Pink Floyd’s next album after Dark Side Of The Moon made an even greater impace on me when I playe it for the first time, just after I left school.

When Wish You Were Here came out, in September 1975, I had just left school in Yorkshire and was living with my parents in an old rectory in a tiny hamlet in Somerset.

At one point they went away, leaving me to stay in the Army quarters of my father’s aide-de-camp – a kind of personal assistant or secretary for senior army officers – in Taunton.

Excitingly, he had a “quadrophonic” sound system in his room. And a stack of softcore porn mags that he’d left in the drawer of his bedside table.
I took along my new LP to play on his hi-fi. Even though I only had two ears (and still do), it sounded fantastic.

I still remember the thrill of playing it for the first time, taking it out of that strikingly strange sleeve with the two businessmen shaking hands, one of them on fire, and placing it on the turntable, eager to engross myself in it.

The tension builds gradually and inexorably from that quiet, almost imperceptible beginning. You could see how long the song was going to be from the grooves in the disc and I recall wondering, that first time, whether the song might actually be instrumental for its entire 13-minute duration.

It’s not, but Gilmour’s vocals don’t come in for eight-and-a-half minutes, making it maybe the longest intro in rock history?

It creeps up on the listener with those gentle orchestral-sounding washes of synthesiser setting the scene like the quiet before the dawn, leading into the glorious arrival of Dave Gilmour’s piercing, plangent guitar, like a sunrise bursting through the darkest sky.

I think I love his guitar tone more than anyone else’s. That liquefied sound, those bent notes; music that seems to my ears to convey emotion in a way words never could.

That introductory section is beautiful in its own right, but then the chiming arpeggio that introduces the second section, and the arrival of the rest of the band, with the drums takes it to another dimension. Then the vocals – a touching tribute to Syd Barrett – and finally the soaring sax solo. Perfection.

Some time the following year, having spent the summer working on a cider farm and the winter digging potatoes, I mentioned to my Dad that it had been a while since I’d seen Chris, who also taught me to play squash.

This was not unusual in Army life, where people were given new postings, often at short notice, and never seen again. My dad informed me curtly that Chris was not in the Army any more.

It turned out he had been caught “corrupting young recruits” and was no longer there. Not court-martialled then? “No, no, we wouldn’t want the publicity for that sort of thing,” Dad told me, explaining that he was instead quietly told that his services were no longer required by the British Army.

As the penny dropped, I asked what he was doing now. “I think he got a job with the Boy Scouts,” Dad replied.