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Love Solent, love music!

Check out our #LoveSolent Spotify playlist - songs expertly chosen by Professor Martin James

1st February 2021
Music and performance

As part of our Love Solent campaign, we asked Martin James, Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries in the Faculty of Business, Law and Digital Technologies, to use his expertise in music to pull together a playlist of 'love' songs to help get us through this difficult time. Here's what he had to say:

Love songs can be about forbidden love, unrequited love, fantasized love and the desperation of clinging to love. They can move from celebratory joy to desperate heartache, the excitement of new love to the heartbreak of a lost love. Love songs bring us together because love is an emotion we all experience in so many different ways.

Here’s a playlist of loves lost, found, forgotten and rediscovered.

Listen to the playlist >

  • David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto, ‘Forbidden Colours’ - A torchlight to love that’s forbidden by culture, religion or ideology. There’s an ache to this song that demands love conquers everything… including doubt.

  • Janet Jay, ‘Silly Games’ - Brilliantly immortalised in the Small Axe TV series ‘Silly Games’ captures the dance of courtship when each word, each look, each move is filled with hope and confusion.

  • Aaliyah, ‘Try Again’ - When things go wrong you can dust yourself of and try again to keep that love alive, or you can fight for love itself and move on.

  • David Bowie, ‘Heroes’ - A song about love in the face of division as a couple kissing beneath the guns of the Berlin Wall become a metaphor for people separated by man made borders.

  • Leonard Cohen, ‘Dance Me To the End of Love' - From the wonderful opening line of ‘dance me to your beauty with a burning violin…’ this song uses dance as a metaphor for love as an anchored centre in a life of chaos.

  • Marvin Gaye, ‘Distant Lover’ - Long distance love, a lover lost in thought or a love long lost, Marvin reaches into his memories and pleads for his lover to think of him in her prayers.

  • Scott Walker, ‘If You Go Away’ - A song about the deep love of heartbreak. Walker mourns a relationship’s passing while grasping the dying embers of love and asking ‘what good is love without loving you?’.

  • Nostalgia Deathstar, 'HolyMoses!' - A song about unrequited teen love that becomes a romance later in life only for the couple to find it was a fantasy relationship composed through nostalgic regret.

  • The Buzzcocks, ‘Ever Fallen in Love’ - The early punk scene was a safe space for so many people who felt excluded. This is about two young men discovering each other at a time of unbelievable homophobia.

  • The Prodigy, 'One Love' - Love comes in many forms, community love is one of the most important. This is a love song to a collective love that choose joy over anger. One love – always.