BEATS OF LOVE 

98. Headache by Grouper

RUNNING THROUGH the farmhouses on Red Hill with my mates older brother, giving chase was exhilarating and once off the path and running across open field, I could easily picture my dead body, left, concealed beneath the long, reedy blades of grass. 

By the time I was eventually caught, all he could muster were a few limp footed kicks at my scrunched up body. I thought there and then that living in my imagination was more fun than anything reality could offer.

Just as well because by the time the orthodontist, Mister Bogues, had finished accessing me, I was sitting patiently with my red greyhound style brace clamp wrapped around my face every evening waiting for my teeth to be straightened. Unable to enter my mid-adolescence, I was instead surrounded by records that I would play on my imaginary radio show every Sunday night. 

By the time he showed me his success with the before and after moulds, my hooter had sprouted both across and out of my face. A face now riddled with at least four red boils at anyone time. No wonder I continued with my imaginary radio show and, in essence, still do. 

'So', asks nobody at all, 'what is the best record you've bought this week?' This haunting beauty, I reply. A record I should've bought in 2016 but didn't. Thankfully repressed in time for the duvet months. Enjoy. 

     

BEATS OF LOVE 

97. Supa Kool by Mr Fingers

AGEING IS great. If you do it properly, by taking a leaf out of Saint Anthony of Padua's book. Who stated wisely:

 'Consider every-day that you are then for the first time beginning ; and always act with the same fervour as on the first day you began.' 

Folk often use their ageing process to ossify dogma into their brains, which sort of steals time away from the self so becomes depressing. Which is why so many older folks look really glum-faced in their unknowing sense of knowing, or vice versa. 

Propaganda is nothing but a calculated lie and, thanks to social media, it pretty much dictates what riles us. Whether we're buying fake news or opposing it. We've witnessed a complete clusterfuck of conservative policies and are still sloshing about in a state of false consciousness. Unable to recognize the face of our oppressor. Thankfully, I've now switched off and decided humans don't evolve. What I probably thought aged five.  

When I was living with my kid sister, our housemate was properly middle-class. She had a part-time job that paid more than my full-time job and an allowance on top. I never used the phone, but spoke to my mother when my sister was on the phone. Anyway, we get this bill and our housemate said she didn't recognize some pretty pricey numbers and wanted it split between us.

My sister, being softer natured than me, said she'd oblige, but I snuck into her room and rifled through her things until I found a pad with these numbers. When I confronted her, she soon-after packed off and left saying she didn't feel secure in my company. Her posh family looked at me like I was a thief. It then formed my belief that people with money and easy access to lawyers are not to be trusted. A belief that I still hold today. 

But I know I must truly let go of it if I want to live with the fervour of a fresh new beginning. In the meantime, I almost convince myself that I'm beginning already by surrendering to this beauty. 

BEATS OF LOVE

96. Scorpio Rising (The Scientist Mix) by Death in Vegas with Liam Gallagher

WOKE UP up feeling lost at sea. Then had to sweep a big fucking dead pigeon into a bin bag and felt even worse.

That sinking feeling when you know you've got two dozen working weeks ahead and you already feel totally knackered after just one. The regret you feel at frittering away all your holidays in a summer that's pouring with rain. Then you bang on this and everything brightens up.

Life in technicolour even. And the sun even comes out giving me a full whole day of clear blue sky. If ever Noel's trite Status Quo styling were borrowed to sound gratingly like The Beatles it was here. The original version sounds too self-consciously aware of this and creeps about like a non-poisonous snake. The genius that is The Scientist strips away a lot of those superfluous psychedelics and decides that adding keys and vibraphone with toasting over Liam's Lennonesque drawling works best. And it does. General Jah Mikey steals the show, demonstrating that sometimes seemingly suspect ideas work really, really well.

You can either roll a big fat one or do what I do and psyche yourself up for a day in the garden. Reaching up for the trowels whilst swaying your head along to its majesty. Music has nearly always saved me from total despair.

I've always found my freedom in listening to it and that probably gives me the strength to endure real life. To paraphrase the great Abba, 'thank you for the greatest music!'

BEATS OF LOVE

95. Something in the Air by Me

 The grazing sheep, the divisive red-stone brick

Of a mill-town anger! or is it just innovation stifling the air?

Why commonwealth cousins sailed across a body-filled ocean

owing to the starkest decisions, and ripping, and killing

Thus, as they arrived, the sixties swung so wildly they hurtled 

curlers clean into the air, and our rich little cotton spun town 

sprang into the sharpest decline

Two sets of once opposing footy firms stand together

united in their micro-aggression, then clean vanish

into a millennial springtime smog

All eyes now on folk they baited on national telly no less

responding with that same carmine fury 

 As the inflamed suffragette toughening up her fight, 

purely to defend a fundamental right