COUP DE GRACE (UNDER PRESSURE)

Elbow - Switching Off

There are songs that you listen to and instantly know that they’re going to underscore moments in your life, especially when you’re a teenager. Every song could turn into that perfect moment a la Skins where you’re pissed and stoned. You’re wandering through a party surrounded by people but you’re alone with the strains of Billy Corgan’s cover of Never Let You Down Again by Depeche Mode playing over the top. Life is not like an episode of Skins though and rarely does reality fit a song so perfectly. I first heard this song as an angst ridden teen (very late I might add, but I was still a teen) wandering alone through the streets of my backwards university town. It conjured up images of that perfect love, that one that would be with you right up until the moments your brain switched off for sleep. It was a love that you couldn’t escape and one that was fairy tale. It was something that couldn’t happen, yet it was a lovely enough song and would definitely be a romantic one, one to remember if you ever got involved with a woman.

Fast-forward a few years and I’m now going out with someone. It’s only been a few weeks yet the thorny issue of Christmas has come along and announced itself. Already we were smitten and she had given me a lovely written list of things to do while alone over Christmas. I needed something, something big. Cue the mix CD with some barnstorming tunes, tunes I thought she should like and of course stupid tunes with hidden romantic meanings. Switching Off made its way onto the CD and I chose to use the lyrics as the coup-de-grace to the letter that accompanied it. At first it seemed to be a typically cynical ploy from me. A perfect use of romantic words and a song to make sure I kept the fires burning over Christmas, but as I was writing the words and re-listening to the song it suddenly had resonance. The words were how I felt, the song was how I felt and luckily enough it was how she felt too. Out of nowhere, after vowing to never be in a couple or one of those couples who had ‘a song’ we had ‘a song’.

It’s not one of those songs you dance to at parties and it’s not one of those you force your friends to listen to while regaling them with tales of how perfect you are together. It’s your song. If it plays at a party you don’t announce to others that this is the song of your relationship and act all smug, you just make eye contact for a fleeting moment and smile. In your quietest moments together it can play and nothing else matters and when it comes to your Wedding day nothing sums it up better. 

Sometimes songs are worth sharing with other people and the wider world and bands need the exposure. Other times though songs need hiding away and protecting as they’re precious and important. This is one of those songs. Glorious; important; precious; ours. Mine and her’s.

Anonymous

1. youtune posted this