Music review: The Streets, Academy, Glasgow scotsman.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scotsman.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Last modified on Thu 4 Feb 2021 04.32 EST
We were passing the turnoff for Norwich prison, near the diner where other children were always having birthday parties, when the car radio jolted me from a daydream. The music was wrong, the beat stilted and crackly. Even stranger were the half-spoken vocals, which sounded the way dads do when they think you’re not listening. Barely even a song, I thought, already half in love.
It would not have shocked me, even then, to learn that Let’s Push Things Forward would cement the Streets in the annals of British pop music. Why distrust mainstream tastes? Nearly everything I adored was wildly successful. Aged 10, I faced just one threat to the sanctity of art and she was sitting beside me in the driver’s seat.
I
f you’re anything like me, your most cherished summer memories are punctuated by music festivals. In my mind, the season is broadly split into two parts, Glastonbury BC and Glastonbury AD, with other festival jaunts forming further sub-divisions. Was that pre- or post-Field Day? Did that happen around the same time we were raving under a motorway bridge at Junction 2? And, hold on, was this before or after we were a few pints to the good and did a little cry when Johnny Marr played There Is A Light That Never Goes Out at All Points East?
The amorphous time blob sometimes known as “2020” was depressingly free of such beer-addled delineations. There were no main-stage epiphanies to cling to, no warm-cider singalongs to hark back to, nothing just a whole lot of unremarkable sameness.