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What is it about Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her, Kiss Her?

One of my favorite XTC songs is "Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her, Kiss Her." For some reason, it has always seemed to be a rather ominous song to me, though. When you read the lyrics, they seem innocent enough; I guess the music really portrays a feeling of autumn and ending because it's always seemed to be a dark song to me.

When I first heard it, I was up to my ears in the writings of Anaïs Nin for a seminar project. One of the stories in Little Birds is about a man who is asked to watch the body of a dead woman that was found floating in the sea. (There's more to the story than that, but I'd rather not offend anyone with further details.) I guess that, somehow, my mind linked that story with the song, thereby giving the song a rather morbid flare that it probably shouldn't really have.

Looking back, I can sort of understand why it happened that way. Certain phrases in the song pop out at you when you listen to it, conveying a sense of demise: "dead deck chairs under shrouds" "November will win her" etc. Plus, "her hair still smells of salt" is hauntingly reminiscent of some of the thoughts that the man in the story has about the dead woman.

I realize now that the song is just about a boy who needs to take a chance before it disappears. However, the imagery is awfully bleak. Maybe the boy is supposed to suffer from seasonal depression or something... it's raining, seagulls are screaming, the sea is grey, the coast is black, there's fog and the descriptions of the deck chairs and lifebelts aren't exactly the happiest of all time either.

A couple of years ago, I made a different association with the song after watching Disney's "The Little Mermaid" at a friend's house. I'm watching as Sebastian the crab is singing for Price Eric to "Kiss the girl" — the girl being Ariel the mermaid — and for some reason this song popped into my head. Would a crab singing "kiss her" be more or less disturbing than seagulls doing the same?

As a side note, I've always really been keen on the couplet,
      The sea is warship grey;
      It whispers "Fool!" then slides away.
It has always seemed like a perfect description of an autumnal tide. That rush of sound in the still air, undefiled by human squawking. A loud sound yet oddly quiet - rather like the rush of sound and then noticeable silence that you get when the air conditioner shuts off in the middle of the night.