‘All right!’ Prof Levin had finally backed off. ‘Enough. We’ll talk about this again. For starters, we just do the album.’

‘Album?’

Prof had spread his arms magnanimously. With his own studio set up, he was at last able to make these decisions without consulting anyone in a suit.

And Lol had thanked him for the offer — very profusely, obviously, because having Prof Levin produce an album for you was kind of like having Spielberg take on your screenplay — but then pointed out, reasonably enough, that he had only four songs: not quite half an album.

Prof had smiled beatifically through his white, nail-brush beard.

‘You have the whole summer, my son. This summer… is yours.’

And he had shambled smugly away to his room in the adjacent cottage, leaving Lol to switch everything off before climbing to his own camp bed in one of the old haylofts.

Like he was really going to sleep after this?

Instead, he’d stumbled out, bemused, into the warm night, to commune with the Frome. But the river was already asleep and that was how he ended up following the track running down a line of poplars and out the other side, close to where the hopkilns stood. The sky was now obscured by a tangle of trees, and he was aware of a high, piercing hum that somehow translated itself into Everybody needs a church. A confessional. Forgiveness.

Not exactly the wisest analogy to hang on Lol who, in his late teens, had seen his parents find religion, watched them being swept away on waves of foaming fundamentalist madness, causing them to reject the Godless kid playing the devil’s music — the kid who would always remember coming home one weekend to find that those two small mantelpiece photos of himself as a toddler had been replaced by framed postcards of Jesus. Which was probably how it had started — the alienation.