Out of touch

'Your out of touch, I'm out of time, cut your hands on the edge of lime...'

I've never really liked that song, whichever version springs to mind first: it's terrible. There seems to be a penchant for terrible music in this country.

I know I've moaned in the past about Radio 1 and its tendency to kill a song before it's even been released, but I'm seriously missing radio programmed by people who know that we are in the 21st Century.

If I judged my surroundings by the music I hear on the radio over here, I'd hazard a guess that it's somewhere between 1986 and 1993. The people who chose the playlists must really have fond memories of this period. Having your eardrums forced into submission, you can still feel like those first winters mornings free of communist control. All to the sweet sounds of Charles and Fucking Eddie.

That's a bit harsh on my favourite interacial (musical) duo from the late 80s/90s. Since arriving here and hearing Would I Lie To You? about 37,000 times, the song really has grown on me.

Where stations try and rebel against the Goodbye Lenin logic (it's still 1989, it's still 1989) they only seem to have stumbled across the kind of shit music (if you can call it that) that boy racers tend to emit from their suped up Suzuki Swifts. Not a day goes by when I don't hear Guru Josh Project's Infinity at least four times. [I just had to check the Radio 1 site to find out a) The name of the artist, and b) That it is a new release.] Perhaps when I arrive back in England I'll hang out in car parks to get nostalgic about the music in Poland that I so dearly miss. I doubt it.

Bizarrely, it's in the high street stores that I hear music that I recognise and/or know and don't despise. The other day we were in H&M (we love you globalisation) and I heard something that sounded like The Killers. I'm pretty sure it was The Killers. Only The Killers sound like The Killers. And once I get hold of whatever their new album is called and listen to it a few times, I'll profess that it's great. (At least that's what happened with Sam's Town.) About a month or so back we were Christmas shopping in a big department type store and they were playing Ladyhawke's Paris Is Burning!

So it seems that now I'm back online I can get back into the habit of being in touch with decent music. It's been a quiet, lonely winter without any new tunes to croon to (yes, more Killers!). And if it means not having to go to H&M to do so, all the better!