THE PORTRAITS

Jeremy: “When we grew up in the 1980s, the cassette was our main option for listening to music. But owning recorded music on tape was a notoriously troublesome business. If the tape itself didn’t break or spool out all over the floor, finding tracks that you wanted to listen to was a laborious task. If you’d reached the last song on the tape but you wanted to listen again to track two, you had to press Rewind and wait an age to get back to the bit you were dying to hear. No wonder the album format was at its strongest in the late 70s and 80s. It was just too irritating a business to do anything other than listen to a full album from start to finish. Sometimes, you’d get so bored of waiting for a cassette to rewind, you’d go off and make yourself a drink and forget all about it. When you finally clicked, and raced back over to the machine to hit stop and press play, you undoubtedly would have reached somewhere completely different and so the process would start again. When I look at today’s politics, it feels like a cassette that is spooling backwards out of control, trying desperately to reach a golden point in the past that we’ve certainly misremembered and which it wouldn’t be of any benefit to us to revisit anyway. We’ve made huge progress in so many areas, not least how we treat each other. We’ve more work to do in our long journey towards true compassion to all other humans and to the planet that we’re rapidly destroying... above all we desperately need to move forward, not backwards. With the rise in populism all over the world, there is no doubt we’re all searching for something we feel is missing in our lives. But the answer isn’t in some twisted nostalgia for the past, as division and prejudice belong there. A better way of living lies in one direction only...forward.”