Paris
August 19th, 2010
"Paris", Moshi Moshi Records 2007, artwork Edward Gibson
It’s touching, because it sounds so naïve – just saying “One day we’re going to live in Paris” already marks you out as a starry-eyed innocent. Paradoxically, it might mark you out as unimaginative as well – as dreams go, it’s hardly exceptional in these days of incessant pressure to try and explore everything within reach of transportation, and then try and find something beyond it (because to be satisfied nowadays is to betray your own potential; worse even, you’re refusing your sacred duty to keep the economy running). Neither difficult, nor original, dreaming of Paris is conventional, provincial even: it ushers in nostalgia, it’s old-fashioned; it almost smells of under-achievement, one should really be striving to spend one’s next holiday in another planet or bungee-jump from a satellite.
Not that any of this should have even crossed the mind of the boy who sings Friendly Fires‘s Paris (who may or may not be Ed McFarlane). But it’s precisely the simplicity and the intensity of this wish that make the song so powerful. Unlike the narrator in Opportunities (Let’s make lots of money), who strives to be cleverer and more manipulative than everyone else in a world of schemers (and, by Neil Tennant’s own reckoning, is doomed to fail), the boy who promises to take his friend (lover?) to Paris doesn’t come across as even knowing the word “cynicism”. It’s an affordable dream, he doesn’t have to trample over anyone to achieve it. However…
