Sad get that I am, this promted a rush of happy memories of staring at the slow creep of a progress bar, desperately hoping that the file would download completely, and that my shaky 56k connection would hold up for the half hour needed to grab a single song. And then there were the emails from friends, or postings on message boards, pointing to files on the network right now, that you just had to get, straight away, no messing about.

Of course, I wouldn’t like to go back to the benighted days before broadband, with Napster the only way I knew of to find the rare or brand new music I’d never get to hear otherwise, but, despite and because of the difficulty in actually bloody sharing files, filesharing was more fun, and more of a social activity (like real life record shopping) back then. These days, it’s just too easy!

1 - I say ‘they’ because I’m not sure which disc jockey played it, but since one seemed to be channelling the spirit of the late, great Trade resident Tony De Vit last night, I’d guess it was the other!