i lived in Glasgow for 32 years. For some of that time lived in Haghill. I should know all about headlights on the parade, I should know all about the second city of the Empire glistening in a downpour. But I still find myself a little perplexed when I encounter The Blue Nile’s Tinseltown In The Rain playing on the radio. It’s just the way I am, I guess, but I’ve never been able to unpack the sublime melancholy others find in this band’s music. I’ve always regarded it as music for other people. The first time I heard them, on the tranny in my wasabi-coloured room at Baird Hall one rainy Radio Clyde Tuesday teatime, I didn’t know what to make of the anguished vocals over music created to display the hi-fi products of the Linn turntable company. A quarter of a century on from their debut, I Love This Life, I still don’t know. Is I Love This Life an ironic title? Could I spend a wet bus journey pondering the same thing about Black’s Wonderful Life? Maybe James Stewart could explain it all to me. Personally, I regard Lou Reed’s Perfect Day as being quite simply about a Perfect Day and have on occasion taken issue with those who put forward the proposition that it’s about heroin. Would you really drink Sangria in the park prior to shooting up? Maybe catch a movie and then head home for a fix wishing you could ride on a clipper shop in sailor’s suit and hat going from this land here to that. Well I guess that I just do know that I don’t think you would.
The great thing about songs, even songs written by hardbitten, druggie Noo Yawk quadsexual superfly guys, is that a lot of the time they don’t have a big hidden meaning. To think they do is, in my book, kinda adolescent. I mean, it happens: we know Major Tom’s a junkie, of course but there’s no double meaning in Heroin, is there? Or are you trying to tell me it’s not actually about heroin? Maybe There She Goes by The La’s (even Lynne Truss would have to acknowledge their right to apostrophise where they wished) is about heroin but I’ve always heard it as an attempt to write There’s A Place by The Beatles.
I said I always regarded The Blue Nile as music for others. I sometimes find it odd what the rest of the world latches onto. In my head I’m hearing the chirpy little riff that burbles through Everybody Wants To Rule The World by Tears For Fears like a dose of corporate coffee. The first time I heard that song I was frightened. Frightened by the notion that everybody wanted to rule the world. Frightened by the projections my mind made of certain people getting their way. Frightened by the blandness of the record. Frightened by how people had told me how they really related to TFF’s Shout which I regarded as an extremely facile allusion to the primal scream. Maybe everyone did want to shout it all out and rule the world or at least run the world in a Live Aid T-shirt. In every dreamhome a heartache. Every theme bar host to a hundred tormented souls. Karaoke masks anguish and megalomania.
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