In 1986, at the end of my first year of university (AKA the three most miserable years of my life), I was 20 and still a virgin. Looking on the brighter side, I had enough of my grant left over to buy my first CD player (strictly speaking I didn’t get a local authority grant as my parents were too well-off, so it was they who funded me, but students of the period always talked about their grant regardless of where the money came from: this was in the heady days before Student Loans).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
IIRC I bought my Philips CD150<\/a> at what we jokingly called “the local corner shop”, Harrods. I can’t remember the price but I think it was somewhere between \u00a3100 and \u00a3150; to put this in context, the weekly rent for my room in a hall of residence in South Kensington<\/a> at that time was, I think, \u00a327. Unlike some of my more audiophile fellow students I had a music centre<\/a> but luckily it had an Aux input so I was ready to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for pretty much everyone else around me at the time, the first CD I bought was Brothers in Arms<\/a> by Dire Straits of which I already had a much-played vinyl copy. The album came out in May 1985 a few months before I left home to go to uni and was pretty much the signature LP of that first year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Money for Nothing was the most successful track on the album (and indeed the band’s most successful ever) and its computer animation video was groundbreaking at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n