a delicate shade of blue

It'll play hob with my sleep schedule but I suppose it can't be helped. Please let the house elves know that if I ask for an early breakfast at, say, three A.M. tomorrow morning, I'm to receive it.

A bruiser with a sandpapery voice, he was a reliable teller of corner-boy tales and, it seemed, a willing cog.

Dozens of tracks that are so look-at-me manicured, so counter-jumpingly pretentious, so breathtakingly brittle, arse-achingly arty and dick-headedly daft that they still rattle and buzz around the collective pop skull, and will do so for decades (because pop that isn't pretentious, brittle and daft simply isn't worth listening to).