Thirteen

On New Year's Day 2010 I started Bagging Area- which has made it very easy to remember when the blog's birthday is if nothing else. Today the blog enters its teenage years, thirteen years old. There are several songs titled for what is often seen as the unluckiest number.

Big Star's Thirteen from 1972 is a celebration of teenage love. 'Won't you let me walk you home from school', it begins, the ache and pain of young love perfectly captured by Alex Chilton and Chris Bell.

Thirteen

Big Audio Dynamite's V Thirteen is from 1987, co-written with Joe Strummer who also produced the album it came from (Number 10 Upping Street, according to Joe, the home of 'an alternative, funky Prime Minister'). V. Thirteen's lyrics take in all sorts of stuff, not least Little Jamie who writes 'V 13'- I've always assumed this means writes as in graffiti- my copy of the 12" came with a stencil for spraying V. 13 onto walls and other surfaces, still unused. V. Thirteen is one of B.A.D.'s finest moments.

V. Thirteen

Teenage Fanclub released an entire album titled Thirteen, released in 1992 following the flush of fame that Bandwagonesque brought. Inevitably it felt like a bit of a slump, the songs not quite up to par, many being fragments and leftovers from 1991/2. The experience of making it wasn't a happy one for the group, it dragged on and became hard work. Drummer Brendan O'Hare left after they toured the album. Time has been fairly kind to Thirteen I think, it sounds pretty good today, just not a great step on in any way. One of the key songs was 120 Minutes, a Raymond McGinley song, which the group recorded acoustically for their Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It EP, released in 1995

120 Minutes (Acoustic)

Andrew Weatherall's 2016 solo album Convenanza included a song called Thirteenth Night. The album was a wide ranging affair, spanning post- punk/ punk funk trumpets and featured Weatherall's vocals on many of the songs including references to writers Hans Fallada and Robert Walser (Fallada wrote Alone In Berlin, the true story of a German couple who leave a series of handwritten postcards around Berlin during the Nazi years attacking the regime and who then become involved in a deadly cat and mouse game with the Gestapo). Thirteenth Night was a slightly melancholic instrumental. For the remix album that followed- Consolamentum- Thirteenth Night was remixed by Andrew's Asphodell's bandmate and studio engineer Timothy J. Fairplay. The Asphodells' steam powered drum machine makes a welcome appearance.  

Thirteenth Night (Timothy J. Fairplay remix)

13 Moons

Drew tipped me off about a new six track record from Sordid Sound System called Lux Exterior, a mix of dub, techno and kraut influences with chunky drum machine rhythms and wonky basslines making a delicious, chuggy, trippy stew. I've been playing it a lot over the last few days. There are only 300 copies on vinyl but if you act quick they've still got some at Piccadilly Records and maybe elsewhere. They put out a four track ep last year, In A Year Of 13 Moons, which you can download from Bandcamp.






Coincidentally our youngest turns thirteen today, stepping into the teenage years. Happy birthday Eliza. She'd probably prefer this- and to make the circle complete, Drew is also a big fan.

Thirteen Today

Our son Isaac is thirteen today. He was born at 7.37 am on November the 23rd 1998, changing our lives forever. Isaac spent the first two weeks of life in an incubator with unspecified breathing difficulties. At eight months, already wearing two hearing aids and having had several minor operations, he was rushed to Manchester Childrens' Hospital with hydrocephalus, had his head punctured and drained and a shunt fitted. A few days later he was diagnosed with Hurlers' Disease (MPS 1), a degenerative condition leading to death by the age of ten. The only partial treatment available was bone marrow transplant, which at that point had a fifty per cent success rate and a twenty per cent mortality rate. BMT has made major advances since then, in both success and mortality. Two bone marrow transplants followed in 2000, the second one successfully restoring the missing enzyme but leaving him with a host of issues and needs, and frequent hospitalisation. Since then he has had major spinal surgery, knee surgery, shunt removal and replacement, continuing bi-weekly infusions to replace his still absent immune system and a cochlear implant. In 2008 he contracted pneumonia, then meningitis (causing him to have a mini-stroke), which very nearly did for him. So turning teenage is a big deal for us and him not least because there have been times when he wasn't expected to survive the night, never mind reach teenage years.

Today he is a walking, talking, somewhat hyperactive, short statured bundle of energy who brings joy to those who meet him, and Isaac meets many people. He just approaches them and starts asking them questions. He is currently full of teenage hormones- his main interests are breasts, Manchester United, breasts, crisps (prawn cocktail flavour), Lego, breasts, ladies wearing make up and high heels, chips, chocolate and breasts. Not so different from the rest of us maybe, although he says exactly what he thinks whereas the rest of us can internalise some of our thoughts about these topics.

Happy 13th birthday sunshine. May you continue to beat the odds.

This was the last song the compilation tape played in my old dark green Ford Escort on the way to hospital just before he was born, sometime in the early hours of the morning thirteen years ago.

'A dreamer of pictures

I run in the night

You see us together

Chasing the moonlight

My cinnamon girl'

Still, I think, Neil Young's best song.

Cinnamon Girl