Bearing in mind the some of the sphincter-gazing gothic crap I used to listen to at 16 - bands like Clan of Xymox, Christian Death and (shame, oh shame) Creaming Jesus - it's astonishing that I've dragged any albums from the early 1990s into my present-day iTunes library.
One of the few is Sonic Youth's Goo. I listened to it again and again as I travelled round the south of France in a battered Volkswagen camper van [cool], driven by a friend's parents [not so cool] which also contained my friend, his brother, and his brother's girlfriend [who subsequently ran off with a middle-aged hippy pal of the VW van-owners and was next spotted on page 3 of The Sun after chucking herself, nude, into the river at Oxford - way too cool for me].
Anyway, the Sonic Youth binge was brought to a premature end as the van's big end went, just as the band was singing Tunic (Song for Karen), which contains the entirely appropriate lyric "You aren't never going anywhere".
So, for years, Tunic was a song I always equated with the "Nous sommes en panne" routine and with running in and out of siesta-deserted shops and restaurants in search of change for the telephone (muttering schoolboy rubbish like "Pouvez-vous changez ca [waving 50 franc note] pour cinq pieces de dix francs - s'il-vous plait?").
Still, given the fact that we subsequently had to travel on a train from Marseilles to Calais with bugger all food, and with no access to the other carriages, it's easy enough to remember that this particular song is actually about anorexia - Karen Carpenter's anorexia.
I don't think I knew that at the time, mind you, as I was more hung-up about my hair - whenever I looked in the mirror it only seemed to be backcombed about a quarter as much as it actually was.
Anyway, I found out the real meaning of the song soon enough. And, I'm sure you'll agree once you've listened to it, it's one of those songs that deserves a permanent place in a decent record collection - even if it does fantasise about making friends with Elvis in heaven (though I suppose his cheeseburger supply might come in handy).
Here's the album: it's a must have.
