Music Arcades: Roy Orbison: Pretty Woman

Ah, I remember the day I got this, all right. Six and a half years ago, when I was playing at being a gentleman of leisure, taking the day off to act as chauffeur for someone just for the opportunity to enjoy her company. Dropping her off for her meeting in Huddersfield and then having to occupy myself for a few hours before our return, I wandered into the nearby Tescos and bought this and one other CD, paying less than today's price of a pack of cigarettes for the two of them.

As with the very first entry on Music Arcades, this was when I was still vainly trying to build a library, as Radio 3 would put it. What a quixotic goal that was! Why build your own individual library when formal institutions or informal collectives can build much better ones — and you can 'borrow' from them? Or, as Tim Jonze wrote on yesterday's Guardian Music Blog, "About 12 years ago, I bought Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here from Woolworths for £15.99. If you work it out with complex maths, this equates to approximately £15.99 per listen."

But everyone knows the Big O is/was a class act, so I felt I had to own my own slice. The instances of his work that really count for me, though, are David Lynch's surrealist/Brechtian/karaoke versions, first of In Dreams from Blue Velvet:

and then the Spanish performance of Crying from Mulholland Drive.

With Orbison's version of Pretty Paper on this compilation, I realise January has had a mini Willy Nelson theme running through it, including Terry Reid doing Willy's Funny How Time Slips Away and Bill Frisell doing his Crazy.

By the way, my chauffering turned out to be, well, not even worthy of the label 'quixotic'; perhaps panzaesque.