Dalí

In the age before the Internet, the primary way in which I encountered art was through pop music, that is, through record covers and videos. Our art classes at school - which basically favoured the visual artists amongst us and made the rest of us feel incompetent - didn't cover art history at all.

Of course, in a pre-Google culture, I had no way of identifying the sources, so while I thought the cover of Kraftwerk's 'Man Machine', for example, looked as though it was in a certain (Soviet?) style, I had no easy way of finding out more. Sometimes it would be years before I could make a connection between a record cover and its inspiration.

I think I first encountered Dalí sometime in my mid-teens and, when I first met Ash at university, I thought it was really cool that his band, The Zane Gray Incident, had appropriated 'Burning Giraffes and Telephones' for the title of one of their tapes.

At some point, I must have encountered some snobbery about Dalí because I remember that, for a while, I did come to accept that his art was mostly liked by adolescent schoolboys. After all, that argument related directly to my own experience. But then, in 2000, while I was on a project in Glasgow, I was sent to London each week to work directly with one of the developers (which, happily, resulted in an enduring friendship).

Every week, I'd be put up in a different hotel and, as they were all booked at the last minute and it was the height of the tourist season, I stayed in some amazing places. My room at the Hilton, for example, looked big enough to hold a 5-a-side football match. But my favourite place was the hotel in the old Town Hall. There was a Dalí exhibition somewhere on the South Bank and there were statues of elephants with elongated legs on the river front. When I looked out of my window, I could see the elephants' heads, just level with me.

I remembered all this today because I had to travel down to Chelmsford and spend the night there. The hotel wasn't quite as hip as its website made out (although it was nice enough) but they did have these pop art prints of Dalí along the corridor.