The day I got a phone call from the people behind the Mercury Music Prize, I thought somebody was having a laugh. We'd like you to be a judge, said the nice chap on the phone, but first you have to meet me for a pint in a pub. Surely this was a wind-up. But then I met the lovely Kevin over lagers and cheese and onion crisps, he said why they wanted me, he said what it involved – listening to mountains of CDs for no money, but for other glorious rewards, like a great time, free records, and a lifetime being slagged off by people on newspaper comment boards – and this woman, bowled over, gave a huge, beaming yes.
2007 was a strange year to start. New-rave was fluttering its brightly coloured sleeves at the time, and the Klaxons scooped the prize, to mixed reviews – and yes, the album I loved belly-flopped before the final hurdle. A year later, however, the opposite happened. The Seldom-Seen Kid leapt over it elegantly, smiled at the crowd, and made the finishing line with a big, burly flourish.
The record still gets better every time I hear it, each track holding its own, special magic, but Starlings is the song that still grabs me by the scruff of the neck. The fluttering beat, like a heart waking up, those thick vocal harmonies rising up slowly, and the soft, simple piano figure whirring the song into action, before brass is suddenly shaking us, BLASTING US into life. Then the story unfurls beautifully. There's the humour of Guy Garvey's complaints about the Premier ignoring his invitations; the way he says "bunch" in that big, Bury gulp; the dreams about marriages in orange groves; the brilliant idea of asking your beloved to "back a horse that's good for glue", and the perfect rhythms of one of the sweetest couplets ever committed to melody – "You are the only thing/In any room you're ever in".
Then the flocks of starlings circling as he looks into her eyes, the understated perfection of the murmured "Darling, is this Love?", that blast again, suddenly louder, more true. The idea of romance infused with reality being so much more romantic; the language of love, plain, dirty and simple, flavoured with alcohol and cigarettes, blood, sweat and tears.
When Elbow won that September, everyone was overjoyed. I had to talk on TV for ten seconds about how wonderful they were, so I babbled a bit, full of happiness and wine. I then watched the band speak to Lauren Laverne, and as they walked off – me being bolstered by booze – I grabbed Garvey by the arm. I told him I was a judge, that I was over the moon, and could I give him a hug – such a terrible, embarrassing fan-girl thing to do. Thankfully, he said yes. He cuddled me back like a big, lovely bear, but dropped his wine glass as he did so, and I was asked by an official, passing by, to get him another.
I can still see Garvey defending my honour, even more full of happiness and wine than me. "SHE'S A JUDGE", he sang brightly, sounding even more precious than he did on record. "She can do whatever she FUCKING WELL LIKES". Not exactly "Come with me, sweetheart, to an island made for two", but a defence nonetheless, and one that he finished with an extra squeeze of my arm, another kiss on my cheek. Thinking of it now, I'm still smiling, the starlings still circling, and the victory lap is still ours for the taking.
Because it's sometimes too simple to look back and look far. Too easy to forget the songs, and the feelings, that have come into life lately. A dark room in the ICA, four shy teenagers, their music so spacious, every tiny part of it shining with magic, with light, and with power. The album in the kitchen, again, again, again, the first one for years to have that sort of impact, the sad, country guitar sounds, the electronics, the darkness, the sink filling with water, over my hands, over the sides, to the floor, as I stood there, captured by it, letting it in.
Sometimes I think that music is an agent of witchcraft, a spell – it can wipe our minds clean, it almost will us to merge with it. It makes me feel just like Shelter suggests – "Could I be? Was I there?/ It felt so crystal in the air". Hearing it in my kitchen, in Dan's living room, on my headphones, in the Hoxton Hall, in the Village Underground, in the Bowery Ballroom, and it taking me away, burrowing me inside it, every time. Hearing Romy singing, "Please teach me gently/How to breathe", my chest rising for her.
I bought The Noise Made By People when I lived in 76 Alexandra Gardens, the first home in London that I loved. It was a strange ground-floor four-room flat on a steep, angled road in Muswell Hill – just across from the palace, down the road from The Green Man – and I adored it more than life itself, for some reason. It was tiny and poky and the kitchen smaller than a stamp, but it had little things about it that I just got lost in. The fairylit bedroom that I mentioned earlier, with a brick-built fireplace in the corner holding a wicker basket of fake sunflowers. The fridge full of Steve's leftover pizza from La Porchetta, which Alex and I would nibble like rabbits. The three little steps down to the living room that she would jump down, bang-bang-BANG, the big Casablanca poster we got framed for too much money, which broke as we used it to fight against the wind on the journey home. The sofa where the three of us would squish through that summer of 2000, watching This Life on repeat and the first series of Big Brother, the same sofa where Alex would sit alone one year later, on an afternoon in September, watching two planes endlessly crashing into two silver towers.
Around this time, I met a man. I forget his name now, but I remember he had a bowl haircut, thick glasses, and was a bit older than me – no, it wasn't like that. I can't remember how we met either, but I remember he wanted someone to sing in his new band. We both liked Broadcast and late '60s music, so I thought that was a good sign, and then he asked me to make a tape of me singing some songs.
I still remember how odd that felt. I didn't know what to do. This was something that other people did – people in proper bands, people with confidence. I picked up my mum's guitar – dusty, lovely and strong, as it still is, its lovely 1969 strings slowly bruising my fingers. I strummed along to something by Portishead, I think, and also this song, making sure every note was perfect. It felt weird and wayward, so I hid behind my fringe to press record, and shyly press stop.
I sent him the tape. Some weeks passed. Then some more. And then he finally replied, saying that my guitar-playing style suggested I didn't understand real music, and no one else would think I did either. So when I look at my mum's guitar in the corner of the room now – its strings reaching middle age this year, the dust even thicker – I still apologise to the poor, beautiful thing. But I also still sing this song in the shower every now and then, hoping the man with glasses and bowl hair has seen my byline picture in the Guardian, and I blow him a raspberry.
The sound of winter. Cold winds. The walk from Penton Street through the N1 Centre, my wet feet on grey paving, a silver crown of thorns suspended in the air. The bus home, the sky black, the voices cutting in, swirling into my ears like water into a plughole. An album so chilly but also comforting, bleak but also bracing, stitching all the sounds from the city effortlessly together, and this track in particular, the one Rob and I would play every morning in the office before it filled with clatter and noise, now taking me home. The two-step rhythms the sound of an approaching train on the North London Line, the swooshes its doors opening, the ghostly vocals in its corners the angels on my shoulders, taking me into the crowd, holding me closely, taking me to the East.
This is March 2005, the motorik beat taking me towards the Hammersmith Apollo, the motorik beat giving the room a warm, steady pulse, the motorik beat taking me towards him again. The beers, the eye contact, the bus home, the unscheduled stop. The six months of watching, waiting and hiding, then saying and doing.
This is March 2009, two girls in Seattle about to broach the West Coast. That motorik beat – three times on the radio in only two days, charging around our twin room at the Ace Hotel, our cases spilling with colours, Belltown buzzing outside, pushing us out towards the Public Library, all yellow neon escalators and ruby red rooms, to Ivo's House Of Clams, shot glasses glimmering with oysters, to the Public Market, the Redwood, the Bauhaus, the Space Needle.
It returning briefly in Portland, like a happy echo. A motorik beat saying so much about him and the life I once had, and the life, once again, that I was about to take back.
Two in the morning, this time last year, Neil asleep on the sofa, as always, dead to the world, the same Neil that Barry and I couldn't wake all those years ago as we woke up on the nightbus, daylight shocking us into consciousness, the 259 heading north-east to Waltham Cross, so many miles from home. Now, he snores gently, the backing track to Lucy, his girlfriend of so many years now, and me, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, white wine filling our livers, slowing our drunken limbs, lifting our voices as we flick through the music channels, looking for Leona Lewis.
We found her that night, and that dark, ghostly video, hearing her soft, smoky voice doing something remarkable to that Snow Patrol ballad over and over and over again. Hearing the way she turned it into a strange, doomy requiem, the way she sung that second line – "and now I really have to go" – giving it a sadness and weight that it had never had before. And me sitting here, a friend's arm round my shoulders, in the flat that he had left, all his things still around us, getting some sort of comfort from it. Lucy's arms holding the pieces of me tightly together as everything else cut me through.
This is the taste of bourbon, gold spilling out of a bottle, swirling around glasses, tickling our tongues. A dark, dusty living room, old sofas, crinkled corners, a television blinking at us through the fog of the night. That strange, lovely spring, the two of us staying up until it was light, talking and laughing and kissing and drinking, MTV2 oblivious to our new lives. This song was its theme tune. This video, all angles, colours and shapes, its reason for being.
I still have my thin-cased, promotional copy of Franz Ferdinand's first album. Even when most of my CDs sit glowering at me now, asking me why I never pull them out of their shelves and unsleeve them – their digital cousins being my usual companions – this one sits there smugly, knowing it is still loved, knowing it is still played. Take Me Out is the reason why. Its first chord like a clarion call, spurring me into action, reminding me why music was there, reminding me what it could do. The repeated bass notes straight after it, like the thuds of a drum, a soldier marching his troops into war. The deceptively slow pace of the song at its start, its stately, slow build-up, its military might. The arrival of the crosshair, the boy who is "just a shot away from you", the brilliant double meanings that give this song its power. "I know I won't be leaving here with you" – a phrase just at home at the nightclub as it would be on the battlefield; "I say, take me out" – the idea of submission, surrender; by his fire, in his arms.
The song exploding into its second section, and me sitting there with him, far away from anyone we knew. A new couple in hiding, a girl with her head marked, letting these words become her new language. They told me I was lonely, and he was here waiting for me. They also told me if I moved, then this could die.
The first time , I was 10. She was on Top Of The Pops, sailing through Sydney in an open-top silver car, wearing a black and white stripy top, her blonde curly hair swirled around by the wind, tall concrete buildings and bridges shooting by behind her. I thought she was the most glamorous person I had ever seen, and I remembering my mother if I could have a perm. She said no, and I sulked.
The second time, I was 16. We were in Martha's, a dodgy club in Swansea, sneaking in, underage. I was drinking a Malibu and Coke – I liked the coconut, but not that strange taste beneath it – and I remember my mascara feeling stiff on my eyelashes. A video screen was playing above the bar, above the crowds of grown-up boys, and I remember looking at it nervously. She was on it, looking like a brightly coloured cartoon character, wearing red lipstick, yellow fur, with lilac, glittery eyelids. "Lonely?", asked the video. "Do You Hurt?" "Sad?" I remember the song's strange, Indian strings shimmering through the bar, me sucking on my straw, letting them soothe me.
The last time, I was 23. It was a bright, Saturday morning in the summer, and we had got up late, drinking tea in our dressing gowns, watching CDUK. She was in a car again going across a bridge – but this time it was yellow, and she was moving the gears. La la la, la la la la la. I called Barry in from the kitchen – quick, quick, quick, this is brilliant – just as she appeared in her white robes, split to here, there and everywhere, and I still remember his wide eyes, our laughs echoing around the living room, our ears alert and alive.
I still love the way that a favourite song can come into your life when you're least expecting it. That the moments that they come be simple as these, as profane as they are profound.
One afternoon, I did it. I left the flat, took the bus to Bethnal Green, and took the tube to Wanstead. I'd been dreaming of Wanstead. Odd, really, because I'd never even been there. In these dreams, it was a little piece of heaven on a red square loop, a soft, grassy wonderland on the edges of the city, wiggling its nose at me at the end of the Central Line. Just close enough to town be lively, distant enough for escape. It called me, and I came.
On the double-decker, as the train doors hissed shut, as the cold Wanstead air swept me towards Starbucks and out again into the light, Hot Chip carried me, insistent and urgent. Shake Your Fist was my favourite track from Made In The Dark, and I remembering playing it four or five times on repeat as I walked, its rhythms pounding the streets like a jackhammer. It was a song about a person in a new strange environment – a festival, I'd guessed, not a twee London suburb, its visions shaped by psychedelic drugs rather than an Extra Shot Latte. As I whirred past the charity shops and estate agents and pubs, I realised what a strange song it was – Todd Rundgren popping up with a game in its middle, cowbells accompanying synth-noises that sounded like alien beings, someone shouting "argh!" as I sped towards Snaresbrook. As I tried to escape, it filled my ears with new, strange sounds.
And as I stood outside Judith Of Wanstead, a peculiar old ladies' clothes shop in the middle of the high street, I also realised how strange I was being. Wanstead wasn't for me, and I wasn't its keeper. I was a Hackney girl, as part of its playgrounds and park benches and Turkish grocers and community churches and swimming pools and Irish pubs and dirty bus stops as anyone else who had lived there for so many years. As the song pounded sense into me, I also realised I needed to escape from something else. New dreams made in the dark were one thing. New decisions made in the daytime, as the sun shone, were another entirely.
Sunday night. The train back from Cardiff, the sky turning black, the realisation that he hadn't done what I asked him to. Outside Kings Cross station, gulps of breath, stinging eyes, the phonecall, protestations, no apologies, my voice raising and raising and the finger on the cancel button, the fuck you as I did it, the storm whirling me up York Way. Emily meeting me at Kings Place, the friend I'd give anything for, the friend who knew exactly how it felt, the dark room, the cold seats, Susanna and the Magical Orchestra slowly digging their fingernails into us, lifting our hearts out, cutting them up with the shining piano strings, her ghostly voice and the silence our surgeons for the night.
Lay All Your Love On Me finished me. The lyrics – spread out against the sky, anaesthetised upon a table – the words of a woman, grown-up, asking for one last chance, her desperation moving into numbness, a cold blast of acceptance. The reminders of our insane early days ("I was sitting like a shooting duck/A little smalltalk, a smile, and baby, I was stuck"). The madness when I met him ("I still don't know what you've done with me" – the "with", rather than a "to", showing how completely your mind can be taken away). The need for him to be there ("don't go wasting your emotions/lay all your love on me"); the soft, icy terror of it ending again ("I feel a kind of fear/When I don't have you near"). Turning round to Emily, her seeing my eyes, us both knowing what was coming.
Six weeks after I told him to go, there I was, in the back of a minicab, coming home to an empty house after a Christmas party, and suddenly ABBA's original was coming out of the radio. I heard hope in its heart for a moment, hope springing eternal, until the magic started to fade, and the real world returned. Then the fare, the closed door, my return to our ghosts.
It all started with Keith running into the office, quick quick, radio on, coffee on, volume up, they're playing it again, yes they are, yes they are, pararapa, pararapa, pararapa, pa-pa, drumbeat, rustle of shaky egg, drumbeat, rustle of shaky egg, the bassline kicking in, put your lips together and blow. Those first few times like being in on a secret – my God, have you heard it, can you feel it, can you whistle it? – before it went out into the world and came something bigger than rattles and breaths.
Listening to it now, it still sounds like a freak of nature, a tiny song that did something extraordinary, a success story out of nowhere that suddenly was everywhere. It makes me think about seeing the band in the Barfly early on in the single campaign, when the fuss was in its first flushes, Peter sitting in the bar wearing a red shirt and jeans, looking absolutely terrified. I think about going to Stockholm, my second ever job for The Guardian, interviewing every Swedish band but them (they were in America by then) about the rush of indie pop taking over our radio stations two days dashing from cafe to office to all-night outdoor party, everyone blonde and lovely under luminous baubles. I think about the moment when every advert and ident was swept up in its magic, and the time Kanye West turned it into something quite different.
But more than anything, I just think of me and Keith, in the office bright and early in the morning, like two partners in crime, in our own secret club, playing it louder and louder, trying to drum and push air from our mouths, the song rushing on and on.
By summer 2002, I knew I had to do something. I was working as a medical secretary at the Tavistock Centre, a mental health trust nestling between Swiss Cottage, Hampstead and Belsize Park, a statue of Freud glowering at patients outside it. I'd fell into the job, really, taking a temp position after a gruesome six months doing advertising sales – something I'd quit that when they stuck me in an Westminster office with only a box of calling cards and a racist, bottom-pinching boss, as low-flying planes over the Houses Of Parliament reminded me what had just happened in New York City. After that, I loved the Tavistock dearly, even though being there wasn't what I'd planned to do with my life. I really loved our office – sitting with Sheila and Alana, gossiping and filing and typing as I administered files for the family therapy team, Capital Gold and Magic FM giving us Foreigner, Mr Mister and Phyllis Nelson on the half-hour, another cup of tea, yes please, my foot on the audio pedal, tip-tap, tip-tap, learning about other people's lives, itching to write about them properly.
But one night at home, I started to cry. I knew where the tears were coming from. I'd wanted to be a journalist, I told Barry, and now it was too late to try again. When I was 16, I worked at the Llanelli Star, writing about old people's memories, magistrates court cases, and the latest goings-on down in Stradey Park, and I'd gone to a short magazine course, run by Mojo editor, Mat Snow, and he'd liked my writing. But then university came, and my confidence left me when I went to the student papers – too many bright, sparkling stars whooshing and whirring around The Oxford Student corridors, my fingers freezing on the keys when I thought about what to write. I got into Students Union politics and the idea of being a lecturer instead, and as the tears fell that night, I still hadn't forgiven myself. Because now, here I was, 24 years old, owner of a Masters degree with distinction, spending my life every day writing about how parents and children were torn apart by divorce and civil war, alcoholism and mental illness, doing a job I could've done straight after my GCSEs.
I had no idea I could change my life at this point. I was doing something worthy, I knew that. But deep down, I knew that it wasn't for me, that I was coasting along, that there was something inside me dying to be set free.
That summer, out of nowhere, I had the idea for Smoke. Matt and I had become friends the previous winter, when I'd met him at a gig for his label, Shinkansen Records, and we'd become email friends, sharing titbits and silly stories about the city I was now falling in love with. One morning it hit me – we could turn our ideas into a magazine. We met in The Lamb in Lamb's Conduit Street, swirling pints of heady bitter, and I told him my idea. We saved money for months, wrote half the first issue ourselves, and I slowly gained confidence. I got a new job, working for a small children's charity, and by March 2003, we were printing the first 1,000 copies of Smoke, letting it out into the world, two proud parents letting their baby roam free.
While Smoke was my little piece of heaven, the charity job was hell on earth. The first day had seemed magical – me in my new red, funnel-neck coat, walking up the fire escape, like a homecoming queen, the promise of a PA position in the House Of Lords pushing me on – before I got redeployed, asked to work one-to-one with young people instead. Young girls coming here from Afghanistan, after being raped, recovering heroin addicts, surly boys with no hope in their hearts for any kind of future. My boss, Captain Chandran, even more unpleasant than the man in Westminster, leering at my chest every day; calling Ahmed, the lovely Muslim graduate who worked with me, Osama; faking statistics; not offering me any training or support; my chest tightening so much on one particular morning that my still very dear friend Heather called me a cab, whisking me to Hammersmith for an ECG, where a particularly bold doctor told me this life had to stop.
But then Smoke was sent to the printers, sparking up a glint of light on the murky Acton horizon, and suddenly I had reason to go forward, go on.
And then, something incredible happened. In February, the same month that we were getting Smoke ready for the printers, I'd spent a weekend in Swansea, and was now at the train station, about to head home. There it was. A new magazine, a picture of Nick Cave on the cover, seducing me from the shelves, calling me over. It was called Word. I remember looking at the cover lines and my heart starting to heave again, an old rush of magazine love returning to my bones. This was just like that moment in Morgans in Gorseinon when I was 10, a magazine called Smash Hits next to Look-In and Hi!, Brother Beyond on the cover with surfboards, begging my mother for 48 pence, taking it home, my life changing, the world opening up, the people writing for it becoming my heroes.
And now, I felt the same again. I was hooked. Every month after that, I'd take the 207 bus to Ealing on the second Thursday of the month, rush into WH Smiths, quickly buy my bounty, and take it back to the office, my lunch hour nearly gone. It had a magazine of the month slot in its front section, and when Smoke came back from the printers, I had an insane idea – we would send some to Word. A few weeks later, I got an email from David Hepworth, saying he loved it, asking if he could interview us. And the next day, Paul Du Noyer sending another, asking me if I'd like to write for him. That night in The Angel, Matt and I, David Hepworth and editor Mark Ellen, the dictaphone, the long-hand notebook, my voice starting to crackle with confidence. A week later, in purple Primark sandals in a posh bar with Paul Du Noyer, talking about what I could write, talking about what I could do. So exciting, so unreal, like a dream coming true.
In Issue 5 of The Word, Smoke was magazine of the month. In Issue 6, my first review glowed in its middle – a piece on Teenage Fanclub's recently released best-of, as part of a feature on great records and books for summer. I still remember touching the page with amazement, imagining that my words and my name were going to disappear. I played the album more and more at home to keep it real, and I Need Direction was the track I loved the most.
Every time I play it now, it still brings back so many memories, every chiming guitar string setting off another. Two months later, taking a train and a lift from Uncle Mike to a Travelodge in Leicester to interview Billy Bragg. A week later, lying about having a meeting with some young mums in Southall, and sneaking down to Hammersmith to interview the Stereophonics' Kelly Jones instead. And then Paul Du Noyer asking me if I wanted to be his assistant over the phone, my face gazing out at the rainy Acton skyline, my smile giving it light. Getting the 207 – not to Ealing, but Shepherds Bush – having a drink with Mark Ellen, the offer letter over the table. The wonderful realisation that something had happened, that something was happening, that this was my new life, that I had made it myself.
A darkening night in 2005, the sun setting sleepily over Clyro, a perfect weekend winding to an end at our first Green Man Festival. The tiny site at Baskerville Hall, the warmth turning the green grass to gold, the feeling of peace and contentment winding through the little fields, the stolen kisses up on the tree trunk in the dark, me getting cider-giddy and buying hippy dresses and daft instruments and falling in love with idea of what a festival could be, the thought that everything could take on a magical glow. And all the musicians pitching up with us – Adem and King Creosote playing gigs after hours around canvas and campfire, while Will Oldham was spotted with mustard on his moustache at the hot dog stand, next to Joanna Newsom, not shrieking and wailing and twanging her harp, but turning out to be a real woman after all.
And then her coming on stage in the Sunday night headline slot, playing new music that I had never heard before. Her songs starting gently, setting alight, becoming long, episodic creatures with no verses and choruses, moving in wild and weird directions. All of them sounding so incredibly beautiful as they whipped and weaved, and the lyrics so strong...listening to them unfold and unravel, knowing I would never forget this hour standing rapt in the light rain, his arm secretly around my middle, listening to her.
We had seen Newsom before, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall back in Spring. A date that started at lunchtime on a Saturday at a fancy restaurant, a long walk along the river, my wrap dress whipping up in the wind showing my tights to all-comers, our laughs deep from our full bellies, the walk across Waterloo Bridge with the gold of Westminster to our right, the silver of Canary Wharf to our left, and then the concert, weak with wine, our held hands, her invitations. And now, on the Welsh Borders on this cooling night in August, watching her moving on, as we followed her lead.
Emily floated into the night like a peculiar, modernist poem, studded with internal rhymes that I couldn't shake from my mind ("The rusty light by the pines tonight"; "the yoke and the axe and the old smoke-stacks"). Then the images that hung in my heart for hours, the meanings running through them well worked-out and whittled (the mud-cloud made by the skipped stones "like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror"; the "furrows, curling back, like a match held to a newspaper"; the peonies that "wetly bow"); the search for a midwife "who could help me find my way back in"; the crackle of death that gave darkness to the song's sweetest moments, the idea of ships sailing away, poppies growing "knee-deep", the lines "fading in my kingdom".
This was Newsom's own Waste Land, full of pharoahs and pharisees, stars and dirt-red bullets, revealing itself to the skies and the stars and to us. And me standing in that field thinking that this is what it must've been like to hear Dylan in the '60s, to hear someone creating their own particular poetry, rhythm and metre, making music that sounded like nothing else, that reinvented the wheel. A complete world calling us in, asking us to fall in love with it, as we did again with each other.
This takes me back to the Archway flat, our dying days, the new TV in the corner like a beacon of light, its ten billion channels keeping our eyes blinking. Wiley's Wot U Call It? offered us a glimmer of brightness on those cold, dark evenings, the video's sharp colours and briskness making us smile, the boys bouncing around the turntables making us laugh, the two of us lapping up the daftness of the melody at the beginning – a sketch from an Oliver Postgate programme gone wonky, gone harebrained, gone gaga – while Barry sang along, "wot u call it - urban? Ka ka ka ka ka KAAAA!"
Me looking at his sweet little face, feeling a grin light mine up, reminding me why we had started this, even though it was ending, making me glad that we'd been there for each other.
I've always been doey-eyed about first lines. I pick up novels just to read their opening sentences again, to hear the syllables taking shape, to feel them curl around my tongue, imagine them spinning into life. "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they had meant to murder him". I like lines like that best – prosaic, conversational almost, before the sentence ends like the toll of a doomsday bell.
Feist's The Reminder begins this way too. It was the first album I wrote about for a series of reviews for The Guardian website in 2007, playing albums in real time, scribbling down thoughts and ideas as I went. I'd not got round to listening to this record before that cold evening, sitting at my desk staring at the black sky hanging over the Lea, a desklamp burning a halo around me to my left, a strong cup of coffee driving me on to my right. I remember putting my CD in the Mac drive, clicking play, and wondering what lay ahead.
Feist's voice – pure, clear, lovely – cutting through the air with precision but prettiness, strength as well as sweetness. "I'm sorry," she sang, "two words I always think/After you've gone/When I realise I was acting all wrong." Its words dancing up the nape of my neck - there was something about the delicate sadness of that opening sentiment, but the ache of regret weighing down its gentle ebb and flow, that I couldn't shake away. I filed the review the next morning, and took this line with me.
I remember listening to it on my iPod a year later, heading down to the Albert Memorial, meeting Welsh Dan for a picnic on a bright early evening, knocking back plastic glasses of wine, trailing our fingers in the grass, going over a friendship of nearly fifteen years, putting the world to rights. And then the ticket he bought for me for my 30th birthday, the great seats under red and gold and white stone and that glorious organ that I'd first fallen in love with when I was seven, watching my mother sing with the Thousand Voices, feeling so tiny, so in awe. And Feist arriving under it, its pipes glowing in different colours, gazing up at it and feeling so much older now. Realising that here I was, listening to grown-up love songs with someone who had known me as a teenager, come with through my twenties, and was still here as my fourth decade slowly spun into life. And Feist singing that song, her first line ringing out as clear as bell, the full stop disappearing, the story moving on.
When I was a little girl – three, perhaps four – my father bought a personal computer. This was 1981 or 1982, the very early days of technology weaving its ghostly way into our ordinary lives. I can't remember if the Spectrum 48K was Dad's first system, but it's the one I remember fondly, its black, rubber keys like velvet under chubby fingers, the tape recorder next to it holding games on cassette – football and cricket acted out in stick figures and formulas, space creatures zapped into pixellated glitter by deadly bytes. My father teaching me to rewind these them all to the start, press LOAD, two quotation marks, RETURN. The screen flashing cyan and black like a stormy sky, then yellow and black like a feverish bee, bleeps and beeps bringing their contents to life.
I loved these sounds as much as the programs themselves. I loved the strangeness and sweetness of sine waves, the way they instantly created a very different kind of world. My father taught me how to make my own tunes with them, using the BEEP command on the Spectrum, and I would spend the hours after school sitting on his lap, learning about the pitch and the length of notes, and translating them very slowly into co-ordinates through BASIC, squealing as they came through the speakers when I pressed the keys.
I still think this is why electronic music has always moved me so much, why it tugs at my synapses, why it sets butterflies swirling in my stomach – especially as it reminds me of Dad, who died a few years later. It is my link back to him, to the geeky side of me that often gets forgotten, to the person who always found excitement in new things, who would have adored to see the world developing as quickly as it did.
In my twenties, at the same time as I started thinking about Dad again, I started exploring these sounds again. Electroclash had rekindled my love for the sounds of computer music, and I went a bit silly for 8-bit and minimal techno. Then I fell for Krautrock and prog, the eerie lullabies of theremins and Moogs. I wrote an article for the Guardian about library music, I went down to Wadhurst to visit Ron Geesin and his music barn full of Fairlights and VCS-3s, and I hungered to hear strange machines – to be the receiver for their ghostly, lovely calls.
And then, late in 2008, suddenly living on my own and cocooning myself in sounds, Benge released Twenty Systems. Benge was Ben Edwards, a musician who collected analogue synthesisers, and this was his history of the way they developed, year by year. It killed me. It was warm, soulful and beautiful – I adored the itchy, doomy pulse of 1968 Moog Modular, beginning the album with menace and mystery, and the soft loveliness of 1978 Roland 100M, an instrument the same age as me.
But the 1975 Moog Polymoog was my favourite. In my mind, Benge had set it off gently, its soft sequenced melodies performed by little wooden creatures, its tune like the memory of an Afrobeat song slipping into a minor key. When Dan and I got back together a few months later, he told me that he'd liked this record too, and when I asked what his favourite track was, he said it was this one. This was a good sign, I thought – that something so simple but so sublime, so humble but so heavenly, could strike a similar note in the two of us.
This is still one of my favourite pieces of music from the last ten years, which is strange for something so short and so small; something intended to be shown as a demonstration of the abilities of an odd musical instrument. But when I hear its soft machinations, there is something almost godly at work in it. It is the sound of innocence reasserting its hold on our memories, reminding us that childlike wonder can still be with us as we get older, and how it can still bring people together.
Imagine it, he said. You writing your long, rambling reviews, heading here, going there, and us living together, me making us dinner, you looking out of our windows at the darkening skies as you typed, tap-tap-tap, me looking after you.
We were in Bishops Stortford when he said it, in his Dad's house, ten minutes walk from the train station (out of the back entrance, across the road, down that posh street with the trees past Herts and Essex, out the end, then across, down the drive, and then home). He'd come and get me, in that corduroy coat with the furry collar that Richard Medina had given him in LA, the one that I thought made him look like a World War two pilot, his hair curling onto his collar, his nose pink in the cold.
That night, he made a Thai seafood curry, while I sat at the table, his comfy headphones on my ears, listening to Bonnie "Prince" Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music, writing a page review of it for The Word. I wrote about my memories of Kentucky in 2000, the way I wanted to find him, remembering the bitter cold while sitting in this new warmth. I remember thinking how I never thought I could be this happy.
Four years later, sitting in our flat, him making us dinner, me looking out of the windows at the darkening skies as I typed, tap-tap-tap, listening to the same record. Wondering what had happened exactly to make the songs lose their beauty, for our dream to die.
When I think of Christmas 2006 and the lead up to it, I think of Amy Winehouse. I think of the album sampler that had been sitting on my desk for two weeks back in August, the moment I finally had time to pop into my CD drive, hearing Rehab burst out, feeling my ears wake up. Convincing the boys in the office to play it on the stereo, their dazed, impressed faces, us all sharing the feeling that this was a big, great pop record waiting to happen. Calling Amy on the phone in early December, in a cab back to her friend's house for a bath – her words, not mine – telling me about her grandmother dying at the beginning of the year, how the death pushed her on, how she wanted a fag and gin, how she'd just done a photo shoot at her old school in Southgate where she'd set off the fire alarm just to piss off the headmistress, and how she lived in Muswell Hill with her new boyfriend, Alex. At the time, I was living here too, for six weeks, in Dan's big, shared house, before we moved in together. Amy and I ranted about the yummy mummies who thought they owned the high street, how crap the buses could be, and how annoying the layout was in Sainsburys. "See you in the crisps aisles, darlin'!" is how she signed off, and I remember putting the phone down, feeling grateful the world had her.
I bought Back To Black for my boyfriend's sister that Christmas, and I remember spending our five days in France in the snow and the ice listening to it pouring out of Hannah's mp3 player. Me feeling like an evangelist, wanting everyone to listen.
And for the first time ever – what a lovely coincidence – they did, although I'm still sad that Amy and I never had our rendezvous by the Monster Munch. Six months later, she was leaving Muswell Hill as well as her boyfriend behind, the biggest new pop star in the world, taking over America, getting back together with Blake, getting back into bad ways. I was still at my desk at Word, trying to find the next Amy in the pile of promo CDs, and getting involved with the Mercury Prize, willing her to win.
Even though she didn't, something that still hurts, I still play this song often – her second single after Rehab – and think about how much it changed pop. How Radio 1 finally gave in and playlisted it after so many people tuned in to Amy's talent; how her ripe, sweaty lyrics made people remember what a female pop star could say, as well as be; what a breath of smoky life she really, really was. Her getting "sniffed out like Tanqueray" as we filled ourselves with Christmas spirits, listening to a dirty angel heating up the winter.
Christmas Day, watching the TV at Mam and Dad's, three weeks after Kentucky, so very far away. Away from my new grown-up life in London as well, no longer 22 and worldly but 12 in pink pyjamas, drinking tea on the settee, listening to Mam's kitchen chorus as I stared at the screen (switched on as always, just like the kettle peeking over the mugs and the teabags). The words on the television – Kirsty MacColl, 1959-2000 – still not looking, sounding or feeling right, a nasty mistake among the baubles and the tinsel and the soft focus smiles.
Fairytale Of New York had made me – and many other people – cry long before Kirsty died. It reminded me of Andrew, a fourth year chemistry student I'd met at university when I was an English fresher, a boy who had fallen off some stairs one night after a drunken college festival, threw up in my toilet, let me give him a new toothbrush, and then sat up and talked to me until the morning came. It wasn't an auspicious start to any whirlwind romance, but what followed was lovely. We went out for eighteen months that we thought would be forever, before I dumped him on a whim, and sat at Digbeth Coach Station in Birmingham on a cold, icy Sunday, listening to David Essex singing A Winter's Tale through the speakers, his voice no longer melancholy, but slyly accusatory.
That Christmas, I listened to Fairytale Of New York on repeat – one of Andrew's favourite songs – and its middle-eight took on new meaning as I tried to justify my actions. To my overly dramatic 20-year-old mind, Andrew had took my dreams with him when I first met him. He thought he'd taken them with him, put them with his own, and built his dreams around me.
Two years after Andrew and I had broken up, after a few ill-advised reconcilations in Midlands bedrooms and London pubs, I'd got to know Kirsty's voice better. I'd bought Electric Landlady on CD with some birthday money, and fallen in love with her warmth and her humour. I'd also heard a few songs from her new record, Tropical Brainstorm, and adored In These Shoes, the strummed harp as it started like a door swinging open. And I listened to its versus and choruses – so exquisite and elegant, so ballsy and wry – I imagined the spirit of Celia Cruz coming through the no-nonsense patter of a Croydon redhead. I loved it beyond measure.
After Kirsty died, I read about how much she had fell in love with the music of Cuba and Mexico, how it had fired her up, made her someone new. And earlier this month, I finally got round to reading the book her mother had written, Sun On The Water, which talked about her daughter's brilliant life, and urged us to remember it. The campaign for justice for Kirsty ended a few weeks later, but many of us will never ever forget her – and this is why, every Christmas, I look past Fairytale Of New York, past its huge, emotional swing and the memories it conjures, especially the memory of those strange days in 2000. Instead, I remember the woman with the sense of adventure, whose songs still make so many people feel strangely alive.
Two-and-a-half hours north of London, white wings carrying us to the top of the world. Belt on, nose pressed to the window like a curious toddler, watching us slowly descend through the clouds. Sharp-edged islands appearing one by one, arching their spiny backs towards us, looking like no land I had ever seen before. Flying over the cliff, the light bright and long - nose up, nose down - the runway shining underneath us, the wheels touching the ground, the Faroe Islands pulling us in.
When I was young, I didn't care for geography much. When I studied it in school, I only enjoyed the lessons about frothing volcanoes and natural disasters rather than river erosion and glacial moraine – I was all for great physical dramas to match my flighty adolescent ones. But as I got older, I started to get itchy feet and look beyond my blinkers, find lovely things even in the most unlovely places. I also wanted to see new things rather than scoot from A to B, so I did. There were the holidays, obviously – the two weeks from Vancouver to Portland, exploring back streets and murky corners, old cinemas and traffic bridges, the waterfall at Snoqualmie and the ice around Mount Rainier; ten days in Western Andalucia with manzanilla sherry and deep-fried sea anemones, falling into Gibraltar for Steve and Liz's wedding, falling out of the pool at 5am with the boys in our underwear; our big trip to Japan and Korea for Oliver and Hyun-Sook's wedding, the typhoon we ran through and the earthquake we slept through, the temple gates and the bullet trains, the barbecues and the paejeons, the onsens and the ryokans, the national parks and the endless tall towers. Then there were the work trips abroad after my first revelation in Vancouver, my two days in Stockholm, and the weekend in New York with Fountains Of Wayne: an incredible weekend in the perfect tiny town of Denton, Texas with Midlake; Autumn in LA with Band Of Horses; Paris with M Ward and The Feeling. And then my two very different experiences in Germany – hopping around Munich with a posh little chap called James Blunt, playing to a crowd of 11 people in a dodgy industrial park. to watching Portishead blow everyone away in a radio theatre in Berlin, hearing We Carry On take us away on a tidal wave.
And then came the Faroes, and a press trip to see Teitur. I had loved him since early January, when the album cover for The Singer stood out in the pile of CDs on my sideboard. It looked old-fashioned, like the front of a strange curiosity shop, and so it was. I adored Teitur's voice, sweet and pure but slightly skewed, singing romantic, mournful songs alongside sad brass and rich cellos, especially on its title track, a heartbreakingly simple statement of intent. "I always had the voice, and now I am a singer", he began, just as I had always had these hands, and now I am a writer; just as I always had these feet, and now I am a traveller. The simplicity of that conversion, the magic that shone from it.
We spent four days in those magical islands, driving through villages full of houses with green, grassy rooves and brightly-painted wooden walls, the lakes bright blue and silent, the air so clean it made you gulp, gulp, gulp. Teitur playing host to us, cooking us horse mussels from deep under the sea, getting us drunk on Black Sheep beer and whisky, taking us to his studio where he kept strange organ stops, harmoniums and a key under the doormat, and then us joining him the G! Festival, watching him play as the sun set, the sea and the mountains glowing behind him.
Me standing there feeling so lucky to be taking in these sights and the sounds, and then hearing The Singer, a cappella, as he finished the set. Teitur's voice vulnerable, lovely and alone, just like the islands he was singing to.
