BEATS OF LOVE

45. Hostile written & directed by Sonita Gale  

HOSTILE WAS an especially raw watch for me and if I watch it again, I will listen to Nitin Sawhney's score. A tapestry of confusing and cruel law changes keeps weaving their way around my own life in a way that's impossible to explain to people. Consequently, uncertainty with a prevailing sense of paranoia leave me living much of it in fear, making everything feel out of my control. Everyone impacted by these 2014 law changes and their accompanying 2012 flagship hostile environment policy will know exactly what I mean.

However, Windrush painted a darker picture still of an even more inhumane system at work. One where landing cards get destroyed and entirely innocent folk are then asked to provide documentary evidence for each year they've spent in the UK. Often totalling over 50 years. This dehumanizing practice even disgusted Paul Dacre.   

Coz the word detention instantly unsettles folk, you feel a reflexive sense of shame and bottle things up deep inside. In theory, only people at serious risk of absconding should be detained, but in reality, it is a tool to test the asset strength of anyone subjugated in the system. Detainees are often dipped in and out for that reason. 

Director Sonita Gale really understands what's going on. These feelings of shame that arise out of the confusion and cruelty are best expressed when a young student losing just about everything still hides her identity from the camera. It's why I have the utmost respect for the four protagonists in this feature-length documentary. They've overcome their own fears to talk at length and candidly. 

Sharing their own unique experiences about the effects No Recourse to Public Funds has had on their lives, we see just how wide the net has now become. Both marginalizing and far-reaching, the inhumane flagship policy was always destined to reach crisis-point. Examining their stories in such an in-depth way indubitably establishes stark injustices which suggest we've now reached that point. It should bring shame to us all. That it doesn't concerns. 

However, it now feels important and timely. English Nationalism is deeply blinkered and on most issues its acolytes are apathetic, so lend themselves to the authoritarianism of a country like Russia, whose grievance narratives really cut through despite being propagated by Vladimir Putin. It's why he was Nigel Farage's poster boy until very recently. 

There has never been a more apt time to wrestle back our humanity from a tory party whose proto-fascist tendencies effectively oversee BNP party policy whilst declaring never to have heard of the BNP. 

A move straight out of the Putin textbook. 

BEATS OF LOVE

44. It's Not Too Beautiful by The Beta Band

AHEAD OF of watching the documentary film Hostile tomorrow, I've dusted down some old VHS videos and had an afternoon on the sofa. 

Reminding myself how thrillingly effective this Beta Band song sounds in the superb One Day In September. Michael Douglas deserves a lot of credit too for his sparse narrative that recounts the sorriest of sagas. Although the film was criticized for being both naïve and gratuitously violent, it recounts a story seldom told and for that reason alone is still riveting.

The song itself best exemplifies Steve Mason's fatigued yet deeply comforting delivery and their squelchy throbbing notes culminate in the most dynamic use of a John Barry sample bar none before building everything back up again from scratch. The band wanted more studio time, but with less always being more, that would've been folly. If you're singing about dusty rooms, you don't want a backdrop of polished sheen; you want this slightly damaged drama. It's perfect.  

At the time of its release, I was expecting redundancy and clearing out dead-files. A dusty room if ever there was and awash with cardboard boxes and choc full of our stock-check documents that stank of stale paper and unsavoury canteen food. Only someone romantically attuned to this song and as anti-social as me would volunteer to spend hours in isolation, pretending to file them away in order. 

By the time I watched the documentary, I was working split-shifts, having been overlooked for the redundancy that was going to kick-start my musical ventures. It seemed everything I watched or read at the time made me angrier and more bitter and twisted. The beauty in the song that I could see so clearly a short time ago was now suddenly obscured.

Luckily, not viewed through the smoky prism of time, this song is now back on the stereo and once again sounding, you guessed it. 

 

BEATS OF LOVE 

43. Eye Mind (The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychedelic Sound) by Paul Drummond

IT'S NO coincidence that the best band of the 1980s, the Spacemen 3, honed their majestic druggy drone music in Rugby. 

The most unfashionable of places. Self-described by leader Sonic Boom as a poly-drug band their Elevators influence is more than a little apparent. The Elevators wanted to be a strictly LSD band quite removed from everything else, but instead got hooked on all sorts of mind-bending substances and often by involuntary means. This somewhat confused their musical vision but cemented an endearing authenticity to their unrivalled sound. 

That Paul Drummond devoted so much time to research, finding so many willing voices crawling out of the wood-work to speak with him, illustrates their far wider influence, and his need to unfold their saga in terms of tragic consequence. His ambitious debut commences with a typically enthusiastic Julian Cope foreword before bedding into a few high minded and brilliant pages that reveal the author's true talent for using his magniloquent voice to engage us with the central protagonists of this strangest of rock biographies. 

Then quickly yields to their under-edited and rambling Texan voices, which miraculously still sound refreshingly warm and earthy. We craved a tale on the mightiest psychedelic band there ever was and then finally got this absolute mind-fuck of an overload. I was on a return train journey to Exeter and literally fell onto the platform when finally arriving back in Piccadilly. 

Had I re-read the greatest book ever written or instead watched the longest music documentary of all-time for a second time? Right now, four days later, I still don't know. 

But I do now know way too much about this band, whose crazed man-child singer, incessant electric jug, and exploratory musical messaging, has captivated me for decades. I need a lie down.      

BEATS OF LOVE 

42. Additions to the Dance by Swittch

SWITTCH ARE a band that has only ever found a home on compilations. 

With the same song. Firstly, on Tracks on the Green, an 84 comp on the obscure Real Time Sound productions label. And now on Perfect Motion, a comp lovingly assembled with by Bruno (Perfect Lives) and Flo Dill. I missed out on a stock copy of Random Access's delightfully abstract oddity Bodywork, so this was bought on sight.

That this track has instead been my major fix is surprising. From behind, the lead singer is the spit of Bonnie Tyler. And the band also look disappointingly Uber 80s in their burgundy leathers and all in one stripe. Beyond those deeply troubling sensory impressions that I've brought upon myself, all I have to play with is the music. Which is amazing. Imagine Jody Watley edited by a wizard with the DIY ethos and you're halfway there.

What is so great about the whole comp is its total lack of information. Other than the artists and titles and some understated cricket themed graphics, there's no accompanying notes. I have to go back to 2011 when After the Void was released to recall a time when just the music simply blew my mind. 

Unlike that mindblower, which is now blocked from sale on Discogs, this one has the writer's full blessing and is also a super crisp sounding pressing to boot. Everyone since, it seems, has either used their own curatorial skills or hired in a big name writer to wax lyrical in a spirit of self-promotion that often undermines the artists themselves.  

It's actually enough to convince me to shut the fuck up.