Nuff said, true believers.

I was just listening to Lady Lynda by the Beach Boys when it struck me that "Darlin', evolution is drawing us near" may be one of the single strangest chat-up lines in pop history.

Hey, chick! Our ancestors crawled from the primeval sludge, dig? And what I'm feeling for you is the result of millions of years of genetic selection! Pucker up!

Any other frankly weird come-ons from the world of music?

Sometimes I wonder if any other lyrics have as perfectly callibrated a sense of loveliness as these:

The first time ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
And the moon and stars were the gifts you gave
To the dark and the empty skies, my love,
To the dark and the empty skies.

The first time ever I kissed your mouth
And felt your heart beat close to mine
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird
That was there at my command, my love
That was there at my command.

And the first time ever I lay with you
I felt your heart so close to mine
And I knew our joy would fill the earth
And last till the end of time my love
It would last till the end of time my love

I think they're the perfect romantic statement: smitten, clearly, and yet somehow measured and wise and eternal. What other lyrics ascend to the heart-filling heights of genuine love poetry?

Ain't Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman) excepted, naturally.

And why not...

Just caught a traffic report from Bruce Springsteen. Apparently the highway's jammed with broken heroes, on a last chance power drive. With tailbacks.

Any other fragments of songs just waiting to be beamed from the Rock FM newsroom?

What a shot. The last flight of the space shuttle Atlantis (larger version here: http://www.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/100514-f-0000c-603.jpg). Is this officially the final image of the Space Age, or just an elegiac pause?

You know this place has infiltrated your subconscious when you peruse the letters page in the latest issue and feel an instinctive need to add an Up Arrow.

I remonstrated with a friend the other day for putting the left headphone of my iPod into her right ear and the right headphone into her left. She, naturally, scoffed, especially when I made some feeble noises about Proven Scientific Facts Why This Is Plain Wrong (Of Which I Can Quote None Just Now).

Does it make no real difference to the listening experience? Or does it, as I believe, potentially summon the nethergods from their dark domain with its sheer, universe-threatening wrongness?

Or is it simply my dormant OCD kicking in?

Tech-heads, take the floor.

Flashback to 1986. An interview with Queen appears in the pages of Ver Hits. The band had recently received a moral broadside for their decision to play Sun City - immaculately coiffed Hall & Oates frontman Darryl Hall delivered a particularly stinging rebuke - but drummer Roger Taylor was unrepentant.

"I will not be lectured by arseholes like Darryl Hall. I will not be lectured by haircuts like Darryl Hall."

It's almost a quarter of a century since I read those words, but they still knock around inside my head and they still have the power to make me smirk.

What are your own strangely imperishable rock quotes - the throwaway asides that simply won't go away?

How gorgeous is this? A gem from The 5th Dimension's 1967 album The Magic Garden, a collaboration with the mighty Jimmy Webb. How many other wonderful songs have fallen between the cracks?

I've just stumbled across this wonderful site dedicated to past visions of the future:

http://www.paleofuture.com/

There's something so melancholy about this kind of thing - all those '30s Buck Rogers rocketship dreams and gleaming '60s space age utopias that never came to pass.

How did you imagine the future would be?

We all live inside songs, if only for three and a half minutes. But if you could permanently inhabit the universe of one particular artist, whose would it be?

I'd choose Saint Etienne - acres of psychogeography to explore, from metropolitan '60s glamour to that lovely sense of wilting English melancholy in out of season coastal towns. "Feeling flash in Leicester Square", I'd wander a London built from equal parts shimmering nostalgia and dance beats. I imagine it would be a beautifully designed universe, too, with a sublime record collection.

How about you?

I've always championed Brett Anderson, and recently despaired of the way he seems to have been exiled to the outer fringes of the media. Here's a glimpse of his new album, Slow Attack. I think it sounds wonderful.

We all know that The Beatles are an invincible quartet, greater than the sum of their parts. But imagine if you could remove one Fab and substitute another equally iconic musician. Who would you remove and who would you add - and what would be the ripple effect on the music?