The Stars Down to Earth

I saw Drive last night. I thought it was good and don't really understand the 'best film ever' hype, but it coincidentally tied together some thoughts I've been having recently in an almost profoundly neat way and I might as well write about it.

When I saw the poster for Drive, I said 'wow I hope it's a film based entirely around the Cars song.' Cos I futtin' LOVE that song:



I was basically right in my prediction (any moment in the film could be soundtracked by the above), but it also uses music in some pretty neat ways which linked several thought chains I've had on the go recently.

Firstly, it uses italo disco as the stylistic anchor for the film. People talk about its 80sness and what they're talking whether they know it or not about is the retro echoes of italo disco. Most movingly, it uses Desire's Under Your Spell:



But that's not their best song though it is of course boss. This is:


That synth riff bopping up and down like a hyperventilating chest.

What did hit me about Drive was that only the morning before I watched it I was day-dreaming about night-driving.

Driving aimlessly at night is so obviously the most romantic thing two people can do together, it's obscene. Just as kissing is better than sex for its manifest pointlessness, so driving is better than dinner because of its vagrant absurdity.

'Do you wanna go for a drive?'

Two people, looking not at each other but straight ahead, hands on thighs. One person in control, the other a willing passenger, unknowing and uncaring of destination- that's what love is.

I come from an area of the world rich in transport links. Trod up the hill to 'churchies', the field next to St Laurence's where my parents got married, and you look out at the marshland corrugated by line after line of means of moving; first a railway line, then the M56, the Manchester Ship Canal and the Mersey, and finally the runways of Liverpool airport. By any means, the North West is rich in ways to get about, not least Motorways:



I live pretty much where it says 'M56' there on the left. That's me.

The M56, Queensferry to Manchester. Highway 56 runs right by my baby's door. Between Junction 12 (Frodsham) and Junction 14 (Stanlow Oil Refinery, Elton, Helsby and Helsby Services (Whimpy, W.H. Smiths, shower block we used for a month when we didn't have a boiler)), there's no junction 13, for reasons much mythologised. I live straight between the two junctions. My area would be unlucky if it had a junction.

Americans romanticise their highways. In Britain this is looked down upon but in reality this road has huge sentimental potential for me. It leads right into the Centre of Manchester and I didn't have to take a single turning to end up literally outside my ex's house in my late teens. It is an ever-present drone to the citizens of Helsby, some including my mother saying they find it hard to sleep when away from it in silence. I use it as a barometer for the how the world works; at midnight on New Years Eve I look out across the Mersey firstly to watch the Liverpudlian fireworks reflected in the river but I always find myself looking at the motorway, and wondering what the half dozen drivers on it at that particular time are thinking; are they even celebrating?

The motorway is the modern-day river and holds the same position that the river held in the renaissance imagination. We use it to travel far and near, for food and for work, and so even when we're not using it, it becomes a symbol for the world beyond the immediate.



From an early age it became apparent that the only interesting thing to do in Helsby is travelling. Not travelling to somewhere else, just travelleing. Initially it was just walking the length of the A56 which of course runs parallel to the motorway, from the park to the shops and back over and over. I still see kids doing this every Saturday, only now it's expanded from the new Tesco to the shops and back. Later, we'd get buses to Chester and do nothing there but walk up and down the high street. Then I learnt to drive and found just another new way to wander. And so came the night drives up and down the M56, sometimes knocking onto the '62, or around the dual carriageway maze of Runcorn.

The architecture of motorways at night becomes as profound as anything in the modern world. Everything is reduced to three primary colours of red, white and black. Lights bob up and down in the distance, cities burn on the horizon. From a distance everything is the same- houses, street lights, cars, industry, offices, security lights bleaching the side of a warehouse. The world is homogenised and comes alive as a result. Whilst in the day motorways are a green tunnel strewn with rubber skids and shrapnel, at night-time they seem like the only place in the world, a speckled band of light in the dark.



There are two options for lovestruck passengers on such a path.

1) Silence, appreciative silence. A sense of common purpose when there is none. We are on a journey, we are young, be quiet, we are taking ourselves seriously because what's going on is serious.

2) Talk as you'd never talk anywhere else. Leaning across the steering wheel, emphatically waving the hands in the air, proselytising to the back of a Transit van. Sitting sideways on the passenger seat, repeatedly turning the radio down. Laughing, gossiping, treading old ground. Lovers become Proustians; everything must be discussed. Tristram Shandy remarked that he could never complete his life story as to describe anything takes infinitely longer than the event itself. But no one in the front seats of their parents' cars on a motorway at 2am cares. When there is no end in sight, anything is possible and everything is infinite. A conversation has no foreseeable ending and so its length is insignificant.



Stanlow refinery takes on a unique beauty by night, as everything and everyone does of course, and from the motorway it doesn't smell as foul as it does from the single track road on the other side.





Legend has it that Ridley Scott drove past Stanlow, presumably on the M56, and used it as the basis for Blade Runner's grotesque industry:



I dunno, who knows?

Anyway, OMD, bards of the teen romantic heart obsessed with the stark, wrote a song about Stanlow's physicalising of local heartbreak and heartache:



But OMD were from up the Wirral, pfft, and probably only saw Stanlow on their holidays or something. For me, I looked at it every day out of my bedroom window, and the gas flares were modern-day beacons, literally the light of my life:




So what has this to do with Drive?

Desire, from way up above, are labelmates of Chromatics, who alledgedly are on the Drive soundtrack but I didnae hear 'em. Chromatics released an album called Night Drive which explicitly channels the feeling of those aimless nights when you knew exactly what you were doing. Astoundingly, only one person on youtube has matched a song from the album with actual footage of a night drive:



Even before the Chromatics album, it was obvious that italo disco was the sound of night drives, if they were to have any sound beyond the prayers of the loved sent unceasing into the night. The gentle hi-hats replicating the quick swish of each successive streetlight momentarily highlighting faces and gazes, that neat rubbery bass methodically sloshing around underneath everything like tyres on tarmac, and the ghostly vocals echoing the rest of society to you in the moment: distant and almost irrelevant.



Anyway, keep on drivin'. Out of the darkness, into the light...



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"Come here, go anywhere."


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Ps. here's some Widnesians singing about shagging in cars. The opening 25 seconds took four days to record.