Walking in the Sunshine

The lightness of this track is almost suspicious — four minutes that feel engineered to make a grey morning feel temporary. Bad Manners take what could have been a throwaway summer song and fill it with the kind of propulsive ska rhythm that gives even uncomplicated happiness a physical urgency. The horns carry the main melodic weight, bright and brassy in a way that suggests outdoor brass bands more than anything clinical, and the guitar's upstroke rhythm gives everything a perpetual-motion quality that makes standing still while listening feel like a failure of character. Buster Bloodvessel's voice here is deployed differently than in the band's more comic material — there's still the largeness of delivery, the sense of a man who communicates in capital letters, but the tone is warmer, less a bark and more an invitation. The lyric doesn't complicate its central image: good weather, good feeling, the simple and stubbornly renewable experience of the sun being out. What the song understands is that this kind of uncomplicated joy is actually hard to capture in music without it curdling into saccharine, and Bad Manners navigate that by keeping the energy slightly manic, slightly breathless. It belongs to the early-80s British ska revival but has the transportability of something designed to work anywhere people want to feel briefly and completely fine. Morning commute, first day of something new, the moment a difficult week breaks open into a weekend — that is exactly where this lives.