I spent most of yesterday dancing round to Bjork and Radiohead... After my last post about qualifying, yes, I am in celebration mode, but am also having to isolate due to track and trace. I'm not ill, so been twiddling my thumbs a bit... Here is a little dance collage piece from that:

I've been a massive fan of Radiohead since I was a teenager...and they have continued to produce new, exciting and beautiful music that always manages to capture what I'm thinking and feeling... This track, Separator from King of Limbs is one I listen to on repeat quite often. I know many die-hard Radiohead fans who didn't rate this album, but for me it works on so many levels. It is sensual, yet  brutal... It has an air of mystery and other worldliness about it,  an undercurrent of the sense of aggressive malaise and inertia that has underpinned this last decade or so with its incredible cross between conventional rock and contemporary electronica, and then there are the lyrics... This particular song and the one that precedes it on the album (Give up the ghost) being 2 of my favourites lyrically. For me, they are linked, as Give up the ghost speaks quite clearly about letting go, saying goodbye... To à loved one; saying goodbye to the romanticised dream we have clung on to of a loved one... It's about needing to allow something (or someone) to die... Separator follows it with this strange mix between describing a deeply sensual instinct and sentiment yet also, the darkness of having passed out of this realm and into death... Into the afterlife...? For me, and all music/art is totally subjective, this is a song about release... Perhaps an imagining of release (after the yearning and aching of Give up the ghost), in death.

"And if you think this is over then your wrong"

Is this a suggestion that Thom Yorke truly believes in an afterlife? Or is this like ee cummings line in Since Feeling is First

"and death, I think is no parentheses..."

In other words, if not in this lifetime my love, then another... 

Classic emo expressions of love, angst and pain. I love it, and it is deeply sensual, as any piece of art that attempts to touch on love, sex and death tend to be... 

Going back to the beginning of my love affair with Radiohead, and in fact Thom Yorke (huge lifelong crush and severe admiration). It has to be Creep. Yes, seminal for so many and a song that has maintained its power across generations. My 13 year old looked shocked when I played it a few weeks ago because, that is one of his songs apparently 😊 he was surprised/annoyed when I told him how old it was. And I am tbh... It still makes me feel exactly how it did when I first heard it at about 16... Classic emo whining, out of check hyper emotionalism and awkwardness, that yes... I have been consistently capable of feeling throughout my adult years in affairs of the heart...

This poetic reimagining is one I did not that long ago really... Very teenage, but felt good:

Anyway, if for some bizarre reason, you have not educated yourself aurally in the delights of Radiohead, then please do so...

For me, Thom Yorke has a depth and sensitivity rarely seen in contemporary artistes, or humans even. Yes, sycophant am I, but it is well justified. The man is not a genius necessarily, just honest and open and is able to translate his feelings well.