I Still Remember, by Gary Numan

You can imagine yourself walking through the night, illuminated by flashing neon lights. London seems so awake and so asleep at the same time: it's as if the city had been frozen, or framed in someone's mental picture. You walk the roads of Soho, getting lost in a labyrinth of alleyways decorated with rooftop shadows and dark entrances to basements. You can feel the city breath, slowly, and clouds of smoke partially veil your sight. You have, of course, been drinking, and you feel the all-too familiar warm numbness in your limbs. You wish you had somewhere else to go, but the truth of the matter is you are broke and lonely. The double-decker buses arrive to Oxford Circus like ghost transports eerily illuminated with a strange green light. Lost souls, dressed in black, look from the windows, their eyes turned inward, dreaming without sleeping, tired but incredibly awake. As the night gets colder the beauty of the city becomes almost impossible to bear. You did not know about it then, of course, but you wish you could freeze that moment forever, walk to embankment, maybe through the Strand, and die in the waters of the Thames like a suicidal whale. Give your last breath there, an enormous, amplified sigh.

But you are not alone because you are walking with your ghosts: as you feel every cobblestone on your way to the river, you repeat to yourself: I remember. You know it's useless to take photographs of the present because the past is blurring every view. The city comes alive in front of you, talks to you with the sound of distant, private moanings. You wish you could trust your body and think with it, become what it feels, understand in its complexity what it senses as the feet touch the ground and the face feels the air and your eyes turn watery. You sing an "old song:

I'm surrounded
By old stories
With nowhere to hide

The song, you remember, begins with a most unusual instrument; it is, after all, a beginning which joins roads, a start for a sentimental journey. It's all about past and present here, about new ways of interpreting the blues. A cyberpunk ballad of memory and brokenheartedness. It could very well be the soundscape as I walk the city, this night, this very instant:

I can't sleep
All your words
Seem to let me down

I still remember it all: it's been a long time, but I still remember. Photographs, indeed, are useless: it's more a question of memory and time-passing, of ghosts and nights, of sleeplessness and the still-burning flames of lost loves. I still remember the river mirroring that London night. I just stood there, wondering, miserably lamenting: "how could you do this to me/again?"

I remember. An electronic jazz, before William Gibson imagined Idoru, before Satoshi Kon directed Perfect Blue. The voice in the machine, the electronic beat of a broken heart: the ghost is remembered, still.

I will never forget those London nights, in which I walked, many times alone, still remembering, often thinking,

This could be
My last song
Everything must end some day