FUCKIN HELL LIKE

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Just arrived back home after a weekend away, turned on Radio 1, was LITERALLY knocked to the floor by an awe-inspiring triumvirate consisting of:

Keane - 'Spiralling'
Alphabeat - 'Boyfriend'
Does It Offend You, Yeah? - 'Dawn of the Dead'

Senseless, Wagnerian, very-possibly-coke-fuelled pop with an underlying sense of desperation and bewilderment: the Eighties revival in full swing.

And yet ...

The Keane tune is, on a purely formal level, actually pretty fucking good.

Strange, that.

JOHN BETJEMAN: NB

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eg.
'Gaily into Ruislip Gardens
Runs the red electric train,
With a thousand Ta's and Pardons
Daintily alights Elaine;
Hurries down the concrete station
With a frown of concentration,
Out into the outskirt's edges
Where a few surviving hedges
Keep alive our lost Elysium - rural Middlesex again.'

Glib, emotionless patois of the English upper-middle class.

Why this is glorified as 'brilliant light-versification' by people who are wont to dismiss other more demotic forms of popular art as inane is frankly beyond me.

LOUISE

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In the morning of my life
there you were, dancing.
I ran the spool against itself
my love,
and watched our children
with their infant fingers drumming
a tattoo on my piggy-back shoulders,
kicking at the dawn,
glue-bound eyes opening
to the world.