"Kid" drove us crazy. The first time I heard the Pretenders it was on “Stop Your Sobbing,” the angle Nick Lowe produced that made lead singer Chrissie Hynde sound like a short let from the Phil Spector Christmas album. It was okay, but it was "Kid" that got me. Nothing like ascending chords for getting inside your brain and the way Hynde slowly climbs an emotional ladder: “You think it's wrong/I can tell you do/How can I explain/You don’t want me to” with Martin Chamber's steel-steady drum beat. I’d break into it all over the place—bathroom, supermarket, you name it...met Jerry one day and drove around shopping, unconsciously bursting out into that break at the same time until we both yelled at ourselves to shut up.

Such is the effect of truly great singles. Not the ones you catch yourself singing when you’ve told everyone it’s the biggest load of trash you’ve ever heard—but Christ that melody line’s so simple it sticks with you—but the more complicated mysterious tracks that lodge into you physically. Unexpected. When they did it again with “Brass In Pocket,” entirely different, insidiously sexual, with Hynde coming on like nobody’s business: “I’m gonna make you see/There’s nobody, no one like me/I’m special”.. .though I didn’t realise how much until the album came out, I had to reassess early reports of the group’s live gigs which were not—to put it mildly—given to encouraging the belief that any of them walked on water.