"Kamikaze"

Now here's a topic which can't have been used all that often for a song. Somewhere I still have the old Thompson Twins album "Quick Step and Side Kick", which is one of those fifty-fifty albums where you quite like the memories attached to the songs, even one or two of the songs themselves, but it's not something that's going to be right up there at the top of your Desert Island list. But this track just seems to slide sideways out of the discard pile and into the "pretty damn good" box. It's totally out of character, in the same way that "Being Boiled" wasn't representative of the Human League's later output. A dark, almost brooding lament, played at a stately, funereal pace. Oh it's pop all right, plenty of stacked chorus and fab production, but it is still.....dark. At one or two points there's a deep, throbbing synth bass line that almost sounds like an old piston-engine, carrying someone off to their rendezvous with Valhalla. Sadly, the lyric is almost, almost spoiled by the last line: "Feeling alone/Flying above you/I'm not coming home/Now I know, now I know that I love you." But you can't have it all.