POPFESSIONS

Adrian Michaels

I hope you set a frequency limit for submissions. I hardly know which one to get off my chest first but we should probably start with Mark Knopfler. It’s about 1985 and I’m 15, staying in an apartment in Portugal with my parents on a summer holiday. There is a cleaner, female, that comes round daily. I don’t recall whether she is attractive or not. Probably middle-aged, rather dumpy and emphatically not attractive. Nonetheless, how else to explain my behaviour other than as a misguided adolescent attempt to appear cool, sexy and, er, biddable.

I wait till my parents are out and the cleaner is in. On goes the Telegraph Road at an earsplitting volume. This is a song that starts the Dire Straits album Love Over Gold and is about 400 minutes long. I still know in my head every note of every one of Knopfler’s overwrought noodling solos. The cleaner doesn’t speak a word of English but I am vindicated when she swings the hoover into the room where I and the stereo are rocking out, eyes shut like Gareth in The Office, and she nods in what I take to be a pleasing way at my musical taste. We don’t go to bed. And I still listen to Dire Straits.

Don’t tell anyone. Tell everyone. Try it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd3btVhwr48

PS. Let me know when I’m allowed another. This hasn’t been cathartic enough. Did I tell you about the time I played Bronski Beat’s Need A Man Blues at absolutely the wrong moment?