‘Love Is a Laserquest’: Alex Turner’s lyrical masterpiece
“Will I have found a better method of pretending you were just some lover?” That’s the question Alex Turner poses at the end of ‘Love Is a Laserquest’, his opus of balance between poetry and candidness.
That’s exactly the golden niche Turner has made his kingdom. Even back on their debut when the singer was merely a kid in a band of kids, the 19-year-old was writing tales of scrappy nights out in Sheffield with the occasional Keats-level line thrown in there for good measure.
As the years have rolled on, the poetry has taken over more and more, though maybe to his own detriment. When their latest album, The Car, was released, that was the main critique. Overwhelmingly, the response was ‘what on earth is he on about?’ He started spewing stuff like “The disco strobes in the stumbling blocks / Wait, there’s the other island now”, or “Lego Napoleon movie / Written in noble gas-filled glass tubes”.
It seemed to be a classic case of genius syndrome, as if Turner had been told one too many times he could do no wrong, so then delved deep into weirdness without feeling any need to explain himself. But in reality, all of his shiniest moments of greatness came when he walks the line between accessibility and magic, between your average turn of phrase and a statement only a true writer could piece together.
There are a few sparkling examples. ‘Fireside’ stands out as Turner sings, “There’s all these secrets that I can’t keep / Like in my heart there’s that hotel suite”, turning “the place on memory lane you liked” into a series of scenes and spaces. ‘Do I Wanna Know’ is another great one, as lust and yearning are palpable in plain speak. Across the entire Submarine soundtrack, Turner is a poet extraordinaire while still feeling understandable and still using exactly the type of language you’d imagine he uses in real life.
In short, I truly believe all the best Alex Turner songs still sound like the same boy who wrote that mythical love letter to Alexa Chung, telling her, “My mouth hasn’t shut up about you since you kissed it. The idea that you may kiss it again is stuck in my brain, which hasn’t stopped thinking about you since, well, before any kiss. And now the prospect of those kisses seems to wind me like when you slip on the stairs, and one of the steps hits you in the middle of the back.”
A leaked love letter like that would feel fake if Turner wasn’t busy writing songs like ‘Love Is a Laserquest’, a song that stands as the absolute pinnacle of the writer at his best.
Looking back on an old lover, the song captures such a distinct brand of yearning. Turner isn’t asking for her back, or retreading the painful ground of the breakup. Instead, he’s simply wondering about a person he used to know fully and deeply. The song is littered with this person’s own childhood memories, like the titular phrase of “do you still think love is a laser quest?”, reflecting on something youthful and light they seemed to say once. But as he follows up with, “or do you take it all more seriously?”, the fact that time has passed and their connection has faded aches through the song.
But despite being a heartbreak song, he manages to somehow still make it so adoring. “Do you still feel younger than you thought you would by now? / Or darling, have you started feeling old yet? / Don’t worry, I’m sure that you’re still breaking hearts / With the efficiency that only youth can harness,” the first verse goes, and it’s all so palpable. Here the writer is, trying to talk to someone he was once with, who he loved then and clearly still loves in a way now, but not wanting it to be painful or difficult, just wanting to know how they are.
Yet the punch always comes. At the centre of Turner’s enduring love and desire to still connect with this lost lover, there sits the fact that he can’t escape: “When I’m not being honest, I pretend that you were just some lover”.
Because she wasn’t; clearly, she wasn’t. In the long list of heartbreak songs penned by the band, or penned by any band ever, ‘Love Is a Laserquest’ sits outside as something more nuanced than just a song of sadness, representing how this loss is more than just that of a relationship. This was more than a mere breakup, and so with Turner clearly yearning for connection, he’s also seemed to yearn for support or solutions from the only other person he thinks might understand how he feels, and it was the person on the other side of this specific love.
I’d like to see Keats try to write that.
