Two things have the power to broaden a teenage boy's musical taste within 24 hours. The first is trying to get into the knickers of a desirable girl who listens to thinly-disguised rubbish. The other is a new-found interest in mind-altering drugs.
I dabbled in both. But whilst my efforts to be desirable and sexy led me to affect a taste for All About Eve and Sinead O'Connor (oholymotherpleaseforgiveme), the enthusiasm I developed for smoking doobies blossomed into an appreciation of dance music, which seemed to do far more interesting things to my head than the supposedly melon-messing Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream and similar stonage fodder for geriatrics.
Being 16 years old and short of cash, most of the dance music I amassed was taped from friends or off the radio, with a fair bit also coming from the compilation albums you could get in Woolworths. One was Dance Energy, which had - amongst the dross - some excellent tracks that included Massive Attack's Daydreaming, 808 State's Cubik and - best of all - The KLF's What Time is Love. All stoned people get fascinated by boring and trivial things, and one that appealed to me was watching the woofers on a big pair of speakers pulse and jump to that last track.
I was watching just that in an acquaintance's room when he passed over the joint he was smoking, then stuck on a track he had only just discovered. It was Little Fluffy Clouds
And though it's years since I stopped smoking doobies, I think it still is.
The best way to get a copy of Little Fluffy Clouds is to buy The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. It's an amazing album.
