Burial Is My Roman Empire

2026-05-23

Just Be The Best

The words "Burial is my Roman Empire" have been bouncing around in my head for months. As someone who went to school in the early y2k's, the trope "What is your Roman Empire?" got me in the tum. Teachers really did make it seem like the only history prior to WW1 and 2 was togas, stamping on grapes and colosseum fights.

When it comes to Burial, a memory persists Circa 2014. Sitting in the 30+ Celsius dry heat, in the back of the trolly bus in some dusty outskirts of Bratislava, returning home after teaching an English lesson. This time to a hungry group of executives controlling the nuclear power emergency readiness facilities for the City. Feeling so main character and serious and solemn, listening to the drifty emotional Burial I’d been obsessing over for years at this point. Totally ungrounded, feeling and being poor as fuck, knowing I am surviving only day to day. Languishing in the sense that I’ll never be able to transmit my psychological distress and no one would ever understand it. I was motivated to share, my depression had not quite revealed itself to me yet. I would try my best and somehow that will make this pain totally worth it. On refection it was a bad place to be; But the music felt so deep and special it was an addictive space to occupy, when feeling like this was so consistent, just escape into the gloomy Mp3's, life is a movie, this isn't really real.

When I was a young hyperactive dyslexic neurotic child I was very bad at spelling and apart from blaming the English language (which I do) it meant that I got pulled out of history lessons and made to attend a special spelling class. I like to blame this occurrence for my poor knowledge of history. In fact I doubt I would have learnt a great deal in those classes anyhow; mainly due to being so distracted all the time, ADHD senses exploding from even the tiniest noises in the reverberating classroom or ...omg... the chance for a chat. I was quite a tormented kid when it comes to merging into this constructed school world. Still to this day (38 years now) I feel physical pain in my body when I need to learn something or do a task which doesn’t fit the desire path of my choosy brain.

A colourful sketch of the album cover from Untrue by Burial featuring a Roman Centurions Spear in the background

Burial Is My Roman Empire

From the outside to me Burial seemed like they had it all, to be lonely but to have the recognition, adoration and a sophisticated channel of contacts for everyone to hear and love them. This became the template, and I believed if I just kept making things eventually this would happen to me. So I did it, I beavered away, ignoring most of the things which you should start doing to ensure you can survive and live a long healthily life. I focused on telling my story, a world of uncertainty and darkness but full of love and passion and poetry. This is where Glass Lip emerged.

Burial even followed me on Twitter (hear me out). A flatmate some years before had a few contacts in the industry and he told me he sent a tune of mine over to Kode 9. I got some great feedback, it was so motivating, then a few months later Burial follows me on twitter and then unfollowed me, and posted something along the lines of "I tried to follow a lot of people and twitter blocked my account". This basically flipped a switch in me. Of course it was probably a bot or a scammer, but something about it seemed real. Thinking about it now reminds me of the "first handshake" scene in Interstellar, where Dr. Amelia appears to shake hands with an ominous gravitational blur in space, Burial being the meaningful blur.

Under the magical realism of my dysregulated brain, Burials quiet mysterious messages felt like they personally spoke to me.

"You can't follow me, I've gone away, but I'm behind you, so just be the best"¹

So an uncertain, unpredictable, hard to reach but not outside the realms of possibility new parent had landed in my life to impress. I would bend over backwards deploying summersaults for them; If I can just make the most emotional tune and throw it out into the world surely something will come of that. It could have been a bot… but who am I to stop this train rolling. Even the uncertainty of that question probably fired-up my imagination even more. This convinced me that being alone and unknown was going to work for me. Solemnity and seriousness is the force pushing me to censor or restrict the things I share, it felt powerful.

Releasing music is the perfect cat nip for me because its quality is so subjective. I absolutely love music which sounds bad and music which doesn’t sound like music. Music is simultaneously the ephemeral and the epic. I create music and put it out into the world, see what happens. Sometimes the desire to do it for a lesser purpose creeps in, sometimes it’s just a perfect transmission of a moment capable of switching on my nerve endings. But again and again the thought which comes each time around is maybe INSERT PERSON² will hear this and everything will be okay. I extend this to any imagining of a human who might come across my work, in a million imagined conversations.

Burial is less now my Roman Empire because I can name this and notice it and imagine another reality for myself. One where friends and peers notice the work. One where I do not try to impress a ghost.

Burial is my Roman Empire: This phrase works because it turned my obsession with the mysterious heroic figure on its head to something less painful. From something more spiritual to something more literal and easier to explain.

Paradise Circus from the Massive Attack vs Burial Release ↩
I realise now this could be anyone. ↩

Return to The Lake

Footnotes