1991: Can only lead to no good

I'd been in my 'proper' job coming up for a year and I really loathed it. It wasn't the company's fault per se, though the lack of training didn't help. It was boring and I was no good at it. I didn't have the patience to sift through law texts looking for literals and putting things into style. It just wasn't me.

But at least I'd made some good friends. Some people seemed to have very exciting lives though, like my colleague and friend whose boyfriend was co-manager of some new singer called Seal. I'd never heard of him but I was told he was going to be huge. And then came his collaboration with Adamski which suddenly set the world on fire and there we were, right in the middle of a big pop moment, with Killer soundtracking the summer of 1990.

While my friend was good at her job and very reliable she, like me, wasn't that bothered about it, so as she had a car and lived nearby she'd pick me up in the morning. But as we worked in the fledgling Docklands (Canary Wharf was under construction) and lived in south west London, it took forever to get there in her battered 2CV and it had to stop. My boss was running out of patience. But that summer was a scorcher, and each morning in the car this would come on.

As the months went by Seal became big news, and we were invited to the Wogan show at the Shepherd's Bush Theatre early the following year to see him perform his new single Future Love Paradise. We met him and the manger in the Bush pub next door first, and he was unusual looking, slightly intimidating, but charm itself. The music biz coterie around him were a different matter, a scary dark denim everything-raddled corner huddle with menacing Ian Dury overtones.

I don't remember who else was on that edition of Wogan except some woman who'd walked the Pennine way on stilts in order to publicise schizophrenia or something. What I remember most is that Terry came out to talk to the appreciative audience which was made up of coach parties of pensioners pre-show, then they all cracked their Tupperwares open during the show. It was flasks a go-go. It was like they'd make the journey just to eat sandwiches in a different setting.

Not long after, my friend's boyfriend was ousted by the management just as Seal went stratospheric and he had to find another interest on the borders of the music industry. I can't be sure, but I think that's what did for him in the end.