Being just off Buckingham Palace, St James’ Park is not so much a park as a place with far too many people in it. It lacks the vast dimensions of Hyde Park, in which, as its name suggests, you can isolate yourself without great difficulty. But I wasn’t there to appraise the thing. I was there to pay my respects to the greatest Hey! in the history of popular music.
It occurs towards the end of The Go-Betweens’ ‘Spirit of a Vampyre’, a Side 2 cut from their glossy 1987 release Tallulah. With all due respect to the other Heys in the song—the first, in the coda, is sublime—the best instance is the third, the Hey which announces the park in question. The sudden shift of location is peculiar; the song opens with the narrator wasting away in a clinic near L.A.—when did we cross the Atlantic? But the momentum from that Hey transforms what might otherwise be an esoteric reference into something joyful, invigorating, entirely in keeping with the song’s mercurial recovery narrative. In the first pre-chorus we hear the saviour figure, the lover, imploring the protagonist to “learn to dance, learn to act, learn the piano”; by the end of the song, they are making jewellery together and—we guess—strolling through St James’ Park, the seedy Californian clinic a fading memory.
Thirty years later I am watching a squirrel bound about in front of St James’ Park Lake, its body and tail tracing its own trajectory over the grass. I hear the gurgly throttle of a helicopter and a winding siren, and I wonder about L.A., that dark, vampiric city.