To usher in both a new decade and a new blog, I would like to offer up a piece of music from an album that fairly consumed me in the final year of the Noughties.

This is Runeii, the closing track from British band Talk Talk’s 1991 swansong ‘Laughing Stock’.

Runeii is a hymn to silence; a whispered goodbye to a friend, a life, a country, a career, or however you see fit to interpret it.  It is soothing and relaxing, yet simultaneously almost discomfiting in its sparse beauty.

‘Laughing Stock’ is a remarkable piece of music which I discovered – to my delight at last year’s BFI London Film Festival – has been plundered by the stylish French director Jacques Audiard for use in his new film – the muscular prison thriller Un Prophete (which had a fantastic 70s-style French poster), due for UK release on January 22.

So, the moral of this story is: go and buy ‘Laughing Stock’.  Go and see Un Prophete.

“Slow to bleed, fair son”.