by Rosaria
Ferraro
There was a boy in Cheshire with a tape recorder and the radio on. He was thirteen in January 1984, which means he became a teenager the same year the Cardiacs were pressing demos in a parallel world he didn't yet know existed, the same year Miami Vice arrived on BBC1 at 9pm and deposited an alternative universe — pastel suits, Jan Hammer's synthesizer, a Miami that never quite existed — into his living room once a week. He recorded what he could catch. He carried what the music gave him before he had language for why.
This playlist is about that boy and what he was carrying. It is also a document of how music functions as a container for what cannot yet be said — how a gay teenager in 1980s Cheshire listened to Madonna's Live to Tell for reasons he couldn't name at the time, and how the reasons were entirely real. How George Michael performed one version of himself through the Wham! years — Freedom, track 8, bouncing and bright — and then, after everything, made another record entirely, burned the leather jacket in the video, and said something true. The distance between those two songs is a decade of pressure and its release.
One track here was not heard in the 1980s. Cardiacs' Is This the Life? — 1988, running in a parallel world that Cheshire and BBC1 didn't reach — was handed to Mark in 2026 by Carrick, twenty years old, a member of Tribe471. Carrick reached back into a world he wasn't born into yet and pulled something forward. The song was always there. It took forty years and a twenty-year-old to find the door. It is placed in the list exactly where it belongs: in the alternative 1980s, the one running alongside the tape recorder and the living room, just out of reach.
The list ends where it needed to end. Freedom! '90. George Michael, remastered, 6 minutes and 29 seconds. On a packed dancefloor at Sonic Yootha in Liverpool in 2026 — every age, every kind of person, Carrick there too — it landed as the communal version of what had once been entirely private. Sonic Yootha is, for Mark, what the Cavern was for his parents: the room where the music and the life arrive together. The place you find your tribe, and dance.
19 songs
afterward
Rosaria
Ferraro
The title of this playlist on Spotify reads: Since Yesterday (Mixtape memories actual ha) :/apr26. The punctuation is worth reading carefully. The actual ha is a particular kind of English self-deprecation — the annotation you add to something that matters more than you want to admit in public. The colon-slash at the end is a shrug, an emoticon assembled from keyboard characters, the way 2026 inherits from 1984's limitations and makes something human out of them.
The British music in this list knows the world it's in. The American music offers an exit from it. Mark in Cheshire needed both — the songs that named where he was, and the songs that showed him somewhere else. Miami Vice at 9pm on BBC1 wasn't America. It was a produced America, arriving through a screen, offering a version of masculinity that didn't exist on Coronation Street. He needed that too.
The full arc runs from Strawberry Switchblade — two women from Glasgow making something fragile and determined — to George Michael finally free. Everything between is the journey. The music carried what couldn't be carried consciously. The reasons were real before the language arrived. They are still real now, on a dancefloor in Liverpool, with every age present, and Carrick there, and all of it arriving at once.