If you could feel how I must feel

Big Country. The Crossing. The album that really spurred me to work hard and get the A levels I needed to get into University. So I could leave home. A big influence on the teenage me, that album. It worked too.

But when I came to pick my top ten favourite songs of all-time ever, it's not one of those tracks that I chose. Not an album track at all.

Wonderland. I listen to it still and it means something different. Every day. Like all the songs on the list it complements the others on the list. It is also musically brilliant. How could a guitarist like Stuart Adamson not produce something as flawlessly brilliant every time he picked up his guitar. I have not an ounce of musical ability in my body but I know a musical genius when I hear one.

Just listen to  the first 80 seconds of this. And in his younger days there was a joy to him, almost.

Such a sad demise.

But Wonderland. Lyrically poetic, and of course it's about loss, so I would love it. The first time I heard it blaring out of the speakers in the Union Bar, it spoke to me of how Uni wasn't quite, or even close to, the nirvana I was expecting.

Later it spoke to me about the loss of idealism, hope, even youth. Now it reminds me of my parents.

I don't know what it was really about, I don't want to know. I just want to wallow in the searing edge of Stuart's guitar and his soulful lyrics. You can search YouTube for a studio version, but as with most Big Country music, the live versions are the best.