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– e.g. Hairshit, Top Radish, Smell Assignment – and asking the sales assistants if they’ve heard their new album.
    3. Nodding thoughtfully when you hear a song you enjoy on the shop stereo, conveying the impression that you are not simply enjoying the music but disassembling its existential meaning.
    4. Saying ‘safe’ a lot, repeating the word ‘yeah’ several times as a form of approval, and walking as if you live in downtown Compton and have recently been shot twice, as opposed to as if you live in Ladbroke Grove and have just had a takeaway patty that has upset your stomach slightly.
    5. Making up a cool address – e.g. Flat 3, Snot Slum, Wandsworth – when signing for the goods you have sold.
    Another excellent tactic is eclecticism. Ultimately, it’s as easy to impress the Music And Video clique with your hip taste as it is to incite their ridicule with your unhip taste. Moreover, by buying the records the sales assistants consider worthy, you’re merely pandering to them and confirming their belief that your life’s ambition is to one day be as stylish, intellectual and credible as they are. A better option is to baffle them with your diversity – not the kind of diversity preached by pretentious people who make a point of reminding the world about how eclectic they are on a daily basis, but
real
diversity: an original twelve-inch of Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted To Love’, say, secreted in a pile containing the first album by the Seventies psychedelic folk group The Trees, the final four Steppenwolf albums and Living In A Box’s
Greatest Hits
. This will have the effect of making their heads spin and their bottom lips wobble as they strive to remain imperturbable while quickly calculating how this pile of records fits into their tapered ideas about musical good and evil.
    Peter’s selection was far more simple. Coming from a fourteen-year-old, a Living In A Box/Steppenwolf combination might have smacked of sheer naivety. However, the unusual juxtaposition of Blue Oyster Cult (uncool, but not outrageously so, and something of an enigma) and nu-metal (cool, but kind of for kids) would spread just the right level of subtle confusion.
    Like a worried father seeing his son through the gates on the first day of school, I watched as my young friend approached the counter, then, from a safe distance, did my best to pick up on snatches of theconversation. It’s difficult, eavesdropping on a teenager and a record shop employee from six yards away, since there’s no real telling if words like ‘mmfffuuh’, ‘d’njjj’ and ‘smrrright’ are real words you’ve misheard or bona fide snatches of an alien – but, in Soho, widely recognised – form of communication. Whatever the case, I took it as a good sign that Peter hadn’t burst into tears by the time he received his change.
    â€˜How did that go?’ I asked him as we walked up Berwick Street towards Oxford Street a few moments later.
    â€˜Fine,’ said Peter.
    â€˜What? You mean nobody put a plastic skull in front of you?’
    â€˜No. Seemed like alright blokes, really.’
    â€˜Are you sure? They’re normally dead rude to me. What were you talking about to them? You seemed to take quite a while.’
    â€˜Oh, the bloke with the big stress patches on his beard and the “Patrick Moore Is My Whore” t-shirt was talking to me about this album that I bought by Kitty. He says they’re playing tonight at the London Astoria.’
    I was baffled, and not just because I didn’t know who Kitty were. It had taken me and my friends years of training to build up psychological armour tough enough to enable us to deal with the Music And Video Exchange in-crowd, and now Peter was not only speaking their language but getting invited to gigs with them. Of course, most music-obsessed men tend to have a mental age of fourteen, so