So yesterday’s lesson was about the perfect ALBUM. Obviously, the only person who learned anything, and took vigorous notes, was me. Because music is almost the most personal thing ever. One man’s Bridge over Troubled Water is another man’s Tie a Yellow Ribbon. As they say. One man’s Iron Man is another man’s Summer Holiday. Whatever.

So my lovely friend Sparkle (that IS his real name before you think all my friends are given pet names based on household cleaning products) sent me a list of tracks, singles and songs which floated his own personal boat across the Atlantic and beyond. But there’s just too many to list every single song that is wonderful. However, I must thank Sparkle for reminding me of Steely Dan. How could I ever forget my introduction to that fantastic ensemble.

I was 17/18 and went to work for the summer holidays selling double glazing. Yes, I was THAT MAN. So on the Monday morning I pitched up at the crack of about 11.30 to ‘the office’. In Ilford. Tiny little space at the front of the factory. Where payments were made, but not for me because you got paid for the week just completed, commission only. And we, the newbies, the lowlies, the unworthies, were to be ‘picked’ by the proper salesmen, to canvass for them. To knock on doors and get them leads from which, if sales were made, contracts signed, we’d all get paid. And generally, for the work involved, its safe to say we got paid much too much. But… like… that was the point, no?

So the widest of wide-boy flash Harries picked me. I felt like a hooker in a particularly downmarket brothel. And Gary (most of them were Gary, made it easier) took me in tow, to canvass for him and ‘learn the required skill set and technical knowledge’ to become… a ‘closer!!!’ The salesman. Those skills being the ability to dissociate yourself from any kind of moral or ethical constraints for the next 5 days. And to say the words: ‘don’t worry about that, just sign here and fill in your bank details’.

We walked outside and he opened the door of his brand new, French blue, Triumph TR6. Gary was 19, been selling double glazing for about a year and the car was ‘bought’, no hp, leases weren’t invented back then. We had two stops to make, always, without fail, every Monday. First to the bank to cash the cheque he’d just received. And then to the local drug dealer to buy half an ounce of whatever was on offer. Then we hit the road. Gary unwrapped his latest tape cassette and stuck it in the stereo system.

Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan. And as we headed down the M4, that music seeped into my head and has never left. Every track sensational. Even without the dope. Every guitar strum, drum beat, every riff simply mind-blowing. Even ‘With a Gun’.

And as the years progressed and Can’t Buy a Thrill came out, and Countdown to Ecstasy and Aja and many others, they became something of an obsession. Shattered only, for me, when Donald Fagan’s solo album The Nightfly came out and for some reason, although massively Steely Dan in almost every way, it sounded like elevator muzak. Yet the rest of the albums remain magnificent to this day.

Happy memories

A xxxx