parade

A brief return to the once popular blogger's sport of pop song/architecture combinations, partly inspired by one of its inventors sending me this recently. This one is cheating a bit - but only a bit - because its urban associations are as much autobiographical as they are a definable presence within the song. I should add too that I was reminded of Hats - the album from which the song is taken - by a conversation on @owenhatherley's twitter feed.....

I used to listen to Hats during my last year of living at home with my parents and it accompanied me (via my extra large '80's style orange foam ear phones) on the way back from countless nights out in the spectacularly un-glamorous setting of Chelmsford, Essex. The parade of the title is a kind of provincial everywhere, summoning up images of late night high streets filled with Saturday night expectation. But it is also a very particular place, a street of shops and bars where I would hang out with friends in the months after finishing school, an odd, in-between period in life inflated with all the doomy grandeur of post adolescence.

One look at the official video (sadly un-embeddable) makes you realise the band may have had something more typically glamorous in mind than Moulsham Street*, but the slippage between aspirations of urban sophistication and the realities of (sub)urban life seems a very '80's theme. The Blue Nile never seemed to fit in anywhere particularly on the musical spectrum of the time though. The lush sophistication of their arrangements and the synthetic drum sound are a continuation of new romanticism to some extent - as is, perhaps, the faint hint of Americana (Tinseltown in the Rain!) - but the exquisite sense of melancholy isn't.

The whole of Hats seems infused with an attempt to summon up the ghosts of old nights out, a haunted echo of the thrills of urban life. The song titles - Let's Go Out Tonight, The Downtown Lights, From A Late Night Train, Saturday Night - communicate the kind of loneliness you can only feel when surrounded by lots of people having fun. They also seem to map out the spaces of an exhaustively familiar town, like the stations of some highly personal cross. It's unclear whether Paul Buchanan thinks that going out will save him, or his relationship, and offer some redemption, or whether this is all long since dead and he's merely remembering a distant, now unimaginable happiness.

On which triumphantly downbeat note I shall take my leave. At least for a while! This blog will be quiet for a couple of weeks now. I'm going on holiday. But not with Paul Buchanan. Expect to see the now standard issue holiday post featuring giant plastic ice cream cones, empty hover ports, abandoned nuclear reactors and seaside parades when I get back. Ta da.

* Strangely enough, I found myself defending another, earlier, teenage hangout this week with an old friend from school. The roof of Chelmsford's multi-storey car park was a great place from which to watch the cricket at Essex County Cricket ground as well as drop small, anti-social missiles on passers by below. Not that I'm recommending either, mind....