I was up in the loft yesterday and I came across my old cassette machine and shoeboxes full of tapes that I'd banished in an almost Stalinist anti-analogue purge a year or two ago. Now lacking a working turntable I discovered a treasure trove of albums I'd either not bothered to buy on CD or albums which you just can't get on CD.

The best example of this was Giant by the Woodentops. 1986, it says on the label.

For those of you too young to remember, The Woodentops were a hotly-tipped indie band signed to Rough Trade. They were unfortunate enough to suffer the Curse of Morrissey. (This was the fact that in the mid-1980s every band name-checked by a certain Stephen Patrick Morrissey soon afterwards dispappeared into oblivion - the Woodentops' lead singer Rollo McGinty went to Japan where he became Big in Techno. I rest my case.)

It's hard to see what Morrissey liked about the Woodentops - they are so goddam cheerful, and a song like 'Love Affair With Everyday Living' is about as far as you can get from 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now'.

But nearly twenty years on, the album sounds just as fresh and lovely as it did back then. And as I rummaged in the shoeboxes in the loft I found more gems by Shriekback, XTC and the Undertones, plus countless recordings of John Peel shows and Chris Morris on GLR. As I looked at the carefully inscribed tracklistings I was taken back twenty years in time without realising it.

My eldest son, now four, yelled up to me through the hole (ahhhhhhh!) in the attic floor and woooosh! I was back in the room, back in 2004, slightly dazed and wondering who this small version of myself was...

William, 1, wonders why sunglasses were so crap in the 1980s. Well, William... oh never mind, it was really nothing...