I’m force-feeding Walker songs from S*M*A*S*H’s debut mini-album, trying to explain their contradictions and why for a year they were my favourite band on the surface of the planet, despite the fact I was always aware of their gaping, incredibly obvious flaws. They were the band who removed the black from my shoulder in favour of one hell of a lot of Khaki. I suspect These Animal Men rather than the Manics were actually to blame for the addition of Eyeliner.

(I at once was completely wise and completely fell for New Wave of New Wave. It was a gloriously self-aware hype - clearly as a movement not at all 4 Real. The joy being pretending it was, which kind of made it more pop than a full year of PopJustice, to be honest. Faked orgasms can feel like the real one. If you can trick yourself, you can trick anyone.)

S*M*A*S*H, while brutal and direct in life, were smart enough to play some of the media games. But when you got to the records, there was no wiles to them - their hearts on their sleeves, no matter how many people took a go at stabbing it.

Boggle-eyed, Ed Borrie primarily wrote about three subjects, only one of which was often talked about: How Fucking Horrible The Tories Are. The other two were what gave credulity and depth to the absolutely relentless attack of the former. They were weighing up the relative merits of drugs and women (Drugs Again, Another Love) and songs about Ed’s mate who committed suicide by jumping off Welwyn Garden City Multistory.

(The eternal Lady Love Your Cunt being one of the notable exceptions - though you could probably work out a fourth category of confused approaches to feminism, if you wanted. Oh Ovary - a love song from a sperm’s point of view - remains one of the bizarrest lyrics of my early pop time.)

I once went out with a girl from Welwyn - who’s on my short list of Exs who I’ll tell anecdotes about until the day I die, so dramatic, exausting, beautiful and insane she was - and I obsessed over that inoculous building. It may have been the first time I was actively aware of the concept of Emotional Grafitti - the invisible stains over architecture that don’t wash away, and will stay as long as you live there.

And I knew that Borrie, who still lived in town, would be thinking about him every time he walked past it. He could never forget, even if he wanted to.

As his songs evidenced, he never forgot.

Revisited #3 remains my favourite…. though that’s not quite the word. A couple of minutes long, its structured around a simple repeat. First half, Ed sings in his slightly nasal yet committed voice over a shuffle of Bragg guitars, the lyric. The guitars then kick in with a simple wall of fuzz, and the lyric repeats.

It’s about guilt, stated in very plain and simple terms: “Back to where my friend died/Not the scene of his ugly suicide/but to where he used to live”. Realisations: “It must have taken years for the pain inside/I could have helped him if I tried”, and repeats and repeats on that. Which reminds you that song’s structure isn’t an excuse for turning up the amps - it underlines the point. We go back to the place the friend died again, and it repeats. Later, with Revisited No 5, the lyric’s expanded and placed in the heart of another song.

Borrie never escapes, because escape is the last thing he wants to do. Like guilt, regrets tend to have a bad rep. Live a life without regrets, and other such platitudes. The empty bravado of “My Way”… it makes me snarl.

People who don’t have regrets either haven’t lived or aren’t really humans. Regrets are about realising you’ve made mistakes, and knowing you can never do anything to make it right. And you either let it go, and become an amoral monster, or cling to it, and torture yourself.

Sometimes you deserve to be tortured. It may stop you doing it again.