Kiss me like a final meal.
A love letter to the lyrics of One Day Like This by Elbow.
It was hard for this song to go up in my estimation. It is a nailed-on, dead-cert sure thing for my fantasy Desert Islands Discs list.
But up it did go. Go up it did. Thanks to the video below, up did it go to the extent that it is now pushing the envelope of my esteem.
I had always taken One Day Like This literally.
When Guy Garvey implored me to throw those curtains wide, my mind’s eye did just that. White curtains billow in the breeze and the room is bathed in sunlight and I am lying half awake with a certain her. One Day Like this is a coruscating love song.
‘Cause Holy Cow I love your eyes
And only now I see the light
Yeah, lying with you half awake
Stumbling over what to say
Oh, anyway, it’s looking like a beautiful day
One Day Like This is a musical Polaroid, capturing with washed out, over-exposed candour a precious moment of uncomplicated tenderness. A moment of love whose ingredients are so fresh and so piquant that the recipe is ridiculously simple, two people in a sunlit room, drinking in the morning sun, blinking in the morning sun.
Someone tell me how I feel
It’s silly wrong but vivid right
Oh kiss me like a final meal
Yeah, kiss me like we die tonight
If it were just a love song it would be a great love song, notable for its nuance and its texture and its frequent moments of poetry. It waxes and wanes from unbridled proclamations to tender sweet nothings, from full-orchestra crescendos to a single pizzicato violin.
When my face is chamois creased
If you think I wink, I did
But I see this song through new eyes now. It is much more than a love song.
It is a modus vivendi.
The video offers a stirring, figurative interpretation of throw those curtains wide.
The song is about billowing emotion.
The curtains that it implores you to throw wide are the self-imposed curtains of convention and conformity. To keep those curtains closed is to surrender to an existence whose default setting is going through the motions. There is no need to live your life like a commercial vehicle whose speed has been limited to 56mph.
With the right attitude there is joy to be found in even the most mundane activity.
Find space to be playful and frivolous. Just one such moment like this each day will see you right.
This is starting to feel like a sermon.
Throw wide those curtains!
Surrender ye not to halfheartedness!
Find joy in the smallest of tasks!
James, co-editor of this publication, ventured that One Day Like This satisfies the criteria of a pop hymn.
It is a song of praise.
It does all the things that Thomas Aquinas asks of a hymn.
A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.
It does all the things that Harry Eskew asks of a hymn.
It should be simple and metrical in form, genuinely emotional, poetic and literary in style, spiritual in quality, and in its ideas so direct and so immediately apparent as to unify a congregation while singing it.
As James also points out, it employs the defining attributes of pop - charm, compression, repetition, simplicity - to do what pop does best, which is to enter public consciousness and popular culture through collective euphoria.
It [pop] has worked out how to generate shared moments of deep emotion about important things.
The writing of A Longing Look has been revealing in that, all too often, the lyrics of great songs are not great in isolation. For the majority of songs the whole is much, much greater than the sum of the parts, and the lyrics are the part most diminished by being divorced from the whole.
Not so for Elbow. Not so for Guy Garvey. His lyrics read like poetry. Witness the first two verses of Starlings.
How dare the Premier ignore my invitations?
He’ll have to go.
So, too, the bunch he luncheons with,
It’s second on my list of things to do.
At the top is stopping by
Your place of work and acting like
I haven’t dreamed of you and I
And marriage in an orange grove.
You are the only thing in any room you’re ever in.
I’m stubborn, selfish and too old.
The poetry of One Day Like This has an epic quality. It is radiant and rousing, entirely uncynical and irony-free. It has an infectious, anthemic, choral quality; maybe not to the same sing-and-stomp-along degree of a We Will Rock You, but it is cut from the same cloth. It is popular hymnody.
So throw those curtains wide.
One day like this a year would see me right.
When it is sung in a cathedral, with an orchestra and a choir, or when it plays a part in an Olympic Games closing ceremony, it works. In an ampitheatre with pyrotechnics it works. In a hallowed, intimate venue, it works. At its most vulnerable and at its most zealous it works. It is fantastic.
Since you got this far, would you mind going a little further?
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