Matthew Sheret

There’s a paranoia at the heart of a lot of the music I like. It swells up in repeated instances, although most often lyrically: Ian Curtis and Luke Haines study the world through windows, and approach the streets with caution. They hate and fear a lot of the things outside of their bedrooms, as well as inside, which makes for a fractious and spiky environment full of emotion. Even when they’re fun or funny they do it by speaking to sex and destruction, not by looking for better places.

Last Black Plastic – my new favourite club night – I found myself catching the drum thumps to this, bobbing instantly along to what I’m fairly sure is the closest rhythm to my heartbeat in my CD collection, urging people to come to the dancefloor with me. An age passed in a flicker, as they stared past me to the near empty floor before looking into my eyes. “We can’t do this,” their faces said to me “we have neither the primal urges nor the inebriation required for this music that charms you so.”

I muttered “fools” at them as I popped away, flicking and twitching erratically, bobbing about on lots of spots, hitting the perfect velocity to deal with ‘Atlas’ in little time at all.

I spent the whole track thinking about if the others would eventually come over to join the brave few strangers on the dancefloor/feeling concerned about how sweaty I was getting/hoping I wouldn’t fall over/wondering who these people were/trying to remember not to scream with joy. All of these thoughts and questions slammed through my brain, moving faster with each metronomic beat of the drums and accelerating with the garbled warble yammering through the track. I love this song because it remains so explosive, so destructive, so delightful.

As it stopped some girl turned to her friends with delight and said “I didn’t think I’d end up dancing to paranoid instrumentals!”