I am the resurrection and I am the life
I couldn't ever bring myself
To hate you as I’d like.
If there’s one place in the world that is rejecting hate at the moment it is Manchester. Refusal to give in to racial prejudice, the extraordinary moving scenes of support and cooperation, mosques offering food and accommodation taxi drivers giving free lifts, a city united against violence and ignorance after Monday’s appalling Manchester Arena bombing, And within that, in the second of our musical tributes to the city, there are few songs that bring together people more powerfully than this 1992 single from the Manchester quartet’s debut album.
Written by Ian Brown and John Squire, its lyrics use religious language, but may be about a relationship. Either way, its words are all about rising above hardship. And how? It does this through the music. And in the final four minutes of instrumental, can their be a more transcendent sound than Squire's guitar riffs, which jingle like heavenly sunlight, or the sheer dynamism of Mani’s bass riffs and Reni’s drums, with their brilliant interwoven togetherness? Surely there can be few tighter trios in any form of music. And the message is in the very fibre of their sound. It is a song of defiance, of joy, of endurance. It is technical. It is playful, stop-start humorous. It is emotional. It is Manchester’s lifeblood and character glimpsed in eight glorious minutes. And it will rise, and repeat, again and again.
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