Come Live With Me

Those people who follow me on Twitter - and please feel free to join them - will know a lot of my posts are simply links to various clips on YouTube which I like. The plan usually is that if I'm listening to a song and I feel 'tuned in' to it, for whatever reason, then TinyURL gets hit up for a short link, and then it's time to fire up Twitterific. However, sometimes 140 characters - minus the link and track details - are not enough, so why not make the first post here about a particular track I love?

HEAVEN 17 - COME LIVE WITH ME
(from the album "The Luxury Gap", 1983)


I have been playing this song pretty much every day for weeks, but it's been a favourite of mine ever since it was released, during the long hot summer of twenty five years ago at the time of writing. It's a criminally overlooked track by radio programmers, who seem to be of the opinion that Heaven 17's output begins with "Temptation" and ends with "Temptation" and pretty much contains nothing in between. Definitely not true.

The song basically tells the story of an older man's ultimately doomed relationship with a younger woman - much younger, the gap being 20 years. What the circumstances were leading up to their meeting is left to the listener, although the video does offer a glimpse into how "unlikely people meeting in a dream" actually crossed paths.

This of course is one of the classic "midlife crisis" stories - when us guys are supposed to go a bit off the rails, grow our hair, buy a sports car and try to bed teenage girls again. It's something that society tends to frown upon, with epithets such as "cradle-snatcher" Indeed the man's friends begin to gossip about him, and slowly he begins to feel the relationship is inappropriate, perhaps under peer pressure: "If half the things they say are quarter true of me..."

In the end, the shame becomes too much and he finishes with the girl,. "The strong are sometimes wrong, but the weak are never free" showing his frustration with the whole situation. He is defiant, but in the end not enough to continue the relationship in the face of public disapproval. And for me, the way the last lines are sung sums up the helplessness of his situation - although he still feels for her, he cannot - must not - have her.

The video puts a slightly different spin on things in that it appears to be the girl who ends the relationship = perhaps she feels getting involved with someone over twice her age is something she's not comfortable with herself, or maybe she's unwilling to live in the "grownup" world. Perhaps the latter shines though in the scene where he's shaving and she changes from her "adult" look back into her student gear. She is only seventeen after all. The end here comes with the classic "Dear John" letter, and if anyone with better eyesight or a better copy of the video can tell me the full text of her note I'd appreciate it. I can make out something like "I don't think I belong in your life".

Having been in a similar situation such as this - on both sides of the equation, though not at 37 or 17 - I can identify with the song a lot more than I did back in 1983 when I first heard it on the radio. Back then it was just a song that sounded good. Now I can really identify with the feelings of falling in love with someone you really shouldn't, at least from society's rather narrow point of view in my opinion.

Oh, and I love the way Glenn Gregory looks in the video by the way - almost enough to get a white suit and a platinum blonde wig (sadly there's not enough peroxide in the world to get my natural hair that colour)