I read Ghosts of my Life by Mark Fisher just after his death. My best friend and I discovered his writing and fell into the rabbit hole of theoretical and musical references head-first. As huge Burial fans and moody bitches with a ~no future~ mentality it was just like… next level. I mean, discovered a bit behind the curve but one of those pivitol books you come across in your life.
Reading ghosts and capitalist realism in the aftermath of the author’s suicide, Fisher’s work felt more urgent and personal (an injury to one is an injury to all). The shape and description of hauntology reminded me of hiraeth – a homesickness defined with a sense of loss, yearning for a home (a Wales) that can never be. For me it was the sense of loss of being left behind by someone who couldn’t see a future; of escaping and hating yet missing my hometown where that happened; of coming from an area of Wales that is intensely haunted by futures that didn’t manifest – with a high body count in poverty, illness, suicide and addiction.
I was also reading about the Miner’s Strike and LGSM around this time which has been one of the few things that bridged the schism between my semi-closeted hometown self and my current guilty-for-getting-out metropolitan self.
I had recently learnt about Paul Robeson and the life-long solidarity he forged with Welsh Miners. Their shared experience of soothing the hardship of struggle through song rattled through McCarthy and down the transatlantic telephone lines.
When I started making this mix in like… 2018? I was writing an essay about Handsworth Songs for uni (something that got increasingly harder to do with my own mental health struggles and knowing even lecturers and established academics were being pushed to the brink). Handsworth was a critical moment of dub-inflected Black british cinema that linked the bloody history of the british empire to the riots of the 1980s. As I came across Fisher’s response to the film written in the context of the 2011 riots, time folded and back further into that old colonial wound when the Windrush scandal broke.
My friend was deep in PhD research and co-hosted a walking tour of Brixton’s radical Black and queer history. The stories of riots, Brixton Fairies, Olive Morris cracking buildings and lesbians on the front line overlapped with our own recent history of queer squatting. Walking and remembering rewrote the internal map I had of my neighbourhood with a deeper bodily sense of the landscape of resistance.
The legacy of empire and Thatcher’s neoliberalism has deeply affected the communities in the places I have lived in and cared about at both ends of the M4. It feels so real and present as we face down a seemingly undying Tory government. Hopefully its not too much of an indulgance in nostalgia for like… 80s/90s aesthetics n politics – but its music n vibes for remembering a long history of interconnected struggles and I like that it sort of captures a v specific time in my life.
Tracklist:
Ghosts – Japan (yes on the nose)
The Gospel Comes to New Guinea – 23 Skidoo
Mother – Dirt
Youth Club 12s Dub – Yaba Radics
Alpenrausch – Monoloake
Statement – Test Dept
Father Can’t Yell – Eric Random & the Bedlamites
As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade – Mark Stewart
Hatch the Plan – Andy Stott
UK Will Not Survive – Rainer Veil
Cateract – AL-90
Ghosts of my Life – Rufige Kru
Jerusalem – Mark Stuart & the Maffia
Ticket – Coby Sey
Home Away From Home (Andy Stott Refix) – Arthur Russell
Didn’t My Lord Deliver – Paul Robeson
Comrades in Arms – Test Dept & the South Wales Striking Miners Choir
(sorry can’t remember what track I put under this bit)
Insurrection – Hiatus feat. Linton Kwesi Johnson
This Life – Tim Hecker
Spoken bits:
All Out! Dancing in Dulais 1985
Handsworth Songs 1986
Will Paynter and Paul Robeson – Transatlantic Concert 1957
Voice of striking miner, Alan Sutcliffe