As musical epiphanies go, it wasn't one of the all-time classics. In fact, perhaps no one other than me would pick Adam and the Ants performing Dog Eat Dog on Top of the Pops in November 1980 as one of music television's seminal moments. Nevertheless, it had the same effect on me as the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show or the Sex Pistols performing Anarchy in the UK on So It Goes are reputed to have had on earlier generations of music fans.
I was nine years old; hardly a discerning music consumer, but old enough to realise that, compared with the rest of that week's chart - which included such immortal treats as Bad Manners' Special Brew, D.I.S.C.O. by Ottawan and the theme from Minder - Adam and the Ants appeared to have come from another planet. They had fantastic clothes. They moved differently. They were miming to a song which had no real tune and no discernible chorus, but which did have lots of loud drums and shouting. This, I concluded, was even more exciting than Star Wars, and Star Wars was the most exciting thing I had seen in my life.
At school the next day, I expected the rest of the class to share my fervour. They didn't. Somehow, in my wild enthusiasm, I had managed to overlook the fact that Adam Ant was plastered with make-up. But make-up was the only thing about Adam Ant my classmates had noticed. The propulsive drums, the twanging spaghetti western guitars, the call-and-response chorus, the wild, thrilling coda of primal whoops and screams: none of these things mattered to them because Adam Ant was wearing make-up. And in a class of nine-year-old boys in Bradford 20 years ago, make-up on a man meant only one thing. Ant, I was informed, was "a gaylord". It was an insult so heinous, I still don't fully understand its implications.
My love of Adam and the Ants was undiminished - a fortnight later, Kings of the Wild Frontier became the first album I bought with my own money - but from then on it was a solitary pleasure. Eventually, he was replaced in my affections - even at 10 I couldn't stomach the dreadful Friend or Foe album - but rock music never really was.
Adam Ant gave way to Kraftwerk, then still a chart act, and Kraftwerk gave way to David Bowie. Moving into my teens, I eschewed anything with a whiff of the charts about it in favour of the delights afforded by the John Peel show: Stump, Bogshed, the 14 Iced Bears. I still know more about mid-80s indie music than anyone needs to know, the mid-80s not being a particularly good vintage. Occasionally, however, epochal bands emerged. I bunked off school to see the Pixies live, supported by My Bloody Valentine. It was like the Adam and the Ants experience all over again, except louder and sweatier, with more screaming and with no one calling anyone else a gaylord. That decided it. A career in music for me.
So at school and university, I formed a succession of bands, modestly electing myself lead singer, lead guitarist and lead songwriter in all of them. It was a spectacular misjudgment: a wide knowledge of music does not neccessarily denote any musical ability, as countless awful bands fronted by music journalists have proved. The results were predictable. Church halls and youth clubs were quickly emptied; plugs were pulled. On one occasion the police were called. After that, even I got the message. We were rubbish. So rubbish that people would rather involve the local constabulary than listen to another ghastly note. If I was going to make my living out of music, I was going to have to write about it.
Which - give or take six years of work experience, features meetings, press junkets, album reviews, magazine editing, freelancing, bitter arguments with press officers, bitter arguments with pop stars and a brief and fairly disastrous foray into television presenting - brings us to the present, to the day I am starting as rock critic of the Guardian.
In his Elvis Presley obituary, the late American rock critic Lester Bangs wrote: "We will never agree on anything again as we agreed on Elvis." Bangs didn't live to see any of the bands I performed with - public opinion was pretty much unanimous about them, too - nor did he live to see Oasis, a band everyone in England at least seemed to agree on. Critics, rock fans, Top of the Pops viewers, middle-aged parents, Tony Blair: all fell for the Gallaghers' beguiling combination of nostalgia, casual fashion and uncomplicated, uplifting rock anthemics.
Britpop died the night England were knocked out of Euro '96 and the BBC played Cast's Walk Away. That night, it became so closely associated with the fortunes of the England team that it was unable to represent anything else and froze in time. Five years on, the era we live in is still best described as post-Britpop. Music has fragmented, reacting against mid-90s consensus culture in wildly varying ways. Where Britpop was chirpily optimistic, now there are furious metal bands waiting to sell you their angst in CD format. Britpop stars like Noel Gallagher and Richard Ashcroft flashed their new-found wealth, bought country piles and designer clothes: bogglingly, Ashcroft even wrote a song about how rich he was, the excruciating Money to Burn. Now Radiohead and Coldplay are troubled by success, guilt-ridden and middle class.
In fact, music in 2001 bears a curious resemblance to music in the early 70s: we are post-Britpop, they were post-Beatles. As in the early 70s, pop music has again become a bewildering phenomenon, marketed directly at very young children. Just as the success of David Cassidy and the Osmonds was inexplicable to anyone other than the under-14s and students of kitsch, so no one apart from prepubescents and gay men can expound on the appeal of Westlife or Geri Halliwell. It is slickly formularised and tightly controlled. These days, poor old Adam Ant - a former punk dressed as a pirate playing music influenced by Ennio Morricone and Africa's Burundi drummers - wouldn't get a look-in. It's surely not just misplaced nostalgia that makes me think that's Top of the Pops' loss.
At the "serious" end of the market, the parallels are even more pronounced. Heavy metal is fashionable and critically lauded for the first time since the zenith of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Visionary black American soul producers are making some of the most exciting music in the world: instead of Norman Whitfield, the Temptations and Psychedelic Shack, there's Timbaland, Missy Elliot and Get Ur Freak On. However much Radiohead and Muse may revile their "new prog" tag, their music is as aloof, intellectual and didactic as anything Pink Floyd or King Crimson produced. British rock's main alternative to prog comes from solid gigging bands such as Toploader and Stereophonics - dressed down, blokeish, musicianly - and acoustic singer-songwriters. Put them all in platforms, invite Whispering Bob Harris to compere and you could be watching the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973.
The path of indie music from Britpop to today's combination of good blokes rockin' and clever guys proggin' accounts for the upsurge of interest in heavy metal, currently the music most likely to affect a teenager the way Adam and the Ants affected me. For decades, metal was rock's laughing stock. My groaning record shelves bear testament to some hopeless musical choices of my callow youth - Birdland? Nurse With Wound? Shaft's appalling novelty rave hit Roobarb and Custard? - but I was never, ever uncool enough to like heavy metal.
By last year, however, it was clear that a seismic shift in metal's importance had taken place. The most intriguing artists in the ostensibly indie-centric magazine I was editing were all metal bands: Queens of the Stone Age, Amen, the Deftones. At last year's Leeds festival, the news that Oasis might be about to play their last gig was greeted with mild indifference. People were more interested in seeing Slipknot, the mask-sporting Iowa band reputed to defecate, fight and set each other alight on stage. They didn't do any of those things at Leeds, but their DJ, Sid Wilson, did jump into the audience, where he appeared to start punching people at random. Whatever you think of such behaviour, or indeed of the grinding racket that Slipknot produce, it has to be more viscerally thrilling than listening to Liam Gallagher sing another Beatles cover.
British rock is currently as dour and unglamorous as it has ever been. It lacks edge and character to an almost comical degree. "Our music is like a chair, you sit in it," Travis's Fran Healy famously commented. He presumably meant that it's recognisable, comfortable and will fit in nicely with the surroundings of your home. That's fine if you're in your 30s - recognisable and comfortable is probably what you want - but not much use if you're 15. If you're 15, you want proper stars, not normal people who look like they've wound up in a rock band due to an administrative error. You want rebellion and an excuse to rummage through the dressing-up box. Say what you like about Marilyn Manson's faintly preposterous approach to fashion, but at least he could never be mistaken for a supply teacher.
Which is why his appearance at this year's Reading festival was so eagerly awaited, why bands like Staind and Slipknot are currently nestling at the top of the album charts, why metal festivals like Ozzfest and Tattoo the Planet do such good business and why a band like Korn, who get virtually no radio play or mainstream media coverage, can sell out Wembley Arena.
Aside from pop and metal, rock music has become introspective once again. Oasis's songs were a communal experience, anthemic singalongs hollered on football terraces. With the best will in the world, you can't imagine the Kop or Maine Road bursting into a hearty chorus of Radiohead's Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors or David Gray's Nightblindness.
Radiohead's music is deliberately exclusive. It's challenging, difficult and rather sniffily designed to sort the true fans out from the masses. David Gray's multi-platinum melancholy is easier on the ear, but no more inclusive. It is intended as an intimate experience with the listener, the only companion you need if you're lonely and failed in love.
Of course, rock music has always performed that function. Like a lot of other people who grew up in the 80s, I spent a troubling percentage of my teenage years convinced that only Morrissey truly understood the depth of my sorrows. Now, however, that sort of thing isn't solely the province of adolescent melancholics. The British record-buying public is buying into sensitive introspection in a big way.
In the early 70s, audiences recoiled from the communal horror of the 60s hippy lifestyle with its be-ins and all-property-is-theft aesthetic. As the spell of the 60s wore off, everyone realised they had made a terrible mistake. They didn't actually want to live in communes and share mung beans with their neighbours. Instead they headed back to the safety of their bedsits with only Joni Mitchell or James Taylor for company.
In 2001, it's happening again. We all spent the late 90s waving union flags and singing along to Wonderwall in the pub, wide-eyed with optimism for the new government and the new millennium. Neither turned out quite as expected. Now, it seems, people would rather stay at home and consider their disappointment to the cosseting sound of Dido or the implausibly fey Norwegian duo Kings of Convenience.
There are even signs that dance music, which exists to soundtrack perhaps the ultimate communal experience - dancing with other people while taking drugs that make you love everyone - is becoming more inward-looking. Chill-out compilations are this year's big hits. Downbeat artists Bent, Kinobe and Blue States have all gained critical acclaim: Zero Seven have even been nominated for the Mercury music prize. If the end result is the same, however, the reasons are probably more prosaic.
M y first proper job as a music journalist was on the dance magazine Mixmag. In the early 90s, clubs seemed the place to be. Clubbing at least appeared to be a sophisticated, sexy activity for the social elite and fashion cognoscenti. Compared with the indie scene, with its gigs in pubs and pints of snakebite, clubbing seemed indescribably glamorous. People were obviously taking drugs, but no one was actually walking around - like the dimwit pictured in a recent issue of Mixmag - with a home-made sign reading "I'm proper fucked".
"Clubbing is getting more stupider ever month," Mixmag's cover wittly noted at the end of last year. It's also getting much younger, as the same issue's photographs of teenagers with dyed hair, fluorescent clothes and painted faces prove. It's rebellion, dance music's equivalent of being punched by one of Slipknot. Just as thirtysomething rock fans would rather listen to Travis than Marilyn Manson, so thirtysomething refugees from clubbing's glam era would rather stay home with a copy of Chilled Ibiza 2. Their club is a chair. You sit in it.
So everybody's staying in and moping. Metal's big, R&B is exciting, pop is rubbish and rock is dour and unglamorous. The only way we can tell it's not the early 70s is because there aren't any power cuts. But now, as then, there's a startling amount of exciting music around. In the early 70s, most of it was being made by maverick artists, impossible to pin down: Roxy Music, Curtis Mayfield, David Bowie, Nick Drake, Can, Isaac Hayes. The same is true today. If there's no consensus, there's no single genre with rules and confines to adhere to. All bets are off. Bands can do what they like.
The best music, the really thrilling stuff, exists in the spaces between genres, the places you can't conveniently label. You couldn't describe Basement Jaxx's cocktail of house, punk rock, ragga and hysterical noise in a snappy phrase. Nor the Beta Band, infusing psychedelic folk with hip hop and R&B influences. Nor the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Kelis, Spiritualized or Missy Elliot. I have absolutely no idea what the next Chemical Brothers album is going to sound like. Good. That's the point.
Critics like to claim that there's nothing new in music, no ideas or sounds that haven't been heard before. Seventy-five per cent of the time they're right. But 25% of the time they couldn't be more wrong. You have to keep listening or you might miss something.
The greatest rock artists are, always have been and always will be the ones prepared to take a risk. They're the ones who understand the golden philosophy expounded in Adam and the Ants' Prince Charming: that ridicule is nothing to be scared of.
You see, I was right about him all along.