I believe in a parallel DNA, a DNA which – if extracted and examined under a microscope – would reveal our absolute individual and unique make up  -  not in terms of carbon and protons – but the stuff that really makes us who we are.  The parallel DNA would reveal books, films, moments, love, sex, friends, journeys, and – most of all – music.  At least, the main component of my alternative DNA is music, music which has become so much a part of me that I truly believe the flesh would fall for my bones if it were not glued together with pop.

They’d find other stuff in my parallel DNA;  Saturday mornings on Kensington High Street, flights to San Francisco, afternoons in ‘80s Liverpool.  It would yield paintings by Boccioni, Schad and Dix.  It would show every man I’ve ever kissed, every joke I’ve ever shared, and every kitten who ever wore underpants.  My parallel DNA would hold a lot of good stuff, but mainly, it would be made up of music. Curling carbons of Kinks, Beatles, Smiths, Gainsbourg, Polnareff – music which worked its way inside of me, becoming as much a part of Amanda as my blood group and my fingernails.

They’d find a lot of good music in my parallel DNA.

But mostly, they’d find Arthur Lee.

Friday night at The Liverpool Academy reminded me of this. As if I ever needed reminding.

Lead singer of seminal Californian ‘60s group, Love, Arthur Lee is a legend.  He is a legend to a small, small group of people – others with whom I share a parallel DNA.  He should be as famous as Presley or Dylan or Lennon. He should be, but he isn’t.  Craziness and egos and prisons and too much talent saw the end of the ironically titled Love, with Arthur Lee slowly slipping into obscurity.

But we still had Forever Changes.

Forever Changes, Love’s masterpiece, pop’s most perfect moment.  The 1967 album was called ‘America’s answer to Sgt Pepper’.  It was not.  Forever Changes eclipsed – not only Sgt Pepper – but every other album in a decade of albums never to be eclipsed, its strange and stunning blend of psychedelia, Tijuana, easy-listening, garage, punk and folk forever joyful, forever heartbreaking, forever eerie.  Forever Changes.   The lyrics were meaningless and pregnant with meaning, Arthur Lee seen as a prophet of pop, a black man who didn’t make black music, an American who didn’t sound like the U.S.A.

Resurfacing in the early ‘90s, he gave a concert.  More of a gathering than a gig, he reappeared for ‘one night only’ in – of all places – Liverpool.  Why Liverpool?  What brought the 50-something jail-bird genius to North West England?  Nobody really knows.  But Liverpool is where he appeared, the musical population stunned that we – yes, we – were The Chosen Ones. 

I’ve always said that that gig was the best I’ve ever seen – the best musical moment of my parallel DNA.  It still is.  It is my all-time favourite musical moment.

Friday night at The Liverpool Academy is definitely my second.

Or maybe it’s my first.  It’s hard to tell.  It was a different Arthur Lee I was seeing on Friday – a happier Arthur Lee.  Gone was the bad, Afro wig.  In its place, a scarf and cowboy hat.  Gone was the quickly assembled band of local musicians who had backed him for his ‘90s gig.  In their place, a string quartet, four horns, three guitars, drums and bass – the band Baby Lemonade who are backing him on this tour.  And gone was the self-deprecating, apologetic Arthur Lee I’d first encountered.  In his place, a confident showman who knew – just knew – how much we loved him.  And he loved us for loving him.  And he proved it to us.

The Academy was full, but not packed.  We all knew the significance of our place there, each of us related by this common strand in our DNA.  His band walked on stage and took up their instruments.  Anyone else would have kept us waiting – would have milked the moment.  But not Arthur Lee.  His appearance on stage, smiling, happy, made us smile, made us happy.  There he was.  In the same room as us.  Just a few feet away.  Arthur Lee. Arthur fucking Lee!  He could have just stood there for two hours and would still have been smiling, we would still have been happy.  But he didn’t just stand there.  He did the thing that made him a legend.  He made music.

Standing in front on his mic’, he played a rhythm on his tambourine.  How many artists could play a rhythm on their tambourine and send an audience into frenzied rapture? We were in a frenzied rapture because his music is such an integral part of our parallel DNA that we recognised the rhythm.  He opened with Little Red Book.

‘I just got out my little red book the minute that you said goodbye’

A sixty-year-old black man in a cowboy hat.

‘I thumbed right through my little red book, I didn’t want to sit and cry’

And we bought it.  We believed he was thumbing through his little red book and going ‘with every pretty girl in town’. He has the energy of a twenty year old. Still handsome. Still sexy.  Still Arthur.

I’d gone to the gig with a group of friends. After the first song, I moved away from them.  I wanted to experience this by myself.  I wanted it to be a private thing. I wanted it to be just me and Arthur Lee.  I think everyone felt that way.  I noticed that groups of friends split up, each wondering into their own little space.  Occasionally, someone I knew or someone I didn’t know would stand next to me. We’d exchange a look, a smile, a shaking-of-the-head at the sheer wonderment that we were there – that we were there with Arthur.

He picked up his guitar. He began plucking a melody.  It was the opening melody to Alone Again, Or.  The first moment of Forever Changes.  The first moment of the first track.  And we all remember the first time we heard that first moment of that first track, and how music would never – just never – sound the same to us again.

‘Yeah, said it’s alright
I won’t forget
All the times I’ve waited patiently for you
As you do just what you choose to do
And I will be alone again tonight, my dear’

Verse II.  On the album, we have strings.  At The Academy, we had strings.

‘Yeah, I heard a funny thing
Somebody said to me
You know that I could be in love with almost everyone
I think that people are the greatest fun
But I will be alone again tonight, my dear’

The audience was equally divided.  Half stood stock still, staring – mesmerised.  The other half lived the song, dancing, singing, cheering, laughing.  I was in the latter half.  That song is such a huge part of my physical make up that I had to be physical with it.  We reached the Middle Eight.  The horns section stood.  If you know the song, you’ll know the moment – that unbelievable moment when the horn kicks in. That unbelievable moment was happening – not on vinyl – but to us. 

It’s no wonder that we ‘lost it’.

And so it went.  Arthur Lee worked his way through the entire track list to Forever Changes. He told us that he loved Liverpool, that he felt as if he were ‘playing in his living room’.  We felt he was, too, the songs we had heard one million, two million, three million times in our living rooms suddenly coming to life like a musical Pinnochio and bewitching us anew.

‘At my house I’ve got no shackles
You can come and look if you want to’

A boy standing next to me turned moist eyes to me and said; ‘This is my song.’  I knew exactly what he meant.  We all had ‘our songs’.  We all have our songs, our lyric, our own Arthurian moment when we truly believe that what he sang in 1967 he was singing just for us.  But where was mine?  He had skipped it.  It wasn’t where it belonged – the first track of the B-side of the album.  But this wasn’t an album.  This was a live performance, and I had a genuine moment of panic that he wouldn’t play it – that he was bored with it – that for some reason, he had decided that Between Clark and Hilldale was no longer the best pop song ever, ever written.

Arthur doesn’t do much banter.  He’s more interested in what he sings than what he says.  Walking to the mic’, he started speaking.  He said that the next song was about his childhood.  It was about an area of downtown L.A near Sunset Strip. He’d hung out there as a teenager, a teenager who decided that if people didn’t like him, they could just go take a hike. He said the area where he’d hung out – which had formed him – which had created Arthur Lee – lay between two streets.  The streets were called Clark and Hilldale.

I was not the only one who had been waiting.  It felt as if the roof would blow off.

What is happenin’ and how have you been?
Gotta go, but I’ll see you again

It was there. It was perfect.

And it came with horns. 

Then I remembered She Comes in Colours, Bummer in the Summer, The Good Humour Man, Live and Let Live – all my other favourite love songs-Love songs. Would he play them? Please let him play them. 

I need not have worried.  Arthur didn’t let us down.

‘Oh, the snot has caked against my pants
It has turned into crystal
There’s a blue-bird sitting on a branch
I guess I’ll take my pistol’

He finished his pre-encore set with the anthemic You Set The Scene.   He has always said that the ‘you’ in the title is to be taken literally; that it is us he is addressing, that it is us – the listener – to whom the song is dedicated.  Seeing this wonderful, warm, wise man standing there on stage -  his trademark vibrato only slightly impaired by his gruelling tour schedule – I truly believed it; I truly believed he was singing to me.

‘This is the only thing that I am sure of
And that’s all that lives is gonna die
And there’ll always be some people here to wonder why
And for every happy hello, there will be goodbye…’

I cried.  I was smiling and dancing and crying.  And I cried because I remembered when I first heard this song.  I remembered the first time I heard Love.  I was twenty-three.  It was a sunny morning in Ladbroke Grove.  A sunny morning with a new boyfriend who climbed out of bed and put a record on.  I remembered sitting and saying; ‘What’s that?!’  I remember him – crouched over a portable record player – flicking black hair from black eyes and saying;  ‘Forever Changes.  Don’t tell me you don’t know Forever Changes?’

We spent the rest of the day listening to Arthur Lee.  Not only to Forever Changes, but to all the songs which made up Friday’s encore; songs from Da Capo and Out There – song after fabulous song which the audience demanded Arthur play, feet stomping a psychedelic earthquake whenever he left the stage, stomping until – smiling and waving – he returned.  He even played a new number, an upbeat, lovely song about love of life and love of England, the country which rediscovered Arthur Lee, embracing him like the god we truly believe him to be.

When I was twenty-three, I had yet to learn that ‘I could be in love with almost everyone’.  I didn’t know that ‘the news today would be the movies of tomorrow’. I didn’t know that every day is ‘just a day like all the rest – so do your best’.  And  I certainly didn’t know that one day I’d have my own ‘little red book’.   I’m glad that I do, because he was right; ‘for every happy hello, there would be goodbye’.

I’ve said goodbye to a lot of people since I was twenty-three.  Arthur Lee isn’t one of them.  He stayed with me – forever present – forever giving. Forever Changes never changes.

I could never say goodbye to him.

He’s the best part of my DNA.