One day in late 1992, along with a few hundred other employees at the nuclear engineering company where I worked as a section leader in IT, I took part in a one-day strike, and stood outside the company's premises with some of my colleagues. A few hours later, we appeared on the BBC's Central News bulletin.

Naturally, I recorded this important broadcast for posterity, and I transferred it from VHS to DVD last night. Here's a frame from it:

I'm the one paying the closest attention to the TV camera. I still have that jumper.

This was the second time I'd appeared on television, albeit rather inconspicuously, that year. A month or two earlier, I was briefly visible in the TV audience for Pebble Mill At One; I'd gone there with some friends to see Gordon Giltrap and Martin Taylor provide the musical interlude.

Ten years ago, a record called Unknown Love, by an artist called Count Indigo, was released. I think it made the top 40, but it failed to make a lasting impression on the Great British Public, and I've never heard it played on the radio, or indeed anywhere else, since the two or three weeks following its release.

It had an intriguing lyric, lush, '60s soundtrack type orchestration, an idiosyncratic vocal and an unusual, nebulous melody. It was an Easy Listening record. Remarkably, a resurgence of this bygone musical genre had taken place in London; for a few brief months in 1996, young people would attend Easy clubs in the West End, there to lounge in comfortable chairs, sip cocktails, and listen to Nancy Sinatra, Jose Feliciano, Matt Monro, or new artists such as the Count.

I've always wanted to hear that record again. Like the Divine Comedy's (rather better known) Something For The Weekend, it's irresistibly associated with memories of my first months in London. I particularly remember listening to Unknown Love on Chris Evans' Radio One programme as I stepped off a train and walked through London Bridge station, on my way to the City one morning in early 1996.


The Count's first LP apparently, 'Homme Fatale'

I've searched for it a few times in the last few years, and I finally found it this week, on Ebay, contained in This Is Easy, a double-CD compilation of tracks intended to capitalise on the short-lived Easy Listening phenomenon of the mid-90s. It bounced onto the doormat this morning.

Today was probably the first time I've ever heard Unknown Love on a proper HiFi, rather than my FM Walkman, and certainly the first time I've heard it since 1996. It actually sounds slightly like a parody now; the lush orchestral accompaniment and girly backing singers afford it an unfortunate cheesy ambience. Still, another box ticked.