Anyone Else Isn't You

Anyone Else Isn't You is an exhibition that I went to see a few days ago which featured three seperate black and white videos of lone people talking to the camera about relationships and music, mainly mixtapes (at least I presume that they all did as I only watched two in the end.)
Mainly the people were in relationships with other people also in the clips, which made for a lot of oh-so-sweet moments where they said the same things about each other or each gave their own accounts of the same events, although I can imagine easily finding this insufferable if not in love.

A lot of it was about very universal stuff, even having never myself actually quite made a mixtape for a prospective lover as was often being described. Or even such a mix CD in fact! It's hard not to relate to talk of singing to each other, going to gigs and having songs that you associate with times though.

The bits which really made me like it however were, perhaps inevitably, the ones which I could relate to because they were about the same music as has affected my life. Seeing more than one person who also couldn't listen to Jeff Buckley because it brought back too many bad memories brought a wry smile. This was followed a bit later by some quoting of lyrics; one girl read out lines from The Arcade Fire's Crown Of Love and one 'so I look in your direction but you pay me no attention, do you?' from Coldplay's Shiver, which really brought home the fact that as much as I love The Arcade Fire and similar bands that it is cool to (or at least cool as dictated by other people who like them, no doubt plenty would disagree! But this tends to be the case for places that I read or people that I talk to), Coldplay will probably always mean a lot more to me and I still don't see it as a bad thing anymore than anyone else's tastes can really be a bad thing.

That song in particular took me back to a day at school when we had a fire drill in the freezing cold outside and I offered my coat to a girl who I was briefly obsessed with at the time, for which I was pretty justifiably widely mocked (she didn't accept in case you hadn't guessed). On the way home that day I stopped off in HMV and listened to Shiver on their listening post feeling sorry for myself generally. It somehow wasn't until the second time round that I noticed the cutting relevance of the title line 'don't you shiver...' at which point I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

I'm glad to have changed since then but I still love the song just as much.

The end.