You take your white finger
Slide the nail under the top and bottom buttons of my blazer
Relax the fraying wool, slacken ties
And I'm not to look at you in the shoe, but the eyes, find the eyes.
Find me and follow me through corridors, refectories and files
You must follow me, leave this academic factory
You will find me in the matinee
The dark of the matinee
It's better in the matinee
The dark of the matinee is mine.
A tale of adolescent anxiety from the Glasgow-based postpunk band that led the charge of new music in the early part of the 00s. This has two connections with yesterday’s Sparks track – first up the matinee reference, and some Hollywood video footage, echoes a current film star theme, and also last year, Franz Ferdinand collaborated on a humorous album with Sparks under the mischievous name of FFS.
Perhaps the real joy of this upbeat indie track, with lovely change of pace, is not just its fresh guitar sound, reminiscent perhaps of early Talking Heads, but also Alex Kapranos’s vocals. Capturing that wistful disappointment, when after some toying unsatisfactorily with some sort of romance at school (Glasgow’s Bearsden Academy) and a wish to head to a cinema with the girl or simply bunk off, success is eventually reached, presumably in a band, but somehow you find yourself on BBC interviewed by Terry Wogan doesn’t seem as glamorous as hoped.
So I'm on BBC2 now, telling Terry Wogan how I made it and
What I made is unclear, but his deference is and his laughter is
My words and smile are so easy now
Yes, It's easy now
Yes, It's easy now.
To make a humorous hit about the hollowness of success so early in their career shows a wonderful maturity. The song was their third single from their first, eponymous album of 2004, which won them the Mercury Prize. Long may they continue.
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