"Sometimes Sunshine" by Duke Keats
Review
With his latest single, "Sometimes Sunshine" Duke Keats manages, as is his wont, to cover several areas: capturing the state of the nation yet through the filter of classic English understatement and painting yet another picture in music for us.
Ray Davies has of course turned his thoughts in this direction already but Duke as ever comes at in via his own oblique angle. In fact this is so acute as to be almost counter-intuitive: anyone using Radiohead as a channel for a song "about lazing around on a summer's day contemplating life and taking the time to relax" is clearly blessed with quite the imagination and vision.
In fact it's quite a lush sort of tune in its own way: based it would seem around the pulse of a human heartbeat and the sense of hazy heat playing tricks on the mind. In fact Duke may be saying to us something along the lines of "isn't the hot weather rather lovely until you get sunstroke and start seeing things?"
In fact the more I play "Sometimes Sunshine" the more its deceptively simple subversive weirdness becomes apparent. Possibly it might be the sort of thing Syd Barrett might have come up with had his career lasted a few decades longer into the realm of this sort of sound.
Equally, the song expresses a seductive lure, pulling us into peril while our minds are distracted: I wonder if he's been thinking of those Sirens in the Odyssey? He also credits the arpeggiated guitar to his considering "weird fishes"…… I'll leave that to you.
Take a Trip with the Duke on this one. Lord knows there are enough songs trying to channel the pandemic: this one may be the one which in time we'll look back on as capturing the Heatwaves of '26.
