Boiler Room tonight was the epitome of why I love London’s music scene: a bunch of people huddled in a little room, leaning into the music, thrilled by the closeness and ready to be surprised. It’s those little conversations, those little smiles, those little nods: they are the layers on layers that bind and remind me why I hold it dear. Damn – and who was that girl singing over Micachu’s scruffy funk beats? She was something else.
Then I sit in a cab on the drive back to Brixton and I know I’m done. I see the place I told my old boss in another life that I wasn’t long for that job, I pass the record shop that is no longer a record shop, and I trace my old bike ride home when I was first learning this new life route. All these memories in all these streets, concrete drenched in days gone by. And Pure X are in my ears, singing ” all of the future, all of the past” and I feel what they mean more than ever.
Ruth Saxelby 