Well, I'm amazed at the bile some folks have reserved for dear ol' GAF, though having read what SK thinks to it, perhaps I should have been better prepared! ;)

Well, here it is: GAF actually got me into The Church. Yes, you read that correctly!

I was at technical college at the time. I'd only been there a couple of months, so the novelty hadn't worn off yet. I mention this purely because one of my favourite haunts was Magpie Records, an excellent little indie record store. When I wasn't at college, or at the pub, I could usually be found browsing through the racks at Magpie.

I was an itinerant radio listener at the time. Every night, after everyone had gone to sleep, I used to plug my headphones into my hi-fi and run the cable back to my bed, where I used to listen to late-night radio until I passed out. One night, I was half-listening to a radio show in the wee small hours when a song came on that wasn't quite like anything I'd ever heard before. It had a New Wave-y stomp to it, but a gorgeous lilting guitar line that stuck in my mind like freshly-chewed gum, and truly off-the-wall lyrics that, somehow, made perfect sense to me in my woozy state of head. About halfway through, I realised I was listening to something that I would have to track down. "And that was The Church, from their most recent album, called Metropolis", said the DJ. Oh my...

So I was straight off to Magpie Records the next day, where I was indeed lucky enough to find a copy of Metropolis - I say lucky, because this was October, and the single had come out months beforehand. Magpie Records was like that, though - you dug around long enough, you were pretty guaranteed to find something amazing for your ears to appreciate.

I took it home. Metropolis was as good as I remembered it, effortlessly seizing my brain and shaking it like a pair of maracas. Monday Morning and Much Too Much were on the CD as well, and lo, they were both great too, albeit in totally different ways. Hey, a band who could do different things and do them all well?

I was hooked. The next day, I dug around in Magpie's racks until I happened across the motherlode: a copy of Gold Afternoon Fix. I bought it without even thinking about it, and - o fickle youth - I actually left at lunchtime and caught an early train home so I'd have longer to listen to it properly.

Perhaps it was because it was the first Church album I'd heard, but I soaked it up like a sponge, and I've always loved it ever since. Sure, there are flaws: Richard's drums being largely replaced by machinery or being pieced together bar-by-bar does strip some of the songs of the amount of energy and 'flow' that I heard later on some of their other work. Yes, the production wasn't quite as good as it could have been, though it wasn't at all an embarrassment.

Beyond those quibbles, I couldn't (and still can't) hear a thing wrong with it. There's not a single track I couldn't listen to right now and not think is great. If pushed, I'd say Laughing and City are my least favourite two tracks, but even they're fine songs, at least to me. That first time through, I was absolutely transfixed. Pretty much all the other songs are favourites to this day, but I have particular soft spots for Pharoah (what an intro!), Metropolis (for obvious reasons), Terra Nova Cain (the point where I started to really appreciate SK's way with words), Russian Autumn Heart, Essence, Transient, and possibly best of all, Disappointment, which was anything but. The second that track started, I felt sure I was going to dislike it because of the percussion track - it just felt like they were trying to do something I didn't they could pull off, but they certainly made me rethink that pretty sharpish.

Within a week, I'd picked up Heyday and Starfish (in that order), and I never looked back. Over time I grew to slightly prefer Starfish, but (perhaps incredibly to some), I still think I prefer GAF to Heyday. SO I'm a heretic: shoot me!

So: GAF. Maligned by many, misunderstood by some, but loved by a few, and I include myself. After all, you never forget your first time... ;)