Late, disconnected, reawoken, a little confused.

But here’s something that’s been rattling around my head for a while, and it needs to get out.

Contemporary songs which capture the essence of a particular city. I have a burning need to compile lists of such things.

So let’s start with the easy ones…

It’s easy to get screwed up watching the news these days. We’re seeing the first effects of the coming scarcity of oil, and yet we refuse to properly explore the alternatives. Tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes and famines and unjust wars are killing millions and sometimes, just sometimes it feels like the end of the world really is nigh.

Yes, that same end of the world so desperately craved by the Christian fundamentalists, waving their “No Fags” banners and eagerly scurrying to renounce womens’ reproductive rights. Because the end of the world will bring Jeebus sailing back down from heaven to cast away the sinners and take the righteous to heaven.

I’m not sure why my love of Orbital has just resurfaced, although their music makes the perfect backdrop to cruising around with the top off your car, so perhaps that’s part of it.

It’s strange to feel how a simple hop across the Atlantic can change the status of your musical tastes. Orbital are pretty well-known and loved in the UK and a lot of my friends there are die-hard fans. But all of a sudden I’m living somewhere where hardly anyone seems to have heard of them, except maybe in passing. A quick change of address and I’m suddenly “underground” (relatively speaking.)

But anyhow, here I am, back deep in the first dance music which ever really caught my attention.

And it’s not without a sense of sadness in a lot of ways, because Orbital have hung up their synthesisers (or so they say) - no more live gigs, festival or otherwise; no more albums.