P.S. let’s think for a moment of Rory Dodd, the man who gave us the back up vocals.

It isn’t about being “too shy.” It’s about having the will – both the will to give and accept real love, and the iron will needed to avoid the fatal illusion of complete perfection.

Every now and then I get a little bit nervous that the best of all the years have gone by.

Because perfection, as with pop music, is only ever aimed at the young and still can’t quite get used to ageing, or to the death of desire. Those songs she heard in 1964, Dusty, Sandie, Cilla – all troubled to varying degrees, yet balanced by this shining baton of hope; knowing that it was her time, so why can’t it be again?

I get a little bit restless and I dream of something wild.

They all had to grow up, just as she has done; to experience pain, rejection, illness, frustration, ecstasy and loss. She has grown up, but she needs that umbilical link, craves that initial radiant blast of new passion, since its absence may unmask and unravel the child who continues to cower.

I get a little bit helpless and I’m lying like a child in your arms.

The piano, single notes played with slow deliberation by Roy Bittan, and bittan as a made-up word would very accurately sum up the impotent raindrops plunking against her darkened bedroom window; bittan also like her tears.

Every now and then I fall apart.

She keeps trying to break out of the cycle, and at the same stage in each cycle she sees

the look in your eyes

terrified that she’ll fall off the cycle and spin endlessly through a blackened hole of sterile compromise. There is the hint of ascent, but still she gazes through that blank window and the clap of thunder nearly splits her mind apart as she falls back to square one. But still she climbs, until she gains a toehold on sanity and identity and cries:

And I need you now tonight
And I need you more than ever

Grasp at the bulb, so there might be enlightenment, and yes,

Forever’s gonna start tonight

- she runs ecstatically to

the end of the line

but finds only a mirror, which sings back at her:

Once upon a time I was falling in love
But now I’m only falling apart

It is a quietened battle being fought between light and darkness, and she doesn’t know who represents which –

Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time

- and is therefore uncertain about who she really is. And therefore her heart cannot feel because she has forgotten how it feels to come into the light.

The piano comes down in slow, gathering avalanche and Max Weinberg’s drums thrash at the heart’s boundaries; halls redolent of hurtful memories of past joys (those sleighbells, Larry Fast’s monstrous avenue of synthesisers – all truer to the core of Trevor Horn than any feeble British impersonation)…

…but of course there is this other voice all the way through the lament, at times overpowering her own – is this her conscience, or is it him, as desperate as she to break back through?

Turnaround.

She faces him and sees it from his perspective.

I know you’ll never be the boy you always wanted to be.

Perfection. The façade sold to us through so many pictures and too many damnable pop records. Be as good, or better, than what I’m being told is possible.

But every now and then I know you’ll always be the only boy who wanted me the way that I am!

She is trembling at her thoughts of him – she gives a truly poignant sob to the “u” of “universe” (and naturally makes it sound like “you”) when she says:

I know there’s no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as you.

- and further -

I know there’s nothing any better
(is she resentful?)
There’s nothing that I just wouldn’t do.

“I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that!”

But then, she cries, screams, for all the Almas and Rubys who came before her, the Sandies, Dustys and Lulus still compromised, the woman’s voice still taken and condemned for granted, even her own when she bettered Rod in the throaty late seventies, and now – and you can tell that she has waited the entirety of her life to sing this song – and now she is singing for all of them, including those yet to be conceived, as she proclaims

EVERY NOW AND THEN I FALL APART

On the repeat of that line she holds onto that last “part” as a loosening toenail might cling to a cliff face as she again pleads for him to hold her tight:

We’ll be holding on forever
(to the same crumbling rock?).

An organ rises to meet her climactic cry of:

We’re living in a powder keg and giving off sparks.

Again, however, the mirror cools, again and finally she returns to the shadows:

Once upon a time there was light in my life,
But now there’s only love in the dark.

His voice – Rory Dodds, let’s give him his name and his dues – has previously been an octave above hers when singing (or intoning) the title, but now they sing at equal height, and Steve Buslowe’s bass rises compassionate to cushion the tears of the last chord change. All that stays is the piano rain, the thunderstorm now spent –

I believe above a storm the smallest prayer can still be heard.

- merging into the empty wind -

Johnny, remember me.

- the voice on the other side of the door, smaller but closer.

Cathy, it’s me, Heathcliff. Come home.

“Mullet with headlights” hahahahah

Anyway, all I had to contribute was to note that my primary association with this song is of a church skit I’ve several times been corraled into performing in, all set to TEOTH. (Something like this.) The year that Old School came out was the year that skit no longer worked for the teenage audience it was aimed at, and we mothballed it gratefully.

‘Mocking’ was in retrospect the wrong word. I guess I’m searching for ‘clever-clever’ or something – the subconscious implication that a group does a song because – fine – it’s a good song, but actually ‘we’re serious artistes, and we’re doing this song to make everybody smile and dance, but at the end of the day we ARE serious artistes and they’re not’ sort of syndrome. As I said, I didn’t hear the Travis one, so that was my own prejudice lumping them in to all that.

I loved The Darkness doing Street Spirit (Fade Out)…

And when you were thinking what a ridiculous project it was, did you think you’d have such a following by this time?!

I think “among songs of cosmic proportions, this is a masterpiece” might be a more accurate way of putting it ;)

(Sorry, a cheap but irresistable point…)

P.S. …and how ironic, there’s a cover of “Billie Jean” by Big Daddy on there too! Michael Jackson meets Gene Vincent – it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does!

Now, if there was an Aztec Camera version of “Total Eclipse of The Heart”… I’d pay good money to hear THAT!