Unhappy Children: Stardust – The Music Sounds Better With You

Listening to Stardust‘s  “The Music Sounds Better With You” takes me back to the scratchy fabric of the corduroy couch we had in the lounge at our holiday house. It was strangely bulbous, immediately soft, but essentially firm, and there was always sand and loose change in the crevices.

I remember lying with my face against the couch while music videos blasted from our massive cathode ray TV (which was, if I recall, similarly brown,  with knobs that you had to pull in and out to switch on and off), sharp cuts and sharper dance moves framed by the polyester wisps of this scratchy fabric.

I wept a little earlier, when hearing this song – though I am a world away from this room now – because I realised the source of the peculiar joy it evokes in me. At the time it was a kind of lifeline. With its video (a boy liberating himself from chilly domesticity through imagination) and its divinely saccharine sentiments it carried a complete message: better times would come.