Coming soon

Welcome to My Mum Loved This Song, a newsletter about grief and music.

Twice a month, I’ll publish written conversations with my guests, where we’ll chat about the music that connects them to their loved ones.

The first edition will be published next week. In the meantime, I wanted to share an excerpt from this personal essay I wrote for Resident Advisor in 2021, “Dancing My Way Through Grief.” It’s about the first time I was finally able to go clubbing post lockdown and after losing my mum.

“My mum loved to dance. She loved disco, she loved pop, she loved big hair, bright clothes and sparkly everything. Since she died, my brothers and I have curated a shared playlist of songs that remind us of her. And by that, I mean songs that remind us of her singing and dancing her way through life: Eternal, M People, George Benson, Bowie, Kylie, Earth, Wind & Fire, KC & The Sunshine Band, and "Oops Up Side Your Head" by The Gap Band, with its signature dance which involves sitting in a line on the floor and moving your bodies forwards and back in unison. I'll never forget her wedding in 2015, when she and her best friends got on the sticky floor of an Isle of Wight pub to show us the moves, almost four decades after they did it the first time—probably at Flicks nightclub in Dartford.”

And so there we have the first song on the My Mum Loved This Song playlist. I’m looking forward to this list of records growing over time, and for sharing the accompanying stories.

Thank you for reading,

Katie x