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The Emigration Playlist: 64 years of songs. # 9 Lola's Theme (Lola's Loungin' Mix) - Shapeshifters/Ministry of Sound 2004.

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So now we come to the first giant on the list. Not the greatest song maybe, not the most legendary , but one that is rooted in me with such a strong emotional hook that it’ll be with me till my last breath as a Top 5 Lifetime Tune. Much of it is actually sampled from elsewhere; a song constructed of the parts of others. Yet I play this song all the time, 22 years after it was first released, and it (specifically a particular remix) is absolutely embedded in a joyous memory. It’s 2004 and I’m running my market research business with my (now) ex. I did qualitative research, mostly what Blair’s government poisoned by embedding the American term ‘focus groups’ into the public consciousness and then misusing it, and them, cynically, but which we old-skoolers called ‘group discussions’. I’m doing pretty well at it, running it all out of our country home in the last few years of the industry's golden age before the internet and lately AI wrecked it, at first by ripping the economic botto...
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The Emigration Playlist: 64 years of songs. #8 Slave to the Rhythm - Grace Jones 1985

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The song came out in 1985, but first and foremost it takes me back to four years later. And another song that is part of my list but actually puts me in another country (something that's making me take stock a bit as it's going to happen again later). It's July 1989, the French Bicentenary is happening, and I am with my first wife in Paris. A few days I'll never forget. We are with a friend in his Ford Escort Cabriolet (the chic😉!), obviously with the top down, cruising a packed city, electric with heat, excitement and increasingly pissed but good natured French people. Millions of them. I'm 27.  All three of us work in a fancy London ad agency, and yes, it's all still a bit Mad Men there . The lunches are long, the money is good, the morals are mostly missing. I'm in Account Management - think of me as more Ken Cosgrove than Pete Campbell (I hope). I'm doing very well, getting promoted fast and on the agency's biggest and most lucrative account (th...
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The Emigration Playlist: 64 years of songs. # 7 Reward - The Teardrop Explodes 1981

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I have spent a couple of days mulling over which year to cover next. Today the answer came as I heard the news that Gary Dwyer, drummer from The Teardrop Explodes has died. That immediately made the answer 1981, and the song, Reward . It's hard to overstate just how damned exciting The Teardrop Explodes were. Liverpool was on fire with music around then - bands like Echo and The Bunnymen and OMD clustered around a club opposite the old Cavern. Holly Johnson cut his teeth there before forming Frankie, with Big In Japan, along with the guy who formed KLF, Ian Broudie who founded The Lightning Seeds, and Budgie who later became the drummer in Siouxsie and the Banshees. Plus the The Teardrop Explodes, led by the gorgeous Julian Cope, a man with so much musical charisma you wanted to lick it off his naked body. There really hadn't been anything like this song or this band before and it was a massive crowd-puller - even the video had loads of them in it, careering around a burning do...
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The Emigration Playlist: 64 years of songs. #6 I'm a Believer - The Monkees 1966

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I've changed the title of this blog series. The previous one has felt melancholy and possibly off-putting. As yet, I'm getting very little interest from others in this list. So be it - I am writing it for me principally - though I started to wonder if people don't really know how to take it if they think I'm having some kind of grief-stricken breakdown about all this. Leaving England is very hard after all these years (though its behaviour to someone of my background month after month has made it easier), and this is part of my process. It's helping. I'm writing about myself, who and where I was as these songs emerged, or when they entered my life. But I am also writing about music and my love of it. So maybe a little less self-indulgent pain in the title and a bit more focus on the memory of these great tunes? Which makes sense for this song especially because, alongside pointing out that Mourning England in songs didn't preclude me from adding bands that ...
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Mourning England in Song. # 5 Violet - Seal 1991

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  Readying myself for emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent in England. You can read more about why I am doing this here: https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html  Memories make identity. That's why I'm writing this series of posts. I have to find and claim my identity, these days more than ever. Yet when you're trans, memories can become complex and loaded. For me, stripped of much by a spouse who was bitterly unable to accept what I needed to do, who I was even, and who made these things clear, memories can be tainted. To back into the past means for me to ready myself for something that's never simple. It can be raw. It can be like remembering a old movie, starring someone else. It can bring joy too, if I can decentre myself - recollections of my children will do that.  One part of my past where I can go where I always recognise myself and where I am always safe is music. My music was always ...
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Mourning England in Song. # 4 Love will tear us apart - Joy Division 1980

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Readying myself for what feels like a forced emigration, I am putting together the soundtrack of a whole life spent living in England. You can read more about why I am doing this here: https://kierkegaardslunch.blogspot.com/2026/08/mourning-england-in-song-part-1.html 1980. Punk has become post-punk. New Wave is happening - though to be honest (and I had been paying attention) I was never really clear what New Wave really was . New Romantic is coming but not quite here yet, though The Blitz had been up and running for a year. Bands like OMD and Ultravox are breaking through - synthpop apostles of what was to come, without as yet the blouses and the eye makeup (I beat them to it on that 😉). For me 1980 was my final year at school. A levels, then a futile attempt to to get into St Catherine's College, Cambridge. When that failed I was left with months to fill before going up to Leeds instead - something I never regretted as I had a great time there, and even ended up with a decent ...
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Fighting the last war. The ultimate failure of trans activism in the UK.

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Today in Britain, statutory legal guidance that instructs service providers - shops, pubs, restaurants, cinemas, sports centres, doctors' surgeries - to discriminate against trans people comes into force. For decades, trans people who have transitioned to live their lives in the gender that made sense to them have had access to single-sex spaces like toilets and changing rooms, unnoticed and without incident. Now the government has put into law guidance that says they must be banned. Facilities should be restricted to those defined "biologically" as women - or men - despite no-one being able to produce any cogent definition of what biological even means, despite the term having no meaning in law and despite the fact that there is often no way of detecting who fits these so-called "biological" criteria and who does not. Trans women must now be segregated into ‘third spaces’ like disabled facilities or gender neutral ones, and if these aren't available (as the...
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