Being thirteen at the time helped, of course. The sentiment is a mixture of idolatry and confidence so low it borders on self-loathing, spiked on this idea of love as something you should change for in order to receive it rather than something that should change you in the act of giving, run through with a sickly devotion to the underdog, and short changing everyone involved by jumping forward to the seemingly inevitable dissolution of all other competition for the object’s love, despite not actually declaring A CHALLENGER APPEARS, instead settling for a CONTINUE? that counts ever upwards instead of down. It’s Clair de Lune gone rotten from the inside out.

Or, in other words, remember my first crush?

More fool me, I held onto Shiver Love until I was nearly nineteen, over five years of systematically repulsing girls whose emotional maturity naturally exponentially increased with each new never-conquest. I don’t think I ever really kicked the habit until I’d finally come to terms with the fact that I didn’t actually like girls in that way, which came a good while after I’d actively started allowing myself to like guys like that. In the meantime the 00’s quickly moved on, to snarl and stomp and droning cool, with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, The Strokes and Muse dominating most of my mid-teen listening habits – not that I snarled or stomped or mastered cool, but boy did I ever want to. Cause, y’know, chicks dig that.

I’m not saying that I’ve never since felt a little too lovelorn or pined a little too hard over a guy. But understanding why I couldn’t get past Shiver Love with all my girl-crushes was definitely an act of self-recognition that helped seal me off from what’s happening here in Shiver, a weird desire of wanting to be recognised by someone else for being something you’re not, in order to validate that something in your own eyes, and then maybe get into their pants if they happen to misunderstand you as much as you misunderstand yourself.

In this way the track could almost be an anthem for the sort of attention closeted boys have for girls they think they’re meant to love. Not exclusively of course, but for a self-proclaimed stalker song there’s absolutely zero lust happening. And if you believe I’m overthinking all this, go listen to how the guitar nosedives just before the chorus. Tell me that isn’t a shrinking, a wilting, a promise of empty promises. For all it’s earnestness, the subsequent ‘Don’t you shiver’ might as well be a cold shower. So now when I hear Shiver part of me gives just the biggest rolling of the eyes. Like, whatever, Chris Martin; I don’t care if somehow you managed to bag Gwyneth Paltrow, this is still a rubbish – a beautiful, tingly, really quite lovely yet unutterably rubbish – template for seduction.

Still it’s been eleven years, and this track is always in my 100 most-played, and I still remember where I was when I first heard it, on the top floor of the Belfast Virgin Megastore. That first chord dropped slow like a felled birch tree, notes of scarlet and ochre settling fast only to be kicked about by angry drums and sad, scorned bass, the whole thing a melancholic autumnal tantrum. Before the last note had died I’d gone and purchased Parachutes. It was my first true gooseloop, or at least the first I can remember, and the song certainly remains one of my most consistently reliable triggers of ASMR.

And they say you never really get over your first love.

Coldplay: Shiver

“You know where she is,” he says. “Showed enough damn police today.”

The visitor – smells of hospital, dresses like Vegas – moseys on through to the bedroom, while Brent’s fugue briefly lifts, dispelled by an old familiar thrum.

“That a ‘56 T-bird you got out there?”

The driver doesn’t answer, but courteously addresses Susannah’s corpse just so:

“My, oh my.”

Murzik: In Nothing

Then, slight as a hummingbird in the New York rush, he hears a riff to blur midday and night:

Spoon: Well Alright

(1998: Spoon are three years old. Madonna is forty. Lady Gaga, for the record, is twelve, making her one year younger than than this song is old today. A second per second can be fast enough.)

You’re secretly not meant to prefer it to the frigonormative ice cream, which contains dairy and is therefore inherently somewhat wholesome. But hold back the white stuff, and what happens? The citrus spectrum, elsewhere smothered under so much gentle lactose, finally gets to throw its bony weight around. Hard booze retains its bite. Vegans get involved which, while not XXX in and of itself, inexplicably tends to act as enabler to harder alternative lifestyles. The texture is rougher. There’s less air.

Sorbet: altogether more adult.

Vienetta: Comfort And Joy

This rarely ever works; when you’re like this it’s usually best to get you just a little drunk as fast as possible. The Showman soon totters under the bleachers – and Boudica takes the ring.

Karandila Orkestar – Fiesta

I’ll endeavour to keep updating semi-regularly, zaś nie obiecanka!

Pishap… psheeprosh… psshehschresha…

Oh, bugger that. Have some music instead.

Poland – Your Sunday Book

It’s the only theory that can show all possible variations of the coat stand at once, Cody’s flatcap and Will’s purple Mac superimposed at all angles on all four arms. Here is a world: the one where Will cracked the stand in two when he missed Cody’s head by inches with the frying pan. Here is another: the one where Cody mended it with tape and nails and glue. Here is one where Earth is a clot of dead rock, nobody wears hats, and some molecules of hot air become a hat rack standing alone in a field of snow.

Some versions are so similar you’d hardly notice an entire functioning universe had come into being, pulled out of some cosmic top hat for as much as a wink or a scowl, for the benefit of a synapse firing on and sinking under the meniscus of sleep.

Some versions are so irreversibly different – Cody in one bed, Will in the same bed with Cody – it’s difficult to believe they share a common history.

And some spoon like two songs – one of shelter, one of decay – summoned from the same piano, a duet in two parts, twins entangled at the core.

Baby Dee : Safe Inside the Day / Regina Spektor : Field Below

“I thought this might help,” says Aleksey, his breath little zephyrs. “I thought here… you might let him…”

The Minotaur snarls. Aleksey meant the best. The Minotaur knows this. He knows this. But Aleksey’s fear fills his wet nose.

“Let me go.”

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Supernaturally

Inside, gold-whorled chairs loose their knots and whimsies like it’s nothing, like it’s simply nothing, and whoops go the stumpy little legs. A display case of powdered wigs winks at the cast iron bathtub making an escape down Ippolito’s stairs. Let’s not even think about the busts, marble cracked like bad meringue.

The stink of it, too, somewhere between a dusty cistern and Napoleon’s jasmine; hankies at the ready, ladies.

Up comes the northern wing, then the south, and the structure takes flight like a twelve-pound cannon shot.

Basements? Slackjawed.

Arcade Fire: Rococo

The unfortunates rend their skin as he makes his way to the dimlit exit. For the past hundred years they’ve beachcombed, sighed, encountered loved ones without so much as a shudder of recognition. It’s dreary as hell.

He has no definite itinerary, but Venice is nice this time of year.

Modest Mouse: The Cold Part