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. Art that added to a pro-independence fervour that I'd seen in books suddenly had more vibrancy and purpose scaled up.

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's fitting that, as 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. While vastly different mediums and cultural contexts, their work is highly personal and evocative. Both are part taught but self-developed, which is why they're so original, I guess. 

Their motifs hold personal significance and are not merely decorative. European tutors encouraged a self-expression of style, which makes a work like Davies-Okundaye ultra vivid The Finger that Feeds Never Lacks (1979) so unique. 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. 

Davies-Okundaye helped charge Emin's work with much more emotion. Something that only happened on the tube, reflecting.

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 to 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. 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 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 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. Course it heard her voice and came running towards 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. 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.