91Èȱ¬

This applies to the newer community centre just as much as it does to the centuries-old former corn exchange. The three key factors are a dusty, damp, old kind of smell, the slight feeling that there are ghosts in the ceiling beams, and the unique way that sound reverberates around the room.

Oh, and the piano. They always have a piano which first saw active service during the war, when all anyone wanted to do was have a knees-up in betwen air raids. Generations of children have bashed out chopsticks on its battered ivories, and now it is massively out of tune, and some of the veneer has come off the keys, one of two of which is permanently stuck.

The reason I mention all of this is that Lykke Li has managed to create a very modern-sounding, upbeat, quirky pop song, which captures something of the dusty, forgotten atmosphere of a provincial English Scout Hut. It's all there in the echoey handclaps and over-hammered piano at the beginning. Then the shiny modern instruments kick in, and the hut becomes an ultra-sleek cabaret bar, albeit an ultra-sleek cabaret bar with the local Scoutmaster serving cocktails he mixed using a tatty old Thermos flask.

This atmospheric miracle is made all the more startling when you consider that Lykke is Swedish, and therefore is unlikely to have spent much time in a British village hall. Maybe there's a local equivalent she was aiming at, and missed. Or maybe music just takes people to different places, depending on who they are and where they've been.

Yes, it's probably that, thinking about it...

Download: Out now
CD Released: May 26th

(Fraser McAlpine)

PS: One of the other things I love about this song is that the verse lyrics have the exact same rhythm as those in .

PPS: has a great live review of Lykke in New York, it's astonishingly well cross-referenced too. Puts me to shame....