#gatewayradio

Everyone has a story when it comes to this band. I remember my dad telling me about his friend, Jasper saying Cec, you have to come listen to these albums, they are amazing! Then him riding his motorbike over to Jasper’s place and hearing A Day At The Races and A Night At The Opera for the first time and having his mind blown away by how different and groundbreaking this was from everything else at the time. There was nothing else like this band at the time, and hasn’t been anything since. A cultural phenomenon. 

For me, the song that really blew my mind was Princes Of The Universe from the A Kind Of Magic Album. And it’s mainly because of the movie tie-in. Highlander was just so fucking cool. No other way to say it. From the worst accent of all time from Connery to the bombastically ridiculous neon soaked sword fights on top of buildings in a thunderstorm, cause why the fuck not? I used to play this on LP at my mum’s place. Being 9 years old and just trying to work out how to get the arm to land on the start of the song. Getting the RPM right. Realising the volume button of the amp was overly sensitive so it would go from near silence to, we getting evicted if I can’t adjust this right. A time before knobs were commonplace and it was a vertical slider that would just always find the volume you weren’t looking for as if by design. 

Was walking around an empty hotel lobby where I work last night, randomly shouting out NO. MERCY. I SHOW NO. MERCY. And could not for the life of me remember where I had heard the song. After much googling and fervent searching inside my own head I found it. And god it was better than I remember. For some reason that discordant and violent guitar just feels like a wave of tranquility washing over me. Just hook that shit straight into my veins and watch me sink through the floor. My inner peace is wave of distortion and bass coming to fuck up my insides with sonic brutality. 

For staccato distortion sledge hammer blows of guitars instantly into her singing my boy hates everybody but me. Oh this journey is gonna be fun. He’s my fully loaded gun, brief silence, bullet casing falls to the ground and bounces a couple of times. You pussies better run. A livewire volatile partner. A Mallory to her Mickey. The wild, dangerous and reckless love of uncontrolled youth left off the chain. Laws, norms and social cues are not even guidelines in this world. They are monuments of oppression to be destroyed at all costs to prove complete and utter devotion. 

Sometimes a song just lands in your lap and you just don’t know what to do with it. Where did you come from? How did you contain so much emotion that caused tears to spring from my eyes? Why are you out here making such soul bearing music to an audience of none? Why was this track hidden behind the first track I heard of a woman who can growl-sing behind a wall of noise? And then this acoustic breakdown of a desperate cry for salvation while standing before the Pearly Gates. Finally feeling at peace with a life once lived only to see the angels looking away in shame as rain comes pouring down in the background. I thought here I could be understood. But no. There was more to this story all along. I just didn’t know. I couldn’t have known. So many mistakes and memories are exposed and I wish they could be gone. I thought I had to break the world before it broke me. 

And her voice just raises and fills all the space as she comes so close to breaking trying to explain and justify her actions. This is who I had to be to survive, you get that right? I had to be this hard to survive. And turned away from the Pearly Gates just to fall back down in the dirt again, where the only choice left is to face yourself. Open every scar and redo the past. Could I have been more kind? The worst part of it is knowing that it was true. Blamed the world, blamed everyone else and never looked in the mirror. Knowing that by hurting first I could never be hurt myself, but at what cost? What did I give up to reach this place? 

The first time I met a woman from South Africa my knees went weak and my stomach started doing backflips. Something about that accent just sent me to pieces. Maybe it’s the old colonizer blood in me from the old days of the British Empire that got woken up inside of me. This is my favourite track by Die Antwoord. Which always raises the next question, how do you deal with artists that become “problematic”. For Die Antwoord’s sake, I am too addicted to their music to stop. Others I have just stopped listening to. Just ok dude, you were fucked up and it wasn’t act. Your catalogue is dead to me. And with Die Antwoord, there is always gonna be that accent that turns me into a human pile of mush filled with adoration. So kinda trapped by my own body's reactions to the way the English language is spoken here.    

And what can I say about the video? I love white trash. I love seeing how we are all trash whether we started on the council estates of England, the hollers on the poorest sides of the  Appalachian mountains, or the white slums of Cape Town. Baby’s On Fire as a track though. It is brutally heavy techno with beats so phat you can’t stop your head from bouncing along. When Yolander sings, her accent is thick; it adds an extra musical rhythm to her singing. I find so many times I am not listening to a word she is singing and just treating her lyrical spitting as another instrument to find a rhythm to bounce along to. 

A man kicked down my wall today. Stood in the rubble of my broken living room looking at me vaping on the sofa in just my boxers trying desperately not to melt away in the heat of this cursed summer. And he said why did you stop writing? What caused you to walk away from all of this that was bringing you so much joy? And as I continued to melt into an ever increasing puddle of my own sweat I said “Iunno. Stuff.” Puff of the vape and staring at this man going, I may need to put pen to paper to get rid of this guy. And remove the friction of sitting down at the screen and typing nonsense to the weird that soothes the soul.  

So with a gentle stammered introduction of mm-ma-mum-ma-madness before the vocals come in and suddenly that voice just eases all tensions past and present. This is home. This is where I belong. Being transported to a heart wrenching tale of loss, learned hopelessness and despair at the madness of trying to keep a relationship going despite there being more red flags than a carnival. Or am I hearing one side of the story and one guy has a bigger platform to tell his side? I guess we can never know for sure. But I love being here. I love this journey he has invited me on. Where madness and musical composition play with each other to say you can never know the whole truth. But dig the vibes huh? 

This came out in the 90’s and I don’t know if I remember this track coming out or if it is memory I have created later on to suit my own needs. I like to think I got to experience to the 90’s but truth is I didn’t hit my teenage years and start developing an interest for music until 1996. So music before then what was it? Background noise? Did I really get to experience the 90s at all? The idea of experiencing their 20s during the 90s is I am sure an idea that many people like to idolise, pedestalise and fantasise about. A decade without smart phones, music that is still played in the clubs today and a sense of hope that I myself felt vanish after 9/11. Just a moment of saying to myself, well, fuck. Things ain’t gonna be the same and probably not for the better either. And well, broadly gesturing at everything, you see my train of thought in action.

But what if I had gotten the 90s? I would not have gotten the 00s. The awkward decade that no one really knows what to call. The Noughties? Sounds ridiculous. But got it was some good music. Or was it really? Is it rose tinted glasses saying, the music that existed in my 20s was the best ever written and everything since has been garbage, soulless trash. And if I had had the 90s now I would be in my 50s now. Looking at retirement getting ever closer as retirement funds disappear into the ether of whatever the fuck is going on out there. From trusting what my own eyes to see, to AI slop being everywhere and not having been trained at a young enough age to distinguish between reality and slop. What a nightmare. The world I loved, replaced by a constant online bombardment of entities fighting for my attention inside a black mirrored rectangle of ever worsening daily doomscrolling post 1990s world in the worse possible way.

Weaponised apathy finally finding a release with a track that was a little before my time yet remains timeless. Just an anthem of hope wrapped in cynicism. The person who listened to this when it mattered most still had hope for the future and believed that the world was a conquerable place just waiting for him to step up to the plate. The man listening today is going where did that hope go? What happened? When did it all fade, crumble and turn to dust? Why did time get so fast? Why are the memories here over 20 years old?

With a raw and vulnerable guitar welcoming us in. Come. Listen. I am still living with your ghost. Which meant nothing to me as a care free teenager. Is crippling to me as an adult with bills to pay and a life that keeps putting up new roadblocks every time we try to change direction. We can live beside the ocean, leave it far behind. Swim out past the breakers, watch the world die. You and me vs the world. In a different life where every single thing was completely different. Perhaps. I am still dreaming of your face snarled out into existence as the guitar riff gets heavier and drums more poundy. We really thought it could be more than this at some point? Right?

Manic Street Preachers - 1998

I woke up this morning from a dream where If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next had been playing on a radio in a sunlit room in a dream. So naturally, I sat down with my morning coffee and just had to listen to the track on the album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. Which said it had the release date August 01, 1994. Which confused me. Cause I remembered listening to this album in school with my mates and no way was I 11 at the time. I was in upper school. So a quick trip to Wikipedia told me this album 14 September, 1998. That’s more like it yeah. I was 15 at the time this came out. A quick chat with the AI bot on the support page of Tidal let them know the correct information and the bot told me it would put the album under review. Spent a few seconds there thinking all my memories were false.

You Stole the Sun from My Heart is the next track on the album after If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next. A stark warning about the need to start shooting fascists pretty fucking soon and acceptance of their place in this world is all downhill from here onward. If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next. Huh. But then You Stole the Sun from My Heart came on and I just remembered what a glorious track this. From it’s staccato drums to it’s huge, era defined, Brit Rock guitars. This song doesn’t as much take me back as it reminds me that love is just fucking weird and I still don’t get it now. You have broken through my armour and I don’t have an answer. I love you all the same. I’m lost among the undergrowth, so much so I woke up. I love you all the same. You stole the sun from my heart.