In 2003 I found myself trying to wrap up a fifteen month breakup that had lasted almost as long as the relationship. The previous year I’d gone to South Korea ostensibly to follow the World Cup. For a complicated set of reasons and a series of miscalculations, I went alone while my girlfriend also swapped the southern hemisphere for a northern summer, pulling pints in a Cornish pub in England. We broke up through an extended cycle of expensive long distance phone calls between a pay phone in her village and my dingy dormitory town flat half-an-hour away from the Seoul subway. It was a one year contract but between the culture shock and the breakup I was laid so low I quit my job without telling the school and withdrew all my savings from the bank. I stuffed fistfuls of won into the bottom of my backpack, left in the middle of the night and flew back to Brisbane. I moved into a hastily renovated worker’s cottage cut into the side of Highgate Hill and got a job as a telemarketer. My ex-girlfriend arrived home two or three months after me. We made a couple of attempts at reconciliation that were as erotic as they were awkward. Under the guise of being friends we’d catch up to see a movie then end up in bed. It unravelled in confusion, mistrust and, eventually, recrimination. Then we would repeat the cycle a week later. It was doomed. She had a new boyfriend anyway: the manager of the pub where she’d worked. He was waiting on a visa before he came over. We kept this up for a month or two until finally, at some point, we both walked away.

I was devastated. I’d hoped somehow that we’d get back together.I turned to introspection and, as I’ve always done, to pop music to give succour to my introspection. The record that got me through was Give Up by The Postal Service. Released fifteen years ago in February 2003, it was a side-project for Death Cab for Cutie front man Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello, the creative brains behind fledgling LA glitch electronica band DNTEL. It was an early exploration of what was possible when traditional indie pop met digital music. The song I returned to, over and over, was ‘Nothing Better’, a breakup duet between a boy, entranced by the possibilities of what might have been, and a girl calling time on what was never going to be. It was the medicine for my heart’s sickness.