Forty Six Minutes Of Twenty Three

Two months ago this weekend, the day before we were taking Eliza back to Liverpool for her final year in university, the three of us were sitting in a cafe in Didsbury village, one of our afternoon walk and a brew haunts. Eliza said, out of nowhere, ‘I think we should all go and get a number 23 tattoo for Isaac’. Lou and I looked at each other and both said, ‘yeah. ok’. It was very spontaneous, none of us ever really thought abut getting a tattoo before. Me and Eliza had joked about but very much in a ‘we won’t ever do this’ kind of way. But at that moment it suddenly seemed like a good thing to do. Unfortunately the tattoo parlour in Sale couldn’t fit us in on the day so we booked in for a month later- it felt like something the three of us should do together and Eliza didn’t want to come back from Liverpool for a while. It also gave us some time to think about fonts and parts of the body.

The number 23 has become associated with Isaac. I’ve written about it before this year. He was 23 when he died and his birthday is the 23rd November (just a couple of weeks away now with the 2nd anniversary of his death a week later). In the last year the number 23 has kept appearing in front of me- on street signs, graffiti, electricity boxes, random tv countdown shows suddenly channel surfed onto, the only available table in a pub. I don’t think it necessarily means anything- it’s just something I’ve started noticing and when I see a 23 now it makes me think of him and smile. Getting a 23 tattoo might trigger the same reaction (and a month later, I’m happy to say it does). We got the tattoos done a month ago. Mine is pictured above, a type writer font on my forearm. Lou got a smaller 23 on her side and Eliza got an even smaller, fine line 23 on her upper arm. 

The number 23 has a rich history. I’ve written before as well about it’s part in KLF mythology, with their interest in Discordianism and numerology. When Isaac died I was reading John Higgs’ book about The KLF. A few weeks after he died I picked the book back up and the first chapter I read was about the significance of 23. I finished the chapter and put the book down, totally freaked about. I read it again the next day and it had a similar effect. When I was looking at fonts for my tattoo I thought about a KLF block 23 but it would very inky and take some time to do. I fancied a type writer font. On the morning we were due to go I suddenly wondered what 23 would look like in a factory/ Peter Saville font and started going through my various Factory art books. What, I asked myself, was Fac 23? A quick search later and I realised Fac 23 was the 7″ release of Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division. Which caused me to stop in my tracks for a moment. In the end I didn’t quite go full Peter Saville Fac font but it played a part in my thinking. We’re all really glad we got them done. At the moment, all autumn chilliness and long sleeves, its often covered up, but when I see it, it makes me smile. The upcoming anniversaries are weighing quite heavily and I’ll be glad to get November over with- but the tattoos feel like a positive and I’m not sure a year ago I’d thought that would be possible. 

This mix is 46 minutes of songs connected to the number 23. I was going to bring it in at 23 minutes but that felt too short so went for double 23. Two of the songs below were also released in full 23 minute versions which felt too long for a Sunday mix but they’re here in shorter versions to represent their 23 minute long brothers. 

46 Minutes Of 23

• Chris Rotter And The Bad Meat Club: 86’d
• 10:40: Sleepwalker
• Local Psycho And The Hurdy Gurdy Orchestra: The Hurdy Gurdy Song (Mothers Of The New Stone Age Remix)
• 23 Skidoo: Coup
• Jah Division: Jah Will Tear Us Apart
• The Vendetta Suite: Eye In The Triangle
• Two Lone Swordsmen: 23rd Street
• Mogwai: U235
• Gorillaz: Aries
• Psychic TV: Godstar
• The KLF: 3am Eternal

Chris Rotter was the guitarist in the live band incarnation of Two Lone Swordsmen and played on and co- wrote songs on Andrew Weatherall’s solo album A Pox On The Pioneers. I became friends with Chris online and then in real life. When Isaac died he wanted to record a song for Isaac. I asked him to do 86’d, a song I heard Andrew play on a radio show, a glorious chiming krauty instrumental. Chris went and re- recorded 86’d in new form, 23 minutes long. For reasons of space I’ve included the shorter one here. The full length 86’d (For Isaac) is here. 

Last December Jesse represented the entire 10:40 back catalogue as an advent calendar. This was the track for the 23rd December, the sleek psych and somewhat krauty Sleepwalker with Ben Lewis on guitar.

The KLF and the number 23 I’ve mentioned above. Read John Higgs’ Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds for more detail. Local Psycho And Te Hurdy Gurdy Orchestra are ex- KLF Jimmy Cauty and ex- Pogue Jem Finer. Their hurdy gurdy, neolithic celebration drone came out on 12″ came out earlier this year complete with a 23 minute mix. I’ve included the shorter remix here but the 23 minute version is the one really. 

23 Skidoo are here for obvious reasons. Coup is a block rocking post- punk/ punk funk track from 1984. In a further Andrew Weatherall connection, it was one of the songs on his his 9 O’ Clock Drop compilation from 2000. 

Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, as I said above, was Fac 23. Factory’s numbering system was central to their ethos. All Joy Division and New Order singles ended in 3. Rather than include the original I decided to put Jah Division’s dub cover in- it fitted better. Jah Division released an EP of four dub covers of Joy Division songs  in 2004. If you ever see a vinyl copy, please give me a ring. 

The Vendetta Suite are from Northern Ireland, the work of Gary Irwin. In 2017 Gary released an EP titled Solar Lodge 23 from which this piece of cosmic dubbiness is taken. 

Two Lone Swordsmen- yes, them again- released their first record in 1996, a 12″ that contained four tracks- Big Man On The Landing, Azzolini, The Branch Brothers and the one here, 23rd Street, a few minutes of abstract Swordsmen sounds. 

Mogwai’s move into soundtrack work has paid off. This is from the soundtrack to Atomic, a bit of a cheat maybe numerically but 23’s in there and the track fits.

Gorillaz have played with the number 23 frequently in their imagery and artwork. This song Aries was a single in 2020 and has the unmistakeable and melancholic/ uplifting sound of Peter Hook’s bass at its heart.  

Psychic TV, Genesis P Orridge’s experimental psychedelic/ acid house band had some interest in 23. In 1986 they began a series of gigs to be recorded and released, 23 in total, each played on the 23rd of a month for 23 consecutive months. Godstar is a single from 1985, a tribute to Rolling Stone Brian Jones.

The KLF’s 3am Eternal was the second of their stadium house trilogy, released in 1991 (after a previous version in 1989 and a subsequent one in 1992). The version here, the 1991 single and chart topper, took this mix to 46 minutes. 

Monday’s Long Song

My ongoing, erm, relationship (for want of a better word) with the number 23 continues. The walk up the canal towpath into town that I did a couple of times in the summer saw me come across a pair of graffiti 23s- from memory they were the only numbers among the many painted and tagged walls (apart from a 2-1 reference to the cup final, proper old school graffiti). I’m aware that confirmation bias means they may be the only numbers I noticed and that I might be looking out for them, subconsciously. The pair of graffiti 23s don’t seem to be the work of the same artist. When we were in South London for the end of August bank holiday weekend we walked up the high street to get to the train station, turned a corner and I almost walked into this piece of street furniture…

At the start of the summer my brother in law and sister in law stayed the night with us before flying from Manchester airport. We went to one of the local pubs and while I stood at the bar ordering they went to find a table. More or less the only one free was this one…

Channel surfing one night I flicked the button and moved up from Channel 4 and onto a Channel 5 countdown of the Best Songs Of 1986 at this exact moment…

I don’t think there’s anything especially mystical about this. It’s coincidence I’m sure. Other numbers appear all around us, I just don’t notice them the same way. 

Isaac was twenty three when he died and his birthday is the 23rd November (we have that anniversary and the anniversary of his death (a week later, the 30th November) suddenly appearing in our view again. Both those dates last year were awful, the weeks building up to them especially. When he went into hospital in November 2021 with Covid I was a few chapters into Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds by John Higgs, a book about The KLF. I didn’t pick it up again until a few weeks after he died and the first chapter I then read was about the number 23, its place in The KLF’s mythology and the significance of the number in Discordianism (a religion or set of ideas invented by Greg Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley in the early 1960s, taking in some aspects of Zen coupled with absurdism and beliefs/ theories about order and disorder. You can get as much or as little from it as you like. The KLF take a lot from it but with them it’s always difficult to tell whether they’re deadly serious or playing). What freaked me out reading the chapter back in December 2021, wracked with grief and loss and pain, was the number 23 and its concurrence with Isaac’s life and death. After that, I started seeing twenty threes fairly often, not least this summer. Again, I know about confirmation bias and suspect that twenty three is a fairly commonly occurring number. But also, I’ve come to like it when I see one, it makes me smile- the only rule is that seeing or finding one has to be accidental, it can’t happen as a result of deliberately looking for them- in some ways, it feels like a weird little connection to him.  

Jimmy Cauty of The KLF and Jem Finer of The Pogues have released an EP, four versions of a track titled The Hurdy- Gurdy Song, calling themselves Local Psycho And The Hurdy- Gurdy Orchestra. The three versions on the A-side of the 12″ are all fairly short, between three and six minutes long, ambient/ rave celebrating the ancient and the current, the old stones that decorate our landscape and the year 2023. The B-side of the 12″ is taken up entirely with The Stone Club Remix, a long version that is twenty three minutes long (of course it is). 

The Stone Club Remix is long with a very drawn out intro, bleeps, drones, the specific broken bagpipe- like drone of the hurdy- gurdy front and centre, noises, seagulls, a voice talking about the stones and about ‘being the custodians of this place’, echoes, found sound. Eventually, about thirteen minutes in a rhythm appears, drums of some sort, tapping away in the reverb smothered distance, through a haze. 

The EP is available at Bandcamp, digitally and on vinyl (although the vinyl was running very low when I wrote this post). Initially there were three hundred 12″ singles in sleeves hand painted by Cauty and two hundred in plain sleeves. Two and three again.