tracks you have played on repeat for like an hour

just did this with the original 7 inch version of jens lekman's "maple leaves"

both sides the tweed - dick gaughan

travelling through the north over the tweed into scotland. for some reason this fused with a sense of an immensity of squandered potential across the UK. of industry and political energy, intellectual advancement, education and artistic adventure, pissed down the drain in national fits of nostalgia, rural and landed regression, general small mindedness, conservatism with any sized c you fancy, probably with an unt somewhere at the end of it.

the idealism dick gaughan’s song, while not entirely free of some of the regressive tendencies above, was jibing nicely with alasdair gray’s motto “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation”.

so i listened to it five or six times in a row into and out of berwick.

perhaps worth noting this song originally came to me in Will Oldham’s Idea and Deed at the end of Joya, where “both sides the Tweed” becomes a more philosophical exhortation to civic unity and achievement.

There is a third, entirely fictitious, version of this song - a figment of some misreading or misprision of mine: Berwickshire Tweed - where the same civic unity and liberty - is created through the industry of the weaving of tweed wool. in berwick. as if it were some sort of material expression of that conversion from personal liberty to civic emancipation, that’s the theme of the song.