Euan McColm: I saw the Rolling Stones while stoned but music is the real drug

My girlfriend suggests we buy some LSD from a guy who used to hang around with her ex and I immediately agree. If ever an event called for a little psychedelic enhancement, this is it.

It’s July 1990, we’ve got tickets to see The Rolling Stones at Hampden Park and, to my 20-year-old mind, listening to “Sympathy For The Devil” while on acid seems like the sort of thing I’d enjoy.

We’ve booked the day off work to make the most of the occasion so we take the stuff with breakfast and lose our minds. I sit by the window for hours talking (I'm later informed) about all the hidden meanings I have identified in the song “Chestnut Mare” by The Byrds and it’s only thanks to my girlfriend coming to her senses that we make it to the gig, minutes before the headliners take to the stage.

The Stones are sensational. Their set is speckled with favourite tracks of mine and the atmosphere in the stadium crackles.

I remember thinking later how amazing it was that these old guys could still do it. I wondered, perhaps, whether that gig might be the last chance I got to see them. After all, how long could men of their vintage possibly keep this up?

At the time, Mick Jagger is 46, seven years younger than I am today.

The answer to the question of how much longer The Rolling Stones can keep things up is, it turns out, decades.

Last week, Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood announced the imminent release of the first album of new material by the band in 18 years. “Hackney Diamonds” will be out on October 20. Meanwhile, there’s a single – “Angry” – to be going on with and, in my view, it’s their best track since 1981’s “Start Me Up”.

Against expectations, 80-year-old Jagger, 79-year-old Richards, and 76-year-old Wood have created something with swagger and attack. The rush I felt on first hearing it was familiar.

If you were bitten, as I was, by the popular music bug in childhood, you’ll know there’s no cure for it. When you’re a kid, listening to those first-love bands rearranges your molecules; the music hits like a drug, whooshing into your system. If you’re lucky, the addiction takes hold.

Over the 40-plus years since the likes of Adam and the Ants, Sister Sledge, and Madness first got me high, I’ve never stopped chasing my next fix. Sometimes, I’ve managed to get hold of the real good stuff – The Cramps, Kate Bush, The Smiths, Broadcast, the Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk – and the hit’s been every bit as strong as the first time.

But, as with all drugs, music’s power can be diminished by constant exposure. It gets harder to recreate the excitement. Every now and then, there's a quick high – a killer single by a soon-forgotten production-line pop star, a thumping dance track that only really works in a club – but on other occasions, I can still pick up enduring habits.

On a wet Saturday afternoon in the Autumn of 1995, I’m sitting in a car in Yorkshire watching a fire in a rail yard when a piece of music knocks me sideways. It’s slow and crackly and atmospheric and beautiful and when the late John Peel – then, incongruously, inflicting his leftfield favourites on a teatime audience – announces that he’s just played “Spirit Ditch” by a band called Sparklehorse, I phone my pal Simon, who runs a record shop, and ask him to order everything he can find by the band.

On a trip back to Glasgow, a couple of weeks later, I collect two Sparklehorse singles and play them over and over.

I learn from the music press that the band is basically Virginia born singer-songwriter Mark Linkous and a frequently changing line-up of supporting musicians.

In 1996, the first Sparklehorse album – “Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot” – is a critical, if not commercial, hit and Linkous comes to the UK. A first Glasgow gig at King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut is glorious and I’m lucky enough to see him perform two more times. A friend ends up playing with Linkous in a band backing the late Daniel Johnston on tour and reports back that he’s as gracious and lovely as he is talented.

In 2010, after six albums – two of them collaborations with others – Sparklehorse cease to be. In the depths of depression, Linkous kills himself, a tragedy for those closest to him and for the world of popular music. But what a legacy.

Last month, my 15-year-old daughter goes to her first concert with a pal. They see a band called Chase Atlantic and when she gets home she's on-the-ceiling high – “and then they did this and then they sang that one and look at this video, that’s the sound of us screaming when the singer looked at us” – and stays up until the wee hours, texting her mate about how great it had been.

Her excitement is a joy to witness and when, the next day, she asks if she could earn money for more gig tickets, I agree. She can start with the kitchen if she likes.

A year before his death, Mark Linkous began work on a new Sparklehorse album. It was to remain unheard until Friday when – at the instigation of his family – it was released into the world.

It’s called “Bird Machine” and I love it.

Before writing this column, I sit in my spotlessly clean kitchen, listening to it with tears in my eyes. While Mark Linkous’s strange and beautiful music fills the air, I repeatedly refresh the website from which I'm to buy tickets for my daughter’s next gig.

The Rolling Stones once sang that it was only rock n roll.

The girl and I know it’s so much more than that.