Extra Sounds of Being Human, #6
For Catrin and Jess: how this song makes me think of us dancing in living rooms, the carpets rolled back, our arms to the ceiling like we’re singing hosannas. The way its minimal synth intro communicates with its Morse Code-like dot-dashes, sending a message to run away from whatever we’re doing, open a door, let the strings shimmer in.
For Bernard Sumner, whose magical qualities seem oddly because of, and not in spite of, his militant ordinariness. I’ve only interviewed him once, in 2010, for The Quietus. He said Lady Gaga was catchy. That he had an Unknown Pleasures cardigan. That a friend’s 14-year-old daughter was listening to some music on her iPod, and he asked what it was, and she said “a band called Joy Division”. He was sarcastic and tough and I loved him more than he loved me, which is how it should be when you’re a journalist. He also wasn’t around for interviews for the liner notes for New Order’s Low-Life box set, which I wrote the summer before last, but I was weirdly glad in a way. This truculent everyman with an peculiarly angelic edge to that his wonky voice… on record is where he glistens for me. That’s true and has always been true. All. My. Life.
For Neil Tennant. I’ve interviewed Neil a few times, my favourite being when I spoke to him & Chris for the New Statesman in 2013, over Kit-Kats in their management office, where I found out how they helped get Alan Turing a pardon. (Tennant drank tea from a mug that said “God”. Lowe’s said “Whatever”.) Neil’s always been arch, dryly funny, slightly distant, exactly how you’d expect him to be. On record, he’s more intimate, vulnerable; you can hear the boy in him trying to occupy a different personality. And so many moments sung by him are perfect: the roundhead general middle-eight in Left to My Own Devices; looking at the two of us in sympathy and sometimes ecstasy in Rent; mourning why you never phoned when you said you would; wanting a dog (a chihuahua) or a heartbeat; wishing that someone missing was sitting here with him.
For Dave Palmer’s drums and their fizzing, urgent pulse. For Anne Dudley, my favourite pop music arranger, who told me that this is the song of which she’s proudest. (And what a catalogue she has: listen to this playlist I made a few years ago and let your jaw hang.)
And for Johnny Marr. For the first twenty seconds of How Soon Is Now? For the first one hundred and thirteen seconds of Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me. For Oscillate Wildly. For creating soundbeds from which a thousand feelings slowly bud and then psychedelically blossom. Within all of these, you can still hear a sweet, youthful tenderness scratching away at their roots, a yearning for the great beyond. For the time we met and we talked about Heart’s Crazy On You and its influence on Bignouth Strikes Again. How he gave me a plectrum for my toddler, the fingernails on both his hands painted blue.
And for this.
The lyrics may or may not be about Johnny’s former bandmate (you know, that guy with a big quiff). Either way, they contain so many different details, of humour, pigheadedness, but also sadness, so much longing, and truth. They came out at the very end of a decade that had started, for all of them, so very differently, and announced a new one with a beautiful, iridescent bang.
For the miracle of all the people from different places and situations coming together behind the sounds that support these words; for the feeling of this song coming to glorious life in a car, in a kitchen, on a dancefloor, in a living room with your best friends. For five minutes and twelve seconds of escape, of energy, of light, of so many things.
