Fun fact - you can listen to the whole of Soukous in Central Park in the time it takes to read this post. Hell! You can probably listen to the whole of The Last Waltz in the time it takes to read this post.
If any of you reading this have ever gone through the breakup of a marriage, engagement or long-term relationship, I have to ask you, what was your break-up record of choice? The one that served as an aural backdrop to your heartache? Perhaps it was one from the 46 albums contained in this list. In my case, it was the Kanda Bongo Man live album, Soukous in Central Park, recorded in New York in June 1992.
It doesn’t feature among the 46 albums compiled in the above link by udiscovermusic.com, though that could be because nobody was available to translate the lyrics that Kanda Bongo Man was singing. For all we know, every line of every song in the set could be him pouring his heart out after a relationship has gone sour. The music certainly isn’t depressing or downbeat, but I associate it with a period of heartbreak and confusion in my life that took place during the autumn and winter of 2000.
A and I had been together for 3 years when we got engaged in August 1999. We didn’t set a date for the wedding because we both had potential career priorities over the course of late-‘99/early 2000, which we needed to get clarity on first. I was 23 years’ old and I wanted to be an actor, but I didn’t have the desire to try and create stuff and flog myself around festivals and small venues trying to get noticed. It was always going to be difficult to do that down in Cornwall, but I felt that because I had somebody else’s future to consider as well as my own, I would only get a couple of chances to try and get trained. I resolved to audition for a couple of drama schools in London and if it didn’t work out, then I’d buckle down to getting a job so that we could marry and move into our own place together. I auditioned for Central School of Speech and Drama (December 1999) and Guildhall School of Music and Drama (March 2000). I enjoyed the experiences, but I was unsuccessful in both attempts.
A also had aspirations to work as an actor. She applied for a six-month short course with Graeae, Britain’s leading disability theatre company. She was accepted on to the course which would be run in Manchester, starting in September 2000. I was delighted for her, and we initially saw it as a great opportunity for her as an individual, and potentially an exciting one for us as a couple. It could have led on to work in other parts of the country, and although the plan was for her to go to Manchester alone to do the course, six months didn’t seem too disruptive a length of time. We’d been through longer separations before when she was at university. But the thing about new opportunities is that they give people a chance to take stock of their lives and compare where they’ve come from with where they’re going…
I spent Saturday 29 April, 2000 in a great mood. I had a job placement with the Cornwall Adult Education Service’s functional skills department lined up to begin in 3 days. Ipswich Town produced a fine 3-1 victory over Charlton Athletic at the Valley to ensure that the race for automatic promotion to the Premier League would go to the final weekend of the season. I was looking forward to going to the cinema that evening. A and I were going to join a couple of my friends to go and see Galaxy Quest. A came over to my house about an hour before we were due to meet our friends. We nipped upstairs to my bedroom, usually a time to talk, cuddle and kiss. As I closed the door she sat on the bed and said, “We need to talk.” “What about?” I replied with blithe unconcern. “About us,” she replied looking down at the floor, with a worryingly analytical look on her face. The kind of look you have when contemplating what to do about something like a door that struggles to close properly or an oven that has spent weeks refusing to work properly unless you kick it while firing the gas ignition. Something that has gone wrong and needs either to be fixed…or thrown away.
She didn’t use these words, but she effectively told me that she had fallen out of love with me. The catalyst for this wasn’t down to anything I’d done but she had taken a good look at me the previous evening when I was taking part in a rehearsal of a Cole Porter revue that she was directing for Carnon Downs Drama Group and suddenly found herself wondering whether she really wanted to spend the rest of her life with me. I had been putting on weight, which she didn’t like, and I looked in her view, unattractive to her. She basically wanted me to smarten up my act and start looking after myself better. I was shocked and more than a little put out. She was telling me that we were in trouble for what sounded like some of the most horribly superficial reasons that I’d ever heard. But then again, if you don’t look after the micro issues, it can completely undercut whatever progress you’re making on the macro ones i.e. the new job which I saw as important to our future.
What turned out to be subsequently worse about this conversation was that she wasn’t dumping me, she was just giving me a warning. But it really would have been more of a mercy if she had ended things there and then. Instead, she skipped going to the cinema and I attempted to enjoy Galaxy Quest with my friends, but with the thought running around my brain that the woman I loved and wanted to spend the rest of my life with, had effectively snapped out of some kind of four-year-long delusion to see me, not as her future husband but as some kind of repellent oddity. After the movie, my mates and I went to a pub which was hosting a karaoke evening, and it took a huge effort of will on my part not to get up and sing What Becomes of the Brokenhearted .
We limped on for another three months; that awful period which doomed relationships go through where every interaction causes another layer of affection to crack and peel off like sunburnt skin. I spent so many days during that time second-guessing her moods and feelings; wondering whether her kisses were regaining any of their former ardour, whether she was looking at me kindly or just suffering my presence. We started to get tetchier with each other; there was one evening where we essentially broke up for 15 minutes only to talk ourselves out of it. Some days were good, most days weren’t, but none of them seemed to contain joy anymore.
I could see her withdrawing from me and I didn’t know how to bring her back. I wondered whether her going to Manchester would help, perhaps absence would make her heart grow fonder again. I told myself that if we got to her departure date, it might make things better. I didn’t want to lose her, but she wouldn’t let me go either despite the fact she was getting more frustrated and distant. In the event, she was waiting for me to do something which would effectively give her permission to end the relationship, and it duly happened over the weekend of 29/30 July 2000.
This date marked a year since we had got engaged. To celebrate, I booked a meal and a room at a hotel near the seafront at Falmouth. It was meant to be a romantic evening together, but it was a disaster. She didn’t want to be there, and the atmosphere turned poisonous. I’d had enough of being treated so badly and told her so, in pretty curt terms.
The next morning we went back to my house, so she could drive home. In an excruciating atmosphere, my mother tried to keep up a flow of polite conversation over a cup of tea while A tried not to cry and I just wanted the ground to swallow me up. When A left, my parents urged me to take control of the situation, one way or another. But A now had her justification for cutting the cord, and on Monday 31 July 2000, 365 days after we had got engaged, she phoned me to say it was over. I had mentally accepted this on the Saturday night and took it without tears or rancour.
“Thanks for the good times,” I said at the end of the call.
“And they were good times,” she replied.
It was the first tender thing she had said to me since 29 April.
So after 4 and a half years, I was single again. And as per the 5 stages of grief, I rolled together denial and anger in an attempt to avoid feeling hurt or sad. I told myself that I was better off without her and used the anger I felt about the way I’d been treated as a way of trying to sustain that sense of relief that I wasn’t having to chase after somebody who no longer appreciated me. A and I met up again for a drink a few weeks later so that she could give me back the engagement ring and I could pass on some engagement gifts that we’d been given, a year earlier. The mood was businesslike but friendly and when I drove away from the pub, I told myself that I was fine. No, honestly, I was completely fine…I tried to pawn the ring but on the day I went into the pawnbrokers, nobody was available who was authorised to give me a price for it. I didn’t want it hanging around the house, trying to make me feel sad, so rather than go back to the shop on another day, I went for the dramatic option. I drove to Pendennis Point and threw the ring into the sea.
My attempt at emotional shielding held up for a few weeks. I was also helped by the fact that the play I was appearing in at the time, Stags and Hens, in which a bride-to-be has second thoughts on her hen night, offered me a chance for some cathartic venting, as my character, who is the best friend of her fiancé, tells her some angry home truths. I took it up a notch when I was told that A was in the audience at one of the performances.
After Stags and Hens finished its run, I threw myself into my new job, but the attempts to distract myself and lead a social life couldn’t stop me from starting to feel a darkness creeping in around the edges of my mind. The date came when I knew that A was leaving for Manchester and melancholia started to edge out defiance. Gradually, with each day, this feeling started to grow and I had to acknowledge that I was upset about the break-up and that I wasn’t fine or lucky or better off. I was heartbroken, and I had been since 29 April.
It was in this mood, circa October 2000, that during an aimless walk and spot of window shopping through Falmouth town centre, I went into Compact Records and Tapes in the high street, now better known as Jam Records. I browsed the racks listlessly, but with a certain curiosity. Having been an occasional listener to John Peel over the previous 3 years since he soundtracked my journeys home from rehearsals, I spotted a few names that I’d heard him play and many more which it looked like he would probably play. But, I was stopped in my tracks after seeing a copy of Soukous in Central Park in the shop. I’d loved hearing the regular plays of Kanda Bongo Man on Peel’s show over the previous year, given that I first heard him in June 1999. And at this time, seeing a Bongo Man record was only going to make me think of A given that I’d been driving out to see her, when I first heard Bongo Man on the Peel Show. All the same, I felt I needed the joyous sound of Kanda and friends to lift me from the slough of despond I could feel myself falling into.
If I’m being honest, the album failed to do what I wanted it to do for me at the time. All of the tunes, including Liza, were perfectly catchy and pleasant, but they lacked the zest that I so desperately needed to feel. I think the reason is pretty obvious. In the vast open space of Central Park, you really needed to be among the 6,000 who were at that concert, otherwise it all sounded slightly distant and underpowered. The studio version, recorded for the Kwassa Kwassa LP in 1989, is understated too, but at least you feel as though you’re in the room when it’s being recorded. By contrast, the live version, instead of grabbing the listener by the throat and dragging them on to the dancefloor, sounded, in parts, contemplative and circumspect, especially in its main refrain (see 0:54, 3:13 and 6:38 to the end), and that was the last thing I wanted to feel at that time. The sound of the album as a whole seemed symbolic of my life and mood in October 2000; there was a good time being had somewhere, but it was too far away from me to be able to join in with it.
At the end of October, I cracked. I asked A’s father if he could give me an address for her, and bless him, he did. He told me that she was finding it hard going in Manchester, and maybe thought that my writing to her would cheer her up. I wrote to her, telling her that I missed her and wondering whether she would be open to meeting up for a date when she came back for Christmas. She wrote back telling me that she would be happy to meet up, and confirming that she was hating both Manchester, and a lot of the elements of her course.
We met up a few times over Christmas, we kept things light and the possibility of reconciliation was floated, but she didn’t want to commit to anything until the course was finished. I agreed to go up and see the production of Blood Wedding that A was going to be touring in with Graeae around the North of England through February/March 2001, and that I would stay the weekend with her in Manchester, over 23-25 February 2001.
Although A and I were moving towards reconciliation, there were a couple of problems still to be resolved. For instance, my parents were not happy about the thought of A and I getting back together. She had upset them hugely with what they perceived to be aloofness when my father was diagnosed with bowel cancer at the start of 2000. The tumour was detected just in time, and my father spent ten days in hospital after having it removed via surgery, followed by a short course of chemotherapy throughout the summer. A had not visited him in hospital, which wasn’t a problem, but on her first visit to our house after my dad returned home - which was about a month before 29 April - she came in and said nothing to him except “Hello”. I still remember us standing in the lounge, and the seconds passing like hours while we waited for her to ask him how he was feeling, or whether he was glad to be home, or even just to go and give him a hug. But she was content to stand there in silence, until I gave the prompt, “He’s looking well, isn’t he?” I was surprised at her behaviour, but I didn’t call her out on it at the time because she had been very supportive to me at least, after Dad’s initial diagnosis and during his time in hospital.
That being said, I understood where where my parents were coming from and found A’s subsequent explanation of her reaction - that her family had lost people to cancer and so found any mention of it hard to deal with - somewhat unconvincing. As my mother remarked at the time, she really couldn’t bring herself to deliver a simple platitude to her future father-in-law?*
My parents felt that if I wanted to get back with A, then I was perfectly within my rights to do so, but they were so hurt by her attitude towards them when Dad was going through his cancer, that they told me that if we were ever to get married, then they would not attend the wedding. All this led to a Christmas Day in 2000 of brittle tension as the three of us sat at home, trying to pretend that there wasn’t an elephant to be carved instead of a turkey.
So, the drama went on into 2001, with me now not only to trying to tentatively fix things with A, but also trying to engage in diplomacy between her and my family. I remember one night in late January, I was walking home from a night out with friends. I was drunk and running over the situation in my mind, and the stress of it caused me to start crying in the street. I was trying to please everyone and felt like I was being pulled apart by my obligations to people I loved.
My depression wasn’t helped by me discovering a new heartbreak album at this time. I’d got a copy of Parachutes by Coldplay for Christmas. I’ve mentioned before on this blog how I find the opening piano refrain in Trouble to be evocative of a pair of tear ducts being hit by hammers. And just as the song said, I felt myself trapped in a spider’s web of emotions, love, desire, obligation and fear. It didn’t help me that the song seemed inescapable at the time, being used on adverts and TV trailers as an underscoring to scenes of emotion.
There’s was also another thought that I held in my head when A returned to Manchester for the second half of her programme. I knew that one reason she had responded positively to my overtures in October was because she was having a hard time in her new environment. But I wondered how she would feel if the second term went better for her? Manchester in winter might be a struggle, but Manchester in spring time might be easier. Not to mention the excitement of touring a play. Although I was all over the place, emotionally, I was clear headed enough to realise that I couldn’t yet trust her not to row back on how she had felt over Christmas.
I was wise to feel this way. As we spoke to each other through January and early February, she began to talk about the course in more positive terms. Inevitably, this led to her telling me, in a call we made the week before I was due to visit her, that she had been seeing someone on her course. It was a casual thing at this stage, and she still wanted me to visit, but she wanted to be honest with me too. I actually felt oddly relieved to hear about this. My instincts had prepared me for it, and I began to see that the drama and heartache might be about to clear, even if it meant that A and I didn’t get back together.
I drove up to Manchester expecting nothing, and that was pretty much what I got. I didn’t see Blood Wedding because the ticket I had reserved for their performance on the 23rd of February was the only one that was sold for that night, so they cancelled it. A was pleased to see me but the fact that I was sleeping on the floor of her room and that we spent most of the weekend accompanied by a woman who was also on her course showed me the direction of travel. Shortly before I left, late on the Sunday afternoon, she was phoned by the man she’d been seeing. As we walked down to my car, I realised that although I had wanted to get her back, what had actually happened over October 2000/February 2001, was the next best thing. She had broken up with me, and then ended up helping me process and come through the split in a way that had seemed impossible to imagine during the curdling of our relationship, the previous summer. We weren’t getting back together, but we had at least mended our fences.
“You’re not coming back (to Cornwall)” I said to her, before I got into the car. It was a statement rather than a question.
“We’ll see how things go after the course,” she replied. “But I want to see what progress I can make.”
I hugged her and wished her luck. Then I drove away and for the first time in 10 months, I felt a weight fall away from me. I could move on with my life just as she was moving on with hers. I didn’t have to sacrifice my relationship with my parents and I could replace Trouble with Everything’s Not Lost as my internal anthem. Also, I could give Soukous in Central Park a second listen too.
In the event, A was back in Cornwall by the summer. She wasn’t especially happy about it at the time, and I remember her coming round to visit me at my flat** in the autumn of 2001, by which time I was seeing someone else, and she painting a pretty dispiriting picture about where her life was, post-Graeae. But she persevered and started getting acting work here and there. She now acts in different projects, both on stage and especially in short films. She also advocates for those diagnosed with her own disability, cerebral palsy. Furthermore, after a brief period apart, she and the man she met at Graeae ended up in a long term relationship, which I think has endured to this day.
We’ll meet A again in due course as and when this blog reaches the mid 90s, and the Peel Show will soundtrack the good times I enjoyed with her, as well as more than a dozen plays which I acted in over that time, several of which were performed alongside her. I can only reflect now on what I would have foretold the 17 year old me, had I heard Liza on 7/5/93, and how 7 years later, I would be trying and failing to kwassa kwassa away a broken heart.
*By contrast, my wife is so solicitous towards my parents’ health that they only need to sneeze and she’s there with remedies, hot drinks and TLC. The difference is like night and day.
**While I was trying to bridge the gap between A and my parents in early 2001, I spoke to someone I knew through work that rented out bedsits and flats about whether he could put me on his waiting list, in case I needed to move out of the family home, in order to have somewhere to be with A. Once I moved on from her, I forgot all about the request until he contacted me at the start of September 2001 to see if I was interested in moving into one of his flats, which was furnished and less than 10 minutes’ walk away from my workplace, the town centre and my favourite pub. With a new girlfriend to entertain and my parents having just moved into a new house which needed doing up, I snapped his hand off. I made sympathetic noises when A came to visit and complained about living back at home with her parents, but I’ll also confess to feeling rather smug about where I had ended up. After all, it was all thanks to her.
Video courtesy of pneuborne.
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