I remember feeling a little sorry for them, not because it wasn’t a rocking song, but because they’d actually been sincere and had foolishly left themselves open to the scorn and sarcasm of others.

My memory might be failing me but I also seem to recall an exchange of a cassette tape, but maybe I just want that to have happened.

Anyway, the most annoying thing about the song was the opening line:

I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park

Frankly, when you’re 11 years old, you don’t need these added lyrical barriers to fully participating in pop culture. It turns out, the Moskva is a river, and Gorky Park is an amusement park, but the web was a couple of years away and I couldn’t just Alta Vista it.

I can’t remember the video clip for Wind of Change, but in my mind I have connected the song inextricably with an image from the period that the song is talking about – an image of the fall of the Berlin Wall:

Make sure you get my sweet jeans in frame

I can distinctly remember coming across this image in a history book at about 15 years old and suddenly realising that all the excitement wasn’t about a stupid wall, it was all about his fabulous tapered jeans.

I mean, just look at them – they’re perfect. When he left his house that day, did he think ‘today I could be immortalised in history for all time, where are my jeans that are just a little too short?’ No, because he was already wearing them, and hadn’t taken them off since he first bought them.

And how perfect is the black leather jacket as a mean Eastern European accompaniment to the jeans?

This photo of his jeans is more important than the entire history of the communist bloc.