At first, Genesis gave him everything he needed, but then he found Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Cream. For an ardent few months he made himself publisher, editor and staff writer of his own handwritten prog-rock fanzine called Us and Them. He got his mother to make photocopies in the offices of Hadfield’s steelworks, where she was PA to the managing director, and he sold them at school, two pence an issue. The magazine business went under when he started a different company, making party mix tapes for people to rent and return. The tapes had titles such as Air Guitar, Guilty Pleasures, Heat Wave, and – thinking himself canny – he organised them so that, if you wanted to please everyone at a party, you had to rent more than one tape. Nobody coughed up the money, so he jacked that in, but by then he had the mix-tape habit and he carried it on, making real mixes, properly mixed up, just for himself, or for friends, or for girls he fancied, speaking to people through music. He believed himself a cipher, for a while, through which the right music reached the consciousness of the uninitiated, the misguided or the uneducated, and he felt, at sixteen, seventeen, even eighteen, that there was no one he cared about whose life couldn’t be immeasurably improved by a Daniel Lawrence mix tape.

Then Alison Connor had come along and he’d thought he was born to make mix tapes for this girl, but she’d told him thanks, but in fact she preferred to listen to music differently to this; she liked only to play albums, beginning to end, because that’s what the artist intended. Dan was thinking about this now as he hurried home with Katelin from the pub, on this foul, wet night: thinking about how, all those years ago, he’d felt simultaneously crushed, impressed, aggravated, flabbergasted. ‘I know that’s what the artist intended,’ he’d said. ‘Obviously, I know that. But mix tapes are something else, aren’t they?’

‘It’s just, if I heard, say, “Alison”, I’d want to hear “Sneaky Feelings” straight afterwards. It’s the way I am. It throws me when Fleetwood Mac comes on, or Thin Lizzy.’ She’d nudged him, trying to gauge how he’d taken her rejection. ‘Sorry,’ she’d said, although he’d known she wasn’t, not really.

Dan’s hand, in his pocket, was wrapped around the phone on which @AliConnorWriter followed you was still showing on the screen. She’d been the first girl he’d met who knew as much about music as he did, and had the ammunition to shoot him down when she took issue with his hard and fast truths. First girl? Only girl, to be honest, apart from the ones at NME of course, where music was akin to religious faith. But of the regular, real-life, ordinary-world females Dan had known, Alison Connor was still the one to beat.