Marsheaux, "Dream Of A Disco" (2006)

When I was sixteen, I went to Thailand with some of my friends from school. It was after some big exam, and may have been the first time I travelled without my family. But one of those friends was Thai, so he confidently ferried us around, and we let him. I remember very little of the trip. We shopped in Bangkok. We went...somewhere cold, a fact I was not prepared for, via a bus filled only with Thai tourists, and with a guide who made jokes in Thai that my friend got tired of translating after a while. After which point he and the rest of the bus would snigger, while we could only stare out the window.

One moment I do remember with surprising clarity: the night we went to a club. We probably thought it was a daring thing to do: in a foreign country, without parental supervision. Of course it was completely uneventful. One of my friends was in fact so tired from travelling that he laid down on a couch, and unapologetically fell asleep -- there, in a discotheque, right in front of a humongous speaker, while strangers danced around him to the throbbing bass and his friends sat, surveying the crowd with something like boredom.

"I dream of a disco/We're dancing and dancing..." A recent "Song of the Day" on Popjustice, Marsheaux's "Dream Of A Disco" appears to have been constructed from residual pieces from otherwise long-forgotten tracks by A Flock Of Seagulls and Ultravox.

I myself have never fallen asleep in a disco. But I've dreamed of dancing forever with someone. And once a candidate warned me not to get my hopes up, because he was -- as The Magnetic Fields would say many years later -- unboyfriendable. "Oh, he just hasn't met the right person, i.e., me, before now," I thought, and so I started down a path that would end in heartbreak. Like my friend in that Thai disco, I therefore demonstrated that, often, we hear what we want to hear, and the rest we block out.