#40: BASEMENT JAXX
“Romeo”
from the album Rooty
Released: June 2001
It was the last party, to which she couldn’t be invited. It opens a record described at the time as the soundtrack to its year’s London summer. Throbbing its pouch out of an epiphanous chorale with that unapologetic and isolated opening guitar chord, immediately making me think of the Specials, the song ejects you from your crinkling pale blue sofa. That right-angled relationship between drumline and bass tempting me back to a comforting darkness which never quite existed. Sunday, 1974, 4:40 p.m. in the dark, ATV, Norman Vaughan (even though Charlie Williams was actually, if fleetingly, presenting The Golden Shot at that time but FUCK FACTS). Determined like a fresh bag of Tudor Crisps. You danced in your head to it one year later to prevent yourself from going mad thinking what might have been, even though you knew in your gut that it could never have been. She just wasn’t that much INTO this.
I don’t think much about the music of 2001 because I had too many other things imposed upon me that year to think about. I still need to catch up with it, even if, as I have done, I arrived in the departure lounge a generation too late. The album came out on Monday 25 June, four days before she collapsed in our GP surgery and had to be taken to the Radcliffe Infirmary. “You used to be my Romeo.”
Let it go?
In 2023 I think about how the two members of Basement Jaxx came from Camberwell, met in Clapham, named their second album after a regular club night in Brixton, and hired two eleven-year-old kids from Streatham to contribute to the song on the B-side of the single of “Romeo,” and listen to the Cloud One/Margo Williams/Patrick Adams song at the cynosure of "Romeo," and even though it now all sounds thoroughly of its time, I realised that this music had actually, and patiently, waited for me to catch up, so that I could identify its real and proper context; in the gloriously happy Lambeth of here and now.
Let all of the past GO!!
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