BEATS OF LOVE

174.  Dogatana LP by  Kazumi Watanabe

AFTER SORTING through the family album, I realised a pic of my smiling grandmother with infant me on her lap was missing. 

It doesn't exist in paper, only in memory, which may be why it feels more permanent. She died and her death left us in the orbit of her husband and her own mother. Folk my father could barely stomach.

Regardless, every fortnight we made the trip to Audenshaw to visit my grandfather in his sombre bungalow. Every fortnight, without fail, he produced god-awful Fruit Polos that cemented themselves 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 my grandmother's mother, lived nearby in a dreary block of flats, so we visited there too.

While my grandmother's brother's car was outside, we had to wait in ours until he had driven off. He'd somehow talked the old woman into cutting her own daughter, my grandmother, out of the will. My father felt compelled to continue the feud by blaming him. I understand my father better now. The folk he had been closest to, his mother and his grandfather, were gone before I could walk. He was grieving in a house full of strangers.

Things improved shortly before my grandfather 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 they in no way encouraged it, they recognised it kept me quiet enough.

We had all been to his funeral a thousand times before it actually happened. I took it philosophically: I was genuinely sad, but also relieved to never eat another Fruit Polo or visit Audenshaw again.

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

IN THE late 1950s, symptoms of bulimia; the bingeing, the purging, were folded into broader psychiatric frameworks, misread, misnamed.

Leading to misdiagnosis or classification under broader neurotic categories, 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 said, 'Your mother was in the bottom block' and moved on. The phrase has stayed with me since. 

I was sad as I recalled how upset we both were leaving Horwich after my father quit his job. He took us to Middleton, unbeknownst to me, my 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. I think of that now and can barely imagine it. I recall my ambivalence after giving up on the Mancunian dream to return home myself and the one thing drawing me back: 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

OUR WORLD, where Trump apes Putin and Farage apes Trump, can only exist while the very poor are made to be the problem, the designated villain.

A world like this needs something Corbynism once promised: politics that names the powerful, not the poor, as the problem. To protect rising inequality from scrutiny, disguising lies as necessary tools becomes essential. Learning this from Mandelson, McSweeney infiltrated and sabotaged Corbyn's principled movement, installing Starmer to destroy it.

Labour parliamentarians, no longer a rich mosaic of perspectives, but angrily differing on nearly all issues, are united in vilifying Mandelson, tearing at him with bloodlust, as if his ruin might wash the guilt from their own hands. They're embroiled in his politics of deception, betraying the very people they were elected to protect, unable to agree on anything beyond the idea of the next betrayal.

It's why the same architect of this latest labour fiasco, McSweeney, was nowhere to be seen, ensnared in an ambush of his own making; the strategist outmanoeuvred by his own strategy. His head will roll. But the revolving door keeps turning, and the next shadowy face it delivers will be just as committed to deceit.

This is the byproduct of the factional politics now consuming both main parties, obscuring them from the electorate while Farage, never one to miss a photo-op, apes his way through yet another pub side-door. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

171. Nuts in May VHS

MIKE LEIGH'S wonderfully improvised 1976 film finds its comedy in the open air, and, watched now, its central character feels uncannily, uncomfortably 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. 

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, after which Keith and Candice Marie pack up and leave the campsite. 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 early-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 pushed us to take the rave experience seriously; to hear what the drugs were doing to the music, and vice versa.

Despite seeing myself as more open-minded 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 lurching onto the dancefloor in a pained but enthusiastic manner, conducting some private ritual only I understood. What I noticed in proper dance clubs was that nobody else stood still, and nobody needed an imaginary mountain to get them moving. 

In typical fashion, just as my scruff look became popular in places like the Herbal Tea Party, I began shopping for clothes and found myself equally out of place there, now overdressed in new clobber. My world has always been my bedroom. A place free from the constraints of conversation or fashion. A place where I play music, read, dream, and worry. I feel quietly alien from people who don't do these things, as though we're orbiting different planets entirely.

Sure, I didn't evolve the way I'd hoped, but at least I've never had Ebeneezer Goode in my subconsciousness. I know folk who have.

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 that, in person, you can only ever sense at best, never quite grasp. 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 conjures vivid sensation in 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 found it cathartic; it taught me about myself (I cringe to admit) and, thankfully, about the wider world.

BEATS OF LOVE 

168. Time Ain't Nothing by Green on Red 

REMINDED OF a good pal who compartmentalised his friendships based on a precise understanding of the British class-system 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; and here he was, collapsing on the floor in convulsions, whilst the eminent lawyers he'd been drinking with 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. My parents, he conceded, were lower middle class like his, but I, unlike those professionals, could afford to be seen with someone convulsing at the start of a heavy session.

He expected me to calculate that he was wrong about them not being his friends, even as I was absorbing it all over a phone call. Unbeknownst, I cast the die on our friendship from the moment I put the phone down, reaching no disagreement. 

What I should have said was this: 'it is very British to convolute a class system in a knee-jerk reaction to Marxism, sub-labelling everything until the original categories dissolve into social embarrassment.' 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 will always be relevant, because too many people have been convinced there is no class war at all.