Teenage heartbreak, The Wedding Present and Labour MP Stella Creasy

Stella Creasy tells of the anguish of unrequited love that an indie rock album was able to heal

Politicians aren’t generally known for the emotional sensitivity - or taste in music. But one Labour MP has given the public a rare insight into her formative years by discussing the heartbreaks and unrequited loves of adolescence in a sleeve note essay for her favourite album.

Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, is a devoted fan of The Wedding Present, the Leeds indie band whose songs of unrequited love led critics to hail them as natural successors to The Smiths in the late Eighties.

Ms Creasy reserves a special place in her heart for Seamonsters, the band’s 1991 album, an unflinching collection of songs detailing the bitterness and recrimination of relationships gone wrong, set to a backdrop of grunge-era distorted guitars. The MP has now written an extended essay to accompany a vinyl, 10in edition of the album, released next Monday.

“There is no more central rite of passage than learning to live with the disappointment of love unrequited,” writes the shadow Crime Prevention minister, whose sleevenotes relive, with vivid honesty, the “burning confusion of rejection”, “the horror of being abandoned unexpectedly” and “the way in which heartache eats you up inside” during her formative years.

Recalling the boys who “stamped on my heart”, one song is etched on her memory. “To this day I cannot hear the following line from ‘Blonde’ without thinking of the boy who I fell for on a dancefloor many years ago, only to discover myself to be one of many taken in by his charms:

“I’m just some name in your book/ That’s why you gave up writing weeks ago/ You won’t be getting in touch/ Oh, do you ever?”

“It is still painful because it is the perfect expression of how you feel when you find yourself discarded by someone you trusted. I wish I had been able to walk up to those who had spurned me and quote verbatim to them some of these lyrics.”

However the MP, who has won acclaim for her campaign to crack down on legal loan-sharks, has a positive message for adolescents suffering similar pains. “I wish I could tell them that it does get better.”

The MP will watch The Wedding Present play the album in full at Koko in north London on Friday. David Gedge, the Wedding Present singer and songwriter, told The Independent: “It’s very flattering. I began a conversation with Stella on Twitter and then I thought, ‘why not ask a member of parliament to write the sleeve notes?’ To my delight she said ‘Yes’.”

Gedge, 52, added: “What she wrote was touching. Perhaps she was able to settle a few old scores too.”

Formed in 1985, The Wedding Present were championed by John Peel and became Top of the Pops regulars, recording 12 top 30 singles in one year in 1990.

House music

Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich

Dory Previn - Mythical Kings and Iguanas

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Angie Bray, Conservative MP for Ealing Central and Acton

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