In The Air
Looking back on my life, it feels like the one thing I spend longest doing is sitting in my room, staring at the wall or the ceiling, thinking I should be somewhere else or be a different person.
I love it when it rains. When it rains, I have a reason to be inside; it feels right to be sheltering. The rest of the time, I don’t understand what I am trying to take shelter from. I find solace in abstract promises of future disaster; I tell myself that I am right to be afraid of a world that seems to be contracting into atomized panic; a world that seems ever less capable of coming to terms with its own fundamental situation, let alone acting to try to repair it.
Today in the UK, the maximum temperature will be 36 degrees Celsius. The fields outside are the colour of leopardskin. It is physically difficult to do much more than sit in front of a fan, bashing at a keyboard, trying to find a way to bring some semblance of sense to what is happening.
I am sitting here thinking about music.
We recorded my first song, “No Joy”, in July. I have been struggling to write a decent track for months. I can’t help but approach songs like poems – like I’m onstage, musing ostentatiously in order to be overheard by a sympathetic and cultivated audience that knows better than not to clap at the end. I am convinced that no good song was ever written in this way. Poetry is a genre so entrenched in the sanctioned exhaustion of tradition that it permits lavish degrees of naval-gazing, oversharing, amateur philosophy, and lame rhyming. Music is different. Music is intravenous. For me, there is only and only
Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
When I sit down to write a poem, I feel as though on some level, I have to say something. I worry so often about fully succumbing to despair; about our society fully abandoning what remains of its capacity to make sense of things; about our propensity as a species to lie down and lick boot in front of what simply asserts to us, over and again, that we are doomed, and we were wrong to ever believe anything else.
Writing “No Joy”, I did not try to say anything at all.
It doesn’t matter if no-one’s worth loving anymore;
it doesn’t matter if you’re getting old.
You got your books, got your movies,
Got your vinyls, got your tapes.
But you take stock of what you got;
you got nothing.
I don’t know if music has ever had any power. Tom Waits: music is mostly just something pretty to do with the air. It can’t make the air colder, or put castles of cloud up ready to burst in a parched sky. Can it give the air some special charge that makes reality look different? I want to believe that it can. I want to believe that saying things – that sharing careful articulations of experience – is worth it.
I doubt we listen to music as well as we used to. It is too easy, now. If you are like me, you still let algorithms and internet searches guide you through the world of music. You “listen to everything”. There is music everywhere, and most of it bad; unintentional, unconsidered, a kind of cognitive littering. A good song, though, still, I think, is like a terabithian bridge into a place where we can at least entertain the idea of being able to see what’s missing from our world more clearly. A good song can give the idea of being people who could theoretically endure – or even resist – their unfolding predicament. Harry creates bridges to these kingdoms of thought by communicating a surpassing sense of calm. Rowan Williams: “Humility is the capacity to be a place where others find rest.” Harry creates these places through song; these places where, for a few minutes, the ideals of love and loyalty have no real opponent. Reference might be made to challenges and difficulties, but he shelters the listener from their impact by allowing the serenity of his lyrics to find an analogue in the structure of his songs. Layered harmonies; repetition; dulcet piano, clean lines, and the woody sonority of acoustic guitar.
I cannot give you these things.
“No Joy” is a rant with a wicked bassline.
Its message is sneering and cruel, but maybe necessary: that we cannot take shelter in our cultural output while the world is eaten away around us. I did not get around to writing a hopeful verse. It would have made the song too much like a poem; too much like the sanctioned guff that leaves you with a little hopeful smile for half a minute before you forget.
I cannot remember poems anymore.
I remember basslines.
I hope my song does not make you miserably look at your wall and wish you could have lived in the days of Proust or Tolstoy or Kurosawa, or make that you think you're a coward if you do.
I hope it makes you feel like how I felt sitting in that studio with a sweet-ass tobacco sunburst Fender Jazz – setting it up, unamped, to be captured by multiple microphones. Or how I felt salvaging makeshift instruments for the percussion, hitting bits of old ship engine with nails picked up off the pavement. Or hearing Harry’s nervous suggestion that he do a guitar solo on this one.
I hope it jolts you. I hope it’s rocket fuel.
I hope, as an Apollonian-Dionysiac pair, we do something beautiful to your air.
Gerard K
14/08/2026