Strikingly beautiful

No! [chuckles] No, not me!

Not this time, at least.

I stream BBC 6 Music into the office and the lab. As the guy in charge around here, I get to make these sort of choices: it’s good to be king.

But 6 Music is what happens in the background: in the foreground there’s TB, lab work, specimens, spreadsheets and databases. And listen (no pun intended), that’s a perfect scenario, because the background music makes the foreground work go more smoothly.

Silence isn’t golden. Silence is anything but golden.
Silence is awkward.

But then there was this song. And even though it is supposed to be in the background, it pushes its way through right to the front of everything, amongst the TB and the spreadsheets, and this happens every time they play it, because it’s so strikingly beautiful.
I recognised the voice, but not the song. And that’s because I had somehow missed the fact that Suede have just released something new. This is it:

Orchestral, theatrical, stunning. I love it.

The scene for the video is a bit galling, mind:

It’s set in a rural landscape, on the hard shoulder of the motorway, among the B-roads and among the rubbish that’s been fly-tipped. It’s set by a chain link fence with a dead badger lying rotting in the ground.

Right, but there’s a new album out soon too, yes?

It’s quite dank and troubling. A lot of this is about the terrors of childhood, so it’s quite unpleasant in lots of ways.

Which sounds… er… lovely.

I can’t wait.