If I recall correctly, the original blurb on the back of Sue Townsend’s first Adrian Mole novel informed prospective readers that its hero believed himself to be an undiscovered intellectual, and in love (a more recent edition has misunderstood intellectual, which is not nearly as funny). Both undiscovered intellectual and in love nagged at me throughout my own teenage years. What would it mean to believe those things about oneself? Why, if one were a thirteen-and-three-quarters-year-old secret diarist, would it necessarily be ludicrous to do so?

Mole contributed somewhat to my sense, as a teenager, that the condition of adolescence was a spiritually disgusting one: that it systematically falsified the sufferer’s experiences, replacing direct and genuine emotions and perceptions with confused and factitious ones (that the sufferer was doomed, moreover, to accept as direct and genuine, being temporarily deprived of the faculty by which children and adults are usually able to tell the difference).

Many people have found after adolescence that they are, as adults, more like the people they were as children than they are like the people they were as adolescents. Adolescence for such people is a kind of weird divagation, a lapse in continuity. That is only a bad thing insofar as continuity is desirable; and it is also true of adolescence that it is a time when certain mind-forg’d manacles can be cast off and the child’s emotional contract with the world renegotiated on - in some cases - more hopeful terms.

It also appears that there are some people who simply did not experience adolescence in this way. I am not sure what their experience of it was like; only that it apparently was not like mine.

The comedy of that word, undiscovered, is that it discloses the essential passivity of adolescent desire. Its imagined trajectory is not that of a career, or a plan of attack, but of a hidden virtue lying dormant until it is revealed in a blaze of glory to the world. Adrian Mole’s primary strategy for obtaining recognition for his secret identity as an intellectual is to send his writings to the BBC. The hope is that someone will read them, recognize the genius expressed therein, and send out the call for the young Wünderkind to take his place alongside the elect.

(A word of advice to young people: if you try to run your love-life along similar lines, you are guaranteed to get absolutely nowhere. Which may after all be what you really want. Just be sure that it’s what you really want. If it isn’t, now’s the time to change tactics.)

I would say that Andrew Brain is the best undiscovered songwriter of his generation; except that, as all the other undiscovered songwriters are presumably equally undiscovered, I have never heard of them, have no idea how good they are, and am therefore in no position to make a comparison.

I will say that Andrew Brain is the best undiscovered songwriter of my acquaintance - which certainly narrows it down a bit.

Keschco is one of Andy’s projects; there are others, of which I wot but little, with names like Bleak House and (in an ideal world) Little Dorritt, but Keshco is the label under which he released the songs I know best, having played a handful of them with him one evening down the Shed in Leicester.

Somewhat before they started putting glamorous celebrity pundits on the telly to witter on about how great it was being a miserable, alienated, put-upon teenager surviving the late eighties/early nineties with only a ZX Spectrum and a stack of Doctor Who magazines for company, Andy was writing songs about how actually it was quite shit. The ZX Spectrum, yeah, that was great. But not, on the face of it, great enough to compensate for the shitness of everything else (everything else apart from Doctor Who, that is).

What happens when you don’t define yourself in terms of the shared values, customs and habits of your peer group is that you find other things to value, other customs to observe, and other habits to get into. The more far-fetched the better. They don’t have to cohere into any sort of a consistent whole: you can be into Greenpeace, Colin Baker-era Doctor Who (I must admit, I don’t share this particular enthusiasm) and avant-garde electronica, and nobody will think any worse of you than they already do.

Keshco can alternate quite happily between Billy-Bragg-a-like leftie singalongs and twenty-bloody-minute soundscapes full of cheap Casio sampling keyboard chirping-noises. These apparently irreconcilable phenomena do in fact eventuate from the same fundamental sensibility, a sensibility it will not now surprise you to hear me describe as adolescent.

That in itself doesn’t make them interesting, of course. At any given moment, there are dozens of genuine adolescents writing songs, some of which may even be as witty and provocative as their authors suppose them to be.

What makes Keshco’s songs special, for me, is that they present the awful Bizarro-simulacrum world of adolescent experience in the light of a rather unsparing self-knowledge. There are cracks in the otherwise wall-to-wall unreality: the possibility of escape.