from full circle to full spiral

dispatches from depression #9 aka 365cryinggirl

In 1998 good things still happened, the best of which probably being the British chart music show, Top of the Pops. This is, with its unfailingly repetitive format, by far my favourite television show of all time.

moon rising @ fort tilden beach, scorpio szn ‘24 - 35mm

In 1998 I still lived in my family home because I was 9, and every Friday I would go to Karate (Wadō-ryū, purple belt), get fish burger and chips from the chicken shop and women’s mags from the newsagents for mum on the way home and settle down for a night of increasingly inappropriate television. My mother would lie on the sofa reading after a hard week at work and ceremoniously high-toss each magazine onto the floor once she’d finished with it, like a fountain of fabricated celebrity gossip, misogynist “sex tips”, harrowing women’s health stories dressed as entertainment and body shaming.

There into the sky goes Heat! Watch your head, Now! is coming through! And I would sit like a little sparrow on the edge of the fountain, taking a joyous sip of each. “These magazines are bad!” my mum would shout over the top of whichever one she was reading. “It’s just my little treat!” before disappearing back into that week’s ladies lore. And honestly, that was one parenting job done really well I think. Every Friday my stepdad would be out playing badminton so it was girls night, forever my favourite kind of night. Jumu’ah Mubarak.

From 1964 to 2006, at around 7.30pm, BBC 1 gave us Top of the Pops (iconic Led Zeppelin theme tune, iconic camera effects), during which we would find out the top 40 charting songs of the week, presented to us by a string of men many of whom have gone on to be publicly disgraced but it wasn’t about them it was about the ~~***music***~~. The top 10 acts of the week would come to the Top of the Pops studio to perform / lip-sync their track to the small, excited audience, and each week I was mesmerised, sitting cross-legged too close to the television like a true disciple of pop, fully engaged in the intimacy of this performance ritual, like they were singing just to me.

In 1998 Cher was at number 1 in the UK with her single Believe, for seven weeks straight. I was there for every single one, dancing in my living room to the same recording of her performance, learning every word though I realised recently, not quite understanding them.