––What are your outstanding memories of the kiss itself?

Albo: He was 17, too, and smoked. To this day I kind of get a thrill kissing a smoker.

Hollander: First off, thank all that is holy that Vanessa knew that I might need a little prodding. If she hadn’t turned to face me and looped her arms around my neck in a style familiar to prom-dancers everywhere, I might still be waiting on my first kiss. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I was trying to affect an air of confidence and familiarity. Somehow or other our mouths locked together in a way that created a vacuum seal, so that when we eventually separated there was the same thwuck you’d expect when opening a new jar of peanut butter. But right, right, the kiss itself: our tongues swirled in an impressive clockwise syncopation, rolling over each other once every third rotation. My belly was doing flips and I had an instant hard-on, which made the fact that I’d chosen sweatpants for this momentous occasion unfortunate. Vanessa smiled when we broke for air, and we continued in this manner for maybe fifteen minutes, sometimes achieving the thwuck effect, sometimes not. I felt like sex must somehow be imminent.

I remember thinking anatomical thoughts, wondering how to arrange ourselves for communion in that canted pit of filth. It’s a nice memory, mostly. The really embarrassing part is that eventually we slunk down to the sand itself, as if we were lovers on some tropical beach, and mind you all this time the sheer stench of that sewage was searing our nasal passages to ash, and I reached under her shirt and pinched her nipple through her bra, basically borrowing my moves from those strips of images I’d seen on the dirty cable channel. And she was sort of moaning in some pantomime of her own, maybe she’d seen the same films, and the sun was indeed going down and everything was so sexed up and my erection was just out of control, dire and excruciating. Which is when I, um… climaxed in my sweatpants. It was like the culminating fusillade of some terrible warfare. I pretended I was tired of kissing and touching and etc., that I had to get home… I think I told her I had to feed my dog. Maybe I thought this would sound noble. We held hands on the return trip and I invented stories about my intelligence and athletic prowess.

Jong-Fast: I remember it being very short and afterwards there was a look of horror on his face, not the look I was going for.

Robinson: I was worried about our noses banging together. I wasn’t sure how the mechanics of it were going to work. So when I moved toward her, I ended up kissing just the corner of her mouth. It was almost a cheek kiss, but I definitely hit lips. She was totally shocked. Luckily, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page took over, and we group-danced the last part of the song.

Stace: We were sitting on the fields behind Cadborough Cliff, as though we had packed a picnic. There was probably wildlife near. The kiss tasted good, and I was surprised at how less messy it was than it looked - I don't know quite how much saliva I had experienced before, or expected, but we seemed to kiss very neatly. She had long, quite thick, pre-Raphaelite blonde hair. (I have never dated a blonde since, strange to say, so perhaps this flaxen 'do was irreplaceable.) Her body was surprisingly womanly. I remember thinking it was much too soon for my hands to stray elsewhere - and she later confirmed that if I had, she would have been "disappointed". Besides, her duffel coat was in the way. We chatted and walked back, and I think it was then that I took photos of her jumping over the bollards outside the Ypres Tower by the Gun Garden.