At some point, there has to be a headphones-in-bed-after-lights-out story, and this is probably it. In this case the bed was in a dormitory in Tonbridge, and the radio programme was Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show. Cool. Rich Smith and I used to listen on separate radios, our beds being at opposite ends of the dormitory. (Eric Stride and Mark [?] Fitzpatrick were also in the dorm, but I don't think that stopped us passing the odd comment on what Vance was playing, probably after the others were asleep.)
So, it's October or November 1979 and I've got the enormous spongy headphones (the style that deserved to be called 'cans') on as 'TV on the Radio' counts down the top ten. It was the mix of guitar synth effects, the windchimes and the lyrics about honey dew and Xanadu that got me, as well as the slow build of the track. Rich, having an older brother, knew about Rush, and knew the album that Xanadu was on. I have this memory — who knows whether it's accurate — of finding the album in the racks of WH Smith in Woking and discussing with my mum whether I could afford it.
This must be one of the oldest records I own, since most of the ones I bought around this time (don't ask) I sold on a couple of years later because I had outgrown them. The record player I had in 1979 was a budget model, before I got my Dual 505, and the heavy play this record got with the cheap stylus has left it with a little surface noise in the quiet bits.
For eighteen months or so this was possibly my favourite album of all time — out of the many-fewer-than-a-hundred that I had on LP or cassette. So it's odd listening to it now. Some of it is embarrassingly poor: I give you "All who dare / To cross her course / Are swallowed by / A fearsome force / Through the void / To be destroyed / Or is there something more? / Atomized - at the core / Or through the astral door/ To soar…" Oh, how profound we used to think Neil Peart's lyrics were. And, yes, I tore the pages for Coleridge's Kubla Khan out of a school-book as a keepsake. I can still hear the things I used to like — and I still know every bass solo, every drum fill on the album — but it was a very long time ago.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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