It is 2012 and I am 18 years old. I don’t know anything about myself yet so I follow everybody else’s lead. My boyfriend is a musician. I follow him to venues in the middle of nowhere. I hate the sound of his band’s music but I think I love him so I accept the stomach pains it takes me to lie about it. I lie again when he introduces me to Paul Simon in a bedroom at his mum’s house; I pretend not to think wow, I want to slap the smile off this man’s face. I don’t know why I want to slap Paul Simon. I don’t know anything and until I do, I will have to bide my time.

So we go on long drives through Liverpool at night to be 18 alone. CDs in the glove compartment. It’s better when he plays me The National for the first time. I don’t want to slap The National; I want to ask The National man if I can help. It’s even better when this boyfriend from the past introduces me to LCD Soundsystem, a bigger band than I’m used to. They have 8 and 9 minute-long songs. Closer to dance than I’ve been before; closer to electronica, to techno, to partying, to drugs, to New York. Closer to a sense of euphoria too, but that’s still very far away. I get excited and look them up but there’s a statement on their website from the year before announcing they’re disbanding.

Before we do the same, I cry because we decide to go to different universities. But he visits me in London and there’s this one night when we’re walking down Embankment and we have to hide beneath an overground arch because we’re too young to dress for snow. There’s a kiss and I think of the LCD Soundsystem line, ‘like kissing under a bridge, it’s an entirely new discovery.’ We’re only together a year and a bit, not even a full hour of my life, before he admits on New Year’s Eve that he cheated with a girl who’s still in school. I pack my bags and pull paintings off his walls while I wait for a taxi on the single worst night to call one.

I block him on everything, obviously, so this loser ends up sending me a handwritten letter. Teardrops over fountain pen in the 21st Century. He quotes the bridge lyric before he signs his name as well. I can’t cry over a boy who plays trumpet, sorry — a trumpet that chaps his lips into watercolour pinks spilling out across a small, also slappable, face. I cannot cry over this lyric either. The lyric is so much bigger than the boy. It is a happy line sung by a band that feels like a big bright strobing heaven — and that music is always building up to something, like rising waters, like the Thames flooding fast over Embankment and knocking some sense into me.

It’s a very good time to break up because the next day, 2014 feels clear like Monday. And at least I’ll never have to listen to Paul Simon again.

Two years before this teenage saga, back before I knew LCD Soundsystem existed, the decade-older Liverpool boy I’d actually end up with was working til close in Glasgow restaurant Stravaigin, his lips perfectly in tact. Michael’s shift was the same night LCD frontman James Murphy was playing a solo DJ set nearby. Annoying because he’d been a fan since clubs played their debut single back in 2002. Like, he’d been a fan before there were even albums out — for as long as it was possible for someone in England to have been one. His ex and her mates went instead.

The girls had gotten talking to James Murphy at the bar afterwards and exchanged numbers. So when Michael was home from work and them lot were back from the gig, they got a text close to 2AM asking if there were any parties. There weren’t. They were just drinking wine and listening to records but James Murphy came over anyway, saying that’s all he really wanted.

And when I ask him about it now, Michael remembers listening to a German David Bowie album together. He remembers a dream houseguest. Good stories, good manners, good with the cat. Before he left, James Murphy said, well, if you’re ever in New York… but he knew it was the one time in their lives this is happening. They stayed up talking until 7AM and then the nice music man was gone.

Fast-forward to 2025, we’ve been together for nine years. We have a laugh, two cats. A pearl around the idea of the two of us, so big now I see soft colours in the white, like stained glass shadows, in and out with the sunlight. I proposed to Michael with a ring hooked on a fishing line when we had to stay two metres apart in the pandemic, but now I climb into his pocket. It’s permission to relax. It’s living like an antidote. I rob his jackets, he likes my caps. He makes art downstairs. Plays piano while he is waiting for the kettle to boil. I write whatever these things are and, like kids, we parallel play. And he has nine years on me, thank god, so I know myself better these days. I watch him draw a straight line out in front of his feet because he always knows where he’s going. I climbed back out of his pocket when I’d learnt to do the same.

The only thing we don’t see eye to eye on is music. I like stuff by people who are alive and who, you know, inevitably show up on Tiny Desk. But he’s plugged into the 70s, collecting Japanese city pop, and buying everything off the Analog Africa label. He looked at me seriously one night and asked me to play Agadoo at his funeral. Agadoo, a specific 6 minute live rendition of Sunny Side of the Street by Louis Armstrong, oh and the Big Brother theme tune. He made me write this stuff down. And do you know what, if he’d wanted Paul Simon on there, I would have written that too because I want him to have everything he wants from this life. And he does have one redeeming quality: he’s into LCD Soundsystem. Thankfully they got back together the very same year we met.

A few months ago when the band announced an eight-night residency at Brixton Academy with one of the dates falling on his 40th birthday, I got us tickets even though I wasn’t sure Long Covid would let me have it. But it was too good a thank you after Michael has done more for me than any doctor, friend, or parent in this time. It was too good imagining seeing them live after they’d spent 13 years a hologram in my head, and 23 in his. The past four years have been dire for health and for money, and the only thing that’s gotten infinitely better is the actual relationship between us, so we had to go. Maybe for one night we could have Brixton be New York.

And then there we were, five thousand people in a heatwave, making a pearl around the band. So hot I saw someone faint, so hot my hands slipped right off the access balcony, delirious. Towards the end of the first song, hard white lights bounced in every direction off a spinning disco ball so that it looked caught at the exact moment of explosion; the big bang at the beginning of the universe. That distant euphoria I’d guessed at all along, I met it in the room in that second. I could not keep still for the life of me, like I was trying to dance myself clean of the virus still inside; or like it wasn’t up to me, because the band were playing now and that’s how my body heard them.

It just built and built. The music doubled down every sixty seconds so that lyrics and volume and energy made good on those explosions, waters rising the entire two hours they played. I burst out crying at one point, riverbanks gone. Felt this huge release in my chest when I heard James Murphy belt at everyone in the room to ’forget a terrible year,’ knowing it hasn’t been one bad year, it’s been four. Look at how eroded I am. There’s something in how so many of the lyrics are imperatives too, all these instructions; and how so many lyrics are repeated like chants so the voice becomes another beat. Something sad in how I might still need someone to follow after all because life is still unclear, and I don’t know if I’m doing it right.

And like, I’m only deciding these things now. I was so overcome I wasn’t actually a person with a backstory in that hot room. Nancy Whang had put the synthesisers aside for a moment to tie puppet strings to all my body’s corners. Drummer Pat Mahoney was pulling on them. I knew this was a big band who played big, vast songs but hearing them live metres from me made it so physical. Being in the same room, none of the art could be flattened for the sake of a neat studio album. None of it could evaporate into the air at a festival, or just absolutely disintegrate when I play it back on YouTube through five quid CEX computer speakers.

I would never be able to play LCD Soundsystem at home again without losing the scale of the music, or the scale of this feeling, a difference I’d never known was there. But I didn’t know it then, too busy in the real strobing heaven I had dreamed of. I just shouted in Michael’s ear that this was one of the happiest moments of my life, and he kissed me in front of the band which is way better than kissing under a bridge.

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