In their song ‘Finisterre’, Saint Etienne have a lyric that runs: “Imagine the nineteenth century never happened / a straight run from Beau Brummell to Bauhaus”. When I think of that lyric I wonder why the nineteenth century in particular and not the twentieth. You would think if you’re going to skip a century you want to pick the one with the holocaust.
All I’ve been able to come up with is France – go straight from the Revolution to the Third Republic. Skip the part where Napoleon subverted the revolution and crowned himself. Skip the part where the Bourbons came back. Skip the failed revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Maybe that’s the meaning of the next lines: “dreams never end / this house believes in skyscrapers”. Maybe the desire is to return to a belief in history as a journey from darkness to light and skip the parts where that isn’t how it works.