BEATS OF LOVE

183. Just An Illusion (The 1989 Remix) by Imagination 

THE ONLY person I properly envied was Gary Jenkins. The young black kid who drummed along to Kings of the Wild Frontier with Adam and the Ants on Jim'll Fix It. 

I was so green; I went upstairs and signed personal messages to myself from Adam on all my posters. This proved cathartic until my cousin Julia visited from Essex and asked about the juvenile signatures. I mumbled a very tall tale about meeting him in person while stuttering and blushing for England. 

I topped this a few years later. Ann Caroll, the kind of girl whose entrance made the room recalibrate itself, came over to our group with some mistletoe at a school Christmas party. Having spent the preceding twelve months confined to my room watching Channel 4 with a greyhound brace set, all I could do when it was my turn was blush badly, freezing in terror and shutting tight both my eyes and mouth. The humiliation was instant. I fled for home to the comfort of my homework, with taunts reverberating around my head throughout the festive season.

Fast forward eighteen months and I'm trying to impress my soon to be best mate. I could've done that by telling him I'd amassed a fair few records, Subbuteo teams, a decent half set of golf clubs, and a six-foot snooker table since we last saw each other; but I had to add an imaginary girlfriend to that list. Not just any imaginary girlfriend, but Ann Caroll, no less. I soon found out that despite not going to the same school, news travels fast. A double humiliation.

You'd have thought I'd learn, but over a decade later Fiona is reciting her poem about me. The poem mentioned the scars on my wrists being like the crossings of a Bakewell tart. Without being a critic, I knew this was the emotional apex of her poem so I just sheepishly held out my wrists, since people were understandably curious. I quite liked this sudden depth to my character, but the simple truth is there's a distinctive shallowness to it. When I was eight, I watched Superman, then after, in imitation, flew out of the glass porch at lightning speed, wrists first before screaming A & E down. 

My mother thought I had an over-active imagination and my father thought I was just tapped in the head. I never settled that argument. I do know scars can be both physical and metaphorical. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

182. You Retreat in Time and Space by Boards of Canada

THE PRECARIOUS labour market began with Thatcher, but Blair embedded it, importing US-style agency work and creating a two-tier economy: security for those already settled, instability for the folk who came after.

Blair then embraced the freedom of movement and cheap labour for business. Adopting the right to settle rather than merely the right to work, a policy choice that encouraged far greater numbers of European migrants to put down roots. Meanwhile, successive governments bombed across the Middle East then expressed surprise at the refugee flows the right was already weaponising.

Until the economic crash one might have forgiven folk their anger; after it, they voted for the very austerity that bled them dry. Austerity was a supposed temporary measure that got a minority extremely wealthy at their expense. It is little wonder that Brexit, the Covid contracts, the Russian energy windfall, and Truss's budget all followed in sequence, each one another extraction by the same minority that has become addicted to exploiting public credulity. Farage's method is simpler: amplify the grievance, then quietly hold the door open for the robbers. 

Reform will need three full terms before it can govern the way it wants. The way Trump can at the moment. It will invoke the threat of civil unrest to intimidate both the courts and the Lords into compliance. Before the courts and the Lords finally yield, enough folk will concede that they've fallen for bite-size misinformation on social media and voted, repeatedly and badly, for a generation. 

If only Labour had the sense to ban voters from social media and not children.

BEATS OF LOVE 

181. Failure is Always An Option: Glorious Adventures on the Beta Band Front Line and Other Tales by Steve Mason

By 1997 I was thoroughly jaded with clubbing, until the Beta Band's Champion Versions EP rewound me all the way back to the first time I heard Loaded. 

I was lucky to catch them live early at the Roadhouse and Uni so witnessed the idiosyncrasy and humour that made them so special up close. I travelled far and wide to fall under their spell of redemptive eclecticism. Getting red-eyed with them at the South bar after their farewell performance in Manchester. I knew they were going to be missed, especially by me, as I was already feeling old by then. 

His best music is fragmented, unselfconsciously so, and the same is true of his best writing. Seeping out in candid tales haphazardly revealing a droll humour. Tales that thankfully encompass more than the Beta Band years. He downplays his own bravery by judging past decisions through a present-day lens, as if the risks he took were obvious rather than radical. His argument that 'selling out' is an obsolete concept stings a little. Quietly dismantling the idealism that made me feel so old by 2004.

He's especially hard on himself when letting us into the drifts of his mind. It's a little too near home but his brilliant gift for story telling makes even the most depressing episodes highly entertaining. The peaks and troughs of his life don't come at you in linear and obvious ways either, instead springing out of the pages in a surprising manner. 

Reading this does what only the best music writing can: it rewinds the music, making it sound new again.

BEATS OF LOVE 

180. Tracey Emin: a second life  & Nigerian Modernism: art and independence

A TATE double-header began with the predictably packed blockbuster Emin exhibition.

No sooner are you in than a big screen recounts her teenage time in Margate. I'd seen excerpts of Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995) on the South Bank show and felt the revenge footage a little hollow in its mockery. I still do. 

She was the most endearing YBA artist, the one we could relate to. And it was a blessed relief to reach My Bed (1998), the most compelling conceptual self portrait bar none and the reason for her lasting infamy. Everything else was a little less tender than I'd hoped and less fearless. That said, not taken on standalone merit but shot through the prism of a personality cult, the work is engaging and not without reverence.

The effect was that when I visited my favourite spiritual space, Rothko's Seagram Murals (1958-59), I was a little less transported than usual. Fortunately, I immersed myself in Nigerian Modernism after a strong coffee a little later. Work I'd only encountered in books suddenly gained vibrancy and purpose at scale, its pro-independence fervour made visceral by sheer size.

The Zaria Arts Society room, a melting pot of learning and leisure, is wild. The Black Orpheius magazines look so now but it's the paintings which radiate the colourful essences of a nightlife that first introduced us to Fela and the original fat bottomed girls. Whilst Ben Enwonwu's impressive room contained the expressive and dizzyingly rhythmic Monotony (1948), causing me to enthuse, I had to listen to the missus, who most admired the work of Nike Davies-Okundaye. 

It is fitting that, long after the Tate double-header ended, this trailblazing woman who valued the workshop culture of passing on folklore tradition should reverberate around my head, reminding me of Emin's textile-influenced work. Though they work in vastly different mediums and cultural contexts, their work is highly personal and evocative. Their motifs hold personal significance and are not merely decorative. Both are part taught but self-developed, which is why they're so original, I guess. 

European tutors encouraged individual self-expression rather than imitation, which makes a work like Davies-Okundaye's ultra-vivid The Finger that Feeds Never Lacks (1979) even more remarkable. Created long after the tutors had fled the civil war of the late sixties, it epitomises a constant need to create inherent in nearly all artists. 

It was only later, on the tube home, that Davies-Okundaye's work quietly reframed everything I'd seen, lending Emin's pieces an emotional charge I hadn't felt standing in front of them.

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 sighted 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 to the internet and the penny drops, the US version misprinted the track listing entirely; the Weatherall mix was never on it. Cue me shelling out over twenty pounds for the UK copy. Obviously, 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 sitting with this in my headphones on a bench 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 to receive blood, we were both totally useless and at the mercy of my younger sisters, who fed us. Shortly after her return, he walked the dog, only to come back looking ashen faced with just the lead in his hand. 

My mother, despite being poorly, left the house, frantically calling out its name. Of course it heard her voice and came bounding home. I still smile, recalling the sheer relief on my father's round face. The song marked the start of me being kinder to us both, infusing a much needed warm memory. 

Songs do that. Pure and simple. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

178. Halucifuge (Freaky Chicken Peck) by Freaky Chakra

MEMORY CAN be cruel. I still wince, reflecting on my first failed attempt at DJing 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 same tunes played in reality a week later, with Jeff and Tim, which were met with the kind of polite blankness that is worse than hostility. Real DJs sound like their home cities. I sounded like nowhere at all, and the faces in that Oldham boozer knew it.

Freaky Chakra's tremendous Halucifuge (Freaky Chicken Peck) should not have followed the mighty Augustus Pablo. It didn't, because I was too dumbstruck with nerves to cue it up myself, and had to tap Jeff on the head to do it for me. I had spun Keith Richards, reasoning that a boozer deserved at least one rock moment, snobbery be damned. I also had a mad desire to share Plank's futuristic acid track Cosmic Reflections, optimistic, given the PA sounded like it had been rescued from a school disco. Real DJs aren't incoherent. They tell stories and check the sound.

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) and got some feet tapping. Even so,  Jeff and Tim did not ask me again. They rightly left me behind and played the Wigan Pier. Jeff arrived with a crate of record-company freebies, first dibs earned simply by being the one who drove. Despite Tim having next to no records of his own, he staked his superiority on keeping more heads on the dancefloor than Jeff. Real DJs don't compete with each other; they build a relationship with the room. 

I'd like to say I learned all these lessons in 1994 but it was nearer to 2024, sadly. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

177. Human Love LP by E.R. Thorpe

I 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.

Only a lowly framework; a bare stool-and-guitar setup constrained her. Now, amidst a Nottinghamshire renaissance, the fuller band setting finally gives her songs room to breathe, revealing their layered and beguiling depth. My favourite songs keep changing, which is always a good sign. 

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 Emma realise her fullest potential, creating a hell of a cohesive whole. We downplay the importance of life affirming music passed down through generations in our world of sound-snippets. But records that hold together as a complete journey, that ask for your full attention and return it with interest, are rarer than they should be. This is one.

Joseph Eid

Reminded of Joseph Eid's powerful image of Abu Omar who smoked a pipe, listening to music in his ruined Aleppo bedroom, refusing to leave the city despite the destruction.

I like to think it was something like Human Love on Abu's gramophone player, music that makes the world around you feel, briefly, less ruined.

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