Many moons ago I heard some strange sounds coming out of my brother’s bedroom. He’d always been one to leave his door wide open, so I‘d been privy to his various musical obsessions over the years. From The Beach Boys to The Eagles he blasted out catchy three-minute pop songs about cars and girls. They hinted at a life that presented few complications, other than how to wile away your time on a road trip, or what cocktail to drink as you watched the sun go down after a real swell day at the beach.

But this sounded different. Gone were the chirpy, upbeat numbers. It sounded restless, sorrowful, inquiring, resigned. I stopped dead in my tracks, scorched by each note that seemed to scream from what I would later learn was a Stratocaster. I’d never heard anything like it before and I wanted to know more. But my brother’s door was shut. And something told me I couldn’t open it and ask him.

That summer we went on holiday together with our parents. My brother had just sat his GCSEs and it would be our last holiday together as a family for a long time. He began wandering off a lot to sit on cliffs overlooking green fields dotted with sheep. He seemed to be continuously distracted as he inhaled contemplatively on a Marlboro – the ultimate sign he’d turned his back on Mum, whose dad had died of lung cancer years before we were born.

I followed religiously behind him, trying to find out why he was a hell of a lot quieter these days and wasn’t interested in coming up with a million different daft accents for my teddies. He would look at me as he shook his head and said: “you wouldn’t understand.” I didn’t. But from the amount of time he spent listening to Pink Floyd, it seemed they did.

That same summer I watched The Wall with my brother, full of content that, in hindsight, was too baffling for a nine year old’s mind. Bob Geldof’s shaved eyebrows aside, I couldn’t get my head around the fact that after 90 fairly miserable minutes, this film was heading towards a fairly miserable conclusion. “Where’s the happy ending?” I asked? “There isn’t one”, my brother replied bluntly.

Five years on and I found myself marinading in my own vat of existential angst, with Pink Floyd on repeat to keep me company, talking to me as though I was the only teenager they’d ever talked to. I wasn’t yet aware of how fortunate I was to have the luxury of self discovery or exploring my own identity.

These days, my brother doesn’t have the time to sit on any cliffs pondering his existence. His three year old son won’t indulge him with a second of self-involvement. But he is already being indoctrinated with Pink Floyd’s symphonic masterpieces, on many a car journey. Eight minutes into one track the other day, he innocently asked his dad: “Is this still ‘Dogs’?”

“Yes, and there’s at least another ten minutes to go, son.”

To this day, I still haven’t heard anything quite like them. And I don’t think I ever will.