You Thought You Were My First Love...

...But you're wrong. You were the only one.

At long last I hold a copy of The Foxgloves' ep Lives You Didn't Lead in my hand. And it feels like the only goal in MY life for a year has been reached. This record is approaching mythical proportions in my mind already. And in the end it took Pam Berry actually handing me the cd. Ara should really work harder to get the Foxyboy releases distributed. Because this borders on ludicrousness. But that's not a bad thing when it all comes down to it. And I won't do it. I won't listen to another record again. It only lingers and then fades, along with every choice I never made. The only pop song we need starts with the line "I dreamt that love was a crime, but still I couldn't get arrested". It's straightforward enough but I could spend the rest of my days attempting to fathom the implications of that metaphor. Whilst I am so doing, I will let myself be endlessly caressed by the crimson guitar lines. "It takes us away from ourselves", but will i find myself in this loss? That's when I'm told how this record is constructed. Everything in it is an index for something else. It hangs together like a chain of associations starting with the tinted photograph of Roland Barthes, the words in the titles, the sleeve notes by Theresa Tzara, the silences between notes. And the notes between the notes. "By going nowhere thus." The Foxgloves know what pop is. They are it. Pop is not what is between the lines. It's what is between the notes. Like waiting for a bus in the rain. Some say pop is intellectual. When it's really only music - or life in general. It takes intellect to prove that it is not intellectual, does it not? Like it takes existence to prove that there is no existence. GU is Glasgow University. It also is not. I know who the dream I can't wake up from is. That's why she doesn't want me to fall asleep. Tomorrow I might wake up to "You're the Dream I Can't Wake Up From" playing on the stereo. To say that it is beautiful would be beside the point. A point is after all infinitely small. And beauty is only a lack of other things. "Probably it never happened: a thought suspended between two times, shaded with the imaginary pastels of long-gone decades. The dowdy time-scrawled tapes still work the strongest magic. I think you were my first love, but it's hard to be sure." Isn't it?

CLOUD 11 The Foxgloves - I Dreamt Love Was a Crime