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.

BEATS OF LOVE 

172. Toulouse by Latin Quarter

A WORLD where Trump apes Putin to play at ruler and Farage apes Trump to Americanize British politics can only happen when folk see the very poorest as a problem.  

A world where more and more folk are now seeing the super wealthy as a problem spells trouble. To prevent this new vision from taking hold, dressing deception as a functionary tool becomes key. McSweeney learned this from Mandelson as he infiltrated and sabotaged Corbyn's movement to destroy Corbynism. 

To listen to the broad church of Labour parliamentarians with their diametrically opposed views vilify while rightly tearing out the heart of Mandelson, in some bloodlust, you can not escape the fact that on some performative level, they're purging their own sorry souls. Theirs is also a politics of deception on a lesser scale which betrays victims by failing to arrive at a consensus on anything. 

It's why the architect of this latest labour car-crash McSweeney was nowhere to be seen. Falling into a booby trap of his own making, like Cummings. His head will roll at a nation's rising anger, but the same revolving door will introduce us to further deceit. The byproduct of the factional politics that characterize our two main parties. 

And for all that Americans thank God they're not in Putin's Russia and we thank God we're not in Trump's America despite having to endure a minor annoyance like an ascendant Farage.

BEATS OF LOVE 

171. Nuts in May VHS

MIKE LEIGH'S wonderfully improvised comedy shows when we're out in the open air, things can get absurd and Reformy.

Keith replete with dictatorial tendencies and his utterly infantile wife Candice Marie, although insular and odd, navigate the Dorset coastline as laid out in a strict itinerary. The camp-site proves harder to navigate, testing their endurance when, despite them pitching their tent first interloper Ray, with his annoying radio, invades their sense of idyll. In Reform party fashion, they move their tent. 

Utterly baffled that Ray has to endure something he dislikes getting a career as a PE teacher, Candice Marie sends her husband into a jealous rage. His real problems begin with working-class Brummies Finger and Honky. First, they want to shag despite being noisily pissed up, which angers Keith, who lies in a sexless state having just refused to kiss his wife's fluffy toy cat Prudence goodnight, then Finger wants to start a fire to make breakfast. Lighting open fires is against the rules. 

Rules dictate everything for Keith. Who in a state of gammon faced abandonment hurls in anger the would be firewood, a tree branch, in Finger's direction. The aftermath of which sees Keith and Candice Marie leaving the camp-site. Again, righteous anger without resolution is very Reform. 

Ironic then that Keith, in trying to impose the same conditions of his suburban life on his trip, blocked his rear-view mirror by overfilling his Morris Minor and attracted police attention. The police also discover his spare tyre was bald. Breaking the rules himself. Reflecting the hypocrisy of Reform, who much prefer the idea of imposing rules that don't apply to their voters. 

Doubly ironic is the fact that characters like Keith and Candice Marie, no matter how unwittingly Reformy they behave, would never vote for such an unruly party. Finger and Honky probably would. 

BEATS OF LOVE

170. Pro>gen (Land Of Oz Mix) by The Shamen

I SORT of became hedonistic in my mid-twenties as the nineties raged on, but before that relatively short spell, I was surly and high-minded. 

Journos, like Jack Barron and Dele Fedele and musicians who spoke to them like the Shamen got me into dance music. Journos and musicians who summoned us to look deeper at the rave experience by marrying together sound waves with psychedelic drugs.

Despite seeing myself as more intrepid and enlightened, the only noticeable change was my taste in music. I was getting more eclectic as I widened my net. My clothes were full of holes and I wore tie dye shirts under fishing jumpers or I pilfered my sister's designer sweaters. I was unsurprisingly the scruffiest in the Hacienda when the Shamen's Synergy experience came to town.

And despite still buying an increasing amount of overlooked cheap bangers on major labels, I have an unbending sense of loyalty to acts like The Shamen. Whose Land Of Oz mixes like this beauty made the band momentarily hip as clubbing took hold. It really annoyed the indie faithful, but it was a burst of jerky positive energy that I knew inside out. 

Whether it was tripping, pissed or just being conditioned to only dance to songs I both knew and liked, I spent my night in clubs hunched against walls. Until briefly springing onto the dancefloor in a pained but enthusiastic manner, moving my imaginary mountain. What I noticed in proper dance clubs was that nobody ever stood still or moved mountains. In fact, nobody ever played this after its wider release. 

In typical fashion, just as my scruff look became popular in places like the Herbal Tea Party, I began shopping for clothes, so was equally out of place there in my new clobber. My world has always really been my bedroom. A place free from the constraints of conversation or fashion. A place where I play music, read, dream, and worry. I sort of feel alien from folk who don't do these things as I imagine them to be floating in space.

Sure, I didn't evolve the way I'd hoped, but at least I've never had Ebeneezer Goode in my record collection. Hard to believe it's the same rapper. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

169. Act Normal: Joy and despair in Postcolonial Britain by Pete Kalu

I READ as a means of catharsis and to learn about myself and the wider world. 

I write for the same reasons despite feeling dwarfed by the many, many, many superior writers. Pete is one such writer whose vibrant and purposeful prose was in a different league from my strained observations when describing the work of Benji Reid. In person, he's self-effacing, neurotic but brimming with passion.

And in this memoir, he is too. Modesty creates a real life stutter, holding neurotic folk back, yet expressed differently, say on a written page, that same modesty creates a candour and wit which communicates an inner confidence. At best, only ever sensed in the flesh. A wholly unique life has become much more than the sum of its parts as told here.

Memory is fragmentary and abstract, so short-stories some only colourful vignettes, without chronology or design, make a sort of perfect sense. It prizes sensory sensations from the reader, and its only constant is the black experience. Not the clichéd black experience but a self-effacing, passionately honest one that, though making himself often the butt of his humour, also constructs observations of psychological genius. Either way, you're left in awe at his storytelling. 

I've found it cathartic whilst learning about myself (cringes) and, thankfully, the wider world engaging with it. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

168. Time Ain't Nothing by Green on Red 

REMINDED OF a good pal this week when discussing the likelihood of Marx having relevance in the future. 

My good pal, despite being advised by his doctor to take things easy, was out on a heavy session. His mother had sacrificed a lot so he could collapse on the floor in convulsions, whilst eminent members of our legal profession beat a hasty retreat, abandoning him. My mistake was to sort of agree with him and concur that these folks weren't his friends. 

Once in semi-recovery and cut off from these highly paid and highly entertaining professionals, he rethought his idea that they weren't his friends. Reasoning that they had much more to lose than the likes of me. Me, whose parents he accepted, were lower middle class like him, but I who wasn't so could easily be associated with someone convulsing during the early part of a heavy session. 

Expecting me to calculate that he was wrong whilst absorbing the information over a phone call. Unbeknownst, I cast the dye on our friendship from the moment I put the phone down, reaching no disagreement. Course, I should've said "it's very British to convolute a class system in a knee-jerk reaction to Marxism by sub labeling everything and creating such unfortunate incidents as these." Marx astutely kept it simple, pitting owners against all wage workers.

It's the sheer simplicity that's its genius and which still instils fear in every lying capitalist. Course Marx is going to have relevance in the future as far too many folks are being duped into thinking there're no class war.