Ok. Thanks to Theo? I have had to seriously think why I didn’t find the music of 1991 particularly inspiring, but thinking more about it it really was a momentous year for music for me, but mostly not entailing music from that year. I had fallen out of love with guitars, and it would take Nirvana to make me reconsider what was a radical, Year Zero rejection of rock in favour of black music. We’d been listening to Blue Lines since the previous summer, having a DJ prerelease and couldn’t stop adoring it. Our pirate station was closed down on the day after the Gulf War started; I had just come out of my first proper, five-year long relationship and was basically having a breakdown! It took me the first four months to reemerge into a semblance of living. Shortly after, I took myself around the secondhand vinyl shops of Manchester and bought lots of jazz, funk, hip hop and reggae, but none of it was actually made in 1991. I remember listening to De La Soul, Public Enemy and Tribe Called Quest from that year, all monster records, but it was Coltrane, Mingus, Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and all sorts of Acid Jazz that really brought me back to life. Oh, the one record that we couldn’t stop playing was Prince’s Gett Off and all of its attendant remixes. I also embarked on my first gay relationship, and began writing my first novel, so it really was a dizzying year. I’m really grateful to be reminded of it. Culturally and personally redefining, but mostly its soundtrack for me was from many other years 
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