On a first date, relatively recently, I put on one of my favourite albums. It was only later that the woman in question described her distress. It wasn’t terminal, but it wasn’t far off. “I just had to accept that you weren’t the man I thought you were.” Blimey. “I thought you might have bad taste in a heavy metal kind of way, but I wasn’t prepared for this yacht rock.”

This album I’d long loved was, apparently, irredeemably naff. It was Breakfast in America by Supertramp. Earlier this week, when I heard that the band’s co-founder Rick Davies had died, I was sad. Does this make me even naffer? I suspect it does.

But I don’t care. I go back a long way with Supertramp. I had all the albums; the day after my last A-level exam, a friend and I went to London to see them at Earls........

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