By Matthew Dodd
That’s how it starts. A freshers’ week tour, groups designated by alphabetised surnames; a social faux pas in a stranger’s accommodation; the first stumble into the local night club. Frantic piano clatters against an empty soundscape. A suspended A chord, rife with all the unresolved anxiety of a journey as yet unbegun. Underneath, the crawling encroach of a rumbling bassline, taming the distempered piano into a steadily alternating rhythm. A pint with a new friend; a surprisingly interesting lecture; the slow realisation that life may not have ended. Order out of chaos, reconciliation out of terror. Your first week at university.
Though I’d been familiar with their work for years before, it wasn’t until my second term at university that I really started to appreciate LCD Soundsystem. The mid-2000s New York Dance-Punk outfit, the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist James Murphy, are not, perhaps, the most natural musical accompaniment to the medieval meander of Durham but, as I wandered the almost familiar streets of the town, their music began resonating with me in a newfound way. Riverside walks were invariably soundtracked by the wryly pugilistic tones of Murphy and the lithe electronic sounds of the band at large. They came to soundtrack a mode of university living that, foreign at first, had become natural to me. Their record ‘45:33’ even had me almost considering going on a run. In particular, I was caught by the clear notion that their 2007 track ‘All My Friends’ might just be the best song ever written.
The eight-minute-long track, built on a relentless piano riff and pounding bassline, is certainly the most energetic expression of aging’s innate melancholy ever recorded. The first two verses tell a hazy story of chance encounters and wild nights – ‘if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up and we still don’t want to stagger home’ certainly reminds me of several recent trips to Observatory Hill. Against this narrative of youthful excitement, choruses stick out as reflections on the ephemeral nature of such experiences: ‘you spent the first five years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends again.’ The entire song is a kind of challenge to the listener: a diagnostic check as to whether the underlying sadness of the lyrics resonates enough to overpower the groove. Indeed, it is that urgent juxtaposition that gives the song its strength: a beat that, like time, will not stop for any reflection.
There was always an undercurrent of sadness to the song, but it’s only really in returning to it now, at the tail-end of a degree, that it has started to sink its teeth into me. I imagine that, in the not-too-distant future, I’ll retroactively understand this time as yet more of the formative hedonism which I’ll one day miss, and consider myself foolish for thinking of it as an ending. Such is the nature of nostalgia, outpacing experience by forcing us to consider everything as a memory in making. In ‘All My Friends’, these early years of young-adulthood are understood as a time where nothing matters but trying to capitulate to societal expectation. Certainly, that seems the case, recalling every night out forgone in favour of writing my ‘dissertation’. The song reminds us, then, that life is intended to be lived rather than remembered. Listening to the song across my degree, I have looked ahead with fear to the time when I, like Murphy’s speaker, will wonder where my friends are tonight. But the song isn’t a grim concession to overpowering ennui. Indeed, the existence of LCD Soundsystem’s oeuvre is a testament to the possibility for late-stage reinvention: Murphy didn’t start the band until he was 32. At 22, the age this writer must accept as his own, Murphy had already turned down a potential life writing for Seinfeld. I doubt I would’ve made the same mistake.
‘All My Friends’ is, fundamentally, a dance track. Its lyrics tell a story of ageing, of losing contact with friends, of accepting the realities of adult life – but this is only half the story. The music itself is alive with the excitement of outsized possibility. It is relentless and unforgivingly seized by motion. The 140bpm gives the keyboard player a nigh-impossible task in keeping up. The message, therefore, is not that life ends at 30, or indeed graduation, but that life is composed of farewells and transformations, and that we must keep dancing through them all. Throughout the LCD Soundsystem discography, Murphy ruminates with half-ironic detachment the possibility of clinging to youth. It’s a fool’s errand, played for laughs in ‘Losing My Edge’, but one that nevertheless grants the band their peculiar mix of ennui and ecstasy. Every moment is fleeting, no friend will stick around forever, but all of that synthesised joy and sadness makes up the grand dance of life. We might not be with all our friends tonight, but we can dance at the thought of them.
In August 2024, the summer after my first year at university, I was lucky enough to see LCD Soundsystem live at London’s All Points East festival (note to reader I think it was also fortuitous and fated that my erstwhile Editor in Chief and my esteemed co-Editor in Chief were also in attendance in the crowd). The set was incredible and, quite possibly, the most deliriously exciting act of artistic expression I’d ever witnessed. As is characteristic of them, they finished with a transcendent rendition of ‘All My Friends’. The song meant a great deal to me then. As I stood in the wilds of Victoria Park – having consciously forfeited my barrier spot to find my friends further back – I was struck by the synchronicity of the event. Amid a mass of buoyant fans, I was there listening to ‘All My Friends’ with all my friends – the mawkishness of this sentiment didn’t phase me. James Murphy’s howling refrain engenders a different feeling depending on our answer as listeners: ‘where are your friends tonight?’ Back then, I was sure: they were stood next to me. As such, the song was a revelation of the wonders of the present moment. Now, as I stand on the precipice of graduation and the grand miasma that lies beyond, I can no longer answer with such security. Postgraduate degrees, Grad Schemes, unemployment, and all other intermediate options see my friends scattered across the country and the world. As we shift from one stage of life to another, from getting with the plan to trying to be with our friends again, there is a pain in slowing down, and knowing ourselves to do so.
At their 2011 farewell concert, James Murphy paused at the start of ‘New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down’, to ruminate on the finality of the act. ‘I only get to pause an eternal amount once more,’ he lamented, ‘this is my last endless pause.’ For many, myself included, university has been an endless pause: an often terrifying but largely joyful buffer between adolescence and the adult world. Now, the final endless pause is over; the real world awaits. And yet, in the all-consuming ennui of graduation, another of Murphy’s lines come relentlessly back to me, as a balm if not a cure: ‘I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision for another five years of life.’
Featured Image – Matthew Dodd