Présenté en direct du stade de Saint-Ouen... non, Saint-Étienne!

Foxbase Alpha, Saint Etienne's debut, came out on this day in 1991.

I didn't hear it straight away. I got to it some time in the months after, when I'd just turned 16, living at a boarding school in Louth, Lincolnshire. I was smitten by it from the first listen.

My world then was books, encyclopedias, maps, TV, films and magazines, not the internet. Music came on records, tapes and the odd CD, and from whatever the NME and the handful of music mags at the newso in town said was worth hearing – if you could get hold of it. Limited choices, so you listened hard to the ones you had, and things reached you a while after they'd happened.

Then I chanced upon this. Chanced is the word. I can't remember how I heard it for the first time. Maybe my roommate Tim had a copy?

Only Love Can Break Your Heart was the way in. The album was pop music and dance music, but not the kind I'd heard before. It had an indie heart, put together by fans not pop stars, record collectors rather than DJs.

It would drift somewhere older too, into traditional songs and folk feelings, and it was soaked in sixties pop. It sounded like someone had raided a jumble sale, a record shop and a late night pirate station, then stitched it all together on a bedroom floor.

It gave me a place I was drawn into, built from old films, snatches of dialogue, like riding buses going somewhere... interesting.

Little ident jingles and half songs slipped in and out between the tracks. It felt like tuning between radio stations. The whole album was a trip. It was only later I realised that place was London. And not the real one, their songs a reflection of an idea of the place, through filters or forms of nostalgia.

Plenty of bands since have tried sampling their record collections. Or making pop that winks at the sixties. Or turning a city into a soundtrack. Nobody has quite got the mix. That balance of warmth and cool seems to belong to Bob, Pete and Crackers alone.

It was the start of thirty five years of brilliant pop records. They're calling it a day now, and going out on a high.

I hadn't heard anything like it in 1991. Thirty five years on, I still haven't.

Happy 35th, you sexy thing.