The Most Beautiful Girl In Hackney

Another Top Boy related post following yesterday's Fuck Buttons double bill. At the end of episode three, series one, Sully says to his young daughter, 'You're the most beautiful girl in Hackney y'know', a line I instantly recognised (Sully is played by rapper and grime artist Kano). It took me a moment to pinpoint where I'd heard it before...

Girl

Girl is the final song on Jamie Xx's solo album In Colour from 2015, a dizzying swirl of synths and beats and a voice, chopped up and distorted singing 'I want your love'. The album, seven years old now, is a peach, a thoroughly modern mish mash of samples, voices and songs, spanning the range from bedsit broken heart laptop ballads (like Loud Places) to massive club tunes (such as Gosh). As well as the line of dialogue from Top Boy Girl samples Brian Wilson and Freeze's I.O.U.

Loud Places, with vocals from his Xx bandmate Romy, was remixed by John Talabot twice. This one is the pick of the pair, a stunning ten minute remix that builds gradually but incessantly, synths and voices climbing euphorically, drums padding softly and then a part of Romy's vocal- 'Didn't I take you to/ Higher places, you can't reach without me?' The second half, after six minutes, takes off elsewhere with the bassline leading and Romy's vocal shifting to breathy mutterings about ecstasy and, in a kiss off moment, not being around when he/ she/ they come down. 

Loud Places (John Talabot's Higher Dub)

Sweet Love

We've been watching Top Boy recently, all four series, back to back. Set in a fictional north London housing estate in Hackney called Summerhouse and detailing the lives of its residents, Top Boy is centred mainly around two young men, Dushane and Sully, who make a living selling drugs. The first two series were on Channel 4 in 2011 and 2013. After that it was dropped and then picked up by rapper Drake and Netflix and two further series were made, one in 2019 and the fourth this year (with one more underway now). One of the episodes at the end of series one saw the tension rising, violence between drug gangs increasing and lives being ended or ruined, quickly and brutally, and the unmistakeable twinkling sounds of this track began to play, looped a little, fading in and out as the drama unfolded. 

Sweet Love For Planet Earth

Fuck Buttons released Sweet Love For Planet Earth on their Street Horsing album back in 2008, a monstrous piece of post rave/ post rock melodic noise, the sound of continents colliding and planets crashing into each other. It's a monumental piece of music, building to a chaotic conclusion. The same year they put out a 12" single of Colours Move with an Andrew Weatherall remix of Sweet Love... on the B-side. 

Sweet Love For Planet Earth (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Weatherall keeps the strange and beautiful melodies and the sheets of noise while welding a huge rhythm underneath, a crunching kick drum and throbbing bassline and lets everything go on and on, in ever whirling circles, building the tension before a heart stopping pause and re- entry at four minutes forty. It's the far end of the arc of a curve he stated back in 1991 with his remix of Soon for My Bloody Valentine, noise refitted for weirded out dancefloors. Exhilarating stuff. 

Saturday Theme Five

We got back from Mallorca yesterday afternoon, Manchester welcoming us back with some biting April cold. Funnily, when we arrived in Mallorca on Monday morning and got to our hotel at Palma Nova it was both cold and windy, the palm trees being blown around all over the place by the strong wind coming in off the sea. The weather got better as the week went on and on Thursday we all got sunburnt sitting/ lying by the pool and on the beach. The break was just what the three of us needed, some time away from here and away from everything that has been going on since Isaac died last November. Not that we didn't take it with us- one of the rules of travel is wherever you go, you're still you- but we were able to unwind and relax. Some of the physical symptoms of grief lessened while we were away, a fact brought home to me when we were in the taxi from Manchester airport yesterday, driving up one of the main roads back to Sale, and some of those physical symptoms suddenly re- appeared. 'Hello darkness my old friend', as Paul Simon put it.

It was very good to be away though and Mallorca has got a lot going for it- a beautiful island, with beaches and mountains, that magical Balearic feel, and a wonderful capital city in Palma. It also has some superb 1960s concrete modernism in its hotels, constructed for the arrival of mass tourism in the 1960s. They pepper the coastline all the way from Palma down the coast to Palma Nova and Magaluf. The bars, restaurants and hotels were only just re- opening after the winter, the season not fully started yet with plenty of places still closed or in the process of getting ready for the summer. We haven't been anywhere since summer 2019 and I'm sure we'd have been happy to be anywhere but Palma Nova and its surrounding areas were very much exactly where we needed to be for a few days. 

The beach at Magaluf has this view, the uninhabited Isla de Sa Porrassa sitting in the bay, stunningly photogenic at dusk and during the heat of the day. 

This is the theme from Top Boy, the inner London crime drama that started on Channel 4 and was then reprised by Netflix. Brian Eno's theme works just as well as a piece of semi- ambient, instrumental music as the theme to a gritty crime drama. 

Theme From Top Boy