The first record I ever bought was Lola, by the Kinks, which was very cool of me and also very stupid. Stupid because, when I bought it, my family didn’t have a record player. I had to take it round to a friend’s house whenever I wanted to hear it. The B-side was a typically irritating piece of Ray Davies English whimsy called Berkeley Mews.

But what a song Lola was; it had everything I wanted from pop music back then, and nothing since has ever given me quite so much satisfaction. After a while, you get used to rock’s limited repertoire of tricks; in 1970, I was wholly new to it.

What did I like about it? Partly the (uncharacteristic, as I later discovered) Yankee rock swagger of the band; partly the careful simplicity of the tune and the wonderful, crunching melodrama of the middle eight. But more than any of that, I liked the fact that it really, really worried my parents. They knew I liked it, and strongly disapproved.

My mum’s hairdresser — while performing his usual cast-iron perm business in the frowzy salon located next to a butcher’s at the top of our road in Middlesbrough — told my mum that Lola was about a man who had sex with a woman who was really a man. She was quite appalled. I was delighted. I don’t think I really wanted a transgender relationship at the age of nine, but for the next few years, my mum and dad were convinced that I was a) homosexual and b) on drugs — assumptions formed solely as a result of my affection for one neatly told little tale in a popular song of the day.

Lola reached No 2 in the charts. Better still, the BBC banned it, ostensibly because of the reference to Coca-Cola in the first verse, but, we suspected, because of the ladyboy stuff. Coca-Cola and illicit sex — what more could a kid want?

I suppose it was simply that I’d suddenly discovered the wonderful excitement of being somehow beyond the edge of my parents’ eyesight, in a place that was all my own. As I grew older, my resistance to being so captivated increased exponentially, as did my parents’ resistance to being so shocked. (Seven years later, when I brought home New Rose, by the Damned, my mum yawned and my dad took the dog for a walk.)

A year or so after Lola came out, my dad caved in to pressure and bought a huge antique record player in a faux-mahogany cabinet. It had a radio that picked up what my dad still referred to as the “Light Programme” and the “Home Service”, but it wouldn’t touch Radio 1 with a bargepole. Its weary Bakelite arm played 45rpm singles at a speed of about 32rpm.

The first record I bought when I had this limited domestic capacity to enjoy it was When You Are a King, by White Plains. Awful, awful, wet drivel from a band who later made a name for themselves doing adverts for Butlins. Such a deterioration in taste, in only 12 months.