Through The Looking Glass

Mew And The Glass Handed Kites at 15

“From a dance hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively jazz music, hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh. I stopped a moment. This kind of music, much as I detested it, had always had a secret charm for me. It was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable to all honest sensuality.”

– Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Prologue.

The world suddenly feels like a bleak place. No art or romance. A bad dream to end all bad dreams. What did we do to deserve this? How should we resist it? What is there to understand?

Let’s go back to first principles, to a time when there assuredly was art and romance in the darkness, and it belonged to us.

Mew are a band who provoke fanaticism globally, but not on a global scale. The distinction is important. That innate outsidership has always heightened the significance for the individuals scattered across the map who each feel like this is somehow just for them. And at a certain point in the mid-2000s, something seismic happened. It felt like being under the spell of genius. It felt like it might be epochal. It was all about this.

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