Songs that mean
something to me.
Hardly an original idea. Ever since Nick
Hornby introduced the idea of blokes writing about their favourite records as a
means of illustrating their life stories, you’re rarely more than six web
clicks from somebody banging on about how acid house made them determined never
to work in an office (usually becoming buy-to-let landlords instead btw) but
here we are. I’m in a creative rut and this might help.
Originally released on the
1980 album Snap, Crackle and Bop.
Words by John Cooper
Clarke.
Music by Martin Hannett
and Steve Hopkins.
“In the cheap seats where murder breeds,
somebody’s out of breath”
At
the start of the suddenly-prescient 2002 film 28 Days Later, a group of animal rights activists infiltrate a
laboratory where chimpanzees are exposed to images of human violence for hours
on end. This somehow creates the Rage virus which decimates mankind. Anyway, I
was thinking about these chimps, strapped into the chair for hours of
terrorism, murder and various forms of bloodshed and I started thinking about
my childhood.
I
hasten to add here that I didn’t see much in the way of terrorism, murder and
bloodshed as a kid. We were in Hyde Park the day that bloke fired an airgun at
the Queen. My sister was at a disco where a boy was murdered. The most blood I
ever saw was when Mark Mercer inadvertently planted his proverbial size nines
into the top row of my mouth, changing me forever.
I
was scared of everything as a kid. The whole world seemed dangerous, every
paving stone a mugger-in-waiting, every stranger a bully-to-be, each waking day
a minefield to be carefully navigated. A lot of this seemed to me to be a
sensible reaction to the outside world. I grew up in a time of endless public
information films, where children would be electrocuted, drowned, trapped in
fridges, smashed by trains, slashed by glass, blinded by the casually tossed
firework and bitten by French Alsatians. The 1970s were grimy, filthy times.
Everywhere you went there was noise and dirt as the country seemed to be in a
continual state of repair. I didn’t like going out. I was a chimp, cured of
rage.
In
the grip of coronavirus, mild agoraphobics like myself have been cured of our
plight whilst those previously in the grip of fresh air fanaticism have been
converted into zealous acolytes for the Great Indoors. And all of us, happy box
setters and hesitant jogger alike, have become hand-scrubbing lords of a
disinfected world.
Beasley
Street is a depiction of late 70s Salford, the same town and time that gave the
world Joy Division. JCC and JD shared a producer, Martin Hannett, whose trademark
sound evokes collapsing industry, impending violence and increasing despair
with claustrophobic dubby bass, stabbed pianos and spiky guitars. I listen to
it and I hear the world as I imagined it to be when I was 8 or 9 years old, a
terrifying labyrinth of murky threats and greasy accidents, of sudden wounds
and fatal steps. Cooper Clarke’s unapologetic Salfordian scowl is heard in
every syllable, the spite and grime oozes through my headphones and makes me
feel wretched, anxious, alert.
I’ve
upped my anxiety meds recently. I’m not ashamed to say I wasn’t coping at
first. I don’t watch the news if I can help it. It feels like Beasley Street
has come back for us all. That, beneath the gentrification and regeneration of
places like it up and down the land in the last forty years, the residual
squalor and misery that haunted these streets never went away, was waiting for
something like coronavirus to make us all feel dirty and scared once more. And
when you look at the panic buying fools eager to believe the proven liar that
leads them, you feel it again, the fear, the resignation, the unkempt presence
of dread in the streets.
And
no amount of performative pot banging for dead nurses will cleanse you.
