Remembering Big Star's Alex Chilton

March 3, 1990
A tired-looking man is on stage in a half-empty pub in Leeds. He looks well into middle age, but he's not yet 40. He's playing guitar and singing, putting little effort into either, and he pays scant attention to the few dozen people watching him – a mixture of men of around the same age as him, and students in indie garb who look awestruck to be in the same room as Alex Chilton. He's got a pick-up band who look just as bored as him – a bassist with his instrument tucked up under his chin in requisite session-man fashion, and a drummer who plods along. It should be terrible, and I suppose it is. But there's a kind of magic at work, too. Even this band, even this man – so contemptuous of his own legend that he can't understand why anyone would be interested in his old music – can't quite extinguish the spark of genius in the songs Chilton wrote as a very young man, playing with the Memphis band Big Star. And when he comes to play the song every single person in the room has come to hear, spines shiver, and though the band – as if they were trying to rob it of its beauty – turn September Gurls into a trudge, hearts melt: "I loved you/ Well, never mind …"

Summer, 1991
My Alex Chilton obsession is at its peak, and I can track the course of the summer by which period of Chilton I'm listening to. At the start of the summer it's all about the first Big Star album, No 1 Record, and the pop-soul singles he recorded as the teenaged singer of the Box Tops. After I graduate from university and return to my parents' home in Essex, while my girlfriend heads back to Devon, I listen obsessively to Big Star's Way Out West, though the distance between Exeter and Saffron Walden doesn't come anywhere near that between California and Tennessee. By the end of the summer, my girlfriend has dumped me, I've found out my father is dying, and I lie in bed playing Holocaust over and over and over. It's the bleakest song I know, and bleak is how I feel.

August 31, 1993
The four members of Teenage Fanclub in a box at the Clapham Grand in south London, headbanging like mad. Below them are two young American musicians, from the band the Posies, who are gazing with a mixture of uncertainty and adoration at Alex Chilton. Joining them is the drummer Jody Stephens, Chilton's old Memphis bandmate. And this show is the London debut of the band who will spend the next decade and a half operating, on and off, as Big Star. They'd convened earlier in the summer, play a show at Columbia University in Missouri, and as long as people were willing to pay money for the Big Star name, Chilton was happy to supply it. The Clapham gig is a revelation. In recent years, it's become a rock rite-of-passage for grown-ups to weep as heroes thought lost make their return to the stage, but it seems as if everyone in the Grand is either weeping or beaming, or both simultaneously, as the songs from Big Star's first two albums are rolled out. Chilton doesn't always look like he's awfully interested – he often told interviewers that he didn't think his songwriting was up to much while he was in Big Star – but at least no one could accuse him of faking it.

November 18, 1993
Teenage Fanclub are headlining at the Forum in North London. A few days earlier, Nick Hornby – not yet a superstar novelist – had written a preview of the gig in the listings magazine Time Out, which affectionately poked fun at the band for their obsessions with the Byrds and Big Star. They must have read the piece and taken it as a challenge, for they begin their set not with their own Hang On, which has been the opener for most of this tour, but with a cover of the Byrds' Mr Tambourine Man, swiftly followed by a version of Chilton's Free Again, then September Gurls, before running straight into their own song, December. Those who were sceptical of the Fanclub always suggested December had been little more than their most shameless attempt to rip off Big Star. I prefer to look at it a little differently, that December was a companion piece to September Gurls, that the singer of December is a rival to the singer of September Gurls. Chilton sings in the latter's chorus: "December boy's got it bad", while Gerry Love sings in the former "I wanted to assassinate December". Standing up in the balcony of the Forum, entranced, I'm convinced this is as perfect as pop gets.

Everyone's relationship with their favourite music, and the singers who made it, is different. And those relationships change with time, and with circumstance. By the early years of the last decade, I found it very hard to listen to Alex Chilton's music. I'd had a daughter, and I was finding it hard to stomach what I perceived to be a pattern in his recordings of regarding extreme youth with an aggressively sexual eye. I returned to him, to Big Star, in the past couple of years. Robert Gordon's wonderful book, It Came From Memphis, led me back to his first album after Big Star split – the extremely peculiar Like Flies On Sherbert. And last year's wonderful Big Star box set caused me to completely forget my discomforts and simply bathe in the glorious music Alex Chilton made, once upon a time. As I walked to work this morning, I skipped over the album I had intended to listen to, stopping instead at the third disc of that box. The sun shone on the canal bank, and over an acoustic guitar, the day after he died, I listened to Alex Chilton sing: "Jesus Christ was born today. Jesus Christ was born."