Playlouder - Music is the Network

Just like LOVE, this single has poor timekeeping – being released like one and a half weeks after Valentine’s Day. But Ketevan’s LOVE, like the end of the world, is worth waiting for.

‘If the lights go out’ is 28 Days Later as imagined by Wombles hit-maker Mike Batt, via the medium of Caucasian corker, Katie Melua.

“They say the world must end somehow”, sings Katie, with an uncharacteristically fatalistic outlook. “They say the end’s not far from now,” she qualifies, presumably referring to whichever foreboding calendar has its money on apocalypse now: Tibetan or Mayan, perhaps. “I think they’re wrong!” she decides, flouting the portentous prophecies laid down by ancient civilisations with no greater counter-argument than the power of LOVE, and later developing her anti-logical standpoint by insisting that such trifles as Ragnarok matter little anyway, as long as you have the LOVE of a good Georgian. Were firey balls of justice to rain from the sky, one imagines Ketevan would still be there, drowning in her pile of cushions with a wistful, longing look on her face, waiting for you (me) to come home with the Milk Tray, the bottle of Pimms and the copy of Nosferatu on DVD.

Obviously, she’s right, and, from a critical standpoint, I can no longer envisage a world in which ‘If the lights go out’ doesn’t exist: to do so plunges my whole existence into everlasting night. This is Katie Melua’s best single yet and by definition the best single yet released by anyone ever.

There’s a video too. As one might suspect, Melua’s post-apocalyptic wasteland is filled with delightfully dilapidated cottages, pineapples, and fields of neon flowers. If this is how it will all end, then come friendly comets and rain on Earth, it isn’t fit for humans now: we’ve reached our peak as a civilisation, and here it is: Katie Melua’s new single.