Fall down and spread their wings like doves
Raise a glass, raise the volume, imaginary club space, embrace immortality
There’s house music playing loud in my kitchen.
I’ve been lucky enough to be sent the new album by Joshua Idehen (I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have Got To Try). Seventeen tracks form a stack of great, big, life-changing music that seems custom-built to raise the spirits, whatever the damn weather is doing outside. There’s a lot of house music on there, and the lyrics hit a kind of spiritual high that feels engineered to lift the mood heavenwards (“this room here is holy to me, this is my church”).
If played at the right volume, I’m convinced music can mentally create the space it should be listened in. Maybe the light in your living room isn’t quite the main dance floor at Drumsheds on a Saturday night, and maybe the fridge won’t quite cut it as the VIP bar at Fabric, but played right, a killer record like this should lift you up and transport you—just for a minute, or for as long as it spins round and round on the stereo. Music can be your home if you let it.
The house music is playing because last week, another old friend left us. And maybe it’s playing loud because I’m trying to create that other space, a place where we’ll all live forever.
News breaks in strange ways now. Often it’s via Facebook posts instead of a sombre phone call from a stiff-lipped relative. Because of that, it took me a while to work out if it was indeed the person I thought it was. My head’s often a bit disconnected from the mainframe; names posted on social media don’t always match the mental pictures I’ve painted. But after a while, photos of Peta’s face joined the Facebook text. The brushstrokes sharpened, and the connection was made.
We weren’t close friends, but we hung out a lot at places like the Heavenly Social in Islington (where she used to DJ on Sunday afternoons with ultimate party conductor Johnno). It was a beautiful wood-panelled room where the music was loud enough to transport you—even if the destination would eventually be Bristol Royal Infirmary’s ENT department many years later. When Facebook came along, we reconnected in the same way all our old friends did, in a club network that exists only through 100-kilobyte paragraphs. A network that’s begging for a great house record to play loud, and any excuse for the unlikely event of getting together and turning the music right up.
Like pretty much everyone I knew in the mid-90s, clubs were foundational for Peta. Most of the times I saw her were in clubs or in pubs, either before the night began or long after it had shut up shop. In each of those places we passed through, house music would have been blaring out of the speakers.
The last time I saw her in person, we were both waiting in the reception area of The Guardian in King’s Cross. I was there to pitch some PR madness to the music department—guaranteed to get knocked back; she was heading in to talk about a job in the building she wouldn’t get. Both full of hope but ultimately powerless, we shot the breeze, zipped through all the years we’d missed, talked briefly about our kids, and then went our separate ways into separate meetings that—for me at least—would ultimately come to nothing.
Learning about a friend’s death through Facebook disrupts the imagined club network. It makes a collective fantasy Friday night out much harder to picture. The hypnotic glow of the dance floor shifts, replaced by the cold grey gravel of the car park outside a crematorium. More than anywhere else I visit online, Facebook has transformed itself into somewhere to reminisce and remember. Our age has made sure of that; it feels inevitable, especially when looking at the list of people who’ve passed away this last month. These aren’t old codgers. These are often people my age, sometimes younger.
One of the things my health situation has made very clear is that I’m not immortal. None of us are. Immortality is being at the beating heart of a perfect club as Hardfloor’s “Acperience” peaks and breaks for an eternity. Or it’s living rent-free in a Michelin-starred restaurant, perusing the giddy heights of the menu with no fears about cost or waistline. It’s a spectrum of impossibilities just waiting to be explored.
Mortality becomes easy to ignore when you’re young, the music’s loud, and the strobes are blinking at full power. I spent years at the beating heart of that moment: pubs, clubs, bars—anywhere you can ignore rational thought while downing 5% beers like they’re going out of fashion. Nights that were totally pure and had no pretence, just love, light, and however long’s left before the lights go up and you’re mortal again, outside the venue in the freezing cold looking for a cab home.
Over the last nineteen months, mortality has become part of the thought process. It was inevitable from the first meeting with the surgeon onwards—you can’t help it when you’re constantly reminded of how “life-changing” the diagnosis is, how tough the drugs you’re about to take are, and what the serious risks are at every step of treatment. Hardfloor’s “Acperience” still sounds phenomenal through my one working ear, but it’s definitely lost more than a little of that “live forever” power in mono. Mortality doesn’t have a number attached to it yet—an age carved into a horrible granite headstone. It’s more the relentless click-clack of a ticking clock. A reminder that all these things are temporary.
And, really, that knowledge seems as good a reason as any to turn the music up.
Let those perfect records be your home for 5 minutes, 5 hours or the next 5 years. Build your own church—your own holy place, based on whatever religious ideas are knocking around in your head on a rainy December morning—and make it somewhere to remember your friends and loved ones, with the sound of house music or any music building all around you. Play those records loud and let mortality wait a while longer.