TANITA TIKARAM
The year is 1988. I’m sitting in my bedroom, in a dingy house in Leeds shared with nine other students, thinking about everything at once: the due date of my next philosophy degree assignment, whether I fancy the woman who showed me and a bunch of (presumably) straight fellow students a book called The Joy Of Lesbian Sex and what my family will say when I come out.
I’ve just come down from the precarious high achieved through boiling stringy magic mushrooms and rediscovered, thank god, that I can’t actually see the world and everyone in it through closed eyelids. I’m tired, awkward and unsure of who I am. Wondering what Thatcher’s anti-gay law, Clause 28 means for me as a maybe-lesbian, I listen to John Peel’s late-night show on Radio 1. Peel introduces a new act with an unusual-sounding name and a sound to match.