CHAPTER 40

 

#61: YEARS & YEARS

"King"

from the album Communion

Released: July 2015

 

 

The gradual demotion and ultimate cancellation of Top Of The Pops was almost as stupid as the idea of the show itself. From what we now know, it should probably never have been commissioned in the first place. Yet where else were you going to see your pop stars, in full view of your parents and classmates? Not in the school assembly hall of Later with Jools Holland, that's for certain (or, more accurately, for the grown-ups).

And we have, since 2006, missed so much of the visuals which accompany any meaningful (or meaningless) pop star by their not being exposed on prime-time mainstream television. As good as La Roux is (are?), how much more dynamic would it have been to see Elly's flaming red electro-gaucho totality belting out "In For The Kill"?

 

 

The increasingly amateurish and pointless annual Christmas editions of Top Of The Pops survived for a while after the main show was cancelled, and it was on the Christmas 2015 show that I finally got the point of Years & Years. I had nodded along semi-agreeably to the Bronski Bros mannerisms of "King" on the radio, but one really had to see Olly Alexander, dressed like an angel, dazed and ecstatic, flanked by the two second-year medical students on keyboards, for its pop to hit home. Lyrically the song is the oldest of pop stories - you're treating me bad(ly) but I can't let go - but Alexander with divine uncertainty transposes the song into the realm of the hymnal, as no one had done since Jim Diamond and Tony Hymas with "I Won't Let You Down." Sometimes in pop, you have to see before you can bring yourself to believe.