The song is a prayer for one more night out, spoken by someone with nowhere better to be: home is their home, and the speaker is welcome no more. Out of that homelessness comes the famous, outrageous offer — if a double-decker bus or a ten-ton truck should hit the car, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die. It reads less as morbid than as arithmetic: intimacy this complete makes even death a privilege. But the darkened underpass verse tells the truth beneath the bravado — my chance has come at last — and a strange fear grips him and he just couldn't ask. The grand death-wish exists because the small, possible question was never asked.

What keeps it euphoric rather than grim is the recording: bright, jangling, relentlessly forward, like the car ride it describes, the voice lifted rather than buried. So when the title finally arrives and repeats into the fade — there is a light and it never goes out — it lands as the one thing the song has proven: not that he gets the person, but that the wanting won't die. The band kept playing as the track faded; the light, true to the title, kept burning.