All I wanted was you to take me out…

I’m not sure if it matters or no, but my favourite single of this year seems to be changing constantly at the moment. Currently, it’s this: 

Goldfrapp’s “A&E” – “Friday Night, Saturday Morning” gone wrong, gone worse. This is more than just boredom, more than an observation on the mundanity of the five-days-in, two-days-out pattern that life slips into. More than pinning your problems on your town’s lack of a branch of fucking Belgo or whatever. Life and love are dissolving with every second of this song. There is no particular redemption, no particular narrative, just three minutes of static oblivion cunningly disguised as Goldfrapp giving you what you want.

It’s a blue, bright blue, Saturday, hey-hey,
And the pain has started to slip away, hey-hey…

It’s a return to their chill-out roots! Duh! There’s an acoustic guitar! “You could easily imagine it in the current top ten,” as, er, Scott Walker might say. On The Drift.

More an attack on the current than the top ten, though. There’s the air of bank advert about that opening couplet, is there not? Nice, easy, free-floating. No weight or attachment to anything, just nice burbling noises while you imagine just how easy your second mortgage will be. Lifestyle pop. Num num num.

I’m in a backless dress

I mean, that’s practically Duffy, the old backless dress thing. Nice bit of vintage fashion. Grace Kelly – mmm!

On a pastel ward, that’s shining

Oh. Hang on.

Think I want you still, but it may be pills at work

Oh.

In “A&E”, going out becomes horrific procedural, a routine conducted in order to prove to yourself that you are loved, or that you can be loved, or you can love. Half-killing yourself just to prove you’re alive, that sort of thing. Here, though, it becomes a particularly gruesome type of self-harm, like that Jam sketch where the woman arranges for tragic accidents to happen to other people so that she can befriend them, but now the perpetrator and victim become one and the same. Love here becomes the fib underpinning everything – what does pop music tell us the void in our lives is? Love! Needing people, wanting people.

I was feeling lonely, feeling blue
Thought I might be needing you

There isn’t even any actual romance at work, just a sort of assumed lack, a need for someone, anyone at all.

So she goes and she dances on her own and attempts to be less on her own, and it doesn’t work. It’s hard to tell what happens next – How did I get to accident, emergency?

Do you really want to know how I was dancing on the floor?
I was trying to call you while I was crawling out the door

Does she leave on her own? Does she go home? Does she cry? Does she want to die?

She has no idea. About… anything. So out she goes, looking. No tears, no melodrama, just the weird disconnect, the chillout excavated and finding nothing beyond the numbness. So we settle for this numbed bliss, we let the pain slip away into a nice, distant corner of the memory where we can forget it, so we’ll carry on living for the now and that will be alright, because if the problem’s not there right now, it may as well not be there at all, and that is absolutely alright and fine. We can make believe like the leaf men are embracing us when we’re just face down in some dogshit.

We all wanna be happy, innit? But how? Other people! How do we get other people? We have to make them notice us. We dance on the floor. We try to transcend ourselves, get past ourselves, destroy ourselves in the hope that someone better will magically emerge out the other end. We medicate, we intoxicate, we ply ourselves with the cures in the hope that one of them makes us better, for pity’s sakes, that one of them is actually the answer we’ve been looking for, the key that unlocks the fantastically brilliant person we could swear to god is bloody well in there somewhere. 

I hoped you’d call
I hoped you’d see me

And what if there isn’t anyone in there at all?

“A&E” is a screaming failure of the senses, of emotion, of the belief that somehow your instinct will lead you to figure out what it is you’re meant to be doing. This is not beautiful, but it’ll be called that. This should not soundtrack bank adverts, but I’ve this awful, awful feeling that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

It’s not unusual territory. A brief squint down this blog reveals that it really, really isn’t unusual territory. But “A&E” handles it in such a superficially charming manner. This is on the Radio 1 A-list because acoustic guitars sound nice, and yet the entire point of this song is that these nice sounds become nothing more than placebo, Dylar, a medicine that doesn’t do anything at all except make you forget for a bit. No resolution is achieved; nothing is really improved. They may or may not have come to see her. The tone leads one to suspect that they saw her dancing on the floor and all they could think was that she was shit at dancing.

“A&E” is not just some wolf in sheep’s clothing deal, smuggling in subversive messages under cover of nice wheezy synth noises. This ain’t The Beautiful South. The gauze is there because “A&E” is apart from the world, not for purposes of purity, but because it has become alienated. It sees what goes on but doesn’t really get it, can’t interact with it, can’t quite understand it.

I should try writing about the happy songs more. There’s lots of good ones about right now, there really are. Lots of songs that are fantastic for dancing to and singing along to and so on. But “A&E”… I don’t know. I needed to say something.