Tune in from 9pm every Sunday on Tameside Radio 103.6FM to catch up with Michael and Neil, but for now read their latest column here...

It feels great to be back. Over the last two weekends, we’ve been to our first live concerts since forever.

My wife Rachel and I nipped over the Pennines to see Richard Hawley and John Grant at the spectacular Halifax Piece Hall.

Then last weekend, me, Neil and our better halves and friends, went to see New Order at Heaton Park, their biggest ever show in Manchester.

Our youngest son went to the Parklife Festival in Heaton Park over the weekend and experienced the emotional burst of joy that you get from a beautiful collective experience.

I don’t think I’m unique in saying this, but I feel a real urgency for life at the moment.

Rachel’s got a big birthday coming up next week and we’re saying ‘yes’ to pretty much every invitation that comes our way.

Before the pandemic, I now realise, we’d been plodding and sleepwalking through life; passing opportunities by, saying no to things that we would enjoy, missing out on good times with friends that I so easily thought could be put off until another day.

I think we’ve all been reminded there might well not be another day. Something else could so easily come along and strip us of all these opportunities to be human.

In our old mode we would have missed out on the late summer splendour of the Piece Hall in Halifax, a gorgeous open space that on a warm late summer evening felt like a Tuscan hill fort. You couldn’t have asked for a better setting.

I watched the whole operation unfolding around us, the people putting the stage together, the musicians, the people selling stuff, and just could have wept for how uncertain their life has been over the last two years, being unable to do what they do so well.

The audience, for the most part, were nice middle-aged people experiencing, like us, that first tentative step into the reset of reality, of life as it’s meant to be lived, not cooped up at home.

It seemed like everyone I knew was part of the 35,000 crowd to see New Order, and everyone felt the same way.

A tremendous show, epic in scale and production, that had a setlist that skimmed the best bits from their long career, including a trio of Joy Division tracks towards the end of the set that allowed us an emotional moment to remember the tragically short life of Ian Curtis, who took his own life in 1980.

A guy who stood near us shared a moment during the song Temptation. It was the song he fell in love with his wife to, but she had passed away. “And I’ve never met anyone quite like you before.” Oh my.

It’s a reminder of the power of music to move you in special ways. As we enter into our second year of producing and presenting our Music Therapy sessions on Tameside Radio, we hope we can get across more of the raw emotion to make Sunday nights feel better, happier and more human.

You can listen to Michael Taylor and Neil Summers on Music Therapy on Tameside Radio 103.6FM on Sunday evenings from 9pm to 11pm. Click here to subscribe and catch up on previous shows.

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