BEATS OF LOVE 

179. Goodnight Jack by Saint Etienne

MUST CONFESS to thinking I owned Weatherall's sublime Mix of Two Halves remix of Only Love Can Break Your Heart for donkey's years. My US copy told me I did, despite it sounding nothing like the reviews I'd read. 

I even sited a UK copy at a party and felt sorry for the host as he hadn't got a lovely shrink wrap sleeve with his. Fast forward the internet and I'm shelling out over twenty pounds for that UK copy because the US version misprinted the track listing and doesn't include the Weatherall mix. I love both, but this song helped me find a bit of perspective on my traumatic life.

The only person I hated more than my father was myself, but sat with this in my headphones on a form in Didsbury Park I actually smiled as I reminisced about him. The lines 'Behind the wheel of my Capri It seems it like no-ones noticed me, And now you're coming out from work, And deep inside I feel so hurt' really resonated as I recalled his company car, a gold Capri. He was definitely not a gold Capri man. When my mother stayed at the hospital, we were both totally useless and at the mercy of my younger sisters, who looked after us. Shortly after her return, he walked the dog, only to come back looking ashen faced with a lead in his hand. 

My mother, despite being weak and frail, left the house, frantically calling out for the dog. Course it heard her voice and came running back to the house. I smiled as I recalled the sheer relief on my father's round face. It was the start of me being kinder to us both and in no way related to a murder ballad. The song's disarming winsome music infused that much needed warm memory that put my feet on the long path to recovery. 

Songs do that. Pure and simple. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

178. Halucifuge (Freaky Chicken Peck) by Freaky Chakra

MEMORY CAN be cruel. Wincing as I reflect on my first failed attempt at DJing back in February 1994. 

It mattered to me coz I still recall the tunes I played to my imagined audience that sounded groundbreaking and brilliant.  Then the very same tunes in an actual Oldham boozer a week later with Jeff and Tim. 

Freaky Chakra's tremendous Halucifuge (Freaky Chicken Peck) shouldn't follow the mighty Augustus Pablo. It didn't, as I was so dumbstruck with nerves I had to tap Jeff on the head to cue it up. I ended on a sort of high with U-N-I (You And I) awe inspiring Don't Hold Back The Feeling (Key Trip Dub) but they did not ask me again.

They weren't perfect. Tim would play anything to entertain (i.e., Jeff's overplayed commercial records), whereas Jeff liked to play more credible tunes. When this partnership played the Wigan Pier with more than a smattering of record company freebies that Jeff got first dibs on by account of driving, tensions snapped. Tim measured his superiority in keeping more heads on the dancefloor than Jeff, despite having next to no records. Real DJs don't count heads they build relationships with their music. 

Real DJs sound like their home cities, apparently. If I'd at least sounded like a large town such as Oldham, I might not be wincing, picturing the puzzled expression on folk's faces.  

BEATS OF LOVE 

177. Human Love LP by E.R. Thorpe

HAD THE good sense to ask Emma to support Huw Costin with Torn Sail way back in 2013 after Paul suggested it. She didn't disappoint, her songs had a beguiling depth.

Only a lowly framework; stool and guitar hindered her. Now, amidst a Nottinghamshire renaissance, extra enthusiasm is at hand to broaden the framework and really prize open the textural depth of her creations. 

Hard not to get emotional hearing Red Dust and Dinner For One in this new light as songs that cradled me during tough times now sound even richer and more memorable. Brilliant players do that. They help realize her fullest potential, creating a  hell of a cohesive spin. It's truly important. We downplay the importance of life affirming music passed down through generations in our world of sound-snippets. But we need artists like Emma and long players like this more than ever. 

Pic - Joseph Eid

Reminded of Abu Omar who smoked a pipe, listening to gramophone records in his ruined Aleppo bedroom, refusing to leave the city despite the destruction. I expect he was listening to something truly enriching like this. Something that places life itself in better focus.

My favourite songs keep changing, which is always a good sign. It repays faith in Jim's production skills as he's handed back to her one mighty album. 

https://erthorpe.bandcamp.com/album/human-love-2

BEATS OF LOVE 

176. Reverend Black Grape by Black Grape

THE MISSUS was in Nigeria for Ma's funeral when Lent began. To compound my worries, I had her physical ID with me and couldn't get any clarification whether she needed it to travel back now that everything was digital, despite asking two solicitors. 

Attended as many masses as I could during Lent and what I thought would be a chore has strengthened my faith considerably. It was just under twenty years ago, on Good Friday 2006, that I went back to church. 

Unsurprisingly, I've got to know some parishioners since. If right wing dogma sits well with their religion, then this masterpiece, the last great TOTP moment, lampooning the hypocrisy of organized religion whilst sounding funky as hell, sits well with mine. 

The Jesus I know hates the commodification of religion, encouraging instead heart led relationships over rule led ones of obedience. That two self-confessed smack heads who had been all but written off could draw on their catholic and gospel heritages to subvert both the religious messaging and season while creating the finest comeback single bar, none is a testament to a wider corroboration. Danny Saber, take a bow. Heart led and unruly, the results are miraculous. 

Course the missus got back with just digital ID. My feverish Lenten prayers answered. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

175. Bolton Wanderers v Ipswich Town - April 21, 1979

SURE, I'VE witnessed some seminal moments; The Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk at Bugged Out, Oasis in a big-top tent in Preston, and Nirvana supporting at the Poly, but none of them were as memorable or enjoyable as seeing this goal at Burnden Park in 1979 sat with my father. Celebrating it was our last shared moment of unadulterated joy. 

My abiding memory of the Oasis gig was watching the totally depressed and baffled looking spoken word poet Joolz try to make sense of their already forming cult, sensing they had hijacked the event. Fellow witnesses couldn't envisage how truly massiv The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk or Nirvana would become, either. 

In 1979, I liked flamboyant footballers who had lank hair and untucked shirts, and my father liked workaday ones who tucked their shirts in like Big Sam. However, in the April sunshine, Frankie Worthington fever finally gripped my father. Despite losing, he hung back, allowing me to wait in the car park with my candy-pink Disney autograph book. 

After a forty-minute wait, the great man finally surfaced, just to strut nonchalantly past us, which I thought was dead cool. Fast forward to the next day and I'm shouting at my father to watch his goal again during On The Ball, but he refused to lift his head out of the Sunday paper. 

Yeah, I saw one of the most graceful and skillful goals ever scored on British soil and all I have to show for it is a Paul Mariner autograph. 

BEATS OF LOVE

174.  Dogatana LP by  Kazumi Watanabe

AFTER SORTING through the family album, I realized a pic of my smiling grandmother with the bulk that was baby me on her lap was missing. 

Not that it matters coz it imprinted this pic in my mind. She died not long after and it left us with her husband and mother, folk my father could barely stomach. 

Regardless, every fortnight we made the trip to Audenshaw to visit her husband in his sombre bungalow and every fortnight he gave us god-awful fruit polos that stuck to our teeth. We, as children, couldn't speak coz he'd get snappy, so we just fumbled about with his brass ornaments until the clock thankfully said it was pub opening time. To compound the pain of the journey, the misery that was her mother lived nearby in a dreary block of flats, so we visited there too.

While her brother's car was outside, we had to wait in ours until he had driven off. He'd somehow talked the misery into disinheriting her daughter, so my father felt compelled to continue the feud by blaming him. I now have sympathy for my father as the people he was closest to, his mother and grandfather, were dead before I could even walk. 

Things improved shortly before her husband died when I was in my teens and able to pick up his News of the World and take it into his bathroom before getting way too over excited looking at its racier pages. My parents were probably sympathetic to me splodging about and, though in no way encouraging my behaviour, recognized that it kept me quiet-ish. 

I think we all felt like we'd been to his funeral thousands of times before. I was philosophical about it, thinking, 'grandfather is dead, which is sad, but I never have to visit Audenshaw ever again or eat fruit polos.'

My mother always stated that things would've been very different had my grandmother survived. That pic of us both represents a love denied them, so seems apt that it is missing. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

173. Free Energy by Bananagun

SYMPTOMS OF bulimia; binging and purging got interpreted through the lens of other psychiatric frameworks prevalent in the late 1950s.

Leading to misdiagnosis or classification under broader categories of disordered or neurotic, so my mother got sectioned. I never knew this in her lifetime, but I was told candidly by my sister. When I mentioned it to her surviving partner, he flippantly said, 'your mother was in the bottom block.' I was sad as I recalled how upset we both were leaving Horwich after my father quit his job.

He took us to Middleton, which also unbeknownst to me, was mother's birthplace before finally taking us back to her hometown. The draw was being with her own mother, despite some folk knowing her history. They held a silence that seems impossible now in such a loud, confessional world. I recall my ambivalence after giving up on the Mancunian dream to return home myself and the one pull factor of my mother, who understood my sadness more than I knew.

I miss that tangible love like when she knotted herself around me prior to my major surgery, so much it hurts still.