You know this like you know what the capital of France is, but the running order of the 'eighties went like this: New Romantics, Falklands War, Wham, Thatcher, Deirdre staying with Ken, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Bruce Springsteen, Royal Wedding, Poll Tax Riots, Ronald Reagan, that yuppie bloke with a flute of champagne in his left hand using his right to wave his wedge at the camera, the Young Ones and then ending when Stock, Aitken and Waterman came along with their drum machine and pebble dashed everything with a thick layer of runny shit. You know this. It's the shorthand BBC 3 zeitgeist.

For someone who was ten when they started, the eighties were rubbish. No internet, no DVDs and no money at a time when everything cost three times as much as it does now. My Uncle Peter's favourite thing in the world was a crappy backlit digital watch which cost people who didn't have a thief in the family £400. Think about that the next time you complain about globalisation.

There were of course little shards of light peeking through the gloom, and one of these was the Sunday Night Annie Nightingale Request Show. She normally played fairly similar stuff to the bilge they played on daytime Radio 1 and read out records from daft lassies who called themselves Duranies or Sharons but five or six times a show she would play something fabulous: Echo and the Bunnymen's 'The Cutter'. XTC's 'Dear God'. The Cure's 'Same Deep Water'. Japan's 'Nightporter'. Television's 'Marquee Moon'. Bowie's rarer moments, like 'A Conversation Piece'. Not the sort of stuff Simon Bates and the rest of the happy smiley gang would give house room but then not as raw or frankly unlistenable as much of John Peel's playlist often was.

One night I switched on halfway through the programme, desolate at the prospect of another week spent amongst knuckle dragging fucknuts who thought ‘Soldier Song’ was the height of aural sophistication. I hated school, absolutely hated it. Not the work, which was easy. Not even the teachers, though most had their interest long since posted missing, presumed dead. It was a significant number of the people I shared an education with, amongst whom violence was a currency whose value never diminished. Creativity was poofy. Liking books was poofy. Liking music that wasn't U2 or Simple Minds was poofy. Not liking football was poofy. Liking the company of girls was, amazingly, poofy. In order to buy the right to engage in such poofiness currency had to change hands. Rarely a week went by without some sort of altercation and even though I became practised in the black art myself, the sheer banal, stupefying numbness that such predictability invoked made dreading the forthcoming five day slog a heavy, heavy encumbrance.

It was during one of these dark moments I first heard this song: It seemed to fill my room with a delicacy, a pure, delicious, almost diaphanous tenderness. The radio wasn't particularly loud but the song seemed so fragile that if I turned up the volume it might just disintegrate into nothing at all. I felt...lifted; joyous, that faced with the prospect of such a shitty, tedious week somebody, somewhere could make something so fabulously beautiful. In 'Young Americans', David Bowie asked why there wasn't one damn song that could make him break down and cry. He will have done, when he heard this.

I tried to buy it the following week but I hadn't heard what it was called and it wasn't by the Cocteau Twins, even though it sounded like it. The Saturday girl behind the counter at Castles; tiny, understocked and the only proper record shop in my neighbourhood asked me to sing it to her. I did. She laughed until she nearly pissed herself. So did I. I asked her out that night and when I met her, she gave me a taped copy of 'Song To The Siren' by This Mortal Coil. Life had just got better.

Alex Cox is married to a wonderfully understanding woman and has never been to me. Or Paradise for that matter though he intended to go once, but preferred to browse round Fopp on Glasgow's Byres Road instead as it looked like rain. To read Alex’s story, ‘Helicopter Pilot’ on the showcase section of this site, click here.

© 2009 Laura Hird All rights reserved.