1991: birthday brass in pocket, I head to the bright lights of Our Price, and splash out on three albums that announce loud and clear that I am not, in fact, quite ready to leave the middle of the road just yet. The albums are by Tom Petty and The Hearbreakers (an American rock band formed in 1976), Dire Straits (an English rock band formed a year later) and, representing the indie team, Blur (at the time, a sort of neatly packaged indie band for the not quite committed).

And so to the first of these - Into The Great Wide Open by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It’s not an album that has lingered long in the memory: outside the title track and Learning To Fly I couldn’t hum you a bar without a quick refresher course. Still, two decent tracks is at least one more than 1985’s Souther Accents, which I also inexplicably bought a little later. (Full Moon Fever also only has a couple of decent tracks. Tom has a low hit rate, but a not too shoddy best of)