Nightshift

The song begins in a particular kind of darkness — not the dramatic, velvet darkness of Gothic theatre but the functional, fluorescent darkness of night work, of the city operating on its nocturnal logic while the day world sleeps. The rhythm has a lurching, seasick quality, pushing forward without ever settling into comfort, and the guitar textures swirl at the edges of the arrangement like lights seen through rain-streaked glass. McGeoch's playing has a vertiginous quality here, phrases that seem to tilt and spin rather than resolve, creating the sensation of disorientation that comes with inhabiting inverted time. Siouxsie's voice is at its most theatrical and most assured simultaneously — commanding the space without shouting, injecting sudden shifts of register and emphasis that keep the listener perpetually off-balance. The lyric inhabits the sensory world of the graveyard shift: altered perception, the strange intimacy that grows among people who share the hours that others surrender to unconsciousness, the way ordinary things take on uncanny weight in the small hours. From 1982's A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, the song stands apart from the album's more explicitly psychedelic tracks through its rootedness in something almost sociological — it's watching real people in real darkness, not conjuring fantasy. It suits driving alone on empty roads after midnight, when the city belongs briefly to a different order of people.