Things Can Only Get Better

I mean, literally

Hello Dear Reader

A year ago today, those of us who live in the United Kingdom hauled our weary bodies into a polling booth near us, scanned the options on the ballot paper, took a deep breath and put an X in the box for the least worst option. Perhaps you hoped for the best and tried not to compare this moment to a balmy May morning in 1997, when your little feet could not carry you fast enough to the local community centre, because you had gone to the polling station first thing that morning, so excited were you by the prospect of change - real change - and for the first time in your life, it felt like little old you could be instrumental in making it finally happen.

Less than a year later came the Good Friday Agreement, and for a while anything felt possible. Even when John Prescott punched someone who threw an egg at him, the nation collectively shrugged: I would have done the same, guv.

Oh to be more Cher and turn back time - a not insignificant number of us would set the time machine for 1997 - 2003. If Elon Musk could just stop with the building giant space dildos for a moment and crack on with a time-travel software upgrade on Teslas, I for one would like to go back and register with an NHS dentist when that was still possible. Failing that, I’d do us all a favour and make sure that the Cats movie was never made.

Moore’s Law applies to everything now - outrage, climate collapse, cabinet ministers. There are decades when nothing happens, and now we have Thursdays when empires collapse between Pret and Pilates, and new political parties get announced at 8pm and split by 9. Sometimes I wonder if everything exists just to be clickbait for the relentless 24/7 news cycle. Politics has replaced show business: everybody is an activist now lest they fade into irrelevance.

A few weeks ago, one of you rightly reminded me that getting too hung up on the past will only hasten my journey towards decrepitude. And in all likelihood, things in this halcyon period of my twenties were possibly just as fucked as they are now, but I was too busy dancing every weekend to notice. It just felt… united? We went to nightclubs based on the music they played and if the clientele had on the right kind of trainers and that was it.

My favourite place was Maximus on Leicester Square, which had been home to the legendary Taboo night until 1987, but by the time I arrived in London, it was known for Love Ranch. It played house, but with big tunes I could actually sing along to, and every weekend I would don my favourite silver sneakers and dance until Bar Italia on Frith Street started serving Sunday morning espressos.

If we were to hop into that Time Machine and find ourselves in there on any given Friday or Saturday in the 1990s, we would be dancing next to drag queens, trainee dentists, Ben the brickie from Elstree, fashion stylists, Iranian dissidents and the son of an Austrian restauranteur in Bayswater whose party trick was to play Edelweiss on glasses to his diners while the dessert trolley went round the tables. You never knew who would be in the toilets or what they would be up to.

It was MAGNIFICENT.

Nobody gave a toss who was voting for who.

Did you love Crystal Clear by The Grid with every fibre of your being? Did you think you were going to explode with joy the minute Danny Rampling dropped D:Ream’s U R The Best Thing? Yes? Then we can be friends!

By the time D:Ream hit the mainstream, I hate to say this, but they were no longer cool. The cruelty of youth culture is such that music artists are but mayflies and so by the time your Nan knows who Wet Leg is, they might as well be Celine Dion. So it was that when Things Can Only Get Better became the sound of Labour’s 1997 election campaign; I might have turned to my flatmate and said oh my God they’re still alive? Wow!!!

Of course, I still loved the song, even if by 1997 I had stopped clubbing and was now into modern jazz and Lewis Taylor and only listened to Jamiroquai in secret. I was never that invested in the lyrics: they merely served as an excellent opportunity for the listener to put their hands in the air like they just didn’t care. But when I came to cover it, I realised I had missed something the whole time.

Its songwriter Peter Cunnah has said he got the idea from a colleague telling him to cheer up when he was working in an office in London, and hasn’t elaborated much further in all the interviews I’ve managed to get my hands on. John Elledge has gone to the trouble of doing a close reading in the way one might a Shakespearean sonnet and by the end of it comes to the conclusion that he still has no idea what it’s going on about.

Cunnah, though, was born in a mother and baby home in Belfast before he was adopted and grew up in Derry during the Troubles.

You can walk my path
You can wear my shoes
Learn to talk like me
And be an angel too
But maybe
You ain't never gonna feel this way
You ain't never gonna know me
But I know you
I’m singing it now
Things can only get better
Only get better
If we see it through

Now, I don’t mean to get all Freudian on yo’ ass, but if this song is not subconsciously about the Troubles then I don’t know what it’s about. And what if - go with me here a moment - Tony Blair and Mo Mowlam were sitting up late one night in 1997, having a little chat about how they were going to sort shit out, and Mo was like:

‘Tone, you know that huuuge choon you used for the election? Every time I hear it I can’t help but think that there really is a way we might bring an end to all the bloodshed and trauma of the last few hundred years and if I could just get your secretary to send Bertie Ahern a copy of the CD maxi single - you know, the one with 12” mixes and all that - yeah, if we can just get it to Bertie, I think we can sort this out once and for all.’

‘I like the cut of your jib, Mo,’ says Tony. ‘Are we talking the maxi Cd with the Superfly Development Vocal Edit, or the one with the Danny Rampling extended mix?’

‘The Danny Rampling one.’

‘Right you are, Mo, I’ll get Natalie to courier one over to Bertie first thing.’

A week later, Tony calls Mo, tells her Bertie Ahern says it is indeed a stone cold banger and it’s made him think long and hard about the future and it’s time for everyone to put the past behind them.

Anyway, that is the story I’m telling myself at the moment. It is very late as I write, and yes, I might have allowed my imagination to run away with me.

It has been a long time since I last played Belfast* - seven years - and the photograph above is one I took when I was last over playing those lovely gigs at Black Box. It seemed apt to share it with you here. It serves as a reminder that we must let go, otherwise we might never move forward. And that it is unfair to only ever compare the present to the past - we have to allow the present to be what it is otherwise how else do we make it to the future?

I want you to think of my version as time travel. Imagine, if you will, that the song has lived many lives and has returned, like some musical ghost of Christmas yet to Come, to pay a visit to its first incarnation.

‘Tell me, child,’ asks 1997 TCOGB ‘did things get better?’

2025 TCOGB looks wistful for a moment.

‘Sort of - but there’s still a bit of a way to go.’

With love as ever,

Nerina xxx

*This time I am playing the Belfast Empire on November 16th and tickets are available here: https://www.thebelfastempire.com/music-hall/nerina-pallot/