scene memoryMy mother brought it up to my room.
That detail matters, because since we'd moved to Lyndhurst Grove in 1979, my room was where I lived. Not slept — lived. The rest of the house was somewhere I passed through on the way to my room.
She appeared in the doorway with a humongous pile of records — and I mean humongous, the kind of stack you carry with your chin — and delivered the entire backstory in one sentence:
“I saw Jimmy.”
That was it. That was the press release. I must have been out when he came by, though this wasn't discussed. Nothing was discussed. She thrust the pile at me the way you'd hand over a parcel taken in for a neighbour, and left me alone with the most precious cargo of my life.
I need to explain who Jimmy was, or rather, what I knew of him. I lived with him from the age of two until I was four. Then my mum married Michael, and we left, and Jimmy became a name rather than a person. My first dad. More on that later — he has a habit of walking back into this story when you least expect him.
But back then, he was mostly a rumour. And now the rumour had sent records.
not a few records. a curriculum.
Not a few records. A collection. A curriculum. Everything he loved, spanning two decades — Michael Jackson's Off the Wall, George Benson, the Whispers, Motown deep and wide, R&B, soul — and, sitting in the same stack like a gatecrasher, Pink Floyd's The Wall. Two Walls in one box. One to dance to, one to disappear into.
I've thought a lot about what that box was. It would be easy to call it a guilt gift — absent dad, grand gesture, job done. But it wasn't random and it wasn't lazy. These were his records, the music of his life, chosen and handed over. He couldn't give me years. So he gave me his taste. Everything he loved, in the only form he could deliver it.
Some fathers pass on a watch. Mine passed on a record collection. I've done alright out of the deal, honestly.
which record do you play first?
I had one turntable. Not two — one. Scratching would arrive in my world soon enough, Grandmaster Flash working the wheels of steel, and years later I'd learn that White Lines came out of Sugar Hill Records under Sylvia Robinson — the Mother of Hip-Hop, the woman who produced the records that built the culture, whose name almost nobody says. I hadn't connected any of those dots yet. I was a girl with one deck, a stack of vinyl taller than the cat, and a door I could close.
So: which record do you play first?
I chose One Day in Your Life. Michael Jackson.
Here's the thing — I already had it on tape. Out of a whole box of new-to-me music, I reached for the one song I already knew by heart. I've wondered why. Partly it's what you do with anything overwhelming: you start from the familiar shore. But I think it was more than that. The tape was mine. The record was his. Playing it was like checking the two versions against each other — the song I'd found on my own, and the same song arriving from him, on vinyl, warm and crackling and real.
And I promise I didn't clock it at the time, because you never do at that age, but listen to what the song actually is. One day in your life, you'll remember me. A man who left when I was four, sending me a record that says: some day, somewhere in your life, I'll come back to you when you least expect it.
He had no idea how literally that would come true. But that's a story for later — it involves a pub in Harrow, and it still knocks the wind out of me.
the language the back row spoke
That box did more than fill my shelves. I was the new girl in Camberwell, headphones on, learning my patch alone. At school I sat in the front row with the swots and stared at the back row, where the cool kids sat — the kids who carried the culture, the style, the sound. I didn't know how to get from my row to theirs.
Then the music was delivered to me. Addressed to me. The exact language the back row spoke, posted through my door by a ghost.
By the time the Lyceum opened its doors to me in 1983, I wasn't a tourist. I walked in already fluent.
Jimmy flared and faded, in the end. Twice, actually. But the records stayed. They're still playing now — you're reading them.