30 years to the Dearest Album of My Teenage Years

My Dad discovered it. My Dad! He didn’t speak English and I had become fluent, thanks to the year spent in the US and then my studies at a boarding school in England. I should’ve been the one discovering new artists. And yet it was my Dad who got this album.

On a rare occasion during my four years in England — the only one — he came from Russia to visit me. We spent the weekend in London and stopped by the HMV music store in Piccadilly Circus. My Dad purposefully searched for this band and this record and we bought it then.

This:

I’m sure I had heard Radiohead’s Creep but until this record, the band didn’t mean much to me. I probably perceived it as a one-hit wonder. The music scene of the 1990s was mostly about Oasis.

And then I fell in love with this album. This album is one of the soundtracks to my coming-of-age years — the loneliness I experienced during my boarding school years, and the memories of the final years when my parents were still together. I’d spend my summers back in Moscow, back in my home city, and at weekends we’d sometimes travel to the lakes or reservoirs outside of the city. My Dad drove a Mercedes — yes a Mercedes. It sounds like we were living a luxurious life and we were — my father’s business had taken off in the 1990s and Mercedes was the very first car he…