Behind the dialogue
We re in a mess.
There’s a future essay to be written about COVID-19 culture – the artefacts that emerged from our plague year and what they say about where we were as a society: celebrities Zoom duets, the veneration of Sir Tom, our weekly clap for the NHS. These things were born of an instinct to find a unifying sense of positivity. Now, with a few months’ distance, it looks more like escapism, all of it masking a terror writhing beneath.
At the time there seemed to be little alternative, culturally speaking. But last year, amid what we would come to know as the UK’s first wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself instead listening obsessively to an album which seemed to capture the public mood perfectly. That album was