Adrian Crowley: "The Wishing Seat"

Newsflash: there’s a real-life Wishing Seat at Chessington World of Adventures, or at least there was in 1998 when I last went there for the day. Come out of the Chocolate Castle, chuck a right past the kidsafe maze, and bingo!—there between two benches, a fake stone high chair with a cushion to protect against piles. You could perch there in January and still not get cold thanks to the queue of previous warm arses, each briefly comfy and whispering dreams that the ticket promised would come true. Adrian Crowley’s “Wishing Seat” is one you can’t buy tickets for, and therefore promotes a colder type of arse to come lower itself into its mandibles: insular, regretful, but still possessing a flicker of the warmth only to be found inside trousers. Crowley doesn’t ask for a hoverboard, new parents, or a trials bike—all he wants is one afternoon back; a lunchtime alongside a brook with his ex so perfect he almost proposed to her. He requests this via a fuzzy jam that glimmers with wildlife and Wurlitzers, and delivers his lines with the hangdog demeanour of Andy Williams with rheumatism. That’s my third wish right there.

Cut from fifth LP Season of the Sparks, “The Wishing Seat” is Crowley even deeper than usual in daydreams, reminiscing sourly about the genie seat where he first smelt the death knell of his relationship. “Like so many before us and to follow / A secret place to eat / Running back / Once again / To the Wishing Seat,” he intones in frosted breath, teasing a respectable Keane melody from his soup of guitars and organs. Said soup runs into the same profound pond water last ch-changed by David Bowie, and Crowley sincerely “pledges all the hope a blade can conjure” as he carves four initials into the wood—one crucial plus sign between them. In that respect it’s very much like Billy Bragg’s “St. Swithin’s Day”: relationships retraced to the fracture point—and definitely not the kind of experience you can recreate on a theme park facsimile. When I had my turn on the Chessington throne I looked round and quickly asked for a time machine. Four years later, I got a watch. Good hustle.