It's Eliza's birthday today. She arrived in the early hours of 14th June 2003 and turns twenty three today. This has been causing some distress- Isaac was twenty three when he died in November 2021 and in a week's time she'll be older than he ever was. It's a strange thing to get one's head around and has brought some emotions to the surface. In the years since he died we've made a thing out of the number twenty three. We've all got a 23 tattoo and it's has become a way we jointly remember him. I still spot 23s out in the wild all the time. This was the table we sat at recently, in a busy pub, the only one with seats left...
Birthdays have been tough since he died. I know I always find them tough, another anniversary to get through, another date he's missing for. Eliza's twenty third birthday has stirred a lot of grief related stuff up and these are things which I've learned you just have to go through, you have to feel the feelings and accept it for what it is.
We're immensely proud of her and everything she's done and we will be celebrating today, just in a slightly different way from usual.
This is a thirty minute mix of songs for her twenty third birthday. There's plenty of other music she likes but these are some of the ones that have become jointly ours.
Eliza's 23rd Birthday Mix
- The Stone Roses: Mersey Paradise
- The Charlatans: Can't Get Out Of Bed
- Ride: Cali
- New Order: Sub- culture (7" Version)
- Oasis: Supersonic
- The Kinks: Misty Water
- Half Man Half Biscuit: The Light At The End Of The Tunnel (Is The Light Of An Oncoming Train)
- Cheryl Cole: Fight For This Love
Mersey Paradise was the B-side to She Bangs The Drums back in 1989, when The Stone Roses were on their ascent and I was nineteen/. It's her favourite Roses song, one that we've sung along to in unison umpteen times in the car. The Mersey isn't far from where we live, we walk on its banks often. Upriver in Chorlton is where Ian Brown and John Squire lived when they wrote the song, maybe inspired by walks through Chorlton Ees and the water park and beyond that Didsbury where I grew up. Downstream it ends up in Liverpool where both she and I went to university, several decades apart. It's a been a constant presence in our lives in a way I only really realised while writing this. She missed The Stone Roses reunion, she was a bit too young and only really became interested a little later, something I regret a bit.
We played North Country Boy at Isaac's funeral and it still retains a lot of power of as a song. I took Eliza to see The Charlatans a year ago at Castlefield Bowl and when they played it we both started sobbing. It's acted as a gateway into The Charlatans for her though and she has several of their songs on one of her playlists, often coming on straight after Mersey Paradise. Just When You're Thinkin' Things Over is one and their 1994 single Can't Get Out Of Bed is another. The album it's from, Up To Our Hips, got a bit of a mixed reception at the time- their star had waned a little in the press- but it sounds like a fine album today.
Cali is from Ride's 2017 comeback album Weather Diaries, a gorgeous guitar song with end of summer lyrics and feel.It was one of the songs that got a lot of time in the car when we went to France in summer 2017, a long drive down to Messanges on the Atlantic coast near Biaritz.
Sub- culture is one of those songs that cut through for her. I'm not sure where it came from- I've played it and many other New Order songs since before she was born so maybe it just seeped in by osmosis. There are various versions. My favorite is the Lowlife one but the one here is the 7" version from 1985, remixed by John Robie.
Supersonic was Oasis' debut single back in 1994 back when they were just five likely lads from Burnage. Oasis are part of Eliza's generation's firmament, and last summer's re- union gave a lot of young people a chance to see them they wouldn't have had otherwise. We were going to go to Gallagher Hill last summer when they played Heaton Park but the Sunday evening when we were thinking about it it began raining heavily and we thought better of it. Probably should have gone- if you avoid doing things outside in Manchester due to rain you'd do very little. Supersonic is a blast, phased guitars and splintering notes over that early Oasis rhythm and a load of half- nonsense rhymes and typically Gallagher arrogance- 'I need to be myself/ I can't be no-- one else'.
Back when Eliza was much younger and going to dance classes every Tuesday night I'd take her and her friend Emma in the car, drop them and then an hour later pick them up. One of the routines of young children. For some reason, Misty Waters became a song they started singing along to, and it became an essential part of the Tuesday dance drop routine that we played Misty Water, the pair of them singing/ shouting along to the chorus. A 1968 hidden Ray Davies gem later covered by Billy Childish.
Another car song from pre- teen years, The Light At The End Of The Tunnel (Is The Light Of An Oncoming Train), is a Half Man Half Biscuit classic, one of their greatest moments. We'd all sing the breakdown, anticipating it from the start of the song- 'No frills, handy for the hills/ That's the way you spell New Mills'. Imagine our joy when we did this actually driving through New Mills.
The line about Eyam is evidence of Nigel Blackwell's genius- 'We both grew up in Eyam/ And strange as it may seem/ Neither of us thought we'd ever leave'. For the benefit of non- UK readers, the village of Eyam is in Derbyshire and had an outbreak of Bubonic Plague in the 17th century. Rather than risk spreading the plague the villagers sealed themselves in, an act of self- isolation that confined the disease but led to the deaths of 260 residents.
Cheryl Cole's Fight For This Love sticks out like a sore thumb in this mix but back in 2009 when she was six it was the first pop song she really connected with and I clearly remember downloading it for her and burning it to CD.
Happy birthday Eliza. X
