Latest news with #mixtape
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jim Legxacy: Black British Music review
On Father, the first single to be taken from Jim Legxacy's third mixtape, the listener is offered a vivid image from the author's past. The teenage James Olaloye, as he was then, is on the streets of Lewisham, the south-east London borough where he grew up. He is 'rolling up a blunt, scheming for the funds … trying to come up off the roads on my own two / I never had a father'. Inevitably, this means he's up to no good: 'Making money off a phone … a key's what they want.' It's a familiar scenario in the world of UK rap, a genre in which you seldom want for bleak descriptions of the life its stars have left behind on often deprived council estates. But in the case of Father, it comes with a small, but striking detail. 'On the block,' he attests, 'I was listening to Mitski.' The self-examining sad-girl alt-pop of Mitski is an intriguing accompaniment for the lifestyle he's describing. But in Jim Legxacy's case, it makes sense. His rise has been a deeply unorthodox one, buoyed up by music that suggests he is almost entirely uninterested in the way things are usually done. You would broadly have described his 2021 mixtape Citadel as UK rap, but it sounded like UK rap that was fraying at the edges: the backing tracks frequently unravelling; his aggressive flow occasionally dropping out of the mix entirely, or suddenly scrambled until unintelligible. His contemptuous boasts were abruptly disrupted by guitar-driven tracks on which the mask slipped and he sang, in a sweet, plaintive voice, lyrics expressing a strikingly raw vulnerability that seemed to have more to do with emo than hip-hop. In 2023, Homeless N*gga Pop Music leaned even further into the latter mode. Featuring more singing than rapping, it pitched grumbling electric guitars against chattering Afrobeats-inspired rhythms and Miley Cyrus samples, the overall mood heartbroken and despairing. It really didn't sound like anything else, including Sprinter, the huge hit single Legxacy co-wrote and co-produced for Central Cee and Dave the same year. You might expect his debut mixtape for an actual label to be even more heartsore and introspective, not least because the first track, Context, details what has happened to Legxacy since Homeless N*gga Pop Music's release: his sister died, his mother suffered two strokes, his track Candy Reign (!) was removed from streaming services after a copyright dispute. These events clearly have an impact on the record. But the adversity seems to have spurred him on. Black British Music is brighter, poppier, bolder in its stylistic leaps, lurching without warning from idiosyncratic pop R&B – laced with sped-up vocal samples that inevitably evoke Kanye West's early 'chipmunk soul' productions – to the alt-rock of '06 Wayne Rooney. The song New David Bowie tempers a series of head-scrambling musical jump cuts with a succession of nagging hooks. It feels like the work of someone who has grown up with the all-you-can-eat buffet of streaming as standard, hurling contrasting ideas and inspirations at you in a way that recalls someone continually pressing fast-forward in a state of excitement. There are booming, distorted beats worthy of the Chemical Brothers, a hint of Frank Ocean about Legxacy's vocals, staccato strings on SOS, bedroom pop on Dexters Phone Call, the latter a collaboration with singer-songwriter Dexter in the Newsagent. It's a risky approach. That it doesn't result in an annoying mess comes down to Legxacy's skills as a producer, which allow him to weave it all into something coherent, and to his songwriting. He turns out to be far more adept at nagging melodies than you might have thought given the hazier approach of his previous mixtapes. There's often something unplaceable and confounding about the results: the cascade of keyboards, vintage soul samples, restless beats and panicked-sounding rapping on the amazingly titled I Just Banged a Snus in Canada Water contrives to be thrillingly intense and euphorically poppy at the same time. A voiceover regularly booms out between and even during tracks, telling you how wonderful the music you're listening to is: 'Somebody tell that bastard to turn that mediocre bullshit off – we're listening to Jim Legxacy now.' It's surplus to requirements: a unique world constructed out of an array of musical fragments, the mixtape doesn't need cheerleading. But perhaps Legxacy does. 'I've always been scared of being myself,' he sings over the acoustic guitars and scraping strings of Issues of Trust. Without wishing to minimise the difficulties he's overcome – or indeed what he has to say about Black masculinity, a regular theme in his work – you hear that line amid Black British Music's giddy rush of sound and think: you could have fooled me. Jessie Murph – Heroin An orchestrated ballad that starts out stately, as if Lana Del Rey relocated to the deep south, but then takes off into raw-throated catharsis, to stunning effect.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jim Legxacy: Black British Music review
On Father, the first single to be taken from Jim Legxacy's third mixtape, the listener is offered a vivid image from the author's past. The teenage James Olaloye, as he was then, is on the streets of Lewisham, the south-east London borough where he grew up. He is 'rolling up a blunt, scheming for the funds … trying to come up off the roads on my own two / I never had a father'. Inevitably, this means he's up to no good: 'Making money off a phone … a key's what they want.' It's a familiar scenario in the world of UK rap, a genre in which you seldom want for bleak descriptions of the life its stars have left behind on often deprived council estates. But in the case of Father, it comes with a small, but striking detail. 'On the block,' he attests, 'I was listening to Mitski.' The self-examining sad-girl alt-pop of Mitski is an intriguing accompaniment for the lifestyle he's describing. But in Jim Legxacy's case, it makes sense. His rise has been a deeply unorthodox one, buoyed up by music that suggests he is almost entirely uninterested in the way things are usually done. You would broadly have described his 2021 mixtape Citadel as UK rap, but it sounded like UK rap that was fraying at the edges: the backing tracks frequently unravelling; his aggressive flow occasionally dropping out of the mix entirely, or suddenly scrambled until unintelligible. His contemptuous boasts were abruptly disrupted by guitar-driven tracks on which the mask slipped and he sang, in a sweet, plaintive voice, lyrics expressing a strikingly raw vulnerability that seemed to have more to do with emo than hip-hop. In 2023, Homeless N*gga Pop Music leaned even further into the latter mode. Featuring more singing than rapping, it pitched grumbling electric guitars against chattering Afrobeats-inspired rhythms and Miley Cyrus samples, the overall mood heartbroken and despairing. It really didn't sound like anything else, including Sprinter, the huge hit single Legxacy co-wrote and co-produced for Central Cee and Dave the same year. You might expect his debut mixtape for an actual label to be even more heartsore and introspective, not least because the first track, Context, details what has happened to Legxacy since Homeless N*gga Pop Music's release: his sister died, his mother suffered two strokes, his track Candy Reign (!) was removed from streaming services after a copyright dispute. These events clearly have an impact on the record. But the adversity seems to have spurred him on. Black British Music is brighter, poppier, bolder in its stylistic leaps, lurching without warning from idiosyncratic pop R&B – laced with sped-up vocal samples that inevitably evoke Kanye West's early 'chipmunk soul' productions – to the alt-rock of '06 Wayne Rooney. The song New David Bowie tempers a series of head-scrambling musical jump cuts with a succession of nagging hooks. It feels like the work of someone who has grown up with the all-you-can-eat buffet of streaming as standard, hurling contrasting ideas and inspirations at you in a way that recalls someone continually pressing fast-forward in a state of excitement. There are booming, distorted beats worthy of the Chemical Brothers, a hint of Frank Ocean about Legxacy's vocals, staccato strings on SOS, bedroom pop on Dexters Phone Call, the latter a collaboration with singer-songwriter Dexter in the Newsagent. It's a risky approach. That it doesn't result in an annoying mess comes down to Legxacy's skills as a producer, which allow him to weave it all into something coherent, and to his songwriting. He turns out to be far more adept at nagging melodies than you might have thought given the hazier approach of his previous mixtapes. There's often something unplaceable and confounding about the results: the cascade of keyboards, vintage soul samples, restless beats and panicked-sounding rapping on the amazingly titled I Just Banged a Snus in Canada Water contrives to be thrillingly intense and euphorically poppy at the same time. A voiceover regularly booms out between and even during tracks, telling you how wonderful the music you're listening to is: 'Somebody tell that bastard to turn that mediocre bullshit off – we're listening to Jim Legxacy now.' It's surplus to requirements: a unique world constructed out of an array of musical fragments, the mixtape doesn't need cheerleading. But perhaps Legxacy does. 'I've always been scared of being myself,' he sings over the acoustic guitars and scraping strings of Issues of Trust. Without wishing to minimise the difficulties he's overcome – or indeed what he has to say about Black masculinity, a regular theme in his work – you hear that line amid Black British Music's giddy rush of sound and think: you could have fooled me. Jessie Murph – Heroin An orchestrated ballad that starts out stately, as if Lana Del Rey relocated to the deep south, but then takes off into raw-throated catharsis, to stunning effect.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I threw it in the bin with everything else he gave me': the mix tapes that defined our lives
At 18 my go-to albums were Dog Man Star, His 'n' Hers and a mix tape called Really, Basically, In a Sort of a Way, Volume 1. Named after the mutterings of a particularly long-winded lecturer, it was the first of many TDK D60s – always the same brand! – from my mate Pat. We had met at our university's registration day a few weeks earlier and would be friends for more than 20 years until his death in 2018. By then he'd not only been on staff at the NME – teenage Pat's dream job – but also written a book about its history. Side A of the tape (entitled 'Barry Manilow Live!') has bands we'd bonded over, such as Kenickie and These Animal Men, two of our first London gigs together. Blur's Popscene is included because we were sweaty regulars at the club night of that name at LA2 in Charing Cross Road. The other one ('David Hasselhoff B-sides') includes Gallon Drunk, the Byrds and Stereolab, all a bit more mature, all nudges into new directions. Everything on the inlay card is in caps and even Pat's handwriting was cool. I hero-worshipped him well beyond our university years and he shaped my taste in films and fashion as much as music. When we were young he could be brutally, hilariously scathing about bands he despised; later, that energy would be spent more on championing than dissing. It's years since I owned a cassette player but, looking at the tape now, I'd forgotten it ends with a 'secret bonus track!' I'm guessing it's a shared guilty pleasure (Carter USM?) and can't wait to find out. It'll be another joke from not just a cool and funny friend but an all-round unfaltering one. Chris Wiegand Nobody had ever made me a mix tape (or a CD playlist as it would have more likely been, since I grew up in the 00s) until my 19th birthday, and even then it wasn't a proper one. Having failed to track down a blank CD in Madrid, where we were both working as au pairs, a girl from Colorado I wasn't exactly dating but who was definitely more than just a friend wrote me a list of songs on a page pulled out of a notepad. I remember reading it for the first time, with its loopy handwriting, doodles, and songs chosen just for me, and thinking it was the most romantic thing in the world. Like most 19-year-olds, I was confused and anxious about so many things, but she brought so much kindness and fun into my life. We were the same age, and I can't imagine that she had everything figured out herself, but she seemed to know more than me about most things, music included, and it was exciting to take a step into her world. I must have lost the scrap of paper at some point over the last decade, and now I can't recall a single song that was on there. I wish I did, and I wish I had a way of contacting that girl from Colorado – I still owe her a 'mix tape' in return. Lucy Knight I find it easily in a bag in the attic – it has a sticker of a cat smoking a spliff, cut around the spools: a remnant of the 90s ska band Hepcat. The one mix tape I would never bin. Chris gave it to me in late 1999. He was 17 and playing gigs at venues like the Astoria. I was 16 and couldn't go to most of the gigs at venues like the Astoria because it was a school night. It's not what you'd call your classic heart-on-sleeve emo mix. It's full of hardcore and punk anthems by bands such as Operation Ivy, Madball, Good Riddance and, randomly, multiple tracks by New Bomb Turks (he must have just bought their album at Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus, where he, then later we, would go on pilgrimages to find all the newest albums). There are also, seemingly, no songs on side B. I re-listen to the tape now on my grandpa's old cassette deck, and have to endure almost 45 minutes of static to get back to the start – I simply cannot risk pressing fast forward in case the whole precious thing gets chewed up. Then, all of a sudden, the radio-recorded dolphin tones of Mariah Carey emerge from the static singing Heartbreaker, a track he knew I loved more than any punk, then cuts off before Jay-Z's verse. Worth the 43 minutes of white noise, truly. But the start of side A, the pièce de résistance – and surely the real reason he wanted me to have the tape – was so I could hear his own band. Two tunes, recorded live with laughably terrible sound levels but faultless drumming by Chris. Two tunes my teenage self listened to over and over. Twenty-five years on, this is the only version of those songs that remains. I absolutely love that they are unShazamable, that they exist solely on this crinkly tape that is one listen away from ruination. I still love those tunes – just as I love his new band. Our two children do, too. Kate Abbott We didn't call them mix tapes back in the day. Well, I didn't. Wasn't cool enough. They were just tapes with songs on. The first life-changing one was sent to me by a friend Steve and it was just the most brilliant mix of all the punk songs I didn't know – the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Ramones, the Pistols, of course, and best of all the Vibrators with Baby Baby. It was – and is – amazing. Lush, romantic, as much full of yearning as feedback, and super loud. Imagine Phil Spector turned punk and you've got Baby Baby. It didn't make me a punk (still too uncool), but it did make me want to dye my hair black (pointless, as it already was), spike it up with sugar, and stick a red arrow through my ear. Which I did a bit later. The last mix tape I made, in December 2023, was very much a modern mix tape. Improvised on the night, and on YouTube. Mum was dying and I spent the night by her bedside with my laptop. I just played song after song that I loved for her, unsure whether she could hear. I introduced them, like a DJ. 'And this is Tom Waits's version of Somewhere for you Marje because it's exceptionally beautiful and I love you.' 'And here's a little number from Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville Don't Know Much,which makes me cry and think of you because I love you.' 'And here's Leonard Cohen at his most melodic singing Dance Me to the End of Love, and I've chosen this because, erm, I love you.' 'Now for something a little different, Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne, which I've chosen for you because I love you, even if its meaning is a bit more complicated.' The songs kept coming through the night and I played them really loud. 'And of course the night would be incomplete without Stevie Wonder's As. This one's for you Mum because yes, you've guessed it, I love you.' Each one was a love song and in their own way about immortality. I didn't know it at the time. And I didn't know what was coming next. I was just somehow reaching for the right songs, in a state almost as altered as Mum's. I like to think she heard them. But even if she didn't, she knew how much I loved her. She died early the next morning. Simon Hattenstone Back in the late 90s, whenever melodic noise-rockers Idlewild would tour, my sister and I would go. We had spent hours engaged in classic sibling bonding: listening to guitar squall while I prevented the mosh pit from stamping on my little sister's head. Yes, her taste often tended more towards the likes of Steps, but for some reason we both loved this band's scuzzy pop, and one day, she made me a tape of one of their live gigs. I was extremely excited. I saved it for a long bus journey, popped it into my Walkman, fired it up and sunk into angular, dissonance-strewn indie. It was absolute joy. There were new songs! Ferociously taut renditions of the classics! And … the random intrusion of Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer. Confusion reigned as I suddenly found myself listening to a Christian rock troupe's schmaltzy ode to smooching – until it abruptly segued back to the gig. And then back to Kiss Me. And then back to the gig. Five minutes later, a blisteringly distorted riff mutated into an advert for a local car dealership. At which point I realised something: my sister had decided to check out a poppier radio station halfway through recording – and inadvertently created the world's worst Idlewild remix tape. My sister has since died. I'll never be able to drag her out of a mosh pit again, or hear her attempt at a silly impression of the vocal tics of Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble. But I'll always have that tape. It might have been intended as a killer Idlewild live recording, but it's ended up something much more precious: a testament to her glorious daftness. Best mix tape ever. Alexi Duggins I was given this mix tape in early 2004, at the outset of a relationship that lasted for almost a decade. It lives on a shelf in my living room with a few other cassettes, displayed for aesthetic reasons, since I no longer have a tape deck to play them on. Looking at it now, it seems like a vivid portrait of my ex and his then passions, from the picture of James Dean rolling his eyes on the handmade cover to the scratchy and abrasive music on the tape itself, from Her Jazz by Huggy Bear to Gutless by Hole, deep cuts like Other Animals are #1 by Erase Errata alongside classics like Patti Smith's Redondo Beach. More than half the tracks are by female or female-fronted acts; my ex was brought up by his mum and most of his friends were women. He once told me that men had been responsible for all the negative experiences in his life (I suspect that our relationship has now been added to this list). Looking at the track listing I'm reminded of his great taste, noting the appearance of Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, then pretty recent but now a romantic classic. We had our ups and downs, to put it mildly, but I'm glad I have this memento of our early tenderness and intimacy. Alex Needham I am very slightly too young for the golden era of mix tapes – open my first Walkman and you would have only found storybooks on tape – but I am exactly the right age to be part of the micro-generation of teens that burned CDs (or MiniDiscs) of stolen MP3s from LimeWire for our friends and crushes. There were two enormous problems with this method of sharing songs: one, the file compression made everything sound unlistenably terrible, and two, what you thought you were illegally downloading from LimeWire was very often not what you were actually downloading from LimeWire. I discovered this when my best friend made me a mix of what she thought were songs by my favourite German metal band, Rammstein. In fact it was a CD full of entirely random European songs that someone on LimeWire had egregiously mislabeled, including a Dutch version of Aqua's Barbie Girl, all with that spangly sound that was unique to low-quality MP3 mixes of the era. We laughed about this for years, but fun fact, that mix CD was how I discovered Finnish metal (and Megaherz, the most early-00s German metal band to exist). Keza MacDonald The Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand. Weezer's Holiday. The Cribs' The Lights Went Out. These are some of the songs that my first boyfriend chose to burn on to a CD for me. It was summer 2006. I had found my true tribe outside of school, most nights (and early mornings) were spent in fields, my last year of sixth form was nigh and I had finally fallen in love. I fell hard. I could not believe – or handle! – feeling that way about somebody. Music was starting to properly soundtrack my life for the first time: club nights and indie gigs, soaking up the albums my new mates played and making plans for Leeds Festival. My ex opened my world to some great music I wouldn't know without him. I thought that CD was so cool and romantic. ('He wants to hold my hand!') The short version of this tragic love story: the relationship soured and it ended by winter. It would take me at least a couple of years to get over it. At some point, I threw the CD in the bin along with everything else he had given me – too young, inexperienced and cried out to know I might quite want to see these items again one day. But every time I hear those songs play – and I do regularly seek them out – I'm comforted by a rose-tinted wave of nostalgia. They take me back to a time when life was just really starting – way more highs and heartbreak ahead. I'm glad I'll always have the music to take with me. Hollie Richardson Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I threw it in the bin with everything else he gave me': the mix tapes that defined our lives
At 18 my go-to albums were Dog Man Star, His 'n' Hers and a mix tape called Really, Basically, In a Sort of a Way, Volume 1. Named after the mutterings of a particularly long-winded lecturer, it was the first of many TDK D60s – always the same brand! – from my mate Pat. We had met at our university's registration day a few weeks earlier and would be friends for more than 20 years until his death in 2018. By then he'd not only been on staff at the NME – teenage Pat's dream job – but also written a book about its history. Side A of the tape (entitled 'Barry Manilow Live!') has bands we'd bonded over, such as Kenickie and These Animal Men, two of our first London gigs together. Blur's Popscene is included because we were sweaty regulars at the club night of that name at LA2 in Charing Cross Road. The other one ('David Hasselhoff B-sides') includes Gallon Drunk, the Byrds and Stereolab, all a bit more mature, all nudges into new directions. Everything on the inlay card is in caps and even Pat's handwriting was cool. I hero-worshipped him well beyond our university years and he shaped my taste in films and fashion as much as music. When we were young he could be brutally, hilariously scathing about bands he despised; later, that energy would be spent more on championing than dissing. It's years since I owned a cassette player but, looking at the tape now, I'd forgotten it ends with a 'secret bonus track!' I'm guessing it's a shared guilty pleasure (Carter USM?) and can't wait to find out. It'll be another joke from not just a cool and funny friend but an all-round unfaltering one. Chris Wiegand Nobody had ever made me a mix tape (or a CD playlist as it would have more likely been, since I grew up in the 00s) until my 19th birthday, and even then it wasn't a proper one. Having failed to track down a blank CD in Madrid, where we were both working as au pairs, a girl from Colorado I wasn't exactly dating but who was definitely more than just a friend wrote me a list of songs on a page pulled out of a notepad. I remember reading it for the first time, with its loopy handwriting, doodles, and songs chosen just for me, and thinking it was the most romantic thing in the world. Like most 19-year-olds, I was confused and anxious about so many things, but she brought so much kindness and fun into my life. We were the same age, and I can't imagine that she had everything figured out herself, but she seemed to know more than me about most things, music included, and it was exciting to take a step into her world. I must have lost the scrap of paper at some point over the last decade, and now I can't recall a single song that was on there. I wish I did, and I wish I had a way of contacting that girl from Colorado – I still owe her a 'mix tape' in return. Lucy Knight I find it easily in a bag in the attic – it has a sticker of a cat smoking a spliff, cut around the spools: a remnant of the 90s ska band Hepcat. The one mix tape I would never bin. Chris gave it to me in late 1999. He was 17 and playing gigs at venues like the Astoria. I was 16 and couldn't go to most of the gigs at venues like the Astoria because it was a school night. It's not what you'd call your classic heart-on-sleeve emo mix. It's full of hardcore and punk anthems by bands such as Operation Ivy, Madball, Good Riddance and, randomly, multiple tracks by New Bomb Turks (he must have just bought their album at Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus, where he, then later we, would go on pilgrimages to find all the newest albums). There are also, seemingly, no songs on side B. I re-listen to the tape now on my grandpa's old cassette deck, and have to endure almost 45 minutes of static to get back to the start – I simply cannot risk pressing fast forward in case the whole precious thing gets chewed up. Then, all of a sudden, the radio-recorded dolphin tones of Mariah Carey emerge from the static singing Heartbreaker, a track he knew I loved more than any punk, then cuts off before Jay-Z's verse. Worth the 43 minutes of white noise, truly. But the start of side A, the pièce de résistance – and surely the real reason he wanted me to have the tape – was so I could hear his own band. Two tunes, recorded live with laughably terrible sound levels but faultless drumming by Chris. Two tunes my teenage self listened to over and over. Twenty-five years on, this is the only version of those songs that remains. I absolutely love that they are unShazamable, that they exist solely on this crinkly tape that is one listen away from ruination. I still love those tunes – just as I love his new band. Our two children do, too. Kate Abbott We didn't call them mix tapes back in the day. Well, I didn't. Wasn't cool enough. They were just tapes with songs on. The first life-changing one was sent to me by a friend Steve and it was just the most brilliant mix of all the punk songs I didn't know – the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Ramones, the Pistols, of course, and best of all the Vibrators with Baby Baby. It was – and is – amazing. Lush, romantic, as much full of yearning as feedback, and super loud. Imagine Phil Spector turned punk and you've got Baby Baby. It didn't make me a punk (still too uncool), but it did make me want to dye my hair black (pointless, as it already was), spike it up with sugar, and stick a red arrow through my ear. Which I did a bit later. The last mix tape I made, in December 2023, was very much a modern mix tape. Improvised on the night, and on YouTube. Mum was dying and I spent the night by her bedside with my laptop. I just played song after song that I loved for her, unsure whether she could hear. I introduced them, like a DJ. 'And this is Tom Waits's version of Somewhere for you Marje because it's exceptionally beautiful and I love you.' 'And here's a little number from Linda Ronstadt and Aaron Neville Don't Know Much,which makes me cry and think of you because I love you.' 'And here's Leonard Cohen at his most melodic singing Dance Me to the End of Love, and I've chosen this because, erm, I love you.' 'Now for something a little different, Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne, which I've chosen for you because I love you, even if its meaning is a bit more complicated.' The songs kept coming through the night and I played them really loud. 'And of course the night would be incomplete without Stevie Wonder's As. This one's for you Mum because yes, you've guessed it, I love you.' Each one was a love song and in their own way about immortality. I didn't know it at the time. And I didn't know what was coming next. I was just somehow reaching for the right songs, in a state almost as altered as Mum's. I like to think she heard them. But even if she didn't, she knew how much I loved her. She died early the next morning. Simon Hattenstone Back in the late 90s, whenever melodic noise-rockers Idlewild would tour, my sister and I would go. We had spent hours engaged in classic sibling bonding: listening to guitar squall while I prevented the mosh pit from stamping on my little sister's head. Yes, her taste often tended more towards the likes of Steps, but for some reason we both loved this band's scuzzy pop, and one day, she made me a tape of one of their live gigs. I was extremely excited. I saved it for a long bus journey, popped it into my Walkman, fired it up and sunk into angular, dissonance-strewn indie. It was absolute joy. There were new songs! Ferociously taut renditions of the classics! And … the random intrusion of Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer. Confusion reigned as I suddenly found myself listening to a Christian rock troupe's schmaltzy ode to smooching – until it abruptly segued back to the gig. And then back to Kiss Me. And then back to the gig. Five minutes later, a blisteringly distorted riff mutated into an advert for a local car dealership. At which point I realised something: my sister had decided to check out a poppier radio station halfway through recording – and inadvertently created the world's worst Idlewild remix tape. My sister has since died. I'll never be able to drag her out of a mosh pit again, or hear her attempt at a silly impression of the vocal tics of Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble. But I'll always have that tape. It might have been intended as a killer Idlewild live recording, but it's ended up something much more precious: a testament to her glorious daftness. Best mix tape ever. Alexi Duggins I was given this mix tape in early 2004, at the outset of a relationship that lasted for almost a decade. It lives on a shelf in my living room with a few other cassettes, displayed for aesthetic reasons, since I no longer have a tape deck to play them on. Looking at it now, it seems like a vivid portrait of my ex and his then passions, from the picture of James Dean rolling his eyes on the handmade cover to the scratchy and abrasive music on the tape itself, from Her Jazz by Huggy Bear to Gutless by Hole, deep cuts like Other Animals are #1 by Erase Errata alongside classics like Patti Smith's Redondo Beach. More than half the tracks are by female or female-fronted acts; my ex was brought up by his mum and most of his friends were women. He once told me that men had been responsible for all the negative experiences in his life (I suspect that our relationship has now been added to this list). Looking at the track listing I'm reminded of his great taste, noting the appearance of Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, then pretty recent but now a romantic classic. We had our ups and downs, to put it mildly, but I'm glad I have this memento of our early tenderness and intimacy. Alex Needham I am very slightly too young for the golden era of mix tapes – open my first Walkman and you would have only found storybooks on tape – but I am exactly the right age to be part of the micro-generation of teens that burned CDs (or MiniDiscs) of stolen MP3s from LimeWire for our friends and crushes. There were two enormous problems with this method of sharing songs: one, the file compression made everything sound unlistenably terrible, and two, what you thought you were illegally downloading from LimeWire was very often not what you were actually downloading from LimeWire. I discovered this when my best friend made me a mix of what she thought were songs by my favourite German metal band, Rammstein. In fact it was a CD full of entirely random European songs that someone on LimeWire had egregiously mislabeled, including a Dutch version of Aqua's Barbie Girl, all with that spangly sound that was unique to low-quality MP3 mixes of the era. We laughed about this for years, but fun fact, that mix CD was how I discovered Finnish metal (and Megaherz, the most early-00s German metal band to exist). Keza MacDonald The Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand. Weezer's Holiday. The Cribs' The Lights Went Out. These are some of the songs that my first boyfriend chose to burn on to a CD for me. It was summer 2006. I had found my true tribe outside of school, most nights (and early mornings) were spent in fields, my last year of sixth form was nigh and I had finally fallen in love. I fell hard. I could not believe – or handle! – feeling that way about somebody. Music was starting to properly soundtrack my life for the first time: club nights and indie gigs, soaking up the albums my new mates played and making plans for Leeds Festival. My ex opened my world to some great music I wouldn't know without him. I thought that CD was so cool and romantic. ('He wants to hold my hand!') The short version of this tragic love story: the relationship soured and it ended by winter. It would take me at least a couple of years to get over it. At some point, I threw the CD in the bin along with everything else he had given me – too young, inexperienced and cried out to know I might quite want to see these items again one day. But every time I hear those songs play – and I do regularly seek them out – I'm comforted by a rose-tinted wave of nostalgia. They take me back to a time when life was just really starting – way more highs and heartbreak ahead. I'm glad I'll always have the music to take with me. Hollie Richardson Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
TV tonight: a nostalgic romance drama with a cracking soundtrack
Tuesday, 9pm, BBC Two'You don't forget the first mixtape a boy makes you.' Cracking music soundtracks this four-part will they/won't they story, starting with New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle, as teenagers Daniel (Rory Walton-Smith) and Alison (Florence Hunt) first talk sheepishly at a Sheffield house party in 1989. Twenty years later, Daniel (Jim Sturgess) has stayed put and is a music journalist, while Alison (Teresa Palmer) is a successful novelist in Sydney. Both have families, but as they remember the mix tapes they shared and unanswered questions, is a reunion on the cards? Think One Day (incidentally, Sturgess starred in the film version) except grittier. Hollie Richardson 8pm, Channel 4Quarter-final time: the teams must are tasked with creating two dozen savoury sweet desserts before the real challenge: summoning up alien-themed showstoppers with jelly art desserts in just five hours. All under the watchful gaze of higher intelligences Cherish Finden and Benoit Blin. Ali Catterall 8.20pm, PBS America Access to a KGB archive in Ukraine provides the hook for this new two-parter on the 1986 nuclear disaster; the files therein suggest officials were aware of flaws in the power plant's design. There are also sombre interviews with survivors, including a technician who was on site when reactor No 4 exploded. Graeme Virtue 9pm, BBC OneSara Pascoe is back to host the 11th series of the amateur sewing competition. The first challenge asks the contestants to create a voluminous tie-front blouse – a garment that seems very much up Pascoe's own style street. They then graduate from gathers to pleats in the 'made to measure' round. Ellen E Jones 10pm, Channel 4The unusual team of actor Emilia Fox, criminologist David Wilson and former detective Graham Hill dig into another cold case. Brian Price and Susan Tetrault were murdered in bed in 1986 in Clapham, south London. Could international drug traffickers have been involved? Jack Seale 10.05pm, ITV2 The brilliant Doon Mackichan guest stars as the head of HR, as supermarket manager Simon (Nick Frost) rounds up the team to discuss how best to get rid of rubbish night-shift worker Liv (Jordan Gray). But how can he do it without being cancelled for firing a transgender woman? Bitingly funny comedy. HR Jaws 1-4 (Steven Spielberg, 1975; Jeannot Szwarc, 1978; Joe Alves, 1983; Joseph Sargent, 1987), NetflixThe 50th anniversary of Jaws – year zero of the modern blockbuster – has already been well publicised. However, half a century of Jaws also means half a century of Jaws sequels, which is a different kind of fun. This week, Netflix has gathered together all four films for viewers to enjoy at leisure. The question is, which should you watch? The peerless original? Jaws 2, which is more or less a remake of the first? Jaws 3, which was shot for 3D seemingly just for the scene where a shark is exploded? Or Jaws: The Revenge, in which a shark with a vendetta chases Michael Caine around the Bahamas? Strictly speaking, only one of these films is good. But in their own way, they are all great. Stuart Heritage Hell Is a City (Val Guest, 1960), 2:20pm, Film4 To be specific, hell is Manchester. This stunning 1960 British noir has plenty going for it, like its tight, hardboiled plot – an inspector is tasked with tracking down a murderer after a jailbreak – and the gruffly unsentimental performances from Stanley Baker and John Crawford. It deserves to be rediscovered and heralded as a classic. However, Hell Is a City was also shot in Manchester – rare for a film – and provides a wonderful snapshot of the city 65 years ago. To describe it as unrecognisable would be an understatement. SH
