BEATS OF LOVE 

154. Ma

SO LUCKY, I had two selfless mothers so quick to love and so slow to judge. Brilliant models of how to live life fully. Religious yet liberal-minded, they made fairer and better choices than the rest of us and had a value system that earned great respect. 

Despite their family commitments, they were both very charitable. Not questioning why someone needs help, but questioning how they can help. My mother was the lynchpin of my UK family. Without her, we grew more anxious, eroding trust, and untying the bonds between us. 

The Missus' mother 'Ma' was the lynchpin of my Nigerian family and its wider community. She came to our wedding in November 2013, imparting her wisdom to us in a short window of time while braving the cold. I saved her from a hard fall when she lost her footing on the elevator in Next, but she saved our marriage by infusing it with her enduring spirit.

With her sad passing, I instantly feel privileged to have had Ma in my life. I feel the profound void she leaves, and I worry for the rest of the family. Like my mother, she lent an ear, and either resolved problems or supported us through difficulties. Despite their boundless patience supporting family recovering from alcoholism or gunshot wounds, they would both rather have been celebrating the birth of a child. They both did it with easy smiles and elegance, despite knowing the deep heartache of widowhood. It's a strength and resilience that I don't see easily in the rest of us.

I will always ache with regret that I didn't fly us out to Lagos for a reunion while Ma was still healthy enough to travel. Instead of the vivid memories we could have made, I am left with a stack of unshelved records that just sit here in silence. It's pretty telling that every Sunday she asks after mother's surviving partner. Only on Sunday we were describing the care home he has just moved into. I wish I wasn't keener on playing my shelved records than staying on the phone longer. Her smiling face brimming with love gave the Missus so much strength and me the comfort of knowing that. Like me, she now walks the world without her mother and closest friend. It pains me to watch her grief collapse her adulthood into childhood vulnerability.

I pray my selfless, wise Ma is at perfect peace. And we honour her by giving, loving without judgment, and living out her true legacy.

BEATS OF LOVE 

153.  Do You Like Worms? (Roll Plymouth Rock) by The Beach Boys

BRIAN WILSON was a true saviour to me. I almost entirely owe my life to Pet Sounds, given how few things mirrored the intense, introspective estrangement I navigated in the late 80s.

Set-aside and bullied mercilessly, and pushed to create by a jealous father, he set the Beach Boys apart. Understanding intricate harmonies whilst tapping into the pop zeitgeist. Still today, the pinnacle of good-time popular music. 

After retiring from live performances in 1964, Wilson poured his experimentation into Pet Sounds. Featuring intricate harmonies, lush orchestration, and deeply emotional lyrics, the album successfully blended commercial success with high art. Complexity made to sound simple is never easy and takes true genius. Exchanging 4 boxes of records in the mid-nineties for my CD box set was an easy decision. 

In the fallout of his aborted masterpiece Smile, bandmates, accustomed to success, played the retro circuit to packed stadiums. His touches of genius on Wild Honey, Holland and Surf's Up whilst mainly laying on his bed full of barbiturate and fast-food are still brilliantly creative. With the conservative brand established, Brian played the part of the led astray leper for years. 

A Smile bootleg and Domenic Priore's Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile! The Beach Boys, which documents the madness surrounding the sessions, were essential to every discerning music freak. Then in 2011 Capitol finally released all the session recordings onto CDs. This mind-blowing music lifted me into a higher state of grace. I have checked off my ultimate bucket list item. 

That it took that long to let the faithful hear the Smile sessions in all their studio glory tell you how conservative the brand was. More tragedy surrounded his life than his death. In death, those that know understand deeply just how important it was that the competition for pop musical supremacy took place. That Wilson felt tortured into surpassing the studio achievement of the Beatles means we've all benefited. 

That I have a favourite out of all his pure gold is a minor miracle, but this was the tune I played in my head post-op when I realised there was no morphine drip as promised. Literally pulling me through some of my most pained moments in this life. A saviour indeed.  

BEATS OF LOVE 

152.  Bryter Layter LP by Nick Drake 

THERE WAS an actual time just prior to its studio completion when this product threatened to sell and make everyone involved in its production thrilled.

A period that echoes the hopeful defiance voiced by Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in real time during the aftermath of Tet offensive. That cut through to society at large. Times then, of optimistic bravery.

Cutting himself off from the security and safety of Cambridge to decamp in the capital, Drake's more urbanised lyrics appear to suggest he felt dwarfed rather than looming large. There's a vulnerability but determination in his voice. A drum kit changed the studio dynamic with Fairport players, amongst others adding to his distinctive finger picked guitar, creating a more upbeat sound. That said, Kirby's arrangements maintain that distinctive wispy pastoral elegance that marked out his debut. 

We all recall playing tunes to amazed small pockets of folk and then mapping the path to a grander scale. Forget about the dark stuff. This record maps a path by searching out pop tones and scaling things up perfectly. Forget too the theorised accounts of its delay and subsequent commercial failure, but bask in the breezy majesty of its repeat play. And let that reticent but compellingly transportive voice whisk you clean away.

We haven’t had a truly influential political voice cut through the cultural noise since Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which is a tragedy. But it's no tragedy that nobody has ever topped Drake's jazz-laced folk-pop. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

151. Find Your Eyes by Benji Reid

IN 2019, ahead of the A Thousand Words retrospective, Benji wanted his work unpacking as he felt wrongly that dyslexia held him back. As part of the writing team tasked with that, our mission was to turn a fraction of his Instagram followers into attendees. 

Volunteering was tough, finding it difficult to write for commercial ends and not simply offer jejune opinion. After the opening night drew on the usual pool of art connoisseurs and affiliations, I felt a sense of failure. Justified after returning to the gallery shortly after to find all his photographs had gone and deciding then that the unpredictable nature of gallery life wasn't for me. 

I also promoted Antoine slap bang in the middle of the Manchester International Festival that same stressful summer. Seeing that big dream evaporate, too. That it has taken this long to attend Benji's Aviva show isn't surprising, then. What is, is how utterly enthralling it is. John McGrath needs thanking for getting Benji back on the stage. A stage that comes alive as the artist narrates his lowest ebbs and inbuilt structures that surround black masculinity to create in real time some of the most captivating photography you'll see all year. Transforming these dark themes over three acts into a challenging triptych of hopeful wonder. 

the Missus and Benji

Interplay between photographer, director and performer is now made explicit. Articulating his multi disciplinary practice as a Choreo-Photolist, better than anyone, demystifies elements of his practice. The process is the performance. It evolves autobiographically, taking us on a journey from sharp monochrome intensity to a gliding colourful vibrancy. There's still a self restricting quality which is trademark Benji but the three graceful performers, themselves defying gravity, transcend all limitations.

I was nudging the missus as she clapped with his star performer mid-flight, but it became infectious and a responsive part of the show. Probably exclusive to tonight. After Benji even gave us a few moves, basking in his artistic identity, and no doubt spotting his pre-imagined Instagram attendees.  

BEATS OF LOVE 

150. Studio Electrophonique : The Sheffield space age, from The Human League to Pulp By Jamie Taylor. 

FEEL I know a lot more about Sheffield thanks to reading this. 

I loved reading about Southport and Blackpool in Bedsit Land: The Strange Worlds of Soft Cell by Patrick Clarke. The roots of their unique style and drive, plus a vivid look at bold teaching in Leeds that gave the group the courage to perform. Then it unravelled. 

James Young’s handling of Nico is a masterclass in dark comedy, wrapping the grim realities of drug waste and decadence in laugh-out-loud irreverence. Clarke keeps the characters at a distance, draining the subject of any potential intrigue. This book is masterful. Everyone and everything is fair game for Taylor's observant wit. Every page is a work of wonder that is both provocative and warm. His tendency to apologise prior to snipping at his prey is very effective. 

Refreshingly, everyday folk are every bit the equal of artists which help when making the goings on in Ken Patten's Sheffield council house the thread, but other peripheral places and people also fascinate. He has a gift for sitting you in the room to really convey memorable sensory perceptions on fellow obsessives without allowing sensitivity. Obsessives unafraid of hard work and standing out from the crowd. 

Keeping Sheffield as his focus creates unlikely asides and bedfellows; Ken Patten's daughter Michelle, hobbyists and academics, fanzine culture and indoor markets, decline and invention, Brutalist architecture and glam styling, to name but a few. Less reliant on maverick teaching methods while counterbalancing economy with imagination, gave folk the front to repurpose past art movement's ideas and really push themselves over the edge, often toward the mainstream. 

The great challenge was to bring them back toward a nondescript council house. That there's no unravelling, just a riveting read from start to finish, is a minor miracle. 

BEATS OF LOVE

149. Blush by Wilson Tanner

NOT AT all sure what Starmer's modus operandi is. 

The depth of anger disabled people feel is now entirely clear to me. For a decade, our labour MP stood by us as we navigated tory hostility. We anticipated social justice to heal years of harshness. Yet, Yvette Cooper has introduced new punitive policies. Rather than a softer approach, we have simply been handed the same bitter cup.

Off the hoof Blairisms without the charm offensive. Mentally we go, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, after two minutes of his News 24 cabinet clones speaking to the media. One week they're paraphrasing the Clegg/Cameron alliance by falsely insisting the economy runs like a domestic household, the next, the harsher tones of the insidious Farage by cutting foreign aid. Sadly, when labour comes to power, accepting the wrongheaded notion that politics has distended into a state of emergency, they adopt tories statute.

Without rhyme or reason and in next to no time at all, they've become the very people they vociferously opposed but still wooing no bigots and racists, and that is terminal. The NHS will have to be totally world-beating to win back voters. Voters who disliked tory U-turning dislike labour hypocrisy more. What could be more hypocritical than pledging 28 billion for green initiatives one month and abandoning net zero targets the next? I know, campaigning with Waspi women one month, then abandoning them the next.

Starmer's modus operandi is to make an absolute mockery of us by tinkering with the austerity designs of his predecessors instead of even attempting to win an argument. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

148. Hamlet Hail to the Thief  by William Shakepeare Adapted by Christine Jones with Stephen Hoggett, Music by Radiohead, Orhestrations by Thom Yorke

THAT THIS 424m building is host to some of the most precariously balanced hats I've ever seen is no surprise. We're still dressing like teenagers. Shakespeare's play needs no introduction. It resonated with my younger self as I went mad after my father died. And resonates still.

The correlation Christine Jones makes between Radiohead's spiked existential angst and Prince Hamlet is as opportunistic as inspired. With Yorke on board to orchestrate their work with fresh players and dialogue sacrificed for dark choreography, it could be called a dumbing down exercise.

That said, would I rather be in a smaller theatre watching a faithful three hour production? My answer is a resounding no. The play will still do the rounds five hundred years from now, but this deconstructed version is of its time. Edited for its overworked audience, it provides a sugar rush rather than great depth. Yet Samuel Blenkin's bereaved prince is utterly captivating and convincing. Spinning around the smoky austere set with pathos and energy in equal measure, he helps concentrate on the mind, emphasizing his most resonant words with an idiosyncratic thump. 

The music interjects at the right time and Yorke occasionally cleverly chops the vocals, which allows for meditative phrasing. Something a faithful reproduction doesn't permit. To hell with plot development. What the peripheral characters lose in dialogue they make up for in expressive movement. The music is a device to prize open what is timeless and weighty, re-contextualising it to accommodate the hurts and betrayals of the everyday. The democratization of culture means a big trade off. With so many of us now able to read and write, so few of us actually read and write what endures. 

Preferring instead fragmentary manicured noise, the effect of too much invigorating choice, and this adaptation is perfect in celebrating that. And for this reason, it gets a thumbs up.