After five songs we stopped for a beer and fag break. I was hyped and jittery, and it was strange to be outside in the June dusk of the pub’s garden, my ears ringing in the summery silence, the birds’ evensong replacing our angry anticapitalist paeans. Matty brought me a pint of lager, and its fizz was soothing on my scratchy throat.

‘It’s going wicked!’ he enthused. ‘Samantha’s mates are loving it, they just told me. They love our songs! That guy with the white dreads, he says his brother-in-law’s in the music business, and if we make a demo he’ll give it to him.’

I laughed. ‘Matty, are you mental? There’s no way we’d get a record deal singing this sort of stuff! We’re hardly New Romantic, are we? We live in a squat!’

Matty snorted dismissively. ‘New Romantics? That crap’s so nineteen eighty-one. And there’s tons of bands out there doing what we’re doing. Look at Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Cure. There’s this new band, The Cult, everyone’s raving about. And we’re better than all of them. Definitely more fucking authentic. I bet Robert Smith never went on a protest march in his life, and he’s probably never even set foot in a squat.’

Samantha appeared in the garden then, looking flushed and high. ‘Honey, this is awesome! I’m dead proud of you.’ She slid her arms round my waist and hugged me, and I blushed with pride. She did look proud. Usually she had a kind of almost maternally fond expression on her face when we were getting off with each other, but this was different. There was actual respect in her eyes.

‘Where’s your brother? I thought he was coming? I’m dying to meet him.’

‘So did I,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘He’s being a flake. I think he’s pissed at me for leaving him on his own with our m-mum.’ I stuttered slightly over the word ‘mum’, having been about to say ‘mom’ then realising that was a step too far, linguistically, on top of the words ‘flake’ and ‘pissed’. Neither of which, in that context, I’d ever used before I met Samantha. It was the first time I noticed how much I parroted her.