My uncle is best friends with John Hartson, the footballer who used to play for Arsenal!
Well done most people! He was a close friend of my English teacher in school, and she got each of us a signed photograph from him.
Both of my brothers went to Cambridge, was in the local newspaper and everything, here’s me visiting one of them for the Trinity May Ball as a 16-year-old.
I was a big Insane Clown Posse fan as a teenager, long before most people knew they existed. I am not anymore.
I have not met any of the members of The Futureheads outside of a gig setting.
Neil from Meursault has worked at various guitar and music shops around town, regularly see him.
Danny B was on the Eurostar back from Paris at the same time as me and babysat me for a few hours, gave me a copy of New Scientist and played me his single the week before he was due to be on TOTP. Glory days
the nuggets was a challenge, it was vile
the cocktail sausage rolls were on NYE 2004 and I went downstairs, nicked the entire lot fresh from the oven, and sat on my room in my own drinking warm lager and eating them in a grump with everyone downstairs for NOT UNDERSTANDING ME
I used to be a Kerrang! subscriber, back when I thought KoRn were the greatest band who ever existed. I played their first two albums a ridiculous number of times. There was an article on ICP talking about them as if they were some underground hiphop act that were very cool, very edgy and very obscure. Teenage me thought that ticked all my boxes so I bought the Halls Of Illusions single on a punt. I liked it a lot, so soon after bought the album The Great Milenko too. Bear in mind that until this point, I had never bothered with any hip-hop and was an angry angry teen. They had a whole folklore about what would happen after they revealed the last jokers card which just made it feel bigger and more profound than other artists. The whole stuff about them being signed to a Disney subsidiary and then dropped due to their explicit content made them sound dangerous. When my family went to Florida for a holiday later that year I bought their first three albums too, though none were a patch on The Great Milenko to me. It was the nu-metal album I needed before I had even heard the term nu-metal.
I used to go to a music shop every day after school and hang out there talking about music to the staff. One was my oldest brother’s friend and he got into them off my recommendation too. One of the members of staff there who was really nice but also really really into his hip-hop ‘lent’ me a copy of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) because he was so appalled that this was my gateway into hip-hop. He also tried to convince me with Eminem’s My Name Is, but I thought (and still think) that sounded far cornier. However the Wu-Tang introduction had the desired effect, that was the beginning of the end of my ICP love.