Saturday 5 January 2013

Radiohead


This felt relevant.


Radiohead is one of my favourite bands. But I can’t listen to it for too long because I’ll go crazy. Melancholic, nostalgic, drowning in incomprehension. There’s so much that I love about these feelings. Lying on my back on the floor, on the bed, listening to ‘Fog’ or ‘Nude’ or ‘Idioteque’, and being transported to a mechanical world where everything is metal and there is no sunlight and the air tastes like blood. There is so much I adore, and need to be transported to this world where the sound is a constant hum of a factory and no humans are to be seen. This ghost world of nothingness, and complete and utter industrialization, so to speak, is as appealing as the ever glamorised balcony overlooking the Eiffel Tower, as appealing as the idea of walking in New York, never looking down. Every one of those things is appealing to a different side of me and is accompanied by a soundtrack, and every song is as essential to my being as the last. But… but. Nothing compares to a world that doesn’t exist. Walking around my neighbourhood at 5am is the closest I’ll get. There’s no light, not a person in sight. There will be a light noise of a car passing by somewhere or the wind making a tree wobble. There is nothing like walking through lonely streets immersed in a world played by Radiohead. Life turns grey and blue and electronic and pure but not of this world.

I can’t listen to Radiohead for too long because I long for this world I created when I heard ‘Paranoid Android’ for the first time. And it has never left me, this longing. And I never am fully there, which is exhausting, frustrating and yet strangely relieving.