Damon, always very clever, is here subverting the cliché that North Korea is a mad dictatorship that keeps its population under a quasi-siege. North Korea is part of a peninsula and Blur is British: the island where he's held and that is darkness itself is Great Britain, so he decides to go live in Pyongyang, to which he goes by plane (on the plane, he looks down from his windom to 'the island'). There, "the perfect avenues / will seem empty without you [his interlocutor that will remain in Britain] / and the pink light that bathes the great leaders [the statues in Pyongyang of Kim Jong-Sun and Kim Jong-Il] is fading".
Damon, always very clever, is here subverting the cliché that North Korea is a mad dictatorship that keeps its population under a quasi-siege. North Korea is part of a peninsula and Blur is British: the island where he's held and that is darkness itself is Great Britain, so he decides to go live in Pyongyang, to which he goes by plane (on the plane, he looks down from his windom to 'the island'). There, "the perfect avenues / will seem empty without you [his interlocutor that will remain in Britain] / and the pink light that bathes the great leaders [the statues in Pyongyang of Kim Jong-Sun and Kim Jong-Il] is fading".