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Aarhus, Denmark (May 29, 2025)

“Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”

(Franz Kafka, about a doll; very probably apocryphal)

But I don’t buy into that.

It has almost been a completed journey with Mew, from my introduction during a liminal phase between albums when I wasn’t yet 18, to this near-end now I am not yet 40. I know intimately what the start felt like, and the story of the middles. This week, I am living through my resolution. I have not known exactly how that feels before; endings, yes, plenty. They tend to feel drawn out. But not one quite like this.

October 2004 til December 2025 (with this false finale in the last of those Mays – insert opinions on that here) has been a lot of uninterrupted time. It started when I was young, and it is concluding now I am not so.

If this should ever happen again, I will have had more and more grey hairs emerge.

If this should ever happen again, I will feel tireder still.

If this should ever happen again, though, I hope there will come a day where there is a two hour farewell set which is intense and unpredictable enough that I forget about my aching feet and ankles and calves. The show in Aarhus feels like time travel, back to a less creaky place. They could have played another hour and I’d have stood through that without a second thought too.

If this should ever happen again, I will probably spend a little less time in bars before and after the shows. You seen the price of pints these days?

If this should ever happen again, I may or may not get a tattoo to mark it.

If this should ever happen again, I would expect to experience more of it on my own. Mew has been a social love affair from start to finish. It has always, with no exceptions, involved the company of others. I am particularly glad of this in Aarhus. For whatever reason, I break down completely during Rows and people are queueing up to give me a hug; no explanations need to be sought.

If this should ever happen again, I will be highly aware that this is not normal. My early days with this odd, singular Danish band felt wholly natural and repeatable, so no thought was necessary. I did not fully and consciously appreciate the rarity. That was a large part of the magic.

If this should ever happen again, the new relationship with the new songs might not follow the same path, or evolve through the same stages: from existential importance initially, to comforting familiarity lately. I don’t really listen to Mew much any more, because the point is that I don’t have to. It’s all in my head, in my head; it lives up here now.

If this should ever happen again, I doubt the source will manage to offer up a composition so elemental and eternal as The Zookeeper’s Boy. Until I hear it, I will be optimistic about the possibility of being optimistic that I might eventually be wrong.

If this should ever happen again, I can say with certainty that I will not be sleeping on airport floors, changing flights at fucking Stansted, spending nine nights in a tent in a field, or looking up the cost of the overnight Megabus to London (though I would like it recorded that even I was never desperate enough to go through with the latter).

If this should ever happen again, I suppose it will still be possible that I will, at some stage, once more ponder the imponderable of why the train journey back from Aarhus is always so poisonously hungover.

If this should ever happen again, I can’t really see myself, as a middle aged man who used to be a teenager, being compelled to make a list of all the songs from the discography that I haven’t seen performed live yet. It’s best not to admit this sort of thing to anyone.

If this should ever happen again, I probably won’t attempt to get so deep with the analysis. I think I would be more likely to let it all wash over me, and leave the rigour to others with more talent in that respect.

If this should ever happen again, some of us may not still be here to see all of it. Some of us didn’t make it through the whole of my timeline. And I miss them. I think of them now.

If this should ever happen again, maybe it will be me who wouldn’t have another two full decades to devote to something else anyway. Who knows? Life is fragile. 

If this should ever happen again, I will not be young.

If this should ever happen again, I will, I hope, still have some of my vivid memories of my youth before they flow away like photographs scattered on a river.

If this should ever happen again, I will live it only through the prism of real love. I will refuse any other way.

If this should ever happen again, it could be better, it might be worse.

If this should ever happen again, it would be different. 

But all of that is by the by.

This cannot happen again; this will never happen again.

Text and photos: Ally Winford

For Simon Stafford, aka Hermit.

Setlist: Introducing Palace Players / Satellites / Special / The Zookeeper’s Boy / 156 / Circuitry of the Wolf / Chinaberry Tree / Then I Run / Gliding / The Wake Of Your Life / Symmetry / That Time On The Ledge / She Spider / Reprise / Ay Ay Ay / She Came Home For Christmas / Rows — Slixxin / I Should Have Been A Tsin-Tsi (For You) / Snow Brigade / Am I Wry? No / Comforting Sounds