“As a child, I got into music in that crossover period between CDs and MP3s. I still buy CDs today so I can put them on an MP3 player and also play them on my oversized Hi-Fi. But I also buy vinyl records—special ones, discoloured jazz and roots sleeves that I summon up the courage to play and meditate over, still amateurish with the needle. The last record I bought was a James Cleveland LP from Sounds of the Universe on Broadwick Street. It was so magisterial I haven’t been able to look at it since. I’ll tell you about my own collection some time. First, here’s a story about my people.”
“When we were growing up in Leicester my Mum worked a number of jobs so she kind of relied on our great-grandparents for childcare. We spent days and days in their big house over the main road. Grandmam and Farda had come over from Monserrat in the ’60s. Fuck knows what they thought of the East Midlands. I was born there and I know what I think of it.
Their house was typical of West Indian homes in that, as well as having Caribbean traits (an off-limits room, untouched behind glass for ‘best’, chairs covered in plastic, orange peels strung from the ceiling) it also aspired to an assimilated Britishness. There were China cups, pressed suits, pictures of the Queen.
Grandmam always kept a tin of pear drops and had a huge wardrobe full of clothes which you’ll probably now find marked up at £50 a piece in Stoke Newington. Farda spent his afternoons drinking rum out of a milk bottle. It was probably the last time I felt innocent.
One weekday in the summer holidays, Grandmam gave us coins to buy things in the charity shop. I owe my thrift store sensibility to her. I picked up Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ for my Dad who had rooms filled with LPs where wallpaper should have been. His house was where I was first exposed to music as a beautiful physical object, a declaration of interests. What can be more disheartening than walking into a house with no books on shelves or CDs in the rack?
I took the Whitney LP home, pleased as children often are with a generous act. But my Dad replied, ‘I’ve already got it.’ So now I have. And I’ve still not had the nerve to play it.”
—Law Holt
Law Holt’s debut album, City arrives in stores 26th August 2016 via Soulpunk.
