Lux and Ivy’s big, brash, funny, sexy masterpiece came out on Valentine’s Day. I’ll love it forever

Given my deep, abiding love for it, it seems apt that my favourite album was released on Valentine’s Day.

A Date With Elvis by The Cramps hit the shops on February 14, 1986 and, thanks to my decision to bunk off school in order to get my copy, it was on in my bedroom before tea-time.

The intervening 35-years have done nothing to diminish the thrill I feel each time I drop the needle on it. It’s a big, brash, funny, sexy record and if you don’t believe me, just check out some of the song titles: How Far Can Too Far Go; Cornfed Dames;

What’s Inside A Girl?. It’s a day-glo splurge, a multicoloured explosion of howling guitars and lyrics that leave little to the imagination.

At the heart of The Cramps was a husbandand-wife duo. He was Erick and she Kristy when they met almost 50 years ago. By the time their band released its first record in 1978, he was the singer Lux Interior and she the guitar heroine, Poison Ivy Rorschach.

And, just as they had reinvented themselves in order to make this music, perhaps I could reinvent myself by listening to it. I was an awkward, suburban 16-year-old and here was a record that swaggered in a way I couldn’t. For as long as the record lasted, at least, I could be someone else.

Listening to the record as I write this, it occurs to me that its powers have transformed over the decades. Where once it transported me into an alternative reality which was more exciting than my own, now it’s a time machine, taking me back to the excitement of youth with all its possibilities.

A Date With Elvis is one of around 4,000 albums that I’ve gathered over the past 41 years. On the shelves in our front room are the first album I bought – a K-tel compilation from 1980 called Mounting Excitement, which includes tracks by Roxy Music, UB40, and Bad Manners – and my most recent purchase, the soundtrack to the TV drama Zerozerozero by Mogwai.

In between there are all sort of gems, records I love for the music they contain and the stories they tell me. There’s the copy of A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles that my mother received as a 21st birthday present and the Neil Diamond compilation that my father used to play obsessively every weekend. There’s the Charlie Mingus album tracked down by my fiancee to replace a copy I’d sold when needs dictated, the white label test-pressing of Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity, a gift on my latest birthday, and there’s even an album by a band, Fat Cops, in which I play guitar.

The rise of downloading changed the way we listen to music. The days when, if you wanted to own a particular track, you had no choice but to buy the album have long gone. Why shell out £20 for a vinyl record when you can download your favourite track for less than a quid or stream it for free?

There’s a lot of chatter about the vinyl revival these days but consider this: The biggest selling vinyl record in 2019 was Liam Gallagher’s Why Me? Why Not? which shifted 29,000 copies. Back in 1994, Gallagher’s band Oasis sold 269,000 copies of their debut album Definitely Maybe in the first week after release.

But for some of us, the album endures.

One of my greatest pleasures is a trip to my favourite record shop, Monorail Music in Glasgow, where the staff, including one Stephen Mcrobbie of The Pastels, whose 1987 album Up For A Bit is another of my desert island discs, always seem to know exactly what I’ll like.

And so, my shelves are now home to albums of Japanese psychedelia, German techno, and Ethiopian jazz, a world of strange, beautiful records that unquestionably improve the quality of my life. If you want to know how dangerous a clued-up record shop can be, let me tell you that – thanks to the good people of Monorail – I now own 39 albums by the French musician Pascal Comelade. Every one absolutely essential, of course.

It is important, I think, for fans to find likeminded souls. This spares others from having to bear us banging on about the circumstances in which this record was recorded or how that sleeve had to be changed at the 11th hour. Not everyone, I have learned, cares it is now possible to buy A Date With Elvis on orange, yellow or purple vinyl. But this stuff matters. Honestly.

When Lux Interior died in 2009, I felt a real sense of loss. How could I not? After all, the records he and Ivy made over a 30-year career are absolutely embedded in my psyche.

But his spirit lives on in great albums such as A Date With Elvis, a work of art of which I will never grow weary.