Old music: Frank Zappa – Charva

Looking through my CD collection one afternoon in the mid-90s, it occurred to me that my music tastes were in need of a shake-up. As a 16-year-old with delusions of musical connoisseurship, my shelf of NME-approved indie suddenly looked a bit embarrassing. "I'm off to university next year," I thought. "Do I really want to arrive there with such a limited listening pool? No one will want to have sex with me if my entire musical world can be summed up with a Shine compilation album ." And so off I went to the music section of my local library, determined to find something clever and complicated, qualities that would surely rub off on me after a few listens. Browsing through the racks I came to the Z section and an album by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. That sounded just the ticket. I paid my 50p for a week's rental, took the CD home, popped it in my stereo and listened hard, expecting a musical awakening. But it was rubbish. Utter rubbish. "Jazz bollocks" is how I described it at the time. Self-indulgent twiddly noise with no hooks and a load of dreadfully unfunny nonsense about prunes. I didn't give up on Zappa straight away – in subsequent months I made a bit of headway with the compilations Strictly Commercial and Have I Offended Someone , mostly enjoying the puerile humour. But eventually I put all Zappa aside, convinced it was something I was never going to get. However, several years later a friend burned me a CD of posthumous Zappa album The Lost Episodes – and it was a revelation. If I'd heard it when I was 16 I probably would have been a lifelong convert. It's accessible, full of tunes, often genuinely funny. This track, Charva, is one of my favourites; a knowing rock'n'roll pastiche based on a familiar riff over which a thug plaintively serenades the girl of his dreams – whose father, handily, owns the liquor store. And there's not a single mention of prunes.