IF MUZAK BE THE FOOD OF LOVE, LET'S KILL OURSELVES


Is there any music in the world not capable of being polluted through misuse? There might be a single you love until the person in the flat upstairs buys it, and has it on repeat play throughout the afternoon while you're trying to work. There is the music that minicab drivers have on at Guantanamo levels while you're trying to update your best mate in the back with what's been happening to you, from whenever you last saw each other until the minute you got into this cab.

The thing that really takes the cake though, I mean really, is supermarket muzak. Many years ago, London Underground installed speakers in tube stations, and began piping a thin, staticky drizzle of barely decipherable pop classics over the happy travellers. It was extruded over your head, just out of reach, as you got on to the escalator at Tottenham Court Road, and somehow made you think about bringing forward that deadline date you'd pencilled in your mental diary for topping yourself, if your life hadn't altered immeasurably by then. Having added hugely to the misery of existence, and probably an increase in assaults on staff, the Tube muzak was withdrawn. It did seem unfathomable that, having tried to stamp out busking on the Underground for year after ineffectual year, LUL would choose to replace it with elevator music from Hades. But they did. So that was quite bad. But supermarket muzak. That really takes the old Swiss roll.

So it is that we find ourselves trudging around Somerfield in Brighton, each of us humming privately, 'I still haven't found what I'm looking for'. And having no idea where they'd hidden the frozen pizzas, I hadn't actually. See what they're doing there? It's an ironic comment on the Sunday afternoon supermarket shopper's plight. A couple of minutes later and a spring comes into our step. 'You wear it well,' we murmur as we pore dubiously over the discounted beef mince, 'a little old-fashioned but I don't mind.' The week before, we'd stood at the checkout in Asda, noticing that others beside ourselves were swaying surreptitiously, almost subliminally, to Embrace. 'You should never fight the feeling,' we lip-synched as the conveyor belt juddered along, 'you have to follow Nature's law.'

At the Brighton Marina Asda megastore, they've created a sort of mezzanine floor for the clothing department, where you can pick up a bomber jacket and jeans for about £2.99. The most salient thing about it is that you can also go and lean on the wall that looks down into the supermarket itself, and get an Olympian view of the entire seething purgatory below. If you were a dour humanist poet of the inter-war years, you might remark that you hadn't thought Death had undone so many. Marlon Brando fans (yes, you know who you are) might content themselves with the Mighty Blob's hoarse whisper from Apocalypse Now, via Joseph Conrad, 'The horror! The horror!'

What seals the good old horror, though, and lends the scene its authentic ring of the infernal, is that it is all bathed in the warm unguent of Coldplay, promising in tones that already sound like the hired hood feeling your collar up some dark Sicilian alleyway, 'I will fix you'.