17. The Beautiful South - Let Love Speak Up Itself
Like many songs covered so far, this one has more than one connection to the time. To get the far less significant connection out of the way first...
I was introduced to The Beautiful South and their 1990 LP Choke by the last girl I went out with before meeting my wife. Given the crapness with women described in previous posts, you might find it incredulous that I ever went out with ANY girls or that I ended up finding one at this point who'd be forgiving enough of my still reasonably inept dating skills to condescend to marry me. The girl that I had a brief, confusing and doomed flirtation with was called Violet Elizabeth. Or Sarah. I was never sure, because she was a self-professed fabricator of information. I was in my third year, gloomily aware that my tenure at university was coming to an end and propulsion into the rat race - one in which I had no idea what job I wanted to do - was a mere 9 months away. I was also eager for a relationship that lasted longer than 2 consecutive weeks. She was in her first year, keen to enjoy the years of student life ahead of her and disinterested in anything lasting longer than 2 consecutive weeks. It was an eventful week and a half. I'd been going out with a girl called Lucy for a short time before this and had decided to end it before meeting Vi-Beth/Sarah at the student union one Friday night. Having agreed to go out on the Saturday night, I then went to break the bad news to Lucy that morning. As you do, I assured her honestly that I wasn't breaking up with her because of someone else. That same evening, I took Vi-Beth/Sarah out to a pub called The Greyhound, near our hall, knowing that students rarely drank in there. At one point, I went to the toilet, came out and found that she'd disappeared. Two minutes later she re-entered the pub laughing at her own prank. The next time I went to the toilet, I came out to discover Lucy and her friends - including Sonia, who I had also been out with earlier that year - sitting on a table next to ours, staring silently at me as I nonchalantly appeared through the Gents' doorway. Clearly it was time to leave. The thing with Vi-Beth/Sarah ended after discovering The Beautiful South and after a drunken argument in the student union which led to me being escorted out by the bouncers for kicking a plastic pint glass across the floor.
Like I said, a far less significant connection to the song, but a story worth sharing.
The song Let Love Speak Up Itself will be forever associated in my mind with our friend Loz, purely because once I'd discovered them, he told me that he was a fan and his favourite track off the new album was this one. And because it's a ballad; and because of the feeling it generates; and because of the fact that within a year of us leaving university Loz had sadly died and we all really did love him.
Loz was the gentlest and most absurdly witty of people you'd ever meet. His demeanour was affably laconic and laid back, so much so that it almost belied the fact that his mind was sharp as a razor and his cultural knowledge deep. He knew and loved The Macc Lads (a band with songs like Dan's Underpants, Sweaty Betty and He's a Poof) as much as he did more conventionally classic literature and film. Despite this erudite quick-wittedness, he was sacked from The Turk's Head pub, where he worked alongside me, for serving half as many customers as anyone else. I don't think he noticed them at the bar. I'd guess he was lost in his own fertile and absurd imagination, from whence came his comic creations that served as long-standing in-jokes in our crowd, such as the 'Good Cake' contest and the imaginary Ticket Inspector who demanded a ticket for just about ANYTHING that you might want to do in life.
Loz had an ambition for a while to take black and white photos of each of us, individual portraits in the same setting of a pub. I'm not sure he completed this project, but I do have one such photo of him, sat in the Turk's lifting a pint of 6x to his mouth, on the dining room wall. If he was here now, he'd walk in, spot the photo and ask, 'Have you got a ticket for that?'
I was introduced to The Beautiful South and their 1990 LP Choke by the last girl I went out with before meeting my wife. Given the crapness with women described in previous posts, you might find it incredulous that I ever went out with ANY girls or that I ended up finding one at this point who'd be forgiving enough of my still reasonably inept dating skills to condescend to marry me. The girl that I had a brief, confusing and doomed flirtation with was called Violet Elizabeth. Or Sarah. I was never sure, because she was a self-professed fabricator of information. I was in my third year, gloomily aware that my tenure at university was coming to an end and propulsion into the rat race - one in which I had no idea what job I wanted to do - was a mere 9 months away. I was also eager for a relationship that lasted longer than 2 consecutive weeks. She was in her first year, keen to enjoy the years of student life ahead of her and disinterested in anything lasting longer than 2 consecutive weeks. It was an eventful week and a half. I'd been going out with a girl called Lucy for a short time before this and had decided to end it before meeting Vi-Beth/Sarah at the student union one Friday night. Having agreed to go out on the Saturday night, I then went to break the bad news to Lucy that morning. As you do, I assured her honestly that I wasn't breaking up with her because of someone else. That same evening, I took Vi-Beth/Sarah out to a pub called The Greyhound, near our hall, knowing that students rarely drank in there. At one point, I went to the toilet, came out and found that she'd disappeared. Two minutes later she re-entered the pub laughing at her own prank. The next time I went to the toilet, I came out to discover Lucy and her friends - including Sonia, who I had also been out with earlier that year - sitting on a table next to ours, staring silently at me as I nonchalantly appeared through the Gents' doorway. Clearly it was time to leave. The thing with Vi-Beth/Sarah ended after discovering The Beautiful South and after a drunken argument in the student union which led to me being escorted out by the bouncers for kicking a plastic pint glass across the floor.
Like I said, a far less significant connection to the song, but a story worth sharing.
The song Let Love Speak Up Itself will be forever associated in my mind with our friend Loz, purely because once I'd discovered them, he told me that he was a fan and his favourite track off the new album was this one. And because it's a ballad; and because of the feeling it generates; and because of the fact that within a year of us leaving university Loz had sadly died and we all really did love him.
Loz was the gentlest and most absurdly witty of people you'd ever meet. His demeanour was affably laconic and laid back, so much so that it almost belied the fact that his mind was sharp as a razor and his cultural knowledge deep. He knew and loved The Macc Lads (a band with songs like Dan's Underpants, Sweaty Betty and He's a Poof) as much as he did more conventionally classic literature and film. Despite this erudite quick-wittedness, he was sacked from The Turk's Head pub, where he worked alongside me, for serving half as many customers as anyone else. I don't think he noticed them at the bar. I'd guess he was lost in his own fertile and absurd imagination, from whence came his comic creations that served as long-standing in-jokes in our crowd, such as the 'Good Cake' contest and the imaginary Ticket Inspector who demanded a ticket for just about ANYTHING that you might want to do in life.
Loz had an ambition for a while to take black and white photos of each of us, individual portraits in the same setting of a pub. I'm not sure he completed this project, but I do have one such photo of him, sat in the Turk's lifting a pint of 6x to his mouth, on the dining room wall. If he was here now, he'd walk in, spot the photo and ask, 'Have you got a ticket for that?'
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