Different songs accompany you at different moments – ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’ by the Eurythmics has been as ubiquitous in my life as the rain is in England.
The rain might be considered a very English metaphor, and yet, here, it is not a simple one. It is a song of deep melancholy and yearning and yet there is a strong element of enjoying it all, of ‘diving into’ it. I think here of a brilliant line in Alan Bennet’s play ‘The History Boys’ – “I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.”
The idea of the rain: ‘raining in my head like a tragedy / tearing me apart like a new emotion’ also makes me think of a poem by the little known but occasionally wonderful poet Charlotte Mew where, stunned by tragedy in the poem ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’, she notes simply ‘this is rain on my face’, as if the speaker has never felt it before and can hardly believe this cold slap of reality. But in the song, ‘the new emotion’ is, of course, love. Or the tentative possibility of it. This is why the seeming contradiction of the all too familiar memory of love affairs past living alongside the exhilaration and newness of the new person.
It has something of Joy Divisions ‘Love will Tear Us Apart Again’ or ‘The Smiths’ lyric ‘Oh, but don’t mention love, I’d hate the pain of the strain all over again’ and yet there is more of a move toward a connection here, even a dissolution in the other: ‘Want to dive into your ocean / Is it raining with you?’
Finally, it’s just a beautiful song, beautifully sang!
