Kerry writes:

I begin with a confession – I don’t really get jazz! I’ve tried, and while I can embrace the early forms that emerged from swing, blues, and gospel, I am one of those people who finds many of its more fluid, modern expressions a bit meh! I can sit back and be amazed by the incredible musicianship, the chord structures, the tones, the syncopation and scales, but it just doesn’t touch my soul.

Why then am I writing about a Jazz album that features in the Mercury Music Prize shortlist? It is partly as an act of challenging myself, trying to be surprised, and embracing what I don’t understand. While on the surface it is about as attractive as cold, milky, weak tea, or Taylor Swift (how dare I!), I genuinely wanted to try and be surprised and to be moved by what is not part of my self-determined musical world. When I listened to the album, I truly admired the musicality of tracks like Gainsborough Grove, Messy-In and Azure Blues, the outstanding audiophile recording, which sounds pristine and sharp, but I still struggled to feel my soul moved. However, it was in the tracks that carried the spoken word of the Geordie poet, Cooper Robson, that I became enamoured and stirred. They became my gateway to the album’s possibilities.

The opening track is 7 Bridges to Burn. It is not musically radical, it gently invited me in with light tempting notes, before delivering the first lines of the stories of working-class life. The poetry played into me over what felt like a romantic film’s soundtrack. The words offered the story of a boy, a man, “who lives on a street you wouldn’t clock on your Strava”. A backstreet world where the implication is that lives are affected by disorder, even threat. There I was invited into struggle, to meet the outsider, the economically marginalised, and socially non-mobile. I listened to the story of those some might label as the underclass, where escape can be restricted to drugs, drink, and crime.

He skives with his lass
They skip class to get off their lips
Blast off their brains on the sawn-off shot glass
The pupils that dilate
Are the students that die early
That found substance in abuse

The difficult truth is the Northeast has consistently had the highest rate of drug-related deaths in England for a decade, and the rates have been twice that of other parts of the country. To this, another story told about is crime:

He got a ring for her finger
A bracelet for his ankle and
Chains for leaving the house
Half his life in the nick
And then I’ll see him at a wake
And he’s nicking pickled onions off my paper plate
And he says,

“Son,” “Don’t do what I’ve done”

And he’s back behind bars…

The cycle can appear inescapable, and the words speak honestly about it, but these words are somehow musically caught in a romance scored by Knats. A reminder, love is more than our limitations. Love is more than one incident, one thing, love transcends and holds on, even when there is little. The song rises to a place of defiant hope, community, and belonging. It blossoms in people who gather and worship, not in church but in St James’ Park. It is manifest in the resilience of Geordies as witnessed by every football fan who has ever seen Newcastle fans dispute the winter weather, and afront sub-zero temperatures with naked torsos and chests!

Call hailstones and gale force “T-Shirt weather”
We dress ourselves in pleasure

Magpies
One for sorrow
Two, for joy
Fifty-two thousand make the ground shake
Make no mistake
Magpies
Magpies

There is a sense that here people are faithful to who they are. They are rooted and they have a story that unites them, that transcends other realities, and they become a prophetic sign. Knats are a band who have left Newcastle to complete their music degrees in London, and yet they know where they come from, and they love where they come from.

Stanley Hauerwas wonderfully wrote about the Church as a narrative-formed
community. He wrote about how the stories of faith form us from their past, but also form us by narrating our future hope. Knats write and perform in a more immanent frame than that. They are more reflective of the past remembered than ordered to a future hope. The album is a strange love song to their city; its title and cover are a homage to the 57 jazz musicians in a black-and-white photo called A Great Day in Harlem, taken in 1958. Formed as musicians by their home city, and the jazz from many other cities, they are inspired to tell their stories anew. I don’t fully appreciate it, but I have at least had some of my prejudices challenged by it.

Let those who have ears, hear, I think someone once said. Maybe I haven’t fully heard, but I did notice more than just the blue notes coming from my speakers.

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Find out more about Knats at https://knats.bandcamp.com/

Richard writes:

‘While you make pretty speeches, I’m being cut to shreds’
‘My body’s floating down the muddy river’

When I was a small child, television consisted of just three channels – difficult to imagine these days. It was at least, in general, more of a communal experience than the way in which we connect with our screens today. The weekend was often dominated by family entertainment programmes like Sunday Night at the London Palladium. One of the most famous programmes of the time was Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game, where contestants joined in short plays, dancing and games of skill before playing a final memory game at the end of the show – what you could remember you took home. Occasionally the show would feature a plate spinner who would attempt to spin more and more plates on top of vertical poles, hoping to keep them aloft without any falling to the ground. The act has ancient roots in Chinese acrobatic troupes who performed in groups, twirling and spinning plates in carefully choreographed movements and contortions. But in the Music Hall and circus traditions, it became a solo act often part of a comedy routine. One plate spinner, David Spathaky, once managed to keep 108 plates spinning at once, still a world record. It passed for entertainment then!

The phrase ‘spinning plates’ carries with it the sense of keeping too many balls in the air, of doing so many things that we feel overwhelmed, even perhaps crushed and destroyed. The Radiohead song, Like Spinning Plates, features on the album Amnesiac although a beautiful plain piano version is also available on the live album, I Might be Wrong. It began as an accident. The band recorded an unsuccessful version of the song I Will, which eventually found its way onto Hail to the Thief. Rather than discard the recording, they reversed the instrumental, creating a dissonant landscape onto which Thom Yorke’s lyrics could be projected. The reversal creates a mood of discomfort, of floating backwards, of deep disconnection in which a voice struggles for connection in the midst of emotional turmoil. It is a contemporary form of lamentation in which the singer expresses a sense of disintegration which works on a number of levels: personal, social and ecological. It is a song about being overwhelmed and traumatised by external pressures; of unease and disillusionment; of struggling to keep the plates spinning in a world where public words no longer bridge the divide but ring hollow and simply open up the ground between us.

While you make pretty speeches, I’m being cut to shreds

It is a world in which the plates feel fragile, about to fall from a height. How can they keep on spinning when the world is fractured, and my body feels like it’s floating in a muddy river?

The prophet Ezekiel seems an unlikely spiritual companion for Radiohead. Yet the prophet finds himself amongst exiles in a context of national ruin and loss of identity, adrift in a reality which overwhelms him. He is crushed, stunned into silence (3:15), traumatised, as he sits amongst his people, with his speech and movement shut down. Yet he offers a profound insight into a different kind of overwhelming. Sometimes we cannot escape the destructive forces that attempt to overwhelm us. Prophetic wisdom offers us ways of living within the ruins until the time when the landscape begins to change. In life, there are all kinds of overwhelmings, some of which are destructive, others of which are life-giving. Ezekiel offers us a way of comprehending reality which invites us to re-orientate our lives on God precisely at the point when it feels that we are dis-orientated and dis-connected. He offers us an invitation to re-order our lives on a stable centre which, whilst it does not remove the external threat, begins to provide us with a base from which we might prevent it from crushing us and perhaps even eventually subdue it. This re-ordering or re-centring has many names but is often found in practices like prayer, worship and community – the wellsprings of vocational identity.

One of the most famous chapters in Ezekiel, chapter 47, offers a vision of a new overwhelming. It is a vision not of a muddy river but of water flowing from the Temple like a life-giving stream. It is a vision of a new Eden which provides an alternative to a lament of disconnection and dissonance. As the text tells us, everything will live where the river goes (v.9).

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Find out more about Radiohead at https://radiohead.com/

Gill writes:

Usually, the Friday Fix takes a break this week. It’s the end of summer and we’re all getting ready for a reset. It also coincides with the Greenbelt Festival (where you’ll find a number of our contributors this weekend) and so quite often, we share the Greenbelt playlist as a peace offering.

Given that it’s been a summer of one hit wonders, I thought we could go out with a bang of one hit wonders, rather than a whimper of just one. So, I’ve taken the liberty of choosing 3 from each decade from the 70’s to the 2010’s. These are the ones that stood out for me – although I struggled to keep it to three (especially in the 80’s!), and each track has a tiny thought with a Friday Fix feel.

You will find at the end of this Fix, a Spotify playlist of the tracks I’ve covered – just in case you miss the Greenbelt playlist.

1970s

• Clout – ‘Substitute’ (1978) – I didn’t know this until I researched it but this is a cover of a Righteous Brothers song, by a South African band, that ended up on Top of the Pops. This was possibly my most favourite song from 1978. A reminder, perhaps, that ‘recycling’ can make some things as good as new.
• Driver 67 – ‘Car 67’ (1978) – a track that set out as a bit of a joke, playing around in the record studio. A taxi radio drama set to music, all delivered with a deadpan Black Country voice. There’s something a bit holy about the ordinary voice in the background, doing the job nobody sees and being alongside you.
• Jilted John – ‘Jilted John’ (1978) – “Gordon is a moron” is possibly the most quoted line from a 70’s song. My slightly older (and cooler at the time) cousin played this relentlessly. Even heartbreak can be looked at gently and lightly. Laughter has always been one of faith’s better coping mechanisms.

1980s

• Fiction Factory – ‘(Feels Like) Heaven’ (1983) – such a classic 80’s song and complete with a synth intro. A little bit of 80’s optimism. A song that reminds us that a glimpse of heaven doesn’t have to arrive with bells and whistles.
• Furniture – ‘Brilliant Mind’ (1986) – wistful and slightly melancholy – just how I liked music in the mid-80’s. Oh, and from the soundtrack of my favourite 80’s film – Some Kind of Wonderful. Just like the film, it feels like a gentle revealing of the soul where pride falls away and shows us the obvious.
• The Icicle Works – ‘Love Is a Wonderful Colour’ (1983) – hailing from my favourite city with music in its DNA (Liverpool). A lovely image of love painted as colour rather than words, and capturing the way that grace tends to work quietly and everywhere at once.

1990s

• The Boo Radleys – ‘Wake Up Boo! (1995) – Radio 1’s unofficial start-of-summer anthem for a good few years. Throw those curtains wide (a nod to Elbow there) with instant sunshine (whatever the weather’s actually doing). For me, this song is as good a description of hope as any.
• Chumbawumba – ‘Tubthumping’ (1997) – I know many who find this a useful life philosophy. Resurrection set to a football chant maybe?
• The La’s – ‘There She Goes’ (1988, rereleased 1990) – this is definitely in my top 5 of One Hit Wonders. I know that The La’s did release more music, but this jangly joy (with quite a dark edge if you believe the rumours about ‘she’ being a drug) was a perfect song that The La’s gave us that we actually noticed. Some songs just capture moments of joy.

2000s

• Spiller ft. Sophie Ellis-Bextor – ‘Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)’ (2000) – the song that launched a thousand club nights and gave Sophie Ellis-Bextor a big break. A proper turn of the millennium vibe. We already know that a dancefloor can be a place of communion – bodies moving together in something bigger than themselves.
• Feist – ‘1234’ (2007) – we can thank an iPod advert for this sweet, skippy tune which is great for a summer trip. In fact this was on my 2026 Canada Trip playlist. Counting things out loud isn’t so different from counting your blessings maybe?
• The Calling – ‘Wherever You Will Go’ (2001) – a long-distance-relationship song, smothered in angst. Don’t you think that a promise to go wherever love leads is as close to a vocation as a pop chorus can get?!

2010s

• Owl City – ‘Fireflies’ (2009/2010) – a song that straddled the decades of the 10’s and 20’s. Can’t help liking the ethereal nature of this song. Small lights in the dark, ten thousand of them is not a bad image of how faith often rocks up – in scattered and flickering ways.
• The Lumineers – ‘Ho Hey’ (2012) – that “ho! hey!” shout probably started to annoy us at some point. But a lovely crossover moment for folk-pop. A shout that everyone joins in with, offering a sense of community for not only those who join in, but for those looking on tofrom the sides too perhaps.
• Passenger – ‘Let Her Go’ (2012) – this song lolled around for ages before creeping up the charts – and then it finally clicked with everyone almost at once. And what a heartfelt message it had. Knowing what you had once it’s gone is one of the oldest and most human of lessons, and love keeps gently teaching us that.

And so we bring our One Hit Wonders summer to a close. Thank you to everyone who shared their picks, their memories, and the odd unexpected theological insight along the way – from JCB diggers to Cold War protest songs, from school playgrounds to breakup ballads, you’ve reminded us that a single perfect (or timely) song can carry more than its three minutes of fame. Here’s to the one-hit wonders, and to whatever seeps into the airwaves at just the right moment to catch us. See you next week.

Tom writes:

When we were given the task of exploring one-hit wonders, this was the very first thing that came into my mind. The fact that it encourages listeners to wear sunscreen while we walk through the hottest, sunniest summer on record in the UK is just one reason to give it a listen – or a re-listen if you were around in 1999 when it was released as a single and reached #1 in the UK and was ubiquitous as part of that summer’s soundtrack.

Of course, one of the features of the song is that it notes something that has sadly become more relevant now than ever – that there is a difference between opinions and facts. Most of what is offered is advice based on experience and philosophical considerations, but, as is noted, the use of sunscreen is backed by science. That is a categorical difference we seem to have lost in this world, and one I’d argue we need to get back.

But really, it’s not that which sticks in my mind as I think back to that first summer that I heard the song – a summer that marked a major step in my life, as I prepared to move from the UK to the US to undertake the third year of my first degree at the University of Mississippi. Rather, what struck me then, and what strikes me now, is just how much of that advice, given knowingly as a set of random thoughts based in nostalgia, actually means something. Of those things, here are the ones I’d highlight:

• “Don’t worry about the future…”. I say this as someone who suffers from anxiety. Worry is a base state for me in my life at many times. And it sucks precisely because I know it won’t actually change anything. Jesus once mentioned something about lilies in the field, and I think he was onto something.
• “Sing.” Honestly, no matter how good, or bad, you are at it, singing is good for you. Whether you do it with others or in the shower where no-one can hear you.
• “Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.” Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, as the saying goes. Or, love your neighbours as you love yourself. And it’s always worth noting that the second version does require us to love ourselves – it requires self-care as much as care for others.
• “Keep your old love letters…” You may or may not choose to take this literally, but in ministry I’ve been encouraged to keep all the thank you cards and letters and emails we received, so when days are hard, and it feels like we can’t do the right thing for love nor money, we can look back at those moments where somebody somewhere thought we did
  something worth thanking us for.
• “Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you don’t know what to do with your life…” I spent a career in student recruitment before ministry, and the most interesting prospective students were almost always those mature students who, at 30, 40, 50 years old, suddenly found a new sense of purpose as they headed in a direction no-one expected. And at the age of 31, on an upward career trajectory, I did the same thing and went into ministry!
• “Do NOT read beauty magazines; they will only make you feel ugly.” This is twofold: it literally applies to those magazines, which I’ve seen do so much damage to people I love, both women and men; it also applies to almost all marketing (and beauty magazines exist as an advertising medium for “beauty” products), which is designed to tell you what’s wrong with you and your life before offering something that will supposedly fix the problem you didn’t even know existed until they told you about it. Believe me when I tell you, it almost certainly won’t!
• “…work hard to bridge the gaps…” This one hurts because I know I’m so bad at it. As someone who’s lived a nomadic life, my closest friends are spread across quite a geography, and I suck at managing to stay in touch. I know my life would be better if I was better at it…

Some of the rest of it also very much resonates with me (I can’t comment on NYC or Northern California – when I lived stateside I spent the majority of my time in the South, travelled to D.C., Seattle, Chicago and Boston, but never went near New York or San Francisco), but those are the bits I’d particularly highlight.

Maybe you’ll listen to the song, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll pay attention to what I’ve written above, maybe you won’t. In the end, it’s your choice. But in this day and age, as the climate catastrophe continues to bring heatwave after heatwave, at least do one thing: wear sunscreen!

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