nowhere' are about as far from Duran's glossy aesthetic as you can get, and so much better for it.

And the album was fab too - turns out synths and drum machines could capture a sense of unease, of dislocation, far more effectively than Lennon’s stale old rockers ever could. Indeed, with the band jettisoned it was pretty much just the two of them on the record. Such is the relentlessness of the subject matter, though, you do half expect the inner child to pop up on backing vocals.

From third rate Costello knock-offs to a hugely successful electronic concept album about childhood trauma. An hugely unlikely, greatly cheering triumph - but what would they do next? In the end they went away, took some advice about cracking America and came back with Shout. And it was over. Don’t get me wrong, it was OK, but the introspection, the searching, the quiet...that was over.

Next: Brian Wilson

Albums influenced by therapy, therapists and psychology. No 4: of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destoyer

Hissing Fauna, American indie band of Montreal’s 8th album, is 12 deeply personal songs about depression and anxiety. Yeah yeah, so what’s new, right. But wait. Believe me when I say few records pursue the theme as nakedly and repeatedly as this one. And as records about depression, alienation and anxiety go, it might just be unique in that it’s an absolute riot from start to finish.

Of Montreal started out in the late 90s, the brainchild of a straight looking young guy called Kevin Barnes. Their early albums were so achingly twee they made Belle and Sebastian sound like Megadeth (and that's coming from a fan). The Gay Parade, for example, featured xylophones, a cast of characters with names like Tulip Baroo and Gertrude Lullaby, and a song about an owl rescuing a lost child from an invisible tree. Honestly, an album of the stuff was enough to make even the most indulgent folk bang their head against a table muttering ‘god help us if there’s a war’.

Over the next eight years the band switched around musical styles - psychedelic, electronic - countless times, releasing a string of fine albums without ever quite shaking off that twee label. One high point among many was when they perfectly nailed in two short lines the sheer mundanity of life as an indie band touring the UK - ‘up to our necks in crisps and litter/in the van we dubbed the Gary Glitter’.

By 2007, several turns of events later, Barnes found himself living in Norway with his new wife and baby. I know what you're thinking - sounds hyyge as fuck. But Kevin wasn’t feeling it - in fact he was depressed, anxious and lonely. So he sought medical help - and found that antidepressants gave him the clarity he needed to create a new bunch of songs. And the cute characters were now a thing of the past; these new songs saw him draw on his recent experiences in a very literal way. The result was Hissing Fauna, an album built on psychological discord and the effects of those antidepressants (and perhaps other substances). And Barnes, no longer the callow milquetoast, sang with a newly urgent, almost panicked delivery.

A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger tells the story: ‘I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown while living in Norway, I felt the darkness of the black metal bands.’ The same song sees him addressing his neuroses while invoking that fallacious Nietzschean saw of whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (maybe more in hope than conviction). ‘I am older now, I see the way you operate. If you don't hurt me then you die’

And the extravagantly titled Heimdalsgate like a Promethean Curse is an anguished plea for the neurons to right themselves. ‘I'm in a crisis. I need help, come on mood shift, shift back to good again! Come on chemicals!’ And so it goes on.

Doesn’t sound too big on the laughs? What these lyrics don’t get across is this: Hissing Fauna is wild. This is a record that kicks down the front door, starts a party in the living room and dares you to call the cops. That song about having a breakdown in Norway? A delirious disco banger. The ‘chemicals’ track? Hyperactive new wave freakout. Add some insane funk jams to the mix and you have one of the best albums of the decade.

The band’s increasingly extravagant, surreal live performances saw Barnes orchestrating scenes like attempted crucifixions and boxing matches between poodle-women. And, just like Lennon before him, feeling the need to bare his soul by baring his junk, performing naked on at least one occasion. What is it with these guys? Still, what a ride. People still called them twee, though. Mud sticks, I guess.

Next: Tears for Fears

Albums influenced by therapy, therapists and psychology. No 5: John Lennon - Plastic Ono Band

'I've rarely seen pain like John's, and I've seen a lot of pain,' said the psychologist Arthur Janov about John Lennon. ‘John had a huge reservoir of unexplored and unexpressed feelings that could be responsible for his bitterness, pessimism, jealousy…’

Wow, Arthur, you sure know how to gee a guy up. Oh sorry, you haven’t finished.

‘...cynicism, violence, lack of confidence...'

OK, you can stop now! That's maverick psychotherapists for you, I guess - not much in it for them to say to a potential client 'nah, you're fine'. Especially ones as rich as John Lennon. Famously, Janov became a major figure in Lennon's life for a time back in 1970, inspiring his first conventional solo album. But while Lennon's Plastic Ono Band was certainly groundbreaking, was it actually any good?

But first, let's rewind to late 1968, when John and Yoko released the first of three rather, let's say, challenging experimental albums. The first, Two Virgins, famously features the pair naked on the cover, an act that scandalised the world and prompted a young Sissy Spacek to record a song called John, You’ve Gone Too Far This Time. Meanwhile the third, The Wedding Album, was so impenetrable that the critic Richard Williams inadvertently reviewed a half hour test signal, unable to distinguish it from the actual music.

When the Beatles' broke up in early 1970, John and Yoko had a bit of down time on their hands. And, as luck would have it, at the same time Janov's famous book, The Primal Scream, had just been published. His newly minted primal therapy was very fashionable, very Hollywood - more a cultural happening than a science. Janov, though, made all kinds of wild claims for it - that he could fix everything from alcoholism and menstrual cramps to - here it comes - 'homosexuality.' Asked for proof it worked, he said 'feelings explain so much that statistical evidence is irrelevant'. 

Someone threw it the Onos way, they gave him a call, and he booked them right in for the next five months. Now, Janov must have been a busy man, so you have to admire his professional dedication in giving up this amount of time to treat the multi-millionaire pop stars.

Janov’s therapy was based on the idea that adult neuroses are caused by unresolved childhood trauma, and that the cure is to violently wrench that trauma from the system. Lennon liked this idea - his dad had been a drunk who ran out on the family, returning only when John was rich and famous. This certainly gave Janov plenty of material to work with - one session saw Lennon ‘on his knees, pounding the wall as he screamed the words 'daddy, daddy' over and over again’.

When the album emerged Janov's influence was all over it - songs about absent dads and dying mums sit alongside John's hamfisted social commentary. But above all it was a chance for John to return repeatedly to his favourite topic: himself. After all, he had plenty of form. The previous year's No Bed for Beatle John tells the story of John visiting Yoko in hospital and getting turfed out of a bed because it was needed by someone who was actually, you know, ill and stuff. Jeez, and you thought things were bad in the NHS these days. Plastic Ono Band, though, took self-obsession to new levels. 'Just a boy and a little girl, trying to change the whole wide world’, he humblebrags. There's even a song called Look at Me. Janov was right, of course, that Lennon had plenty of issues that did need 'fixing' - not least his violent tendencies, especially towards women. Funnily enough, there isn't a song about that.

This was a much more conventional record than his previous solo output, complete with piano, choruses and Ringo, so you can only imagine how relieved his fans were to hear some actual songs from the erstwhile moptop. That must account for its rapturous reception. Learning point: the value of setting yourself an exceptionally low bar.

Because if you’d imagined some pretty transcendent music must have emerged out of those soul searching therapy sessions, you'd be wrong. Lumpy blues and sporadic bouts of pub singer howling, more like. While Lennon may have been many things (‘bitter, pessimistic, jealous…’) he wasn’t really much of an experimenter. There are some nice moments; Love is pretty enough, as is Isolation. But it's mostly pretty midding, stodgy fare. John, you haven’t gone far enough this time.

God, meanwhile, is a temper tantrum of a song in which he rails against the world, renouncing everything from Jesus, Bob Dylan, er, God, and mostly shockingly of all, the middle bit of Yellow Submarine. ‘I don’t believe in yoga!’, he sings. Nobody’s forcing you to, John. Try a zumba class, whatever. Perhaps he could have just cut to the chase and screamed ‘I’m nothing like Paul!’ over and over for 45 minutes. Or ‘help me if you can I’m feeling down’. There you go.

As for Yoko’s record, she was at least good at this stuff. Her Janov album is genuinely batshit, all insane, frazzled jams and basically screaming the fucking place down. True, only a very few brave sonic conquistadors have ever made it to side two. But at least it sounds like a look into someone’s deepest psyche. Lennon’s is more like being stuck next to a bloke ranting at you in the pub. Of course, Yoko’s album was ignored while Lennon, the male genius, was fawned over by the critics. Fortunately time has been kinder to Yoko than to post Beatles John, I think.

Meanwhile McCartney was holed up somewhere windy wearing heroically large jumpers and writing the opus that would become Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. Now tell me again, who was the best Beatle?

No 4: of Montreal

Bunch of Fives: No 1 - The Monochrome Set

I’ve had enormous pleasure this week rediscovering the music of the Monochrome Set. I first got turned onto them back in 1985 when a single called Jacob’s Ladder started getting played on daytime Radio One. It was an unabashed, feelgood pop song, all rockabilly guitar and pound shop gospel choir - a throwback to more innocent times in an age of big, synthy productions. The album it was taken from, the Lost Weekend, was similarly brimming with spiky wit, playfulness and choruses invariably sunny side up. I was smitten. It must have been the first ‘alternative’ record I ever owned, not that I realised it at the time. And it was also a springboard to discover the Aladdin’s cave that was their extraordinary back catalogue.

I was first drawn in by the sheer daftness of songs like The Man with the Black Moustache (‘Who’s that man? Who IS that man? It’s the man with the black moustache!'). Then there was RSVP, which was made up entirely of a stream of French phrases - 'Pas de deux, cordon bleu, quel dommage, à la plage' - maybe to mock pretentiousness, maybe just for the lolz. And not only was there a song called The Monochrome Set, but songs about each of the individual band members, including the excellently named guitarist Lester Square. But there was a was a lot more to them than mere larks.

They were unapologetically intellectual, with dark, sardonic songs about murderous regimes and the corrupt class system. But they also possessed pop nous in spades, with an unerring knack for uncanny hooks that belied the subject matter. Lead singer Bid - apparently descended from Indian royalty - wasn’t the most technically accomplished vocalist you’d ever heard but he got the point across well enough, in his deadpan way. Square’s guitar lines, meanwhile, were practically masterpieces in themselves.

They had formed in 1978, originating from the same band that spawned the first incarnation of Adam and the Ants. They came racing out the blocks; the stomping He’s Frank (which Norman Cook persuaded Iggy Pop, no less, to cover) was a doozy of a debut single, but even better was Eine Symphonie des Grauens, as dark, baffling yet tuneful a racket as you’re ever likely to hear. The early stuff was all edgy, angular art school post-punk - but with brilliant jokes. Later albums successfully broadened the musical palette without ever losing the spark.

They broke up once or twice over the years - check out this gem Bid released under the name The Raj Quartet - but it was never for long, and remarkably they’re still going strong and making fine music to this day. There’s never been another band quite like them.

The five

I’m not claiming these are their best five songs, just five I love in no particular order.

1. Espresso 

I could have chosen almost any track from Strange Boutique, the extraordinary first album which packs more great songs into its first half an hour than most bands manage in a career. Love Goes Down the Drain, Martians Go Home and Goodbye Joe would all have been very worthy picks, but I’ve always had a particular yen for this breezy little tale of illness and death. ‘I left my blood in a plastic mug, I get a funny taste when I chug-a-lug’ sings Bid. The song chug-a-lugs, too, in the most winning way.

2. Avanti (Ten Don’ts for Honeymooners)

This bouncy 1981 single was chock full of practical advice for those about to tie the knot. Like: ‘Don't dance the polka in a dhoti and whistle the Rite of Spring, don't recite Hamlet's soliloquy while munching onion rings’. You know, just the obvious stuff really.

3. I’ll Scry Instead

The 1982 album Eligible Bachelors saw a move towards a (relatively) poppier sound. This song sees Bid set his sights on charlatan fortune tellers and the gullible people who reply to their newspaper adverts. Yeah, it’s that hackneyed old pop trope I’m afraid. It’s genuinely funny - ‘Dear Miss Rosa Lee, tell me my destiny. I enclose my vibes with a print of my palm, I'd like the full works, plus the box of assorted charms’ - and elevated by a truly swoonsome chorus.

4. White Lightning

The Monochrome Set often mined early rock’n’roll to great effect; this impeccable cut from 1990’s Dante’s Casino showed that they could master a psychedelic late 60s vibe just as effortlessly. White Lightning brings to mind of lots of things at once: the Byrds, the Monkees when they went off-script, REM’s King of Birds, and perhaps more than anything XTC’s alter-ego the Dukes of Stratosphear. And it’s great.

5. Jacob’s Ladder

Where it all started for me. This one leaves the snark at home: it’s a joyous paean to love and marriage that leaves you feeling like you’re covered in confetti.

Next time: who knows, we'll see if anyone likes this one first.

Queen and me: the story of a teenage obsession

I’d set up a chair in my Dad’s living room, two litre bottle of coke by my side. Dad knew there was no arguing - the TV was mine for the day. From noon until six, I barely moved from my seat - rapt, but anxious in anticipation of what was to come. Then, finally, it was time - this was our moment. The band ran on the stage, all four splendidly clad in white, then ran to their stations. You could see they meant business. The singer - white jeans, white vest, pumped, so much underarm hair that you could practically smell him - strutted around the stage, before settling at the piano.

I was shaking.

For a few seconds the singer tinkered with the keys, keeping them guessing, teasing them. Then, those four familiar notes - and a huge roar erupted around the stadium. Moments later 70,000 people were singing as one: ‘Mama, just killed a man…’

It was going to be OK. It was going to be more than OK.

20 minutes later, as the band launched into We are the Champions, I was practically weeping with joy.

I was approximately 12 months into my love affair with Queen. Before that I had simply liked all pop music. I mean, everybody watched Top of the Pops. But I read also Smash Hits every week from cover to cover, and listened to Radio 1 as much as humanly possible - before school, after school, occasionally during school, and all weekend. I even had my own chart. Each week I would compile a new top ten, detailing climbers, new entries, chart milestones reached - based of course entirely on my useless opinion and my useless opinion alone. I know, and Top of the Pops still tediously insisted on recognising the - yawn - ‘official’ chart, based on trivial matters like record sales.

I didn’t discriminate a great deal, musically. As luck would have it, one of the first albums I owned was Bowie’s Scary Monsters. But the other was Shakin Stevens’ This Ole House, and I liked one exactly as much as the other. For one holiday I made myself a compilation from songs taped off the radio. I had two particular favourites on it, which I played on my cheap personal stereo all week. One was Love Cats by the Cure; the other was Agadoo. They were both great songs as far as I was concerned.

My idea of a good song was one with a catchy bit and perhaps some words I could make out. My idea of a bad song was a slow one. They, without exception, were boring.

In 1984 everything changed. One week, on Top of the Tops, the video to I Want to Break Free came on. Queen were dressed as dowdy ‘housewives’ and did chores, and I found it - I’m sorry to say - funny almost beyond belief. Look, they’re funny little northern ladies! What sports the lads are! Before the clip was over I’d decided it was a brilliant, brilliant pop song, and as soon as I had the money I bought its parent album, The Works. At first I didn’t like all the songs on it, but because I didn’t own any other albums, I played it over and over again until I’d convinced myself I did.

Two things occur to me when I listen to the album now: first, how odd it is, and second, how bad it is. It’s a strange mish-mash of an album all right. Lumpy throwback rockers sit alongside bizarre electronic experiments and glitzy piano ballads. One song sounds like a Shakin’ Stevens b-side. More famously there’s the plodding Radio Ga Ga, which brazenly criticises the standard of the music played on pop radio, without pause to consider whether it might be part of the problem rather than the solution.

Then there’s Queen’s social conscience moment, the egregious Is This the World We Created. ‘Just look at all those hungry mouths we have to feed. Take a look at all the suffering we breed’, Freddie sings, risibly. You almost admire the sheer chutzpah - decrying the injustices of the world in one moment, signing off the deal to break the international boycott of South Africa with a series of concerts the next. ‘Somewhere a wealthy man is sitting on his throne.’ Well, quite.

For the sake of balance, I should point out it is one of Queen’s worst albums, albeit among keen competition. The Works, I think, marks the point where Queen moved from ‘I’m not sure if that is fucking brilliant or fucking terrible’ to simply ‘Jesus, that is really fucking terrible’. And yet it was the gateway into an obsession that was to last almost 18 months.

It was a time when many of the kids at school were becoming more aware of the unfairnesses in the world; they were wearing badges, writing angry essays, going on demos. There was certainly no shortage of injustices to get agitated about: Mrs Thatcher and miners’ strike, apartheid, the ever present fear that we would be swiftly wiped out by a sudden nuclear attack, QPR’s plastic pitch. I was against all this too, at least in theory.

But I was fatally prone to obsessions and crushes - footballers, classmates, characters in Neighbours, they all became the unwitting object of my attentions. So when I fell for Queen, I fell hard, and precious little could compete for my affection. I read every magazine article, bought every book, read every magazine piece I could find. I recorded a radio documentary by Paul Gambaccini, and listened to it repeatedly. I had a crush on the band. Not the individual members; the band as a whole.

Although actually Roger was my favourite. I often fantasised about meeting him and his French wife, Dominique, and being invited to hang out with them and their lovely family, at their chateau.

From then on every time I had six quid saved up I went to Our Price and bought another tape, and it wasn’t too long before I owned every album the band had made. Admittedly the very early ones, with their heavy, proggy songs about gods and fairy kings, didn’t get too many plays. I wasn’t a natural rock fan by any stretch: I didn’t care for long guitar solos and I liked Dungeons and Dragons not at all. But everything from Sheer Heart Attack (1974, and I didn’t have to look that up) onwards was a treasure box to me. I was a music fan now, and I liked the fit. I was an explorer on the choppy seas of pop, and I was navigating, man.

At one point I seriously considered buying a record by The Cross, Roger’s side project, but some small residual voice of sanity told me: this is a step too far.

Leading up to Live Aid I really was as nervous as I was excited. I was all too aware that the band had appalled most right-thinking people by playing in South Africa (I performed some nimble moral gymnastics and managed to put my abhorrence of apartheid neatly to the back of my mind). And I also knew that some people thought Queen a bit, well, naff. What if the Live Aid audience laughed at them? Of course, I needn’t have worried. On the day Queen’s stadium-friendly anthems went down a storm. And, ludicrous though they undoubtedly were, I guess they did make most of the other acts - especially the likes of Nik Kershaw - seem a bit poxy and small that day.

Back at school on Monday everyone was talking about their performance. “Did you see Queen? They were wicked!” I was more delighted than I dared show. But perhaps something changed that day, as well. Somehow my passion for one of the world’s most famous bands had seemed like a private, personal thing. Now I had to share them with everybody else.

When the single One Vision was announced a few months after Live Aid my obsession was still raging. It hit number one in my chart a couple of weeks before I’d actually heard it. I bought it on the day of release, then counted down the days until the (real) charts came out, fretting about its position. No 7 - pretty good. But then it stayed at number 7 the following week, instead of climbing as it should have done, then fell swiftly. I was devastated, and also a little relieved that I could at least stop worrying about it. But as 1985 became 1986 I turned 15, and in the same way it had suddenly flourished, my love for Queen began to fade.

Unsure of what to listen to next, for a few months I dallied with becoming a rock fan. I bought a Marillion album, played it twice. I tried to listen to Tommy Vance on Radio One, and watched No Limits on BBC2. I found that I wasn’t really enjoying either, and it dawned on me that it was Queen’s pop songs that I’d liked. I quit trying to fool myself, and let myself drift back towards pop, albeit pop in different clothes. By the time Queen’s next record was released in June 1986 I had no interest in hearing it whatsoever. After an all-encompassing, burning, two year obsession, I never listened to another Queen album again. Well, until today.