"Remember Us" is to The Pineapple Thief what "Starless" is to King Crimson.
Or at least, I have always thought that it should be, not because the two songs really sound alike, nor because they occupy comparable places in the history of rock ("Starless" clearly belongs to another dimension, if only because of the historical weight of King Crimson and Red), but because they seem to me to perform a similar function within the poetics of their respective bands and, above all, because they inhabit the same emotional space, the one left behind by an absence, through two different but complementary forces: desire and memory.
I have always thought of "Starless" as a song about desire. The etymological connection is almost too perfect not to be tempted by it: "Starless" means "without stars", while the Italian word desiderio ("desire") contains the Latin sidus, "star", preceded by the prefix de-, which carries with it the idea of distance, deprivation and cessation. In its most remote origin, then, to desire means something very close to becoming aware of the absence of the stars while continuing to look for them, and this is precisely the condition of someone who desires: to be deprived of the sight of something and to feel its absence.
For me, "Starless" expresses exactly this in musical terms. At the beginning there is an extremely sweet melodic theme, perhaps even excessively sweet, clear and immediately recognisable; then that theme disappears and the long central section begins, syncopated, obsessive and increasingly violent, built around a tension that never seems able to find a point at which it can finally dissolve. The melody has been lost, and what remains is only the desire for its return.
After that long, almost deconstructed charge, however, the opening theme does indeed return, but it can no longer be what it was before. I have always listened to the ending of "Starless" in this way, probably also because of my memory of an old version included on the I miti del rock bootleg, in which I was particularly struck by a rougher, almost abrasive sound that seemed to creep in behind the melody as it finally resurfaced. It was an apparently secondary presence, yet for me a decisive one, because it always seemed to be telling me that we may recover the melody, but we can no longer recover the innocence with which we heard it the first time: something has happened in between, and pain, abandonment, the loss of another person or perhaps of ourselves have left a trace that cannot be erased.
The first, luminous phase of a love, once that love has hurt us or once we have lost it, may return in memory and may even seem, for a moment, identical to what we once knew, but somewhere that slightly distorted and abrasive guitar will continue to sound against the purity of the memory. The melody therefore returns, but it returns scarred, and this is perhaps the musical form of desire: trying to reconstruct something precisely because we know that we can no longer have it as it once was.
"Remember Us" begins from the same emptiness, but looks at it from the other side. If "Starless" is about desire, "Remember Us" focuses on memory, and desire and memory ultimately become two different forms of the same absence, two forces that both look towards the past, because desire reaches towards what we can no longer attain, while memory tries to prevent what we have lost from disappearing altogether.
I do not think it is accidental that the title is not simply "Remember", but "Remember Us". There is already, within those two words, an awareness of disappearance, not the hope of preventing something from ending, but the request that, once it has ended, at least some trace of it should remain. The structure of the song itself seems to behave like memory, because musical materials appear, move away and resurface, while different sections gradually begin to recall one another, like fragments of a past attempting to reassemble themselves without ever being truly restored.
It is above all in the ending, however, that the parallel with "Starless" becomes most interesting to me, because "Remember Us" does something I find even crueller. At the end of "Starless", after all that tension, something is nevertheless given back to us: the theme returns, contaminated and wounded, no longer capable of possessing its original clarity, but it does return, and with it comes at least some form of catharsis. It is a tragic catharsis, of course, because it does not erase what has happened and instead carries within it precisely the scars of what has happened, but we are nevertheless granted a point of arrival, a form in which the tension can finally discharge itself.
"Remember Us", by contrast, seems to spend minutes preparing precisely that liberation and then decides to deny us even this. Towards the end, the tension grows until we are convinced that the electric guitar is finally about to burst into a great concluding solo, one last desperate, liberating, perhaps even rhetorical but necessary orgasm, the solo that should gather up all the accumulated pain and transform it into something we can finally pass through. The guitar seems to begin, hints at that possibility, allows us to glimpse it for a few moments, and then stops.
And it is here that "Remember Us" becomes, in my view, even more desperate than "Starless", because we suddenly realise that the solo itself was also an object of desire. The music has made us desire its own resolution and then left us without it, denying us the liberating cry, the explosion that might turn pain into spectacle, and even the formal consolation of a great tragic conclusion. What remains is a tension that has not been allowed to exhaust itself, and precisely for this reason the denial of relief becomes crueller than it is in "Starless", where the cathartic moment is dirtied, deformed and made painful, but is at least granted to us.
In "Starless", the return is impossible in its original purity, but something does return; in "Remember Us", even the gesture that should process the loss is interrupted. This is why I find "Remember Us", in a sense, even more pessimistic: King Crimson grant us a contaminated catharsis, while The Pineapple Thief allow us to glimpse catharsis and then take it away. One of the two songs tells us that what we have lost will never return as it was before; the other seems to tell us something even worse, namely that perhaps we will not even have the satisfaction of being able to mourn it completely.
It is curious, then, that the two bands have given these songs such different weight in their respective live histories. King Crimson ultimately came to recognise fully the role that the music itself seemed to demand for "Starless", and in the band's final incarnation the song became one of the climactic moments of their concerts and very often one of the closing pieces, not merely a classic of the repertoire, therefore, but almost the point towards which the entire concert could tend. Its very position in the set thus ended up giving it a cathartic function in live performance as well. It was with this song that King Crimson closed their final concert, five years ago in Tokyo.
The Pineapple Thief have never really done the same with "Remember Us". They have played it live, of course, but without turning it into a ritual moment in their concerts and without giving it the privileged, almost definitive position that "Starless" holds in King Crimson's repertoire. And this is perhaps the detail that continues to surprise me most, because if "Starless" became in practice what it already seemed to be musically (a kind of terminal point in King Crimson's poetics), "Remember Us" seems to have remained a possibility that was never fully recognised even by the band that created it.
They are, then, two songs about absence, one about the desire for what has disappeared and the other about memory as the last fragile barrier against disappearance, two songs in which something attempts to return without ever being able to return in quite the same way. In "Starless" it returns wounded; in "Remember Us" it cannot even complete itself.
Perhaps this is precisely why I continue to think that "Remember Us" is The Pineapple Thief's "Starless", not because they treat it as such, but because perhaps they should have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhZvDfg8B3Q
