Got the radio on.

I cannot stress how much impact this episode of Dancing in the Streets - the BBC documentary series about the history of popular movement - had on me, I must have watched it a hundred times in the late nineties. I think I've still got the videotape in storage, on a tape after a dubbed copy of the Third Man. Even for an absurd sentimentalist like myself, that's a bit much.

But this episode, man. Just when I was trying to figure out what kind of person I was, I watched this and saw something I didn't know I needed. It opened my ears to the political aspect of it all, and the fact that it was a working class artform. It showed me that music didn't have to clash with other cultures, when it could make friends with them instead, and that there is no different between a hard punk riff and a deep reggae groove.

I could chant 'no future!' with the best of them, but this was my own, personal future.