Rearrange me till I'm sane

Quite by chance, we have ended up this evening drinking Rioja and watching Classic Albums on BBC2. Very ABC1. But hey, this week it's Dark Side of the Moon, which is possibly the album most centrally placed in the Venn diagram of the intergenerational record collection occupying the middle room of my significant relationship.

M saw Pink Floyd in Brighton in 1972, around the time I was toddling Up North, busy getting used to solid foods. I envy him that gig experience. I have never seen The Floyd, and have no desire to now. Musicians, unlike writers, rarely age well. He still loves the album, but he's mainly into it for the music, the strange time signatures, the special effects which these days could be done at the drop of an automated hat, but then involved lots of tape machines being turned on at the same time.

For me, it's mainly about the lyrics. I heard them first in about 1985, while still in deepest Lancashire, lying on the bedroom floor of a boy who was trying to get into my pants, too drunk for comfort and wondering what the hell was going on. The thing I remember from that first listen is all the clocks at the beginning of Time. I think they probably prompted me to get up and be sick.

A few years later I was on holiday with my Significant Ex in still (as opposed to former) Yugoslavia. It wasn't a good holiday, for reasons I am still too ashamed to articulate, but one of its high points was a visit to a nightclub at the end of the universe, where we asked the DJ if he had any English music and he played us Time. We threw spacy shapes on an empty dancefloor under the stony glare of crewcut Communist Europopsters and tried not to think about hanging on in quiet desperation.

That experience notwithstanding, over the next few years I had some of my most memorable orgasms, whether alone or accompanied, to the strains of Great Gig in the Sky. And it became a sporadic ritual to head out to the pub, roll a big spliff on returning, lie in companionable 20-something heaps on the floor and listen to the whole album with the lights off and the essential oils burning.

I don't really do that sort of thing anymore, and neither does M, but every time we put the album on I kind of figure we should. He bought my uncle J a reggae take on it for Christmas, listening to which made us giggle for at least five junctions worth of the M6 (a near impossible feat), and it was also sampled (Time again) by Madonna for one of the tracks on Confessions. Clearly it's not an album that's lost its mojo. And that's a beautiful thing.

My Pink Floyd secret is that (very unfashionably) I like the Roger Waters bits best. Us and Them, now there's a heart stopping song. He said on the programme that he fel slightly embarrassed that he'd got away with such Lower Sixth lyrics. Maybe I don't see them that way because I first heard them when I was in the Lower Sixth myself, or maybe they just work because the world was different then. They didn't have postmodern paranoia in the 1970s. It's not all progress.

joella