The cover design and sleeve art of Elbow’s Mercury Prize winning fourth album was designed by a local artist Oliver East. Commenting on his now celebrated images he said: ‘My research saw me walking from Manchester Piccadilly train station to Bury tram stop’. Apt for an album whose heart is firmly in the Manchester streets of the bands native Bury. The image of the train is also somehow fitting. It is an album of departures – of loss and leaving – but also about the unexpected arrival of love.
As here, in the opening track ‘Starlings’. Take a moment to marvel at the sheer poetry of Guy Garvey’s lyrics. That particularly Northern blend of humour and pathos – the cheeky audacity of the opening line: ‘How dare the Premier ignore my invitations?’. (He has made the listener wait too, a whole two minutes, for the start of the song.)
‘Starlings’ contains everything I love in one song. An intoxicating mix of Romanticism lightened by humour (I sat you down and told you how / The truest love that’s ever found / Is for oneself / You pulled apart my theory / With a weary and disinterested sigh.)
The song ends, as it started, with a question: ‘Darling, is this love?’
Well, yes!
