It was spring 1994, I was 15. I kind of had one foot in the indie world (Kingmaker!) but hadn't quite gone all-in yet - I was probably still picking up second-hand Tears for Fears and Roxy Music albums at the car boot.
But my best friend at the time (thanks Ian) kept on going on about this amazing band he'd heard called Pulp, and despite my weird resistance eventually lent me his tapes of Intro and His'n'Hers. I wasn't totally sold at first, but after a few spins they started working their way in, especially lyrically: "the sun rose from the gasometers at 6.30am" still has to be one of the all-time great opening lines, and not one you were likely to hear on a Bryan Ferry record anytime soon.
I think the real hook for me was that they were somehow depicting exciting things happening in a very believable world. Those songs with their tales of love, sex and existential drama against a backdrop of rainy bus journeys, drab suburbia, stupid boys and all the rest weren't set in the exact world I was living in, but it was close enough to be recognisable, and make me realise that LIFE (and all that entails) was perhaps more within reach than I'd realised. Which is what every bored teenager needs to hear, right?
I was a fan from then on, and everything that happened from then on cemented my devotion for a while - Babies on TotP, Pop Quiz, White Room, Common People, Glastonbury, the Heineken Festival (my first live time - amazing, needless to say). Even the Jacko incident, at the time, felt like an hilarious triumph. Through all of it, Jarvis had this knack of making it feel like he was somehow up there on 'our' behalf, making our world a bit brighter.
I was a lost cause by then, and within 2 years of sticking Intro on the tape deck for the first time, I'd decided I was going to write a book. So I guess hearing Pulp really did alter the course of my life. Something changed, as they say.