A Love Letter to This is The Day by The The
I’ve had this idea for how a film would end for a while. By film, I am naturally referring to the only kind I don’t have to force myself to care about; a coming-of-age romcom. I don’t know anything about the preceding plot to my cinematic finale. I know nothing of my two protagonists, what their childhoods were like, who their friends are or what motivates them. They don’t have names. But I know at the end, after agonising twists and turns, raised hopes and shattered expectations, they meet in the road. It must be five or six in the morning because, in my head, a standard London highstreet is flooded with that early violet haze, transforming the off licenses, newsagents and flittering litter with a simmering magic.
Our protagonists walk into the frame, one from either end of the street. They face each other, stopping about three metres apart. In the chasm between them sits all the hesitation, fear and promise that has got them this far. The camera focuses in on one face, contorted by an expression that reads more of disbelief then of happiness. A short exhale, maybe an attempt to attach useless words to any of this, hangs in the space between them. But now the camera is on the other girl, her equally pained countenance slowly breaking into something resembling joy, the corners of her mouth creeping upwards, her temples creasing, her eyes beginning to sparkle. And in comes the introduction, each twinkling note of the synth suspended in the air like stars. The camera is on her long enough to see the emergence of a laughing grin, perfectly timed with that first hit of the omnichord.
The End.
The credits roll to the rest of This Is The Day by The The.
It’s not indicative of any creative genius that this song conjures ideas of endings in my mind. The cult classic, after all, is so loved for weighting its euphoric dance drive with a painful, melancholic nostalgia. Matt Johnson writes about the hopeless task of grasping the present moment. He writes about the adolescent realisation of youth as a finite resource, its inherent mania leaving it, and you, depleted once the fun’s all over. You didn’t wake up this morning ‘cause you didn’t go to bed, you were watching the whites of your eyes turn red. You can imagine the kind of havoc a line like that causes in the heart of a confused eighteen year-old with melodramatic tendencies. This song managed to make me reminisce on my youth at the age of 18 like a grandparent remembers rationing. You smile and think how much you’ve changed, all the money in the world couldn’t buy back those days. This Is The Day pleads with the passage of time. So it’s a predictable choice to end any story.
But I don’t think that’s why I chose this song to end my imaginary film that no one asked me to make. Contrary to its obvious pining for days gone by, I’m obsessed with the idea of This Is The Day framing an ending because the piece provokes anything but finality. For all Johnson’s feelings of being stagnant, watching the glory zoom past much like, in his words, an airplane flying across the clear blue sky, he also anticipates the moment where it finally feels like you’re in the right place at the right time. When the empty chasing can finally stop. This is the day where things fall into place.
Even without such explicit conviction that the future holds something better, the song glistens with possibility. Its kick drum latches on to your pulse and sends you running forward, a life affirming jolt of energy that makes you want to dance or cycle at speed through an empty suburb or stand up in the back seat with your head sticking out the sunroof, etc. It rouses the part of me that lies dormant after heartbreak; the feeling that at any moment, something could burst into your life with such force that nothing will ever be the same. It awakens the instinct that maybe tonight holds the next chapter of your life. It’s true that belief in such a notion often causes more trouble than good. It’s what spurs you to pay twenty quid to get into a club that’s closing in hour, it’s what drains your month’s salary on Ubers to Deptford, it’s what worsens your tonsilitis. But funnily enough, when I first heard the song at six a.m on Arthurs Seat, looking over the silhouette of the city I had just moved to alongside someone who is now a treasured friend, the feeling that there was something better on the horizon proved, quite perfectly, to be correct.
I like the suggestion that my protagonists’ story does not end with This Is The Day. I like that that the relief of her laughing smile gives way to a melody that sparkles with the freedom of new life, the beginning of a new story we will never get to see. But I also like that the past is as present in the song’s mournful, warped bassline and pining lyrics as the hesitant faces of my characters. No song sits so brilliantly in both the past and the future, and no ending, in real life or in film, can eliminate the highs and lows of what came before. They meet in the road not to end their story but to start it, again. This is the day your life will surely change. Maybe this time, that will be true.