come fly with me

I have finally made up my mind about my holidays in January, so I thought I'd celebrate it with a post about planes.

It's not big news that I love planes/airports but what about planes in music? There are many songs about flying, but not many by bands I like. Teenage Fanclub are not experts on writing witty lyrics (but writing great tunes), however they have a song called "Fear of Flying" where they say "don't always look for comfort in a song". Indeed, a sentence to think about. "This is your one-way ticket so don't fuck it up, your flight is boarding and you're running out of luck". Lyrics that probably have nothing to do with travelling on a plane. The songs you may find about "flying" are not exactly about the physical action of travelling on a plane from point A to B. I wonder, how many airlines have you flew with? 12 for me.

When we have to fly I guess we have those who are excited about it and those who are dead scared. I've read that the odds of dying on a plane crash are 1 in 20,000. Interesting are the figures for intentional self-harm, 1 in 121. I reckon this doesn't help someone who have (ir)rational fear. Pavement sing "Hit the plane down", Divine Comedy "Tonight, we fly" or Neutral Milk Hotel "In the aeroplane over the sea". I still haven't found a song, probably by a Spanish electropunk band singing about Iberia, but I enjoy Blueboy's "Air France" and the idea of "leaving the world behind". Cooper (Spanish band on Elefant) have a single called "747". And dont' forget Sinatra singing "come fly with me, let's fly let's fly away"!.

The first song in "I'm wide awake, it's morning" starts with a story about a plane crash. From the very first moment, I hold those words as mine, syllable by syllable until I imagined my own version of the story and gave them the meaning I wanted. Today I've seen the new video for the song and I was horrified. Because now I can actually see the girl and the man, and I can also be appalled to see how everybody on a plane that is about to crash starts to sing and make out. Oh well, I don't know what I would do in such situation, but I don't seem to like the video too much. Am I too sensitive or is it a bit disturbing?

I guess it's the same as when you read a good book and you understand what you want to understand and then you see a bad telefilm on Sunday afternoon right after the news, and that is not what you wanted it to be. I know I'm exaggerating, okay. Some people ask why on earth is Avril Lavigne on the video or again what would you do if you were on a plane that was crashing and everyone around you started singing, drinking and kissing?.

I don't want to crash, I want to kiss Heathrow's carpet.