This song was sparked by one of those rare and odd moments where you whizz pass someone you don't know while you're on a bus and their whole life flashes in front of you. The Lady Gaga and Gwyneth Paltrow mentions are less cultural reference points than suitably hurried attempts at description. I had, for reasons beyond my ken, pinned her as a travel agent, and that was the (presumably complete) misapprehension out of which the song developed. From there, it's a short imaginative leap to the rest of her life conditions - she spends most of her waking hours immersed in the minutiate of other people's happiness. So what better mindset from which to speculate upon the philosophical nuances of the annual British holiday?
I had in mind an update of the Pistols' 'Holidays in the Sun', but the musical palette - despite tantalizing whiffs of mid-90s Brit Pop (Pulp's 'Have You Seen Her Lately?' and Blur's 'Girls and Boys' - or was it 'Boys and Girls'?) it ends up sounding more like Pistols contemporaries Magazine - doesn't move it on all that far I suppose. But then it's almost an ancient (in pop terms at least) trope - from Cliff's 'Summer Holiday' to Weller's 'thinking 'bout your holidays', it's another to add to the above and the song's main contention - that the great British getaway is less of an escape and more another form of incarceration is equally hackneyed. The vacation as not so much relief from as reinforcment of the workaday horrors of the rat race is probably just about redeemed by genuine concern for Shirley's need for a holiday: we've all, to varying degrees, felt that same desperation at some point I should imagine.
I'm assuming that it's her own 'two weeks in a dancefloor hell' that she's imagining - perhaps not; maybe Shirley's is just a general meditation on consciousness? A teeny suspicion of class consciousness peeps through towards the end and I think perhaps Shirley shares my disdain for all those 'Keep calm and...' t-shirts/baby grows/topiary effects etc. My favourite is suitably subversive: a poster put up by a fiery Roman work colleague - 'I can't keep calm, I'm Italian....'
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