Has This Hit?

Holly Blackmore

‘My guts are on the floor,

For you to adore me

And all I can be’

Tickets were released while I was in Byron Bay, drifting home after yet another day beside the lucid waves. My internet connection was dropping in and out, ebbing and flowing, my fingers hastily seeking the correct site. I can distinctly remember the instant I was asked for my credit card details – having to surmise the numbers from memory and recent use – and the overwhelming relief granted by those welcoming words, ‘Holly, You’re Going To King Krule’. It would be the consummation of a two-year love affair.

And a love affair like no other. His albums barely left my CD player, his magnetic voice, his immersive lyrics prompting me to sleep each night. It was as though he existed somewhere above me, furtively visiting my bedroom for several minutes each day before evaporating into a cloud of adolescent angst. I’ve never truly idolized anybody before. My role models have been few and far between – yet this scrawny boy from South London had occupied an ardent crevice of my mind.

Waiting in line for his gig last Monday night, catching covert glimpses through stained glass windows as he proceeded to complete his sound check. Inside the Enmore we were pressed against the barrier, bodies writhing in unison. The crowd was fitting. King Krule may not have many fans, but those he does have are unwavering in their devotion. I was charmed to see so many singing along to every lyric. Heads thrown back in enigmatic ecstasy. And a jolting figure on the stage before us, pulling restlessly at his scalp as he growled into the microphone.

He is a gaunt boy, pallid, and agitated in his movements. Temporary flesh and bone, another body like my own. I had never before considered him in a secular sense – in my mind, he was always tinkering away in some distant, divine garage, painting abstract shapes on plywood and cradling a half-eaten heart. My emotions ran riot, a sickening sense of anticlimax assembling itself in my stomach. There he was, right there, and he was forlorn and drug riddled and anguished. A broken boy with the voice of an angel, sounding no different to his mediated recordings yet less celestial to my eye.

‘Now I’m constantly cleaning, the skies you’re dealing’

How can one cope with the wavering weight of inflated expectation? His words lingered on my sternum and I couldn’t breathe anymore. Striding out of the mosh, hunched over in the foyer of the theatre. Has this hit? Yes Krule, it certainly did hit me.

My idealized romance was ravaged on that dreary autumn night. The next morning, however, re-watching the few videos I had procured became a heavenly pastime. In fact, I’m listening to King Krule’s discordant tunes as I write this today. My augmented adoration has since rebounded, although it is perhaps less naïve than it was this time last week.

‘When I look into the sky, there is no meaning’

I can finally understand this disenchantment that he divulges.