paravostok

If you’re feeling sinister is one of – if not my favourite - songs ever. It blends an upbeat twee sound with sophisticated lyrics to create a song that exists in two states, one where you don’t know or care about the lyrics and it is a sort of Simon and Garfunkel adjacent track, and the other where you do and seriously analyse them, some questions begin to appear. Naturally it is the latter I want to talk about as the lyrics are something I constantly come back to, always reconsidering and wondering how they could be interpreted or analysed, as such, I wanted to compile my most credible reading of them, their meaning, and how it mattered both when it was contemporary and arguably even more so in a modern context. The song starts by introducing us to the character Anthony, telling us his story in a reversed chronological format, starting by telling us he “walked to his death”. Immediately the first line in the song, we learn that the character is already dead, and that he “walked” towards it himself, but with this line there is still ambiguity, and the tense matters, he “walked”. Past tense, meaning that his death already happened. However the next few lines “...he thought he’d never feel this way again”, “If he goes back to the house then things would go from bad to worse What could he do?” play with the chronology here, with future tense “if”, “could”, “would”, now becoming the narrative, making the character’s death less sure, almost as if we are inside of his head as he is thinking about what is happening, and to me it seems as though he is considering suicide, and how his legacy will be remembered. The next few lines seem to affirm this, with the third person future tense continuing. The most powerful being “He wants to remember things exactly as he left them on that funny day” suggesting that something was the last straw and death is a calculated, cold escape. Anthony, feeling as though things are getting worse and worse, decides that it’s not worth going home, as things won’t get better if he does, so he might as well “pause” his legacy now, whilst people can remember him still as the pre-breaking point Anthony, as something has now clearly happened that would change this. The final relevant section of this verse is the last lines “And if there is something else beyond, he isn’t scared because it’s bound to be less boring than today, bound to be less boring than tomorrow.” Anthony’s suicide isn’t one out of depression or desperation, simply a cold and calculated move. He would rather die today than face the boredom of tomorrow – the boredom of the rest of the day, he sees his own life as a redundancy to fix. If there is something after? He isn’t scared of it, it would secure him a purpose, a more grounded existence than one on Earth. The second verse starts with introducing us to Hilary, much in the same manner we were introduced to Anthony, by someone in the third person speaking in the past tense. However, unlike with Anthony, the narrator here never switches tense, staying in the past the full time, implying that whilst Anthony’s death was still uncertain, or at least, hadn’t yet happened, Hilary’s definitely had. We get another allusion to the suicide here at the start, “Hilary went to her death because she couldn’t think of anything to say”, telling us that partly, it happened because she didn’t know how to communicate she needed help, and then the next two lines, “Everybody thought that she was boring so they never listened anyway” tell us that it didn’t matter, because even if she could’ve mustered the words, the people were never going to listen to her, so in contrast with Anthony, who was bored with life and wanted to end it on a high note to maintain a legacy, Hilary had nought. She doesn’t find life boring, life finds her boring, fairly or not. The next two lines further paint our picture of Hilary, “Nobody was really saying anything of interest, she fell asleep she was into S&M and bible studies.” Hilary here seems to be a person who has no one to confide in, as she finds everyone else just as boring as they find her. Hilary is immediately interesting due to her almost oxymoronic interests, on one hand, bible studies, representing the Church, a broadly sex-restrictive and sex-negative institution, and on the other, sadism and masochism, the sexual fetishes of receiving sexual pleasure from inflicting or receiving pain. Hilary doesn’t come off as interesting, despite this uniqueness, likely due to both communities not cross-pollinating, she has no one to speak to about this, each side would hate the other, and perhaps even represents an internal battle between repentance and pleasure, both seen as vehicles to escape her distress, whilst also being directly contradictory. The next few lines again drill this into us, through repetition “Not everyone’s cup of tea, she would admit to me her cup of tea, she would admit to no one her cup of tea, she would admit to me, her cup of tea, she would admit to no one”. I can see two different ideas here for what has happened and why sometimes she admits it to “me” (the narrator) and sometimes no one. Either, this is read from the perspective of Anthony, and Hilary was someone he knew, and he has found out somehow that she has killed herself, and is now considering his own suicide, as he knows going home would make it worse - hence the mixture of tenses at the beginning – or we are reading it from the perspective of a suicide letter. She admitted it to no one but the narrator, but the narrator wasn’t meant to see it, as she admitted it to no one, it was only after someone, likely not even an acquaintance of Hilary’s found the note, and perturbed it. As we see later on, I believe this perversion and loss of privacy to the dead to be a central concern for the song. The third verse sees us venturing further back into Hilary’s life, which I think supports both of my narrative ideas, as it could be Anthony, still thinking back on her life and how this happened, or the narrator reading further down into the note, almost voyeuristically, whilst we – the listeners - are doing the same, we aren’t absolved of the guilt, it may be wrong, and yet – we don’t stop. We see Hilary seek help in this section through the Church. Interestingly, it’s not clear if this contradicts the “bible studies” claim from earlier or not, as the man giving her confirmation here is referred to as the “...vicar or whatever”, suggesting that one of two things. Either the bible studies part was what people believed about her without actually knowing the truth, and that she wasn’t actually interested in them, but was seeking religion purely as a path to an easy absolution, or that this is another clue that the narrator is Anthony, as we know he isn’t religious due to his comment about the afterlife. The next line, “Saint Theresa’s calling her The church up on the hill is looking lovely” refers to Saint Theresa’s RC Church in Possilpark, Glasgow, the church being on the hill and “looking lovely” is a clue that again, her attraction to the Church is not one out of fear of god, but one of aesthetics, the church looks pretty, and she sees it as the simple way to get out of this. However, unfortunately, as the next line states, “But it didn’t interest, the only things she wants to know is how and why and when and where to go”, which reaffirms that the connection to the Church was only ever surface level, she was just seeking a purpose, and when the vicar only presents her with institution, and not a pathway into the Church, she loses interest. Hilary has to look elsewhere for a path out of her current state, as the Church has either failed her, or just isn’t for her due to her lack of genuine conviction. The line then repeats three more times, reinforcing that the Church represented a map to fix things to Hilary and not a place of worship, but somewhere to correct the incorrect. The chorus then comes in “But if you are feeling sinister go off and see a minister he’ll try in vain to take away the pain of being a hopeless unbeliever”. I believe this to be Hilary’s interpretation of the Church, and why it hit a wall with her, it was because she never believed from the start, she recognises she didn’t seek faith out of belief, but out of a marriage of convenience, and she believes that’s why things went wrong. To the minister she was a potential convert and the pain was from her lack of faith, Hilary, ironically sees the issue with this one dimensional “solution” but seemingly doesn’t recognise the irony as it is exactly what she was seeking. The fourth verse then focuses on Hilary walking home from the church, taking place after the chorus chronologically, after she felt like the church couldn’t “solve” her. “When she got back, her spirituality was thrown into confusion.” To me this is her either coming to terms with the Church not working out in the way she thought it would, either because she was irredeemable or because there was a lack of genuine faith. The next line “So she got a special deal On renting from the man at Rediffusion” shows us that she is trying her best to distract herself now, so she gets a television to try for one last time to fix everything, but ultimately all of her self-help is not “proper”, she either redirects, seeks distraction, or the easy route and it doesn’t work. She was not true to herself and her beliefs and I see this as the turning point for her. After this, other than the next line, we never hear of Hilary again, and I see it as the point she killed herself, “Look at me! I’m on TV It makes up for the shortcomings of being poor Now I’m in a million pieces picked up for deliberation by the people listening at home”. Even after her death she focuses on the superficial reading, she doesn’t regret it, and is instead excited and perhaps venerated. Beyond that I read this as her being able to see how people treat her after her suicide, suddenly she no longer just the boring girl who no one would listen to, but the illustrious girl “in a million pieces”. I think this commentary on the loss of narrative control, once she is dead she can no longer have that, and paradoxically for Hilary, it gave her fame, attention, something she sought out her whole life, and yet it’s only granted once she’s unable to appreciate it. The following line “picked up for deliberation by the people listening at home”, I interpret as the literal ego death of Hilary, as everyone invents a different version of her that they all knew and felt bad for, despite being entirely inactive during her life, they ignored her. Now, they ogle her as an impossible and unseen tragedy and invent a version of her that never existed, not only to moralise themselves and cleanse them of guilt, but to rationalise her death. They never understood her and yet now she only exists through the perverse recreation of her that people project on to, creating a parasocial relationship with the most unattainable people of all – the dead. I think that if we’re continuing with Anthony being the narrator, that this is why he killed himself, as he saw what happened with Hilary, and he didn’t want the same to happen to him, he wanted to control his legacy, not be in a million pieces. At the end of the titular lyric “If you’re feeling sinister, go and see a minister” loops and loops, acting as the voice of society itself which, especially in Glasgow during the 80s/90s in working class communities would reinforce church-based support as the righteous path, until... suddenly the last words spoken disagrees with it, with society; “The chances are you’ll probably feel better if you stayed and played with yourself.” the outro could mean several things, but I take two to be the most plausible. One being that it is a reference to masturbation, and therefore a callback to Hilary’s S&M, and that if she went down that avenue instead of the Church, things could have been different. The second being that if she didn’t chase the perceived “correct thing” in vain and instead sought out help with a more genuine conviction, perhaps by uncovering her shame surrounding her sexual preferences then maybe things would have ended better. Help is not one-size fits all. Part of why I think the song is so powerful is the way it brings up everyone’s versions of Hilary after her death. Hilary being treated like a commodity - something to “own”, becoming a social currency valued upon the saddest or “most” conscionable mourning for a feeling that they had done something, and that if they knew prior they would’ve done so then too. Hilary’s post-death biography became hagiographic as she became the one dimensional “perfect victim” we see time and time again in real life. I also see an almost uncanny parallel in today's influencer culture, the growing awareness of parasocial relationships and the messaging of the song. As content becomes more relatable and personable, it’s only natural to begin to feel like the creator is someone you know personally, as the barrier between the creator and the consumer breaks down. We also see this with Hilary, where everyone began retroactively creating their own memory of her prior to her death to moralise themselves. However I see this specific type of relationship uniquely awful, as unlike a regular parasocial relationship that at least is two sided if not equalised (the many to the few), the relationship between the living and the dead is unique because it is fame without a recipient. It is not parasocial but antisocial, and we have only seen it rise with content such as true crime, trivialising the dead in the same way Hilary’s memory was. To define the dead by their death is to create a new version of them, and to put them in “a million pieces” that they cannot object or disagree with, they are mined bit for bit and fade into a factoid instead of a person, incentivised by status and clout with obnoxious performative guilt to moralise it for the creator, and for the consumer. As after all, who isn’t morbidly curious sometimes? --- Originally written in 2025, polished up in 2026 to put on the website. Thanks to Annie for parsing it for me to correct grammar and general mistakes.