Time travel is possible, I surmise, inserting the long-forgotten CD into the hi-fi player’s tray. I whack the volume up full to twenty-three and wait…for the steady slow build of The Verve’s ‘New Decade’ to crash into its undeniable, anthemic, wall of sound.
The tune is still burning true, with its urgent soulful message for the near forgotten ecstasy generation injected with the hardcore values of peace, love, and unity.
The tune is the opening track on a CD mixtape recorded over two decades ago in a terraced basement dwelling in Brighton’s Hanover district.
It was recorded for a new lover who would freely follow me into life’s battles – with a beaming smile, a sweep of gorgeous blond locks, and an eye on the prize of future glories – that would come to run through her fingers like water, or lost liquid gold.
The mixtape was a youth rite of passage back in the day. A sonic love letter, born on the wings of the soul, to take flight on another’s. It would be compiled on the rolling reels of a tape cassette, burned on the reflective silver of a CD, or more lately, digitally downloaded as a streaming music playlist.
The mixtape would express a secret underground, or overground, yearning for another, coded in the white heat language of music.
And dusting down the cracked plastic case of the buried CD mixtape, I pour over the carefully handwritten playlist with veteran, wiser, and well-versed eyes. Inscribed in bold caps is the New Order strapline: ‘I’ll find my soul when I get old.’
Listening attentively, closer now, the mix is scratching through the bends of Radiohead, is skipping on the slight return of the Bluetones, and emerges triumphantly to break fantastically into the long way home of Faithless.
I am emotionally sucker-punched into a twisted time loop. A musical mobius strip. Where memories are magnetised, and the world tilts slightly less precariously on its axis.
While the glaring intention of the mixtape, recorded and coded in the shadows of the millennium, was to burn with eternal love – on this day of days it feels like an urgent memo to my future self.
So, I breath deep and reflect on the tempting green eyes of New Order, feel the burn of punk mentality of The Clash in Brixton, and hard-wise-up to the timeless soul decay of Roots Manuva.
Then, the mix sonically shifts to 90’s boom time: rolling deep through the hard-fought, urban wisdom of the Wu Tang; peeling through the lemony skin of the Stone Roses; and vibing with the street-beat melancholy of Massive Attack. All the time manifesting memories of a Universal lightning bolt strike in a golden age of Island music.
I muse, heavy heartedly, on how a lonely CD mixtape abandoned on the shelf can tell a thousand tales of love’s lost and found.
Unexpectedly, my ears prick up, my heart widens, and soul flies, to the closing tune – the Rasta chant down of Marley’s ‘African Herbsman’ – and it brings all the sad feelings of tomorrow, with a burning sun of hope for all the mixtapes of the future.
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