The Songs That Saved Your Life

While I was truly Mancunian, I lived in student accommodation. Being 27 and living amongst 18 year old students who have nothing to spend their student loans/parents' money on except alcohol and Topshop meant that a lot of nights I would lie awake and hear them all coming home from the Footage, the Met, the Font, or Revolution, screaming, laughing, mostly screaming around 3am. EVERY MORNING.

So, rather than being the old lady I felt like being (which involved me opening a window and yelling 'SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU BASTARDS!'), I would listen to my iPod. Edie. She's red. She's amazing. She's a Shuffle. And of course this would mean that Edie was on almost constant recharge.

Lately I've been having trouble sleeping right away at night, so I decided to listen to Edie before bed. And in a flashback to last year, I woke up this morning with the sounds of Devendra Banhart coming from somewhere in my bed and alas, once more, Edie was dead.

But I have a secret. Edie was not my first Shuffle. There was another...a light blue one. Bigger on the inside. Naturally, it's name was the TARDIS.

I loved the TARDIS dearly. But because the charger is so small, someone stepped on it and broke it and I needed to buy a new one. And at the time it was the same price to buy a whole new iPod than buy a charger for TARDIS. So I bought a red one that's only available online and because Apple sucks and are slave to record companies and...ahem...intellectual property and copyright, you can only sync one iPod to a computer. So all of the music now on TARDIS is trapped inside it. And it was dead.

But my sister had a passing fancy for an iPod and I offered TARDIS. And because if something's slightly difficult, she doesn't want to do it, I got TARDIS back fully charged.

And I was curious. What was Sallie 2008/2009 listening to? Was she going through a crap phase? Had she discovered some wonderful new band? It turns out that, well, we have a lot of music in common. She hadn't had her heart broken by Morrissey the way Sallie 2010 was, so she was digging him. A LOT. And Lou Reed. And the Smiths, natch. She liked the Presets a lot more than she does now and, happiest of happies, she reminded me that I love New Order, the Cure and Mates of State.

And awesomely, she also had my friend's band, Fictions, EP Motel Kids With Hotel Dreams and a band my friend at work used to play drums for, Tin Pot Operation. Please listen to them both. A LOT LOT LOT.

Oh, and when I get my hair extensions, this is the song that should be playing at all times whenever I walk anywhere, in slow motion, wind machine blowing my locks in a flattering, look there's the girl in school everyone loves but you know is going to end up with John Cusack kind of way:





Everybody knows that after hours love is free...