Counting Crows came from San Francisco and immediately struck gold with their debut single, Mr Jones, in early 1994.

I adored this debut single by Counting Crows when I heard it, and I’m pleased to find it has lost none of its appeal. At the time I’d slightly lost touch with ‘new’ music because I’d had my first child and started a full-time job at the Standard a year earlier.

This song somehow filtered through my preoccupation with babies and celebs, and drew me in with its elaborate lyric and folky undercurrents, reminiscent of R.E.M.

At the time I was convinced Mr Jones was a coded reference to marijuana, “Mr Jones and me stumbling through the barrio,” “staring at all the beautiful women,” “smiling in the bright lights… when everybody loves you” and making “all of the beautiful colours very very meaningful”.

But it’s not. It’s about following your dreams.

Adam Duritz says he wrote it after a night out in San Francisco with his friend Marty, whose dad was performing in a flamenco troupe, at a time when they were struggling musicians, observing their friends with proper jobs and wondering whether they would ever make it as a band.

“And after the gig we all went to this bar called the New Amsterdam and we got completely drunk. And Marty and I sat at the bar staring at these two girls, wishing there was some way we could go talk to them, but we were too shy.

“We kept joking with each other that if we were big rock stars instead of such loser, low-budget musicians, this would be easy. I went home that night and I wrote a song about it.”

I remember buying the first Counting Crows album, August And Everything After, which has a wonderful opening song called Round Here, and an equally good final track, A Murder Of One, sandwiching another great single called Rain King.

Produced by T-Bone Burnett, it’s Duritz’s serpentine and frequently melancholic lyric writing and subject matter that appeals to me as much as their laid-back instrumentation with its retro references. Not so sure about the dreads though…