iTunes Reviews

[SheriffFatman]

Because I enjoy writing, and I was bored, I started reviewing each of the songs on my iPod, and posting the results on the Radio 1 messageboard.

Using tactics that reminded me a lot of the scheduling of Top Of The Pops, the BBC stopped promoting its messageboards so no one would relise they were there, and has now announced it is closing them at the end of this week as they are under used. I have decided to post my reviews here instead.

I simply did the tracks one at a time alphabetically. My iPod will only fit around 1,000 songs and is always full, and since autumn 2008 I have written 140,000 words.

I doubt Radio 1 will archive the old message boards, so I will start by trying to post what I've done so far here, from the start of the alphabet to Gimmie Hope Jo'anna. I imagine Haven will not allow me to make a post that's 140,000 words long but it's worth a try, here goes...

[SheriffFatman]

An MP3 Odyssey – One Man’s Obsession with his iPod

A-Punk by Vampire Weekend
I have a lot of really quite old music and not so much that’s very new, so this seems a strange place to start. Not only was it only released this year, but as it wasn’t a hit and the follow up, Oxford Comma, was, it is due to be re-released as a single next month. So I am writing about it slightly ahead of the reviewers who make a living out of being first.
For me, this one was truly an internet phenomenon. I noticed it in the bottom of the iTunes top 100 early this year, and after playing the 30 second clip several times was sufficiently fascinated to purchase the whole thing. (This was before I realised you could hear a whole song and watch the video by typing the title into Youtube – I am still getting to grips with the post CD single era.)
The song itself is an absolute gem. I have no idea who Vampire Weekend are or what they’re going on about, but A-Punk is incredibly catchy and sounds like absolutely nothing else around at the moment. It seems a guitar that sounds like it only has 3 strings, strange sub-aqua type noises that sound like a TV theme to a show I’ve never watched, and indecipherable lyrics that sound a bit Latin even though they’re English is a good combination, although goodness knows how they worked that out. For me this was the sound of Summer 2008, hopefully for lots of other people it’ll be the sound of Autumn.

A.K.A. I-D-I-O-T by The Hives
I first heard of The Hives when the NME started going on about them being the saviours of rock ‘n’ roll. The NME is given to excessive superlatives, but on this occasion it seemed necessary to check the band out, because instead of them being the usual unwashed Americans or English art school types, they were Swedish and wore suits.

The strange thing about Swedish music is that it always seems to be attempting perfection, instead of just being happy with what it is. Abba were the perfect pop group, Roxette took the late eighties power rock formula and polished it until it gleamed, and now The Hives were doing the same for shouty garage rock. The NME were right though, it really worked.

The best thing about A.K.A. I-D-I-O-T was that I had been listening to the album for a while before I took the time to read the title, and had assumed the guy was just yodelling or something. Even listening to it now the whole thing is so fast it is completely indecipherable unless you’re paying attention. Quite why The Hives were never massive I do not know, maybe shouty garage rock is a genre destined to never reach the mainstream, however much you polish it and however sharp your suits are. Even so, this track is fantastic fun and cannot fail to put a smile on the face of all who hear it.

About A Girl by Nirvana
I’m not going to pretend that I knew of Nirvana before Nevermind came out, I was 14 and anyway I don’t think anyone in the UK had. I do think though that this song, from their first album Bleach, is a clear example of the problem that Kurt Cobain had. He wanted Nirvana to make rock records that sounded home made, and that were inaccessible to anyone except the generation of like minded rock fans who had had enough of the excesses of radio friendly bands like Bon Jovi and Guns N’ Roses. Instead, he wrote and they made songs like this – edgy enough for the target market, but also melodic enough for mainstream radio and as a result a massive worldwide audience. The rest is history.

Eighteen years later, and this still stands up as a gem from the Nirvana back catalogue. Quieter than most of Nevermind, the lack of smooth Butch Vig style production gives it a more authentic feel. The lack of the attention grabbing loud bit / quiet bit style means it will never appear on any of those “best song ever” lists, but to the uninitiated (if there are any) it would be a very good place to start.

About You Now by the Sugababes
There is an old joke in Only Fools And Horses about Trigger receiving an award from the council for keeping the same brush to sweep the streets with for 20 years. Under questioning he reveals that it is indeed the same brush, and all the maintenance it’s required in that time is 5 new stales and 9 new heads.

It seems that the people behind the Sugababes are working on the same theory, as though they have a target for their average age never to exceed 23. To their credit though, it does seem to work very well.

It is a fact, only slightly undermined by the release of this year’s ropey cover of Here Come The Girls, that every time a new Sugababes album is released you can be sure of a blinding lead track, in the case of About You Now the kind of towering pop genius that makes me wonder if my years listening to Nirvana and The Smiths were wasted. Of course it is true to say that the creative input of the ‘Babes themselves was almost certainly zero, but even manufactured pop has its fantastic moments, and this is one.

And I fancy Keisha.
Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive by Johnny Mercer
There’s not a lot of Easy Listening in this list, but here’s an exception. Recorded in 1944, I’m pretty sure this is the oldest track I own. It’s also one of the cheeriest.

I have this song on an excellent compilation album of tracks from films that have been shown on Channel 4, it is on there because it was in LA Confidential. I’ve never seen the film, and hadn’t heard the song until I bought the CD, but it is great.

Let’s face it, who could really argue with the idea of living your life by accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative? Sounds like a good idea to me, even better if you can sing along while doing it... I think that’s why I like this song so much, it reminds me not to be too cynical, to latch on to the affirmative, if you will. Also, at one minute 55 seconds it’s not quite long enough to become irritating.

Ace Of Spades by Motorhead
Absolutely everything that a metal record should have, multiplied by 10. Turned up to 11.

Screaming about playing cards with the devil while the guitars race along at a pace where it’s only just possible to maintain a tune, this is where Lemmy entered rock history. The lyrics may seem like indecipherable, end of the world nonsense at first, but they are littered with lines that can be applied to the genre itself. As the great man says, “the pleasure is to play / it makes no difference what you say”.

When the breakneck instrumental is over and Lemmy sings “that’s the way I like it baby / I don’t wanna live forever” you know he really means it, and you get the feeling that if he died on the spot he’d die a happy man.

It’s hard to think of any songs tracks that more fully embrace everything about a certain genre, and that’s what makes Ace Of Spades such a fantastic, absorbing three minutes. Then, just as you’re convinced that the rest of your life could heavily feature very long moustaches, knuckles with love & hate tattooed on them and a lot of sweat, chains, leather and exhaust fumes, in a flash it’s all over. You take a deep breath, embrace a moments silence and it’s like nothing ever happened.

Across The Universe by The Beatles
One of the amazing things about The Beatles is the way they took their audience with them, and I think this is a great example. If you compare the Sanskrit ramblings and eastern influenced, drug infused trippiness of this track with the jangly guitar pop of their early hits, even if you know nothing about them it is clear that this is a band who have been on something of a journey since becoming famous. So many acts have followed The Beatles down a similar route of fame followed by experimental drug use, but they usually end up a mess, and if they get it together to release anything at all it is most likely unintelligible nonsense that no one else would ever want to hear.

Lennon and McCartney on the other hand, seem to have been completely incapable of making a record that was less than brilliant, and Across The Universe is cast iron proof. From the opening line “words are flying out like endless rain into a paper cup” it is clear that however high they’ve been, they never lost the ability to use imagery that touches people back down on planet earth. In 1969, “limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns” must have sounded like a vision of a possible utopian future that could be achieved if only more people bought Let It Be.

Sadly, by the time Let It Be was released The Beatles, like the ‘60s, were finished. Personally, all of this was several years before I was born, but if I close my eyes and let Across The Universe take over, it feels like I was there and lived the whole thing. I wish I had.

After All by The Frank And Walters
I first had this on an old compilation album called Loaded on cassette. It only had about 20 songs on it (they often used to) and this, having reached number 11 in the charts in 1992, was about the biggest hit. I loved it.

This is the wistful sound of early 90s indie pop dreams, jangling along at a pace and coming complete with inconsequential lyrics that mean nothing much to anyone other than the singer and his girlfriend. Whoever The Frank And Walters were, they sound like they definitely spent time listening to Blur’s debut album the year before, and that’s no bad thing.

This is catchy and fun, but unlike singles by several recent bands with similar formulas (Scouting For Girls, The Feeling etc) it easily avoids descending into an irritating parody. On this basis The Frank And Walters could well have been on the edge of becoming huge, quite why it never happened I have no idea. If you don’t know this though it’s well worth checking out, it won’t change your life but it will have you humming all week.

After The Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way) by Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
And so to the greatest British band in history. Or so I believed when I was 14. In retrospect, in order to qualify for that title, they ought to have at least had more than two members, but at the time I really did like them that much.

So what was it about Carter USM that appealed so much? Sometimes it is hard to remember, but when the 20 second violin introduction on After The Watershed gives way to thumping synthesised bass it all comes flooding back. At a time when dance music was still occasionally good and indie was still on the sidelines, Carter combined the technical advances of the first with the sound of the second to make a type of music that really did sound fresh and new. There’s a lot of good music around these days, but how much of it genuinely sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before?

Then there were the lyrics. As an angst ridden teenager, I didn’t want someone singing to me about how much he love / hated / cheated on his girlfriend, I wanted someone to scream from the rooftops about all the injustices in the world, someone who sounded like they wanted things to change and believed they could make people change them. That in itself was nothing new, after all this was 15 years after The Sex Pistols had suggested that the UK might benefit from a bit of anarchy. Carter were on a mission to highlight much more specific issues than that though, and on After The Watershed were letting the world know how they felt about the evils of child abuse.

I am happy to report that the worst abuse I was receiving at the time was the occasional clip round the ears for getting a bad report in my homework diary. Even so, I wanted issues like this to be highlighted, it seemed right to me that the medium of pop music, which spoke to so many people, should be used to make the world a better place. That makes me wonder who the 15 year olds of today that feel the same way are listening to, but maybe they’re all just shut in their bedrooms playing computer games. Their loss.

After The Watershed was, of course, the song that made Carter brief tabloid favourites, when, half way through a performance on the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party live on BBC1, it was faded out. The schedulers were obviously concerned about over running after Extreme had decided to treat viewers to an extended version of More Than Words, but Jim Bob and Fruit Bat were incensed, storming across the stage and knocking Phillip Schofield clean off his feet while he tried to introduce the next act.

In some ways it is a shame Carter are remembered most for this rather than the fantastic body of work they had already built up, or the number one album which followed in 1992. Still, while I do now accept that there have been more accomplished acts with better song writing skills who actually did things like employing a drummer instead of using a machine, they will always remain amongst my favourite acts of all time.

Albatross by Fleetwood Mac
I must confess my knowledge of Fleetwood Mac has some big gaps in it. I know Mick Fleetwood is the very tall guy who ruined the Brit Awards one year with Samantha Fox, and that Rumours is one of the best selling albums ever. Also, the Mrs has a CD of theirs called Tango In The Night with lots of great 80s FM Radio classics on it that I can remember from when I was a kid, like Everywhere and Little Lies. Albatross, though, is very different, and 20 years older.

So maybe I should forget the band’s story and concentrate on the track. If you listen to all the other number one singles from the sixties, or any other time for that matter, it really sounds nothing like any of them. Incredibly calming and restful, it is a good job it is only two and a half minutes long because if it was any longer it would send listeners to sleep. (In a soothing way, not because it’s boring you understand).

Coming at the end of a decade when all the other instrumental number ones had been by The Shadows (or people trying their best to sound like the Shadows), all of which sounded like they belonged on a crap “teach yourself to play guitar” cassette, this must have surprised a lot of people. Really though, at a time when being cool was synonymous with being mellow, I bet a lot of musicians heard this and wished they could write music so good it didn’t even need vocals to make it a classic.

Also, I imagine this track inspired a whole generation of other musicians to come up with soothing, instrumental moments of bliss. I don’t know who any of them are though, and that is sort of the point. This type of music does not normally appear in the charts with well known names behind it. Instead, at best it is on the coolest film soundtracks and in advertising, at worst it is on those machines in Woolworths where you press a button and it plays you a 20 second clip of a CD you can buy for £1.99.

In short, this is a unique hit single, and that is always a good thing. The fact that the band apparently went on to produce some of history’s most radio friendly soft rock 20 years later is also great, if a little mystifying.

Albion by Babyshambles
Any track that begins with 58 seconds of feedback and odd thumping noises is begging to be ignored, and nobody could be criticised for switching off before the music even starts. I could say something really poncey here about how that is the sound of Pete Docherty’s tormented mind, and when it gives way to the gentle strum of the opening chords this signifies how music is his only escape from the fuzz of drugs and alcohol gradually destroying him, but I’m not a poet, and all that would detract from what eventually becomes an excellent song.

This is Docherty’s ode to England, and while much has been written about the place before, not much of it can be identified here. It is as though Pete has ideas about the things that make this country what it is, but when he puts them all together it sounds like nowhere I’ve ever seen (or want to). “Gin in teacups”? Most people stick to glasses with ice and lemon as far as I’m aware. “A pale thin girl with eyes forlorn”? Couldn’t she be found in most countries, and anyway aren’t we number two on the obesity scale these days? When he starts singing about “violence in dole queues” and something about “horrible warlords, good warlords” it is clear that this is an Albion that exists in a reality populated only by Docherty himself. Still, as with just about anything he’s involved in, it’s a fascinating song and will have you singing along after a couple of listens.

At the end, when it descends back into feedback, Albion leaves you confused, fascinated, and maybe a little bit enlightened into the mind state of one of the tabloid’s favourite ne’er do wells. It may be a slightly disturbing experience, but I would rather listen to Albion’s distorted view of my home country a thousand times over than even 30 seconds of Fat Les’ Vindaloo.

All Along The Watchtower by Bob Dylan
So much is said about a certain version of this track being the best cover in rock history, the absolute brilliance of the original is often over looked. Dylan always seemed to want to give the impression that he just knocked out the tunes and if anyone liked them then so much the better, and that is backed up by the fact that so many of his best songs were hits for other people. The truth is though that he never really tried to have big hits – All Along The Watchtower was not even released as a single. It seems that Dylan was happy retaining the authenticity and kudos that has always, rightly or wrongly, been attached to being an ‘albums act’, while other people made him a fortune by topping the charts with his songs.

The incredible thing about this track, especially for those more familiar with Hendrix’s version, is it’s simplicity. The acoustic guitar hook is instantly catchy, and when Dylan’s trademark harmonica cements one of his most tuneful introductions ever, it is a fantastic record before the vocals even start.

Then when they do start the listener is taken to a whole different level. This is not the prosaic, socially conscious Dylan singing about injustice and politics, instead it is the mystical version, spouting wonderous lyrics that seem to have come to him in a particularly bad dream. The incessant hook and interspersing harmonica give the whole track a sinister edge, and the lack of a definable chorus means that although the listener is swept along into this strange land of barefoot servants and growling wild cats, they are invited more to listen and pay attention than to sing along. Dylan’s more psychedelic output is often of the sunny, cheerful variety, but not here. The line “two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl” reminds me of the darker moments in Lord Of The Rings, and my love of that book may explain why I am so fond of this unusual part of Dylan’s output. Or maybe it’s just because almost everything he’s ever done is brilliant.

All Along The Watchtower by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Now for the first convincing argument that doing this in alphabetical order was a bad idea – the same song for the second day running.

To be fair though, Dylan’s dark, brooding classic deserves no less, especially considering how astounding this cover version is. I am a big fan of rock, pop (and folk) music from the sixties, but to anyone who was into pop music at the time, this must have sounded like it had been beamed in from outer space as it climbed up the top 10 in the autumn of 1968. Equally, I don’t think any Dylan fans would have ever seen any of his songs being interpreted like this. Well, they couldn’t, nothing had ever sounded like this before.

I must confess, I am not a massive Hendrix fan, not because I don’t like his music, but mostly because I have never really known much of it. In a strange sort of way, I think the reason I have never explored his back catalogue further is because he is so critically acclaimed. I have always loved great songs far more than I have admired the technical skill involved in playing them, probably because I know a great tune when I hear one but I do not know much about playing music. I don’t really care much what brand of electric guitar a musician is playing, or, as in Hendrix’s case, he’s playing it with his teeth, I just want the end result to sound great. I’m not saying Hendrix doesn’t sound great; I just want to avoid getting out of my depth in conversations about technical wizardry. It bores me.

So all that I can say about this version of All Along The Watchtower is what has been said many times before by many other people – that it is one of the best cover versions of all time. When people are saying that cover versions ought to be great but also noticeably different to the original, this is the track that justifies what they are saying. In the sixties there had been a lot of people having big hits with carbon copies of other people’s (especially The Beatles) songs, and this work of genius by Hendrix exposed that practise for the corporate, money minded process it was. It set a new standard for cover versions that has rarely even been approached by anyone since.

All Apologies by Nirvana
“What else should I be? All apologies.” So begins one of the most heartbreaking tracks I have ever known, written by a man whose inability to accept what he was led to his suicide, only two years after the world first heard those words. The lines “I wish I was like you, easily amused” and “Everything is my fault, I’ll take all the blame” always seemed like they came from the pen of a tortured soul, but people are used to artistic types exploring the full range of emotions. In retrospect, it is hard to listen to this song without questioning why no one helped Cobain at the time, but what is done is done, and he left behind not just grunge anthems for generations of indie kids to mosh to in sweaty clubs, but also this beautiful, heartfelt song for them to put on when they arrive home alone.

The version on my iPod is the studio recording from In Utero, which, with the controversy-courting Rape Me as a double a-side, was the last Nirvana single to make the UK charts. There is also an incredible live version on the MTV Unplugged album, with (even more) stripped down guitars and Kurt’s vocals absolutely perfect. The fact that the guitar hook on what is in some ways a very complicated track is so simple, is testament to the whole bands’ intrinsic ability to make brilliantly appealing music. Whatever you know already about Nirvana, one listen to this track and it stays with you for a long time, especially the haunting repetition of “all in all is all we are” which, rather that fading, slurs towards the end of the track in a way that suggests Kurt just cannot sing anymore.

Ultimately, you know a track is good when it changes your emotion. If you’re not the kind of person who likes to dance, but just can’t resist when you hear a certain song, that song must have something special about it. Personally, I am not an overly emotional man, but All Apologies makes me cry.

All Day And All Of The Night by The Kinks
I first heard this song when a cover by The Stranglers made the top 10 in 1988. After it had been a hit I saw it in the bargain basket in Woolworths, knocked down from £1.50 to 79p. This was great because at that price I only needed eight pence on top of a week’s pocket money and I could afford two singles. I can’t remember what the other one I bought was, but it’s funny to think that 20 years later 79p is the standard price I pay for singles, makes me wonder how the artists actually make any money these days.

It was only when I caught my parents singing along to the new record I’d bought that I found out it was a cover, and the truth is the original is many times better.

In the early to mid sixties the Kinks released a few singles, this included, that really set a standard and went on to define what would be expected of rock music in the future. It is too easy to look upon those times as though The Beatles were leading the way and everyone else was just copying. In actual fact, while The Beatles were starting to explore what could be done within the boundaries of pop music, The Kinks were making simple, out and out rock, before the differences between the two had really even been defined.

Like so many great rock records, the genius of All Day And All Of The Night lies in its simplicity. A catchy, easily remembered lyric, combined with the incessant, banging guitar, puts this song in the ‘once heard never forgotten’ category. Also, despite being incredibly cool, it is the first song in this list which a DJ at a wedding might reasonably expect to achieve a good turn out on the dance floor. It may have been released in 1964, but this is what Air Guitar was invented for.

All I Really Want To Do by Bob Dylan
Like so many Dylan songs, I reckon this could be appreciated on paper almost as well as by listening to it. That, I think, is an excellent way for the many people who seem to object to his distinctly nasal singing style to begin to understand why so many millions of people, myself included (obviously!), have come to love it.

Essentially, I think of All I Really Want To Do as a poem as much as I think of it as a song. In each verse Dylan lists things that he has no desire to do to the lady in question, before concluding “all I really want to do, is baby be friends with you”. Personally, I can’t help thinking that this is a clear attempt to get to do certain other things to the songs intended recipient, and I think it is this cheeky attempt at reverse psychology style seduction that makes the track so appealing. The fact that Dylan appears to be struggling not to laugh while singing it adds weight to this, even if it is deliberate.

While musically this track is obviously very simple, the word play is fantastic, with a rhyming verse structure unlike any other song I know. Dylan’s meandering, folky style often gives him the opportunity to break convention by not rhyming things, but here he does the exact opposite. You have to admire lines like “I ain’t trying to straight-face you, race or chase you track or trace you, or disgrace you or displace you”, and undoubtedly part of the fun here is wondering what, if anything, half of it actually means. He certainly doesn’t straight-face me though, this track it has me grinning every time I hear it.

All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow
The vast majority of country music released in the last 25 years has been rubbish. Sadly, although the genre has some fantastic, world class acts in its ever more distant past, some time in the late seventies it stopped meaning anything relevant and gave way to both sickly, mawkish, over-sentimentality, and the kind of flag waving, exclusive patriotism which is always disturbing in any type of music.

This makes it all the more surprising when a track comes along that takes on elements of country music but actually does something with it that makes it seem relevant to modern, mainstream culture. Taking the best elements of story telling in a song, and applying them to the solo pop singer sound of the mid 1990s, Sheryl Crow’s debut single walks that tight rope ably, and with a great sing-along chorus to boot.

Although I know it’s not exactly fashionable, I have always liked the idea of songs that tell a story. It is very difficult to do that well, the results tend to be either spectacularly bad or excellent, with nothing in between. Fortunately, this is the latter.

Part of the reason All I Wanna Do achieves what it sets out to is the description of the characters. Sitting in a bar “at noon on a Toosday” (!) while opposite “the good people of the world are washing their cars on their lunch breaks”, Sheryl and her drinking mate Billy are outsiders where normal society is concerned, their main problem being what to do to pass the time, as opposed to the worries about money, work, commitment etc that plague the rest of us. The song appeals so much because really most people would like to be in that situation, whether they admit it or not. Let’s face it, who ultimately would not agree that all they want to do is have some fun? Certainly sounds good to me.

All My Best Friends Are Metalheads by Less Than Jake
Ska has always been a genre which I’ve found it difficult to make up my mind about. While Madness had some great tunes and fun sing-along choruses, there’s something about the enforced wackiness of their music that irritated me. There were some good ska records in the first half of the eighties, but more often that not they had a novelty element to them and were by bands who only ever really had one or two decent songs. It was like these people were trying to take pop music in a new direction, but it didn’t want to go. By the second half of the decade, in terms of commercial success it had all but fizzled out.

In the States though, and bear with me as this is not exactly my specialist subject, it seems to have become the music of choice with skate boarders. I first heard All My Best Friends Are Metalheads on Radio 1 in 2000 – I can’t remember if it was playlisted but I liked it straight away. It was a real blast of energy compared with so much other guitar music that was around at the time. Maybe ska-punk would be the new way forward for rock music in the 21st Century; it was certainly great to pogo to so it could happen.

Alas, it was not to be. All My Best Friends Are Metalheads reached number 51 in the charts, although as is often the case it deserved much more. Maybe it was hampered by the fact that despite its excellent title it didn’t seem to have anything to with the singers friends being into metal, or indeed, having metal heads, which would probably be even better. Whichever Radio 1 DJ played it though did me a favour, it’s a great record and although it sticks out of my collection like the proverbial sore thumb, I’m very happy to have it there.

All Or Nothing by The Small Faces
I don’t know much about The Small Faces themselves, but I have read before that along with The Kinks, they were one of the biggest influences on mid 90s Britpop, and it really shows here. This is a fantastic single which even if you knew nothing else at all by the band stands alone as a towering piece of mid sixties pop rock.

Unusually for a song which reached number one as early as 1966, it also has quite a complicated arrangement. The beginning sounds like you have accidentally turned on the track at the end, as though it is about to finish, but then the vocals kick in and the singer, Steve Marriot, sounds genuinely heartbroken. There have been so many successful pop songs in which the singer sounds like they haven’t put a moment’s thought into what the lyrics mean, but here, when he sings “I thought you’d listen to my reasoning, but now I see you don’t hear a thing”, the idea that he is distraught at losing the love of his life seems completely believable.

The haunting backing vocals, chanting “all or nothing” during the quiet bit near the end of the song, are brilliantly juxtaposed by Marriot’s screaming the same words. To get across that feeling of raw anguish, but at the same time making the track accessible to a wide audience, is no mean feat. The fact that All Or Nothing was number one in 1966, combined with the influence this band had on popular music 30 years later, are clear evidence that they achieved it.

Strangely, unlike a lot of other great music from the sixties, this hardly seems to have aged at all. I heard a cover of it by Starsailor from a compilation album Radio 1 released in 2002 to celebrate 50 years of the charts, and they hardly changed it. You could argue this was down to that band being limited by their own creative ability, but I think it was also at least partly because it is so good. All Or Nothing needs nothing extra to make it sound fantastic, it is already.

All Summer Long by Kid Rock
Sometimes a song comes along that it is cool to dislike. Maybe I just like to champion the underdog, or maybe, deep down, I just have no taste. Either way, I have a confession to make – I think All Summer Long is great.

One major criticism that I have read about this song is that it is just a rip-off of Sweet Home Alabama. This is ridiculous for two reasons. Firstly, the entire track is based around the piano riff from Warren Zevvon’s Halloween party favourite Werewolves Of London, which is nothing at all to do with Lynyrd Skynyrd. Kid Rock just seems to have noticed that they have a similar chord progression and put the two together.

Secondly, it’s not like he’s trying to hide the Sweet Home Alabama connection, that is actually what the song is about, and he mentions the title in the chorus. Personally, I think the idea of writing a song about a song is a great idea, not sure if anyone else has tried it but they should.

It is true, of course, that the lyrics to All Summer Long are completely absurd. I read a review in The Guardian which said if you weren’t paying careful attention while listening you could be left with the impression that he was making love to the lake as opposed to by it. Also the idea of going out of your way to make love to your favourite song is quite hilarious, personally I love Bigmouth Strikes Again by The Smiths but I think the wife might be a bit put off if I cranked it up on the CD player at bedtime. Really, you have to question why, as a 17 year old in the summer of 1989, Mr Rock’s favourite song was a rock record that was already 13 years old, when everyone else was listening to Ride On Time by Black Box. I think if he had been though this would have been a very different record indeed.

In the end, I think the best approach to such an unashamed slice of Americana is to judge it on its merits, and it cannot be denied that this track is very catchy and never attempts to be anything more than a bit of fun. That, after all, is one of the main purposes of pop music. It’s not a classic, it’s not even very close to being amongst the best songs of this year, but it does make me laugh, and that’s why I like it.

All The Small Things by Blink 182
Released in March 2000, this had, in my opinion, at least a month as the Best Single of the 21st Century, and eight and a half years later it still sounds great.

American frat-boy rock is a genre that can often be very bad, but Blink 182 have consistently walked the line between serious rock and puerile nonsense carefully, staying on the right side almost all the time. I say almost bearing in mind that this was the lead track from an album called Enema Of The State, but I think they can be forgiven the odd rubbish pun about bottoms when their music is this good.

Against the expectation of the genre, All The Small Things is actually a very simple love song. I think the reason it was such a big success was that the subject, doing nice little things for the person you love, could be excessively twee under certain circumstances, but combined with the rock-lite guitar and distinctly Californian nasal whine of the vocalist it avoids becoming a cliché. This, along with the genuinely funny video, and the fact that it sounds so perfect on the radio, made this a track an absolute joy, and one that has not diminished with time.

All The Things She Said by t.A.T.u.
Of all the gimmicks used to sell pop records, Russian teenage mock-lesbianism was definitely one of the more creative. Although a huge success at the time, the marketing was so memorable, such a one off, that it was also t.A.T.u.’s downfall, because they were never going to either make the massive hype last or create it again, so they were destined to sink into obscurity, which, after another very similar single and a failed attempt to win the Eurovision song contest for Russia, they duly did.

Not that I would ever want to discourage attractive young ladies from kissing each other on Top Of The Pops, but the irony of all this is that this is such a great, towering pop record that it really didn’t need any of that marketing, I am sure it would have been huge anyway.

The secret behind All The Things She Said’s success is entirely in the production, and that comes courtesy of pop dinosaur Trevor Horn, who first came to prominence when he reached number one pretending to be a group called The Buggles on Video Killed The Radio Star, and later was the man behind Frankie Goes To Hollywood. I’m not really a fan of either, but if you listen to Frankie’s biggest hits it’s clear he has the ability to start with lyrics that barely even constitute a song and turn them into something enormous. That’s what he does here – it’s not as if the vocal contributions by t.A.T.u. themselves really make much difference, it’s the producers vision, maintaining the pop sensibility while giving the track a dark, desperate, almost sinister feel, that makes it so great.

So it is that t.A.T.u. are destined to remain no more than an irritatingly punctuated memory, and to be fair, this is probably quite right to. Ever since pop music began there have been acts that had massive but short lived success. This track is proof that this is not always because they are rubbish, sometimes they only really have one idea, but if it’s an idea that results in something as good as this then long may it continue.

All These Things I’ve Done by The Killers
Hot Fuss is one of my favourite albums of the noughties. The first two singles, the incredible Mr Brightside and the huge hit Somebody Told Me, were such a breath of fresh air in a stagnating music scene, and installed The Killers as the kings of indie disco.

As if that wasn’t enough, Hot Fuss also had a lot more to offer, as the reflective, thoughtful All These Things I’ve Done was to prove. It was not as big a hit as it’s predecessors because by this point millions of people owned the album, but it did complete The Killers cross over into the world of mainstream radio, which is rare for a band who were and still are filed under the very odd title ‘alternative’.

When I first heard this track, after buying Hot Fuss, I realised that this could be the point where it all goes wrong. The song that made me love the band, Mr Brightside, was so brilliant that it would be unfair to expect them to have other tracks on the album that good, that immediate, but was the world really ready to take a step back to the electro ballads of the early 80s? Well, yes and no. No because recording out and out love songs in this genre, like Soft Cell or Spandau ballet 20 years earlier, would probably have been a step to far in terms of credibility (and listenability if there is such a word). Yes, because although there is a fair bit of naval gazing contemplation going on here, it does not really seem to be a love song, and a similar guitar sound to their big hits helped this track become a strangely modern take on eighties retro.

It is a sign of The Killers seemingly natural ability to write endearing pop songs that even this reflective, slow building track stays with the listener long after it’s finished. Intriguingly, this is not, as you might expect, because of the chorus, but more down to the repetition of the inspired line “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” two thirds of the way in. When Robbie Williams started singing that line in front of millions of people during his set at Live 8, he just confirmed The Killers’ knack of writing music that has the magic formula of having mass appeal but still remaining very cool. Later on, when they came out on stage themselves, this was the only song they performed. I bet if you asked the crowd what Killers song they wanted if they could only hear one, this wouldn’t have been the choice. I doubt anyone was complaining after though.

All Together Now by The Farm
In 1989 and 1990, there were people in the North West of England who believed that the region was about to reclaim its title as centre of the pop culture universe. Dance music as we now know it had only just started to take off in the UK when certain bands began combining the sounds and techniques of that genre with the best of eighties indie. Although there were other bands who would go on to far more success and critical acclaim, at the time, leading the charge at the top end of the pop charts, were The Farm.

All Together Now is, in several ways, a genuinely unusual record. The most obvious way is its subject matter. After a slow building introduction comes the line “remember boy that your forefathers died, lost in millions for a country’s pride” and it is clear that the singer has something on his mind other than the usual boy-meets-girl shenanigans that we’re used to from singles this successful. It soon becomes apparent that this stroke of genius is actually a song about the football match that, legend has it, happened one Christmas Day during World War One between the occupants of the German and English trenches. At a stroke The Farm had created one of the most unifying, positive pop songs ever, and also arguably the only ever good song on the subject of football.

The anthemic qualities of the chorus are really what holds this track together, and as you might expect from a chant-along, terraces favourite, it’s nothing complicated. You could argue that when it was re-recorded for Euro 2004 with the phrase “in no mans’ land” replaced with “for En-ger-land” some of the tracks’ meaning was lost in translation, but I get the feeling The Farm always meant for it to be enjoyed by drunk people in a line with there arms around each other. The fact that it’s brilliant is an added bonus.

All You Good Good People by Embrace
I am starting to become concerned about the number of times the words “soaring”, “epic” and “anthemic” are appearing in these reviews. After listening to All You Good Good People on the way to work this morning, I decided I’d better ask for a thesaurus for Christmas.

In 1997, when Embrace first appeared on the scene at the tail end of Britpop, I must admit I was not all that impressed. I did not know how the music industry was ever going to attempt to continue the fantastic output of so many British bands in the previous few years, but I was sure it was not with dour Yorkshiremen making plodding, earnest but very boring rock records.

It wasn’t until a friend pointed out that this track was actually very good, and I noticed I had it on a compilation album, that I actually had a proper listen and realised I was going to have to cut Embrace some serious slack. What, on first listen (probably on the top 40) I had thought was very dull, was in fact a slow building but gorgeous record, the gruff accented vocals perfectly complimented by a brass section, heading skyward in a chorus of “la la la la la la la”. When the song comes back down again it is quite astounding, as it whirls around and fades away to the sound of the singer pleading “listen to me”.

Listening to this song in 2008 it is also really quite remarkable how much it sounds like Snow Patrol, especially Run, with its slow, meaningful beginning, soaring middle and quiet ending. I love that track, but it had never occurred to me before that they might have taken inspiration from a band half as successful who, at first, I didn’t even like much. Now that I’ve thought about it, I want to go round their houses and check their CD collections.

All You Need Is Love by The Beatles
Since pop music first became a recognisable force in popular culture, there have been a few songs that just become so well known they become part of the public consciousness. Your grandma knows them, and so will your kids. Often these songs are known more for their novelty value than anything approaching quality (YMCA springs to mind), but just occasionally, as with All You Need Is Love, it is both.

The very simple lyrics were apparently deliberate. John Lennon was asked to write a song for the first ever global television show, broadcast live in many countries, and he wanted to come up with something that would be understood by as many people as possible. The concept of love being all that is required for absolutely any situation is really the ultimate hippy sentiment, one that The Beatles might have been expected, at least a year or so later in their career, to have expressed in some heavily drug influenced, complicated track. In the circumstances though, Lennon clearly wanted to write something relatively simple, and in doing so got his message across in a way that made this one of the most well known and instantly recognisable pop songs in history.

It says something about the reverence in which this song is held, that Tony Blair’s government were prepared to overlook the fact that it begins to the tune of the French national anthem when selecting a song for Her Majesty The Queen to sway along to at the ceremony in the Dome to mark the beginning of the new millennium. John Lennon was a man of many contradictions, and so it seems suitable that this track both embodies the hippy ideology while clearly appealing to an audience so big most of them probably have little idea about it, and is seen by many as a very British song despite starting with a foreign national anthem.

For me All You Need Is Love represents the kind of musical simplicity that at once astounds you by sounding so easy, but at the same time is incredibly hard to replicate. Any discussion of this track really goes beyond the realms of an individual song and becomes part of a wider admiration of what makes up our popular culture. I think John, Paul, George and Ringo really are the only people who could make something this fantastic and this successful seem like just another day at the office.

Alright by Supergrass
One of the most recognisable songs of the mid 90s Britpop era, both because it was such a huge success, and because it is so unlike anything else which was big at the time.

I don’t know if it was a clever, well thought out plan on the part of the record company, but Alright, officially listed as a double a-side with Time, was the fourth single to be lifted from the fantastic album I Should Coco. The singles had each been more successful than the last, but Alright is such an instantly catchy song it is hard to see how anyone who heard the album would not think it deserved to be a single immediately, and it sent Supergrass’ career into the stratosphere, sending the album straight to number one and becoming one of the biggest airplay hits of the decade.

None of that really matters though. What is important is that this track is three minutes of pure summertime youthful exuberance, with a completely mad, rollicking piano and lyrics about cleaning your teeth and driving a car across a field. On paper it all sounds a bit Chas and Dave, but it captured the zeitgeist, at a time when teenage Britain had suddenly stopped gazing glumly at the floor and decided instead to drink, pogo, and leap about in celebration of all that is good about life. If Alright were to be summed up in one word it would have to be ‘happy’, and as there are plenty of songs on this list for which that word simply never arises, it never fails to make me smile (and sing along) when it crops up on shuffle. Listening to it while writing this, I realise that I should play it more often instead of leaving it to the whim of my iPod.

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life by Monty Python
People who know how much I like music tend to look at me a bit funny when I say this is one of my favourite records ever. I mean it though, and I’m talking top ten, not just top one thousand.

Oddly, for someone who’s not a huge fan of Monty Python in general, The Life Of Brian is also my favourite film of all time, but that does go some way to explain my love for this record. For me, this has everything. I love the silly chorus, the silly whistling and the silly talking at the end, but my favourite part is the following verse:

Life’s a piece of ****
When You Look At It
Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke it’s true
You see it’s all a show
Keep ‘em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

The thing is on one level the song is completely silly, but on another level it perfectly sums up what I have discovered to be the best recommendation for how to live my life during the first 31 years of my existence. Not respected poetry, not deep and meaningful philosophy, not the Bible (and I have had a try with all three), but Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life by Monty Python.

Putting aside the incredibly astute satire on the life and times of one Jesus Christ which is the main theme of the film, to me this song simply says that yes, whatever way you look at it, life is ****. There is no way of avoiding this absolutely clear fact. People are dying needlessly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the environment is doomed due to man’s greed and stupidity, Jeremy Clarkson exists, so does Chris Moyles, and the X Factor Finalists are number one. So the first step is to accept that life in general is sh*t and there’s nothing we can do about it. Once we have overcome that, we might as well just do our best to enjoy it. Or, to put it another way…

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle
Don’t grumble, give a whistle
And this’ll help things turn out for the best

Metaphorically, that’s what I do. I don’t grumble, I give a whistle. That’s why I listen to music. That’s why I love my wife. That’s why I like to travel. That’s why I love watching comedy on the telly. That’s why I will always enjoy listening to Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life.

Always On My Mind by The Pet Shop Boys
A strange noise a bit like air being sucked out of a balloon, five seconds of fast, electro build up and bang, you’re in! A fantastic, eighties power pop tune blasts out as synthesisers scream along in the background like fireworks, then Neil Tennant preposterously starts singing a song previously crooned ten times slower by Elvis Presley. Another instalment in the argument that there is such thing as a good cover version, this is The Pet Shop Boys at their ridiculous best.

Being as I am obsessed with the pop charts, this track has always been a bit of a difficult one for me. On the one hand, it is clearly a great record. I was 10 years old when I bought it on 7” vinyl and it’s still a joy to hear 21 years later. This was PSBs second fantastic number one single that year alone, they were consistently producing brilliantly unique pop records, and the charts were theirs for the taking.

The problem is not this record itself, but what it prevented. By being Christmas number one 1987, it denied that position to the best Christmas record ever recorded. However great this Pet Shop Boys cover is, Fairytale Of New York is one of my favourite singles of all time, and that fact that it has never been number one, especially now that it has made the top 10 four times, just seems stupid. I remember seeing Shane MacGowan on The Top 10 Christmas Songs on Channel 4, and he bawled “you were always on my mind, you were always on my mind” and then said “I mean, any ****er could do that”. That is a bit disingenuous, as already mentioned Always On My Mind is a great record, but Fairytale Of New York should have been number one. In fact it should be every Christmas.

Putting aside its unfortunate monopolisation of the top of the charts that Christmas, this really is a classic addition to the Pet Shop Boys catalogue of work, and they continued adding more great stuff to it well into the next decade. Since then they have become much more of a niche act, and their fantastic early singles are now overlooked somewhat by people who have heard the fan base only purchases that still occasionally shoot them into the upper reaches of the top 40 and then disappear without trace the next week. This is a shame because there are several other acts from the eighties who were nowhere near as good but have made a living out of cleverly marketing their back catalogues. It doesn’t matter much though, I doubt the PSBs need the money, and they still seem to be enjoying themselves (more than ever actually, bearing in mind their often sullen appearance at their creative peak). If I was recommending this band to anyone it would be important to make sure they concentrate on 1985 – 1993 or they might think I was a bit daft. They really were fantastic though, although I think Shane MacGowan may still disagree.

America by Razorlight
I recently saw a copy of Q Magazine on the shelf in Co-Op with Razorlight front man Johnny Borrell on the cover. In reference to their new album, the headline was “Finally – Razorlight are as good as Johnny Borrell thinks they are”. I don’t know much about them personally, but it made me smile.

Well, I say I don’t know much about them, but I have got their last album, and for a while I loved it. It just sort of got boring after a bit, but maybe I listened to it too many times. In a way they are probably the perfect band for iPod shuffle – any one of their tracks is a pleasure to hear, more than 2 and there’d be a danger of nodding off.

I don’t mean to be disparaging though, America is one of several great songs they’ve done. It’s apparently not just me who thinks so either, as it actually sneaked a week at number one in the charts in 2006. This was an especially unusual achievement as it was the second single from its parent album Razorlight, released three months after the album came out. That suggests there must be something about this track that sets it aside from their other material as a great choice for a single, and it does sound very good on the radio, crossing boundaries which make it cool enough for Radio 1 but not too edgy for those crappy local contemporary rock stations.

I think I remember reading at the time this was out that Borrell wrote the song while bored in a hotel room while on tour in America. I immediately wished I hadn’t read that because I find such a literal interpretation of lyrics can sometimes spoil my enjoyment of a song, but it did get me thinking about the chorus. All my life there’s been trouble in America too, and maybe he was just taking a moment to reflect on how much that country has an effect on what we see and do in the rest of the world. Then again, maybe that’s just me grasping around for any sign of deeper meaning in a song I like because it makes me feel better than the thought that, but for the fact that he was on tour in America not, say, Asia, I’m not driving along the motorway singing “All my life, watching Sri Lanka”. In fact, if those had been the words, I think I would have concluded that it was about cricket.

American Idiot by Green Day
The title track to my favourite album of the 21st Century, American Idiot was an absolute revelation. It came at a time when that great nation, with its enormous, all encompassing influence on every aspect of life in the developed world, seemed to be moving away, culturally, socially and politically, from everyone else. They held an election, an absolute buffoon almost won, and then when he realised he hadn’t won he went to court and somehow became president anyway. That this madman was in charge seemed like a travesty of justice impossible in the kind of civilised, democratic country everyone thought the USA was, but then, four years later, when he actually got re-elected fairly, it seemed that the population of America had completely taken leave of its senses.

The best music often arises from the most unlikely scenarios, and what Green Day seemed to be trying to do with American Idiot was make the rest of the world realise that they weren’t all insane. Hearing them stating how they did not want to be “part of a redneck agenda” and that they were living in “an age of paranoia” was as big a relief as watching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. It made me realise that there were people trying hard to help the US electorate realise where they had gone wrong.

The great thing about Green Day of course, is that unlike a lot of people over the years who have been moved to make a political statement via their music (Shoot The Dog by George Michael anyone? I thought not), they were able to keep it simple enough to fit their well trodden (and almost always excellent) formula of loud, melodic, three minute rock songs, appealing to a generation who were not yet even old enough to vote. Then, two years later, Barack Obama took centre stage, and the eight year nightmare is now about to end.

Ironically, the rest of American Idiot the album is notably lacking in the aforementioned well trodden Green Day formula, expanding their repertoire into soaring rock ballads and, perhaps most amazingly of all, tracks that were over twice as long as this one. All at once they confirmed themselves as one of the best, most innovative but also most reliable rock bands on the planet, and as the kind of guys you’d like to know. I believe they have new material due to be released soon, and I can’t wait.

American Pie by Don McLean
I remember hearing American Pie on the radio when I was a kid and singing along, but the first time I really paid it much attention was in 1991 when it was re-issued, and made number 12 in the charts. The excuse for the re-issue was that the all new CD single format had made it possible to release the entire track as a single, whereas on the original release in 1972 it was not technically possible to get all eight minutes and 29 seconds on seven inches of vinyl, so it simply faded out half way through, and faded back up again on the other side.

Hearing it on the charts in 1991, but still being several years away from actually owning a CD player, I sought out the original in a second hand shop, and eventually, annoyed at having to turn it over half way through to hear the other side, I bought the LP of the same name. It’s been one of my favourite songs ever since.

In many ways American Pie is more than just an incredibly good song, it’s actually an amazing achievement. Writing and recording a song that becomes so well known and yet also so highly regarded is not a bad thing to be remembered for, but when that track is so unusual, not just in length but in content too, that is something that does not happen often.

Of course American Pie is not just a piece of rock history, it is actually about rock history. There are whole essays online analysing who each of the characters is and what it all means. It always seems strange to me that it is widely accepted that Bob Dylan features heavily (The Jester, I think), because it appears that by thinking of Dylan during the writing of the song McLean, incredibly, came up with something as good as anything Dylan ever did. There really are not many people I would say that about, but American Pie is simply a masterpiece.

The song also serves as a good reminder never to take any notice at all of UK chart positions, something that I am often guilty of forgetting. McLean had two number ones, with ‘Vincent’ and ‘Crying’, but this one stalled in runners up position behind ‘Without You’ by Nilsson. I’m not saying that was a bad record, but better than American Pie? I think not. To add insult to injury, the song did eventually reach the very top, in a truly awful, ill-advised cover by Madonna 28 years later. I do not agree that some songs are untouchable, but to make this fantastic song sound as boring as Madonna did is actually quite a mind boggling achievement in itself. If you don’t know it already, take my advice and seek out the original.

[SheriffFatman]

American Pie by Don McLean
I remember hearing American Pie on the radio when I was a kid and singing along, but the first time I really paid it much attention was in 1991 when it was re-issued, and made number 12 in the charts. The excuse for the re-issue was that the all new CD single format had made it possible to release the entire track as a single, whereas on the original release in 1972 it was not technically possible to get all eight minutes and 29 seconds on seven inches of vinyl, so it simply faded out half way through, and faded back up again on the other side.

Hearing it on the charts in 1991, but still being several years away from actually owning a CD player, I sought out the original in a second hand shop, and eventually, annoyed at having to turn it over half way through to hear the other side, I bought the LP of the same name. It’s been one of my favourite songs ever since.

In many ways American Pie is more than just an incredibly good song, it’s actually an amazing achievement. Writing and recording a song that becomes so well known and yet also so highly regarded is not a bad thing to be remembered for, but when that track is so unusual, not just in length but in content too, that is something that does not happen often.

Of course American Pie is not just a piece of rock history, it is actually about rock history. There are whole essays online analysing who each of the characters is and what it all means. It always seems strange to me that it is widely accepted that Bob Dylan features heavily (The Jester, I think), because it appears that by thinking of Dylan during the writing of the song McLean, incredibly, came up with something as good as anything Dylan ever did. There really are not many people I would say that about, but American Pie is simply a masterpiece.

The song also serves as a good reminder never to take any notice at all of UK chart positions, something that I am often guilty of forgetting. McLean had two number ones, with ‘Vincent’ and ‘Crying’, but this one stalled in runners up position behind ‘Without You’ by Nilsson. I’m not saying that was a bad record, but better than American Pie? I think not. To add insult to injury, the song did eventually reach the very top, in a truly awful, ill-advised cover by Madonna 28 years later. I do not agree that some songs are untouchable, but to make this fantastic song sound as boring as Madonna did is actually quite a mind boggling achievement in itself. If you don’t know it already, take my advice and seek out the original.

Anarchy In The UK by The Sex Pistols
In 1992, when I was 15 years old, I bought Never Mind The b****cks Here’s The Sex Pistols on cassette. I had read in NME about how it was one of the most influential albums of all time, but this seemed odd because I didn’t actually know anyone who knew any of the songs on it. I also though the sleeve was pretty cool, and the idea of featuring the work ‘b****cks’ in the title of anything appealed to me. I had been collecting old number one singles for a few years, but this was really the first time I had made an effort to explore music that I didn’t ever hear on the radio, and I didn’t know what to expect. I wasn’t disappointed.

Great music often evokes a range of emotions, but Anarchy In The UK is more basic than that. From the very beginning, with Johnny Rotten’s sneering laughter before he goes on to proclaim “I am an Anti-Christ, I am an anar-khist” (surely one of the best opening lines in music history) this is about just one thing – anger. I have very little knowledge of paramilitary groups in the 1970s, and therefore have no idea what Rotten is going on about when he mentions the MPLA, UDA and IRA in the last verse, but he still leaves the listener with the absolutely clear impression that he is not happy.

Another acronym he uses, the NME, I am much more familiar with. I could never work out if the line “I use the NME” was name-checking a magazine with which he had similar views, or if he was actually being disparaging about the fact that they would print and agree with everything he said.

As is well documented elsewhere, The Sex Pistols record label EMI dropped the band straight after this was released, so it only ever reached number 38 in the charts. What it signified though was a complete change that would come about quickly in the music industry. The first half of the seventies were characterised by bloated, wealthy rock bands making so called ‘progressive’ music which was becoming ever more boring. With this one single the Sex Pistols changed everything, redressing the balance and forcing the music industry to focus on what Britain’s youth wanted to hear, something new that spoke to them about their own lives.

The Sex Pistols were never great musicians, but without their attitude on their one great album and handful of singles the music world would be a much more boring place, even today. We should be grateful.

Angels by Robbie Williams
When planning our wedding, the wife and I asked the band if they would play Is This Love? by Bob Marley & The Wailers as our first song, but they didn’t know it. They did do a pretty cool version of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You though, so we settled on that and everyone was happy.

What we didn’t know, and would have tried everything to avoid if we did, was that part of their repertoire towards the end of the night involves getting the bride and groom in the middle of the dance floor, asking as many guests as possible to link arms in a big circle around them, before launching headfirst into Robbie Williams’ pension plan. So it was that The Happiest Day Of My Life ended being surrounded by staggering, howling drunken friends and relatives, shuffling around a West Country hotel’s function room while the love of my life quietly sang the words to ‘Arseholes’ by The Shirehorses in my ear. It makes me cringe just thinking about it, but it is a happy memory. I suppose.

So yes, my iPod contains the one song that everyone can still remember all the words to, even after ten pints. Why? Well, actually, despite everything it represents, it is actually quite a good song. In a way I think it would have to be to become that popular. It’s like the pop ‘Wonderwall’. I have a horrible feeling that the way this soaring, heart-warming track was loved by the public may have inspired whichever evil pop svengali is behind the complete drivel that Westlife have been churning out for the last 10 years, but even so, that’s not Robbie’s fault. He was just singing a nice song.

I am a sucker for pop chart trivia (I’d be great at pub quizzes if they just had music questions. I mean, who cares about sport anyway?) so it would be remiss of me if I didn’t mention that this and White Christmas are the only songs ever to sell a million copies in the UK without entering the top 3. It always bemuses me that this was the fourth single to be taken from the album Life Thru A Lens. I wonder how close the record company were to leaving it at three singles when South Of The Border only peaked at 14? I think Mr William’s career would have been very different if they had.

The Angry Mob by The Kaiser Chiefs
The Kaiser Chiefs’ first two singles were brilliant, and it was never going to be possible to maintain that level of quality, or the level of excitement that surrounded the band. They had to carve themselves a niche, otherwise they would quickly just end up sounding like a parody of themselves.

Early indications from their second album, Yours Truly Angry Mob, were not good. First single Ruby was a stomping singalong effort that was very catchy at first, but when radio stations attempting to grab a slice of the bands credibility played the song over and over they actually had the opposite effect – the credibility went, and Ruby had started to sound distinctly like everything else that you knew off by heart but wouldn’t care if you never heard again. In these circumstances, the title of the second single, Everything Is Average Nowadays, seemed particularly unfortunate.

This was a shame, because the album actually contained a few pleasant surprises, The Angry Mob being one of them. Starting fairly slowly and sounding fairly average, after about two minutes it all slows down, gets quieter and slightly sinister, a bit like the fantastic instrumental bit one minute into Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand. Then, with an extended guitar hook winding away in the background, The Angry Mob suddenly becomes a completely different song, with Ricky Wilson chanting about reading newspapers and being stubborn.

After a couple of listens it appears that this is a song of uncharacteristic complexity, probably about the right wing tabloid reading majority that seem to have a frightening amount of control over the news agenda in this country. I used to really hate those people, but anyone who gets Jonathon Ross off the telly for three months is fine by me.

So there is unexpected depth to the Kaiser Chiefs, both lyrically and musically. I suspect that going down this route they are never going to reclaim a fanbase the size of their I Predict A Riot days, but for those who do check them out, if there’s more stuff of this quality it can only be a good thing.

Animal Nitrate by Suede
In the early nineties I stopped buying Smash Hits and started reading the NME instead. Back then it was mostly black and while, was slightly bigger in size than a tabloid newspaper, and had no staples. This change in format away from glossy, quality packaging to more earthy, serious paper which left ink on your hands was a very deliberate attempt by me (and probably millions of others) to reflect the change in my musical tastes. I had been listening to Kylie Minogue and Jive Bunny, now I was listening to Suede.

Animal Nitrate is wonderful. It was brilliant then and it still is now. It has an authentic, under-produced, clanging guitar sound that I hadn’t heard before, and sleazy lyrics that told me I was now being addressed by someone distinctly different to the polished smiles and poodle haircuts brigade I was used to. Brett Anderson sang about council houses, and I lived in one. He was talking to me.

The NME featured long and protracted debates around Anderson, who apparently claimed in an interview that he was a homosexual who had never had a homosexual experience. I had also never had a homosexual experience and was pretty damn sure I never wanted to, but the chance to read about such things, and the weekly comments with equal amounts of readers saying that he was mad as were saying they agreed with him, just added to the mysticism surrounding their music. This casual ambiguity, combined with brilliant singalong guitar music in what seemed to me a completely new style (but I realise now was a bit of a Bowie pastiche) made Suede seem great.

In the end musical progress, if you want to call it that, over took Suede quite quickly. A year after they released their debut album Oasis arrived on the scene and indie music would soon never so be effeminate again. For a while though, Suede were one of a few bands that lead the way in English guitar music, and listening to Animal Nitrate now it is clear why.

Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2) by Pink Floyd
Until recent years, this was pretty much all I really knew by Pink Floyd. Being 2 years old when it was released, and having older sisters who empathised greatly with the anti-teacher lyrics, it was one of the songs that always seemed to be around when I was a kid. My love of it then was helped no end by the novelty of the fact that a large proportion of the vocals were recorded by people not much older than me.

It’s actually very easy to see why this might appeal to children. Not only is it sung by them, and the ultimate statement of rebellion against school, but until the brilliant guitar solo that the single version fades away to, it is really very simple. Short, chantable verses and an uncomplicated melody make it seem like Pink Floyd were aiming directly for eleven year olds, and maybe they were. Even at a young age though, I saw the irony in the fact that these kids, by singing “we don’t need no education”, were proving that they clearly did.

My early introduction to pop and rock music was almost entirely through radio (Radio 1 in fact), so bearing in mind that this was Pink Floyd’s first single for ten years, and their last top twenty hit, it’s hardly surprising that I didn’t know anything else by them. When I got a bit older I was vaguely aware that some people held this band in great reverence and considered them one of the greatest acts of all time, but I never had any idea why, and not much inclination to find out. It’s a nice enough song, but hardly earth shattering.

When I was at university there was a pub just down the road which had a free juke box (I think the coin thing just broke and no one bothered mending it), which was great, but it had a Pink Floyd live album on it, which wasn’t. Admittedly, I was usually extremely drunk, but every song seemed very boring, mostly instrumental and went on for about 20 minutes. Hardly the stuff of legend, although there were always some men with big beards in the corner by the window who loved it.

Since getting married I have been introduced by my father-in-law, who was slightly horrified at the fact that my vast musical knowledge was confined mostly to singles, to the album Wish You Were Here. Unfortunately for his generation though the days of albums are over, and I just downloaded the title track, which I have to admit is very good. There’s also quite a funny cover of it on The Ecleftic by Wyclef Jean, which I introduced him to and he was even more horrified than before.

Another Chance by Roger Sanchez
Although there is a lot of music on my iPod that makes me want to dance, there is very little that would actually be considered dance music. I know that a huge amount of people like it, and I’m in danger of sounding a bit of an idiot by writing off an entire genre containing half of the popular music from the last twenty years, but I never really got dance music. I like instruments and lyrics, and I’ve often stood in nightclubs watching hundreds of people enjoying themselves to techno and wondering why I am different, why it’s just not for me. That is before the pub licensing hours were extended of course, since then I’ve not been in a nightclub. I mean, why would you? It’s not like the music’s any good. I’m not going to get all hypocritical and make out I’ve never taken drugs before, but I have certainly never taken anything that made Ministry Of Sound compilations seem good.

Every genre has it’s moments though, so every now and then a record comes along which is officially considered dance music but which I know really is just very good pop. Another Chance is one of them. More than anything this track just makes me want to go “Doof, Doof” really loud, it has the best fake drum bit of any dance record ever.

I have absolutely know idea who Roger Sanchez is, or indeed if he is actually a real person, and not just a series of networked computers in some German teenager’s bedroom. Either way, he made an absolute cracker here. The minimalist lyrics typical of the genre, which a Google search has told me are “If I had another chance tonight, I’d try to tell you that the things we had were right” repeated nine times, are predictably not what makes the track great. The stand out element is the spacey, synthesised sound over the top of the beat, barely a tune in its own right but at the same time strangely addictive. This is very much a track where a number of unlikely ideas are brought together to make the whole much greater than the sum of its parts.

So there you go, one of very few tracks that will have me up on the dance floor at the same time as everyone else, instead of being there dancing on my own when everyone else sits down because the DJ has finally relented after the tenth time I asked for The Smiths. Mr Sanchez, I salute you.

Another Girl Another Planet by The Only Ones
In January this year, while hanging round waiting for the wife to try on multiple potential purchases from George at Asda, I spotted a 61 track compilation album called NME Classics. I stopped reading NME a few years ago, because although I will probably never like any publication as much as I liked NME when I was in my late teens, there comes a time when you have to accept that you have grown up, and frankly no amount of praise will ever convince me that Fall Out Boy are any good. I am still very loyal to the brand though, and this album fascinated me because even though it contained what it said were NMEs favourite songs of the seventies, eighties and nineties, I only knew about half of them. I bought it, and it was my best musical purchase this year.

Another Girl Another Planet didn’t stand out from the track list, because I’d never heard of the song or the band, but it is truly fantastic. Being as it is from the late seventies, it is pitched somewhere brilliantly between The Sex Pistols and Herman’s Hermits, with the seemingly sweet, innocent, wide eyed sentiment and the tunefulness of I’m Into Something Good, but with the sneering Englishness of, say, Pretty Vacant. At first, although it’s much less frenetic, it reminded me more than a little of Teenage Kicks by The Undertones, so it was no great surprise when I did some research online to find it was one of John Peel’s all time favourites. It always seems strange that he is credited with liking (and often discovering) so much of the music that I love, but whenever I tuned into his show he’d be playing some obscure and completely impenetrable looping feedback by a Japanese death metal come electro funk band.

Something I only noticed after a while is that if you listen more carefully to Another Girl Another Planet, despite the apparently syrupy, space age subject matter of the chorus, there is actually something much darker going on underneath. I have no idea who The Only Ones were or are, but bearing in mind the verse “You always get under my skin, I don’t find it irritating, You always play to win, I don’t need rehabilitating”, it is not much of a stretch of the imagination to think maybe the singer had a drug problem. Some of the best music definitely comes from some of the worst mental states.

There will be more in this list from NME Classics. That album, and this track in particular, which Wikipedia reliably (?) informs me has never been a hit anywhere in the world, has served to remind me that despite my love of the single and the pop charts, there is a whole world of fantastic music out there that most people will probably never even hear.

Another Rock And Roll Christmas by Gary Glitter
When I started writing these reviews in October, I had a few decisions to make. One of them was about the fluidity of my iTunes, it’s changing all the time. It’s only 4 gigabytes, and it’s full, so every time I add a song I have to take one off. I decided that each day, I would simply write about whatever song came next alphabetically, and not worry about what I deleted before I got round to writing about it, or what got added to a letter after I’d completed it.

What I wasn’t thinking about though was Christmas, the one time of year when, in an effort to get into the spirit of things, I pepper my play list with a sprinkling of songs that I acknowledge are not actually that good. I kind of hoped that they’d all be deleted again before I got to review them, but rules is rules, so here we are.

What this does mean is that I have an opportunity to consider the music of a man who has featured in the media an awful lot in the last few years, but not exactly for the quality of his output. In fact his music has become almost completely ignored, with the only exception being the odd brief clip of Top Of The Pops appearances on news reports when he’s appearing in court, or being refused entry to another Asian country. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we should be celebrating the music of a convicted paedophile, much less lining his bank account, but it is odd. He has committed a crime so heinous it is as though his musical career has been wiped from history, and I’m not sure that’s happened to anyone before. I remember seeing one of those countdown shows on Channel 4 of the best selling singles ever. I Love You Love Me Love was number seventy something, but they skipped straight past it.

To give him credit, Another Rock And Roll Christmas is very festive and great fun, which is why it’s on here. Coming in the mid eighties at the end of his chart success, it harked back to the Roy Wood style of Christmas song, with everything Yuletide cliché you can possibly think of thrown into the production. It is also quite a catchy song too, and complete nonsense, just like so many Christmas songs before it. Fortunately, unlike almost every other song of its genre, it does not seem to have a children’s choir on it, with Glitter doing most of the backing vocals himself. Really, I think that would be too much to stomach.

Anytime Anyplace Anywhere by Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
A slow, synthesised introduction, played under the clinking, shouting, cheering and talking sounds you hear in a busy pub if you sit alone and just listen, gives way to Jim Bob’s unmistakable vocals, and the best opening lines agit-pop electo indie has to offer: “The tequila sun is rising and the Harvey’s Bristol moon is sinking / put the Binatone on Snooze, open up some Special Brews and start drinking”. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Carter USM on alcoholism.

This was a very early Carter single, and only became recognised for the genius that lies within after other tracks had made them famous. These days there are probably a few people who would question whether they ever really were famous, but I would draw their attention to the fact that in 1992 they had a number one album. OK, it was probably a slow sales week, but number one never the less.

Looking back now it seems odd, even a bit quaint, how Carter seemed to choose a different “issue” each time they released a single, but in the early 90s it seemed to make perfect sense. No one else had anything to say about these things, and it was important that someone spoke to Britain’s youth on a level they could appreciate about the social and political world in which they lived. Personally, I think I had progressed past the stage of not caring about current affairs, but was not yet at the point of independent free thinking, I knew I should have an opinion but I needed someone to tell me what it was. As Carter chose the medium of electro-indie to get their message across, they got my vote every time.

Not that Anytime Anyplace Anywhere was particularly party political, in fact it was less so than some of their other material. It did, however, deal with the awful consequences of alcohol abuse, a message which, if the media and politicians are to be believed (and for once they might have a point), the current British youth would benefit from a great deal.

More than anything, the thing I loved about Carter was their use of words. I am not going to pretend Jim Bob was a great singer, or that over synthesised and under produced indie was ever really going to set the world on fire, but lyrically they were amazing. Even when I didn’t know exactly what they meant, it still sounded both very cool, and unlike anything else I had ever heard. The over all effect of creating this fantastic sound and also getting across a message was so clever that it didn’t really matter that however hard I tried I couldn’t find any actual meaning in “There’s no such thing as Dr. Seuss / Vodka and tomato juice”. It sounds too cool to question.

Therein lies the reason for success of Carter USM – they provided something to a niche audience that wasn’t coming from anywhere else in the music scene. There is no one anything like them now, and I miss them.

Are Friends Electric? By The Tubeway Army
Quite why Gary Numan chose to call himself The Tubeway Army for his debut single is anyone’s guess. I suppose it would seem slightly less odd if he had stuck with it rather than reverting to his actual name for all subsequent releases, but that is just one of the many strange aspects of a long career built on the success of two fantastic singles.

Listening to this, and bearing in mind it was a number one single in 1979, makes me wonder if Numan actually invented dance music. I guess he probably owed a lot to other pioneers before him whose work I am less familiar with, (Kraftwerk spring to mind). To have this sound accepted by a mainstream audience was a huge achievement though. In the late seventies, with the charts full of rock, disco and syrupy love songs, this track must have sounded like it was beamed straight in from outer space. There are not many times a record that sounds like it was created at the very limits of new technology have become a big success, and ‘Are Friends Electric?’ really was setting down a blueprint for the future sounds of pop music. Within a few years, both punk and disco were all but forgotten, and synthesised pop reigned supreme in the UK charts.

It was a neat trick by Numan to match the futuristic sounding music to a lyric that seemed to be describing a scene that made no sense. Even now it is not clear even what was meant by the question posed in the title, let alone what the answer is. The very clear, almost clinical vocal delivery fits the chilling instrumentation perfectly.

Now, in 2008, it is hard to imagine any single sounding so unusual. I think modern pop music consumers believe that they have heard everything, but then most people probably thought the same before this track was a hit. It takes a special, visionary person to be able to see into the future in that way and then introduce everyone else to it, and Gary Numan was one such person.

I have a theory that music can be traced backwards just like a family tree. I am no great fan of dance music but I genuinely believe that a large proportion of the music that has fallen under that umbrella term in the last 15 years can be traced directly back to this track. There are people who know more about dance music who would be much better qualified than me to speculate, but I am convinced that from illegal raves in the Welsh countryside to sun soaked parties on the beaches of Ibiza, there are clubbers who owe an awful lot of thanks to Gary Numan.

Are We The Waiting? By Green Day
Until American Idiot, I had always known Green Day as exponents of reliably catchy, professional, fast paced, three minute rock songs. Dookie was one of my favourite albums of the 90s, and every track on it fitted that model. I listened to it over and over again, and it completely shaped what I expected from the band. ‘Are We The Waiting?’ proved to me that even though I thought they were great, I’d still underestimated them.

Starting ominously with a slow drum beat and nothing else, a simple but equally slow guitar riff kicks in after ten seconds, and then something odd happens. The vocals start, and it seems that Green Day have written a ballad.

It works brilliantly though, for two reasons. One is that they apply the same simple lyrics and tune combination to this song as to their other, more familiar style, they just do it slower. This means Are We The Waiting is just as appealing as, say, Basket Case, the only difference is it makes you want to sway instead of jump around.

The second reason it works so well is that it doesn’t sound like any other band singing a rock ballad, this is definitely no Bon Jovi record. It would not work if Green Day, a band well known for covering topics like masturbation and psychiatry in previous songs, came along with a happy (or sad), boy meets girl and they fall in love type tale. Instead, this is an arms aloft, lighters in the air affair. If anything it seems to be addressing the futility of life itself and asking what the future holds, which is a fair enough reason to slow down a notch in my opinion.

It really was quite a precocious idea of Green Day’s to release a long and complex concept album at a time when the music industry and its customers were beginning to move away from albums in favour of the instant gratification of individual tracks. It was clearly a gamble that paid off well, American Idiot was as successful as it is brilliant, but it does leave this track seeming a bit odd on iPod shuffle. When listening to the album it flows seamlessly into the next track with no gap at all, but it’s quite disconcerting when on the iPod it cuts off seemingly half way through and is followed by Bob Marley. Still, the reason for its inclusion here is that despite its clunky nature, it is one of the absolute standout tracks on a genuinely brilliant album, and well worthy of scrutiny in its own right.

Are You Gonna Be My Girl? by Jet
I bought this song as a CD single in the early noughties, I had heard it on the top 40 and thought it was great. Actually, although technically it’s very good, listening to it again has made me realise it does a bit wear thin after a while.

The reason for this is that ever since being first released in 2003 it has been all over the media, in adverts, films and on TV. When that happens I find it very difficult to recapture how it felt when I first heard a track, but I seem to remember thinking that this was brilliant, and I can just about still tell why. Really, it’s probably for the same reasons the admen have played it to death.

‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl?’ is a very infectious, catchy, but simple song. The bass line and the guitar rip along perfectly all the way through the track, and the less than challenging lyrics and clear but sincere vocals make it very easy to get it stuck in your head. Once it’s there it takes some shifting. The aforementioned bass line also moves quickly to the feet, and this is one of the best examples of indie rock being aimed directly at the dance floor for several years.

Maybe that’s the problem though. Jet sound like they’re trying a bit too hard to work out the perfect formula for combining Iggy Pop’s sound with the kind of audience reaction experiences by the Bee Gees in the late 70s. They have achieved it, after all it’s hard not to at least tap your foot to this track, but in the process they seem to have stripped away some of the soul at the heart of making music, it’s just too calculated. They end up dangerously close to their fellow countrymen INXS, making technically perfect but completely vacuous rock-lite for a global audience of advertising executives and aging radio programmers.

So why is it still on my iPod? Maybe it just slipped through the net, but in truth I think that actually it’s because I still like it. It’s a guilty pleasure, a song which despite amounting to a whole lot of nothing in the grand scheme of things, is still a pretty fun way of passing three and a half minutes. I won’t be rushing out to buy the album though.

At The River by Groove Armada
As has been established by now, I love, rock, indie and pop music. Everyone has to relax a bit sometimes though, and while I would never entertain the concept of owning an actual chill out compilation album, on me this track has the same effect.

I lived for four years in Cornwall, and At The River was released towards the end of my time there. This is one of the reasons I like it. Although as far as I am aware it has nothing directly to do with that corner of the UK, it just seems to perfectly sum up the calming, relaxed pace of life I experienced down there and have never quite found anywhere else. Cornwall is, of course, also the perfect place to be “if you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there”. A track so gorgeous, so peaceful, doesn’t really need any more lyrics than that, and At The River doesn’t have any more.

It was only while watching Jack Dee make a joke about chemicals in food from Marks and Spencer on Have I Got News For You last week that I realised they are using At The River as the track in the background on their “this is not just food…” adverts. I like the track so much, and like everyone else in Britain must have seen those adverts a thousand times, but I never even noticed it was there. I think that is the essence of At The River – it is so unobtrusive, unless you set out specifically to listen to it you hardly even notice it’s there, but unlike so much other music that has the same effect, when you do listen it’s an absolute treat. It massages the brain after a hard day at work, relaxes tense shoulder muscles and makes you feel content, like there really is nothing worth worrying about. Thinking about it, I can see why M&S would want to associate it with their food. Luxurious horns, angelic vocals, slow sloping beats and lyrics about being on holiday. This is not just music, it’s very good music.

Groove Armada themselves are a strange lot, with a back catalogue of tracks that usually have no more than a few sampled lines of vocals, which have never really set the charts on fire but which have sound tracked an awful lot of advertising. I am sure there are people who have never heard of them would still recognise the line “I see you baby, shaking that ass”, and maybe even “If everybody looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other”. Personally though, I find most of their other material ranges from dull to down right irritating, which is probably what I said about the advertisements they were in at the time too. At The River, though, stands out as being by far their best effort, and no amount of seductive Irish voice over ladies slobbering over mouth-watering Christmas dinners is going to spoil it for me.

Atmosphere by Joy Division
Some of these reviews are fairly easy to write, I already know what I want to say. I have been trying to write this one for five days though, trying to work out how I could do it justice. I am a late convert to Joy Division, which is one of the reasons for my hesitation, because I know that for some people they are virtually an obsession so I need to be careful not to mess it up.

I first heard this track after buying the soundtrack CD from the film 24 Hour Party People. That remains to this day the only soundtrack I own to a film I’ve not seen. This may seem odd, but while the concept of Alan Partridge pretending to be Tony Wilson stretched what I regarded to be worthy of 2 hours of my time, the soundtrack, with extensive New Order, Happy Mondays and other stuff I already knew I liked looked spot on. It also introduced me to, amongst other tracks, Atmosphere.

Although it seems almost silly to mention this, prior to Joy Division’s song the only track I had ever known before called Atmosphere was a 1984 Christmas party hit for Russ Abbot, which is both absolutely dreadful and highly appealing to seven year olds, which I was at the time. I have tried hard to imagine how two tracks with the same title could possibly be more different, and I’ve concluded that it’s impossible.

Joy Division’s Atmosphere (as it henceforth should probably be called) is just an incredible record. Starting with an ominous, rumbling bass interspersed with desolate drums, it turns into the view of the psyche of a desperate man, someone who believes things are bad and will never get better. Paradoxically, like certain other songs which seem to come from the depths of despair, it eventually takes on an epic, almost uplifting feel, as the deep mournful vocals and slow, low bass contrast with shimmering percussion. It consumes the listener’s thoughts and seems more like a physical experience than a song. Never did any track have such an appropriate title, Atmosphere actually creates and controls the mood wherever it is played. Unlike Russ Abbot’s Atmosphere though, it certainly is not a happy one.

There is apparently a genuine rock shrine not too far from where I live, in the form of singer Ian Curtis’ gravestone in Macclesfield cemetery, with the words Love Will Tear Us Apart on it. Although they had already received some recognition and were rising in popularity, his suicide in 1980 came a few months before they actually had any hits. I have thought about paying the cemetery a visit, but that sort of thing seems a bit morbid to me, it’s not as if I could claim to be their biggest ever fan. Still, judging the merits of Atmosphere, I can see why some people did develop that level of devotion, and I don’t blame them.

Atomic by Blondie
One of the most instantly recognisable tracks ever, within five seconds of this track starting anyone who has heard it before will be able to name the title and artist and be thinking about dancing. Even if stuck behind a desk at work one afternoon just before Christmas.

Atomic was a number one single in February 1980, but in a strange sort of way that doesn’t matter. The song has been a constant presence ever since, entering the national consciousness and giving it a kind of timeless quality that must be like striking gold for a record company, and a band for that matter. The fact that Blondie have done this with other songs from that period too just goes to show what excellent, visionary song writers and musicians they were.

There was, of course, more to it that that though. The presence of Debbie Harry, surely the most attractive woman ever to front any credible pop music, breathing the vocals in apparent near-ecstasy cannot have done the bands chances any harm either. I do not recall anyone ever saying to me when I was down the pub “your hair is beautiful tonight”, but if I could choose anyone to do so then I could do a lot worse than 1980’s Debbie Harry. Not that she’s looking bad in 2008, but I tend not to go for the much older ladies.

Whenever I hear Atomic, it instantly brings to mind the nightclub scene in Trainspotting, where Sick Boy and an unidentified female are swapping pills from one tongue to the other, and Renton first meets Diane. That film was released 14 years after Atomic, but it still seemed devastatingly effective alongside the likes of Underworld, Leftfield and Elastica. Fourteen more years have passed since, but somehow it still does.

Blondie’s influence can be heard and seen all over pop music ever since their peak, the most notable recent example being The Ting Tings. It is tempting to suggest that it was the mixture of disco sensibility and punk attitude that made Atomic so cool, but Blondie also variously flirted with reggae, pop and even, well before anyone else in the mainstream tried it, rap. Ultimately, it just seems that for a while they could do no wrong, and easily secured their place in pop music history with songs like this one. Anyone reading this and wondering what to play at their imminent New Year parties to get all ages onto the living room floor need look no further. You might want to play Heart Of Glass straight after it too.

Babies by Pulp
When Pulp released The Sisters EP in June 1994 I was 17 and living at home with my parents. I bought it partly on a recommendation from the ever trusty NME, partly because the opportunity to buy a genuine 4 track 7” vinyl EP with a limited edition number on it for the price of a normal single was actually quite exciting, and partly because the name Jarvis Cocker made me laugh.

Babies was track one, and I loved it immediately, playing it over and over again. My Mum heard it and was not too impressed. When she was young pop groups made songs about boys and girls meeting and falling in love, now it seemed they were making them about hiding inside someone’s wardrobe so you could listen to them having sex, and I genuinely think she was worried for me.

She needn’t have worried at all. Intrigued and amused though I was at the thought of slightly unconventional sexual practices being set to jangly indie guitar music, my own preferences were never likely to be influenced by this deep voiced, wirey Yorkshireman, I had determined them sometime earlier. I was intrigued by the apparent gender ambiguity though, especially when Jarvis yelps the brilliant line “I know you won’t believe it’s true / I went with her ‘cos she looks like you”. It was only while listening to it again on the way to work today that I realised the clue to the sexuality involved was in the title of the EP. Can’t believe that took me 15 years.

Jarvis’ attempt at injecting some of Britain’s sleazy suburban underbelly into popular culture worked spectacularly well. The Sisters EP was Pulp’s first top 20 hit, providing an early glimpse into the mind of a songwriter who, when the next single, Common People, was released exactly a year later, would go on to become one of the leading figures of Brit Pop, and of 1990s popular culture generally. He is, of course, an absolute legend, certainly one of my all time heroes. Even though he doesn’t always musically hit the mark for me any more, he is one of the few people in the public eye who I can genuinely not remember disagreeing with anything they’ve ever said.

Lumping Pulp together with Brit Pop was all very well because that’s how things were panning out at the time. The truth is though that their time had simply come, and the whole of His ‘N’ Hers and A Different Class are different enough from everything else that was out at the time to make it fair to say that Pulp were simply in a league of their own, doing their own thing, and it was fantastic. I think it is often the case that the most outstanding bands at any particular time are partly so brilliant because they sound different from everything else, and I certainly don’t think anyone has ever come close to matching Pulp’s sound, musically or lyrically. Their music, Babies included, was not really of any particular time, and would probably sound fresh if it was being released for the first time now. Looking at the current music scene, there is always hope, but I kind of feel that it’s a shame it’s not.

Babylon by David Gray
Sometimes the music industry has pivotal moments, incidents which seen alone are not anything special, but in the context of what happens afterwards actually fundamentally influence the industry. The success of this single was one of them.

From 1994 onwards, the 1990s had been all about bands, and a lot of people in the music industry had spent most of their time, often with quite high levels of success, trying to get their protégés to emulate the performance of Oasis. By the end of the decade though it had all started to seem a bit predictable and it was widely felt by the industry and the consumers that a new formula was needed. Whether one was ever really found is a matter of opinion, but one thing that has been tried over and over again in the noughties is the male singer / song writer. David Gray may have lead the way, but James Morrison, Paulo Nutini, Damien Rice and a string of others have a lot to thank him for.

Unfortunately the first word that springs to my mind when surveying the list of male balladeers that has been trotted out in the last ten years is dull. They’re not exactly a musically inspiring bunch, in fact most of them seem to have a debut album with a couple of catchy songs on and not a lot else. David Gray is probably the best of the bunch though, and Babylon itself still sounds great, eight and a half years after I first heard it on the radio while queuing, penniless, very hot, hungry, hung over and seriously concerned about a lack of petrol, to get out of the field I parked in at Glastonbury in 2000. Radio 1 must have had it on the A list, because it took 8 hours to get out of there and I heard it several times. After getting home and sleeping for about 2 days I walked to Our Price and bought the single. Songs always seem so much better if they’re linked to a happy memory.

Special mention must go here to a take away near my house which, shortly after the success of this single, renamed itself Kebabylon. I kind of wished they would put a poster in the window reading “If you want it, come and get it, for crying out loud”, but maybe that would have been going a bit too far. Sadly, despite a brilliant flare for marketing, they obviously weren’t much good at making kebabs, because they closed after about six months. The Grill From Ipanema is still there though.

Back For Good by Take That
For the first four years of their pop career, Take That had phenomenal success by releasing a combination of well chosen but obvious covers and genuinely rubbish, insipid, dull original material. Then, in early 1995, something completely unexpected happened, which nobody could have predicted. Gary Barlow wrote a good song.

For me (and probably a lot of other music fans), this was problematic. It was the mid 1990s, indie music was king, and Take That had been comfortably filed away in the ‘always rubbish boyband’ category, established years earlier by the likes of New Kids On The Block, without even the slightest hint that there might be anything else to come. The idea that a Take That record might actually be good took some serious getting used to, but eventually, with Back For Good, it couldn’t be denied. With almost cool strings, simple but effective harmonies, a catchy chorus and a sentiment that was very easy to identify with, it came as a timely reminder that ultimately a great pop song is a great pop song, whoever it’s by.

That left Gary as a bit of an enigma. I once read somewhere that everyone has one good novel in them, and I wondered if it was the same for him, if his life’s work was destined to be seen as very successful but with just one moment of actual quality in it. Even that didn’t sit very well though, as disturbingly the next Take That single, Never Forget, preposterous and pretentious though it was, also showed a certain amount of charm that suggested at least a modicum of writing talent had gone into its creation.

These uncomfortable feelings for a fan of ‘proper music’ thankfully went away all together after Take That split, and Gary’s solo career consisted entirely of absolute rubbish, like someone completely devoid of the ability to write a tune or good lyrics trying desperately to sound like Elton John. Then, over ten years later, it finally became clear what Take That’s legacy would be. They would be remembered as a band that was completely full of surprises.

Quite how I feel about Take That’s return I’m not sure. Greatest Day sounds like instead of trying and failing to be Elton John, Gary is now trying and failing to be some sort of uplifting and inspirational life coach. A lot of people are going for it though (the album just because the second fastest million seller ever), so who am I to knock it if it works for them? And I was actually convinced that Shine was a great (if slightly obviously ELO inspired) song until it started grating courtesy of the people at Morrison’s.

Really though, however many million sales they achieve, and however many thirty something Mums they get screaming at them in arenas up and down the land, I’m still not convinced they’ll ever come out with anything better than Back For Good for sheer pop joy and simplicity. Time will tell.

Back In The USSR by The Beatles
It’s funny that however varied The Beatles output was in terms of style and subject matter, at the heart of a lot of Paul McCartney’s songs you can find a similar, slightly old fashioned, role out the barrel style piano stomper. It’s there on Lady Madonna, it’s there on the Magical Mystery Tour, and it’s definitely there on Back In The USSR.

As with practically everything he did in the sixties though, it works a treat. Opening with the low rumble of a jet plane (which in 1968 must have sounded like there was something wrong with the needle), the introduction quickly gives way to what manages to be a very intelligent but also somewhat sarcastic sing along. It is pretty clear from the harmonies that McCartney had the Beach Boys in mind, the track seems to be partly a tribute to the perfect pop of their song California Girls from three years earlier, and partly a side swipe at the all-American nature of its lyrics. It seems that resistance to the dominance of American culture in Europe is nothing very new, The Beatles were pointing it out forty years ago.

Although it’s all ancient history now, the idea of taking California Girls, with it’s misty eyed references to US clichés like “mid west farmers daughters” and “southern girls with the way they talk”, and changing it all to reflect the young ladies of Soviet era Russia, must have seemed like quite an amusing idea at the height of the Cold War. It’s a bit unfair in a way, because despite the excessive all-Americanism of their early songs, The Beach Boys were a brilliant pop group, and must have been more than a little put out by this apparent ridicule. It especially would have hurt because it worked so well, Back In The USSR is a great pop song and must have made a lot of The Beatles’ fans question whether Utah was really any less foreign than Ukraine. I wouldn’t mind betting it raised some eyebrows in government too. It wasn’t exactly a communist call to arms, but even so, I think most American politicians at the time would have preferred the electorate to be fearing the evil Ruskies than singing “Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind”. Hardly any wonder that John Lennon later had his views investigated by the FBI.

Funny thing is, despite all my extensive and slightly obsessive pop knowledge, I always though Back In The USSR was one of The Beatles’ seventeen number ones, but I just looked it up and it was never even released as a single until 1976, when it just scraped the top 20. There really are very few bands in history who have pop songs this good in their back catalogue that they never even bothered releasing as singles, and that is yet another testament (as if it was needed) to the brilliance of The Beatles’ music. The subject matter may be so dated as to mean very little in 2009, but it is still a great song.

Back To Black by Amy Winehouse
I must admit, for some reason I was a late convert to the music of Amy Winehouse. I think I just didn’t believe that anyone would really be making good jazz or soul music in the noughties. Also, I do tend to think that these days for anyone to be shifting that quantity of albums the music must have to be fairly bland, that’s how they have such a broad appeal. My sister bought me the deluxe edition of Back To Black for Christmas in 2007 though, and when I had a listen I couldn’t believe what I’d been missing. It’s quite unlike anything I normally listen to, but it’s still brilliant.

That question about the potential for mass marketed blandness is very quickly dismissed at the start of this track. The opening lyrics are “He left no time to regret / kept his dick wet / with his same old safe bet”, and it’s immediately clear that Winehouse is no Katie Melua. In fact, as the track (and the album) progresses it seems that, as the title suggests, much of this comes from a very dark place. There are drugs (“you love blow and I love puff”), sex, and a lot of what appears to be depression. Interesting when you consider it was written before she became victim (or willing participant, depending on your point of view) of all the tabloid witch hunts.

More than anything, what occurs to me when I think about how good this track is, is how much a genuine talent is being wasted as she surrenders herself to drink, drugs and ridiculous relationships. Not that it’s anyone else’s business if she chooses to destroy herself, but there is a kind of comfort to be gained in the thought that people who usually do this in public either have nothing worth while left to give (Boy George, George Michael) or never did in the first place (Britney Spears, Michael Barrymore). To see someone destroying themselves at the peak of their talent is tragic, but it obviously doesn’t stop the media when they see blood. In fact, they seem to like it even more.

Credit has to be given here of course to Mark Ronson as well. I saw him on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, Bill Bailey was trying to play the introduction from Back To Black on a little keyboard, and Ronson just looked at him and said “I wrote that piece of music and it sounds nothing at all like that”. All at once he had revealed himself to be a pompous tit and an excellent musician, I reckon the two often go hand in hand. Winehouse’s brilliant song could easily go unnoticed though if it wasn’t for the excellent bombastic production he achieved here, but their combined talents have produced a combination which I am very glad I belatedly opened my mind to. This extra-marital tale is not a happy song, but I reckon it will be singled out in years to come as one of the pieces of music which sound tracked this decade.

Bad by Michael Jackson
I recently read Cider With Roadies by Stuart Maconie, in which he proudly declares that his Mum took him to see The Beatles in Wigan when he was three years old, so he always impresses more than anyone else in the ‘what was the first gig you went to?’ conversation. Having been born in 1977, I’m afraid I can’t match The Beatles, but at the age of 11 I was taken by an Aunty to the Milton Keynes Bowl to see Michael Jackson.

I distinctly remember that for my parents, who were just coming to terms with the modern use of the word ‘wicked’, the idea that this was the Bad Tour was a bit too much to take. I had always been taught to understand the difference between right and wrong, but what hope did I have surrounded by thousands of people cheering manically at a man proclaiming he was bad?

The truth is I was probably a bit too young to take it all in. I didn’t know very many of Jackson’s songs, had never seen so many people in my life, and remember the concrete cows we visited the next day more vividly than any of the concert. I did enjoy it though, and realised at the time that I was watching something very special. If I could go back to that day now, and have the opportunity to see one of the worlds greatest entertainers performing all his best songs at the peak of his fame and success, I would have the time of my life.

After Thriller had become the biggest selling album ever, Bad (the album) was snapped up by millions of people as soon as it was released. This meant that the nine(!) singles taken from it were increasingly bought only by fanatics who bought them for completion’s sake even though they already owned a copy of the song. Thus some of the greatest singles of the eighties underperformed on the chart, and I would include Bad’s title track in that list, even though it did make number three.

The track itself is quite a curious one. It begins with a startling fanfare, much like the title track from Thriller only even shorter, and then gives way to the secret ingredient of many of Jackson’s best tracks, a fantastic bass line. Then the song starts and it’s actually quite a low key affair, not getting going until the chorus. I wonder if some people were a little under whelmed by it at first, maybe that explains the single’s performance too. Listening back though I still think it sounds amazing, a statement of intent by a man who was already one of the most famous people in the world. The production is fantastic, the vocals are as mad as ever, and the ending is so sudden it still sometimes takes me by surprise now. I think it’s only during the sudden silence when the track has ended that you really get chance to acknowledge how good it was. This is pop brilliance on a rarely achieved level.

Bad Day by Daniel Powter
In June 2008 the Performing Rights Society, the people who add up all of the royalties owed to song writers and performers for every time their songs are played on radio or in shops etc, announced that Bad Day by Daniel Powter was the most played song of the previous five years. I thought this was fascinating – it had not reached the top of the charts and it was by a man the majority of people would not even recognise. A lot of pop music criticism focuses on the ability of huge stars to have big hits regardless of what the music sounds like, so did the success of this virtually anonymous song mean that it was absolutely fantastic music?

Well, not really. I mean it’s OK, maybe even pretty good, but not exactly the best song you’re going to hear, certainly not over a five year period. It fairly pleasantly passes four minutes, all tuneful piano bits, wishy washy lyrics about kicking leaves and drinking coffee, and slightly anguished but not too over wrought key changes. It’s hardly ground breaking though, in fact you could be forgiven for forgetting you’d heard it within moments of it ending.

Maybe that’s where the secret lies. Bad Day is not controversial, it doesn’t make you sit up and listen, it is not technically brilliant and it doesn’t require any thought whatsoever. It’s just quite good.

Apply that to the logic of the commercial radio programmer, or the people who make CDs for shops. They don’t need you to do any of those things, they just need to make sure you don’t turn of the radio or run from the shop swearing never to return. They’re not trying to get your attention, as long as you’re still either tuned in or shopping at the end of the song their job is done. It seems that by being mildly good but not at all challenging, Bad Day tapped into a magic formula which propelled it to the status of the ultimate in background music. A strange achievement, but no doubt a highly lucrative one for Mr Powter himself, a Canadian singer songwriter about whom I (and, I’m guessing, most people) know very little. I did see that last autumn he had another single out though, it peaked at number 70. I’ve not heard it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this one moment of slightly less than brilliance may be the closest he gets to actually becoming famous. Mind you, I don’t suppose he needs the money.

As for me, I must have really liked the song at first because I bought the single. Even say, I can’t say that these days when driving along with my iPod on shuffle and it comes on I punch the air with joy at hearing it, I don’t remember ever getting annoyed by it either though. In fact, if I wasn’t writing these reviews, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it was on there.

[SheriffFatman]

Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival
A couple of years ago, I was working with a guy who was French and said he found listening to English music helped him learn the language. Another guy said someone had recently given him a DVD with a load of music on it from each of the previous 50 years, and he could have a copy if he wanted. I said I’d have a look too, in case there was anything I liked and hadn’t got.

45 minutes later I couldn’t quite believe what I was looking at. I had downloaded onto my company issue laptop an MP3 of each of the first 1,000 number one singles. Where on earth the guy had got it from I do not know, he didn’t even know what it was. This was particularly odd for me as when I was 12 I started collecting number ones, old and new. I managed to get, mostly on 7” vinyl, every number one between 1977 and 1998, eventually taking the decision to give up when Freak Me by Another Level topped the chart. I just couldn’t bare the thought of anyone I knew seeing me in the shop buying it. Even so, after years of searching for old Jam records and wondering who the hell the Goombay Dance Band were, I had achieved what seemed impossible in just a few minutes.

I have since listened to them all, making a CD for each year. There was some fascinating stuff on there, but I think my favourite find was a chart topper from August 1969 – Bad Moon Rising. I’d never heard the track before, and have still never heard anything else by the band, but it is great.

The most noticeable thing, especially when comparing it to other music from the time, is that Bad Moon Rising comes across like the sixties never happened. Starting with a brilliant guitar hook in a kind of shuffly, rock-a-billy style, the singer starts to warn of “nasty weather” and relates this inexplicably to the moon. Personally, if I were told “don’t go around tonight, it’s bound to take your life, there’s a bad moon on the rise” I would probably choose to have a quiet night in. “Hope you are quite prepared to die” he warns in the last verse, just in case you hadn’t quite understood the seriousness of the situation. What on earth CCR were thinking when they wrote this I do not know, but it is an inspired, if slightly bewildering, two and a half minutes.

Apparently, CCR were quite big in America, enough at least for the producers of The Simpsons to expect people to understand why Homer breaks into his own impromptu version of this song in an episode when Marge asks him to “perform CPR”. They had a couple more top ten hits in the UK too. I would be fascinated to hear if the rest of their material is similar apocalyptic visions, or if they went down the route of the catchy but underproduced pop which this song hints at. Next time I have a tenner spare I might go on Amazon to see if I can find out.

The Bad Touch by The Bloodhound Gang
One of those songs which everyone knows, but which is difficult to identify from the title. If they’d called it You And Me Baby Ain’t Nothing But Mammals So Let’s Do It Like They Do On The Discovery Channel everyone would know which one it was straight away.

This single is part of a well established tradition in the UK pop charts of American or Canadian bands with silly names (Barenaked Ladies, They Might Be Giants) having one big hit and then disappearing forever. They’re not often as big as this one though – it may only have reached number 4, but it remains inside the 100 best selling singles of the decade, outselling most number ones.

The secret to the success here I think is the exact same thing that advertisers everywhere use to flog their products – sex. This is, quite simply, a filthy record, and a quick listen again to the lyrics makes me wonder how they ever got any airplay, especially on commercial stations, which usually shy away from anything that has to have words missed out to make it acceptable for daytime radio. Maybe that’s the clever thing about it though. With the exception of my favourite line, “and then we’ll do it doggy style so we can both watch X-Files”, the sex itself is described using highly creative although not particularly subtle innuendo.

So instead of describing the act itself, which would be unpleasant to say the least, we get talk of coffee machines with an automatic drip, rising “an hour early just like daylight savings time” and wanting “to be down in your south seas”. It is very funny, and actually far more disgusting than if they just explained their intentions in clear terms.

Oddly, it’s very good musically too, excellently produced with a very dance orientated backing track and a base line that reminds me of 1990s Depeche Mode, only a little bit silly. Also, the deadpan vocal delivery is juxtaposed brilliantly with the rampant enthusiasm of the subject matter, imagine listening to Jack Dee planning an orgy and you’ve basically got it. A strange record, but also insanely catchy and great fun, and there’s no harm in that after all.

Yesterday I was sent a link to a song on YouTube which 17 million people had seen before me. By a band called The Lonely Island, the song is called **** In My Pants. Apparently number 120 on the iTunes chart, it is very funny, absolutely disgusting electro rock. I think someone’s been listening to The Bloodhound Gang.

Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty
In 1992, Pete Waterman was becoming increasingly desperate for a way to continue his phenomenal success. With Jason Donovan going all West End and Kylie failing to shift the units she had been at the turn of the decade, he signed a band called Undercover. I never knew if their name was meant to be a deliberate tacit acknowledgement of what they did for a living, but their stock in trade was identikit dance versions of well known songs from the seventies. Even this wasn’t a new idea, someone calling themselves KWS had already spent five weeks at number one with a cover of Please Don’t Go earlier in the year. Still, there was money to be grabbed from unsuspecting teens who could get into the pop end of the new dance music craze, and who didn’t already know the originals. Undercover’s debut single was a cover of Baker Street, and this, I am almost ashamed to admit, was where I first heard the song.

Thing is, the song itself intrigued me. It was actually a genuine step in a different direction for PWL, as I’m pretty sure it was their first single about a washed up, alcoholic ex-rock star’s dreams of living a cleaner life. It still had the awful, tacky, cheap sounding production that they had made their trademark, but there was clearly something here that I needed to investigate.

I do really like the song too. The lyrics are actually interesting, and they seem to fit together in a way that makes you want to listen. If you pay attention, it quite cleverly makes you feel sorry for this guy. “Just one more year and then you’ll be happy, but you’re crying, you’re crying now” – I think it’s the mixture of hope and desperation that gets me. “He’s got this dream about buyin’ some land, he’s gonna give up the booze and the one night stands” – I don’t know much about Gerry Rafferty, other than that he was in Stealer’s Wheel and this was his first solo single, but I wonder how autobiographical this song is.

Of course, it’s not the lyrics that are the most striking thing about Baker Street, its main selling point is undeniably the saxophone break, arguably one of the most recognisable instrumental breaks in the history of rock. Personally, I tend to think that a sure fire way of ruining any song is to break out the saxophone, the instrument of choice for anyone who can’t think what else to do in the bit with no singing. Maybe that’s what makes this track so unique, because here the saxophone is brilliant. The only other place I can think of where I have ever even tolerated a saxophone is at the end of Walk On The Wild Side.

Interestingly, my wife hates Baker Street. If the iPod is on shuffle the first few bars send her into fits of shouting, usually something along the lines of “Turn that off. What have you got that rubbish on here for?” To her it represents all the worst of dull, self important seventies rock music, and even I will admit that there is a lot of that about. My mind is a little bit more open though, and I know that there is good music in every genre if you look hard enough. Baker Street is fantastic, and is certainly as good as dull, self important seventies rock ever got.

The Ballad Of John And Yoko by The Beatles
When, after a sustained period of success, a band starts writing songs about themselves, name checking their family in the title, things are surely looking grim. Any pop star who records a song about the perils of fame and their unfair treatment at the hands of the press is running a severe risk of hearing a resounding “so what?” from their previously loyal fans. Bands get big making music that others can empathise with, and disappear again when they become self obsessed, and unable to recall the normality of their pre-fame lives.

I am tempted to argue that no such thing is happening here, and that the success and popularity of this track mean that it is an exception to the rule. Problem is, that would be to ignore the fact that The Ballad Of John And Yoko was the last single The Beatles released before they officially split up.

The contradiction here is that although John Lennon appears to have descended into writing very descriptive songs about his and his wife’s jet set lifestyles and odd behaviour, this track is so great it hardly feels like a descent at all. The melody, the guitar, and the fantastic (if a little controversial) sing-along chorus prove that even though they had been huge for seven years, The Beatles went out on top of their game.

On the subject of that chorus, no review of this track would be complete without reference to the content that upset so many people. After proclaiming in 1966 that his band were bigger than Jesus, Lennon’s every move was always going to be watched carefully. Bearing that in mind, having the lyric “Christ you know it ain’t easy, you know how hard it can be, the way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me” in the chorus to this song gave the distinct impression that he didn’t care. He was deliberately winding people up, in the knowledge that whatever he said millions of others would love it, and he was right.

Another interesting point about this song credited on release to The Beatles, is that George Harrison and Ringo Starr do not appear on it at all. So here we have a band in the process of falling apart, comparing themselves to Jesus Christ and making the assumption that anyone cares about the problems with the privileged lifestyles of the rich and famous. On paper, everything about this record suggests it will be rubbish, but it’s not, it’s great. Really though, how could it be anything else? It’s The Beatles.

Band Of Gold by Freda Payne
When I was a teenager, I worked at weekends and during the holidays in a restaurant which had a big function room and a bar. Every Saturday night, while I should have been out myself getting drunk and sleeping with loose women, I was actually serving drinks, collecting glasses and watching drunken wedding guests dance to Band Of Gold by Freda Payne.

I could never decide if this was an in joke amongst mobile DJs, or whether they really were stupid enough not to realise that it was a song about a broken, loveless marriage. It’s not even like it was a successful marriage at first either, I often looked over at brides and grooms to see if they were paying attention when Freda sang “we kissed after taking vows, but that night on our honeymoon,
we stayed in separate rooms…”. They never were. Despite all this, high on alcopops, Stella Artois and sausage rolls, the guests didn’t mind at all, and would happily dance the night away, falling all over the place and generally behaving in a way that would make them feel rotten the next day.

It wasn’t only this odd use of the song that made it appeal to me though. So much of the music that is played on occasions like that is tacky, brainless and sounds horrible (Ottowan, The Village People etc). Band Of Gold is different. It has a brilliantly sung, heartfelt lyric, with production that combines the very best of sixties soul with a unique ability to move the feet. Released as it was at the start of the seventies, it’s surprising there is not more music this good from that time, wedged in between the glory days of Motown and the beginnings of disco. Or maybe there is and I just don’t know it.

My quest to find this track began way back in my vinyl collecting days, but even though it spent six weeks at number one in 1970, it was very hard to get, and I never did find it. Second hand record shops tend not to have a Freda Payne section, and I reckon everyone who had a copy just liked it too much to let it go. The copyright can’t be very valuable though, because when I did finally get it, it was courtesy of a CD that came free with the Daily Mirror. I suppose the download revolution has made searches like this a thing of the past, 79p and it’s yours. In fact, if you’ve got 79p spare, go and get this, it’s great.

Band On The Run by The Foo Fighters
In 2007, a compilation album was released to celebrate Radio 1’s 40th birthday. They had asked different acts that were popular at the time to choose one of the 40 years and cover a single that was released in it. It’s a strange idea, never one that was going to be a huge seller, and I can’t help thinking that if it had been anyone other than the nation’s second most listened to radio station requesting this, most of the acts would not have gone anywhere near it. In a way Radio 1 were in a difficult position – 40 years in existence is the kind of anniversary that can’t really be ignored, but when the oldest members of their target audience are only 25 years old, how can they make any celebrations appeal to them?

I can confirm that, much as I love The Streets, getting Mike Skinner to croon Elton John’s Your Song was not the way to do it. There was some good stuff on their though, lurking amongst the slightly forced, embarrassed sound of pop stars not really having any idea what they’re doing. I reckon the Foo Fighters’ version of Band On The Run was amongst the best.

I imagine my liking of this track was helped no end by the fact that I don’t really know the original very well. I mean, I knew the chorus, but that only has four words, and I knew it was by Wings, but not much else. I was kind of aware that a lot of people thought Wings were great, but my knowledge of Paul McCartney’s output is very sketchy between the end of The Beatles and Ebony And Ivory, and I figured I would probably rather not hear the sound of a man going on a ten year journey from creative genius to pointless schmaltz. I was missing out though, Band On The Run is a great song, it just took Dave Grohl to make me realise it.

The Foo Fighters have clearly put their mark on the track too, although it is a bit more wordy than their usual output, once the slow, quiet introduction is over it definitely sounds like them. I wonder if they get requests like this a lot. Listening to this track I can kind of see how they could take virtually any song and turn it into a Foo Fighters track. You could argue that this is the sign of a band with a somewhat tired formula, but I don’t see it as a bad thing. Sure, they shout and rock and not much else, but there’s obviously a market for that stuff so somebody’s got to do it, and they do it very well. It’s also worth noting that, unlike a lot of other stuff on Radio 1: Established 1967, this doesn’t sound rushed at all, the production values are as good as anything else I’ve heard them do. In fact, come to think of it, maybe they should do more covers, I’d probably like that more than their new material.

Bang Bang You’re Dead by Dirty Pretty Things
The Libertines came and went so quick, and at a time in my life when I was usually skint, that I never actually bought an album by them. I was fortunate enough to almost always have a couple of quid spare on a Monday lunchtime though, and so built up quite a collection of their singles which I absolutely loved. When they split up I was always going to be interested in whatever came next, and it was great to find out, via this single, that Pete Docherty was not the only talent in the band.

I never did really understand what was going on within that band. I remember seeing a documentary about their break up made by a guy who seemed to get far to involved in the whole mess himself, and I seem to recall one of them breaking into the other’s house for some reason. I think I may have had a bit to drink when I watched that, as it sounds like the kind of thing that would be on Channel 4 very late, and my memory of it is sketchy to say the least. I remember their all their singles though, as they’re really good, and far more interesting and important than how they were destroying each other outside the studio.

Bang Bang You’re Dead was the first single by Carl Barat’s post Libertines band. It came at the tail end of the period in the UK charts when a single could achieve a very high position and then disappear again without anyone noticing or remembering, peaking at number 5 in 2006. Singles like that were very often rubbish which didn’t deserve the position in the first place, but this is an exception, a genuinely great indie single. It starts deceptively, with a trumpet (I think), giving the impression that you may be about to hear some ska. Crunching guitars change all that though, and a simple but highly effective sing-along indie anthem ensues.

The title of this track brought back to my mind what is, with hindsight, a slightly disturbing playground rhyme – “bang bang you’re dead, fifty bullets in your head”. I did not go to an inner city primary school, am not American and had never heard of gangster rap until I was a teenager, which makes me wonder whether there is actually any truth in the suggestion that children these days behave more violently. The lyrics to the song do seem to be about the desire to kill someone who has upset you though, and whereas playground rhymes may have referred to things when I was young, top ten hits tended not to. However, as the hazily remembered documentary suggested, this is no ordinary bunch of indie kids, so one can only hope, for Pete Docherty’s sake, that this is poetic licence.

Basket Case by Green Day
Everyone remembers Britpop when they think of the mid 90s, but the great thing about the music scene in those days is that all the excellent guitar music coming out of the UK was making some in the industry look at what was coming from abroad too. Acts like The Eels and Beck would probably have struggled to become well known at any other time, they were not even very commercially successful at home in the US, but in the UK they were becoming big names. It was through this very same national open mindedness to non-pop American acts that I, and the rest of the UK, were introduced to the mighty Green Day.

Basket Case was their second hit single, and the first one I knew. It absolutely blew me away, mostly because apart from The Sex Pistols I had never really heard much punk, and it didn’t occur to me there might be anyone in America, much less in the 1990s, making it. It instantly appealed to me though. This was certainly punk in delivery (loud and fast guitars without too much attention paid to the quality of the vocals), but now instead of being angry at the state of society, the genre had gone introspective and was angry at its own state of mind. I could really identify with this, after all sometimes I gave myself the creeps too. I was 17 years old and had a poster of the sleeve to Dookie on my bedroom wall, and the cassette permanently resident in the stereo of my first car. Thinking about it though, that was clearly the idea. Basket Case, and its parent album, was giving over privileged teenagers who didn’t know how lucky they were something to be angry about. Themselves.

Considering how much I loved Definitely Maybe, it would not be right to say Dookie was my favourite album of 1994. The competition was clearly not fair though, and it is still in my list of all time favourites (or would be, if I actually had a list. Now there’s an idea for the next slow day at work…) I still have Basket Case on limited edition bright green 7” vinyl tucked away somewhere, well used but in good condition. Offers in the region of, no, actually, I think I’ll keep it.

Even though I loved this track and the album so much, I never would have expected to still be loving new Green Day material 15 years later. They had some way to go to prove that they were anything other than a one album wonder, and they struggled at first, releasing more music later in the 90s that sounded a lot like Dookie but not as good. Their metamorphosis into an all conquering, stadium filling rock act was unexpected and took a while, but they achieved it by realising that men in their 40s cannot get away with teenage angst as well as men in their twenties can. Becoming political was risky but turned out to be a masterstroke, so while I don’t expect a repeat of Dookie, the anticipation of their next album, apparently due out later this year, is almost too much. I haven’t looked forward to a new release so much for years. In fact, I feel almost like a teenager again.

Bat Out Of Hell by Meat Loaf
When I’m working in the office, I usually listen to the subject of that day’s review in the car on the way. Today I had to go the long way.

Everything about Bat Out Of Hell is ridiculous, rare proof that if you take an idea and make every aspect of it absurdly overblown and pompous, it can actually work very well. The track starts with several loud booms, and then what sounds like five pairs of hands hammering the same piano, before long screeches of electric guitar begin to appear in the background, eventually turning in to some approximation of the tune to come. All of this carries on for just over two minutes, so by the time the vocals start Bat Out Of Hell has already surpassed in length 15 tracks from elsewhere on my iPod.

And then there’s the vocals. Meat Loaf has the unique ability to go from wobbling, tender, angst ridden desperation to full throated, inhumanly long and loud bellowing in the space of a few seconds. The man must have incredible lung capacity to keep this up. Personally, if I tried this at karaoke I would be reaching for my inhaler about a third of the way through. That is if I hadn’t already been faded out.

I had known Bat Out Of Hell for quite a while before I ever really appreciated what it was actually about. The delivery by all involved is so dramatic that the story doesn’t really add much to it, but for the record the song seems to be describing a very fast journey on a motorbike that ends in a violent and fatal crash. After riding at high speed, or, dare I say, like a bat out of hell, for most of the track, the last verse finds our hero “torn and twisted at the foot of a burning bike”. It is a particularly bloody end too, as the last thing he sees is his heart, “still beating, breaking out of my body and flying away, like a bat out of he-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ell”. The whole thing eventually ends just before the 10 minute mark, with soft, funereal guitars fading away forever.

I have a feeling the intention is for me to be deeply moved by this, so maybe I have a particularly hard heart, because I can’t help being amused by the sheer pantomime of it all. This is rock music as theatre, and that is a ridiculous idea which cannot ever be truly taken seriously. It doesn’t help that every time I hear Meat Loaf’s voice, I immediately get an image in my head of his quivering, frilly cuffs, shaking as he grips the microphone stand with sheer strength of passion. It makes me laugh.

Bat Out Of Hell’s parent album has to date spent an astounding 474 weeks (over 9 years) on the UK album chart. Despite this, no single from it became a top 10 hit until 14 years after it was released, when this track was re-issued and hit number 8 in 1993 as a quick cash-in following the success of the equally mad but not as good I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).

Looking back, the original release of the album and single were audacious moves to say the least. It really takes guts to make a track as absurd as Bat Out Of Hell and expect people to love it, but eventually millions of them did. And do you know what? I’m one.

Be The One by The Ting Tings
The Ting Tings unleashed themselves on the world last year, and were surprisingly successful. They were not universally popular though, they came in for quite a lot of criticism. Personally, when I heard That’s Not My Name I thought it was an excellent single, a great mix of pop and indie at a time when the two seemed to be moving further apart. Then I heard Great DJ, and that was even better.

Their third single was the shouty Shut Up And Let Me Go, and suddenly I could see why some people found them so irritating. I was still sufficiently interested in them to ask for the album for Christmas though, and I love this track, which apparently was the fourth single, although I didn’t hear it at the time.

One of the criticisms the band have faced is that they are nothing original, and it’s true that listening to them you notice their influences quite a lot. The drums on the first five seconds of Be The One are indistinguishable from Young Folks by Peter Bjorn and John, and then a synthesised tune breezes in, sounding a lot like Union City Blue by Blondie. It is gorgeous though, and I love it before the vocals even start.

When they do start it turns out this is the The Ting Tings in sweet, lush mode like the “are you calling me darling?” backing vocals on their debut hit, as opposed to the cool but screechy mode of “they call me Hell, they call me Stacey” shouted over the top. This is a simple but very good song, and would sound great on the radio, although as single number four maybe they’d just milked the album too much for it to be a hit. I can’t help thinking if it had been by someone far cooler like Feist or Yael Naim it still would probably not have been a hit, but reviewers in The Guardian would probably have been calling it one of the singles of the year, and some car manufacturer would catch on and put it in their advert.

It didn’t happen though, leaving Be The One a very minor footnote in the pop music of the noughties. All of which still leaves one question to consider - which is the best Ting Tings? The one with shouting or the one with soft, breathy vocals? Or, to put it another way, Shampoo or Blondie? Personally I’m quite happy with both.

Be There by UNKLE featuring Ian Brown
Released in February 1999, this track was uber cool amongst left field arty types when I was a student. I am always very sceptical of music that gains that sort of legendary status, unlike many of the lefty types I was at university with I believe that if a track is really good then usually quite a lot of people will realise. Be There fits both models though, because it did sell enough copies to reach number 8 in the charts, but it also disappeared fast enough for most people not to notice.

I have very little idea who UNKLE are, and still less why their name is spelt in capital letters. Suffice to say, they were some sort of drum ‘n’ bassy, trip-hop types who stuck gold by coming up with a very haunting, echoey track and getting Ian Brown to sing some nonsense about looking into your mind over the top.

What really works here is the juxtaposition of that ghostly, mysterious music with Brown’s perfectly pitched but still monotone and distinctly northern vocals. It makes this track both catchy and slightly creepy at the same time, and there is nothing at all reassuring about Brown’s offer to “lead you by the hand”. You would rather not be there at all.

Brown’s vocals are usually fascinating, and Be There is no exception. It is amazing how on record they can be the very best aspect of a track. Imagine I Am The Resurrection sung with a Southern accent, it just wouldn’t work at all. Be There is the same, even if the main credit does go to UNKLE, and however clever the production on this track is, the really clever thing was the choice of vocalist. His smooth, unfaltering tone makes this track very odd and very appealing at the same time. I have never heard him do this live (I don’t even know if he has) but when I have heard live performances by The Stone Roses, Brown’s voice seems to be the one bit of studio magic they found hardest to reproduce. Here though, at the hands of some unknown (to me) dance producers, it is at its very best. Ten years after release, this is a track that is perhaps not very well known, but well worth seeking out. After all, The Stone Roses always were at the dance end of the indie spectrum, so maybe this route is the logical progression for Brown which in the end he never followed. I reckon his solo work could have been better if he had.

Beat It by Michael Jackson
As has already been established, I am a fan of eighties Michael Jackson. This is a particularly spectacular track though, one of the best things he ever did. There are not many songs by anyone which can claim a fantastically catchy chorus, incredible production, a fascinatingly telling lyric and a guitar solo that is frequently voted one of the all time greatest. I can just listen to Beat It over and over again.

Jackson’s enormous success during the decade of my childhood was due in no small part to his own determination. He was not one of those artists who went around saying things like “I just do what I do, and if other people like it then so much the better”. He wanted to be great, in terms of both quality and popularity, and whatever it was that was driving him he completely achieved it here.

He neatly sums up the desire to succeed at all costs on this song, with the much repeated chorus pointing out “no one wants to be defeated”. He comes across as a man who is all to aware of the potential to fail, and a clue to why he’s so determined not to comes in the suggestion that he has personal experience of what happens to people who do - “they’ll kick you and they’ll beat you and they’ll tell you it’s fair”. I wonder in a way if the song is about being a black man in America - “they told us don’t you ever come around here, don’t wanna see your face you’d better disappear”. The burning desire to over come assumptions about what a black person can achieve goes some way to explain Jackson’s talent, but it also makes his eventual transformation into a white person seem even more bizarre (if that is actually possible). Years later he was, of course, still informing us “it don’t matter if you’re black or white”, but if that’s true why bother changing? Maybe the ultimate answer to Beat It was resignation – if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

All of which is not at all meant to take attention away from the main reasons this track is so brilliant. Both Quincy Jones’ production, all understated drums and police sirens, and Eddy Van Halen’s guitar playing are spectacular. I have listened to Beat It four times while writing this review and I struggle to see how pure pop music could actually be any better. I am a big fan of a wide range of different stuff that’s made the charts before and since, but I cannot recall any song where the different elements have come together to make a more wonderfully complete pop single. If you only ever heard one pop record in your life, you would want it to be this one.

Beat Surrender by The Jam
When, aged 12, I started collecting number one singles, I was struck by the odd price structure in second hand record shops. Initially, I did not know anything by The Jam and could not understand why their singles were selling for between five and ten pounds when Bucks Fizz number ones from the same period were usually at most a quid. Logic told me that if they were all number ones they must be available in roughly similar quantities. I was misunderstanding the rules of collecting vinyl though, mostly because I didn’t know the actual songs. The Jam’s singles were so expensive simply because they were so good, so not only could record shop owners get more money for them as people wanted them more, but it was also more difficult for them to get hold of them because people did not sell. Bucks Fizz, on the other hand, were crap, so even people who had bought their records eight years earlier no longer wanted them.

The Jam were very unusual in the first half of the eighties, because very few bands who were actually making good guitar music ever had success on the singles chart, whereas Beat Surrender was their fourth (and final) chart topper. They seemed to have found a brilliant method for combining the distinctly British attitude of the punk era with the pop sensibility of American sixties soul, and then played guitars over it. That made the band cool enough to appeal to people who loved punk and wondered where the new decade was going to take it, but also fun enough for pop fans and, as such, radio programmers.

Having said that, I do wonder how radio stations felt about the very clear line “bull**** is bull**** it just goes by different names” in the second verse. This was some time before the days of cleverly removing swear words from songs so that you’d hardly notice, and I know at least one radio station that will still not even allow you to type that line onto its website without asterisks 27 years later.

The Jam ended on a high, splitting up while this song was still in their charts, making them one of fairly few acts whose last ever single reached the top. What happened next, and indeed what has happened ever since, completely amazes me. It is as if Paul Weller went over night from being the front man in one of Britain’s most exciting bands, to being a boring, dull as dishwater old man, one of rock’s elder statesmen who is always hanging around the indie and rock scene making awful records for middle aged people who hate surprises. I have not heard much Style Council but what I did hear sounds like average eighties white soul, and then his solo career approached whole new levels of pointless self importance. Listening to some of it I’ve almost felt slightly embarrassed for him. (Just to completely contradict myself though, I did quite like Wild Wood!)

So Beat Surrender is the Paul Weller I try to remember. To be fair, the man who wrote Going Underground, Beat Surrender, A Town Called Malice etc can be forgiven for letting it go to his head a bit, they a all brilliant songs. And also, however bad his solo career was, it was never worse than Sting’s. Still, I can’t help thinking it’s a shame that Beat Surrender wasn’t the last single he ever released in any guise, then he truly would be a legend.

Beautiful Ones by Suede
When I looked at my iTunes to see which song was due to be reviewed next and saw this one, two things occurred to me. Firstly, that I knew I liked it and it was a great record, and secondly that I couldn’t remember how it goes. I think therein lies the essence of Suede.

To be fair, I was getting a bit mixed up with another, similarly titled single of theirs, The Wild Ones. When I realised this I was taken with how different the two tracks are, and it occurred to me that Suede basically release two different types of single. The Wild Ones is a slow, sweeping ballad, Beautiful Ones is all out indie disco. I’m not sure which type I prefer, but the indie disco ones are clearly the ones more likely to be hits.

In the 1990s indie music became associated with lads. Blokes. Men who read FHM. Men who like girls and lager and football, and talk about all three continually lest anyone doubt how much they like them. In that era it is strange, but somewhat refreshing, that Suede actually managed to carry on, let alone find success, but they did. Beautiful Ones, now that I remember which one it is, is an excellent reminder of why. It is the absolute antithesis of that culture, starting with jangly guitars that couldn’t sound any more effeminate if they were sprayed pink and used to play Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Then there’s Brett Anderson’s vocals, which have all the butch masculinity of Kenneth Williams at a wedding fare. It’s all good though, because this is meant to be fun, it’s meant to get you dancing, and it does.

I read once that the singer from Franz Ferdinand said that before they released anything they made a conscious decision that they wanted to make indie music that girls would dance to. Well, maybe Franz Ferdinand are the natural successors to Suede, because they certainly though of it before them. As this song closes out to a camp as Christmas singalong of “la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la…” I have a feeling the girls are dancing, the gay men certainly are and hell, I think I might dance too. Whether we can persuade any FHM readers on to the floor is another thing.

Beer And Sex And Chips And Gravy by The Macc Lads
At school in Cheshire in the late 80s and early 90s, there was always a lot of talk of music. Guns N’ Roses were the band most people chose to idolise, but there was also plenty of other stuff to both pour scorn on (manufactured pop and early dance music) and to love (Northern indie music and US rock). There was one band though that were simply the stuff of legend, a band whose music you could not buy in Woolworths and who you suspected more people claimed to have heard than really had. The Macc Lads music changed hands on poorly recorded cassettes copied from older siblings, and was often such bad quality it was barely comprehensible. There was the feeling that in listening to this band you were somehow doing something wrong, something naughty. In retrospect that’s not surprising.

You see The Macc Lads were never likely to get much mainstream radio time. Hailing from just down the road in Macclesfield, they sang mostly about their experiences with the people and place where they lived. Characters such as Julie The Schooly and Sweaty Betty, and the various services these young ladies were prepared to provide, were whispered about on the playground and, if we’re honest, not properly understood.

As an adult I have questioned my fondness for this band a lot, it troubles me. The thing is, I am not racist, homophobic or sexist in any way. I have been sent on diversity courses by my employer and broadly agree with is all. I find Chubby Brown and the legions of morons who go to his gigs to verbally bash asylum seekers repulsive. Despite all this acknowledgement of the concept of political correctness though, I still can’t help but smile when I hear the line “she said I was good looking and I looked a bit like George Michael, but she didn’t want a ******* cos she was on her menstrual cycle”. Does that make me a bad person?

Beer And Sex And Chips And Gravy is the title track from the Macc Lads finest album, and is basically a manifesto for the band, listing in the title the four things they care about most. It has always amused me that the instrumental introduction, played on a kazoo, is actually quite a good, catchy piece of music, and could easily have formed the basis for a big mid 90s dance hit if anyone had five minutes spare to put it together. Musical ability is rare in this band though, it’s all about the lyrics. Go on then, I’ll give you some more so you get the idea: “Vauxhall Viva’s covered in rust, but you can’t **** your bird on a 29 bus”. Thank you.

The debate about whether comedy can ever have any excuse for being offensive to specific groups in society is ages old and I am never going to solve it here. I just believe that it is possible for me to like something which I find very funny without believing the ideology behind it. Some of the Macc Lads music is simply too much for me (Now He’s A Poof does not feature on my iPod for example), but some of it just makes me laugh a lot and reminds me of simpler times, before I even became aware that political correctness exists. I’m perfectly happy that it does exist, but there’s no harm in reminiscing about the time before, is there? Well, maybe there is, but as the Macc Lads perform two of the 1000 songs on my iPod, I’ll not worry about turning into a right wing maniac any time soon.

Beetlebum by Blur
Say what you like about Blur, they were never boring. In 1999 I saw them at Wembley when they decided, for some reason, to play all of their singles in chronological order. It was brilliant to see them playing these songs, but it was a very strange gig because, being a bit of a fan, I always knew what they were going to play next. Also, they ended, somewhat obviously, on their most recent single, the slightly ropey Music Is My Radar, which, when you’ve just heard them play all of their best songs, is something of an anti climax. Still, a good night was had by all, and seeing them play tracks like Beetlebum was an absolute privilege.

One of the things that made Blur so great is that they were never inhibited by being pigeon holed. Really, although the press called them an indie band, you never really knew what they were going to sound like next. Beetlebum is a good example – I bought it as soon as it was released, but it took me several listens before I even decided if I liked it. I really do though, it’s just that the scuzzy guitars and slow, lolloping pace do not make it the most instantly accessible of tracks. This was a major change in direction when you consider the lead track of their previous album was Country House.

By this point in their career Blur were really in an excellent position. Virtually any other band who had written and released Beetlebum would not stand a chance, it was too complex, too long and too different from anything else on day time radio at the time for a mainstream audience to take on board. Blur had enough fans to take this to number two in the charts though, and the people at Radio 1 knew it was their listeners buying it, so it went straight onto the A list. Certain newspapers were not convinced that a song with the lyrics “she’ll suck your thumb, she’ll make you come” had a place on a publicly funded radio station aimed at young people, but by this point Radio 1 had survived enough tabloid hysteria to not care. The hacks weren’t really that serious though, they just knew it made a good story, and in truth that just formed another part of the pre-release publicity. It does raise the question of what the song is actually about though, and to be quite honest, I have no idea.

Anyway, fast forward 12 years and it seems Blur are now reformed and due to play at this year’s Glastonbury. Sadly, due to a lack of funding, I do not have a ticket this year, but my TV will be on BBC3 all weekend. I hope they play Beetlebum. They should, it’s one of their best.

Before I Fall To Pieces by Razorlight
There is a strange phenomenon in modern music, that there are some bands who it is cool to dislike. This does not make too much difference to their success or their sales because most people who buy music do it regardless of what the media says, they just buy it because they like it. As a result, we have a few British bands who sell bucket loads of CDs, but who anyone who is anyone will tell you are rubbish. Coldplay are the biggest victims here, but Razorlight suffer with it quite a bit too.

The problem is, what the countless people who I have seen call this band as Razor***** or who bemoan their “indie-lite dullness” are missing is that their songs are quite good. No, a Razorlight album is not the place to look if you are after a revolutionary sound that is like nothing you’ve ever heard before, but if all you want is some guitars and a good tune to sing along with as you’re driving down the M62 in the rain (and is there anything wrong with that?) then you’ve come to the right place.

Before I Fall To Pieces will not change the world, it is not the most fascinating song ever, but it is good enough. It is good enough to appear on my iPod and to deserve 470 words of my attention. Its jangly guitars and lyrics about an impending nervous breakdown are actually very appealing, even if it is the sort of song which doesn’t exactly command your attention. If you heard this song for the first time being played by some young upstarts in a sweaty small town indie club you would think they were fantastic. Maybe it is one of those where I find I did not particularly notice it was even on my iPod, but when I listened to it I found I knew every word. To put the song into the context of other radio friendly hits that have been around in the last few years, surely it is better that this song might wash over you a little as opposed to being incredibly irritating and making you want to destroy your radio like Scouting For Girls, The Hoosiers etc?

Sadly for Razorlight themselves, what I have heard of their more recent album seems to suggest that they have actually lost the ability to create catchy tunes such as this one. Maybe they actually took all the criticism to heart and tried to do something that would be cool, but in the process alienated the people who bought their records in the first place. That is what happens when music journalists start writing what they think other music journalists will agree with, instead of just listening to the bloody music.

Bentley’s Gonna Sort You Out by Bentley Rhythm Ace
When planning this review in my head, I thought I would begin with something along the lines of “As with most dance music on my iPod, I have absolutely no idea who Bentley Rhythm Ace are”. Then I decided this was lazy and that I should try to find out, and was astounded to read on the internet’s premiere source of misinformation, Wikipedia, that they are actually two former members of eighties and nineties Brummie industrial indie dance favourites Pop Will Eat Itself. I knew there was something great about this track, I just couldn’t work out why I liked it so much. Now I know! I had forgotten all about Pop Will Eat Itself, but am now inspired to head under my old bed at my parent’s house in search of my 7” copy of Touched By The Hand Of Cicciolina.

Anyway, back to Bentley’s Gonna Sort You Out. As is often the case with dance music that I like, this track actually calls the name of the genre into question. This is dance music that I can’t really imagine many people dancing to. Apparently, again according to Wikipedia, it is actually Big Beat. I have heard of that before, and that is where I would file the entire back catalogue of Fatboy Slim and all of the other mystifyingly popular tracks from the mid nineties that basically just put thumping noises behind speeded up versions of old American soul b-sides. This is not like that at all, instead it is a looping, twiddly sounding track with very little in the way of vocals, just dome bloke (not Homer Simpson, but similar) saying “dough” every now and then, and some women singing “I love it”. It is an incredibly catchy, and has me walking around muttering “dub dub dubba dubba dubba du du ba da” under my breath like some demented robot for hours after I hear it. For me, there is a fine line between a dance record being very catchy and very irritating, and not many make it on the catchy side. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is that puts this record in the minority, but it’s definitely there. I love it.

I have a feeling Bentley’s Gonna Sort You Out may have been used in a lot of TV adverts, although I can’t remember which ones. It also soundtracked several of those “Top 100 best…” shows on Channel 4. Its use in things like this mean that I am sure most people know it, even if they don’t know its name, and even though it only reached number 17 in the charts when released in 1997. Essentially, that’s where we are with this track, in the territory that makes the artist a huge amount of money not because it appeals to radio programmers or people buying CDs, but because it sounds good in the background. Truth is though, it sounds good in the foreground too, and when you consider some of the atrocities that have done very well in the charts in the name of dance music, this is something of a forgotten classic. All together now: “dub dub dubba dubba dubba du du ba da…”

Big Area by Then Jerico
This is a song that I remember from my childhood. I didn’t buy it at the time, Simple Minds style power rock not really being my thing when I was 11, but it did strike me as a good song. I was astounded to find it, years later, on CD single in a Cornish charity shop. Astounded partly because I had forgotten all about it and had not heard it for years, but mostly because it seemed to me to be from a distant time before CD singles were invented. Unless it is actually a reissue (which I doubt because I can’t think of any reason why it would have been put out again) then it is probably one of very few copies that actually sold on CD, and this combined with a desire to be taken back to my childhood for four minutes, made me snap it up. Oh, and a desire to donate cash to Help The Aged of course.

So I bought it, played it, and a few years later when sifting through my extensive boxes of CD singles it was deemed good enough to go on the iPod. I say good enough, it is actually something of a guilty pleasure, hardly the kind of song that would spring instantly to mind if anyone asked me what kind of music I liked. I have a feeling that Then Jericho were big names for a while, but maybe it’s just the big nature of their sound that makes me think that. This is the kind of music that U2 started out making, and made themselves a long lasting international success. I can only assume that Then Jericho, whoever they actually were, found that they only had one fast paced, rocking, slightly synthesised anthem in them, which is arguably for the best anyway.

I shouldn’t rubbish them though, because, although completely dated, the song itself is actually great, the kind of track that you would want to hear while standing on top of a mountain with the wind in your hair, admiring the view and thinking about how wonderful life is. It was quite a success too, making number 13 in the charts back in 1989, with the album The Big Area going as high as number 4, so at the time music lovers could have been forgiven for hoping for great things from this band. Why that never happened I do not know, but it is a shame. Maybe the public just had enough earnest power rock already, I suppose Then Jerico could have missed the boat slightly as this track is definitely more eighties than nineties. This is the type of track that should appear on those compilation CDs of music to drive to, but never does because the people who compile them cannot see any further than Oasis, bands who sound like Oasis, or bands Oasis sound like. Not the best song ever, but pretty good all the same.

Big Sur by The Thrills
When I first heard Big Sur I liked it straight away, it is one of those instantly likable tracks. My lack of American geographical knowledge meant that I didn’t actually realise that it was named after a large stretch of the Californian coast line, but even so it was clear that the band were from that part of the world, their all-American, chilled, surfy, sunny sound was heavily Beach Boys influenced and so much the better for it. Except I was making a mistake, they’re from Dublin.

Now I’ve been to Dublin myself, it is grey and it rains a lot. Finding out The Thrills were from this side of the Atlantic was like discovering Liam Gallagher is from Paris, it just did not seem plausible at all. Apparently though these Irish chancers just went on holiday to Santa Cruz and wrote a few songs while they were out there. The result is a sound so Californian it is impossible to imagine these guys growing up in the land of Guinness and shamrocks. I doubt anyone has ever been more influenced by a holiday they’ve been on.

Which just goes to show that a particular sound can be commandeered by anyone, I suppose it’s no different to a bunch of white guys from the West Midlands making reggae records in the eighties. If you like a particular type of music does it really matter that you are not part of the demographic currently making it? Not at all I suppose, it’s not as if loads of surf music purists held demonstrations when The Thrills’ debut album was released. (Mind you, if there are such people they probably assumed they were Californian too!)

So here you have it, the ultimate feel good, cool, sunny day music for the 21st century. Things have moved on a bit since I Get Around and Surfing USA, but not so much that Big Sur is missing any of the requisite elements for the kind of smiley indie pop crossover that makes you feel like it is great to be alive. It has a sing along chorus, jaunty verses and, unusually, what sounds to me like a banjo. Big Sur pulls off the clever trick of being a happy song without actually becoming irritating, something which so many others fail to achieve. As if it wasn’t summery enough, like I eventually discovered, it is actually about what we in the UK call the seaside. Admittedly there’s no Mr Whippy or buckets and spades here, it’s all soft top cars and cliff top sunsets, but that’s the genius of music like this, it makes you feel like you’re part of it even if the closest you ever really get is a wet week in Devon. Or Dublin.

Bigmouth Strikes Again by The Smiths
The most common criticism I hear of The Smiths from people who don’t like them is that Morrissey is always miserable. I always find this quite ironic, as personally I can’t think of any other credible, respected band who made songs that are so funny. A sense of humour is a strange thing though, and maybe if you don’t share Morrissey’s, which I clearly do, then you see him as being someone with no humour at all.

To be fair, the perception of misery is probably heightened by his chosen subject matter. The thing I love most about The Smiths is that their music makes me consider dark, upsetting concepts and then laugh about how absurd they are. Bigmouth Strikes Again is a good example. “Sweetness”, Morrissey croons, “Sweetness I was only joking when I said you should be bludgeoned in your bed”. This comes only a couple of likes after he suggests he was also not serious with the comment that “I’d like to smash every tooth in your head”. Now, I am not one to make light of domestic violence, but the juxtaposition of ‘Sweetness’ as a term of endearment with fantasised visions of extreme violence suggest a man who is saying one thing and means another, and that makes it funny. No, it’s not an actual joke, and yes, domestic violence is the kind of subject that would usually not be laughed about, but Morrissey as a song writer has an incredible ability to find humour in the darkest of places, where most would not look.

After the grovelling of the first verse, the line “Now I know how Joan Of Arc felt” is repeated several times over, with the typical Morrissey flourish of lots of “la la la”s as well. Now I don’t know much about French history, so while I may not quite be on Morrissey’s intellectual level and therefore not always able to understand what he’s on about, I know a great song when I hear one, and this is one.

I first got into The Smiths as a student, almost ten years after they split up. I had read many times how brilliant they were and how they were every student’s favourite, so I figured I should find out more and bought two CDs, Best I and Best II. Since then the only other one I’ve got is the brilliant The Queen Is Dead, so I’m not a Smiths obsessive or anything, but I do adore just about everything I’ve heard by them. I don’t know of any other band who have managed so brilliantly to combine tunes at the pop end of the indie spectrum with every day subject matter. They are endlessly quotable, often baffling and always entertaining. They are also completely unique – I cannot think of any other act who sound or write like this. It’s a shame there’s not a modern day equivalent.

Billie Jean by Michael Jackson
Although it’s easily at least as brilliant as anything else Michael Jackson did in the eighties, Billie Jean is an unusual single for him, for lots of reason. For a start, unlike nearly all his other big singles, it does not grab your attention with a loud introduction, preferring instead to tap away with a relatively slow beat and bass line before the strings start and everyone realises what they’re listening to.

The whole track is really quite understated, with the production taking a back seat in order to emphasise the excellent song writing. The song is a cautionary (and apparently fictional) tale about a young lady who claims to have had Michael’s baby, when he says it’s not his. This sort of subject matter, the kind of thing that a large proportion of his audience could actually relate to their own lives, is quite rare for Jackson, but works brilliantly. These days this sort of thing would easily be sorted out with a DNA swab, and without such situations several daytime TV shows would not have anything to feature. Even so, this one moment of clarity for Jackson, where he briefly appears to combine his evident genius with an understanding of the actual real world around him, lives on incredibly well, both in dodgy small town nightclubs and on local radio everywhere. Unlike a lot of artists it is hard to say which Jackson’s most popular single is, but this is definitely a contender. I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t know it. Maybe my Nana.

Michael Jackson provides a good example of why you should never pay much attention to the pop charts. If you look at his list of number one hits, and compare it to his singles that didn’t top the charts, it makes the British public’s taste seem very odd. For example, his chart toppers include One Day In Your Life, Earth Song, You Are Not Alone, and Blood On The Dancefloor, as opposed to those that missed the top spot, such as Beat It, Thriller and Smooth Criminal. This is presumably due to the fact that his album sales were so enormous that people already owned the tracks, so it is testament to the brilliance of Billie Jean that it managed to sneak a solitary week at the top spot in 1983 despite its parent album Thriller already being in the shops for three months.

It is also worth remembering that Billie Jean is the song Jackson was performing when he first debuted the dance move of the eighties, Moonwalking. For me, anyone who can not only can make a record this good but also perform it while propelling themselves in a different direction to the one their feet appear to be going in is showing true signs of genius. What a guy.

[SheriffFatman]

Birdhouse In Your Soul by They Might Be Giants
We’re back now in the territory of wacky American bands with silly names that have one mid-table top ten hit which is all over the radio and then disappear again. Before Bowling For Soup, before The Bloodhound Gang and before Barenaked Ladies there was They Might Be Giants.

Any song that starts with the lines “I’m you’re only friend, I’m not you’re only friend, but I’m a little glowing friend, but really I’m not actually you’re friend, but I am” is bound to set the enforced wackiness alarm bells going straight away. The news that the lyrics are apparently sung from the perspective of a child’s night light does nothing to dispel this. It’s not just the lyrics that are a little on the experimental side either, recording the first verse at half the volume of the rest of the song is a pretty unusual technique too.

It takes a really creative mind (or several of them) to come up with a song this bizarre. These are not the nonsense lyrics of psychedelia, like, say, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. These lyrics are steely eyed, sober nonsense that someone has taken a lot of time to craft, but despite them meaning nothing whatsoever to anyone else, They Might Be Giants still managed to cause millions of people to be walking round with a chorus that starts with the line “blue canary and the apple by the light switch” stuck in their heads. It seems like calculated nonsense, which I suppose is exactly what wackiness actually is. Take the UK’s premiere exponent of all things wacky, Timmy Mallet, for example - he isn’t actually certifiably mad, he just takes a decision to behave that way.

In They Might Be Giants’ case that decision was a good one. This song was an international hit, reaching number 6 in the UK in March 1990. Like most 13 year olds at the time I absolutely loved it, so much so that I bought the follow up too, Istanbul (Not Constantinople). Unfortunately though it seems that the problem with madness is that although it may be fascinating at first, it soon becomes a bit irritating. That second single reached number 61. This was the last the UK heard of TMBG until 11 years later, when they charted with the theme from Malcolm In The Middle, Boss Of Me. That wasn’t very good, so I prefer to remember Birdhouse In Your Soul, a unique, fascinating and really very good single.

Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve
I bought a special edition of Q Magazine once, which claimed to list the 1,001 best tracks ever. Each one had a comment on it about what it was best for. I can’t remember what it said about Bittersweet Symphony, but this morning I found that it is the best song for falling back into a blissful, hung over sleep while travelling to work on the bus.

The Verve’s success came towards the end of an unprecedented renaissance for British pop music, with Bittersweet Symphony dragging them from the lower end of the charts into the minds and ears of everyone who went anywhere near a radio in the second half of 1997. An incredibly good song about nothing more complicated than the struggle that is life itself, some people have said this is one of the best songs ever written, and I’m not about to disagree. Despite being near the end of the dominance of Britpop, it managed, along with follow-up The Drugs Don’t Work, to establish The Verve as one of the bands that best represent that period in pop history.

There is a long and complicated story about this song, and in particular why no one in The Verve ever made any money about it. Basically, there is a low, quiet string section at the start of the album version that basically underpins the whole track, and was pinched from an old Rolling Stones song. I’m not quite sure what it adds to the single, but the Stones have very good lawyers and despite not having any real creative input into the track lyrically or musically, it ended up being credited to Jagger & Richards. This injustice would not be so bad if it wasn’t such a fantastic song, a career defining achievement for Richard Ashcroft that he got no financial credit for at all. I hate things like this because they detract from the music, and I can’t help thinking Mick ‘n’ Keef probably didn’t really need the cash. Ashcroft himself was quoted as saying it’s the best song either of them had written in 20 years.

The irony of all that is that the way Ashcroft was treated actually reinforces the songs lyrics, “it’s a bittersweet symphony that’s life, try to make ends meet, you’re a slave to the money then you die”. Looking at those words on the screen makes it seem odd that a song with that sort of message could have such an uplifting, unifying effect on people. Maybe it’s really just about accepting your lot in life and trying to be happy about it, I reckon a lot of people can identify with that.

It is also ironic that the underlying string section caused so many issues, because the one thing that makes the track instantly appealing is the brilliantly catchy main string section, which was composed by Ashcroft himself. Whistled by a million builders every day, and appearing in no end of TV commercials, that was the stroke of genius that took this track from being the kind of Verve track that was largely ignored by the public on the previous two albums, to the kind of track that appears at the top end of lists of the 1,001 best tracks ever.

Black And Gold by Sam Sparro
When my wife first heard Black And Gold on my iPod she laughed at me and said I had downloaded a dance record. In 2008 that would have been a fairly stupid thing to do, dance music being dominated by rehashes of old hits that were not that good first time around anyway (Infinity, Encore Une Fois etc) and chavved up rave rubbish from the likes of Basshunter . I knew better though, because Black And Gold is not a dance record, it is pure pop brilliance.

Well, OK, brilliance may be a bit too strong a word, but it is a great record. Subtle, slow building electronica and strange lyrics questioning the theory of evolution may not sound like the ingredients for a big pop hit, but surprises like this are what makes pop music so exciting in the first place. Sometimes a single just seems to come out of nowhere, sounding like nothing else that is around at the time, but ends up being the soundtrack to a year. Black And Gold is just that, an omnipresent, radio friendly track that never got boring, even though it was playing in every shop and every club you went in last summer, and never seemed to be off the radio.

As it happens, Black And Gold also represents a good example in an argument that is raging in some quarters about the pop charts. It originally charted in June last year, and since then has spent a total of 40 weeks UK top 100, three of them at number two. It currently resides at a lowly number 95, one of its lowest positions to date, but no doubt will be on the way back up again if some celebrity couple decide to skate to it or if it’s used in Hollyoaks. I can never decide if the new chart rules, which allow any download to make the charts regardless of when it was released or what the record company actually want, are a good thing or not. These changes have certainly made the charts more representative than ever before, they really do show what the public is buying more accurately than any chart ever before. As Black And Gold and a few others prove though, for some reason the public’s taste does not seem to change as much as may have been expected. This means the days when a few fans could make a song top 10 just buy buying it all at once are long gone, and that some tracks, like this one, become all-conquering mega hits, often spending over a year on the chart.

My problem with this is that surely it must be at the expense of new music. Black And Gold is a great track, I really like it and believe it deserved its success, but there seems to be very little motivation now for the music industry to release much new music. There are less new entries on the chart now than ever before, this week’s top 40 contains just two. I wonder what we are missing out on so that we can hear another week of the same old familiar songs on Radio 1 every Sunday afternoon?

Black And Gold reminds me of changing times in the music industry for another reason too. When Sam Sparro appeared on Christmas Day Top Of The Pops last year, seven months after this track was released, myself and my father-in-law both remarked that we were surprised to see that he was white. This UB40-esque revelation means very little in the scheme of things, except that now the BBC's enduring pop music showcase has disappeared from our screens forever, ordinary people, ie people who don’t spend all day glued to TMF, have no idea what pop stars look like any more. It was always the sound that mattered most though, and Black And Gold sounds great.

Black Or White by Michael Jackson
Jackson’s first single of the 1990s contains elements of the genius that made him the biggest pop star on the planet in the previous decade with early signs of the madness that would drag him down in the next one. Since the release of Bad in 1987 the tabloid stories about chimps and oxygen chambers had got completely out of control, as had his apparent obsession with plastic surgery. Releasing a song with the prominent message “it don’t matter if you’re black or white” when he had apparently changed himself from the former to the latter did nothing at all to counter the suggestion that his grip on reality was fading.

Let’s deal with the positives first though – Black Or White is a great record. A very catchy and well structured song, it had the added bonus of Slash playing a brilliant guitar hook that sticks in the mind as soon as you hear it. This track may not scale the heights of the best stuff from Bad or Thriller, but many artists have long careers without ever doing anything half this good. Also, leaving aside Jackson’s inability to practise what he preaches on the question of seeing through race to the person inside, the track does have a very simple, uplifting, unifying message, and the pop world can always benefit from that.

The rap by an anonymous MC in the middle of this track is very telling though. A nod of acknowledgement towards the changes that were happening on the music scene at the time, it nevertheless represents the moment Jackson stopped setting trends and began following them. This was his last great record, all that came afterwards was tuneless funk (Scream, Jam) and dull, meaningless schmaltz (Heal The World, You Are Not Alone). The least said about the appalling career low that was Earth Song the better (is it just me that thinks that this being Jackson’s best selling single in the UK is the most damning indictment of the British music buying public’s taste imaginable?)

Black Or White is undoubtedly a great track, but back in 1991 when I was 14 years old the issues it deals with were incredibly confusing, not just because of the ambiguity of Jackson’s race. I remember a friend at school who was shocked by the line “I’m not going to spend my life being a colour”, claiming it was racist in itself. To him “a colour” was a type of person, in the same way that he considered himself “a white”, and so he interpreted this as Jackson proclaiming his desire to change race. It just goes to show the issue of race is a minefield and while a pop star may have the best possible intentions, dealing with it in a cheerful three and a half minute single is pretty risky. I’m not sure Michael actually solved any of the world’s major conflicts with the musings on this track, but still, I bet he had quite a few people across the globe dancing.

Blackberry Way by The Move
The Move were a successful but barely remembered rock group from Birmingham, who had several hits between 1967 and 1972. These days their best known song is probably Flowers In The Rain, which often appears on sixties pop compilations and was actually the first song ever played on Radio 1. Even so, their biggest hit was Blackberry Way, number one for a week in 1969.

In some ways Blackberry Way is quite a forward thinking song. Sixties phsychadelia had been mostly characterised by sunny, happy, hippy sounds, not the kind of thing a bunch of guys from the industrial West Midlands would be expected to produce, and they haven’t. Instead, although the sound is still unusual and experimental sounding, this is actually quite a bleak song, beginning without any introduction, straight into the lyrics with the lines “Blackberry Way, absolutely pouring down with rain, it’s a terrible day”. Although I wasn’t alive at the time, this imagery sounds to me more like the seventies, with its power cuts and three day weeks, than the sixties, when everyone loved each other and the sun was always shining.

The production on the track is fascinating. Although a simple, chugging guitar riff propels the whole thing along, the strings and vocals are pretty much at the same volume level, so even though Roy Wood’s vocals are strong and quite harsh sometimes it is difficult to focus on what he is singing. This everything including the kitchen sink style would become a staple of seventies rock and pop, with Wood’s own group Wizzard one of the main exponents.

All of this complicated arrangement cannot take away from the song’s real selling point though, which is the fact that it has a genuinely great, catchy chorus. In this respect it reminds me of that other late sixties pop rock crossover, Hi Ho Silver Lining by Jeff Beck. I think it’s only the prominent production that prevented Blackberry Way from becoming a post pub shout along in the same way that track has. It proves that although there is a wide variety in his back catalogue, at heart Roy Wood had the ability to create a genuine pop classic if he chose too. I won’t say Blackberry Way is the closest he came though, and I doubt anyone who has helped make I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day a top 40 hit in each of the last two years would either.

Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis
I hate Simon Cowell. He is a terrible, terrible man. The whole X Factor concept is appalling – four months of patronising, mind rotting television, ending on Christmas week with Cowell in a position where he has a brand new artist by whom he could release a fart and it would sell quarter of a million copies.

And so that is basically what he does. That’s My Goal, A Moment Like This and When You Believe are three of the best selling singles of the twentieth century. All three are complete garbage, loved and fondly remembered by no one whatsoever within a couple of months of being released, available now at a charity shop near you.

I do not mind when people buy records that I don’t like, they just have different taste and I can live with that. However, when they buy music that they don’t even like themselves without even thinking about the quality within it drives me mad. You may well enjoy slobbing out on the settee on a Saturday night while people with an inflated idea of their own ability sing, dance and beg for phone votes for your viewing pleasure, but just think before buying the cash in single. Next time you’re in the supermarket don’t just drop it in your basket, think! Deep down you know you don’t want it, it’s ****!

All of which makes it seem a little odd that I have one of Cowell’s protégés nestling on my iPod. The thing is, however much I detest the man, I still try not to let that affect my judgement when I hear a record. It was a painful process though, Bleeding Love had been number one for a while before I even heard it, I never for a moment considered it would be any good. In a way, that meant that discovering the catchy, slow burning, brilliantly produced pop song within even more of a pleasure. It is, quite simply, a good song sung and produced very well. I just found it a bit difficult to admit.

As for Lewis herself, she certainly demonstrates here that she has a very powerful voice. That alone is clearly not enough to make a pop star any good, but if she keeps being given material of this quality she should be around for a few years to come.

Blinded By The Lights by The Streets
When I first heard The Streets’ second album, A Grand Don’t Come For Free, it was like nothing I’ve ever heard before. I was aware of the existence of concept albums, but thought they were the preserve of prog rock bands who had deeply complicated ideas that took several twelve minute tracks to even begin to explain. This was different, in many ways it was more like listening to a play than to music, with each track a different act.

The story it tells is nothing unusual, it’s about a holiday, with typical Brits abroad references and all the leering at women, getting p*ssed and eating take-aways that you would expect. The great thing about this is that it’s a clever idea but on a subject matter that a lot of people can identify with. Really, at heart, the album is about relationships, both with friends and with girls. That is what made the album’s first two singles, Fit But You Know It and Dry Your Eyes such a big success.

Blinded By The Lights is something altogether different to those first two singles though, and actually a very odd choice for the third. The fact that it made number 10 in the charts must be almost entirely down to the success of the first two, it is probably one of the least likely songs on the album to ever receive radio airplay.

The track basically tells the tale of a very bad night, in which Mike Skinner gets lost in a nightclub, split from his friend and his girlfriend, while the pills he’s taken at first don’t seem to work and then, when he takes more, work too well. The claustrophobic music, with very slow, dull beats and a full sounding synthesised hook are like the sound of a DJ playing in the next room after you shut the door. This disjointed effect is heightened by a very odd, helium enhanced vocal occasionally singing about blinding lights and “people pushing by”. It’s not even clear if the voice is male or female, and as it interrupts lyrics about our hero having to go to the entrance to get bars on his phone and the amount he’s drinking (“Brandy or beer? Water’s a good idea…”) it is like you’re there in the club with him, sweating, hazy and lost. At the end of the song, he is so mashed he is not clear whether he can actually see his friend and his girlfriend kissing, or whether he actually cares when the music is so good, but later on the album, in the cold light of day, the after effects will be heartbreakingly documented on Dry Your Eyes.

Music can often remind you of a place, or a holiday, or a person you knew. This music is something different though, something more special. Personally, I have never been off my head on pills in a nightclub in a hot foreign country, but hearing Blinded By The Lights makes me think I know what it would feel like. That is what is so great here. OK, you’ll not hear me singing this one in the shower, but sometimes with music the experience is more important than the song itself. The Streets cut through any expectation of verses and choruses, and get right to the emotions. Quite a skill.

Blinded By The Sun by The Seahorses
Apart from Love Is The Law, which managed the rare combination of great guitars and a sense of humour, I had always assumed that the Seahorses output was dull, work-a-day indie which only people who were completely and solely dedicated to the genre, and therefore quite boring, would like. Several years after Blinded By The Sun, the band’s second single, was released though, my wife (probably girlfriend at the time thinking about it) found it on an old compilation album of mine with this on and played it over and over, insisting she loved it.

The wife and I do often disagree on music, but to give her credit, one thing I would never accuse her of being into is dull, work-a-day indie. In fact she would probably say that about me. So I figured she must have hit on something with Blinded By The Sun, and actually, it’s true, she was right. It is really rather good.

I think the problem I had with this track is just that there is nothing outstanding about it, no one thing that grabs your attention. That doesn’t make it bad though, and this has made me think that I am probably sometimes guilty about raving about how good a track is just because it’s different, as though a song’s unusual qualities can sometimes leave me blinded to the fact that it’s not really any good. Blinded By The Sun is the opposite to that – it may be the same old sliding indie guitars and wistful, vaguely romantic lyrics on the face of it, but if you take the time to pay attention it’s actually rather nice.

Although not very specific, the song appears to be about a failed relationship, with the singer asserting his newfound ability to “do what I want to do from now until forever”. Bearing in mind that the singer in question is John Squire, recording this shortly after the break up of The Stone Roses, I wonder what kind of relationship, this really describes. I’m sure I’m not the first person to make the link here (I remember the NME getting all excited when they realised the band’s names was an anagram of ‘he hates roses’), but as the song ends with the lines “and don’t ask me what went wrong, the list goes on and on” it seems quite a credible theory. Although they were arguably the best band in the world in the late eighties, the famously acrimonious split of The Stone Roses was all quite irrelevant anyway by 1995. It didn’t seem at the time that any good would come out of it at all, but maybe this song proves that is not entirely right. Not a classic or anything, but well worth a listen.

Blockbuster by The Sweet
I have no memory of the 1970s, having been two and a half years old when they ended. My impression of that time is that it was full of industrial disputes, power cuts and The Osmunds, so it is heartening to listen to this song, especially as my generation apparently hurtles towards its own grim financial apocalypse, and realise that even back then some people were actually having a lot of fun.

In fact I would suggest that in a more general sense there is not enough fun in pop music anymore. There is a some very smart, ironic, knowing music which is pretty good in its own way, but Blockbuster is just grown men being silly for your listening pleasure, and I’m not sure that happens as much these days.

The song itself, for those who don’t know it, is a glam rock stomper with daft lyrics about someone apparently being pursued by the police. Block Buster seems to be a terrible villain (“he’s got to be caught, he’s got to be taught, cos he is more eveil than anyone here ever thought”), or maybe he’s some sort of anti-goth militant (“you’d better beware, you’d better take care, you’d better watch out if you’ve got long black hair”). I have read that Blockbuster is actually the nickname of a terrible bomb that was used during the blitz, which seems to tie in with all the air raid sirens in the background but would also make even less sense lyric wise (a bomb that targets Goths maybe?) The question of what it’s about doesn’t detract from the quality of the track though, this is glam rock at its commercial best.

The thing that has always amused me about Blockbuster is that the guitar riff that opens the track and holds the whole thing together is exactly the same as the one from Jean Genie by David Bowie. That seminal single was only released 5 weeks before it though, and Bowie and The Sweet have both always insisted it is no more than co-incidence. While Bowie wins hands down in the credibility stakes, The Sweet won commercially, spending five weeks at number one shortly after he had peaked one place lower. It seems that a bizarre, transgendered tale about eating chicken was commercial enough to become a popular success but not enough to reach mega hit status afforded to the Sweet. If I was at school in 1973 I would like to think I’d have loved both, but if I was short of cash I’d probably have just bought Blockbuster and regretted it when I was older.

Bloodsport For All by Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
In January 1991 Carter USM were on the cusp of something huge. The music press were full of them, and they were ready to launch there latest single, which incredibly was already getting played on Radio 1. A scathing attack on life for new recruits in the armed forces, it was about to take politics into the pop charts and kids in playgrounds everywhere would be singing “the coldest stream guards of them all, say God save the Queen, bloodsport for all”. Who knows, maybe they would even start to make up their own puns.

Then something unexpected happened. The British government declared war on Iraq, and the BBC fell directly in line, immediately banning any songs with references to war. No more Boom-Bang-A-Bang by Lulu, no more 19 by Paul Hardcastle, and no more Bloodsport For All. The single spent one week at number 48.

Not that I knew anything about it at the time. I remember seeing the single at the bottom of the chart back when my local Woolworths stocked the top 50 7” singles (back when my local Woolworths existed, come to think of it). I had never heard of the band, but I remember hesitating for a second, wondering if liking their name was a good enough reason to buy it. I decided I’d better not in case it was dance music. Little did I know it would only be few months until they re-issued a song which would become one of my all time favourites, and which I would be using as a nick name on internet message boards 18 years later.

So what is so great about Bloodsport For All? Beginning with a startlingly loud synthesised fanfare, this is a song that demands to be listened to. Jimbob and Fruitbat do a fantastic job of sounding angry, like they urgently need you to sit up and listen. The lyrics, if you can wade through the puns, are quite powerful too. You don’t often hear anyone singing anything as serious as “Suffer in silence said Brigadier General Holmes, or change your name to Smith or Jones, learn to live with all the death threat notes, the big bananas and the racist jokes”, so when you do it forces you to think about what they’re saying.

If I had any criticism of this track, it would be the glam rock style “yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah” near the end, as though they’ve ran out of lyrics but still have some tune left. It is actually a brilliant bit of music, but after all the seriousness that has gone before it seems slightly vacuous. Still, there’s not much to be gained from picking holes in brilliance. I’m going to see Carter in November and you can be sure I’ll be singing along with the whole song, ending and all. I can’t wait.


Blowin’ In The Wind by Bob Dylan
Eleven years ago in a small Cornish record shop, a guy who I didn’t know very well was telling me how brilliant Bob Dylan is. I must have had some student loan to waste, because I asked him which album would be a good one to start with, he suggested The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, and I bought it. I owe that man a big favour, I now cannot imagine my life without Bob Dylan.

Blowin’ In The Wind is a folk song, written by Dylan in the early sixties, in which he asks a series of questions. When he first started performing it hardcore folk music fans apparently criticised him for asking all of these questions without providing any answers. What they didn’t realise though was that it would be in pursuit of answers to questions like these, and following some of the revolutionary ideas that Dylan had in his mind already, that a single generation would change western society for ever.

Folk music had often been used in the past to garner support for a cause, sometimes directly encouraging people to take action. What Dylan did here though was far cleverer than that, instead of demanding people get up and change the world, he planted the seed in their minds that made them want to do it themselves. In the past, no one in popular culture had ever asked questions like “how many times must the cannon balls fly, before they’re forever banned?”, and now here he was doing just that, and it made perfect sense. One man, with no more than a guitar and a harmonica, single handedly changing the world.

I really believe the message within this track is universal too, and applicable to any era, not just the sixties. Whenever I saw George Bush talking about the Middle East on TV in the last few years the line “how many deaths will it take till he knows, that too many people have died?” sprang immediately to mind, and I wondered how, in a post Blowin’ In The Wind world, such an idiot could ever get elected.

So it makes me think, makes me dream, and makes me happy that I live in a world where speech is free and people are allowed to sing things like this, even if they’re not always listened to. Blowin’ In The Wind is the single most beautiful, inspiring piece of music I have ever heard.

As a bizarre and entirely co-incidental footnote to this review, as I write it the track is enjoying its first ever appearance on the UK charts. Although various other people have had hits with it, Dylan’s version was never released as a single in the UK. Now, thanks to a rare agreement from the man himself to allow the song to be used in an advert for the Co-Op, it is, according to The Official UK Charts Company, currently on its second week at number 97 in the charts. I won’t hold my breath for domination of the top 10 just yet, it would seem a bit out of place amongst Lady Gaga and Flo Rida, but even so if only a few young people hear it and buy it as a result of this exposure, the world will be a slightly better place.

Blue Monday by New Order
Being completely anally retentive where music is concerned, I have to have my list of the three best records ever made mentally prepared in case anyone ever asks me. No one has yet, but just in case. I used to always think I would say I Want To Hold Your Hand, Blue Monday and Live Forever, but after a while I suddenly realised that it seemed a bit odd to claim that the three best tracks in the global history of recorded music were all made by people who were brought up within 35 miles of my house, so now I tend to substitute one at random for Like A Rolling Stone.

Everything about Blue Monday shouldn’t work. It is seven and a half minutes long, starts with a 25 second drum (machine) solo, and has been going for over 2 minutes before the vocals begin. It is high energy, eighties dance, but with guitars and a deadpan, emotionless vocal delivery. It features thunderous explosions, electro firework effects and a breakdown part where sound of the relentless beat can only really be compared with being punched in the head. On paper it sounds a bit of a mess to say the least, but in fact it is one of the greatest records ever.

Blue Monday is also the stuff of legend. It did not just transgress boundaries musically but in lots of other ways too. Its original release in 1983 was on 12” vinyl only, a move that would be expected to severely limit the number of sales. Instead, the sheer unsuppressable genius of the track made it become the best selling 12” single of all time, peaking at number 9 but staying on the charts for 38 weeks. Bizarrely, the sleeve that had been designed for the single was so expensive to produce the record company actually lost money every time they sold a copy. When they tried to recoup some of their losses by re-issuing it in 1988 as a shorter remix on 7” vinyl the extra sales pushed it past the million mark, making it one of the 100 best selling singles of all time in the UK. Not bad for a track that sounds like nothing else you’ve ever heard before.

My relationship with the song is a tricky one. When I was 5 my Dad won a copy in a Reader’s Digest competition, and, never having seen a 12” single before and therefore assuming it was an LP, he played it several times on top volume at 33rpm instead of 45. I didn’t know my music that well at the time, but I knew I hated the big record in the black sleeve. That memory stuck with me for years and when, as a teenager, I dared to have another look to see what it was, I couldn’t believe what lay inside. I pointed it out to my Dad and he claimed to have no idea what I was talking about. He did let me keep it though so I forgive him.


Blue Orchid by The White Stripes
I have to admit, when I saw that Blue Orchid was the next track to review my first reaction was to wonder what it was. When I listened to it, however, I realised it was the one with the fantastic “ner, n n n ner” riff at the start, and that alone immediately makes the track good enough to qualify for a place on my iPod, even if it’s not enough to make me remember the title.

Jack White’s music charts an interesting progression since The White Stripes first appeared on the UK scene in 2001. It seems like he started out with fun, charming and incredibly simple rock music (Hotel Yorba, Fell In Love With A Girl), and then got progressively darker and more complicated, but got away with it from a commercial perspective because he had already established himself as one of the best rock musicians of the decade. Blue Orchid was released in 2005, and is neatly positioned in the middle of that change, darker and more demanding that the early stuff, but still retaining the instant hook and simple lyrics that were missing from his later tracks, like last years Conquest and the Bond theme he did with Alicia Keyes, Another Way To Die.

This single was the first track to be taken from The White Stripes fifth album, Get Behind Me, Satan. I bought that album on the basis that the previous two had been so good but I was disappointed. Blue Orchid is great but as track one is very much the high point on the record, the rest is a bit of a muddle. The White Stripes would still do some good stuff in future, but nothing I liked as much as White Blood Cells or Elephant.

It has just occurred to me though that, bearing in mind the name of the album, the lyric in this song “Get behind me, get behind me now anyway” suggests that the whole song might be sung to the Dark Lord himself. I have read elsewhere on the internet that White has denied the song is about the break up of his relationship with Renee Zellweger, so someone obviously thought it was written from the perspective of him singing to her. I’m not a big Bridget Jones fan, but even so comparing Zelwegger to Satan seems a bit unfair. If it was Hugh Grant then I suppose I could see the point, but he never went out with Jack White, and the lyric “your lips taste sour” would seem a bit strange to say the least. I think I’ll just stop trying to understand it, and just accept that with that fantastic riff and screamed vocals it ticks all the boxes for everything you need from a White Stripes single.

Bohemian Like You by The Dandy Warhols
The first Dandy Warhols single I bought was called Get Off. The NME had been going on about the band for ages, and they had sneaked into the charts a few times with singles I’d not heard, including the entertainingly titled top 20 hit from 1998, Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth. I figured it was time I found out what all the fuss was about.

I was a bit disappointed with Get Off. It was pretty cool, a very American take on indie music with clever harmonies and toned down guitars, but something was holding it back, like it was almost a great record but not quite. I listened to it a few times and then mentally filed the Dandy Warhols away as being unlikely to merit any further attention.

What I didn’t know at the time, and to my shame it took the advertising people at Vodaphone to make me realise, was that the single before Get Off, Bohemian Like You, was actually pure pop genius. When a song this good stalls outside the top 40 it must be an absolute godsend to advertising companies, they just need to decide which product to attach it to and they have an instantly recognisable campaign.

Back in those pre-download days of course it took a re-issue by the record company to enable the track to re-chart, but in this case it did happen and Bohemian Like You sealed its rightful place in the top 5. It is one of the more memorable indie hits of the early noughties, if only because its status as one of the most played songs on TV meant that it crossed over to commercial radio stations, instead of being promoted only through the Radio 1 play list as happens with so many good singles.

Although it is undoubtedly the jaunty, counter culture sound of Bohemian Like You that appealed to the ad men, it is worth mentioning that the lyrics are pretty interesting too. It basically tells a simple boy meets girl and tries to ask her out story, but these people are just uber cool. Or at least they think they are – “I really love your hairdo yeah, I’m glad you like mine too, see we’re looking pretty cool”. He goes on to invite her to where he waits on tables (providing she likes vegan food) and then suggests that he has no problem with her still living with her ex boyfriend as long as he sleeps on the couch when he visits. I’ve always thought that it would be great to be seen as bohemian, and had absolutely no idea how to achieve it. I guess that as I eat meat, have a fairly good job and have never done anything to my hair except wash it I don’t have much hope. And if my wife’s ex wants to sleep on our couch he can forget it.

Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen
I have always been a bit confused by the phrase ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’, as if the two things are opposites. This track is clearly both at the same time.

Bohemian Rhapsody is an enigma. More than a mere song, it eschews all convention, with no consistent elements, no chorus and not really even any one genre. But then you know all that already, and the reason you know it is that Bohemian Rhapsody also sweeps aside any questions of familiarity. Everyone knows Bohemian Rhapsody.

This track is an example of recording artists taking a conscious decision to make a track that sounds nothing whatsoever like anything anyone has done before. I am reminded a bit of what I wrote a few days ago about Blue Monday – it’s like the different things that are all thrown into this track just shouldn’t work together. However, unlike Blue Monday, I’m still not even sure if they actually do. Instead of making a track that is bigger than the sum of its parts, Bohemian Rhapsody is like several different parts just stuck together. It goes from vocal introduction, to piano ballad, to opera, to heavy metal without these separate elements overlapping at all. The saving grace is that it is all so excellent, that haunting piano looping over and over in your mind long after the track has ended. The opera part is so bizarre it couldn’t help be good, and while the heavy rock guitar that comes afterwards is a bit more like other Queen records, it is also the band (and especially Brian May) at their very best.

The lyrics, meanwhile, have always been a source of fascination. Freddie Mercury claimed that it was just some words thrown together with no real meaning. While I’m prepared to accept that is a possibility as far as “Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?” is concerned, it doesn’t take a psychologist to realise there are probably significant things going on inside a mind that gives the world lines like “I don’t wanna die, I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all”, and “if I’m not back again this time tomorrow, carry on carry on, as if nothing really matters”.

None of this actually answers the question about whether the track is actually any good though. However, considering it is the third best selling single of all time in the UK, the only track ever to be number one in four different years, and one of very few singles ever to enter the US top 10 twice, the question hardly seems relevant anyway. It is a milestone in rock history, and being a huge fan of music generally that is good enough for me. In a way it is six songs in one, and they’re all pretty good. Maybe I think about these things too much though – there was certainly no doubt in Wayne and Garth’s minds.

Born In The USA by Bruce Springsteen
I recently read in The Guardian that this is the most misinterpreted song in rock history, so summing it up in 450 words is quite a daunting task, but here goes…

The critical thing you have to recognise in order to understand Born In The USA is the different impression people get when they listen to it carefully as opposed to just hearing it in the background. I personally have to remember that most people are not as obsessed with music as I am, but music can still be a wonderful thing even if it is just what you hear while you’re doing something else.

The central contradiction here is that the lyrics to the verses of this song constitute a searing, bitter criticism of American foreign policy, and in particular the Vientnam war, while the chorus sounds distinctly like an exercise in flag waving patriotism. Only when you listen to the verses, in which Springsteen sings about his (fictional) brother, saying he was “fighting off the Viet Cong, they’re still there, he’s all gone” do you realise that the chorus is actually meant to be a deeply sarcastic comment on the type of people who believe that being born in the USA is something to be unquestionably proud about.

This misinterpretation incredibly went all the way to the top, with no less a figure than then president Ronald Regan including a reference to the song in a speech he made, suggesting it is exactly the sort of music young Americans should be listening to. It also damaged Springsteen himself, who has ever since been completely unfairly tarnished with a reputation for being uncool, both by people who have never got round to listening to the verses, and people who believe he should never have been so naïve as to think that a track with a chorus like that would be interpreted in any other way.

All of this is a shame, chiefly because Born In The USA is a phenomenally good record. The eighties had plenty of searing, sing along rock anthems, but very few of them had anything approaching a social conscience, and very few of them were anywhere near this good. The title track from an album that also included Born To Run and Dancing In The Dark, it has its place in rock history well secured, not just by the confusion over what it’s about, but also because if you can get passed that it is also very good.

Born Slippy by Underworld
When you think about it, it seems odd that the mid nineties, an era dominated by indie music going over ground, should be immediately brought to mind by this track, which has never had a guitar anywhere near it. Slave to rock as I am, my own preferences mirror this. Approximately 95% of what was labelled dance music in the nineties, I would more succinctly label crap, and yet this track, forever linked to everything that represented the nineties dance scene, is one of my favourite singles of the decade.

I suppose you could argue that what makes a truly great single is the ability to cross genres, or at least, as with Born Slippy, the ability to cross people’s prejudices of those genres. All those blissed out ravers enjoying themselves on the beaches of Ibiza until the sun came up in the mid nineties probably owned at least one Oasis album, Born Slippy was simply a cross genre single that went the other way.

How it achieved this is probably rooted in the fact that it didn’t sound anything like any other dance music that was around at the time (or since as far as I, with my limited knowledge of the genre, am aware). Starting with a brilliant but simple keyboard hook, and the apparently mad but loud and slightly distorted ramblings of someone who may well not just be high on life, it suddenly changes after about thirty seconds into a completely different record, nothing but loud, urgent beats and more rambling. At the end, just as it is all about to become too much, the keyboard returns to reminded us how it started, before the beats fade away into the distance. Needless to say I have the single version on my iPod, not the one that goes on pointlessly for another three minutes.

It should also be pointed out that there were two other major factors in making this track such a huge success. One was Trainspotting – being inexorably linked to the coolest British film for many years can not have done it any harm at all. The other was the lyric “lager lager lager” repeated several times near the end, which, apparently to Underworld’s horror, gave rise to a chant that could be heard emanating from herds of unpleasant young men wearing pastel coloured shirts in Yates’ Wine Lodges up and down Britain (but especially, I suspect, in Romford) every Friday and Saturday night for several years.

So with film buffs, binge drinkers, dance music fans and shoe gazing indie lovers all covered, this track, unusual though it may be, could not fail to be a huge success. The underlying fact still remains though that it was so big because it is so great, proof that brilliant music can sometimes come in the least expected guises.

Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf
Canadian band Steppenwolf only ever had one hit in the UK, but they had it twice. Amazingly for such an iconic track, on release in 1969, Born To Be Wild could only climb as high as number 30, and never got any further until it was re-issued for some reason in 1999 and got to 18. That just goes to show that even where individual tracks are concerned, the charts don’t always tell the whole story.

Born To Be Wild will, for a lot of people, always be the ultimate track for evoking the open road, specifically seen through the visor of a motorcycle helmet. Now, personally I don’t own any leather clothes whatsoever, and I’m far happier on four wheels than two, so I don’t think I will ever truly appreciate what this song represents to men with big moustaches who like large, throbbing lumps of metal between their legs. I do realise how significant it is to them though, and for a song to mean so much to so many people there must be something fairly special about it, and there is. Listen to Born To Be Wild and you are listening to heavy metal being invented.

There are, of course, people who know far more about the history of rock music than me, heavy metal especially. I do know though that when this band sing the line “heavy metal thunder” they may well be referring to the power of their vehicles, but it is the first time that the phrase, which would evoke a specific type of music and style in the minds of everyone within a few years, had ever been used in relation to music.

For many, the song’s association with motorcycles came via its use in the film Easy Rider. Widely regarded as one of the all time greatest films, I am ashamed to say I’ve never properly seen it. When I was a student I was part of a group of people who started a kind of film club, and this one was shown. I really should have been paying more attention, but instead I volunteered to sit on the door taking the money, the appeal of which came largely from the fact that any girls who came to see it might think I was cool. Looking back, shamefully trying to associate myself with such a cool film in the minds of female students was never going to work, especially as I’m about as heavy metal as Barbara Streisand. I might as well have volunteered to put the chairs out instead, then I wouldn’t have had my back to the film. I still got to hear Born To Be Wild though, although I suppose I could have done that by staying at home.

So no, I don’t quite get heavy metal, I haven’t seen Easy Rider and I don’t like motorbikes. I will always like this song though, with its screeching but still tuneful guitars and urgent vocals. To me this is the sound of things changing. The hippy ethos of the sixties was by this point being left behind at quite a pace, and a new kind of rock was emerging. I like it when songs seem to define a changing mood, so Born To Be Wild will always have a well deserved place on my iPod.

Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen
While writing about Born In The USA last week I got thinking about Born To Run (which I mistakenly said was from the same album – it’s actually the title track to an earlier one). I found a live version of Born To Run on 7” vinyl in a charity shop a few years ago, and I remembered quite liking it. Based on this memory and how good Born In The USA is I decided to download it last week, and due to Springsteen’s unimaginative choice of words at the start of his song titles, five days later I’m reviewing it.

Born To Run is a song about the youthful desire to escape from the town in which you were brought up, something which I imagine a lot of people can identify with. An epic sounding track with multiple layers of instrumentation, the thing which originally appealed to me is clearly the very catchy “niw niw niw niw, niw” hook. This is delivered each time Bruce perfectly evokes the need for escapism when he hangs on to the last note in the chorus line “baby we were born to ruuuuuuuuuuun”. It is a track that is very good at making the listener empathise with the singer’s point of view, a song that makes you want to break free from the chains that bind you, even if you didn’t realise they were there before it came on.

Having said all that, I would be lying if I didn’t say I’d cringed a few times while listening to it over the last few days. The first thing that struck me was that I wasn’t to keen on Bruce’s mumbling vocal style. Maybe on the live version this just sounded like he was too far away from the microphone stand, but on the recorded version it sounds decidedly odd. Then I looked up the lyrics on the internet and realised that the reason he was mumbling might be that he didn’t want anyone to actually hear what he was saying. Rolling Stone magazine claimed Born To Run was the 21st best song of all time, but who would seriously say that about a song that contains the line “just wrap your legs round these velvet rims and strap your hands across my engines”? VH1 actually said it was the greatest song of all time. Don’t get me wrong, it does have its merits, but when the saxophone kicks in I’ve had enough, it reminds me of Wombling Merry Christmas.

I have tried to think about what would make me like this track more. It definitely has some excellent constituent parts. The subject matter, the hook, and the huge “whoa whoa whoa” bit at the end are all pretty good, as it the delivery of the one line chorus (although I’m still a little confused by the use of the word “tramps”). Maybe if it had no verses, so was almost instrumental, and without that saxophone, I would love it. In actual fact, that is just the live version but with the microphone turned off. I’d like to hear that, it would be a big improvement.

Boulevard Of Broken Dreams by Green Day
A while ago I read about a website where they list mis-heard lyrics from songs, such as Jimmy Hendrix saying “excuse me while I kiss this guy” or REM opening Losing My Religion with “let’s pee in the corner”. They are quite funny, even if it is doubtful whether anyone really thought that was what was being said. Personally, for some reason, even though I know it’s not right, every time I hear this track I can only think the singer is saying “I wore cologne, I wore cologne”.

Boulevard Of Broken Dreams was the second single from Green Day’s last album, American Idiot. All over the radio and TV at the end of 2004, it was the albums second top ten hit. It was also quite a change for Green Day, demonstrating that they were no longer only in the business of two and a half minute blasts of punk metal, but were now just as comfortable with crowd pleasing stadium rock. They had broached this territory before, most notably with the slow but much more low key Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life), but here they were going directly for the stadium rock fans and succeeding brilliantly.

I think the reason this track, and subsequently the album, were so successful is because Green Day managed the neat trick of taking on a whole new market of people who like their rock a little softer and melodic, without alienating their core audience. It is a rare example of a successful act changing fairly dramatically but being successful with it. Then again, I suppose you could say that there was little risk attached to releasing a song like Boulevard Of Broken Dreams, it has such wide appeal that it could hardly fail. The risk would probably have been greater if Green Day had not changed, released a whole new album of punk metal and found that their audience had moved on.

I guess ultimately this track is not entirely unlike other stuff, and it’s not changed the face of popular music, it is just great, and there’s no harm in that at all. It does make the question about Green Day’s future material all the more intriguing though, and apparently their next album is only a couple of months away. I can’t wait.

A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash
I remember my Dad, who has always been a bit of a country fan, telling me about this song when I was a kid. Although I know deep down they’re often rubbish, I have always found something quite appealing about songs that actually tell a story, so I sought this one in second hand record shops and eventually found a copy of the single, a live recording which made the top 10 in 1969.

For the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know already, A Boy Named Sue is the tale of a man who spends his life roaming the towns of the southern USA looking for his Pa, intent on killing him as revenge for giving him a ridiculous name before he left his Ma. When he eventually tracks him down a bloody fight ensues, until the old man is able to explain that he gave him that name because he knew the subsequent teasing and fighting would make him hard in the absence of a father to do it for him. The song ends with Cash proclaiming “and if I ever have a son I’m going to name him… Bill, or George, anything but Sue, I still hate that awful name!”

Making funny records is fraught with difficulty, and even the very biggest comedy hits often only happen because something is very briefly hilarious. Looking back years later at Shaddap Yo Face, Star Trekkin’ or The Stonk only leaves you mystified about how on earth anyone was ever amused by them, and yet they all reached number one. That makes the fact that A Boy Named Sue is still a great record 40 years after it hit the charts fairly remarkable, but the secret is definitely in the lyrics. The words are brilliantly evocative of an existence that I have certainly only ever seen in Westerns, and when Cash sings about Sue and his Dad “kicking and a-gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer” it’s easy to imagine John Wayne himself watching from inside the saloon. The imagery in the song is so rich, with Sue and his Ma being left no more by his Pa than “this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze” it really makes you realise where the ‘Western’ in Country and Western music comes from.

My only complaint here is that iTunes let me down a bit. I did not realise there were lots of live recordings of this track available (obvious now I think about it) and just downloaded the most popular one, from The Very Best Of Johnny Cash. On the single version I had the audience were clearly enraptured by this story, laughing at the hapless boy’s story, especially when he first introduces himself to his Pa, “My name is Sue! How do you do?” On the version on my iPod I guess it must have been much further into his career, because the audience clap along appreciatively but seem to know all of the jokes already. Without the uproarious laughter it is somehow less funny to listen to, and even Cash himself sounds a bit weary of it. The sparse introduction is enough for the audience to know exactly what to expect, and when he delivers the first line, “Well my Daddy left home when I was three” he has the distinct air of a man who’s thinking “oh God, not this again”.

I have since discovered that the version I have on vinyl was actually recorded at a concert in a prison, which was being filmed for Granada Television. Strange how even in the most unlikely circumstances the best music often seems to somehow involve the North West of England, the part of the world that gave me “the gravel in my guts and the spit in my eye”. Makes me proud!

The Boys Are Back In Town by Thin Lizzy
I have always been a bit sceptical about classic guitar rock from the seventies, sometimes the focus goes too far away from the quality of the music towards putting emphasis on the technical ability of the performers. Personally, I cannot play the guitar, but I know when I hear something whether I like it or not, and if it’s a 12 minute electric guitar solo in which the musician uses his teeth and toes then I probably won’t.

Years ago, some time in the mid 90s, I bought a double compilation album on cassette called ‘The Best Rock Album In The World… Ever’, one of the first in that series where they kept changing the genre and eventually, I felt, making genres up. It was a pretty good tape though, and it had a mixture of over the top rockathons and classic singles the like of which are rarely heard these days. The Boys Are Back In Town was one of my favourites.

The key to this song is pretty simple – it has a very catchy hook, short, repetitive, and enough to make even the most reserved listener break out into an enthusiastic performance on the air guitar. Sometimes that really is all it takes to make a brilliant single, just a moment of inspiration and you have an instant classic.

Thinking about this track got me wondering about the lyrics though. I pretty much know them all off by heart, but have very little idea what they’re about. Who are the boys, where is the town, and most intriguing of all, who is the song aimed at, this person who’s “been living down town, driving all the old men crazy”?

A search of the internet has thrown up one theory, but not one which answers many of those questions. Apparently, Phil Lynott, who wrote and sang the track, was encouraged by his management to write something specifically to appeal to his audience, which was largely made up of young, working class males. The boys of the title are apparently returning from service in the military. Somehow that explanation doesn’t really seem to satisfy my need to know what the song is about, I would prefer a story of some sort to the thought that “Dino’s Bar And Grill” was just made up to sound like somewhere that people could identify with, and that the line “every night she’s be on the floor shaking what she got, man she was cool I mean she was red hot” is not really about anyone in particular. I think I’m finding a down side to writing these reviews – sometimes there seems so much more to a song when you don’t actually think about it. Really though, I’d be daft if I let the apparent lack of meaning spoil my enjoyment of this track, it is still a truly great record. A rock classic for the people, not just the connoisseur.

[SheriffFatman]

The Boys Are Back In Town by Thin Lizzy
I have always been a bit sceptical about classic guitar rock from the seventies, sometimes the focus goes too far away from the quality of the music towards putting emphasis on the technical ability of the performers. Personally, I cannot play the guitar, but I know when I hear something whether I like it or not, and if it’s a 12 minute electric guitar solo in which the musician uses his teeth and toes then I probably won’t.

Years ago, some time in the mid 90s, I bought a double compilation album on cassette called ‘The Best Rock Album In The World… Ever’, one of the first in that series where they kept changing the genre and eventually, I felt, making genres up. It was a pretty good tape though, and it had a mixture of over the top rockathons and classic singles the like of which are rarely heard these days. The Boys Are Back In Town was one of my favourites.

The key to this song is pretty simple – it has a very catchy hook, short, repetitive, and enough to make even the most reserved listener break out into an enthusiastic performance on the air guitar. Sometimes that really is all it takes to make a brilliant single, just a moment of inspiration and you have an instant classic.

Thinking about this track got me wondering about the lyrics though. I pretty much know them all off by heart, but have very little idea what they’re about. Who are the boys, where is the town, and most intriguing of all, who is the song aimed at, this person who’s “been living down town, driving all the old men crazy”?

A search of the internet has thrown up one theory, but not one which answers many of those questions. Apparently, Phil Lynott, who wrote and sang the track, was encouraged by his management to write something specifically to appeal to his audience, which was largely made up of young, working class males. The boys of the title are apparently returning from service in the military. Somehow that explanation doesn’t really seem to satisfy my need to know what the song is about, I would prefer a story of some sort to the thought that “Dino’s Bar And Grill” was just made up to sound like somewhere that people could identify with, and that the line “every night she’s be on the floor shaking what she got, man she was cool I mean she was red hot” is not really about anyone in particular. I think I’m finding a down side to writing these reviews – sometimes there seems so much more to a song when you don’t actually think about it. Really though, I’d be daft if I let the apparent lack of meaning spoil my enjoyment of this track, it is still a truly great record. A rock classic for the people, not just the connoisseur.

Brass In Pocket by The Pretenders
Brass In Pocket is one of those songs which people tend to know when they hear it, but not if they just hear the title. This is probably related to the fact that the title is only used once in the whole song, in the first line, which comes in the first 10 seconds, before anyone’s paying attention.

Brass In Pocket was released in late 1979, and became the first number one single of the 1980s. It would be seem fitting if the song to get this accolade was a sign of things to come, some sort of visionary electro pop track sweeping the seventies aside. Brass In Pocket is not like that at all though, and in fact it wouldn’t be as good if it was. Instead it is pleasant, guitar driven pop with Chrissie Hynde’s wonderfully smooth and deep vocals and a tune that somehow manages to be very catchy without actually having a recognisable chorus.

The lyrics are quite intriguing too, and there is a certain amount of dispute over the line where she appears to sing “been driving, Detroit leaning”. Others hear, “detail leaning”, and neither seem to make much sense. There is even a school of thought that she actually says “ditalino”, which is an Italian word referring to a private activity that ladies are rumoured to do while alone, which does kind of fit in with the next line “no reason, just seems so pleasing”. Could such a pleasant, mild mannered song really be about such a subject? I guess only Chrissie Hynde can ever know.

My favourite part of the track is where the key builds and Hynde lists the tings she’s “gonna use” (including her fingers, which is probably more evidence for the theory suggested in the last paragraph). It reminds me of (Ain’t Got No) I Got Life by Nina Simone, a great track which was demolished by some remixing idiots in order to sell yoghurts a couple of years ago.

Thinking about Brass In Pocket got me wondering what The Pretender’s most well known song is. If this one had a more recognisable title it would probably qualify, it was their biggest hit. Back On The Chain Gang is one of my favourites, and 2000 Miles was not that big a hit but gets loads of airplay every Christmas. Thanks to Girls Aloud though I have a feeling their most famous song is probably I’ll Stand By You, which is a shame in a way because although it’s OK it is hardly representative of their music. Give me Brass In Pocket over that one any day.

Brianstorm by The Arctic Monkeys
After the incredible success of the Arctic Monkey’s debut album, with their first two singles immediately becoming amongst the best number ones for years as soon as they were released, it was difficult to see how they could ever maintain their popularity or the quality of the music. Indie, rock and pop in the noughties have all been blighted by the phenomenon of bands coming along with brilliant first albums and then completely failing to follow them up with anything worth listening to, so could the Arctic Monkeys be any different?

Well yes actually. The temptation to try to make another I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor must have been great, but instead, by not trying to completely repeat the sound of what made them a success in the first place, they made something quite different, and not as immediate, but after a few listens impressively close to being just as good. There’s a lesson there for The Kaiser Chiefs, Scissor Sisters, The Strokes, Gnarls Barclay and countless others.

Brianstorm, which looks like a typo but is actually about a man called Brian, is immediately darker and heavier than anything the Arctic Monkeys had come out with before, which is a brave move for the first single from a second album. The essential qualities that made the band so brilliant in the first place are still there though, with clever, witty lyrics delivered in a filthy Yorkshire accent. The lyrical highlights include “she’ll be saying use me, show me the jacuzzi” and the excellent “we can’t take our eyes off the t-shirt and ties combination”. This vivid portrait of a smooth but slightly sleazy character is exactly what this band do best, they evoke these apparently imaginary people so well you feel like you know them personally.

I think that is where my love of the Arctic Monkeys comes from, in that while I recognise they’re not for everyone, I just get their sense of humour very well. My favourite awards ceremony moment for years came when, shortly after Kate Nash had accepted a Brit Award and profusely thanked the performing arts school for middle class children The Brit School. Next it was the Arctic Monkeys turn and Alex turner decided to draw attention to his complete lack of a leg up to the top of the charts by a public school named after an awards ceremony by dedicating their award to the school too. It is great to think there are still people in the music industry prepared to make most of the others look stupid, and the Arctic Monkeys, with their debauched tales of working class sleaze, are the ideal candidates. Long may they last.

Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel
The title track from Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s fifth and final album together, Bridge Over Troubled Water was a huge success, reaching number one in the charts in the UK & the US (as well as several other countries) in February 1970. It is often featured in magazines and on TV in lists of the best singles ever made, and was the duo’s biggest hit.

Is it any good though? I have been asking myself this question for a few days now while trying to think of what I wanted to say about it. I think the answer has to be yes, although whether I actually really like it is another matter, it’s just a slightly difficult process for me to separate the two things.

I like most of what I know of Simon and Garfunkel’s back catalogue. From the wistful, folky brilliance of the Graduate soundtrack to their earlier, more country influenced stuff, I honestly think they’re great. I recommend their Greatest Hits - the song writing is never less than amazing, and the tunes just keep coming and you’ll be humming them for days. I love it.

Bridge Over Troubled Water, though, is something entirely different. Having contented themselves with strumming away on acoustic guitars for most of their career, it’s as though they suddenly decided to have a change and do something deliberately big. This track is like a huge orchestral hymn, going from barely audible piano tinkling at the start to an ending that sounds like all of the world’s violinists have come together for one giant crescendo. If they did set out deliberately to make something that sounded massive then they definitely achieved it.

The lyrics to the song are basically a promise to a friend that the singer will always be there to help no matter what, a sentiment that has often become sickly-sweet at the hands of less skilled writers, but which here just sounds genuine and heartfelt. I have to admit, although it seems strange even to me, I actually find this uplifting message a little depressing when surrounded by the huge but mournful sounding orchestration, as though the real message is more about the certainty of needing a shoulder to cry on rather than the suggestion that it is there just in case. I actually find this track a bit uncomfortable, it seems to be confirming your worst fears rather than offering counselling against them.

One thing that can be said for this song is that it has been hugely influential, and maybe my problem with it stems from the fact that I dislike much of what it influenced. I definitely think the similarity with Art Garfunkel’s own solo work, in particular Bright Eyes, a song that scarred a generation when used as the soundtrack to the death of fluffy cartoon rabbits, cannot be ignored. I reckon Andrew Lloyd-Webber may have listened to it a few times to while contemplating Don’t Cry For Me Argentina amongst other songs, and any right thinking person would wish he hadn’t bothered.

The fact that the world would be a much better place without a lot of what this track influenced, combined with its obvious difference from S&G’s previous material, are probably why I’m not sure I like it. I wonder why I put it on my iPod in the first place. I think I had the notion that it was somehow very worthy, and I’ve just been skipping past every time it came on. Not now I’ve thought about it though. It’s taking up valuable megabytes, so I’m deleting it.

Brimful Of Asha by Cornershop
High on the guitar pop of what seemed like endless brilliant bands in the mid 1990s, I was aware of the existence of Norman ‘Fatboy Slim’ Cook, but could not see the point of him at all. Why, when there were people around making albums like Definitely Maybe and A Different Class, would anyone ever want to listen to some guy speeding up old records and sticking throbbing noises in the background? It was completely beyond me, and, I have to admit, to a large extent it still is. My favourite record to which Norman ever had any input is Happy Hour by The Housemartins.

Back in 1997 though, I was still a full year away from being horrified by Another Level into stopping collecting every number one single, so when his big beat romp through Cornershop’s Brimful Of Asha, which I had never heard before, stormed to number one and provided a little light relief at the top of the charts from Celine Dion’s appalling My Heart Will Go On, I duly trouped down to my local record shop to buy a copy.

The first surprise was that it was actually readily available on 7” vinyl, still secretly my favourite format even though I’d owned a CD player for four years. The second was that in this format it only cost £1.99, so I bought it. The third surprise came when I got it home and put it on, because for some reason on that format the a-side was the original, with Fatboy’s reworking tucked away on the b-side. It turns out that, against all odds, underneath all the bleeps and whistles you got every time you heard it on the radio, there was actually a really good song. Melodic, cheery, interesting and even fairly simple to play yourself (it must be if I can, although I’ve forgotten how again now), Brimful Of Asha is genuinely a good song. Quite why in this country we had a situation where talented artists released great records which went completely ignored until some middle aged fool turned them into anthems for drunken beach parties is anyone’s guess, but I still have Mr Cook to thank for introducing me to this song, so he’s not all bad.

For the record, the strange and slightly complicated lyrics are apparently about underrated music from Indian films, which makes sense the more times you listen to it. There is a running joke in my wife’s family that her brother, still at school at the time and having no concept of what the actual words were, used to sing “cheese goes with crackers and it’s very nice”. The thing is though, he was absolutely right, it does go and it is nice. I think that’s a neat example of how regardless of how difficult it is to work out what a song is about, if it’s a cheerful, catchy tune people will like it. Brimful Of Asha is, and I do. And so does my brother-in-law.

Bring Me Sunshine by Morecambe and Wise
Songs by comedians can be notoriously bad, you only have to look at the atrocities inflicted on the charts over the years in the name of Comic Relief to realise that. Bring Me Sunshine is different though, for several reasons, most notably that it is not actually intended to be funny, just to make you smile. If making people smile was indeed Morecambe and Wise’s intention when recording this, then it’s a spectacular success.

Now, it’s not like I’m a massive fan of the duo personally and that’s why this song is here. In fact I didn’t really know much about them until I was in my twenties and they were well passed their heyday, my introduction to their shows was thanks to the BBC’s entirely justified habit of repeating their shows every Christmas. I do like watching old comedy programs, and who of any generation could fail to be charmed by Angela Ripon’s leg kicking antics or Eric telling Andre Previn that he is playing all of the right notes, “just not necessarily in the right order”? Some of those bits where they’re in bed together are downright bizarre, but as a whole the shows are just charming, entertaining family fun, which would be in danger of being forgotten if the Beeb didn’t keep repeating them.

More than anything else, I think the reason Morecambe and Wise were loved so much is the fact that they clearly believed in what they were doing, they had a genuine desire to make people happy. That makes this song the perfect choice for their signature tune. They may not be the best singers in the world, but when they croon “in this world where we live there should be more happiness” I do not believe there is a single artist on my iPod who is more sincere about the words they are singing. And really, although it’s not the most profound sentiment in the world, who could argue with them really?

As far as I know this track was never actually released as a single, although it is probably on hundreds of budget comedy and children’s compilation albums. Back in the seventies it must have been one of the most familiar songs never to be released, although I guess the general public as a whole are now are probably a bit less aware of it. For me, it just provides a bit of light relief in the mix with everything else on my iPod, and at only 2 minutes long it is enough to put a smile on my face but not enough to become irritating before the next, undoubtedly less cheery, tune comes on. Bring Me Sunshine - always a pleasure.

Bring Me To Life by Evanescence
For me, it was a major surprise when Bring Me To Life spent four weeks at number one in June 2003. Gothic rock was not a particularly popular genre at the time, and it never had been one that troubled the top end of the charts very often. Although I hadn’t heard the track I like chart surprises, so despite my reservations about videos with fake blood in them and people in white face makeup wearing capes and fangs from a cracker, I bought it. It’s not bad, either.

I guess the fact it made its debut at the top of the charts and managed to stay there for a month is largely down to airplay. Unusually for a track of this nature it does lend itself well to the radio, with a very polished, melodic take on hard rock. Interestingly, the lyrics to the track lead some people to label it as Christian Rock, although the band denied that they intended it like that.

I must admit I have never quite understood what Christian Rock is. Clearly, if someone sets out to make rock music to promote Christianity then that is it, but what if someone just happens to write and record a song about God? Or what if someone who is openly, devoutly Christian has a hit that does not particularly seem to be about religion at all? I have always found the concept of people using pop and rock music to draw young people towards religion a bit creepy, wondering if they find some great victory in hearing someone with no interest in religion going round all day singing “yeah, yeah, God is great” just because they heard One Of Us by Joan Osborne in the car on the way to work. Music is a very powerful force, but I kind of feel that religion should be able to stand up on its own without using music to sucker people in without them knowing. On the other hand, we all have free will, and is there any harm in someone religious who also has the ability to write a catchy tune combining the two in order to spread the good news?

Thinking about this, you can see why Evanescence might be at pains to distance themselves from such a debate, while at the same time being careful not to offend anyone on either side of the fence who might buy the record. The strangest thing to me is that elements of popular culture that are particularly anti-religious (horror films, Iron Maiden record sleeves etc) are often very similar to things that are specifically pro-religious. It’s just the same imagery, but one has more blood. When the singer on this track says she’s “without a soul, my spirit bleeding somewhere cold” I have, to be frank, no idea whether she’s pro or anti.

Maybe that is the essence of Bring Me To Life. As well as being catchy and unusual enough to stand out but not so much that people won’t listen to it, it is highly ambiguous. There is a lot of money to be made out of being all things to all people, and I guess Evanescence did just that. Personally, every time I hear the track I have to force myself past the fact that the male backing vocalist sounds like that bald bloke from Aqua, but as long as I ignore that it is a great record, a genuine curiosity.

Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison
Several years ago, when Cassettes were still a viable format, I bought my Dad a double compilation tape for his birthday called The Best Sixties Album In The World… Ever. It was an early example of a series of albums which were hugely successful, the makers just kept substituting the third word in the title, so ‘Sixties’ became Rock, Dance, Hip Hop etc. Eventually it got silly and they started adding numbers on the end, creating compilations that were both an album and a contradiction in terms at the same time.

While this cassette served as a trip down memory lane for my Dad, for me it introduced me to some brilliant music I had not heard before. Having slavishly collected number one singles, I had often overlooked lesser hits that were much better. Brown Eyed Girl is an example of how easily this can happen, as, although it was released as a single in 1967, incredibly it never actually made the charts.

Before this track all I knew of Van was a dreadful (as I remember it) duet he did with Cliff Richard one Christmas called Whenever God Shines His Light. It was not the kind of introduction to an artist that makes you want to find out more, but this is another mistake that is important to avoid. I wonder how many young people’s introduction to Stevie Wonder was I Just Called To Say I Love You? Or, with Michael Jackson, Earth Song? You just wouldn’t ever bother looking any further, and who could blame you?

Anyway, Brown Eyed Girl, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a truly catchy, nostalgic tune about teenage lovers. When I lived in Cornwall there was a pub which seemed to be playing this every time I went in, and it does seem to have become something of a drunken party classic, despite also being very good. It always reminds me of Bryan Adams’ Summer Of ’69. This is partly because that track has the same end-of-the-night status on the play lists of bad DJs in small town nightclubs up and down the country, and partly because that too has never troubled the top 40, but also because it has that same rose tinted theme of innocent teenage years spent in the company of a pretty girl. I think one of the reasons I like songs like this is because it is escapism, enabling me to look back fondly on a teenage existence that actually never happened. When I was 13-19 I was terrified of girls, and spent most of the time hiding in my bedroom listening to indie music and watching Quantum Leap. Don’t think I’ll ever be writing any songs about that, although of course Morrissey has several times.

These days for me Brown Eyed Girl is just one of those songs that makes me immediately happy, perfect in the car on a sunny day with the volume up and the windows down. It is often voted one of the best pop songs ever, and I certainly wouldn’t argue with that. Maybe now the download era is upon us someone will stick it in a TV advert and it will finally become the hit it always should have been, but either way it will remain a favourite of mine.

Brown Sugar by The Rolling Stones
The riff at the start of Brown Sugar is so simple and yet so effective it makes me wonder why someone else hadn’t written it already. As soon as the second guitar kicks in and the drums start to shuffle along this could only be The Stones or someone copying them, no one else ever made Blues so accessible.

Brown Sugar was written by Mick Jagger in 1969 and was number 2 in the UK charts in 1971, the lead single from the album Sticky Fingers. The lyrics are intriguing, and just in case there is any doubt about the excesses of the lifestyle The Stones had at the time, Jagger apparently said in an interview that the song is about interracial sex, cunnilingus, slave rape, sadomasochism, lost virginity and heroin use. I think most even most modern day hip-hop stars would struggle to cover all that in under four minutes, and they would definitely not do it so eloquently, in a way it could be played without censorship on the radio. The line “just like a brown girl should” seems incredibly out of place in a post-PC era, but amusingly it would still be quite offensive with the word brown removed. I think a modern way of describing brown sugar would be to say that it is“wrong on so many levels”, but it’s right on even more.

Despite what may be considered its somewhat unsavoury subject matter, on the radio is exactly where Brown Sugar belongs. From the moment it was released it instantly became a rock classic, perfectly embodying where the Stones were in the early seventies, still able to write brilliant tunes and some way before the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle that gave them so much inspiration turned them into a cliché. The site of them rocking away to songs like this even now, mostly in their mid sixties, is actually quite hilarious. Considering the fact that Ronnie Wood’s current girlfriend is 20 years old though, (and that must be true because I read it in The Guardian last Saturday!), I imagine a lot of what they were singing about back then still holds true. They are either disgusting old wrinklies, or an inspiration to men everywhere, depending on your point of view. That same point of view will probably have some bearing on how much you like Brown Sugar, but just to give you an inclination of where my opinions lie, I think it’s brilliant.

The Bucket by the Kings Of Leon
I suppose I’d better be clear from the outset here – I really like the Kings Of Leon. I bought their single Molly’s Chambers in 2003 after reading a review that said they were a bit like Queens Of The Stone Age, and four albums later I can honestly say I have still never heard anything by them that I don’t like. I normally think of this word being reserved for boy band obsessives, I don’t feel happy using it about myself at all, but I’ve got to admit it - I’m a fan.

The Bucket was the first single taken from the band’s second album A-Ha Shake Heartbreak, and is an upbeat, fast passed track with a great guitar hook at the start and a tune that gets stuck in your head, even though the lyrics are typically indecipherable. Following attempts to understand what Kings Of Leon are going on about I have often found myself singing words which are actually far removed from what is really being sung, but through reading the sleeve notes to their albums I have discovered that the lyrics are very good, and quite fascinating. On this track they become the first Americans I have ever known to use what I thought was the English only slang term for cigarettes, singing “three in the morning come-a-bang bang bang, all out of fags and I just can’t wait”. Or at least I think they do, the alternative seems a bit unlikely.

The Bucket performed moderately well, reaching number 16 in the UK charts, roughly average for their pre-2008 singles and about as good as could ever be expected for a credible American indie rock band. It really made a fantastic single, with enough pop-sensibility to be incredibly catchy but not too much production to make it watered down. I was not surprised when this song didn’t become a huge seller, as I am used to that happening to the music I like most, but I was astounded when they suddenly became multi-million sellers last year. I have read countless comments from people saying that the band suddenly became watered down in 2008, that they made a commercial decision to make more highly produced material. Listening to The Bucket I just don’t get that argument at all – it still sounds as fresh and exciting as the day I first heard it, if it was the first track of their next album it would be perfectly poised to repeat the successes they had last year. Maybe it was just the case that in 2008 their time had come, or maybe the record company just decided to try harder with their marketing. Maybe people just like songs with sex in the title.

Whatever the reason for their latter success, The Bucket remains one of Kings Of Leon’s finest moments. A triumph of a single, it is one of my favourite tracks of the 21st century.

Buddy Holly by Weezer
Maybe it was just my age and this happens to everyone in their late teens, but it seemed to me in the mid 90s that almost all of the music being released was brilliant. Admittedly there was some crap pop and dance music coming out, but that was easy to ignore, and virtually everything I heard that had a guitar anywhere near it was great. This meant that some fantastic tracks came from the most unlikely of sources, and Weezer are definitely included in that.

Buddy Holly is not, oddly, a song about Buddy Holly, but more about the lead singer being teased at school because he looked like him. It sounds like someone has crossed the lo-fi British indie music of bands like Stereolab with the Beach Boys at their tuneful, melodic best. The result is all scuzzy guitars and unmistakably American harmonies, and the whole wonderful noise is finished in a little over two and a half minutes. That’s plenty of time for a single to become a classic though, and that is exactly what Weezer achieved here.

I have to confess, great though this was, I only ever bought the single, and imagined Weezer fading away to wherever They Might Be Giants and a hundred other quirky American bands with guitars had ended up. Unexpectedly though, they actually developed quite a following, and achieved some critical acclaim over the following years. Then in 2005, ten years after Buddy Holly just missed the UK top 10, they bettered that performance with Beverley Hills, their biggest hit to date. That was pretty good too, but Buddy Holly, the second single off their first album, remains the best track I’ve heard them do. In fact it would take quite a bit of bettering. Good to know they’re still trying though.

Buffalo Soldier by Bob Marley and the Wailers
When I was a student I read somewhere that Legend: The Best Of Bob Marley And The Wailers was the all time best selling reggae album in both Britain and America. All I knew of Bob Marley was No Woman No Cry, the brilliant single he first hit the UK charts with in the mid seventies. I had heard this on the radio when I was a kid, and bought the 7” in a second hand shop as a teenager. It had been one of my favourites ever since.

My CD collection when I was a student was boosted immensely by ‘4 CDs for £20’ offers in Our Price. I saw Legend in one of these offers and I can’t think of any time I’ve spent a fiver more wisely. Greatest Hits collections can sometimes be a bit hit and miss, but on this one every song is absolute genius, and Buffalo Soldier is one of the best.

The track tells the tale of black men “stolen from Africa, brought to America, fighting on arrival, fighting for survival”. It sounds like a song written to document the struggle of black Americans generally, and I figured that the war that the man Marley describes being involved in is just meant to be symbolic of the fight for civil rights. It turns out Buffalo Soldier was a phrase used to describe actual people though, black men forced to fight native American Indians in the 1860s. However, this was many years after the importation of slaves to the US was abolished, so the lyrics cannot be taken literally. Whether Marley was getting his facts mixed up or whether the song was meant to make a generic point doesn’t really matter though, and I bet millions of people have been able to personally identify with the sentiment.

Sadly, that process is something that Marley himself will not have been privy to, because he died before the track was released. It went to number 4 in the UK charts, very good when you consider genuine Jamaican reggae music rarely got any higher, and perhaps surprisingly it remained his biggest hit until somebody calling themselves Funkstar De Luxe remixed Sun Is Shining and took it one place higher in 1999.

The real achievement where Buffalo Soldier is concerned is nothing to do with chart positions, it is more the admirable feat of creating a record on a complicated matter of moral and political history, and yet making it so good and so accessible to the general public. This was Marley’s talent. Not for him the impenetrable style of some long folk and protest songs on very specific subjects, instead he made these issues easy to consider. If you can make people think about the tragedy of inequality that underlies the history of the USA and have them tapping their feet at the same time, then you are truly a great musician. There is no question at all that this is exactly what Bob Marley was.

Build Me Up Buttercup by The Foundations
I’ve been contemplating this one for a while. Writing these reviews has really made me think about why the tracks are on my iPod in the first place. The answer to that is that I like them, but the reason for that sometimes seems a bit of a mystery, even to me. With Build Me Up Buttercup this is particularly interesting, because it sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. Whatever plays before or after it on shuffle, it is always quite a big change. But I must like it, otherwise it wouldn’t be here.

The Foundations were a strange band. Firstly, they were multiracial, which was unusual in 1968, to the point where their debut single, Baby Now That I’ve Found You, was the first ever number one single by a multi racial act. Secondly, their oldest and youngest members were 20 years apart, which would be unusual whenever they had put there mark on pop history, even if it was today. Thirdly, they were very successful for the last three years of the sixties, and then disappeared completely. Fourthly, they had 4 top 20 singles but never had a hit album. Pop music is littered with strange statistical anomalies, and it seems The Foundations provide a few of them.

Build Me Up Buttercup is a cheerful, happy pop soul crossover track about being disappointed by your girlfriend. In fact the singer appears to be alluding to the suggestion that his girl keeps giving the impression that she’s going to give something to him, but then he never quite gets it. While I can’t possibly imagine what that might be, the trick of describing it in the language of clean teen dating is very sensible and brings this song, with its catchy chorus and ability to make even the most miserable of people cheer up a bit, into the mass market, and sent it to number two in the charts in November 1968. It’s been a Radio 2 standard for as long as I can remember.

The track is slightly, but only slightly, spoiled by over use at a very bad nightclub in a town near where I lived as a teenager, usually played immediately before or after Daydream Believer by The Monkees. (This of course was before the extended opening hours for pubs rendered nightclubs, or at least all the ones I’ve ever been in, completely pointless). It is important to take the song out of the unpleasant context though, and actually it’s very good. It’s not going to change the world or become you’re favourite song of all time as soon as you hear it, in fact I suppose it’s just a bit of fluff, pop for pop’s sake. There’s no harm in that though, and I’m not ashamed to say that I really like it.

Burning Shandy Dan by The Family Mahone
Last year the organisers of a literary festival in the small town near where I live somehow managed to persuade Mark Radcliffe (of Mark ‘n’ Lard fame) to appear in a room above a pub as the climax of the weekend (actually it was probably because he only lives just down the road). I’ve bought loads of excellent music after first hearing him play it on the radio, and the absolute comedy genius of Fat Harry White, the “Stop… Carry On” game and countless silly catchphrases like “biggety biggety bong” were often the only reason I bothered getting out of bed as a student, albeit at 1pm, so I got tickets. It was billed as an evening of music and literature, and was actually him reading extracts from his new book (which I believe is published this month by the way) and playing some songs with another guy from the Family Mahone.

It was a great night, thoroughly enjoyable. The book sounds great, highlights included the time he accidentally took a wrong turn and drove ‘80s boy band Bros around a Manchester industrial estate and down a dead end, and couldn’t get them out because their entire entourage had followed, (it’s much funnier when he tells it), and when he and Lard got rather too drunk before going on stage to introduce David Bowie. The music sounded great too, and one of the highlights of that was Burning Shandy Dan. I had never heard any of their stuff stuff before, but they were selling CDs so I bought one called On The Razzle With The Family Mahone and this was on it.

Burning Shandy Dan is a song about a man, brilliantly described in the chorus as “a soundly ****** misogynist”, who would have the blokes down his local believe the he is the lord and master of his home, or, to put it another way, he likes to “keep the bread knife in its place”. His reputation as a sexist drunk goes before him, until one day the said bread knife turns up at the pub “and it’s yes love, no love, three bags full love, gentle as a lamb, his reputation lies in tatters, Burning Shandy Dan”.

As you can tell, it seems unlikely that Radcliffe will ever win an Ivor Novello or bring about world peace with his lyrics, and I’m not going to pretend he’s the world’s best singer either, but I guess someone who loves music as much as he does can hardly help themselves from having a go at making some themselves. Also, the whole band sounds like they’re having a fantastic time, which is probably their main objective anyway. As with much folk music, to fully appreciate it you have to see it live, but the humour and the genuine sense of fun come through enough to make the Family Mahone pretty good on CD too. According to their website, after their planned shows they are going to have a break, the kind that sounds distinctly like it might go on indefinitely. If you take my advice you’ll go and see them while you still can. And buy the book too.

Burnout by Green Day
I always knew when I started writing these reviews that one of the biggest risks was that I would end up repeating myself. Due to the vagaries of the alphabet, I have already reviewed four Green Day tracks, and reading back through them today I realised that in three of them I had ended by saying how much I was looking forward to their new material. Well now I have some, Know Your Enemy, the first track from their new album, having been released two weeks ago. And the verdict? Well, I don’t know exactly what I expected but it’s just sort of OK, but no better than that, so a bit of a disappointment really. I’ll still be rushing out to buy the album next month, but for now I think I’d better concentrate on Green Day’s past.

Burnout, which was never a single, is a track from Dookie, the band’s third album and first to be a success in the UK. A girl who I fancied but was too shy to tell bought me the cassette, sadly not because she felt the same but as a gift because I refused to take money for giving her a lift home from the restaurant where I worked on Saturdays. Looking back I wish I’d taken the money, I could have bought Dookie myself and probably had quite a bit left over. One night a guy who I worked with got a lift too and strangely, even though he lived nowhere near her, he got out at her house too. God, I’m so glad I’m not a teenager anymore. I mean, for Christ’s sake, he was into happy hardcore.

All of which makes it strange that the reason I love listening to Dookie even now is that it makes me feel that age again. It wasn’t all bad though, and in fact that whole album documents much of what I felt when I was that age. The underlying themes within are that girls only like other people, parents will just never understand, and the only place where any solace can be found is my bedroom, home of TV, loud music and masturbation.

Burnout is not a stand out track from the album, but that is really because, with the exception of Basket Case and Welcome To Paradise which are even better than the rest, every track on there is equally brilliant. Burnout is apparently a term used in American high schools to describe people who, to quote Wikipedia, are “interested in heavy metal music, drugs and alcohol, vagrancy, and vandalism”. I was definitely interested in all of them (although only personally involved in two), and I genuinely believed the line “I’m not growing up, I’m just burning out” applied to me. Now aged 32 and married, I have to admit the growing up part has happened. There’s no harm in me putting this on my iPod during the bus journey home, closing my eyes and pretending it hasn’t though.

By The Way by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers
By 2002 the Chilli Peppers had been having medium success with their sporadically brilliant output for 12 years. Always worth a listen, often worth a purchase, just occasionally a bit dull. Then along came By The Way, and the best way to describe it is that it was their Sex On Fire. It still contained all of the constituent elements that they were best known for (wistful, summery Californian vocals, catchy tune, shouty bits, lyrics which if they mean anything at all it is hard to tell what), but suddenly it was wrapped in a 3 minute package perfect for radio and destined to be the sound of the summer. It was number 2 in the UK charts and a huge success in nearly every country you can think of, and after all that time the Red Hot Chilli Peppers were one of the biggest bands in the world. I, for one, did not see that coming.

Funny thing is though, it is not exactly the best thing they ever did, it just opened up the commercial potential of all their other stuff. One of their first singles, Under The Bridge, had long been considered by some to be one of the best songs ever recorded, but while it was a hit in it’s own right it didn’t draw much attention to the rest of their music. That is probably to do with their other music at the time being much harder edged, closer to the punk / funk crossover of Give It Away than the melodious driving music of By The Way.

Personally, my favourite stuff by them was on the album before By The Way, Californication. By The Way seems very linear though when you consider it in the context of the previous album, almost like the band realised they were on to something big, they just needed a simple, catchy single to launch the next step, and this is it. Great though it is, I can’t help feeling that some of the band’s charm is lost in the slick production and the need to keep it simple so it would stick in people’s heads. There is other stuff on the album though that is fantastic.

I have always been slightly amused by the line “Dani the girl is singing songs for me”. Even now it just seems ridiculously clunky, as this person’s name was Dani and he had to add in “the girl” just to clarify. God forbid anyone should think he the person singing to him was a bloke called Danny. This assertion of heterosexuality just in case there was any doubt at all makes me laugh and seems distinctly American – I’m sure anyone English would just have thought of a girls name with four syllables. Er, hmm, I know, Antonia! No, that’s no good, people might think he meant Anthony…

So that’s By The Way – not the best song ever, not even the Chilli Pepper’s best song ever, but still perfect for hot sunny days with the windows down and the stereo up. Roll on summer.

California by Phantom Planet
A few years back, when I was supplementing my meagre 9-5 office based income by stacking boxes in a warehouse on weekend mornings, I came home to find the Mrs watching something American on Channel 4. Some very rich kid was having a party, and the highlight for me (in fact the only reason it stayed on) was that the entertainment was in the form of The Killers miming along to the best bits off their debut album on a stage in the corner. Dancing around our flat with the telly blaring on a Saturday lunchtime is an image that comes back to me every time I’ve heard that album since.

What I later realised is that this experience was my one and only exposure to date to The OC. Although that moment is a fond memory I’m not sure I would actually want to watch a show about the difficulties faced in the lives of a bunch of Californian’s who are so rich they can afford to have one of the best bands in the world play at their birthday parties. I have to admit though, it is a neat promotional trick on the part of The Killers to appear as themselves in a drama series. Shame it hasn’t caught on here, I would have broken my lifelong commitment never to watch Casualty if, say, the Arctic Monkeys were in it. No band could make me watch Hollyoaks though, that’s just never happening.

Anyway, although I never saw it again, The OC impinged on my life another time when, after hearing California by Phantom Planet on the radio, I went to Virgin Megastore to buy it and saw it had a sticker on the cover proclaiming it was The OC’s theme music. To some people, therefore, this probably seems like a ridiculous thing to be listening to, like having the theme from Neighbours on my iPod. For me though it represents nothing more than the song it is, and I really like it.

To me California seems to capture the essence of the place it is named after, all lazy days driving in the sun shine with the stereo on along wide highways. I’m not exactly qualified to make that assessment, having never actually been to America, but still, I imagine that’s what it’s like. One day I plan to fly to Washington, hire a car and spend about six weeks driving in a wide ‘u’ shape through the southern states until I get to LA. At the current rate of saving it will probably be some time during retirement, but still, there’s no harm in dreaming. As I leave Arizona heading west, in my head this song is on the stereo. “California here we come”. Quite a literal use of the song I know, but yesterday I practised on a wet bank holiday in North Wales, and it still felt good.

California Love by 2Pac featuring Dr Dre and Roger Troutman
Almost one in ten songs on my iPod are classified as ‘Hip Hop / Rap’, but oddly not a single one of them begins with A or B. Time to start redressing the balance.

As might be expected of a white man in his thirties, my taste in hip-hop does tend to be fairly mainstream. In fact one thing I’ve always liked about the genre is there’s never any of the silly posturing you get with rock and indie, where artists who are hugely popular are considered in some way not as authentic as those who are not so well known. In hip-hop the aim is to sell a lot of records, and if you don’t it will be widely assumed that it’s because you’re not that good. This track is a good example, it was a huge success, and the reason for that is because it’s brilliant.

I have to admit I was a late convert to all things hip hop, largely thanks to early noughties albums by Eminem and Dr Dre. I vaguely remember hearing California Love when it was released, but that was the mid nineties and I was listening to British indie bands almost at the expense of anything else. In this decade though I’ve bought a lot of rap music, much of which was from the nineties but passed me by at the time.

California Love was released in April 1996, five months before 2Pac was shot dead. I have to admit that while I love a lot of the music, I struggle to follow a lot of the rap’s more soap opera like elements, and therefore I am, like most people, fairly mystified about how 2Pac has managed to have such huge success since he died. To quantify this, prior to his death he had three UK top 40 hits (including this one), since it he’s had 13. He never made a track better than this one though, it’s even better than the one he did with Elton John. Maybe being dead was a factor in that, we will never know.

The main credit on this track goes to 2Pac, but as with so much of the hip-hop I like the driving force behind this track is Dr Dre, whose trade mark bouncy production makes it insanely catchy, and who also does quite a bit of the rapping. Dre’s love of California, and L.A. in particular, is a constant theme running through a lot of his records, and this track name checks neighbourhoods and is basically an ode to the place. That part of the world has inspired a huge amount of music that has become popular the world over, from the Beach Boys to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, but no one’s enthusiasm comes over more than Dr Dre’s.

Mention should also go here to Roger Troutman. I figured if I was going to review the track I should at least find out who he is, and it turns out that not only is he the guy doing the vocodered lyrics in the chorus, but he had been making music since the seventies and actually invented the vocoder himself. I guess that means we have him to thank for the late nineties revival of Cher’s career, but still, it’s not worth holding a grudge, especially when a track this good wouldn’t have existed without him. In 1999 his brother shot him dead, before doing the same to himself. That makes Dr Dre the only California Love survivor, a strange thought for a song only 13 years old. I hope he’s got more tracks like this left in him.

California Waiting by Kings Of Leon
Taken from the bands debut album Youth And Young Manhood, California Waiting was Kings Of Leon’s third single. Hailed by NME in 2003 as one of the best debuts in the last 10 years, the album briefly made the top ten, and the first two singles, Wasted Time and Molly’s Chambers, each only just missed the top 20. Even so, Kings Of Leon remained very much a minority interest, and this single must have been stretching the promotion a bit far as it peaked at 61.

I find this odd because I know the album well, and if I was trying to make it a big success I would have released California Waiting first. With its catchy guitar hook, sweeping chorus and manic shouty bit, it seems to me like the perfect single. It is classic Southern rock, with country, rock and blues blended into something which is not a million miles away from a pop song, but still raw and edgy enough to maintain its authenticity. The tracks on their most recent album may be a tiny bit more polished production wise, but California Waiting demonstrates that this band were able to put together an excellently crafted track with potential mass appeal long before they became mega famous for it.

The lyrics, as is usually the case with Kings Of Leon, remain something of a mystery. Most of them can only be guessed at from listening to the track, and they do not appear in the sleeve notes on the album, but if you take the trouble to look them up online you’d probably be none the wiser anyway. I’m sure it means something to them. It is actually quite fun to make up Kings Of Leon lyrics, just have a listen and then guess what they’re saying, it will probably make more sense that the real ones anyway. I was watching a video on Youtube the other day where someone had done just that with Four Kicks, a track off their second album, and then animated it. Sounds stupid, but it was quite funny actually.

So, California Waiting is a great song by a great band. I can’t say it stands out particularly from the rest of their back catalogue, but that is because, as I already said when reviewing The Bucket, I am a huge fan and I think just about everything they’ve done falls somewhere within the range of brilliant and absolutely brilliant. I would like to think that I was able to consider any new material they released entirely objectively, but still, I have to admit that mine is not exactly an unbiased opinion. You should still check it out though, it’s brilliant.

Californication by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers
I am ashamed to admit that I remember when I was a student discussing the Californication album with a friend, and arguing that it was a really bad title. I lived in Cornwall at the time, and although I knew their first album was great, I had come to know the Red Hot Chilli Peppers as a somewhat pointless rock-funk crossover band, favoured mostly by surfers, skaters and general baggy clothed layabouts, none of whom I ever used to see at home in t’ North. The title confirmed to me everything I already thought, basically saying “we are from California and we like sex and bad puns”.

After several fantastic singles were released from the album, of which this was the fourth, I had to admit I’d got it all wrong. I bought Californication, some t-shirts that either said Oakley or Rip Curl on them and started hanging around the car park near the beach in long shorts with a tub of board wax sticking out of my pocket. Well, I didn’t actually, but I could’ve. In some ways Cornwall really does actually seem to believe it is California, and from what I have seen of the rest of Britain it is the closest we have, so I would have been happy to be part of the dream. Even if would’ve looked did look a tit.

Californication is, of course, about Hollywood’s influence on the rest of the world, and as befits such an unlikely subject for a rock song, is really is quite unusual, but definitely in a good way. I read elsewhere that the Chilli Pepper’s had a lot of difficulty working out how to record the song as it just didn’t seem to work, and on the face of it you can understand why. The lines to the songs sometimes seem to have too many syllables for one line, which makes it all the more fascinating to listen to. For example, the lyric “Destruction leads to a very rough road but it also breeds creation, and earthquakes are to a girl's guitar, they're just another good vibration” is very complicated and contains at least four words you wouldn’t expect to hear in a song, but that makes the fact that they pull it off so well all the more brilliant. I also love the line “Space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement” – a very good point in its own right. This is the kind of track that could have gone very wrong but in the end the exact opposite happened.

So it’s fair to say the Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s career has been sporadic. They showed signs of absolute genius at the very beginning, and they still are OK in a radio friendly rock kind of way, but for me this is where they reached their peak, the fantastic, dreamy, all encompassing title track from an album that also included several other great tracks too (Scar Tissue and Otherside to name just two of the singles). Maybe they’ll reach these heights again at some point in the future, but even if they don’t their legacy is secure.

Call Me by Blondie
Some songs on my iPod are forgotten gems, songs that I feel passionate about but no one else has ever heard, or songs that I believe were excellent but there are plenty of people who disagree. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Call Me by Blondie though.

Call Me was a massive success. In America it was the best selling single of 1980, in the UK it was Blondie’s fourth number one in a little over twelve months, following hot on the heels of the equally brilliant Atomic. The track is produced by Giorgio Moroder, the producer responsible for a huge amount of the dance floor filling pop of the seventies and eighties. The list of people he worked with is like a role call of who was famous at the time, including Cher, Janet Jackson, Kenny Loggins, The Three Degrees and loads of others. I may be missing something though, but I have searched in vain for any other track on my iPod over which he waved his magic wand, there just doesn’t seem to be anything there.

I suppose when it comes down to it I’ll just never be a disco king, I can respect how clever and well produced songs by the likes of Earth Wind And Fire are, but I would never actually want to hear them while in the car, or doing the ironing. I’m sure tracks like that do have their place, it’s just that I can’t help feeling that the place is 1978.

This got me wondering why Call Me is different. I can’t help thinking it is probably the fact that at least half of the influence on this track came from Blondie themselves, with Debbie Harry writing the lyrics and the melody as well as supplying her always brilliant breathy vocals. There are lots of reasons why this song was such a big success, but Harry singing “roll me in designer sheets I’ll never get enough” before singing two lines in French (“Ooh, amore, chiamami chiamami,
oo, appelle-moi mon cherie, appelle-moi” anyone? I got a D at GCSE) cannot have done its chances any harm at all.

Basically, Call Me is simply three and a half minutes of swirling disco pop brilliance, the kind of track that just couldn’t fail to be huge, but unlike a lot of songs that get this big, it deserved it all. Blondie flirted with various different genres during the course of their career, but I don’t think they ever hit the nail on the head any more than they did with disco, and I imagine Mr Moroder is largely to be thanked for that. Even if I don’t own anything else I should thank him for.

Camaro by Kings Of Leon
Camaro is a track from Kings Of Leon’s third album, Because Of The Times, released in 2007. Since I’ve seen that this one was coming up in the reviews, I’ve been listening to it trying to work out if it’s on my iPod because it’s a genuinely great track, or if it’s more a symptom of my KoL obsession and I just loaded everything by them on here regardless of how good it is.

The thing is, it can’t be entirely the latter otherwise I’d have every track they’ve ever done on here, because I own all four albums on CD, so I must have seen something special about this one. It is quite unusual for a Kings Of Leon track though, and certainly not much like anything they’ve released on single. It starts with a low growling noise followed by some bass guitar, and is quite slow paced throughout. In fact, if you took away the southern US drawl of Caleb Followill’s vocals and replaced them with more yelping, it could actually be The White Stripes.

The lyrics are quite sparse too, really just a repetition of one verse four times, with slight variation. I know absolutely nothing about cars beyond how to drive one, and therefore didn’t realise what a Camaro is. Even now I don’t know what type of car it is, although I imagine it’s something fast (he sings “it go boy, go go go”) and maybe convertible. I’m assuming as well we don’t have them in this country. I’d never heard of them before (not that this means much) but also it does sound much more exotic that any of the ones I have heard of. “She looks so cool in her Vauxhall Astra” would fit in terms of syllables, but somehow seems a bit less plausible. It would be good marketing though, and I know of a certain factory in Ellesmere Port that could do with all the help it can get these days. Maybe someone should re-record it.

Actually, that raises the interesting prospect of whether KoL were given any incentive to record a song about a particular car. While I’d like to think my heroes would not succumb to such blatant product placement, the song is probably a Camaro marketing man’s wet dream. This train of thought has got me thinking, I bet Natalie Cole is never short of Pink Cadillacs either. My God, they’re all at it!

Anyway, back to the original question of whether Camaro is worthy of a place in this list. What I like most about the track is the screaming guitars in the instrumental break near the end, they alone make it stand out from the rest of KoL’s stuff. There is no way it would ever be considered single material, it’s far too dark and lacks the necessary catchy chorus. It’s very good though, and I would recommend it to anyone who only knows the band’s singles. They’ve not exactly got the most diverse back catalogue ever, but this is about as far away from the melodic, radio friendly sound of Sex On Fire or Use Somebody as their material gets.

[agentmosco]

Well played Sherriff. <thumbsup>

[SheriffFatman]

Camouflage by Stan Ridgway
This is one of the first records I ever bought. I saw it on Top Of The Pops in 1986 when I was nine years old, and I was absolutely entranced by it. Actually, I suppose I still am.

Camouflage is a ghost story set during the Vietnam war. It begins with a soldier who has become split from his colleagues in the jungle, and is trying to find his way back to base while being fired at. To let Stan tell it himself, “just then I heard a twig snap and I grabbed my empty gun, and I dug in scared while I counted down my fate, and then a big marine, a giant, with a pair of friendly eyes, appeared there at my shoulder and said “wait””.

They go on fighting through the night, but the marine seems to have some sort of other worldly ability to prevent either of them getting killed. The fact that the bullets “seemed to go right through him, just as if he wasn’t there” gives a clue as to what is to come. Eventually, the big marine, who has by now identified himself, saying “the boys just call me Camouflage”, leads Stan back to his camp and waves goodbye. Back at HQ, Stan tells them what has happened and is informed that Camouflage is known to them, and in fact he has been lying there sick on the base for a week and died the previous night. Before he died he “said his only wish, was to save a young marine caught in a barrage”. Stan and the medic then “both said a prayer for a big marine named Camouflage”.

I am always impressed by this song, I have never heard good story telling put to music more effectively. The twangy guitar country guitar and Ridgway’s strong US accent perfectly evoke the hot, claustrophobic, spooky nature of the situation, and the vocals at the end genuinely sound like a man who can’t believe that what he’s saying is true. It’s like a ghost story told by boys around a bonfire, set to music. With the line “things are never quite the way they seem” repeated in the chorus, it even sounds like a warning that you should be aware that something this scary could happen to you too.

The track was actually quite a big hit, reaching number 4 in the charts in the UK. Strangely though it seems to have been completely forgotten. Despite the many local radio stations constantly going on about how much eighties music they play, and the seemingly endless one hit wonder compilation albums and retro days on music TV channels, I have never seen any reference to it anywhere for years. A genuine forgotten gem, even iTunes only has a live version of it available, which doesn’t quite work as well as the single with the brilliantly atmospheric production.

Ridgway himself is apparently still recording new folk country crossover type music and touring in the US. I have not heard any of it but I do tend to get the impression with country music these days that there is a huge amount of stuff that never gets promoted but is much better than what does. Of course, that could be said about any genre, but I can’t imagine any successful modern country singer making a record even half as good as this one.

Can’t Get You Out Of My Head by Kylie Minogue
Time now to worship at the alter of pure, unashamed pop music. This is an incredibly unusual record, because despite having absolutely nothing alternative or counter culture about it whatsoever, it not only was a massive commercial success but also received universal critical acclaim. That’s not the only reason it’s unusual either – how many other singles released by long established pop acts sell over four million copies worldwide without becoming widely hated?

You could question how much of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’s success is actually down to Kylie herself, and you’d have a point. Early nineties pop star Cathy Dennis produced this track, and unlikely though that sounds a lot of the musical credit should go to her. Even so, pop music is as much about image as sound, and although I’ve never really understood that myself, in that sense this is a major triumph for Ms. Minogue.

It says a lot about how much people were taken by surprise by how good this record it that it was often referred to as a comeback, when anyone who was paying attention would know full well that it was released barely a year after she topped the charts with Spinning Around, and she’d had two other top ten hits in between. None of that mattered now though, because this song was clearly better than anything she’d ever done before. Since I Should Be So Lucky topped the charts thirteen years earlier, she had made a career out of fluffy, radio friendly but instantly forgettable ditties that no one really cared about, but all that could now be forgotten. Following this song she was now a pop grandee, officially up there with the most loved and most successful acts in the UK charts ever.

I remember the week this single was released driving 250 miles to visit my girlfriend at the time and listening to an interview with Kylie on Mark and Lard’s afternoon show. One thing I always loved about them is that they were never snobbish about music, if they liked a record they would say so, even if it was pure pop. (I was reminded of this a few months ago when I heard Radcliffe on Radio 2 raving over Lily Allen’s The Fear). On the way I stopped at a shop and bought it and we listened to it all weekend. The infectious, looping “la la la” never gets boring, and I still love the track now.

One of my all time favourite pop facts, for entirely puerile reasons, is that Kylie is the pop star with the most number twos, ten all together. Whatever you think about the more juvenile side of my sense of humour, you must agree that Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is, in every sense, clearly not one of them.

Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley
During the 32 years since his death, opinion over Elvis’s career has divided between those people who are completely obsessed with everything he ever did, and those people who are indifferent to it all. The thing that always amazes me about Elvis’s music is that there was just so much of it, he would often have more than one song in the charts at once and for every time he had a big hit single there were several that didn’t even make the top ten. Judging from the quality of it all, it seems like he never refused to record anything, because although some of it is clearly outstanding there’s plenty more mawkish and sometimes frankly bizarre rubbish.

The Elvis obsessives that I mentioned don’t do themselves any favours either. Back in 2005 they successfully managed to give their idol seventeen top ten hits in as many weeks, simply by having each of his original number ones released a week at a time and buying loads of them. This was stupid for two reasons. Firstly, far from raising Elvis’s profile and engaging a new, younger audience, it was seen as an orchestrated campaign by a bunch of nutters, and just annoyed anyone who was actually interested in the charts. Secondly, just like any artist, many of Elvis’s greatest songs didn’t get to number one, and many of the ones that did were not even very good at the time, but in 2005 sounded ridiculous.

Uniquely, Can’t Help Falling In Love can be considered both a number one hit and an example of how Elvis’s best songs were often badly marketed. A gorgeous song translated from French especially for the great man to record for the film Blue Hawaii, someone at RCA took the extremely questionable decision to release it as a double a-side track, the main track listed being Rock-A-Hula-Baby. (Remember that one? Me neither). It is the perfect song for demonstrating Elvis’s incredible vocal talent, the like of which has rarely, if ever, graced the charts since, and definitely ranks as one of the most romantic recordings in pop history.

The single topped the charts in the UK in February 1962, and went back to number 3 in March 2005, although I must confess the first I knew of the song was back in 1993 when UB40 took it back to the top of the charts. Unlike some people, I am not entirely dismissive of Birmingham’s number one reggae export, but to say they missed the boat with this one is something of an under statement. I am not a fan. However, anyone my age or younger attempting to understand what all the fuss about Elvis was should start here. If you see just turning up at the studio to sing whatever your told to as a weakness, then to a certain extent I agree with you. Listen to this song though, and concentrate entirely on the vocals, and you’ll see what I mean. Nobody does it better.

Can’t Stand Me Now by The Libertines
The NME ranked this track as the 13th best indie anthem of all time. I must have used a slightly different formula to them, as I calculated that it is actually 27th, but that’s still pretty damn good.

Can’t Stand Me Now is quite unusual for a Pete Docherty song. With lots of Libertines songs while it is clear there’s an element of genius in there, somehow it all gets lost in the mix, leaving the end result a fascinating concoction but still frustratingly not quite as good as you think it could be. This one is not like that though, it’s a tight, melodic, catchy song, perfect for indie discos and radio stations that want to be cool without scaring anyone off.

The track begins with an excellent and surprisingly long instrumental section that both showcases the guitarist and makes you wonder if it would be a particularly bad thing if there were no vocals at all. Then when the vocals do start they are surprisingly clear for the Libertines, both in terms of what is being said and why. The title says it all really, but “an ending fitting for the start, you twist and tore our love apart” is an excellent opening, and a reminder that Docherty is as much a poet as he is a musician. As if to emphasise the point the track even goes all Dylan at the end, with a crescendo of harmonica no less. There’s not enough of that instrument in the charts these days.

Speaking of charts, like so many of the best indie anthems before it (Wonderwall, Bittersweet Symphony, Common People, the list is actually enormous), Can’t Stand Me Now entered at the number two but could climb no higher. On this occasion, the track the great British public deemed better than one of the best singles for years was Baby Cakes by 3 Of A Kind. There really is no accounting for taste. Still, it is far and away Docherty’s biggest hit in any guise, and it is easy to understand why. I suppose now he has descended fully into being drug addled, gin soaked tabloid fodder, he is unlikely to ascend these heights again, but this is one of several tracks that secure his place in rock history.

Can’t Take My Eyes Off You by Andy Williams
What makes a good love song? It is a strange genre which has produced some of the biggest selling atrocities in pop history. It seems like most pop and rock acts have a go at writing a ballad, but in many cases it goes badly wrong. The strange thing is that there seems to be a huge market for just that, sappy love songs with an unpleasant, sickly sentiment which mean nothing but which somehow seem to touch people in a way that I will never understand. Celine Dion has made an entire career out of it, as have Westlife. These people represent what I see as being the very worst of popular music.

So what makes Can’t Take My Eyes Off You different? The answer is in the lyrics. “You’re just too good to be true, can’t take my eyes off you, you feel like heaven to touch, I wanna hold you so much”. Now, I don’t mean to get all mushy or anything, but I fell in love once and that is exactly what it was like. This song does not exaggerate, it is not full of angels or little boys with harps or any other over dramatic nonsense, it just describes perfectly what it is like to fall in love, which, after all, is just about the best thing that could ever happen to anyone.

The fantastic production of the track helps a great deal too, with William’s reliably excellent vocals brilliantly complimented by the horn section, to which very few people can listen without walking round going “der der, der der, der der der der” for the rest of the day. Then the instrumental bridge gives way to the chorus and Williams is down on one knee with a simple but powerful declaration of all he needs to say – “I love you baby…”

This first I knew of this song was when the Pet Shop Boys oddly released a version of it as a medley with U2’s Where The Streets Have No Name. I bought a copy of that when I was 14 and the truth is the brilliance of this song didn’t really come through. Then years later when I heard Andy Williams’ version, itself a cover but the definitive one as far as I’m concerned, I found it difficult to listen to the instrumental bit without breaking into “I want to run, I want to hide”. It kind of spoilt it for a while, but I have successfully avoided the Pet Shop Boys’ version for a few years now and its effect is fading.

The wife and I tried to be cool at our wedding and asked the band for Is This Love? by Bob Marley and the Wailers for our first dance, but they didn’t know it, so we went for this instead. I’m glad we did, because it was brilliant. We danced awkwardly for a bit, then they invited other couples to join us, and then they started speeding up the “der der, der der, der der der der” bit so it turned into a mad stomper with friends and relatives spinning all over the place by the end. The perfect song for a wedding, and having a quick reminder of the official Happiest Day Of My Life on my iPod is a great thing.

Can I Kick It? By A Tribe Called Quest
It may be hard to believe now, but there was once a time, back in the late 80s and early 90s, when a lot of hip hop was more about peace, love and flower petals than guns, bitches and bling. De La Soul lead the way, they called that era the Daisy Age, and people called them hippies. They were not alone though, A Tribe Called Quest were one of several acts who achieved notable success with a laid back rap style that seems almost completely absent from hip hop today. Can I Kick It? was their biggest hit in the UK, reaching number 15 in January 1991, a time when rap music was still very much a minority interest on these shores.

The main sample on this track is from Walk On The Wild Side by Lou Reed, the slow, looping bass line being the perfect soundtrack to the message of love A Tribe Called Quest were spreading. Although Walk On The Wild Side has been a favourite of mine for years, I have never really thought about what Lou Reed is actually doing on that track. I mean you wouldn’t exactly call it singing, and it’s not reading poetry or anything, I guess he’s actually just telling a story. By creating the perfect backing track to talk over, did he inadvertently have the first hip hop hit in 1972? It’s a theory I have not read anywhere else, and actually Lou Reed as a hip hop star is quite a funny thought, but I guess A Tribe Called Quest must have recognised the similarity between that track and what they were trying to do.

It is very noticeable how different the lyrics to this track are to anything anyone in the charts has said on a hip hop track for quite a while. I can’t imagine the line “Come and spread your arms if you really need a hug” coming from 50 Cent’s mouth, or Ice Cube threatening that if you diss him he will “give a big shove”. There is no swearing here, the aforementioned shove is the closest we get to violence, and no members of the opposite sex even get mentioned. Although I’m a fan of a lot of more recent hip hop too, it is difficult to understand how the genre went from this to a situation where a lot of big hits can only be played on daytime radio after being subject to heavy censorship. There were plenty of people doing this stuff back then, as well as these guys and De La Soul, PM Dawn, the Dream Warriors and the Jungle Brothers were all pretty big. I guess that avenue of hip hop just closed off, and stuff that the likes of NWA and Public Enemy were doing at the same time came to the fore.

There are plenty of web sites that claim the likes of A Tribe Called Quest were very influential though, and I can see how, even if it wasn’t their message that caught on. The use of scratching to provide the beat on this track is genius, and even the way they took such a well known instrumental and used it as the main part of the track was pretty revolutionary at the time, but has been done a thousand times since. Also I was listening to I Love College by Asher Roth, apparently hip hop’s brightest new star, the other day and his laid back delivery reminds me a lot of hip hop from 20 years ago, even if his subject matter does seem to be heavily influenced by bad American teen movies and soft porn.

Can You Dig It? by the Mock Turtles
This is a track which in order to remember how brilliant it is I have to try hard to think about how I felt listening to it when it was first released. It was 1991, a few weeks before my 14th birthday. That was the year I found Carter The Unstoppable Sex Macine and turned my back on pop to become forever indie, but it wasn’t only Carter that lead me down that path. This track was a big influence, with it’s Madchester accents, sliding guitars and upbeat tempo it was the perfect song to dance around my bedroom to when I was sure there was no one watching. Something about that swirling sound made me feel free from all the crap that goes with being a teenager, and I often listened to it several times in a row because I didn’t want the feeling to end. I had been just a little bit too young to appreciate the Stone Roses when they were at their peak, so I didn’t realise how much this track was influenced by them. I wish I had, I’d probably have bought their debut album, one of my all time favourite records, about six years earlier than I did.

The reason I have to concentrate so hard on those teenage thoughts now is that this track has become a little debased over the years. In particular, its ubiquitous appearance in a Vodaphone commercial sent it back to the bottom end of the top 20 twelve years after it first rested there, and inspired, if that’s the right word, a remix by no less a figure than Fatboy Slim. I am used to him ruining great records I didn’t know in the first place (Brimful Of Asha springs to mind) but this was not fair. I have also always been quite disturbed by the fact that the lead singer in The Mock Turtles is Steve Coogan’s brother. I want to imagine them as baggy clothed working class heroes, but when I think about that I get an image of a middle aged local radio DJ in a Ford Mondeo singing Can You Dig It? as he drives down the motorway.

I was always quite astounded at the failure of Can You Dig It to set the charts on fire, as it seems to me to be the perfect bridge between the pop music of the day and the more extravagant, spaced out elements of the Madchester scene. I have recently formulated a theory though, which basically is that it’s James’s fault. They hit the charts with the all conquering Sit Down in the same month that Can You Dig It? came out, and I guess there was only room for one massive indie anthem in the charts at a time back then. On reflection I suppose the best song won, but Sit Down would take some beating in the indie anthem stakes, and Can You Dig It does come pretty close.

Cannonball by The Breeders
I distinctly remember sitting in my bedroom one Sunday afternoon in August 1993 when the chart show started on Radio 1 and this track entered at 40. I had by this point become addicted to the NME, so I’d already read about how good it was, and I was not disappointed. I must have had no cash though because I never bought it, and as that was it’s one and only week of chart glory I didn’t hear it again for years. At the end of the 1993 NME announced it was their single of the year, and it deserved it, it’s one of the very best singles of the 1990s in my opinion. This was of course the year before Oasis released their debut album, and ever since then no rock or indie track would ever be so critically acclaimed but not become at least a mid-table hit. Cannonball came at the very end of the time when decent rock music was a minority interest.

So what is so good about it? Well, the first thing you notice is that it’s different. The first 30 seconds consists of someone apparently testing a microphone, then going “awoooo oooh” six times, followed by drum sticks being clicked together and a deep, stuttering bass guitar. Then the fuzzy guitars start, the bass guitar loops in a way that’s almost hypnotic, and the luscious sound of Kim Deal from the Pixies singing about spitting in a wishing well takes over. The verses are fairly clear and incredibly sexy, the choruses completely incomprehensible screaming. Apparently she’s saying “Want you, koo koo, cannonball”, but for years I’ve just been screaming anything along with it and I don’t think anyone can really tell that she’s not.

I rediscovered the track in the late nineties on a compilation album called, believe it or not, The Incredible Sound Of Jo Whiley. A series of these were released to little fanfare, where a few Radio 1 DJs (and other trendy music industry types I think) were asked to put together a compilation of their favourite songs. I can’t remember who exactly, but I’m sure I remember seeing The Incredible Sound Of Trevor Nelson too. I have never been a huge Whiley fan or anything, I just liked a lot of the songs on there, and figured I would probably like the ones I didn’t know too. I never listen to her show because I’m at work, but I reckon if she played a lot of music like this it would be great. I have seen the playlist though, so I doubt she does somehow. Needless to say there’s no Basshunter on the album, or anything remotely like it.

Interestingly, before writing this review I did a quick Google search on the track and found it was a huge hit in France, reaching number 2 and spending 30 weeks in the charts. I imagined the French charts to be full of whimsical folk singing in French and crap Euro disco, but maybe I’m wrong. They certainly got this one right, which is more than can be said for the UK.

Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa by Vampire Weekend
The very first review I wrote on here was of A-Punk by Vampire Weekend. That was October last year and it was about to be re-issued after a less than impressive chart run earlier in the year. I explained how brilliant the track was, and said I thought it deserved to be a big hit, but I guess some things are just not meant to be. Despite being A-listed by Radio 1 twice, appearing in numerous TV shows and commercials and spending 21 weeks in the top 100, it never actually crept any higher than 55. I got the band’s eponymous debut album for Christmas though, and this lack of success really is a shame because while A-Punk may be amongst the best things on there, it is all extremely good.

Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa is a track off the album. For the uninitiated, Vampire Weekend are from New York and they perform a mixture of lo-fi indie and what big record shops like to call, for some reason, world music. On this track there is a heavy hint as to where their influences come from when they mention Peter Gabriel in the lyrics. The thing is though, in my opinion at least, his flirting with world music was always a little awkward. It always sounded like he made a conscious decision, once he was very successful, to investigate music from parts of the world where his audience wouldn’t expect and then to force it upon them as though he was doing them a favour. With Vampire Weekend it’s not like that at all, they come across as people who are making music that is both catchy and quite odd at the same time, just because they want to and that’s what comes naturally. Maybe it is just a bit too unusual for a mainstream audience.

This track begins with a stuttering, stop start guitar hook which is ridiculously infectious, and has lots of lines with only a few words, including references to Louis Vuitton, reggaeton (a blend of West Indian and Asian music originating in Panama according to Wikipedia) and the Colours of Bennetton. So it seems to be a song about fashion and music, performed using music that is not really in fashion. It doesn’t matter what other people thing though, when the bongo drum instrumental, during which the vocalist performs a series of extended oooohs and aaaahs in the background, gives way to the stuttering guitar again just before it all becomes too ridiculous, I know that there is at least a hint of musical genius at work here. Maybe when the band will come back with a second album the public will take them to their hearts, but even if they don’t I’m confident it will be fascinating, and I’ll certainly be buying it.

Careless Whisper by The Gossip
As with the Foo Fighters version of Band On The Run which I have already reviewed, this track is taken from a compilation album released in 2007 to celebrate 40 years of Radio 1. Forty different acts who were popular at the time were asked to record a cover of a track from one of the years since the station started, and The Gossip got 1984. Their decision to tackle the first and biggest solo hit of George Michael’s career may seem like an odd one, but it produced one of the best tracks on the album.

The first thing to point out is that the saxophone solo of the original, iconic and appalling in equal measure, is completely gone. What The Gossip are then left with is George’s heart wrenching but also faintly ridiculous lyrics, and a tune which, whatever anyone thinks about weedy ballads, was enough to send the original past the million selling mark. Add to that Beth Ditto’s emotional, desperate vocals, along with a deep bass sound and rapid disco guitars and you actually have a very good cover. Ditto proves here that she really is a great vocalist, as in her hands George Michael’s self indulgent whining, which epitomised all that was wrong with music in the 1980s, is transformed into a needy, urgent track where you actually empathise with the singer’s point of view. Even the line “guilty feet have got no rhythm” sounds slightly less absurd as The Gossip’s indie disco thumps along at three times the pace of the original.

Good covers are a rarity, good covers of songs that were originally not very good are even rarer. I am not convinced this track could ever have been a hit though, Careless Whisper just seems like too unlikely a track to cover. If the point of the compilation though was to pick one of the defining songs of the year then The Gossip certainly chose that, and I can’t imagine that they could possibly have done a better cover of Two Tribes. Maybe 99 Red Balloons would have been good though. If they’re still around in eight years they should do that for Radio 1’s fiftieth.

Cast No Shadow by Oasis
I was 18 when (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was released, and like most English people my age I still know every single word on the entire album. This was the sound of Oasis going from being the best indie band for years to the biggest band in the world, and it really felt like no one deserved it more. Cast No Shadow was not one of the stand out tracks on the album, but considering the album also featured Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova and Don’t Look Back In Anger, to name but a few, it was up against some pretty stiff competition. Put it on just about any other band’s album from 1995 and it would be worthy of becoming the lead single.

In many ways, although it wasn’t particularly one of the tracks obsessed over by the media, Cast No Shadow is actually very representative of the whole album. The change from Definitely Maybe is clear, the loud guitars and whining vocals have all been pared down, replaced by a softer sound. Although it doesn’t appear to describe a boy meets girl type situation, it is to all intents and purposes a ballad, a reflective, wistful song that belied the band’s rock ‘n’ roll reputation.

Cast No Shadow also neatly represents the change in Noel Gallagher’s lyrics. Suddenly it no longer sounds like he’s throwing words together for no reason other than that they sound good, instead he seems to be choosing them carefully to reflect the mood of the song, although whether they actually make any sense or not is still questionable. The track is introduced in the first verse as “a thought for every man who tries to understand what’s in his hands”. It’s a great idea, and sounds like it’s going to offer up the mysteries of the universe for all to understand, but unfortunately only gets as far as describing someone who “walks along the open road of love and life, surviving if he can”.

Now I’m not claiming to be a brilliant lyricist, but I would argue that not just anyone could get away with such school boy poetry. The reason Noel pulls it off is simply that Oasis have such incredible style, from Liam’s vocals which imply he doesn’t give a **** despite being note perfect, to the sliding quitar intro and outro. This is Oasis at their sing along best, and while it may not be as much an after pub favourite as Wonderwall, it more than earns its place on the same album.

Caught By The Fuzz by Supergrass
Released in 1994, Caught By The Fuzz was Supergrass’ debut single. It was not until nine months later, when the album’s fifth single, Alright, was released, that I took any notice whatsoever. That just goes to show the importance of looking outside the top 40 for new music, because for one week from October 29th there it sat, one of the greatest songs ever to attempt to describe what it’s like to be a teenager, at number 43. It is a genuine credit to the band’s record label that they kept plugging away like they did. Very few bands these days would have five singles released of the same album, especially when only one of the first 3 made the top 40, but in this case Parlaphone’s perseverance brought one of the greatest bands of the 90s to the public’s attention, and eventually caused the album spend three weeks at number 1 in summer 1995.

Caught By The Fuzz tells the apparently autobiographical story of a 15 year old boy being stopped by the police for possession of cannabis. Not knowing who to trust, wishing his brother was there to help and being far more scared of his Mum than anyone the police can throw at him, the lyrics perfectly capture the wide eyed fear and confusion of a kid who was just innocently trying to have a good time and has got in too deep. The police display the kind of blunt stupidity that anyone who’s been in a similar situation would recognise - “we’ll make you wish you’d stayed at home tonight”, and Mum sees generations of honour and honesty disappearing in one unforgivable moment of youthful abandon “You’ve blackened our name, well you, you should be ashamed”.

This song has always reminded me of the Undertone’s Teenage Kicks. The two tracks have a lot in common, they are both short and snappy with loud guitars and both sound like there is no way anyone over the age of 16 could ever have made them. There is something brilliant about the urgency of teenage attitude that is not represented in music often enough, maybe because it can only be captured in a fleeting moment. It’s worth remembering that Supergrass matured pretty quickly and can be found (id anywhere) in Radio 2 land these days. At least they didn’t go down the Fergal Sharkey route and betray every teenager who ever related to them by releasing big ballads aimed at the top of the charts. Supergrass are still cool, they’re just older with it, and I recommend anybody at all who doesn’t already own the album buy it. It’s one of those that’s usually cheap in HMV.

Celebrity Skin by Hole
The majority of Hole’s career passed me by completely. I have never really been one to follow gossip columns or read celebrity magazines, and I think this oversight may have come about because I assumed that Courtney Love was only successful because she was married to Kurt Cobain. Even now I don’t really know much of what they did, although I remember reading somewhere that Doll Parts was one of the best singles of the 1990s. Now we’ve entered the digital age I could find out for myself for 79p, I think I might do that.

Anyway, despite being ignorant of most of their career, I do remember seeing them perform this track on Top Of The Pops and I loved it, I went out and bought the single straight away. Kind of electro disco indie glam rock, it’s the title track to their fourth and final album, released in 1998.

The lyrics seem to be a scathing attack on the vacuous nature of fame and Hollywood superstardom, something which Courtney will have known a lot about by this point in her career. I take her claim to be “a walking study in demonology” as a reference to the general dislike that a lot of people had for her. I think many Nirvana fans held her partly responsible for what happened to her husband, which seems unfair to say the least, but would also be a difficult accusation to shrug off. Who can blame her for putting herself at the mercy of Hollywood following his death? I reckon she needed to become known for something else, for her own sake. This is a great track, so even though I don’t know much else of what she did I can tell she was definitely talented enough to be known as a musician in her own right.

The only problem I have with this track is that the guitar bit at the beginning and just before each verse sounds exactly like early the eighties radio friendly prog rock nightmare that is Owner Of A Lonely Heart by Yes. Any track that reminds me of that is always going to be at a disadvantage, but I will forgive it because everything else that makes it up is so good. A critique of celebrity culture, and maybe a prediction of what was to come in the following decade, this is not the most well known song I will refer to in these reviews, but it is well worth a listen.

The Chain by Fleetwood Mac
There is a feature called The Chain on Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie’s evening show on Radio 2. Viewers call in suggesting a song to be played that in some way vaguely relates to the last one. It’s nothing more complicated than that and is basically just an excuse for them to play old songs they like. Every night they begin the feature with a phenomenally good bass guitar intro, over which the North-West’s favourite newsreader (and everyone else’s favourite Krypton Factor presenter) Gordon Burns says, in an alarmingly determined fashion, “The Chain”. For ages I wondered what the music was, and then one day I heard Radcliffe make a comment about Fleetwood Mac just as they played it.

A few days later, on a rare occasion when the Mrs was out and I was alone in the house with the music up loud, I decided to try and find it. I found this track on iTunes and assumed from the title it must be right. After downloading it though I decided I must have misunderstood. I put it on and just got some close harmonised 70s folk rock, no sign of the bass line that made up one of the best introductions I had ever heard. Disappointed, I went to the bathroom instead of listening to the rest.

Two minutes later, as I came down the stairs with the sound of the systern filling back up behind me, in front of me was exactly the sound I’d wanted, “dum, duba dum duba duba dum dum”. It really is excellent, but it took me a few seconds to work out what was going on. It seems the best introduction to any song ever actually happens half way through it. I listened to the whole thing over again and that is exactly the case – three minutes of pleasant soft rock about how “you can never break the chain” give way to a few seconds hush followed by what can only be described as the beginning to a completely different track, even though it’s the same one. Quite what Fleetwood Mac were taking at the time to make them think this was a good idea is beyond me. Strange thing is though they were right.

A few days after after my empty bladdered revelation I noticed that entirely by coincidence BBC1 had started using the exact same few seconds of music to advertise their Grand Prix coverage. It seems that Stuart Maconie, Mark Radcliffe and I are not the only ones to appreciate this hidden moment of genius. In fact, considering the fact that The Chain’s parent album, Rumours, sold over 40 million copies worldwide and spent 465 weeks on the UK chart it’s not like I’m going to be the first person to notice it. If there’s anyone reading this who hasn’t though, I recommend you go and find a copy.

Champagne Supernova by Oasis
There was huge expectation for Oasis’s second album, and the pressure on Noel Gallagher must have been immense. Definitely Maybe was widely recognised as one of the best debuts of all time, and had sparked an unprecedented worldwide interest in scruffy young British men with guitars. The early signs were not too good though. The first single from Morning Glory, Some Might Say, was very good but sounded similar to everything off the first album, just with a huge dollop of T Rex on top, raising the worrying possibility that the new material would be too derivative and not a step in a new direction. The second single, released two weeks before Morning Glory, was Roll With It, a very simple track that rocked along pleasantly but seemed a bit uninspired and had all the lyrical twists of a book for toddlers, and which therefore deservedly lost the (admittedly absurd) battle for number one with Blur’s Country House.

Then the album was released, and it seemed someone at Creation had been having a laugh with their choice of singles. (What’s The Story) Morning Glory was in fact a big step away from the punk inspired rock of their first album, filled instead with glorious singalong anthems that would make Oasis the biggest band on the planet, and the most important British act for many years. The crowning glory of the whole album came at the very end with Champagne Supernova. Just as you thought this triumphant, life affirming record could get no better, this track slides in and takes the post pub singalong to a whole new level.

I remember reading in NME the week before before the album was released a quote from Noel in which he was talking about his song writing technique. Referring to Champagne Supernova, he said there was one song on the track where he wrote the line “slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball” and everyone thought it was inspired genius, and he was saying “what are you on about? It doesn’t even mean anything!”. Personally I think he can be forgiven a lack of deep though processes if he comes up with tracks this good by just throwing words together. I’m sure there are songwriters who have spend their entire lifetime writing extremely creative and poetic lines but never getting anywhere near this good. I guess some people are just gifted.

Incredibly for a seven and a half minute track by an English rock act, Champagne Supernova was a top ten hit in America, where it got a proper single release. Strangely though the track was never released as a single in the UK, so has therefore never made the charts. The phenomenal sales of the album mean that it is probably one of the most well known songs of the 90s, and these days such a thing could just not happen, because any track is fair game for the charts as long it is available to download. I guess this means Champagne Supernova would be a huge hit if it was first made available now, whether the record company wanted it to be or not. Bearing in mind the fact that since downloads were admitted to the chart we have witnessed the spectacle of Stairway To Heaven spending a couple of weeks in the top 40, is this the best track ever not to be a hit? I can’t think of a better one, but maybe that’s because there are better tracks I don’t know, and I don’t know them because they’ve never been a hit.

Charly by The Prodigy
As I’ve mentioned before in these reviews, me and dance music do not usually go very well together. The thing is I basically like guitar based music, but at the same time I’m always interested in anything that sounds different in some way, I like to be challenged. For years now dance music, which is obviously not in the first category, has also almost universally failed to make the second one. Most of the stuff that makes the charts is repetitive, generic, dull and pointless. It lacks any innovation or anything of interest at all. I know that taking drugs can enhance the way music sounds and the way it makes you feel, but music that only sounds good when you take drugs is basically, in the cold light of day, crap.

Back in the early nineties none of the above applied. I was 14 years old and still mostly liked rock music, but time and again records kept coming out that challenged the boundaries of what music even was. They were usually by visionary types who I’d never heard of and wouldn’t again, people like K Klass, Altern 8 and A Guy Called Gerald. Into that field, in the summer of 1991, stormed The Prodigy.

I was old enough to remember being shown the Charly public information films in primary school, which is the first thing about the record that appealed to me. It was huge at the time, I remember kids in my year dancing to it by holding up a fist on each side of their hear and bending their knees and elbows in time to the sliding “wa wa wa, wawa” bit, in fact I might even have joined in. I’m not quite sure where that came from actually, whether they were doing it in the video or whether we made it up. It was fun though, I tried it again last night, purely for research purposes.

The summer of 1991 was a big one for me musically. I was pretty uncritical at the time, and looking back half of the stuff I liked was actually rubbish, I just listened to whatever was in the charts. It’s a strange combination, but this track takes me straight back to a family holiday that summer in Scotland just as much as other songs that were around at the time by Bryan Adams, PM Dawn, Extreme, Right Said Fred, Zoe and Jason Donovan.

I read recently that dance music magazine Mixmag criticised The Prodigy at the time for spawning a number of other hits with a kids TV related theme. It’s true that Trip To Trumpton, Sesame’s Tree and Roobarb And Custard would probably never have happened if it wasn’t for Charly, but you can hardly blame The Prodigy though, it’s not like they could have seen it coming. Also, I bought all of those on 7” vinyl too, like I said I was pretty uncritical at the time.

One thing is certain though, no one at the time Charly was a hit would ever have predicted that The Prodigy would go on to become one of Britain’s most successful acts, I don’t think anyone really even knew who they were. Six years after Charly they had two number one hits in a row, and after another 12 years after that they are still having huge selling singles. You certainly can’t say that about K Klass, Altern 8 or A Guy Called Gerald.

Charmer by Kings of Leon
When I think about it objectively, a song about a charmer who stole someone’s karma and sold it to a farmer doesn’t sound like it’s going to have very good lyrics. As I’ve mentioned before though, I don’t tend to think very objectively about the Kings of Leon, because they’re just so bloody good.

Starting with a low bass heavy rumble that fades in slowly, this track is classic KoL, eventually getting going at quite a pace but ending just before the three minute mark. The lyrics are fairly sparse but this one has a bit of a novelty factor, Caleb’s vocals turning to a scream at the start of each line. I wonder how they created this track originally, it must have been a strange one to write. The screams are initially separate to the verses, as in “aaaargh! She’s always looking at me”, but eventually become part of the lyrics, as in “so-aaaargh-ld it to the farmer oh no”. It’s very unusual, quite funny and almost impossible to copy. The guy really does have quite a yelp, it mus be ruining his voice doing that at every gig.

When I went to see them last year, during this song each time Caleb screamed a funny but also quite scary picture of an old lady screaming in some apparent distress appeared on the screens behind them. It was a great effect and everyone who noticed was laughing. It did get me thinking about a common criticism I’ve read of the band though, that when they play live it is almost a note perfect copy of the recorded version, which I guess some people see as being a bit boring. I can take the point, it must take quite a bit of co-ordination and no deviation whatsoever to align the music and vocals with the video in such an intricate way, it offers no room for error whatsoever. It still looks great though, and hey, should we really crticise a band for being able to play their own songs extremely well? They certainly give the crown what they want.

Interestingly, this track, which is the third single from their third album, Because Of The Times, only managed to scale the dizzy heights of number 85 in the UK charts. Back then, they were the kind of band who, once all the fans had bought the album, there was no one left who was interested in singles. Now though, only 2 years later, it just wouldn’t happen. If this was off the current album it would have been a huge hit, and quite right too, it’s reliably great.

Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol
Now for a genuine digital phenomenon, the song which more than any other demonstrates how downloading has completely changed the process of consuming music over the last few years. I can’t imagine this was ever anyone’s intention. I would have thought that Snow Patrol recorded the song and though that they could well have a hit on their hands, but what actually happened speaks volumes about the way different media can be used to market music in the 21st century.

Chasing Cars entered the charts at number 25 in July 2006. Gaining airplay as it went, it peaked within a few weeks at number 6. Nothing unusual so far, and a few weeks later, when the record company became keen to market the band’s next single, they deleted this one, which under old rules meant that the download was no longer chart eligible. Shops ran out of copies, and it left the charts in November. In the new year, however, the rules were finally changed to allow any download into the charts, and Chasing Cars appeared at number 9 as a re-entry. That was unexpected in itself, but what followed was unprecedented and very hard to explain. The track spent most of the next 2 years somewhere or other on the charts, and has to date spent 131 weeks un the UK top 100, last appearing at number 100 in May this year.

All of which statistical analysis begs one very important question – what is the record like? Well, oddly, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, it’s not really anything special if we’re honest. I mean, it’s a highly competent, soaring rock song, which sounds like the band were given the word ‘epic’ and told to do whatever they could with it, but nothing about it said that it was likely to become a chart monster. I reckon the reason for its longevity is mostly to do with it sound-tracking so many TV shows. Lazy producers who lack any imagination and have a scene where someone’s crying just reach for the opening bars of this track and the audience’s tears start flowing too, or at least that’s the theory. There’s nothing new about using music to convey emotion on TV of course, but always using the same music because you’ve seen it on other shows and it worked then is just lazy and makes for boring TV. It not only makes people cry though, it sends them scurrying to iTunes too.

The thing is, I do like this song, which is why it’s on my iPod in the first place, I just don’t like what it’s become. I actually thought Run was much better, one of my favourite songs of 2004. That track has also benefited from the download revolution, although not quite as much, re-entering the charts last year when Leona Lewis realised that some of it’s magic may rub off on her if she did a note for note cover of it. So Snow Patrol seem to me to be an OK band who have gained a lot of money but equally lost a lot of credibility, partly through no fault of their own. They just make good songs, it’s other people that spoil it.

Chelsea Dagger by The Fratellis
I heard a program on Radio 4 last year, which I believe has now made its way to digital TV, called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. The basis of it was that some minor celebrity or others would provide Marcus Brigstocke with a list of things they’d never done, he’d arrange for them to do them and the show would be based around the celebrity recounting their experience, or even doing it in the studio if practical. One of Rory McGrath’s choices was colonic irrigation – very funny on the radio but I’m glad I wasn’t in the audience.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I have never been to a football match. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever even watched a whole one. I often wonder why, I guess I just don’t have a competitive nature. Absolutely nothing about it appeals to me. I constantly hear conversations at work that I don’t understand (today’s subject seems to be someone called Torrez). I kind of feel a bit left out, but at 32 years old I don’t see how I could suddenly become interested in the game and I also don’t really see the point.

One thing that fascinates me slightly about the game though is the male bonding aspect of it, different generations of men getting together on a Saturday afternoon to have a collective experience, cheering and singing along together. Yesterday, while having a look to see what Wikipedia says about Chelsea Dagger, I discovered that it is played at lots of football team’s matches as a kind of celebratory song when they score. I have loved this song for ages, but I tend to be singing “duh, duh duh duh, duh duh duh, duh duh duh duh duh” alone in the car, or at the very most in something approaching harmony with the wife. It has suddenly occurred to me that singing it at the top of my voice every Saturday with a bunch of men I don’t know sounds like a lot of fun. Now, rather than be bewildered at why so many people are obsessed with something that seems pointless, I am starting to think I’ve missed out.

Chelsea Dagger was released in September 2006 and reached number five in the charts. A rip roaring, sing along romp through lyrics that sound like they might be very rude but which don’t make any sense, the track is basically, at its most fundamental level, a mixture of Status Quo and Chas ‘N’ Dave, but with a Scottish accent. That sounds like a stupid combination, and in many ways it is, but it was briefly a winning formula. The Fratellis first album, from which this was the second but most successful single, was much the same and actually a joy to hear. It is great to hear a band making music and sounding like they’re enjoying themselves, in a way you have to hear it to realise how miserable everything else sounds. Sadly, they couldn’t keep it up, and Mistress Mabel, the first single off their second album, flopped last year. It can’t have been helped by the fact that it sounded distinctly like McFly in their tuneless, weedy “buy this because we look good and there’s a free sticker with the CD” mode. The Fratellis don’t even look that good though, so it was destined to fail.

Chemical World by Blur
Simon Mayo is probably not best remembered for his excellent musical taste, although this is perhaps a little bit unfair. Back in the days when Radio 1 had breakfast show DJs who actually liked music, I distinctly remember him championing the singles from Blur’s second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish. It didn’t work terribly well though, this track and the excellent For Tomorrow both peaking at 28 in the charts. Back then, Blur were best known for their top ten hit of two years earlier, There’s No Other Way, and it wasn’t until their next album, Parklife, was released that they became hugely famous. Unfortunately, I distinctly remember thinking that this track did sound pretty cool, but if Mayo liked it then it couldn’t be that good, after all he did also keep playing The Proclaimers, so I didn’t buy a copy. Like a lot of people, it was only after completely falling in love with Parklife in 1994 that I bought a copy of the previous album and realised how glorious that was too.

The Saturday before last I read an article about the newly reformed Blur, set to headline Glastonbury next weekend, which said that they were arguably the most important British band since the Beatles. On the face of it this sounded a bit ridiculous even to me, but when you really give it some thought, has there been anyone in the 39 years since The Greatest Band Ever split, who so brilliantly combined all round musical ability with lyrics that perfectly summed up their time? Of course that’s only my definition of what makes a band important, but it does make you think.

Chemical World starts with unashamedly loud, unashamedly indie guitar playing, in several three second blasts punctuated my moments of silence. Then suddenly a lone electric guitar sounds like it is being played under water, before the song starts and Damon is singing, funnily enough, about someone who’s had enough of their job so moves to the country. Yes, Blur’s lyrics are almost always amazing, but it’s not too hard to find themes running through them. I remember reading a criticism of the album The Great Escape (probably in the NME, because I hung of every word it said back then) saying that Blur’s reliance on invented chirpy characters to drive the narrative in their songs was getting irritating. I don’t agree though, it was a bit of an unusual quirk but it’s one of the things that made them different, and better than just about anyone else.

Arriving early in their career and to little acclaim, I don’t suppose Chemical World will ever be one of Blur’s most famous songs. This is a shame though, because it holds its own even against the fantastic music they produced in the years to come.

Children Of The Revolution by T Rex
This may seem a little controversial, and I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead and all that, but I sometimes find T Rex a little bit irritating. I know they made some fantastic music, and their influence on the time in which they were successful and the decades that followed is immeasurable, but there’s just something about Marc Bolan that made him come across, on record at least, as a bit smug. It’s like, great music made by a man who knows he is making great music is not quite as good as great music which came about when some people who didn’t realise how good they were surprised themselves. As with everything else in these reviews, it’s just my opinion, feel free to violently disagree.

Whatever my opinions of T Rex’s back catalogue as a whole, it would be silly to suggest Children Of The Revolution is anything other that a brilliant record. It is exactly two and a half minutes of perfectly orchestrated, simple singalong rock. The glam elements that made the band so popular are toned down a bit, and this still has the slightly hippy feel of the late sixties to it, but combined with the powerful, crowd pleasing delivery that Bolan perfected. The lyrics are pretty sparse, and although the line “I drive a Rolls Royce, ‘cos it’s good for my voice” doesn’t do much to counter my accusations of smugness, I have to admit that is pretty cool, and a little rock ‘n’ roll excess can be forgiven in a musician this famous.

In a way I guess that although the hippy, jangly element is what appeals to me, maybe that is exactly what the audience at the time did not want. This was the third year since the sixties ended, and though they were brilliant it was clearly time to move on, and glam rock seemed like the way forward. Maybe this is why, coming hot on the sparkly heels of Telegram Sam and Metal Guru, Children Of The Revolution was T Rex’s first single of 1972 not to reach number one. The charts are fickle though and not too much can be read into this tracks failure to make the list of the biggest hits ever, three weeks at number two is not to be sniffed at.

I have to admit, maybe one other reason I like this track so much is that I have an underlying belief that it is not possible to make a bad rock record with the word ‘revolution’ in the title. Basically, if you have revolution on your mind and a guitar on your hand then you are already on the verge of doing something both brilliant and popular before you play a chord. If the results are anywhere near this good, people will talk about you like you’re a genius for years to come.

Cigarettes And Alcohol by Oasis
Easily the best track on Definitely Maybe. No, actually, that’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Star. Or maybe Live Forever. Truth is, 15 years after it was released, I am still absolutely in awe of that truly amazing record.

I bought Definitely Maybe on tape the day it came out in 1994, three weeks before I past my driving test, and it was rarely out of the cassette player in my orange B reg Astra for the rest of that year. Embarking on A-levels, no longer bound by the shackles of public transport, and with more free periods than I knew what to do with, this was the first time in my life I actually began to feel a little bit of freedom. Soundtracking that time with a whiney Manc in a parka singing what Alan McGee claimed was “one of the best social statements anyone had made for the last 25 years” just seemed like the right thing to do.

It is hard to exaggerate just how relevant this record was to me at the time. Just like Liam, I was genuinely unsure about the answer to the question “is it worth the aggravation, to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for”, it seemed like an extremely good point. In later years I would begin to appreciate the value of doing an honest day’s work, but at that stage it seemed a perfectly valid thing to challenge. The live for the day mentality demonstrated in the lines “you could wait for a lifetime, to spend your days in the sunshine, you might as well do the white line” was both exciting for me and highly influential over the whole music scene for the rest of the 90s. Oasis weren’t just changing my world, they were changing the British music industry forever.

With the release of this single, Oasis were also subtly changing what people thought of them. It was actually the fourth single from the album, after the much mellower Supersonic and Shakermaker, and the era defining Live Forever. Prior to Cigarettes And Alcohol, the bands rebellious attitude and confident swagger had been very slightly slightly at odds with the Beatles influenced, hippy imagery of their songs. This track put all that right, and it was clear to the world that Oasis had every intention of becoming the biggest band on the planet, in fact they already thought they were. Rarely in the history of rock music has so much confidence been entirely justified, and that’s what’s made Oasis so good. They didn’t just believe they were the best, they actually made sure it was true.

[SheriffFatman]

Civil War by Guns N’ Roses
I know I said the same thing in the last review about Definitely Maybe, but in September 1991 I bought both Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II on cassette the day they were released. I was 14 and had to ask my Mum to write me a letter so I was allowed to leave school at lunchtime, walk into town and go to Woolworths.

Looking back, I am pretty sure some if not all of the money was stolen from an older sister who had a Saturday job and didn’t realise I had found where she kept the proceeds, but I don’t regret a thing. If I wanted to get any respect from my peers, if I ever wanted girls to engage me in conversation, and if I was going to be even slightly serious about my music collection, I had to listen to those albums until I knew every note and every lyric. So I did.

Eighteen years later, and I am happy to admit that pompous US stadium rock was probably not the most exciting thing 1991 had to offer, but I also retain a fondness for a lot of what Guns N’ Roses did back then, and quite justifiably too. Civil War is one of several tracks from those albums which sound just as good (if not terribly relevant) today, even if there are as many that seem a bit ridiculous.

Civil War starts with a quote about “failure to communicate” from a film called Cool Hand Luke, which I have never seen but which sounds very good. Axl Rose sings a few lines about young men dying and women crying over strumming guitars, and then it suddenly turns into a loud rock anthem and he gets really angry. As a protest song about the futility of war it is actually really poignant in places, treading the line between genuinely meaningful sentiments and absurdly overblown rock made by rich men from Los Angeles very well. I distinctly remember hearing the emotionally charged vocal delivery on the line “did you wear a black arm band when they shot the man who said peace could last forever” as a teenager and feeling like I was beginning to understand something about the futility of armed conflict. I had absolutely no idea who they were on about, in fact I still don’t, but this is the kind of epic, all encompassing rock that’s enough to turn a fourteen year old boy into a lily- livered, peace loving hippy for the rest of his life. Maybe that’s what did it…

Thinking about it a little more rationally now, the odd thing about Civil War is that it seems to be a protest song that is not really protesting about anything in particular. I guess America is a country scarred by the Vietnam War in ways that I will never comprehend, but this song came out 16 years after it ended. The first Gulf war happened in early 1991, but this song is about the kind of armed conflict where you can see the white’s of your victim’s eyes, there is no mention of precision guided missiles.

Anyway, maybe Civil War is overblown nonsense, but even if it is then it’s perfectly executed, brilliantly produced and genuinely affecting overblown nonsense, so I can let it off. Furthermore, I can see how learning the words and understanding the sentiments contained within may have been a small step on my road to becoming a peace loving, conscientious person, interested in international affairs and honestly concerned for the well being of people across the world in places I will probably never visit. Maybe if Tony Blair had heard this when he was 14 the Middle East would be a very different place today.

Cleaning Out My Closet by Eminem
In the early stages of his career, it looked like there would only be one type of Eminem record, jokey, silly and a lot of fun. That changed with The Way I Am in 2000, and this track, taken from 2002’s The Eminem Show, is in much the same vain. Full of bile and recrimination, this is apparently Eminem’s attempt to put the past behind him and move on. The method he chooses for this is what a lot of people would call washing your dirty laundry in public.

Anger in popular music is of course nothing new. The Sex Pistols spring immediately to mind, and they inspired the attitude of hundreds of acts that followed them, from The Jam to The Prodigy. Early hip-hop, from the likes of Public Enemy and NWA, also spoke with indignation about the injustices in the world. What all that has in common though is that it was focused on The Man, The System, the chains that bind us and force us to know our place. I honestly think what Eminem was doing here was something completely new, focusing the anger on his own personal circumstances, ranting about his family and shortcomings in his upbringing. Blaming other people for everything that’s wrong and then announcing that you don’t need them any more may be a regular theme of daytime television, but I don’t think it had ever been set to music. Which artist before Eminem would you expect to dedicate the line “you selfish ***** I hope you ******* burn in hell for this ****” at their own mother?

There is of course a real danger that all this whining could become tedious, after all they’re his issues, why would anyone else want to know about it. The reason it is so compelling though is his delivery, he genuinely sounds like he means every word he spits out. The sheer nastiness of it all is all the more fascinating because it doesn’t sound like someone telling you a story, it sounds like someone telling you about their own actual life. It would be rude not to pay attention.

I have to admit I have never really kept up with the soap opera elements of Eminem’s life, maybe I read the wrong magazines. (Or the right ones, come to think of it). As a result I find it a bit difficult to follow what he’s going on about sometimes – I know Hayley is his daughter, but who is Nathan? Whoever he is, he’s getting old now, and he’s going to know that Eminem’s Mum (sorry, I mean Mom) is phoney. Glad I know that.

Mention should also be made here of what the brilliantly understated production brings to the mix. Devoid of the squelchy noises and silly screams that are a regular feature of Eminem’s more comic moments, this track instead just has a quiet, tapping beat and haunting piano bit, the perfect way of giving the listener time to think about what they’ve heard while our hero gets his breath back. As ever with Eminem records, much of the credit must go to Dr Dre, suffice to say the man is a genius. The raw power of this track, that feeling as it fades out that something very special just happened, is definitely down to both of them. They are a winning combination and for about six years from 1999 onwards were responsible for several of the best singles released, and had huge success as a result. Tracks like Cleaning Out My Closet prove categorically that every bit of that success was justified.

Clocks by Coldplay
Coldplay are a funny bunch. They make technically brilliant pop indie rock crossover music, which is massively successful in both sales and airplay, and occasionally even quite inventive. Chris Martin is a great singer and their lyrics, while not always making much sense, do usually make the band come across like they’ve got something od importance to say.

Those are all the positive things. On the other hand, hardly any of their song titles actually brings to mind the song in question, and for the most part you could be in any situation anywhere in the world with one of their songs on in the background and you probably wouldn’t even notice.

I feel duty bound when reviewing one of their tracks to actually provide a lot more information about which one it actually is, because the title alone isn’t enough to distinguish it. For the record then, this is the one where Chris Martin sings “youuuuuu… are” several times in the chorus, and it has an incessant, looping piano bit a bit like The Scientist but much faster. And for the record, The Scientist is the one that goes “nobody said it was easy” in the chorus. Nobody said it would be easy to distinguish between these tracks.

At first when I think about it, it seems like Clocks has somehow found its own way onto my iPod without me even noticing. When I actually concentrate though rather than just letting the track wash over me, I remember what it’s doing here. It is really quite a lovely song, with a slightly mournful lyric about “cursed missed opportunities” and “tides that I try to swim against”. The vocals are dreamy and the aforementioned looping piano gets under your skin and forces your feet to tap. Making a record as unassuming as this must take considerable talent, although I do always get the feeling that Coldplay do it at least partly by accident. Lucky them.

Just in case you think I’ve made this up and could be writing about any Coldplay track, there really is a song called Clocks. In fact it was taken from the bands’ second album A Rush Of Blood To The Head and reached number 9 in the singles chart in 2002. See, now you feel silly for not knowing it.

Actually, I admit that most of what I’ve said here could be applied to any of their records, but like I said in the first place, they’re a funny bunch. The only band that I know I like but couldn’t confidently remember any of their songs more than ten minutes after hearing them. Well, except The Scientist, I really like that one.

Close To Me by The Cure
Back in the 80s when I was a chart obsessed child The Cure were one of a few bands that bemused me slightly. They regularly seemed to make the top 40, not usually very high, but they managed it without me ever hearing them on the radio and without me knowing anyone at all who liked them, and they almost always disappeared within a week or so of entering. What’s more their records sounded weird, with odd instrumentation and rarely any sign of anything as conventional as a chorus.

It wasn’t until 1992 and the release of Friday I’m In Love that I actually bought anything by them. Looking back now, in comparison to their previous output, that song was the odd one. I believe some of the bands fans were a bit unhappy with it too, it’s joyful verses and singalong chorus something of a chart friendly departure from their other material.

When I was at university I heard some old Cure music, not sure where, but I cam to realise that they were actually sometimes very good. I found Lovecats on 7” vinyl in a charity shop and played it over and over, then in recent years became quite a fan of Close To Me too after it was used as the theme music to the BBC’s brilliant and hugely underrated sitcom The Smoking Room. There’s just something subtle about the first minute or so of this track that matched that show perfectly, it’s strangely addictive even though not much happens.

As usual I listened to this a couple of times prior to writing the review and realised that my lack of genuine musical knowledge might hinder me a bit here. The problem is while I know when I hear something I like and am able to go on about it for ages, I’m not really that sure of the technicalities, like what actual instruments I’m listening to. This track has a brilliantly simplistic organ bit on it which gets totally stuck in your head, then there’s some plinky noises which are not a piano but I don’t know what they are, and there’s also quite a lot of trumpet-like things thrown in too. The end result is strangely wonderful and compliments Robert Smith’s equally unusual vocals very well.

To back up my point about Cure singles underperforming in the charts, Close To Me reached number 26 in 1985, but then peaked at number 13 when remixed in 1990. I don’t actually know which version I have here, but it is a truly excellent single and deserved far more.

Cold As Ice by M.O.P
I have always been a fan of swearing in hip hop. I love the English language, and am continually fascinated by rap records that seem to be made by people who have an awful lot to say but a somewhat limited vocabulary with which to say it. I know that a lot of the time rappers are actually highly literate individuals who just like to give the impression they’re not, but the creativity this contradiction throws up can often be very interesting, and sometimes, as with Cold As Ice, downright hilarious. The fact that it ever got played on the radio, let alone A listed on Radio 1, is an absolute credit to the hard working people who edit offending lyrics so as not to upset old folk.

Sometimes the swearing is just relentless, as with “you ain’t in my class ******, I’m the last ******, you gon’ **** around and get blast, sucker *** ******”. Other times the lyrics are just completely baffling – “we’ll come through and clear yo’ ass out, dump and air you’ ass out”. I don’t know what that means, but I have a feeling it’s not about colonic irrigation. Finally, in a line which I see quite simply as comedy gold and which is surely one of the best lyrics of the 21st century so far, they say “******* though M.O.P. stand for mop and ****”. I sometimes find it hard to decipher what these guys are on about, but I definitely knew all along they had not named themselves after an item of floor cleaning equipment.

Swearing aside, the main appeal of this track is the equally relentless and incredibly fat (actually that should probably say ‘phat’) bass line. It is immensely appealing and holds the whole thing together brilliantly, the kind of music that would have the door upholstery vibrating in even the very oldest of Vauxhall Novas. It is a track that demands to be played loud.

It would be remiss of me not to also mention the chorus sampled from a track with which it shares a name, Cold As Ice by Foreigner. I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard that track, knowing one song by the people who gave the world I Want To Know What Love Is is quite enough, thank you. It is quite amusing to think of the 70s & 80s mullet haired soft rockers providing the creative influence behind such a great hip hop track though, and I’m sure they appreciated the royalties. I imagine (although I don’t know) that the vocals on their track were an octave or two lower and M.O.P. sped it up for their purposes, but it was a good move. In early 2000 there were people across the world who wouldn’t be seen dead with a blonde perm or in tight leather trousers singing the chorus to a Foreigner song, and they probably didn’t even know they were doing it.

Anyway, having just found a website with the real actual lyrics to the M.O.P. track, I’m now off to try out my new favourite greeting on a colleague: “Word the **** up!”

Cold Desert by Kings of Leon
Track 11 on KoL’s most recent album Only By The Night, Cold Desert is a brilliant choice of track to end it with. Slow building, sweeping and soaring, when you’ve listened to this track you get the distinct feeling something very special just happened. If I’ve had a tough day, if I’m tired, if something’s bothering me, this song slows down my thoughts and my heart rate and sends me to sleep, and in my dreams I’m flying across the desert, propelled by the sound of that epic guitar, and Caleb Followill singing “nobody, nobody but me…” like his heart is breaking and he wants everyone to know.

If I’m honest I know that this track is exactly the sort of thing that has lead to criticism of the band from those who feel they’ve betrayed their bluesy, rocky beginnings. The polished, well produced sound of Cold Desert is undeniably a long way from the home made style of their first album, but to me this is just a sign the band are growing up. When they made Youth And Young Manhood they were poor, relatively unknown and making music on a really small budget. When I saw them at the MEN Arena last December one of the few things Caleb actually said in between songs was “We never dreamed 10,000 people would even know who we were, let alone all see us at once”. Now that they are huge around the world it would not be right for them still to be making songs that sound like they were recorded in a shed. It is a credit to them as musicians that they have been able to use their new found status and wads of cash to develop and to make songs as lovely, gorgeous and life affirming as this.

Sometimes when writing these reviews I have been at a loss to explain exactly why I like a track so much, why it makes me feel the way I do when I hear it. Cold Desert is a good example, there just seems to be something definitive, kind of final, about it that, once I’ve heard it, either makes me want to just hear it again straight away, or just to sit in a happy, dreamy bubble imagining what it would be like if all music were this good. There is some sort of magic in the way the bass, guitars and soft “aaaaaahhhh” bits of the vocals fit together, that don’t remind me of anything else but at the same time sound like they have been around forever. It is the least threatening record imaginable, there’s no surprises anywhere, it just gently draws you in. After nearly five minutes it fades out, which could be seen as a bit of a cop out if it wasn’t for the fact that a few seconds later it fades back in again. Clever, confident production, and again exactly the way an album should end, with a reprise. I guess if it worked on Suspicious Minds then why not here too?

Ultimately, I know certain people who liked some of KoL’s earlier stuff were disappointed with this, but I guess I just got old with them. It’s worth pointing out that when I first heard Molly’s Chambers I was scraping around for a living, stacking boxes in a warehouse, but these days I’m married, with a half decent job and enough money to own an iPod and a car in which to listen to it. KoL aren’t the only ones who are not so rock ‘n’ roll anymore.

Columbia by Oasis
After reviewing Cigarettes And Alcohol the other week, it’s back once again to the greatest debut album of all time. I have to admit that from the name of the track I can never remember how it goes, but I only have to hear the opening line “there we were now here we are” and I can sing the entire thing word perfect.

Not that Columbia is incredibly wordy, mind you. Just three verses that are almost all the same spread over six and a half minutes of glorious, slow, fuzzy, late Beatles-esque electric guitars. Definitely Maybe is pretty much split 50/50 between slow and fast paced tracks, this is definitely one of the slow ones, with long instrumental bits between verses and an even longer bit before the track ends, and Liam hanging on to every syllable for at least twice as long as anyone else in the country would. Although the word ‘shine’ does not feature anywhere in the lyrics, it is songs like this that gave birth to the myth that people from Manchester take at least five seconds to say it. When Noel joins Liam for harmonies in the chorus Oasis have found their signature sound, this is what made them popular and they’re still doing, with varying degrees of success, to this very day.

I don’t remember ever reading anything about the inspiration behind Columbia or what it’s all about, but I don’t think it’s too big a stretch of the imagination to assume that the fact the song is named after the world’s biggest exporter of cocaine is no coincidence. One might have thought that in their days as two skint lads from Burnage, Liam & Noel wouldn’t have had enough money for the rock star’s party drug of choice, then again maybe that’s what they spent their advance from Creation on. The line “I can’t tell you the way I feel because the way I feel is oh so new to me” makes a lot of sense in that context, as does the general lack of coherence in the rest of the words. “This is confusion, am I confusing you?” No, I think I understand…

Far be it from me to glamorise or promote shameful illegal activities, indeed I would strongly recommend Class As are avoided at all costs, but if the real inspiration behind Columbia did come in powdery form then the world owes a pat on the back to whoever’s shout it was. One of the main problems with society’s attitude to drugs is that it is so full of contradictions – one the one hand, you should never take acid because you may end up a gibbering wreck for the rest of your life, on the other hand you should listen to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band because it’s one of the best albums ever. The only recommendation I have (other than that you should never take drugs) is that you listen to Columbia and make up your own mind.

Text in red was added in an attempt to comply with the BBC’s rules that posts must not “Break the law, or condone or encourage unlawful activity” after my first post was removed.

Come As You Are by Nirvana
When the first single of an album is widely proclaimed by all who hear it that it’s one of the best records ever released, what becomes of the rest of the singles? In a lot of cases I think they are consigned to history as somewhat irrelevant, but the reason Nevermind’s singles are different is that it was not just the first single that people have been heaping praise on ever since, the album is also regularly voted one of the greatest of all time. This means that despite Come As You Are being the follow up to Smells Like Teen Spirit, it still stands as one of the definitive sounds of the early 1990s.

Come As You Are starts with a genius bass guitar hook, and quickly moves on to with a drums and pared down guitar that symbolises the radio friendly punk style of Butch Vig’s production which simultaneously made Nirvana global megastars and rather unhappy. It is fascinating to listen to this track and compare it with a song like Radio Friendly Unit Shifter (who says Americans don’t do irony?) from In Utero. That track, and to a certain extent the whole album, seems like a reaction to the success of songs like Come As You Are. Certainly Kurt Cobain wrote it, but I don’t think he ever meant for it to appeal to daytime radio programmers. It is thanks to Vig’s visionary, era defining production, and the savvy business minds of the people at Geffen, that the world got to hear these songs. It is also, at least in part, thanks to them that Cobain went completely mad.

Back in 1991, when I was 14 and got Nevermind on tape for Christmas, this didn’t seem watered down though. To someone who had only two years earlier sited Kylie Minogue as one of their favourite artists, this seemed like the ultimate in rebellion. Come As You Are seemed dark and complicated, the kind of music that could be played as loud as possible in the knowledge that parent’s would definitely not like it. (My Mum had an annoying habit when I was listening to music to shout up the stairs for me to turn it up so she could hear it. Although in some ways I guess I was lucky, this didn’t quite seem right to me and ownership of Nevermind was in part an attempt to correct the situation).

I remember the day after Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994 hearing Danny Baker play Come As You Are on his weekend morning show on Radio 1. Near the end, as Kurt was singing “well I swear that I don’t have a gun” he faded it down and made a comment along the lines of “well it turns out he did” and laughed about it. Someone must have written in to complain because I read a couple of weeks later in the Radio Times that he had been reprimanded for this lapse in taste. While I am always complaining about Chris Moyles and Fearne Cotton, this serves as a good reminder that employing morons as DJs is nothing new. In fact, at Radio 1, it is quite a long standing tradition.

Come On Eileen by Dexy’s Midnight Runners and the Emerald Express
The 1980s were a strange time. On the one hand I feel quite a lot of contempt for the decade in which a lot of people seemed to believe that proper instruments were old fashioned and that the future would be entirely synthesised. On the other hand, the 80s were a time when it was possible for a record, if it was good enough, to completely defy prevailing opinions and become huge even though it was nothing like anything else that was around at the time. That very rarely happens these days, but it was into just that climate that Come On Eileen was released in 1982.

In Britain Dexy’s Midnight Runners were not completely new, they’d been plying singalong folk ska crossover music for a while, and had even briefly topped the charts a couple of years earlier with a song called Geno. Come On Eileen was something different though, the kind of single that only comes along quite rarely but unifies the generations and sears its melody into the minds of the entire nation for years to come. People at school discos across Britain were putting their hands on their hips, shuffling from side to side in a line, kicking their legs in the air with their arms round each other and stamping their feet on the floor. This kind of behaviour almost exclusively accompanies dreadful novelty hits by the likes of Black Lace which could never be listened to when sober for fear of irrationally destroying the hi-fi equipment, but on this occasion there was no shame involved at all, and not necessarily any alcohol either, because the song was, and still is, a work of absolutely unique brilliance.

This song was so ubiquitous throughout the 1980s that several of it’s greatest achievements – 1.2 million copies sold, the best selling single of 1982, to this day the 48th best selling single of all time in the UK – are only to be expected. The fact that I find absolutely incredible though, for a song featuring an abundance of Irish fiddles and lyrics that are completely indecipherable with the exception of “toora loora toora loo-rye-aye”, is that it was even a number one single in America. Humour and pop music rarely go together in the states, and while this wasn’t exactly a comedy record its jovial nature was about as far from the smooth, highly produced R&B sounds that nation was used to as you can get. To put this into context, it knocked Billie Jean off the top of the Billboard charts, and was succeeded by Beat It. It is a great testament to the infectious nature of this record that even America joined in the fun.

On the subject of those lyrics, I was part of a group of about nine inebriated students who once took to the stage in a Cornish nightspot which was usually very cool but for some reason was having a karaoke night, purely for the purpose of finding out what they were. In the unlikely event that anyone present in the audience is reading this, I can only apologise for the bawling racket that followed. (Before going on stage we were actually split over whether to do this or Firestarter). For the record, my favourite line is “With you in that dress my thoughts I confess verge on dirty”, which is really quite funny and has probably been heard by many millions of people who did not know what they were listening to. What a track.

Come Out 2 Nite by Kenickie
Incredibly attractive, highly intelligent, knowledgeable about the arts, into great music, witty, Northern – is Lauren Laverne the perfect woman? (I had an alternative ending ready for that sentence – “Lauren Laverne and I have so much in common” but I decided against it at the last minute.

Indeed, it is easy to forget, while salivating over late night arts programs on BBC2 or hanging on her every word during the Glastonbury coverage, (yet another reason why I wish I was Mark Radcliffe), that Laverne was a mere 17 years old when she was the driving force in one of the best British punk bands of the 1990s, and when this 1 minute 58 second blast of youthful exuberance reached the dizzy heights of number 192 in the UK charts. I had seen the band (although I only remember her) in NME and was instantly smitten, not only with this gorgeous blonde who despite being a year younger than me seemed convinced that she could personally use indie music to change the world, but also with the music itself.

Kenickie’s first album, At The Club, was a collection of short punk tracks celebrating the brilliance of youth. The band genuinely seemed to believe that the world was theirs for the taking, and that being under age, working class, from Sunderland and obviously inexperienced in playing music would be no barrier whatsoever to them achieving everything they ever wanted. Their incredible self belief, combined with an innate ability to describe the world around them, was infectious; it made the listeners believe it was all possible too.

Come Out 2 Nite reads like a manifesto for a lifestyle that you immediately want to be a part of as soon as you hear it. It opens with handclaps and a rapid fire low-fi guitar intro that sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom, then Lauren sings “We dress cheap, we dress tacky, we dance for thrills” and the listener is introduced to a world of happiness, tackiness and Geordie council estates. The song talks of getting drunk in the park, getting chatted up by the lads and “bombing down the street” before revealing some advice for anyone who wants to be like them – “Take what you can, eat of the man, wear high heels, and get a record deal”. Genius.

I would love to say that the creative impetus behind Kenickie just kept coming, but alas it was not to be. The second album was oddly poppy with a slightly lounge type feel. I bought the single Stay In The Sun, which was OK, but no better. By changing musical style so drastically it was as though they had undermined the whole point of their existence in the first place. I guess they must have known it too, because in 1998, when Laverne was still only 20, they split up. Eleven years later their career remains a very brief footnote in rock history, but an absolute treat for anyone who takes the time to look them up.

Comfortably Numb by The Scissor Sisters
Back in January 2004 I was working for the same enormous company I do now but in a remote office, there were only 8 of us there. Our manager came in one day and asked if anyone wanted to buy a copy of the Scissor Sister’s album off her. I have no idea at all where she got it from, she was a middle aged lady who you’d expect to be listening to Classic FM not touting pirated copies of brand new pop albums. Anyway, no one else in the office had heard of them, but I had read that they were going to be huge, so I gave her £3 for it.

So it was that I found myself listening to what would become the best selling album of the year before anyone else I knew had a copy. I liked it straight away, even though it was a bit more poppy than my usual tastes. If there was one stand out track then it was Take Your Mama, but I was also fascinated by Comfortably Numb. My Pink Floyd knowledge extended little further than Another Brick In The Wall (and still does actually) so I did not realise it was a cover, but it seemed a strangely structured song with very odd lyrics. “When I was a child I caught a fever, my hands felt like two balloons” is lot a line you expect to hear in what is essentially a dance record. It was very low key dance music though, more for foot tapping than blowing a whistle and waving your arms about. It is also very obviously Bee Gees influenced, from the high pitched vocals to the first half of the last line in the chorus, “I have, have, have become comfortably numb”, the second half of which could be replaced with “staying alive, staying alive” and it’s doubtful anyone would notice.

The realisation that this track was originally by Pink Floyd explained away a lot of the oddness in the lyrics, which I now realise are actually a rather clever transcription of a patient’s consultation with their doctor. I still don’t quite get the line “A distant ship floats on the horizon” but maybe it wasn’t all meant to be understood. The truth is I have never actually heard the original, but I think it’s fairly safe to assume it sounds very different to this version, and indeed I have read that many Pink Floyd fans were horrified by this. They should get over themselves though, it is annoying when someone ruins a great song, but some people seem to think that all cover versions are a bad idea. They’re wrong, and this track is proof.

In the event this was the first single off the Scissor Sisters’ debut album, and it was followed by some others which didn’t sell that well themselves, but which seemed to get universal blanket airplay for the whole of the rest of the year, lodging the album in the top 10 for several months. The second album seemed to be received in reverse – the first single spent 4 weeks at number one, but there was very little else of interest on there and it did not sell very well at all, marking the Scissor Sisters down as one of several mainstream acts from the noughties to spectacularly fail to capitalise on their early huge success. Maybe they need to think of some more songs I don’t know to cover.

Common People by Pulp
In 1995 I was 18 years old and still living with my parents, but gradually being introduced by people I worked with to a new world, one of dingy town centre flats, back rooms in pubs with pool tables that stank of smoke and stale beer, nightclubs that were horrible but the only alcoholic option after 11pm, and most exciting of all, girls who like all the same things. This time in my life was soundtracked by some incredible music, it was as if the entire world suddenly understood the appeal of the stuff I’d been listening to all along, and week after week you could turn on Top Of The Pops and there’d be at least one track on there that was excellent. The song that stands out as a defining anthem of those heady times more than any other is Common People.

One of the first things that is apparent about this song is the everyman touch that Jarvis adds, both to the lyrics and his delivery of them. The song mentions things that are easy to identify with – supermarkets, fags, rum and Coca-Cola, and specifically tells a tale that has elements familiar to anyone in the later stages of their education. It is also important how close the song goes to being classed unsuitable for radio without actually crossing the line. That may have been an accident but I reckon it was crucial to its appeal and its success. It also probably made Jarvis Cocker the first person to regularly use the word “screw” in this context on UK daytime radio, not to mention the lack of ambiguity line “I wanna sleep with Common People like you”.

To fully understand the popularity of Common People you have to look at it in its social and historical context. The impact of the success of Oasis was being felt far and wide, and people who were working class and Northern had started to see ways in which they could use those two things to their advantage. It was with all this pride and optimism going on in the background that Pulp launched this song, about Jarvis’ experience with a posh Greek girl who saw how cool it was to be working class and wanted to do it herself. Unfortunately for her, being a common person provides status that is not something you can gain, it’s something you’re born into, simply because, as Jarvis explains, “if you called your Dad he could stop it all”.

Pulp took the fantastic lyrics Jarvis had written and what they did with them was amazing. The track starts as a peculiar but engaging ditty, but after the first chorus gradually works its way up to a massive wall of sound, captivating the audience and making them feel almost as if they were actually in the song, not just listening to it. This is crucial in understanding what makes the song so good, it introduces this social commentary that you can identify with, and then sweeps you along with it so this isn’t just a song any more, it’s part of your life.

I always find it difficult to put the songs I like best in any kind of order. I can listen to this song and decide it is the best single ever released, but then I listen to Do You Remember The First Time? and I’m no longer even sure it was the best Pulp single ever released. Also, before getting too excited about how successful Britpop was it is worth remembering this track’s chart performance. In one of the all time great miscarriages of chart justice, it sat for two weeks in runners up position behind grinning soldier idiots Robson Green and Jerome Flynn’s dreadful karaoke version of Unchained Melody. Really though, that doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t change the fact that this song meant and still does mean so much.

Concrete Schoolyard by Jurassic 5
I can never quite decide which type of hip-hop I like best, the chilled out sound of the late eighties and early nineties by the likes of De La Soul and the Dream Warriors, or the later, more confident and more professionally produced stuff by Eminem, Kanye West et al. Jurassic 5 are a bit of both – musically this track falls into the first category, but in terms of timing it’s closer to the second.

On closer listen though that apparent anomaly appears deliberate, as this track is essentially a plea for hip hop to return to its more organic roots. Released in 1997, Concrete Schoolyard passed me by completely, as it did most of the rest of the country, reaching 35 in the UK charts. A few years later when I first met the wife it was one of only about 10 CD singles she owned, somewhat uncharacteristically as she’s not exactly into rap, far from it in fact. I had never heard of Jurassic 5 and didn’t know what to expect when I first played it, but as it turned out introducing me to this track is a minor entry on the list of many thousands of things I have to thank her for, it’s great.

Rap music about rap music is nothing new, but Jurassic 5 shy away from the tactic of naming people they don’t like, which would become standard practise a few years later, and instead talk about styles of music and the general feeling that hip hop had lost its way. I’m not sure I agree with that, but they make their point with style, claiming, hilariously, to have the aim of “killing the first born of lyrical Yul Brynners”, and pointing out injustice in the music industry, saying “a lot of tight rappers out there ain’t got no deal”. All this is set to an excellent looping piano, which holds the track together, would have even the most apathetic listener tapping their feet, and in all honesty provides the track’s main appeal. It sounds like it could be a sample of something, but I don’t know what, and bearing in mind the line in the chorus extolling the virtues of “original beats and real live MCs” that would be a little ironic.

The CD single contains two versions of the track, a clean one and an unclean one. The clean one is very irritating, as the vocalists’ slow, laid back delivery make the chorus sound strangely disjointed when the word ‘****’ is missed out. The unclean one, which I have on my iPod, is over a minute longer, with an intriguing and completely different bit tagged on the end, suggesting Jurassic 5 may well have a less relaxed approach at times. Over a sparse bass line, the rapping is much quicker, on a completely different subject, and overtly political. The line “I live in America but **** this government”, several years before George W. Bush came to power and made such sentiments common sense, must have seemed quite controversial, and I don’t really understand what provokes it. Maybe I would need to seek out more Jurassic 5 to understand what brought that on, and on the basis of the only track by them I have ever heard, that might well be a good idea.

Cool For Cats by Squeeze
At the start of the eighties I was 2 years old. Thanks largely to older sisters the radio was rarely off in our house, and due to the lack of local stations playing pop it was almost always Radio 1. As a result this song, released in 1979, is one of several seared involuntarily on my consciousness since before I can even remember.

A jolly, piano lead romp which is mostly talked rather than sung, there are several things about this track that fascinated me as a child, and a few of them still do. Most of all was Chris Difford’s cockney accent – I had never heard anyone talk like that, and genuinely didn’t understand some of it for years. It is actually only recently that I realised the opening line to the song is not “The Indians send signals from the rocks at Balfour Pass”. I imagined Balfour Pass must be some dusty mountain trail in cowboy era America, but in fact he just says “above the pass” which is actually far less interesting. I always knew what was mean when he says “shape up at the disco and I think I’ve got a puw, I ask ‘er lot of questions and she ‘angs on to the wuw”, I just though it sounded funny. In my adult life, because of my work, I have actually ventured to the south-east of England myself occasionally, and I can confirm, ridiculous though it may seem, that there really are people there who actually talk like that.

How it is all said is only part of the fascination though, what is said also captures the attention pretty well. The language is so rich throughout the whole song, you can’t help but listen. The first verse is about the Wild West, the highlight being the line “the squaw is with the corporal she’s tied against a tree, she doesn’t mind the language it’s the beating she don’t need”. Verse two veers randomly to “a bunch of villains in a shed up that ‘Eathrow” who are always “in and out of Wandsworth”. In verse three the narrator declares that he’s been “posing down the pub” and mentions the resulting STD, and in the first sign of continuity between verses the fourth and final one is where he attends a disco, meets a young lady and is “invited in for coffee and I give the dog a bone”. It’s as funny as it is perplexing, and combined with the matter-of-fact delivery and jazz piano tinkling certainly makes for an unusual hit single.

The only other Squeeze song I know is Up The Junction, which I have realised while writing this is a glaring omission from my iTunes which I must sort out as soon as possible. In fact maybe I should buy a Greatest Hits, they must have one. I saw Chris Difford on The One Show late last year, over the course of a week he wrote and produced a song called Let’s Not Fight This Christmas. It was dreadful, but to be fair there’s only so much you can do with Adrian Chiles, Hardeep Singholi and John Sergeant on vocals. If you saw that too don’t let it put you off though, that track may be best forgotten but Cool For Cats is a real gem.

Could You Be Loved? By Bob Marley & The Wailers
For the second day in a row, this is a single from the early 80s that is a long standing radio favourite. Years later, during my days hanging around in second hand record shops, this was the first of several Bob Marley singles I bought on 7” vinyl. It is also on the multi million selling Legend compilation which was one of my most played CDs when I was a student.

Could You Be Loved is a good example of how, with Bob Marley records, although it is always clear he is approaching them from a reggae point of view, it is not always purely reggae. It has quite a fast beat and is fairly clearly influenced by the more rocky elements of radio friendly 70s pop, with harmonising from the Wailers an a perfect singalong chorus. It still retains a slightly dark, political sounding side though, as might be expected from a single taken from an album called Uprising. The lines “The road of life is rocky, and you may stumble too, so while you point a finger, someone else is judging you”, are apparently a quote from Judge Not, a single from the other end of Marley’s career. This is a pivotal moment in the song, a reminder that while you may be tapping your foot and singing along, there are forces at work here that would also like you to do some thinking about what you’re hearing. Their excellent delivery, sung entirely by backing singers, also serve as a good reminder that Marley was often not a solo artist, something which the credit to the Wailers on many of his biggest hits is often not enough to make people remember. Could You Be Loved is most definitely a collaboration, not a song by one man.

I hope this isn’t a sign of a deep rooted racist within me that I didn’t know existed, but ever since I was a child I have thought this track sounds, at the very beginning, as if someone is making monkey noises in the background, the kind that might well be accompanied by armpit scratching. It only lasts a few seconds, and on close listen could possibly be something similar to a wobble board, although as far as I am aware Bob Marley and Rolf Harris is a meeting of the minds that never actually took place. Whatever it is I know this song so well it instantly provokes me into an involuntary, out loud “oo oo oo, oo oo oo” noise as soon as I hear the first few bars, which someone who didn’t feel the same way could reasonably interpret as being deeply offensive. I must try to stop it.

Could You Be Loved was released in 1980, and reached number 5 in the UK charts, a year before Marley died at the tragically young age of 36. To be at this level of creativity at the time of death is not just a tragedy for the man and those who knew him though, it is a great loss to the world at large. With Legend becoming the best selling reggae album in the world during the years after his death, I think it’s safe to say that very few people have been so widely remembered.

Country Fair / Rainbows by The Mouldy Peaches
For several years I used to go down to my local Virgin Megastore on a Monday lunchtime and look at the new releases in the singles section. If it was a poor week and I had some spare change I would occasionally buy stuff I didn’t know just because I liked the look of it, and that is how me owning this track came about.

The Mouldy Peaches are, according to Wikipedia, a New York indie band. That doesn’t tell the full story though. Truth is, I have never really heard anything quite like this.

Country Fair / Rainbows, as the slash in the title suggests, is a track made up of more than one song, although it chops and changes quite a bit over the course of six minutes so it is hard to tell exactly how many songs it is. It starts off as a harmonious, catchy, inoffensive singalong that sounds like it was recorded on a budget of £5. Then it goes quiet, a new song starts, and the female singer, quite reasonably, sings “you’ve got to have rain, to have rainbows”. The next line is where the listeners’ jaw drops though – “***’** *** ** **** **** ** **** * **** ** **** *****”. A couple of lines later comes the rousing chorus where a man and woman sing together, as follows: “*** ***’** *** ** **** ** **** **, *** ***’** *** ** *** ** *****, *** ***’** *** ** **** ** **** off”. It is so absurdly offensive, and so unexpected, that you can’t help but laugh, and I think that’s the idea.

Just to give you a further understanding of where The Mouldy Peaches’ heads are at, later in the song, in two separate exchanges, the woman asks in a broad New York accent, “****** *** **** *** ****** *** *****?” and “***** ****, ** *** ***** ** **** ** * ******?”. The man’s response to the first question is denial, and to the second enthusiasm. Whatever they were trying to achieve here, it definitely wasn’t radio airplay.

Really, this track is juvenile and silly rather than really being offensive, after all there are plenty of hip hop artists out there who really push the boundaries a lot more than these guys messing around. I think the main reason it’s such a shocking track though is that the style – guitar strumming, very basic drums and off key singing – is the kind of thing you might expect to hear from scout masters round a camp fire, or religious types who perform in town centres while their friends give out leaflets. At one point they even become a bit preachy, saying “*** ******* **** **** ***** ** **** ****’** ****** ******** ***** ******* ****”. Rather than abstinence or a cold shower though, the Mouldy Peaches’ suggestion is that they “****** **** **** **** ***** **** ***** *** **** ** *** ****”. I’m not sure most parents would agree.

Ultimately, at the root of this track, is some genuine musical talent and the ability to write a memorable, catchy tune, and that’s why it’s on my iPod. I also like watching peoples’ faces when I play it too them.

Country Girl by Primal Scream
Primal Scream are a funny lot. Sometimes when you listen to their music it seems like they first of all decided what genre they were aiming for before they wrote or recorded anything, that’s the only way I can think of to explain the huge variety in what they do. It’s a hit and miss approach, with some of their back catalogue universally loved and some completely ignored except for die hard fans who’ll buy anything they do. It’s an interesting idea though. Put it this way, I don’t see Chris Martin having a meeting with his Coldplay band mates and saying “look lads, I want the next album to be techno”, but if they did maybe they would be a better band for it. They’d certainly raise a few eyebrows.

The only Primal Scream album I have ever owned was their debut, the early nineties dance and indie love-in that was Screamadelica. Country Girl, on the other hand, is taken from a very different era and what I imagine must be a very different record, 2006’s Riot City Blues. Before this one, Bobby Gilespie and friends decided they were going for rural rock.

The rock element in that genre that I just invented is pretty telling too, despite its title, and despite the lyrics containing phrases like “go back to your mama” and “payin’ your dues”, this is not a country record. For a start, country music doesn’t often come with a Scottish accent, or, for that matter, what sounds distinctly like a Spanish guitar. It also doesn’t usually go at such a pace, or sound so happy.

So basically it would appear that Primal Scream took the decision, because it’s how they felt at the time, to make a barnstorming, life affirming blast of cheerfulness, set to a pop / rock background and aimed squarely at the charts. If that’s the case then they got what they wanted, as it made the top 5 and is the biggest hit single of their career. That seems a bit odd because it is by no means the best song they’ve ever done, but I still defy anyone not to be grinning and singing along by the end, which is more than can be said for a lot of their older stuff.

Reading the lyrics, I wonder if the song is actually about someone in particular. It is basically advice to someone who appears to be living life a little too fast (“stay out drinking ‘til the morning comes” / “wake up drunk and bleeding in some strange bed”), recommending that they go home and calm down a bit. A fairly simple concept for a song that proves greatness can often be found in simplicity.

Country Grammar (Hot ****) by Nelly
Released in 2000, Country Grammar was Nelly’s debut single and, in my humble opinion, remains one of the best rap records so far this century.

As I have mentioned before, I am quite a fan of silly lyrics in rap records, but this one comes with the added bonus of a silly title. Personally, the part of the title in brackets makes me think of my cat’s litter tray, and the hilarity is only heightened when Nelly appears to say in the first verse “I’m from the loo and I’m proud”. (According to metrolyrics.com he actually says “loop”). It is bizarre how different American and English slang can be, and I certainly would never hear those words said by someone with an English accent thinking that they meant something was good.

It’s not only the way things are said here that’s funny though, it’s the actual content to. Since he became old and successful my Dad’s choice of vehicle has been a Range Rover, basically because it’s expensive, demonstrates to all the posh farmer types in the area where he grew up in relative poverty that he’s done well (in many cases batter than they have), and can be justified because the road he lives down has a few pot holes in it. It absolutely kills me though to hear this song and realise that the very same vehicle is the ultimate status symbol for mid-west US gangster wannabes. My Dad will indeed be “going down down baby your street in a Range Rover”, especially if your street is in rural Cheshire. He’ll be the one with mud splattered up the doors listening to Foster & Allen.

It wouldn’t be fair to say I only like this record because it makes me laugh though, there’s a lot more to it than that. When this track came out it was a complete breath of fresh air, for a start I don’t think many people in the UK had ever heard anyone that sounded like that. Instead of going on about ghettos in major East Coast or West Coast US cities, Nelly was giving a shout out in his southern drawl to places like St. Louis, Memphis, Indiana and Alabama. This must have been quite a geographical shock to the American music industry, but to the rest of the world it just sounded like something different. About eight years earlier Arrested Development had been rapping about rural Tennessee to some degree of success, but there had been so much gangster rap in the meantime that the stuff they were doing had all but been forgotten. Nelly wasn’t just taking hip hop back to an old style either though, he took the laid back delivery of earlier rappers who had nothing much to say except how good their lives were, and applied it using the R&B style that would become dominant in the years to come.

I was a big fan of this album, including the even bigger hit Ride Wit’ Me, and the oddly spelt Hot In Herre off the next album was good in a silly kind of way too. Before long though Nelly succumbed to the lure of stodgy R&B which has clogged up the charts for much of the last decade, having hit after indistinguishable hit with his own records and as a featured artist on other people’s. None of that makes any difference to this track though, an excellent example of how hip hop has the incredible ability to change drastically and be all the better for it.

Coz I Luv You by Slade
Long before anyone sent a text or posted something indecipherable on a message board, a certain West Midlands band were upsetting teachers and parents everywhere by spelling the titles of their hits exactly as they said them. Personally I would have called this song Cuz I Luv U, but I suppose I’m not from the West Midlands.

When people think of Slade, (which is usually at Christmas), I reckon they’re usually contemplating the incredibly catchy shout-alongs that they made their trademark sound, like Cum On Feel The Noize and Skweeze Me Pleeze Me. I am the first to acknowledge that those unquestioningly cheerful singles must have seemed like brilliantly welcome escapism to kids growing up in the drab early seventies, but it’s worth noting there was actually far more to Slade than infectious choruses and big hats with mirrors on.

Coz I Luv You was the first of Slade’s six number one singles, and is always a surprise for anyone who only knows the aforementioned anthems for which they’re best remembered. Although it might be stretching it a bit to call the track a ballad, the slow build and minimal instrumentation at the beginning give the impression it could be one. Also, far from being standard glam rock, it actually has a whiny, almost psychedelic violin instrumental break after the first chorus, and again near the end. By this point the clapping and banging are turning the track into a bit of a knees up, but it’s as much hairy folkies in a barn as it is teenagers at a school disco.

I had a copy of this track on 7” which had a tiny scratch that made the needle slip back into the previous groove during the instrumental. Oddly, you could listen to it for quite a while before noticing, the whiney violin just spun round and round a bit like it does anyway, just for longer. Eventually if you gently held a finger against the record player’s arm it would stay in the groove and finish the track properly. I suppose the psychedelic element within this track is partly a result of it being recorded in the immediate aftermath of the 60s, barely a year after The Beatles split, and partly existent only in my head because I unwittingly created my own, nine minute, mostly instrumental version. I don’t recommend that, but I do recommend listening to it, it’s both a great track and a bit of a surprise.

Crack A Bottle by Eminem featuring Dr Dre and 50 Cent
When it was announced around last Christmas that there would be new Eminem material early this year I was a little cautious. I was a huge fan of his first several albums, but the last one, Encore, had been a bit of a disappointment. The worst thing about it was the first single, Just Lose It, everything about that track was wrong. It was an attempt to simply re-create the magic of previous Eminem album leaders Without Me and The Real Slim Shady, but the humour had gone from being outrageous and brilliantly topical to tired, puerile and dull, and the instantly catchy chorus was replaced with the title repeated over and over while someone made silly noises in the background. At the risk of sounding like a tabloid journalist, Just Lose It was a very public demonstration that Eminem had just lost it, so crap that it didn’t seem likely he’s ever be worth listening to again.

Encore was followed by a Greatest Hits collection and then an announcement by the man himself that he was going to retire, which didn’t seem like a bad idea in the circumstances. In music though retirement is different to any other business, no one ever goes away and stays away. At the start of this year Eminem’s return was an intriguing prospect - would he have spent the intervening four years perfecting his craft and be back on top of his game, or would it be the final nail in the career-coffin of the 21st century’s best rap star?

And the verdict? Well, he scraped through, just. I’m not going to pretend Crack A Bottle is anywhere near the heights of his earlier material, but it is still one of the best hip-hop tracks this year. Having said that, considering it actually features three hip hop royalty in the credits, so it should be.

As tends to be the case with the first single off a new Eminem album, this is one of the gross out Slim Shady ones. The humour is still present, although the balance is once again tipped more in the direction of silliness than satire (at one stage he invites the audience to “lick the ******* ****** from under my ****”). The chorus is catchy though, and his delivery sounds fresh and confident, not at all like he’s going through the motions, which was always a danger. Then he introduces Dre, who obligingly mutters some stuff about how many cars he owns and how he likes driving round LA crashing them, and it’s like the two of them have never been away.

Next up is Fiddy, who compares himself to a napalm bomb. I’ve never been a fan of his personally, but even I wouldn’t say that, or maybe I’m missing the point. The very fact that he turns up at the end here though makes this the best track he’s done since his debut, the admittedly brilliant In Da Club.

Overall then, not exactly a full scale triumph but still a welcome return. Happily, Eminem’s next single, We Made You, was even better. It’s good to see him back.

[SheriffFatman]

Crash by The Primitives
I was 11 years old when I bought this, and at the time I think it must have been the most alternative record I owned. In a decade awash with synthesised pop and frothy manufactured nonsense, this loud and cheap singalong by an indie band from Coventry stormed into the top 5, and stuck out like a sore thumb. In 1988, even as I was building up my collection of Kylie Minogue records, it still somehow appealed to me when a song that sounded unusual became a success. Crash sounds to my 2009 ears like it should have been a minor hit championed by the NME in the early to mid nineties, one of those brilliant female fronted indie records by the likes of The Breeders or Elastica which it was very cool to know but not many people did. I guess The Primitives were just ahead of their time.

Having said all that, I have read on Wikipedia that this band was compared at the time to Transvision Vamp, the British pop rock outfit who had big hits with Baby I Don’t Care and I Want Your Love. I suppose I can see the similarities in vocal style, and both singers had blonde hair, but apart from that it seems a little unfair. In particular, Transvision Vamp’s efforts, while having a certain rock ethos, were really very polished affairs, highly produced for maximum radio airplay like most of the rest of what was being made at the time. Crash, on the other hand, sounds like it was recorded in a cupboard, and the charm is that despite the vocals being at times barely audible over the fuzzy guitar you still can’t help singing it for hours after you’ve heard it.

My memories of Crash are putting the vinyl on the turntable of my wood finish record player, tape deck and FM radio combo and spinning round my bedroom while looking at the ceiling and singing “na na na na na, na na na na na, na na na you’re gonna crash” until I fell over, it was the kind of record that felt like it’s all around you rather than just coming out of the tinny speakers. Years later, after playing it at in the bedroom of a student house one day, a slightly younger housemate said “no way, you’ve got that record off Dumb And Dumber”, which made me laugh in an old and wise kind of way. Since then I’ve heard it in loads of places, it seems to have become popular with TV soundtrack people and the guys who put together compilation albums. I even saw it on one called Top Gear Driving Anthems or some such nonsense. I don’t really know what is good music to drive to, but I can’t help thinking that a song which keeps insisting “if you don’t slow down you’re gonna crash” is not ideal. Then again, maybe the government should use it on public information adverts.

Crazy by Gnarls Barclay
In 2006, sat in a German airport while returning from a friends’ wedding, I bought a newspaper and read in it that this track had just become the first ever UK number one single to get there on download sales alone. It was at that point I decided I’d better find out what on earth a download actually was, and how to get them. When I got home though I still went out and bought the CD.

I knew Crazy already, it had been on the radio for ages, with Radio 1 leading the way if I remember right, and there was much debate about who on earth Gnarls Barclay actually were (or was). In the event I was actually a bit disappointed by the outcome of this, because although they were both apparently well respected in their field already, I’d never heard of either them. The song is so good though it didn’t really matter who it was by.

Crazy, in the unlikely event that there’s anyone out there who doesn’t know it already, is the kind of smooth soul record that seems to have become all but extinct in a world awash with horrible, whiney, sex obsessed R&B singers (yes Usher, Ne Yo, Chris Brown etc, I’m looking at you). With an infectious hip hop bass line and a chorus that sticks in your head the song is like an instant rush, one of those rare tracks which you know you like the second you first hear it. Cee Lo’s excellent, vocals are also part of what makes it so good – no one had ever sung with such reasoned, level headed clarity about being insane. Well, I suppose you could say Patsy Cline did, but that was a long time ago.

With nine weeks at number one, Crazy became a massive hit of the kind that only comes along once or twice a decade, in fact it was 12 years since anyone had spent so long at the top. Unfortunately, in the new download dominated market the record industry proved completely inept at knowing how to handle such a phenomenon, giving Crazy one of the oddest chart runs of all time, and failing to preserve its legacy in the record books. After 9 weeks at the top, the record company decided to delete the physical copy of the single, presumably so they could promote Gnarls’ next one (which, incidentally, was far inferior). The Official Charts Company, in a concession to high street retailers, had created a rule so that downloads could only chart for up to 2 weeks after a single was deleted. As a result, after its domination of the top spot, Crazy fell to 2, then 5, then off the chart altogether. Six months later, when the rule was scrapped so any download was chart eligible, it re-entered at 30, so it almost certainly would have spent all the time in between on the charts too. It’s a minor thing and I probably shouldn’t get worked up about it, but the music industry has a long history of pointlessly over complicating things to its own detriment, and this is a fine example.

Still, the record buying public and I rarely agree to such a degree – not many songs that are this successful are any good. Crazy is a rarity, and despite all that success is still a pleasure to hear.

Crazy In Love by Beyonce featuring Jay Z
So much R&B from the last ten years has been successful despite being completely void of creativity that it is easy to forget that occasionally the genre gets it right. In a way I think my immediate assumption that any R&B track will be dull, stodgy rubbish makes the excitement even greater on the odd occasion when I’m proved wrong. Destiny’s Child had always been a cut above the rest of the mega selling US pop acts at the turn of the century, with some genuinely good songs (Independent Women, Survivor, Bootylicious, they were all great) but following Kelly Rowland’s so-so duet with Nelly in 2002, it remained to be seen if a solo Beyonce would be worth listening to. I can’t say I gave it much thought at the time, but suffice to say I wasn’t waiting for her debut single with baited breath.

That just goes to show that sometimes good music can come from the least expected sources – Crazy In Love is quite simply brilliant, one of the best pop singles of the noughties. Driven along by a beefed up horn section sampled from a song I’ve never heard before, Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So) by the Chi-Lites, it is quite simply pop genius. There’s plenty of space for Beyonce to show of her well established vocal talents, but she does it with exactly the right amount of restraint, not going off on a Mariah Carey style attempt to sing the same word in a hundred different notes. The songs theme isn’t complicated – she’s in love and she likes it – but she her presence and enthusiasm come across so successfully the whole package leaves a grin on the listeners face too. I may be wrong, but it seems to me almost impossible to dislike this track.

Earlier this year the Guardian newspaper did a series of 7 pull out sections about what it said were the 1001 best tracks ever. Each day’s pull out had a theme, and the love song day had a separate section for songs made by people who were in love with each other at the time. Until then, I am actually quite proud to say that I didn’t even know Beyonce and Jay Z were (or had been) a couple, but listening to this song that does make sense. His contribution here is fairly minimal, turning up two thirds of the way through to do a rap bit, but even that works very well, which is to producer Rich Harrison’s credit. So many songs in this genre sound like they have a rap in them because by that point everyone had run out of ideas, but somehow Jay Z just fits in here perfectly.

Reviewing a song like Crazy In Love, which was fairly recent and a huge success, seems like a slightly odd exercise, because it’s not as if anyone doesn’t know it already. Of course the point of this exercise though is really to justify why everything on my iPod is there, and Crazy In Love definitely deserves its place, more than a lot of others. It’s a great record and 20 years from now it still will be.

Crazy Little Thing Called Love by Queen
I was reviewing the list of songs on my iPod late last year, while also bearing in mind my Mum’s annual demand for a Christmas present list (I’m 32 for Christ’s sake, but I suppose I shouldn’t complain), and concluded that my life was lacking Queen. The thing is, I never really got round to downloading any Queen because I wouldn’t know where to start. I mean I wouldn’t want to buy 10 songs by them but there are at least that many of equal quality that wouldn’t be out of place in this list, so how would I choose what to buy?

I noticed that Greatest Hits 1 & 2 were pretty cheap in HMV so I asked for them, and all year when I get round to it I rotate the Queen songs on here, maintaining about six at any one time and always including Don’t Stop Me Now and Bohemian Rhapsody.

I think as a child I knew Crazy Little Thing Called Love for a long time before I knew who it was by, I just assumed it was either Elvis or someone trying to sound like him. I can’t pinpoint exactly when I realised who it was, but it does sound like a bit of a strange one for Queen, rock ‘n’ roll in the big collared white jump suit sense rather than the stadium filling, hand waving guitar solos. It was the kind of song that was on the radio in the background though, as opposed to one I really listened to carefully. On closer inspection there are some signs that all is not entirely fifties.

This is, in fact, apparently Queen with a sense of humour, something which I reckon they always had but which tended to come across more in their videos than their songs. The start of the song, where Freddie sings “this thing, called love…” is the most openly Presleyish thing about the whole track, his vocals seem to come straight out of Blue Suede Shoes, and lyrics like “there goes my baby, she knows how to rock and roll” are deliberately generic, but fit perfectly. The vocals do get more Mercury-like later on, making it seem more like he’s trying to be an Elvis impersonator rather than Elvis himself. The hand clapping break down bit near the middle, too, is half fifties rockabilliy and half We Will Rock You, I can’t decide which it sounds most like. Then there’s the guitar solo, which in context is a bit rock ‘n’ roll sounding, but really is also quite classic Brian May too.

I guess it’s a mark of how accomplished these guys were that they could just take on board a completely different genre and decide to record a song in it. It was a big success too, although not quite topping the charts in the UK it was number one for 4 weeks in America, not bad for a song which you feel wasn’t meant to be taken entirely seriously. Although it’s a nice enough track, it’s place on my iPod is far from secure, but that’s only because they’ve got so many others that are just as good.

Creep by Radiohead
Some songs on this list do not have much of a back story, history wise there’s not much to be said about them, so that makes me focus on my own feelings and what the song means to me. Creep, on the other hand, could constitute a two thousand word essay in third person all on its own, focussing on what it achieved, how it was packaged and received, and what it meant for the both the band and the music industry as a whole. I’ll try and draw a line between the two.

Creep was Radiohead’s debut single, released in 1992 to very little acclaim, reaching number 78 in the UK charts. If you take the UK charts alone though it soon appeared as if Radiohead might actually become a minor success, with the now long forgotten follow up single, Anyone Can Play Guitar, briefly cracking the top 40, and the album they both came from, Pablo Honey, knocking around the bottom of the charts for a while in spring 1993. Unusually for a British indie band in the early 90s, the real action, however, was in the US, where Creep was picked up by radio stations a few at a time and eventually became something of a phenomenon, mainstream success for a track and band who sounded anything but mainstream. Following the unexpected US enthusiasm the record company reissued Creep over here, where it became a top 10 hit, setting Radiohead on the way to becoming one of the most popular and consistently successful bands for many years.

Really, when you think about the theme in the lyrics and the general feel of the track, I suppose it should come as no surprise that it was the nation who had unleashed Grunge on the world two years earlier which first noticed the charm of Creep. Rock music is notoriously unpredictable, and a bunch of navel gazers from Oxford would not have been anyone’s first thought in terms of the sound of the future, but in a way a song in which the singer voices his self hatred so clearly fits nicely in after the global success achieved by Nirvana with songs about hating oneself and having no friends.

Personally, I was always fascinated by the loud bit / quiet bit element of Creep. It was a technique that had been well in evidence on tracks like Smells Like Teen Spirit, but here it was less polished but just as popular. I always thought the stuttered crunch of the guitars before the chorus reminded me of a car ignition refusing to start.

Seventeen years after it was first released, Creep is like a museum piece. It and its story tell us an awful lot about the type of music that was around back then and the way it could become successful. It may have been a weight around Radiohead’s collective neck for many years, but it also remains a fantastic slacker anthem, really quite separate to almost everything else they ever did, but I can’t help wondering how much of that would have been possible if Creep hadn’t existed. I’m glad it does.

Cringle Fields by The Family Mahone
This is the second of two songs on this list which are taken from a CD I bought after seeing Mark Radcliffe and a fellow member of the Family Mahone, whose name I’ve forgotten, perform in a room above a pub as part of an arts festival in the town where I live. The music they played is a bit hard to define, I suppose it was traditional Celtic folk music in every way except that instead of actually being Celtic, the accents, attitude and subject matter were very much rooted in the North West of England.

Cringle Fields is a municipal park in Levenshulme, the residential area of south Manchester more famously known for its Curry Mile. I’ve lived in the North West all my life (except for a few years as a student when I fell in love with the West Country), but unlike a lot of people my age from my neck of the woods I’m not going to pretend I know Manchester particularly well. I understand the feel of the place though, the steely determination to make the most of living in a permanently grey, damp place where it seems, rightly or wrongly, like you have to try so much harder to make anything of your life than people from anywhere else in the country. Equally, after years of sitting in front of North West Tonight, I totally understand the pride of a city that gave the world Oasis, Eccles Cakes, The Smiths and L.S. Lowry, amongst other things.

This is the contradiction of much of what I have heard by The Family Mahone, and this track especially. The banjo, fiddle and flute make you think they should be singing about fishing boats and buxom wenches in isolated moor land farmhouses, but their actual lyrics talk of biscuit factories belching smoke into the night, and describe “a shelter where the biddies huddle every afternoon” because “bingo’s not til after tea and tea’s at home alone”. This grim sounding place, and Radcliffe’s experiences there as a young man, are sung about with such affection that you can’t help but marvel at people’s innate ability to make the best of a bad situation. When he mentions the fair visiting and buying hot dogs “from the grumpy bloke with earrings and the dirty finger nails” you actually with you’d been there riding the waltzers with him.

I have read in various places that The Family Mahone are a Pogues tribute act, and have never really seen why. Apart from the name connection (The Pogues were originally called Pogue Mahone, but changed it as this is Irish for a certain popular but offensive phrase) there does not seem to be that many similarities. I suppose when you think about it though, aside from everybody’s favourite Christmas song, one of The Pogues’ most famous tracks is a cover of the Ewan McColl song Dirty Old Town, which is about Salford, a city within a city that is, according to Multimap, a grand total of 6.4 miles from Levenshulme. So maybe inner city folk music isn’t such a new idea, and although Cringle Fields is no Dirty Old Town, and for that matter Mark Radcliffe is not the worlds’ greatest vocalist, The Family Mahone carry the torch for that genre as well as anyone ever could.

Cry Me A River by Justin Timberlake
Sometimes I bow to pressure and my add something to my iPod’s play list at the insistence of my wife. When I first loaded songs on to it I went through most of our CDs adding my favourite tracks, and on inspection she was incensed at the lack of anything from her treasured and much played copy of Justin Timberlake’s debut album, Justified.

The thing is, I don’t follow the tabloids much, and especially not celebrity magazines. I am always keen on the news, as in what important things are actually happening in the world, but the minute details of anyone person’s relationships are of no interest to me at all. However, despite this, even I knew that Justin Timberlake had been going out with Britney Spears for a while and then they split up. The fact that I knew this irritated me, but some facts like that are covered in such a blanket way by the media that you can’t avoid them. The irrational thing on my part is that because I knew facts about these people that irritated me I was irritated by everything about them, and did not want to acknowledge their music. I dislike this trait in myself, but I can’t help it. I love music but I don’t think I will ever listen with a critical ear to a Girls Aloud record, just because Cheryl Cole is in the band and she’s also like a one woman media machine. I should be less narrow minded.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that I’d never paid any attention to any of Justin Timberlake’s music, assuming it was merely a means of sustaining the main Justin Timberlake product, namely stories about his love life. The fact that the Mrs owned one of his albums had washed over me altogether, and I begrudged all three of the tracks I added to stop the complaining, planning to remove them again when she’d forgotten about it.

Thing is though, two and a half years later they’re all still on here, and I’ve been asking myself why. I think I’ve decided it’s because I like them.

Cry Me A River starts with the sound of running water – so far so literal – and turns into a shuffle through what I read today for the first time may well be an account of the actual Timberlake/Spears break up. The chorus is catchy despite never really coming to much, and the production, with it’s clever “dah dah dah dah dah….. daaaaah!” hook is an early Timberland prototype, before he became responsible for 50% of any week’s top 40 sounding exactly the same.

Something I have always wondered about Timberland – is the guy with the deep voice who talks on most of his records actually him? It’s certainly not Falsetto Timberlake. Whoever it is might be pleased to know this song got under my skin so much that for over a year I developed a slightly irritating tendency to repeat the words “the damage is done so I guess I’ll be leaving” as I walked out of the office where I work each night. When even the talking is catchy the producer can be confident his song is a hit.

Crying Blood by V V Brown
As a music consumer in 2009, I have a problem. I no longer seem to be sure where to find out what new music I will like. I used to buy, and mostly believe, the NME, but I’ve have naturally grown out of it. That was bound to happen, because I’m just older than its target market and no longer impressed by teenagers dressed in black. It’s good to see them banging on about alternative bands and getting young kids into guitar music, but these days I watch from a distance because most of the actual music, by the likes of My Chemical Romance and Panic At The Disco, sounds, to my 32 year old ears, a bit lame.

Top Of The Pops fell by the wayside some time ago, and the chart show on Radio 1 is frequently unlistenable as it’s presented by morons. Mark Radcliffe no longer plies his trade on Radio 1, and his Radio 2 show with Stuart Maconie is very good but the musical recommendations tend to sometimes sound distinctly like they’re coming from two men in their fifties. All of this leaves me a bit lost, listening to the 30 second clips on the iTunes top 100 and trying to work out from the single plays on BBC3’s festival coverage whether I like something or not. That’s where I heard this song – I’d read VV Brown’s name online already so I was keen to see her Glastonbury set even though I had no idea what she’d sound like, and this seemed to be one of the best tracks she did, with the crowd clearly enjoying it, so I bought it.

It sounds like I’m preparing to say it was all a mistake and this song is rubbish. It’s not though, but after a few more listens I realised it’s just OK. I mean, it’s pretty good, just not really anything special. It’s the type of single which if I’d bought it 5 years ago I’d have listened to it a couple of times and then put the CD away somewhere and forgotten about it. Now in the download era I face either keeping it on this list as an equal to some of the greatest songs I know, or pressing delete and consigning the track to memory forever. I can’t decide which to do.

To put the music into context, Crying Blood is a jaunty pop track influenced musically by ska and vocally by the sixties. In other words, it’s a lot like several Amy Winehouse tracks, but not as good. In fact, entering a market where daring has already been done by Winehouse and chart friendly has been done by Gabriella Cilimi, at roughly the same time as the Noisettes released their excellent but slightly underperforming Never Forget You, this effort, which for various reasons is not quite as good as any of those, didn’t stand much of a chance. That’s a bit of a shame because although it’s not brilliant it is still a lot better than a lot of the other stuff clogging up the charts. There may be life in the VV Brown project though – I don’t know if this was ever released as a single, but another song, Shark In The Water, which sounded a bit dull in comparison to this one, scraped the bottom of the top 40 a few weeks back. Although I won’t be buying any of her other stuff any time soon, I’ll probably be hovering over the delete key with this one for a while yet.

The Crystal Lake by Grandaddy
American indie outfit Grandaddy released The Crystal Lake in 2000, and it came to my attention because it was Mark and Lard’s record of the week at the time when I was writing my dissertation. My routine involved getting up each day around 1pm, walking into town to buy a pasty and a newspaper, eating the pasty and reading the paper while listening to their show, then when it finished doing 5 hours work before going back into town for chips which would be eaten in a friend’s flat before going to the pub until around 1am, then back to bed for 10 hours sleep before doing it all again. I bought a lot of great music that I heard during the radio listening part of that process. I was also permanently hung over.

Crystal Lake is a fascinating track, driven by the contradiction between a clumsily simple but compelling guitar loop and a massive swirl of spacey synthesised noises that make me feel dizzy when I think about them too much. Musically, this is like taking the commendably worthy but undeniably dull indie of someone like Idlewild, and then throwing the more avant garde, tune free elements of Air or Royksopp at it to see what happens. The results are lovely.

Also, although that sounds like quite a European sound, the vocals are distinctly American. I don’t know where exactly Grandaddy are from, but they’re the type of Americans who pronounce words that rhyme with ‘ear’ as if they have two syllables, as in the line “I’ve gotta get out of hee-yur” repeated several times towards the end of the song. I bet it just sounds normal to them but to me, throwing an almost hypnotically monotone, nasal vocal with a Blink 182 accent into the mix just adds to the somewhat disconcerting brilliance on display.

Mark and Lard may have drawn my attention to the track, but they didn’t have the same effect on many other people, as Crystal Lake missed the chart altogether when first released. For some reason though it was re-released a year later and reached number 38 in the charts; still not exactly an overwhelming success, but I bet Radio 1’s ex-finest would be suitably amused to know the track fared better when they were not promoting it than when they were.

Excitingly, during the course of remembering exactly where I first heard this track, I have found an online archive of all of Mark & Lard’s Record’s of the Week from their time at Radio 1, (and, as it happens, all of Radcliffe’s from Radio 2 too) maintained by some anonymous geek for the eternal benefit of the interested but lazy such as me. I can now see myself spending quite a bit of time alternating between that website, Youtube to hear the songs and iTunes to buy them.

Cum On Feel The Noize by Slade
In March 1973 Cum On Feel The Noize entered the UK chart at numbers one, the making Slade the first act to do so since The Beatles in 1969. It was their fourth of six UK number ones, the following two would both also enter the charts at the top, although after Merry Xmas Everybody the feat would not be repeated again until the 80s. Cum On Feel The Noize was also right in the middle of a run of 12 consecutive top 5 hits for Slade, an impressive chart run even when compared to the modern day artists. All of this proves that it is difficult to underestimate the popularity of Slade at the time and how completely their sound dominated the lives of teenage pop fans in the early seventies. Speaking as someone who even wasn’t born until 1977, as soon as you listen to this track the reasons become instantly clear.

Cum On Feel The Noize is a rip-roaring, insanely cheerful shout along song, with the one clearly stated intention of making the listeners grin from ear to ear and accept that rock is the only way forward. Like a tabloid newspaper it directly instructs its audience, in words of no more than two syllables, exactly how to behave, the title being followed with the line “girls grab your boys”. (Thinking about it, I imagine when Noddy first wrote this down it was actually “girlz grab your boyz”). It is such an incredible blast of unquestioning happiness that you get swept up in the enthusiasm. If you think about this band, in boots with silly heels and hats covered in mirrors, playing songs that in four minutes can leave you feeling that everything in the world is fantastic and nothing bad could ever happen, and then put them in the context of the drab early 70s with three day weeks and workers on strike, it is no wonder they were so popular. Cum On Feel The Noize is pure escapism.

In terms of my iPod in 2009 it may be difficult at first to see how this track could have any relevance. At its heart though, it is like a master class in how to create the perfect pop moment. All the elements are hear, from the catchy chorus, silly noises, vocal enthusiasm (Noddy’s “eeeyoooooo” before the first verse is just as spectacular as his “It’s Christmas!” on their most famous song of all), and a brilliant guitar hook that actually quite subtly holds it all together. I remember the song enjoying a bit of a resurgence in popularity when Oasis covered it on the b-side to Don’t Look Back In Anger, and Noel Gallagher was saying in interviews what a big influence Slade were on him. You can see the similarities to this track and several of Oasis’ biggest hits, words like soaring, anthemic and singalong would clearly appear in reviews of both. I’m sure there were just as many people staggering out of pubs singing Cum On Feel The Noize in 1973 as there were singing Wonderwall in 1995. This song is on my iPod as a reminder of just how much fun pop music can sometimes be.

Cupid by Amy Winehouse
Cupid is an old Sam Cooke song, which was a hit for him in 1961, and a bigger hit for reggae star Johnny Nash in 1969. It’s one of those songs that always seems to have been around, everyone knows it but no one is really sure who it’s by. It’s certainly a song that’s been covered a lot, and although off the top of my head I can’t name any of the products, I have a feeling it’s been in a lot of TV adverts, many of which, knowing the levels of subtlety in the advertising industry, were probably on around Valentines Day.

As is often the case with songs that seem to be part of culture as a whole, rather than just a hit single at a certain time, the main reason for the ubiquity of Cupid is simply that it’s a great song. Very catchy with vivid but simple imagery, anyone can sing along and appreciate the sentiment of someone hoping that someone else will fall in love with them.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was a bit late getting into Amy Winehouse, first buying Back To Black after it had been re-issued in a Deluxe Edition. This track is taken from the ‘bonus’ CD of that set, and is a classic example of songs that get recorded for this latest desperate ruse by the music industry to get people to buy the same record twice, as opposed to them making the effort to find something new consumers might want to buy.

The fast reggae style arrangement is simple and the whole thing probably took about an hour to put together. Thing is though, the combination of such a classic song, and Winehouse’s incredible vocal style that could make How Much Is That Doggie In The Window? sound like a sumptuous classic, this couldn’t fail. Her voice really is stupendous, always surprisingly exotic in a white English soul kind of way, and the production is very similar to the main album, which is of course absolutely brilliant. The cutesy backing vocals, quietly and sweetly repeating the title over and over, contrast perfectly with Amy’s deep voiced style. Unlike some of several of the darker tracks on the main CD, this track also gives her the opportunity to sound like she’s enjoying herself, and it’s infectious. Altogether, this is not the most complicated or carefully created track on my iPod, but a genuine pleasure to hear any time.

Da Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home) by The Crystals
Jive Bunny and The Mastermixers, for anyone who doesn’t know, were two men from Rotherham who briefly enjoyed enormous success by releasing singles made up of old songs sliced together with the same drum beat throughout. In 1989 their first three singles all reached number one in the UK. Swing The Mood became the best selling single of all time in Australia, and even reached the top 40 in the US. The criticism they received was almost as huge as their sales – absolutely everyone who had an opinion about music seemed to consider them creatively bankrupt, accusing them of raking up things from the past that were better left there, taking up chart positions that might otherwise be occupied by something new and interesting. They didn’t get played on the radio, but that didn’t seem to make any difference.

Being 12 years old I was completely immune from the opinions of clever people who understood and cared about the history of pop, and so I loved them. I bought every single, and got the album for Christmas. Now, I’m not going to try to justify Jive Bunny and make out they were actually any good, but it is true that there are many good songs that I heard for the first time on that album which I went on to investigate further and was a better person for it. One of them was a fluffy pop masterpiece from the early 60s called Da Doo Ron Ron.

I have always been fascinated with the lyrics to this song. In particular, it amazes me how the wonderful innocence and intrigue portrayed in the opening line, “I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still”, is so fundamentally undermined by the comic absurdity of the line that comes straight after, “somebody told me that his name was Bill”. The idea of a young lady in the midst of teenage romantic idealism could fall for a man called Bill just seems so funny, although I guess in 1962 it was probably less so. You could say that this one hasn’t aged that well.

This track isn’t just a silly pop song though, the production is a sixties masterclass. Phil Spector (that guy who was recently sent to prison for shooting someone in his house) performs an early example of his wall of sound technique here, with layer upon layer of music and backing vocal taking the concept of cute pop songs about teenage crushes to a visionary new level of musical accomplishment.

In amongst most of the other stuff on my iPod this track may seem a little out of place, indeed the wife heard this when it came on shuffle the other day and asked me why I “listen to music that you know is crap?” I beg to differ. These days American pop music for teenagers, by the likes of Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, is most definitely over polished and horribly predictable, but Da Doo Ron Ron was recorded in an era when it was possible to appeal to kids and still be pushing boundaries. To quote Jive Bunny, (and not many people do that these days), That’s What I Like.

Daddy’s Gone by Glasvegas
Like most people who have heard of them, I discovered Glasvegas last year around the time they re-released this track. I absolutely love it, it’s one of my favourite singles for years. It’s not very often (not often enough in fact) that you hear a band for the first time and it’s immediately clear that they’re making brilliant music that sounds like no one else around at the time, but that’s exactly what happened here. For a track that wears its influences on its sleeve for all to see it is amazing that it sounds so unique, but it’s really the combination of different styles here, plus the heart breaking honesty of the subject matter, that make the song so brilliant.

Daddy’s Gone is about the love a young boy has for his absent father, which turns to pity as he gets older. Written by the band’s guitarist, I don’t know if it is biographical but if so the sentiment must have virtually destroyed his father. It starts off with the lyrics “How you are my hero, how you’re never here though”, detailing the things he wished he could do with his Dad when he was a child. Later he asks “what kind of way is that to treat your wife, to see your son on Saturdays, what way is that to live your life”. Eventually, in the chorus, the son concludes that he may not be the one who missed out most – “I won’t be the lonely one sitting on my own and sad, a fifty year old reminiscing what I had”.

I am well aware that divorce can be an extremely complicated issue, and there are two sides to every story, but I think the incredibly raw emotion in this song would make it uncomfortable listening for a lot of fathers out there. Next year I’m going to be a Dad myself. It’s five months until I even get to meet my first child, but the thought of them expressing sentiments like this to me when I’m older is unbearable.

All of this, of course, seems an extremely unusual subject matter for a pop song. This is no normal pop set up though. Glasvegas sing in Scottish accents as strong as any I’ve heard in the charts since The Proclaimers, but their major influences are not just other young men with guitars. The vocals are fantastic, crooned with the kind of ability usually associated with easy listening or Elvis, and the backing vocals and layered production are straight out of the early sixties pop groups the like of which I was reviewing, entirely by co-incidence, yesterday. It’s a heady mixture which, against all odds, works amazingly well.

I would like to say I have Glasvegas’ album and that it’s brilliant, but unfortunately the wife got upset about the lead singers appearance on Never Mind The Buzzcocks and became vehemently opposed to me buying it. I didn’t see it, so I’m not clear on exactly what he did wrong, but her opposition was so strong I couldn’t face telling her I’d bought it anyway. Marriage is all about compromise I guess, which is maybe what Glasvegas’ guitarist’s Dad never fully appreciated.

Dakota by The Stereophonics
The Stereophonics’ debut album, Word Gets Around, was released in 1997 and was brilliant. No one noticed it at first, but eventually five excellent singles were released from it and it spent a total of 118 weeks on the album chart. Just as Oasis seemed to be heading in the wrong direction, indie fans had a new bunch of working class blokes with guitars to idolise.

After that though it all went a bit wrong. They fell victim to that unfortunate trap that bands who unexpectedly find they are hugely popular can often experience – their first album sounded like it came from a lifetime of experience and practise, their second sounded like it had been rushed because they needed to put something out quick after 18 months on tour. More albums followed over the years, and although they retained a hardcore group of fans, they came to symbolise clumsy, dull rock with little tune and almost no redeeming features. Several forgettable singles did well on the charts due to large first week sales and then sank without trace. Have A Nice Day marked a successful return to radio airplay but was not exactly very exciting, and the fact that their biggest hit of all, Handbags And Gladrags, was a cover of a Rod Stewart song seemed to finally confirm that they had nothing of any interest to say.

Then, at the start of 2005, something strange happened – they release Dakota. I remember hearing Colin Murray say that he never thought he would make another Sterephonics track single of the week, but he never thought they’d make another song this good. This track made me and, I suspect, a lot of other people re-assess the future of what we has assumed was a rock group in terminal decline.

Dakota is different for several reasons. For a start it features a slightly more synthesised sound that the band had produced before. Really though, it is just quite simply a really good song, far better than anything they’d done for years before. The sweeping, naggingly catchy chorus makes the listener feel like they’re driving an open top car across America on a sunny day while chewing gum and drinking fruit juice. It’s life affirming stuff from the least likely of sources, and was a huge success, giving them their first and to date only number one single. It’s great to see a band reversing their fortunes by simply improving what they release, as opposed to marketing or excessive promotion, especially when it sounds this good. Dakota serves as a lesson not to write anyone off too early.

Dancing In The Dark by Bruce Springsteen
After the Mrs finished university, the Mrs and I were broke. With no prospect of anything approaching a decent job in the Cornish seaside town where we’d lived together for a year, and our parents willing to take us back but living 250 miles apart, there was not a lot of choice.

I drifted back North and managed to get a job packing boxes six nights a week in a food factory. It was a huge site with only a few of us there, doing whatever the day workers had not had time to finish. The machinery was loud so hardly anyone spoke except for at break times, and they were short, but it’s not like you need an hour for lunch when you’re working 10pm-6am. The one relief from the seemingly endless boredom was that we had the radio on, and if you were lucky enough to be standing by the speaker you could just about hear it. One night, as I was standing there packing while half awake, this song came on. Bruce started singing, and I had a strange moment when I realised that I must have heard this song hundreds of times but never actually listened to it.

“I get up in the evening, and I ain’t got nothing to say
I come home in the morning, I go to bed feeling the same way
I ain’t nothing but tired, man I’m just tired and bored with myself
Hey baby, I could use a little help”

Suddenly, in my head, it wasn’t a five mile cycle ride across the Cheshire countryside that took me to work each night, it was a dangerous drive through the back streets of New Jersey. I was no longer packing breakfast cereal, I was dancing in the dark. Bruce Springsteen was singing my life.

It was only after this moment of clarity that I really paid any mind to anything by Springsteen, I had previously assumed that almost all rock music from the 80s was to be ridiculed or avoided altogether, especially if it featured synthesisers. Challenging prejudices like that is always a good idea though, and now, for me, Dancing In The Dark is not just a song that reminds me of a certain time in my life, it is also a great record that works on several levels. It’s an anthemic pop song the like of which doesn’t come along very often, and the difficulty in categorising gives it the potential to appeal to more people. I still instinctively feel that synth driven rock is not usually a good thing, but every genre has its best bits, and Dancing In The Dark is proof.

Dancing In The Moonlight by Toploader
At Glastonbury in 2000 there were a few songs that seemed to be on everywhere I went, and this was one of them. It had been a minor hit at the start of the year, but I mustn’t have been paying attention because I’d never heard it before. It sounded like the greatest song no one knew, like either it was a cover of an old track which should have been huge but wasn’t, or Toploader, who I’d also never heard of, had managed to create the perfect early seventies pop song 30 years late. Turns out it was the first.

Dancing In The Moonlight is actually the title track from a 1972 album by a band call King Harvest. A hit in the US, it inexplicably never caught on anywhere else, and sat in obscurity for 28 years, just waiting to be rediscovered. Far from being the creative geniuses I initially though Toploader may be, they had actually just recorded a note for note copy of the track and reaped the benefits to be had by no one else already knowing it. Not the noblest method of gaining success, but it worked very well.

Even this version wasn’t an instant success though. In the early noughties, with downloads still several years from being added to the charts, for a single to be a hit it had to have the support of Radio 1. For some reason, the station seemed to have an unofficial ‘no covers’ policy at the time, ignoring any single that was released, no matter how good it was, if it contained virtually any reference to the past. Hence Dancing In The Moonlight, a genuinely great song not known by many people which sounds fantastic on the radio, seemed doomed. What actually happened was even stranger.

After scraping the bottom end of the top 30 in March 2000, Toploader headed out on tour. They performed at several festivals and even though it had left the charts a while earlier, local radio stations started picking up on this track and playing it. These days that would be enough to get it into the charts on downloads and then Radio 1 would be forced into playing it, as has happened a few times recently with songs they initially didn’t think were cool enough for them. I bought Dancing In The Moonlight as a really expensive CD single on import, think it was about £7, but the album was still more expensive and this was the only song I wanted.

Eventually, out of desperation to make the track a success, the record company released the single again in a remixed form that was obviously meant to make it sound more modern. It was actually a complete sham, basically it was exactly the same track but with some guy muttering things like “here we go” and “another sure fire hit” in between verses. Radio 1 could resist no longer and started playing it, and the song made the top 10 in November 2000 and hung around the charts well into the new year.

As for Toploader themselves, the exposure this track gave them increased interest in the band so much that their follow up, Achilles Heel, shot straight into the top 5. It disappeared just as quick though, basically because it wasn’t very good. Neither, it seems, were they, as they never troubled the charts again. It’s an odd story about an unusual track, but ultimately the world got to hear Dancing In The Moonlight, and would be a worse place if it hadn’t.


Dancing In The Street by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
When considering how to write these reviews I try to work out what other people will think about the songs, because I already know that I like them. Today I have been racking my brains trying to think of anyone who would seriously say they don’t like Dancing In The Street. This track is virtually as old as pop music itself, it was Motown explaining to the world this is what pop music is, and this is how it should be made. In the 47 years since Dancing In The Street was first a hit, very few people have so perfectly defined what pop music should sound like.

Dancing In The Street is basically an appeal to the people of the world to enjoy themselves, to embrace and rejoice in the pleasure of pop music. It contains a fervent, almost religious insistence that the world is a great place and we, its citizens, should be publicly celebrating the fact. The message behind the song was apparently interpreted by some over suspicious types as being a call to riot, as if demanding people get out on the streets could only mean one thing. It is this kind of negativity that some at Motown genuinely seemed to believe could be eliminated through the power of joyous, upbeat R & B, music and sentiments which could be appreciated by all cultures and all generations.

The production on this track is simply perfect, with Reeves’ gospel vocals unfaltering throughout, and the horn section driving things along and demanding the listeners attention from start to finish. When you think about it, with pop music this good being released only a few years after the genre first emerged, it is obvious that such a level of creativity could not be sustained, and that the music would become derivative before too long.

At the time though it must have seemed amazing, new sounds like this soundtracked the beginning of a decade of unprecedented social and cultural change. This was actually the sound of black people driving popular culture to a whole new level before they were even allowed to sit on crowded buses in many American states. The voice of black America was becoming inescapable, and black people would not be oppressed, at least not officially by the state, for much longer.

Does the track have any relevance in 2009 though? Well, I suppose I could concede that point, maybe it doesn’t. Really, Dancing In The Street is now a museum piece in the history of recorded music, and to an extent its reputation as a wedding party favourite debases what it represented at the time, as did the cringe-worthy chart-topping charity cover version by David Bowie and Mick Jagger in the mid 80s. Even so, you don’t very often hear records that are better than this one.

Dancing Queen by Abba
I look ahead occasionally to see what songs are due to be reviewed, and I’ve been thinking about this one for a while, trying to work out how I can justify its place on this list. When I was originally loading songs onto my iPod it just went on, I’m not really sure why, I just never seem to have questioned it. The easy thing to have done would be to delete it before the review came along, but I am actually intrigued as to why it is here. Deep down, I have a feeling that it might actually be because I like it.

Everything that I can think of to say about Dancing Queen is kind of obvious, but then I suppose that is testament to the ubiquity of this track. It begins with what I was excited to learn today is called a ‘glissando’ – in other words, Benny runs his fingers quickly down the piano keys. This opening second is surely the most recognisable introduction to a song in pop history, I don’t think anyone has ever released a single which elicited such an instant reaction in its listeners. Everything about the track fits together perfectly, even though the performers make it all seem completely effortless. I have a feeling that there are an awful lot of people who don’t like this song, but that is probably really because they resent how unavoidable it’s been for the last 33 years, rather than having any genuine gripe against the track itself.

The success of the song has to be mentioned too, even if that’s also quite obvious. It spent six weeks at number one in the UK in 1976, and was number one in many other countries too, including the US, where it was Abba’s only chart topper. In the UK it was their fourth of nine number ones, and probably the one that is most well remembered. Funny thing is I can’t help thinking that in some ways several of their other singles were actually better (Knowing Me Knowing You is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine), but it’s this one that remains Abba’s signature song.

So there we are, I admit it, every time a song comes on shuffle when I’m driving there’s a one in 1,000 chance it will be Dancing Queen, and I make no apologies for that. Amongst the many accolades the track has received over the years, I read that an Australian website named it the Gayest Song Of All Time, and I can kind of see their point. Personally I’ve never seen Mama Mia, must be one of the only people in Britain that does not own Gold: Their Greatest Hits and can never remember which of Abba is which, but I know a good song when I hear it. Even if I’ve heard it at every wedding I’ve ever attended, it’s still a good song.

Danger! High Voltage by Electric Six
We’re back in They Might Be Giants territory now – quirky American bands who release a record which is funny, although possibly not quite as funny as they think it is, have a big hit with it and then disappear again.

Danger! High Voltage is a disco infused mock rock epic which reached number 2 in the UK charts in 2003. It boasts an infectious, stomping beat and, impressively, Jack White from The White Stripes on backing vocals. It has a manic, almost apocalyptic feel to it, and fairly minimal lyrics that bring to mind Disco Inferno by The Trammps, delivered, deliberately I guess, in a manner that makes the singer sound like he may be on fire himself. He deep voiced American accent also sounds, in his less yelping moments, like he is suffering from constipation, and I have a feeling that might not be so deliberate.

When I first heard this song, I have to confess I didn’t know what a Taco Bell was. Apparently, in America, it’s the Mexican food equivalent of McDonalds, with 5,800 outlets across the country. I really like Mexican food, so I have a feeling I wouldn’t like this place, in the same way that I imagine burger connoisseurs (if there are such people) are not too keen on Big Macs. Really, it seems strange featuring the name of a company so prominently several times within a hit single, and I wonder if Electric Six were on commission. Having said that, coming from a country which had another number 2 hit in this decade with the chorus “a Pizza Hit, a Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut, McDonalds, McDonalds”, I suppose I shouldn’t be too judgemental.

Like so many quirky American bands before them, Electric Six have released a lot of material over the years, six albums altogether, but have never got anywhere near replicating the UK success of this song. I think the key to that success lies in the fact that it is both catchy and stupid, so it can be laughed at and admired in equal measure. In 2007 the band released an album called I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master, none of which I have ever heard, but the title alone suggests to me that this is a band who appreciate their own jokes far more than anyone else does. Danger! High Voltage may be clichéd and slightly idiotic, but it is also great fun, which is why it is on my iPod. I can’t help thinking that in terms of songs by Electric Six it was probably a one off.

Daniel by Bat For Lashes
While the top end of the singles charts this year has been universally dreadful (Lady Gaga, Dizzee Rascal, David Guetta etc) a bit lower down there has been a noticeable new phenomenon. They may not have been as successful as the aforementioned commercial rubbish, but 2009 has been the year of the wistful, flowing skirted young lady. Suddenly it seems like there are no end of passionate, breathy voiced children of hippies all desperate to recreate Wuthering Heights, and it’s really quite refreshing to hear.

Bat For Lashes is actually Natasha Medina, a 29 year old singer and multi instrumentalist from Hertfordshire whose first album was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize in 2007. It was a minor hit on the back of the nomination, and this year’s follow up, Two Suns, made the top 10, and spawned Daniel, which reached number 36 in May. I had seen it bumping around the lower end of the iTunes chart for a few weeks, but first heard it in full on the top 40 show on Radio 1. I somehow managed not to be put off it by Fearne Cotton expressing how much she loved it.

Daniel is an ethereal, spacey, synthesised delight, with half whispered lyrics giving the impression you’re being told a secret. It is really not very commercial at all and did very well to reach the charts. Everything it lacks in terms of chorus or catchy tune it easily makes up for simply by being so fascinating. I really wasn’t sure about it at first, and it took quite a few listens before I decided it was definitely worth the 79p, but sometimes it can be quite a thrill to get into a song slowly instead of expecting instant results.

The song is apparently about an imaginary boyfriend Natasha had as a child. Personally, the existence (if that’s the right word) of an imaginary boyfriend sounds to me like the exact kind of thing you would make up if you were trying to seem esoteric and mysterious, but somehow, maybe just because Daniel is such a nice song, I am completely suspending my inner sceptic and believing every word she says. It helps that the lyrics are so cool – when creating a mood, sometimes the meaning is less important that the choice of individual words, and lines like “the smell of cinders and rain perfumed everything” and talk of dreams, running in the dark and having “a flame in your heart” all do the trick nicely. I have no idea what Natasha Medina looks like, but if I were to be somebody’s imaginary boyfriend I would love it if she could write stuff like that.

A Day In The Life by The Beatles
When I was in the third year at school I chose as one of my GCSE options what was known as ‘Ham’, the letters actually standing for History and Appreciation of Music. Everyone in the class except me and a friend were also studying for GCSE Music, but we couldn’t play a note which meant we got the chance of a GCSE plus a free period every Friday while the others were studying for their second one. Shamefully, we both treated the whole thing as a joke, not listening to any of the music the teacher taped for us, and after not completing any course work we were thrown out of the class. I was arrogant, under encouraged and had no concept of how important exam results would be, but it was my loss. Most of the albums I refused to listen to, reasoning that if the teacher said I had to then they must be rubbish, were classical, but one that wasn’t was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Not long after leaving school I was sufficiently interested in The Beatles to buy a copy on tape, and it has been my favourite album ever since.

A Day In The Life is the final track on the album, and is widely regarded as one of the most ground breaking recordings in the history of popular music. Such accolades have the unfortunate effect on paper of making it sound boring, but The Beatles had the unique ability, unparalleled ever since, to make music that was both hugely influential and instantly accessible. I remember first playing this song on that tape and not quite being able to believe what I’d heard, it was so unusual, so deep, so fascinating, and yet at the same time as all this it also sounded remarkably simple.

The track is an interesting one to consider in relation to Lennon & McCartney’s song writing technique, and the notion that after a few years they were really just writing individually with credit going to both of them, because it is really two different songs joined together. The track starts with a slow piano, and Lennon singing about a news story of someone who had been in a road accident in front of a crowd of people. The next verse is about a military film, and is followed by a huge crescendo, achieved by getting a 40 piece orchestra in the studio and then over dubbing the result four times. When it ends the piano is playing a different tune and the song is one of McCartney’s most distinctive compositions, detailing the mundanity of getting up and going to work and explaining how it sent him into a dream. That is followed by the crescendo again, and one more verse of Lennon’s composition, about “four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”. Then the biggest crescendo of all, followed by a single, very deep piano note that goes on for nearly a minute. On the LP the groove at the end which the needle goes around continually had strange giggling noises played backwards in it, on my iPod they’re there too but only last about 20 seconds.

Enough has been said about The Beatles for me not to have to go over how incredible it is that in five years they had gone from Love Me Do to this. People do say that this is one of the best records ever made though, and unlike me when I was at school, I recommend you believe them.

[SheriffFatman]

Day Tripper by The Beatles
When I first started buying records I was always suspicious of double a-sided singles. Re-issues could sometimes be great because you had a chance of two great old songs for the price of one new one, but when the material was new there was usually a feeling that the record company had released two sub-standard tracks together because the artist didn’t have one good one.

I have, therefore, always been slightly mystified by the fact that several of the Beatles biggest hits were double a-sides. Basically I guess the Beatles just had a huge number of brilliant tracks and the record company just released them however they saw fit, as Day Tripper suggests. Released as a double a-side with the equally brilliant (if a little understated) We Can Work It Out, it was Christmas number one 1965 and sold over a million copies. The huge sales were no doubt helped by the fact that neither song appeared on an album.

On the one hand Day Tripper is quite simply an example of the fact that the Beatles were always brilliant. There is more to it than that though, as it serves as an interesting marker in their career transition from catchy pop to drug influenced psychedelia. It opens with a blindingly brilliant guitar hook that is probably the most distinctive introduction to any track they ever recorded, as soon as you hear it you instantly know what it is and you just have to listen to the whole track. The guitar continues throughout the entire track, and it is clear to see how this level of pop brilliance could have come from the same people that gave the world From Me To You and I Want To Hold Your Hand a couple of years earlier.

There is a distinct difference though, and that is in the lyrical content. No doubt many pop fans believed that The Beatles had turned away from basic girl meets boy style pop to a more subtle type of love song, using the idea of going out for a drive at the weekend as some kind of metaphor. In retrospect though, the barely disguised drug references throughout the lyrics and even in the title, which were confirmed by both Lennon and McCartney in various interviews after the band split, are a clear sign of the new direction the band was taking. These were no longer four clean, clear cut lads from Liverpool, in fact they had become global citizens, both leading and being lead by the changes in society across the Western world. To put it bluntly, they were taking drugs. They had not yet reached the point where their musical style was heavily influenced by narcotics, but their opinions on a lot of things had begun to change and this was reflected in the lyrics which they applied to their catchy pop music. The clever thing with the Beatles is that they were never between audiences – instead of snubbing young, fresh faced pop fans in favour of hippies and peacenicks, they turned their audience from one into the other. It was still the same people buying the records, but the records changed the people forever.

The Day We Caught The Train by Ocean Colour Scene
Moseley Shoals by Ocean Colour Scene is, to date, the only album I have ever bought while drunk. I had been sitting in the local park drinking cider and celebrating / commiserating over that day’s A-level results with a group of classmates I never liked that much and would never see again. A warden type guy told us, understandably, that drinking was not allowed in the park, so we moved towards the town centre where it was. One guy had a tape player with him and had been playing Ocean Colour Scene over and over, and his enthusiasm must have rubbed off on me, because by the time I stumbled home I had a brand new copy of the album in my pocket.

The Day We Caught The Train had already been a big hit and I had bought the CD single. It was a great track, one of the enduring sounds of 1996 thanks to copious radio airplay and a hands in the air, communal singalong feel that suited the mood perfectly in the year after (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was released. As far as the band were concerned though I had always had a slight suspicion that although this track was very popular, they themselves were the kind of musicians who are far too interested in the technical aspects of what can be achieved by men with guitars, as opposed to just enjoying themselves and writing great songs. The ubiquitous use of The Riverboat Song, especially as the theme to TFI Friday, did nothing to dispel this idea, it was as though we were being told that you weren’t actually a man at all if you didn’t like Ocean Colour Scene’s music. I always react badly to being told what to do, which is why I did badly in those A levels, and why I would only ever have bought Moseley Shoals while drunk.

I did listen to it though, and was slightly disappointed to find that it was actually very good. With British guitar bands so popular at the time, it just seemed that certain people (Chris Evans, Jools Holland, Paul Weller) were getting away with making people believe that this music was simply good, and if you didn’t agree then you were wrong. I dislike that steamrollering of different people’s taste and opinions, and that made me almost feel guilty for liking this. I’ve got over it though, partly because I just accepted that it was a good album and whoever else liked it was irrelevant, and partly because everything Ocean Colour Scene did afterwards was pretty crap, so I felt kind of vindicated after all.

Barely three minutes long and with a chorus that consists of no more than the lines “ohhh la la, ohhh la la”, The Day We Caught The Train is proof that in pop and rock less is sometimes more.
The song is apparently based on the events described in The Who’s musical Quadraphenia, which was turned into a brilliant film starring Phil Daniels in 1979. It’s a strange idea for a song, but it works extremely well - as well as being a great song in its own right, it fits the reflective mood of that film perfectly, despite being released 17 years after it. A further 13 years later both the film and the song are still favourites of mine.

Daydreamer by Menswe@r
1995 was a bumper time for the music industry, and especially so for the several tabloid newspaper pop pages that had sprung up from nowhere to cover the antics of the biggest rock stars of the day. NME had been writing about British guitar bands for longer than anyone could remember, but suddenly, unexpectedly, everyone was interested.

The year after Definitely Maybe and Parklife caught the worlds imagination, everyone wanted to know where the next world dominating indie album would come from. It was in this over heated climate that a few blokes from London landed themselves a £500,000 record company advance based on little more than a speculative interview in Select magazine and the fact that they had found a novel purpose for the previously unused ‘@’ key. They had only recorded a few songs together and done 5 gigs, but no matter, they were officially The Next Big Thing.

Their debut single was on limited release to create even more of a buzz, and they followed that up with their first single proper, Daydreamer. With a blindingly simple guitar hook, stop start bits and apparently nonsense lyrics, most people in the music industry greeted it with ridicule. They accused the band of grabbing the money and then not caring what they released, and the song was said to rip off 70s and 80s rockers Wire. For me though these people had missed the point, which was that most people buying music in the mid nineties, myself included, did not know anything by Wire, so while not exactly earth shattering Daydreamer did at least sound good fun, and a bit different. I may have been 18 years old, but I am not ashamed to admit that this song made me jump up and down in time on my bed.

Daydreamer did also sound a bit like Elastica, which was closer to home because they were fresh in my mind and sounded great. It was as though with this song Menswe@r had simply tried to take the Elastica formula and make it a bit more poppy, not exactly a noble aim but still one that could have been quite successful. Alas it was not to be – Daydreamer may have made the top 20, and a later single actually cracked the top 10, but the band never really survived the ridicule. Listening back to Daydreamer now, that may not have been an altogether bad thing, it is little more than a jaunty little throw away moment in indie pop history. It’s still great fun though, and reminds me of happy times.

Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground by The White Stripes
The first song I ever bought by The White Stripes was Hotel Yorba, on CD single. By the end of 2001 I had been playing it over and over for 2 months, and had decided that this was the best single I had heard for years. I had read that The White Stripes’ stripped back guitar, drums and yelping combination was often more rocky than this country tinged track, but had to wait until the 2002 re-issue of their third album White Blood Cells to find out for myself, as none of their older stuff was available in the UK. Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground, which eventually also became a single, was track 1, and was a brilliant introduction to the loud, crunching, bass free, fantastic racket that Jack and Meg White made their signature sound.

It starts with a loud screech of feedback, followed by the opening chords of the electric guitar, and you immediately feel that rock music would be better if more of it sounded like this. The very basic, earthy sound cleverly matches the theme in the title, and the guitar continues throughout, skilfully treading on the right side of the line between catchy and plodding in a way that it was previously impossible to imaging a band without a bassist could. Jack’s faltering vocals sound heartfelt, despite it not being clear what he’s really on about. “Only the man with the microphone can tell you what he loves the most” he announces, and as the track and the rest of the album unfolds it seems likely that he may have been referring to himself. What he loves the most is bluesy, dirty and very basic rock music. Listening to this you could be forgiven for thinking that the electric guitar is the most recent technology available to a musician, and that the White Stripes are pioneering new ways of using it to explain their unique world view.

The very simplistic nature of the White Stripes’ music was in some ways a big step backwards for rock, not in a negative way, but in a way that made people remember what the genre was really all about, and where it came from. This also contributed to the general impression, encouraged by the media (especially the NME) that The White Stripes themselves were somehow a little backwards, and rumours abounded that they were in fact not man and wife but brother and sister. The blurring of this boundary, as they gazed lovingly into each others eyes during photo shoots and consistently refused to clarify their relationship, was as captivating as it was odd, and as far as I know has never really been cleared up. It may have been a gimmick they dreamt up themselves, or it just may have been a joke that got out of control, but whatever the truth it did not distract from the excellence of their music, in fact it kind of added to the general air of mystery about how two people from Detroit got the inspiration for such an era defining sound. For me, they go down as one of the most important acts in rock music’s recent history.

Debaser by The Pixies
I occasionally wonder if I bang on about Mark and Lard a bit too much in these reviews, but the thing is they really were a big influence on the music I bought during their years a Radio 1. My long standing respect for their choices is demonstrated by the fact that so many songs which I heard first on their shows are on my iPod years later.

I had read quotes from Kurt Cobain referring to the ‘loud bit quiet bit’ structure of Smells Like Teen Spirit in which he said “basically, I was just copying The Pixies”, but Debaser was the first Pixies song I ever knew, and I heard it first on Mark & Lard’s ill fated breakfast show. They had a feature each morning at about twenty to eight in which Lard claimed to be in some sort of Radio 1 dungeon that housed the station’s record collection. It was fairly ridiculous, with copious echo and squeaky door sound effects, and usually resulted in Mark playing an old record which was both excellent and completely unsuitable for listening to first thing in the morning.

Debaser was chosen because it was about to be re-issued as a single, to promote a Best Of collection called Death To The Pixies. Unexpectedly the re-issue actually became the Pixies biggest UK hit, peaking just outside the top 20. I’d like to say that the breakfast radio exposure had a big impact on the sales, but baring in mind the fact that several other brilliant singles that Mark and Lard played often failed to chart at all it seems unlikely. It was enough to make me buy the single though, and after I’d played it over and over for about a month I bought the album too. It’s brilliant.

Debaser is a short blast of rock music with an incredibly catchy guitar hook and, as is usually the case with Pixies records, the brilliant juxtaposition of Frank Black’s manic yelping and Kim Deal’s surfer girl backing vocals. The words are frankly bizarre – I have always heard the opening line as “Slicing the Bibles” but apparently it’s “Slicing up eye balls”, hard to say which is more odd really. Apparently, the song is based on an obscure surrealist horror film called Un Chien Andalou, which Black just changed to “Une Chien Andalusia” in the lyrics to make it sound a bit less French. The words are not the point here though, Debaser would be one of the best rock records I know even if it was instrumental. Hearing this song invariably results in involuntary air guitar from me, which can be quite alarming to passengers if I’m driving at the time.

Discovering the Pixies was a great experience, they have a whole back catalogue of excellent material that has had very little promotion in the UK. Debaser is a great way in too, a fantastic introduction to the strange but hugely rewarding world of a band who were not together for very long but whose influence has been heard ever since.

Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp by Mercury Rev
I first heard of Mercury Rev when their single Goddess On A Hiway was released in 1998. I liked it so much I bought the album, Deserter’s Songs, on which this was the last track. I didn’t know it at the time but apparently this was the second single, and I think I’ll go as far as to suggest it is even better than the first one.

Deserter’s Songs sounds like it has been beamed in from another world, full of dreamy, spacey tracks delivered via a smooth, focussed vocal that sounds like it comes from a man who has seen magical things that you can only imagine. Musically, they often sound a bit avant guard and arty, but combine that with a melodic pop sensibility, like a clever combination of the Eels and Air. They are apparently often compared to Flaming Lips, and with their peculiar lyrics and singalong choruses I can see why, although back in 1998 I wouldn’t have known who the Flaming Lips were, but I knew I liked this.

Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp starts with a harpsichord, and that’s not something I will be saying about many of the songs on my iPod. For a brief moment it could be a medieval madrigal, but it quickly turns instead into a multi instrumental and somewhat revolutionary pop song, with lyrics like “kicking up the dust, constructing new ideals”. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a hint of where Mercury Rev think music in general should be going in there, but maybe I’m reading too much into it. Soon a countrified electric guitar slides along appropriately in the background to the repeated line “sliding away in the washed out delta sun” and the effect is blissed out and sleepy, hardly a demand for a change in direction for the future of pop.

Before long the pace has quickened to the point where flutes are playing frantically in the background and the drums and guitar make you feel like you’re attending a barn dance on the moon. I defy anyone not to be singing along to the line “waving goodbye I’m not saying hello” after he’s repeated it a couple of times. I particularly like the title to this track, because rather than referring to anything specific in the lyrics it instead describes the song. It describes it perfectly too, which is kind of a shame because that’s supposed to be my job.

Ultimately, Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp is a great answer to anyone who complains that indie music (or ‘Alternative’ as iTunes seems to call it) has a tendency to be miserable. This is music which manages to be positive and make you feel good without being cheesy, it expands the imagination and takes you to unexpected places if you’ll let it. It’s unusual, and all the better for it.

A Design For Life by The Manic Street Preachers
Despite reading the NME every week at a time when they were writing about them constantly, I never really got into the Manics until they released A Design For Life, the lead track off their album Everything Must Go. Prior to that single the only release of theirs I owned was a 7” vinyl copy of their excellent cover of The Theme From M*A*S*H, but within very little time of A Design For Life being released I had bought and fallen in love with all of their previous albums. That’s a bit like getting into a band in reverse, because after Everything Must Go they were never really as good again.

I think it’s fair to say that the release of A Design For Life was one of the defining moments for British music in the 1990s. Tagging neatly onto the huge market that had opened up for anthemic British rock music, it saw the band go from having a medium sized fanatical fan base to being out and out popular, and inevitably some people saw this as a sell out. The huge, sweeping, orchestral sound of the music was really just the sound of a band who, having achieved some success already, could now afford to do whatever they wanted. They had not compromised their politics or their authenticity, they had just opened them up for the whole world to see.

Personally I felt that the track was almost perfect. I didn’t really understand what the band was on about (I’m still not sure I do), but they sounded both intellectual and vaguely socialist, clearly the kind of band I would want to associate myself with. The fact that the song was so good helped no end. When they sang “We don’t talk about love, we only want to get drunk” it felt like they were talking about me and my friends, defining a generation which by happy co-incidence seemed to be in search of its own identity. I always vaguely wondered if they sang that line with disdain, but it was easier to gloss over that possibility than spend too much time thinking about it. I wasn’t alone either – a generation of people who got drunk rather than talking about love did so to songs like this, along with Wonderwall, The Universal, and countless other tracks that still permeate popular culture a decade and a half later.

It is worth noting that the change in direction for the Manics, at least in terms of who they were aiming their music at, came after the disappearance of songwriter and guitarist Richie James. I don’t know enough about his influence on the band to know if the two things were linked, but as an outsider it seems quite likely. It is also worth noting that after Everything Must Go, most of which was written by James, they were never really as good again. Although it may be a complete distortion of the truth, I guess I have it in my mind that the massive success of the Manics was dependant on James’ brilliant song writing, but equally held back by his desire for the music to appeal to a specific market only. The irony of that is that after buying all those old albums I think I actually like their debut, Generation Terrorists, the best. I guess I must be part of the specific market he was aiming for, it’s a shame it took his disappearance to make me sit up and take notice.

Desolation Row by Bob Dylan
I first got into Dylan when I started university, via his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. I absolutely loved everything about it, and buying Dylan albums became an obsession. You could often pick them up in the local Our Price for about a fiver, and I would buy one virtually every time I went in there. (If anyone from the Student Loans Company is reading this, yes I am still deferring every year, and yes that is the kind of thing it all went on.)

Many songs that I heard for the first time during that period (Only A Pawn In Their Game, The Times They Are A Changing, Maggie’s Farm, the list is enormous) changed the way I approach life, let alone the way I think about music. Inevitably though, when some of it is so immediately appealing, there were other tracks that sort of passed me by, not because they weren’t good, just because I was listening to other ones. Then earlier this year I was reading a review of the charts on the internet and saw that a cover of Desolation Row by My Chemical Romance had just missed the top 40. I was intrigued because I couldn’t remember the song, so I went looking through my collection and found it on the end of the 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited.

I’m sure I had played it before, but maybe I had not paid the track much attention because of its length – even to a confirmed Dylan fan, 11 minutes 21 seconds sounds like a bit of a commitment, especially as I often only fully appreciate his stuff after a few listens. It really was worth it though, this is classic Dylan. The song rambles along with a cast of slightly odd, circus like characters, some of whom are familiar (Cane and Abel, Cinderella, Ophelia, Einstein “disguised as Robin Hood”), and others who are made up (“a jealous monk”, “all the agents and the superhuman crew”, “Dr. Filth” and “his nurse, some local loser”). The tune is brilliant and the words are as wonderful as ever, this is Dylan in poet mode more than rock star mode.

When the acoustic guitar is joined by a harmonica over eight and a half minutes in, it occurs to me that the very thing that Dylan fans love about him is exactly what Dylan haters dislike – I mean who else waits that long to introduce a second instrument to a song? For me, this demonstration that he will do what he wants and doesn’t care about what anyone else thinks just enhances the aloof brilliance of it all. It is a very sixties thing to do though – I can’t imagine many record companies being keen on the concept of such long songs now. Of course, Oasis’ All Around The World was nearly 10 minutes long, but it was also pretty crap, a sign of a band completely past their best. Desolation Row is Dylan proving that he was at his best.

So yes, I can see why a lot of people might not be too keen on this track, but for me Desolation Row is just another addition to the canon of Dylan’s genius. It does seem to go on and on, but I’m still always a little disappointed when it ends.

Destiny Calling by James
It’s funny how insignificant things sometimes stick in your mind. I distinctly remember sitting drinking on the quay outside a pub in a small Cornish town on an unusually mild afternoon in autumn 1999, telling two friends that I thought the new James single was excellent. One of them had heard it and agreed, the other one hadn’t heard it but refused to believe it could be.

I am always quite sceptical of new singles that are released for the purpose of promoting a Greatest Hits album, there’s always the suspicion that they will be off cuts from previous albums that were deemed not good enough at the time. Destiny Calling was one such single and bucks that trend completely – it was the lead single from Christmas cash-in compilation the Best of James, and I reckon it’s one of the best songs on there. I bought the album, and as I already had Sit Down, Laid and Sound on 7” vinyl maybe it was inevitable that I’d like it, but I was really surprised how many excellent songs were on there that I didn’t already know.

Destiny Calling was also a bit of a surprise for me. It seems unusual amongst James songs as it’s actually quite funny, in a cheeky kind of way. It seems to be a comment on the fickle nature of the fame achieved by pop stars, with lyrics like “he likes the posh one, she likes the black one” particularly resonant at the peak of the Spice Girls’ fame.

The inevitable demise of such acts – “tell us when our time’s up, show us how to die well” – wraps it up into a neat subject for a three minute pop (or indie-lite in this case) song, but seemed a bit of a departure for James, who I certainly expected to be a little more abstract most of the time. I have read on line that the song was actually supposed to be a cheeky “so what?” style response to fans who had accused the band of selling out from their authentic indie roots to making more radio friendly music. That all seems a bit pointless to me though, considering their one huge hit, for which they’ll forever be best remembered, was by this point 8 years behind them.

I like songs that mean something, I like songs that include humour, and I like songs that I can sing along to in the car, so I am bound to like Destiny Calling, even if some people consider it a little obvious for a band that was seen by some people at one stage as being very cool. Nine years later, when, thanks to Simon Cowell, the concept of five minutes of pop star fame was even more relevant, Just Jack’s Starz In Their Eyes covered similar ground in a different style, although was a bit more serious in its distain. Ultimately though, it’s only pop music, maybe it’s more sensible to be wry about it rather than getting upset. If you can’t beat ‘em, you might as well sing along.

Devil’s Haircut by Beck
I was having a conversation with my 17 year old nephew the other day about music. After speaking to me and to his parents, who are about 10 years older than me, he reckons that everyone always thinks the music from their teenage years was best. I didn’t want to admit that he was right, because clearly the nineties were best, it had nothing to do with how old I was. Music now is OK but it seems to just be a small part of popular culture as a whole, happening alongside the internet, computer games and various other things I’ve never even tried to understand. Music in the 80s, meanwhile, was almost universally bad, you had to really dig deep and look a long way from the charts before you found anything that wasn’t absolutely terrible.

Then again, when I look back at my teenage years and try to define what I liked, it is a very broad church. Maybe the co-ordinated music scene which seemed at the time to be leading popular culture and taking the world in an exciting direction was just a figment of my imagination. In retrospect, young English men playing guitars (Oasis, Blur, The Verve etc) are easy enough to lump together, but there was also a large amount of music which seemed incredibly cool but which sounded nothing like any of those guys. Perhaps it was just me and others like me who threw all these things together, and perhaps we just did it because we were teenagers and our narrow view of the world was the only one we were prepared to acknowledge. He may only be 17 and into Panic At The Disco, but my nephew got me thinking.

Beck is a case in point. He first came to the world’s attention via his brilliant single Loser from the album Mellow Gold. I never got around to buying that album, but the next one, Odelay, was one of my favourites of the decade. Not really dance music even though it made me dance, not really hip hop even though it was completely full of samples, it stood out in its own as a beacon of brilliant American oddness. The strange thing about Britpop is that it swept up a load of things with it that weren’t British and also weren’t really pop, Beck was one.

Devil’s Haircut was one of Odelay’s singles, and is mellow and trippy and yet also very melodic. The lyrics, about dead hands hanging from trees and eyes ripping out of sockets, are slightly creepy, and the vocal delivery is in a style that suggests Beck is almost entirely asleep. It doesn’t sound like a very alluring combination but take it from me, this is great. But then I would say that, it’s from the 90s.

Digsy’s Dinner by Oasis
As I’ve mentioned several times already, Definitely Maybe is, in my opinion, one of the greatest debut albums of all time. The more I think about it though, the more I wonder if the fact that this song is about inviting a girl round for tea and cooking lasagne for her (actually, make that lasaaaaaanyaaaaaaaaaa) is somewhat at odds with how good I say it is.

Digsy’s Dinner is a simple, guitar chugging, piano tinkling romp through what is not exactly a complicated concept. It includes the lyric “I’ll treat you like the Queen, I’ll give you strawberries and cream” and the closest it gets to abstract is the line “These could be the best days of our lives, but I don’t think we’ve been living very wise”. It only really has eight lines, and I’ve already typed four of them in this review. Considering all of this, it seems a bit odd to say that it’s brilliant, but it is. I’m just having difficulty working out why.

I suppose it may be worth pointing out at this point that at the height of their creative powers, the Beatles included a song on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band called Lovely Rita, about a parking attendant that Paul McCartney was fined by but didn’t mind because he fancied her. Incidentally, that song includes the lyric “when are you free to take some tea with me?”. It doesn’t mention whether they had lasagne but still, maybe I’ve found the source of Noel’s inspiration. Who’d ever have thought he was influenced by The Beatles?

I guess ultimately the whole package of Definitely Maybe is what made it so brilliant, and if they’d made an entire album of Digsy’s Dinners I suppose it might have been a bit hard to stomach, pardon the pun. In its own right though this song speaks of youthful innocence, it’s actually quite romantic in a teenage kind of way. As could be expected from mid nineties Oasis it’s also great to sing along to, the kind of song that you know all the words too without realising it, and that makes it perfect for my iPod.

Dirty Diana by Michael Jackson
At that start of this year I began reviewing my iTunes that began with B. I was a bit concerned that Bad, Beat It, Billie Jean and Black Or White in quick succession would make me seem like a bit of a fanatic, but I pressed on because a) it’s not my fault so many of his best songs begin with the same letter and B) even though I mostly listen to indie and rock music I genuinely believe some of his stuff is amongst the best music to make the charts in the last 30 years. Publicly expressing a love of Michael Jackson’s music in early 2009 did feel a bit like a lonely cause though.

I think you can see where I’m going with this. I’m not going to try and make out like the huge success of his back catalogue after his death vindicated me in any way, it’s not like there was any major argument against it anyway. Also, call me cold but I was more fascinated than devastated by the loss of a man I have never met and who was clearly never going to make any more good music. I have to admit though I did quite enjoy listening to the top 40 show the week 13 of his songs were on it. It was also weird to see The Essential Michael Jackson, a compilation I bought in 2005 because up until then I’d mostly just got his stuff on vinyl, spend seven weeks at number one in 2009. Both La Roux and Florence And The Machine missed out on having chart topping debut albums because of it, which must have been annoying, but hey, it was just bad timing.

Dirty Diana is one of Jackson’s rock numbers - there was one each on Thriller, Bad and Dangerous, this one was from Bad. It tells the fictitious tale of a groupie who comes on way too strong in his dressing room back stage after a gig. When he tries to subtly get her to bugger off by calling his girlfriend in front of her and asking her to “unlock the door because I forgot the key” she snatches the phone off him and announces “he’s not coming back because he’s staying here with me”. I have always found the whole of this scenario quite bizarre, it sometimes feels like Jackson was writing about how he imagined the world must be because he didn’t have any normal experiences of his own that his audience could relate to. Oddly though, the fact that this sounds like it’s based on a scene in a made for TV movie somehow makes it even more compelling, as if it’s an insight into the mind of a man we read so much about but were able to really believe so little.

Fascinating though the subject matter is, as with other Jackson stories (Billie Jean for example) he could really be singing about anything, it’s the combination of his vocals and the production that really matter. Here he came closest to making an out and out rock record, but it still retains the almost indefinable pop genius that runs through most of his stuff from the 80s. In America, where airplay is a big factor in the charts, it was his fifth straight number one single. In Britain, where almost everybody had already bought the album, it made number 4.

Like I said, he was never likely to make another great record, but his death somehow seems to underline the fact that it seems unlikely that anyone will make anything that sounds quite like this ever again.

Dirty Old Town by The Pogues
Dirty Old Town was written by Ewan MacColl (Kirsty’s Dad) in 1949. He was a militant left wing folk singer, born in Salford in 1915 and actually monitored by MI5 because of his views in the 1930s. Special Branch even had the BBC ban some of his songs, and prevented his wife from becoming a children’s TV presenter. Left wing working class socialism and trade unionism is know to have had a strong link with folk music in the first half of the last century, but when you listen to this wonderfully evocative, charmingly romantic song about the city where he was born, it is hard to see what all the fuss was about.

It actually seems a bit odd to me to think that Dirty Old Town is only 60 years old, its talk of factories and gas works it could be referring to somewhere 100 years earlier. I suppose what it really hints at is the industrial squalor that still occupied much of what we now call Greater Manchester, even after the war. I guess it also seems old because my parents both know it, I can remember my mum humming it when I was a child, but it always seemed more like an old traditional song than a hit single. As is often the case with folk music it has travelled far more by means of live performances by buskers and bands in pubs than pop stars and people you’ve heard of, even though, over the years, it has been covered by acts as diverse as The Specials, Rod Stewart and U2.

I first heard a recorded version of the song when I bought a Reader’s Digest Dubliners compilation from a second hand shop. I played that a lot, but have since got to know this version by The Pogues which was a top 20 hit in the mid 80s, taken from their second album Rum, Sodomy And The Lash. Unusually, Shane MacGowan sounds only half cut, so you can still make out most of the lyrics. This version brings out the tune better than the Dubliners did too – they mostly just used a banjo, but The Pogues put in a full on Celtic fiddle style instrumental break that makes the whole thing all the more lovely.

Ultimately though, this track is all about the song, and more a credit to Ewan MacColl than anyone else. It is a simple, wistful tale about finding love in a landscape that speaks of anything but. The theme of love conquering all is hardly a new one, and hardly enough to warrant the attention of MI5, but it is done here as well as anywhere.

Disco 2000 by Pulp
Sometimes before I write these reviews I try to find the lyrics to a song online; it’s always handy to be able to quote from them and also to see if what I’ve been hearing for all these years is actually what’s being said. There is no need with Disco 2000 though – I absolutely love this song, already know every word, and much to my wife’s dismay it’s one of my all time favourites for singing in the shower.

Disco 2000 is the type of story a lot of men can probably relate to, with Jarvis singing directly to a girl who he fancied at school but who was too popular with the other boys to be anything other than friends with him. That really does sound painfully familiar in relation to my own time at school, a time when I spent a huge amount of time concentrating on the wrong things. Jarvis brilliantly recreates the slightly pervy thought processes of a teenage boy – “you were the first girl in school to get breasts” – along with the influence of and feeling of inferiority to dubious peers – “Martin said that you were the best… the boys all loved you but I was a mess”. It’s almost like Mr Cocker was at school with me.

Set to a guitar riff largely stolen from an early 80s hit called Gloria by someone called Laura Brannigan, and with its perfectly timed subject matter (released in 1995, the chorus hinges on Jarvis’ plan to “meet up in the year 2000”) this is, in my mind at least, quite simply one of the best pop songs ever. It is the point where the incredibly cool and always fascinating world of Pulp clashes with the family disco, and basically everyone’s a winner. This is not just one of my favourite pop songs ever, thanks to me constantly playing it in the mid 90s it’s also one of my Mum’s and one of my nephew’s. With the album A Different Class Pulp had reached a huge audience after years of releasing albums that hardly anyone noticed, and with songs like this they could not really have failed.

Disco 2000 was actually the fourth track to be lifted from A Different Class to be a single, after Common People and the double A-side Mis-Shapes / Sorted For Es and Wizz. It seems quite amazing to me that a song this good should be fourth to be released, but that just shows how brilliant the album was. It made the top 10 over Christmas 1995, and soundtracked thousands of New Year parties four years later, vying for a piece of the pre-midnight action that everyone had previously assumed would belong to 1999 by Prince. Ten years on, with the excited build up to the new millennium a distant and slightly ridiculous memory, it still sounds fantastic.

Distant Drums by Jim Reeves
My Grandad was 60 years old when I was born, and he died a couple of years ago aged 90. In all the time I knew him his music loving days were pretty much behind him, but apparently when he was younger he was a big Jim Reeves fan. They played this song at his funeral.

My Dad’s side of the family for as far back as anyone knows have always been traditional country folk, in fact I represent the first generation not to leave school and go straight to work on a farm. It has always fascinated me that my Dad’s large family all like country music so much. The fact that it is full of imagery from landscapes thousands of miles away the like of which they would never see (save for in Sunday afternoon Westerns) didn’t seem to matter, it was simple, gentle, honest music and that fitted the culture of rural Cheshire as much as rural Texas. TV was the same – John Wayne films made far more sense to my Grandad than Coronation Street, which was set 40 miles away.

When I was a child the trade in music always seemed different in the countryside too. I have been obsessed with the charts for as long as I can remember, but used to be a bit confused by the stalls full of tapes that tagged on to cattle auctions and car boot sales. How did Foster and Allan or Val Doonican ever make any money, surely these people with trestle tables with vinyl cloths on them covered in cassettes were actually breaking copyright laws? I still don’t really know how they got away with it, I guess it was just seen as a victimless crime. The printing on the sleeves was always slightly blotchy, sometimes it was even quite obviously just a photocopy. I wonder how much money the artists missed out on? Maybe they didn’t, maybe farm workers just got into a singer by buying old copies of things that were no longer available and then going to the shops when they’re new stuff came out. That said, I honestly don’t think my Grandad ever went in HMV.

This type of music wasn’t always under the radar though, as Distand Drums proved, reaching number 1 in the charts in September 1966. As with many songs of its genre it involves a girl called Mary, and Gentleman Jim (as his fans apparently knew him) croons away about how much he wants to marry her. The song is pleasant if uneventful, the vocals are flawless and the overall effect is actually quite sleepy. I can’t help thinking that even in the mid sixties this track must have seemed incredibly old fashioned. It sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb on my iPod, but when it comes on and I’m driving I like the fact that it offers me a couple of minutes quiet reflection before the next song drags back into (or closer to) the 21st Century.

Do It Again by The Beach Boys
When I was about 16 I worked in a restaurant with a guy who didn’t really like music that much, with the one exception that he absolutely loved The Beach Boys. I didn’t really know much by them except the obvious stuff (Surfing USA, California Girls), but he would play a double cassette he had of theirs over and over when we were closed, and quite a bit when we were open. To my teenage self it seemed strange music. Although it was quite unlike most other stuff that I’d heard from the sixties or any other time since, it all seemed to blend into one track in my mind. There were harmonies and guitars and fast paced songs with sudden slow bits, and it was all very pleasant but somehow none of it really grabbed me.

I did buy a copy of the cassette myself though, and the year I had my first car I spent much of the summer driving round the countryside with these songs which spoke of sunshine, surf boards and pretty girls blaring out of the tinny speakers. I never quite understood why so many people who wrote and spoke a lot about the sixties compared The Beach Boys with The Beatles, because they seemed completely different. I guess I can see how they probably appealed to a similar audience at the time, in America at least, but while I eventually developed quite a fondness for the wide eyed innocence of their pop songs, it was always clear to me that The Beatles were a lot better.

Concerned that I might be missing the point by listening to the wrong songs, I bought their seminal album, Pet Sounds, when I was a student, and that clearly is a cut above their other stuff. I do really like that album, and several songs on that appear on my iPod. Do It Again, however, is hear as a reminder of the first version of The Beach Boys that I knew, and to take me back to those care free days in a clapped out orange Vauxhall Astra.

Having said that, this track was actually released in 1968, by which time they’d been through their incredibly creative psychedelic stage and apparently gone full circle back to songs about chilling out at the beach. The thing is, I never got round to buying any Beach Boys Mark I stuff on CD, so had nothing to copy across to my iPod. Surprisingly though, Do It Again is one of only two UK number 1 singles they ever managed, so I have it from a DVD I have of the first 1,000 number one singles. It seems surprising that a band who are so critically acclaimed and who were essentially only ever making pop music should only have reached number one twice, although I find that slightly re-assuring. Their music is nice enough, but it’s not just me who doesn’t quite get it, it’s the whole country.

Do You Realize?? by The Flaming Lips
This would have to be a very good record for me to forgive that ‘z’ in the title (that’s a zed not a zee by the way) and happily it is just that. Even so, I do also feel the need to point out that both of those question marks are the bands’, as opposed to a typo on my part. They want you to know that this is not just a question, it’s a very important question.

Do You Realize?? is the first song I ever heard by The Flaming Lips, and it immediately made me wonder why I hadn’t been listening to them for years. Synth driven and very spacey, it asks, by means of close harmonies and quirky American accents, all sorts of grand questions about life, death and the very purpose of our existence. It’s not convoluted or dressed up in flowery language or excessive theory though, it just asks you directly what you know – “Do you realise the sun doesn’t go down? It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round…”. My favourite line is the blunt, undeniable truth, “do you realise that everyone you know some day will die?”. It’s certainly true, but the somewhat gloomy subject matter is in stark contrast to the dreamy, happy sound. The subtext appears to be that this is categorically a definite fact, you can do nothing about it, so you might as well smile and enjoy life. I have read that the song was written by the band’s singer and was inspired by the bass players’ desperate attempts to rid himself of heroin addiction, and in that context the cosmic, questioning nature of the lyrics make a lot of sense.

The over all effect of this record is both pleasantly life affirming and slightly disturbing at the same time. Then after you’ve heard it a few times you realise that you’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about it, and that’s not a very normal effect for four minutes of pop music. The best word to describe the song is just ‘Unusual’, so when you hear that it’s taken from an album called Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots you hardly bat an eyelid, it just seems right. Then when the next single turns out to be the title track from the album and is just as brilliant as Do You Realize??, it all makes sense, and you are now a fan of The Flaming Lips.

Do You Remember The First Time? By Pulp
A lot has been said over the years about the pointlessness of pigeon holing music. Even so, if pressed on the subject, I think I would name my favourite genre of all Indie Disco. If you combine the intelligent lyrics and musical authenticity of indie at its best with the accessibility and mainstream appeal of pop music then as far as I’m concerned you will win every time. It is not easy, and many people have tried and failed at this in the past, but carefully treading this fine line is how you make great indie disco. Do You Remember The First Time is my all time favourite indie disco track.

Sex is a notoriously difficult subject about which to write a good song (think R Kelly, Mousse T and a thousand other atrocities) but Jarvis Cocker handles it with perfect skill. He sings the verses in his clear, deep voiced Yorkshire accent, and the effect is both sleazy and absolutely compelling. From the mouth of a lesser performer the line “and you know you’re gonna let him bore your pants off again” would sound merely like a cliché, but when Jarvis sings it he leaves you in no doubt that he is referring to the depressing inevitability of underwear removal. Essentially Jarvis is asking a woman why she accepts the substandard loving that she gets at home when she knows that it could be so much better with him, and he doesn’t leave much doubt about his message either – in the chorus he shamelessly cries “I don’t care if you screw him, just as long as you save a piece for me”. This is so refreshingly removed from the big budget American love songs we’re used to, it’s something far more special, a song about the intricacies of people’s real lives.

This track is also musically fantastic. The squeaky electric guitar compliments the disco beats like a hybrid of Suede and Chic, a combination that works so well you wonder why no one did it before. If this comes on my iPod when I’m at home alone it is absolutely guaranteed to have me dancing all over the place within seconds, flailing my arms about and simply not caring if anyone’s passing. Great music takes you out of your immediate surroundings to somewhere far more exciting and less inhibited, and that’s one of the reasons I know this is great. To me, this track is perfect, to the British public, worthy only of no. 33 in the charts. A year later though Pulp released Common People and all the hard work paid off, Jarvis was the star he was always meant to be.

Doctorin’ The Tardis by The Timelords
First things first – Dr Who has the best theme music of any TV show ever. The combination of the dreamy, spacey synthesised hook and the ominous, doom predicting bass line perfectly represent a program that has children (and quite a few adults) go from dreaming about the endless possibilities of space and time to hiding behind the settee in terror within a few seconds. TV themes often endure merely because of familiarity, but Dr Who’s theme is a genuinely inspired piece of music.

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty no doubt recognised this when they had the idea for Doctorin’ The Tardis. It was a supremely daft idea – essentially, they just took the doctor who theme, spliced chunks of Rock ‘N’ Roll Part Two by Garry Glitter and Blockbuster by The Sweet over the top, chanted the lines “Dr Who, hey, Dr Who; Dr Who, hey, the Tardis” over the top and released it as a single. They were apparently on a mission to prove that it was possible to have a hit without anyone involved having any musical ability, and the reward for their efforts was, incredibly, a solitary week at number one in the charts in June 1988. I remember listening the top 40 the week they knocked Wet Wet Wet off the top spot, and even at 11 years old wondering if the world had gone slightly mad.

To put this record in context, the idea of sampling someone else’s track was still very new, and had only been tried commercially with tiny snippets, as on Pump Up The Volume the year before. These days I don’t think anyone would doubt that there are many hit singles on which no instruments are played, in fact the use of computers in pop music has blurred the lined of what instruments even are. Drummond and Cauty were real pioneers at the time though, and they knew it – they followed this single up with a book called The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way. It was a bizarre self-help style tome about how you can achieve whatever you want if you believe in yourself, with Doctorin’ The Tardis used as evidence.

In the end it turned out that Cauty and Drummond did have musical ability after all – as the KLF they started making rave music and regularly visited the top 10 between 1990 and 1992, even returning to the very top with 3AM Eternal. As the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu they reached number 10 with my favourite of all their records, It’s Grim Up North. Over pumping but dreary industrial techno they read out the names of towns in the North of England before the whole thing morphed into an orchestral instrumental version of the hymn Jerusalem, ending with the screeching of a sea gull. They also claimed to be performance artists, dumping a dead sheep outside the venue of The Brit Awards while the ceremony took place inside, and apparently burning a million pounds in cash on a Scottish island.

Unpredictable, mad, odd, and ultimately brilliant, the KLF were very welcome at a time when a lot of mainstream music was quite boring. The music scene in 2009 would be a lot better if acts like this existed.

Dog Days Are Over by Florence and the Machine
I was first introduced to Florence and the Machine earlier this year via a cover story in The Guide, the weekly media review in The Guardian every Saturday. The interview made her and her music sound quite exciting, although the whole concept of this big skirted, Celtic sounding, attractive but also quite quirky front woman with anonymous session musicians lurking in the background did also sound a little forced, a bit like the record company had an idea and decided to find the artists to match it.

Still, I was curious enough to head over to iTunes for a listen. I always keep one eye on the iTunes top 100, and had seen Kiss With A Fist and Dog Days Are Over bubbling under a few times earlier in the year. I listened to the 30 second clips of each and bought this one because it sounded best.

A few months later, Dog Days Are Over is vying for position as my favourite song of 2009, and its most redeeming feature is undoubtedly Florence’s vocals. I used to wonder whether the fact that female fronted music made up about 10% of the tracks on my iPod made me a terrible sexist, or whether this was a product of a male focussed music industry. This year it all seems to have changed though, and listening to this track it is clear why. The incredibly powerful delivery on this track just gives it so much drama, refreshing like spinning madly through a field on a hillside on a cold autumn morning. In fact, although I’ve never seen the video, that’s what I imagine Florence is doing.

In terms of pace and mood Dog Days Are Over seems to contain everything, starting off quite ethereal and churchy with talk of someone who “hid around corners and hid under beds, “she killed it with kisses and from it she fled”. I’m not sure what “it” is, but it could be the horses, because they “are coming, so you’d better run”. As soon as running is mentioned the pace, which has slowly been increasing, becomes manic and culminates in another reference to the horses – “heeeeeeeere they cooooooome!” It is thrilling, exhilarating stuff and there is barely any let up before it all starts again. At one stage the track seems to wear out, dying into hand claps followed by a slight pause for thought, before it is thundering along again with more talk of running. Utterly bonkers, and refreshingly unlike anything I was expecting 2009 to deliver.

It is great to know that in a music scene that on the face of it seems to be strangled by a turgid hybrid of dull American R&B and irritating European pop, you don’t have too look too far below the radar to find something altogether different. Florence and the Machine’s sound may not be entirely new, (in fact Dog Days Are Over has the words ‘Kate Bush’ written all over it), but it is different, and always full of surprises. I’m asking for the album for Christmas.

Doll Parts by Hole
Earlier this year, after receiving tow £15 iTunes gift cards for my birthday (I’m “hard to buy for” apparently), I was trying to remember old songs that I used to like but had forgotten about, or stuff that I’d always wondered about but never actually heard. Doll Parts falls into the second category – I vaguely remember seeing Hole doing this on Top Of The Pops and thinking it sounded cool, but I never got round to making a purchase. Various people, including the wife, had since told me that this was a great song, so I thought I’d find out for myself.

Interestingly for a song that is apparently highly thought of, Doll Parts is more of a grower than an instant hit, but after knowing it for a few months I do really like it. Courtney Love is said to have written the song after meeting Kurt Cobain and thinking he didn’t like her, and when applied to his short life lyrics like “he only loves those things because he loves to see them break” take on quite a disturbing context. Love is typically honest and brutal about her opinion of herself too – “I fake it so real I am beyond fake” – a sentiment that other people have also expressed about her.

The singing on this track is quite anguished anyway, but Love took to performing this live following Cobain’s death, which must have been heart wrenching for her and the audiences. The awful truth is that thinking of this sad song in that tragic context actually makes it all the more powerful. What once must have seemed like a well written song by someone doing a good impression of heartbreak actually became something of a self fulfilling prophecy.

Listening to this today it occurred to me that not many bands in recent years have made decent but slow rock songs. There have certainly been a few big hits by American men with long hair in the last couple of years (The Fray, Plain White Ts) but although they kind of fit the genre, they also sound distinctly like they were made with the needs of daytime radio and music TV channels firmly in mind. I also heard the monstrosity that is What About Now by Daughtry recently, which is over blown, moaning soft rock horribleness and apparently due to be covered for the next Westlife single, which says it all really. No one actually seems to make anything that sounds both emotional and genuine any more though, which is a shame because 15 years ago, when Doll Parts came out, Hole were not alone, Nirvana and Pearl Jam spring immediately to mind too. Maybe I’m just lamenting the demise of Grunge, but does no one with guitars really actually mean anything any more?

So Doll Parts is a very welcome recent addition to my iPod, if not the exactly the perfect song to cheer you up. It is also a clear sign that if there is not much new music around that I like, it’s worth looking to the past to find what I should have been listening to years ago but for some reason wasn’t.

[SheriffFatman]

Dominos by The Big Pink
When planning these reviews it helps if I try to remember the first time I heard the track. With this one it was last Wednesday. Someone from work gave me a lift home and had it on in her car, I said I liked it but she didn’t know what it was because it was a CD a friend had copied for her. On Sunday afternoon I was listening to the top 40 with the wife while trying to find space for a cot in the spare room when it came on the radio (new entry at number 29, fact fans). She liked it too, and musical agreement is quite a rare thing in our house so I downloaded it quick before she changed her mind. I’ve since read on the internet that it’s been all over TV for the last few weeks thanks to an Xbox advert, which just proves I must never pay attention during the break.

“The Big Pink are an electro-rock duo from London” to quote Wikipedia directly (I wouldn’t want anyone thinking I was pretending I already knew). Dominos is the fourth single to be released from their debut album A Brief History Of Love, and the first one anyone has ever noticed. I don’t know where their funding is coming from, maybe they have an unusually generous record company, but I reckon they’ve done well to get to a fourth single when the first three didn’t chart.

Persistence sometimes pays off though, and Dominos is not only in the current top 40, but according to the midweek charts it’s likely to go further up next weekend. Quite right too – with its deep looping beats and infectious if repetitive chorus (essentially the line “these girls fall like dominos, dominos” several times over) it is really rather good. The trip hop beats, guitars and shouty vocals suggest they may have been listening to quite a bit of Kasabian, but that’s no bad thing at all, so have I. Really, Kasabian have been ploughing a bit of a lonely furrow in terms of musical style, but it’s been very good and very successful, so there’s definitely room in the current music scene for more of the same sort of thing.

I hope Dominos is a big hit. It’s great when a good song unexpectedly climbs the chart gradually to become a really big hit, as Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap did over the last few months. As for The Big Pink, it remains to be seen whether they can repeat this success without the support of any computer game manufacturers in the future, but the fact that they chose 3 other songs to release before this one has to be a good sign. I think some re-issues cannot be too far away, and I’m looking forward to hearing them.

Don’t Believe The Hype by Public Enemy
The second single taken from Public Enemy’s second album It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, Don’t Believe The Hype was a UK top 20 hit in July 1988. I remember hearing Public Enemy on the top 40 show when I was a kid and trying hard to understand why people bought their records. To my 11 year old ears, all they were really doing was talking, when the whole point of being a popular recording artist was that you sang, or made people want to dance, or a combination of the two.

What’s more, their singles sounded as completely out of place on 1980s Radio 1 as they did in my bedroom. There were plenty of popular black recording artists and had been since the sixties, but they were successful because they made music that white people would like. Public Enemy were different, they seemed to be obsessed with actually being black, it’s all they ever talked (or rapped, if you will) about.

As a child in an almost entirely white area of rural Northern England (out of almost 1,000 kids at my school, there was one who was Asian) what I was failing to realise is that I was bearing witness to the beginnings of an assault on the pop charts that amounted to a revolution in popular music, and which certain people in America were concerned could actually produce a revolution of a more traditional kind too. There had certainly been rap hits before – MC Miker G & DJ Sven from The Netherlands rapping about what they did on holiday, and the Sugarhill Gang filling dancefloors the world over – but they only were aiming to entertain. Suddenly, here was Chuck D talking directly to the youth of America via a medium that they seemed to understand like no other, and talking about racism, politics and the treatment of black people in the media. He even mentions Louis Farrakhan, head of a religious organisation called the Nation of Islam, who has spoken up for black people’s rights for many years but also has a tendency to mad statements, such as his recent proclamations that the flooding in New Orleans was a deliberate plot to kill the city’s poor, and the H1N1 vaccine is actually intended to kill people. It’s no wonder people in the establishment were worried.

In the end, hip hop was fairly easily consumed into mainstream popular culture, changing it forever but not causing any revolutions along the way. In an age when the US has a black president, it is easy to forget that opinions like those expressed in Don’t Believe The Hype seemed so radical as recently as the late 80s. The track still fascinates me now as much as it did 21 years ago, and is a good example of how much the definition of popular music has stretched to accommodate different ideas over the years.

Don’t Cry by Guns N’ Roses
As I’ve mentioned before, my love of Guns N’ Roses as a teenage boy came out of the realisation that liking them gave me something that girls would speak to me about. They were a band that it was cool to like, and I bought Appetite For Destruction for that reason. By the time Use Your Illusion I & II were released though I was a genuine fan. There is very little music that I liked in 1991 which I would still listen to, but those two albums sound brilliant even now.

The rock ballad is a mini genre that has produced some dreadful records over the years, many of which have been big hits. Axl Rose always was a cut above the rest where song writing is concerned, and there’s just something about Don’t Cry that put Bryan Adams, The Scorpians, Foreigner and a hundred others to shame. A lot has been said about Axl’s vocals being not exactly to everyone’s taste, but I reckon there’s a faltering, heartfelt quality in his delivery that just makes it all sound real. I’m not usually given to public displays of emotion, (maybe I’d be a better person if I was), but this song is just so, well, sad. I think it helps that unlike some of their more croonsome peers, Guns N’ Roses were not exclusively balladeers, in fact their previous single to this one, You Could Be Mine, saw them go top three with a track that was full on heavy metal; so when they choose to crank up the emotion it has a bit more authenticity to it than a band whose songs always have them either falling in love or splitting up.

Thinking about it now, it is fairly easy to see why a teenage boy might get the impression that this music would help him score with girls, or at least be allowed to sit next to them in English. Guns N’ Roses made rebel music, they were rock outlaws, with their tattoos and ripped clothes they represented excitement that was rarely experienced in rural Cheshire. Combine that with an apparent sensitive nature, which seemed so much more real than the personalities of manufactured pop acts, and what teenage girl wouldn’t go weak at the knees for a boy who seemed to relate to the band so much? Well, that was the theory anyway, the truth is actually much more cruel. I remember hearing two girls talking about this song during a lesson and asking them whether they thought the impressively long note that Axl holds at the end was recorded in one take or just created in the studio. My answer was along the lines of “how should I know? Do you want me to just call him and ask?”, and then I was blanked for the rest of the morning. Still, there’s no harm in trying.

Don’t Cry has aged well, really because very few acts have had big hits with rock ballads in the 18 years since it made the top 10. Those that have been big are largely unmentionable tosh (Aerosmith selling their souls, Bon Jovi confirming they never had souls). It’s clearly a genre where there’s a lot of money to be made, but doing it well is a difficult thing which Guns N’ Roses achieved several times.

Don’t Ever Think (Too Much) by The Zutons
I really like Liverpool – the people, the buildings, the culture, the art, the night life, The Beatles, just the general feel of the place. I read an article once which half jokingly claimed that it is culturally and psychologically not in the UK at all, but in fact it is the furthest east city in the USA. I do think that makes a lot of sense, because the people, brought together mostly by their accent, have a genuine community spirit – if one Scouser hears another’s voice anywhere in the world they will start a conversation, and there’s not many cities you can say that about. Also, unlike so many other inhabitants of Britain, they exhibit genuine pride in their place of birth, while people from the rest of England seem to treat Scousers like they are an alien species.

My love of that great city, and deference for the critical role it played in the rise of pop music globally, has occasionally lead to me paying slightly more attention that is warranted to bands from that part of the world, and being over defensive on their behalf. Thus, I still quite often play The Wombats’ album and have a couple of their songs on my iPod despite having read, and if I’m absolutely hones, sympathised with, an awful lot of criticism of it. That is possibly what makes me like listening to The Zutons so much – not only are they Scouse, they’re also brilliant.

Don’t Ever Think (Too Much) was an early Zutons single which was added to the end of their debut album Who Killed The Zutons? when it was re-issued reissued. It is a very catchy little tune, essentially held together by the band singing “duh, duh duh, duh duh, duh duh duh” at the beginning and in the break down bit in the middle. That may seem a little uninspiring, but this is actually a really clever track, and an early showcase of the song writing talent that would eventually make them a fortune when Mark Ronson asked Amy Winehouse to cover Valerie, a track from their second album. I reckon she could just have easily have done this one and it would have been equally massive.

I was wondering, rather than just saying ‘indie’ and making this sound like a standard dull low fi guitar record, what genre the Zutons really were. Their music is a bit all over the place (in a good way) and they use a variety of instruments that sound like things which probably don’t often make the pop charts. Wikipedia suggests ‘Psychedelic Cartoon Punk’, which does seem to cover it pretty well. The same website also carrys the disappointing news that the band were dropped by Sony/BMG in 2008 after their third album didn’t sell very well. I hope they find another home, the music scene would be less interesting without them.

Don’t Falter by Mint Royale featuring Lauren Laverne
Mint Royale, despite sounding like a desert from Burger King, are two guys from Manchester who produce dance music, sometimes for other people and sometimes under their own name. Their first big success came in 1999 when they a remix of Tequila by Terrorvision they had done reached number 2 in the charts. I must admit I wasn’t entirely convinced by that effort that they were any good, but 12 months later, when they teamed up with Kenickie singer Lauren Laverne and released Don’t Falter, I changed my mind.

The first thing to point out is that this really isn’t dance music, it’s pure pop, and quite twee pure pop at that. Listening to this recently has made me realise one of the things that made Kenickie so cool was the juxtaposition of down and dirty lo-fi indie music and attitude with Laverne’s sugary sweet vocals, the combination was very appealing. Here Mint Royale instead seem to have matched her soft Geordie delivery and “la la la la” backing vocals with equally mild music. It’s saved from all being a bit too much by the fact that it’s such a great song. Every now and then a record comes along that is a complete one off, and this was such a track, because on paper you’d think it really shouldn’t work but it does. In that sense it reminds me a bit of Is It ‘Cos I’m Cool buy Mousse T, another pop song which you assume will be rubbish based mostly on who it’s by, but which takes you by surprise if you give it a chance.

Amazingly, having reached number 15 in the charts, Don’t Falter is the only ever top 20 hit to which Lauren Laverne has contributed. I say ‘amazingly’ because I can name at least 5 tracks with her on vocals which, if I was in charge of the charts, would have been number 1, and this is one of them. Still, there’s no accounting for the taste of the general public.

Oddly enough, speaking of number ones, this wasn’t the end of the road for Mint Royale chart wise. They had a few more minor hits in the noughties, notably the hilarious but really quite bad Sexiest Man In Jamaica which reached number 20 in 2002. Then, in a bizarre twist of fate which I very much doubt even they anticipated, in 2008 some kid from Warrington danced to an odd advertising jingle remix of Singing In The Rain which they’d released a year earlier and it stormed up the charts and spent a fortnight at the top, despite being only 2 minutes long and sounding distinctly like no one was ever meant to even notice they were listening to it. Hilariously, I recently read on the local news on Teletext that said kid’s mother has just been prosecuted by Halton Borough Council for fly tipping after she left two bin liners full of his fan mail in the street. A better comment on the fly by night nature of TV talent show fame is hard to imagine.

Don’t Look Back In Anger by Oasis
Don’t Look Back In Anger was the fourth single to be taken from Oasis’ second album, (What’s The Story?) Morning Glory, and it spent a week at number one in the charts in February 1996. The first 4 seconds of the track are lifted wholesale from John Lennon’s Imagine, and this introduction perfectly sets the scene for Oasis doing what they did at their very best, a singalong indie anthem which became one of the most distinct and recognisable songs of the 1990s, even though in both style and content it would have been far more at home in the 60s or 70s. In fact that’s where most of its constituent parts originate from.

Looking back at songs like this now, it is hard to believe Oasis didn’t face more in the way of criticism for an approach to music making that relied so heavily on borrowing. There were a few musos who had the odd gripe about Oasis being nothing new, but I think there are lots of good reasons they got away with it. First of all, the band themselves, and Noel Gallagher in particular, didn’t seem to care. No attempt was made to hide Lennon’s influence on this track, Noel even admitted that some of the lyrics (the bit about starting a revolution from his bed) were originally spoken in an interview with Lennon that someone had played to him while he was in America. Secondly, the result of Gallagher’s plundering had such a feel good quality to it that it simply made a lot of people very happy, (…Morning Glory is one of the UK’s all time best selling albums), and it’s hard to argue against music that has such a massive positive effect. Music historians may find this a bit odd, but through releasing music heavily influenced by the past, Oasis made new music cooler than ever, causing a genuine renaissance for British bands.

It wasn’t just the past influences that heavily outnumbered music purists objected to though. Also well in evidence on this track is Noel’s slap dash, happy go lucky approach to song writing which, despite apparently being based on nothing of any substance at all, seemed to connect with so many people. The opening line, “Slip inside the eye of your mind” is typical of Oasis lyrics that sound like they mean something highly profound but it is not quite clear what, and the whole song continues in the same vain. Again, Noel is not at all bothered by the suggestion that songs should somehow mean something. Referring to the character Sally in the chorus, he once said "I don't actually know anybody called Sally. It's just a word that fit, y'know, might as well throw a girl's name in there. It's gotta guarantee somebody a shag off a bird called Sally, hasn't it?".

Only a rock star could get away with saying something like that and nobody would mind. It makes you wonder how they ever had any credibility whatsoever, let alone became figureheads for a whole cultural phenomenon. For some reason it all just seemed to work, and it still does. This was one of several tracks that took Oasis from being the best indie band you ever heard to globe straddling daytime radio success, and evey time you hear it even 13 years later it’s still just as good.

Don’t Speak by No Doubt
This has been a tricky one for me. I was quite surprised to find it was on my iPod, I must have been listening to it and not even noticed. I couldn’t for the life of me work out why it was there, and don’t really know much about the song or the band, but when I had a listen I remembered I quite like it.

Don’t Speak spent three weeks at number one in February 1997, and was the first major hit No Doubt had in the UK. I remember thinking at the time that it was unusual for a rock record to be such a big hit, but it took me a while before I particularly liked it. Essentially, I think the secret of its success is largely that although technically rock music it is really very unthreatening to radio programmers and to their audiences. It has a catchy chorus and simple lyrics, and the guitars are kept down far enough in the mix for it not to upset pop fans who might be scared away by tattoos or long hair. Cleverly though, the track does still retain a certain rock edge to appeal to fans of the genre, so essentially Don’t Speak is all things to all people. To me it’s just slightly elevated above the level of FM radio fodder, at least in part die to the excellent vocals of Gwen Steffani.

She, of course, went on to become one of the biggest selling female artists the world over, while No Doubt also continued as a group for a while but never again did anything as successful as this song. Strangely, I can’t really think of much else to recommend this track. It stands up fairly well in the list of UK chart toppers, and is a lot better than some more recent ones, if not terribly memorable. It could really be from the eighties too, quite like something Starship might have released. I need to have an iPod track cull soon to make way for some festive stuff, I think this one may be for the chop. Not a bad song, but not that exciting either.

Don’t Stand So Close To Me by The Police
Private Eye occasionally features in the funny section in the middle the newsletter of a fictitious English public school called St. Cakes, relating stories in the news to the goings on within this fine institution. A recent edition mentioned a number of job vacancies, which were explained with the statement “Miss Strumpet-Blower is leaving to take up a position at Holloway, and the Head of Biology, Mr Peter File, has taken early retirement and is continuing his studies into human sexuality at Wormwood Scrubs.” Twenty-nine years after it reached number one in the charts, Don’t Stand So Close To Me has never been more relevant.

For the benefit of anyone who did not turn on a radio at any point in the 1980s, I should probably explain that introduction. Don’t Stand So Close To Me tells the story of a young teacher who finds one of his pupils has a crush on him, and struggles against the feeling becoming mutual. The story is brilliantly told, dealing with their feelings, the jealousy of her friends and the suspicion of his colleagues.

There is no resolution in the song (no arrests, no actual sex in fact) but lyrically this is a real gem, it excellently describes the kind of complicated situation that can arise in otherwise mundane lives. The lyric “temptation, frustration, so bad it makes him cry; wet bus stop, she’s waiting, his car is warm and dry” is just perfect, there are very few four minute pop songs that tell a story so vividly without becoming corny. The line “just like that old man in that book by Nabakov” does show a glimmer of the preposterously aloof route that Sting’s career would eventually take, but on this occasion he can be forgiven as this is such a great track. Maybe he couldn’t find a rhyme for ‘Lolita’.

The accompaniment to this tale is a typically stripped back rock number from the rest of the band, allowing the story to take centre stage. The chorus is nothing more than repetition of the title, but it’s a good title, and that just serves to emphasise it, making this not just a song but a brand. Entering at the top of the charts just nine months after the 80s began, it became one of that decade’s most recognisable tracks, a radio favourite and also a favourite of mine.

Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey
A couple of months ago I watched the Tom Cruise film Cocktail for the first time. It is fascinating – one the one hand it’s an excellently told, inspiring tale of someone who achieves what they want despite coming from humble beginnings, on the other everything about it is incredibly, deeply naff. This song is exactly the same.

Don’t Stop Believin’ was released in 1982 and sums up the aspirational theme of that decade more than any other song I can think of. It preaches that if you genuinely believe something can happen then it will, and it does so via the medium of stadium sized synthesised rock. It is so deeply embedded in everything the 1980s was about that it has really not aged well, but there is still something incredibly charming about it.

It’s not just me that finds something relevant in this incredibly dated track, far from it. I have mentioned before that I get all geeky and excited about unusual chart statistics, but they don’t come much stranger than this one: last week was Don’t Stop Believin’s 87th week on the UK top 100, but it has never climbed higher than its March 1982 peak of number 62.

I have to confess I never even heard the track until earlier this year. I had become fascinated by its perpetual residence near the bottom of the charts, and after listening to it on YouTube and reading about it on Wikipedia I decided to go the whole hog and splash out 79p. It seems that the track is a real phenomenon of the download era, having initially been propelled back to public consciousness via American Idol. I guess when you think about it, the song’s theme is perfectly suited to that sort of show. Since that, it seems to have maintained its steady sales through word of mouth, and I guess the fact that it was not a well known track in the UK already has helped. Now, co-incidentally in the week it comes up for review on my iPod, it is finally going over ground thanks to a performance on last week’s X Factor. Next week, if early sales figures are to be believed, Don’t Stop Believin’ will become a top 20 hit, incredibly giving veteran rockers Journey their first ever shot at the UK top 40.

All of this begs the question why the track was not a hit here in the first place, and I honestly don’t have any idea. It sounds like a lot of things that were big here (Jump by Van Halen springs immediately to mind) but I guess it was either just under promoted or disliked by radio stations. I have a feeling that even in 1982 we British may have considered the song’s message of empowerment just a little to corny, but in our post-modern, media savvy era I guess it is the cornyness that makes it good (the lyric “some will win, some will lose, some were born to sing the blues” cracks me up). It was originally meant to inspire, now I reckon it just makes people laugh, but either way it is well over due the success which is on the way.

Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen
Queen’s chart history is strange. When I was a kid, prior to the death of Freddie Mercury and the further cementing of Bohemian Rhapsody as one of the most loved songs of all time, I never really listened to any of their music, they were just one of those bands who entered high in the top 10 only to disappear again within a few weeks. I was vaguely aware that they’d been around for some time before I was taking an interest, but wasn’t that interested. In fact, Don’t Stop Me Now peaked at number 9 in 1979, when I was 2 years old.

The reason this seems a little puzzling to me is that this is exactly the kind of all round good fun party song that I would have loved if I’d known it, but instead the 80s fed me a diet of crappy manufactured pop (which, misguided that I was, I loved) and gave me the impression that Queen were only capable of middle aged snorathons like One Vision and I Want It All. Why wasn’t Don’t Stop Me Now one of the most famous songs of the 70s? Or was it, and no one told me? These things will remain a mystery.

Anyhow, many years later, when I was still basically of the opinion that most Queen tracks were boring and Bohemian Rhapsody was the exception, I was planning a cross family new year disco for my folks and the in-laws. The very idea was fraught with horror, and my plan was simply to ignore everyone for four hours with the relatively small duration of the average 7” single as my excuse. Even this wasn’t easy – while my tribe are happy as pigs in muck rowing back and forth in a pretend canoe to Ooops Upside Your Head, the wife’s lot are a little more reticent in the dancing department, in fact she reckoned the only song her Dad would ever dance to was Don’t Stop Me Now. Undeterred, I sought and found it in a brilliant second hand record shop in the town where I live (which, like most of its kind, has since become a victim of iTunes and closed). The party got a mixed reception, about the best that could be hoped for in the circumstances, but the music was a triumph. Both families were well represented on the floor during this one, and some of them even stayed there for Tainted Love straight after.

In the process I had gained a new found respect for Queen; it turned out they were not just stadium filling dullards with daft hair, they could also knock out a decent and half credible party tune when they wanted to. I have since bought their Greatest Hits 1 & 2 albums and found a few songs I didn’t know but like, and a few I had dismissed as boring but have now changed my mind about. As the party season closes in on us, I can see this one experiencing a resurgence in the Most Played list on my iPod.

Don’t Worry Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin
At the start of this year I was seconded to work for this woman I didn’t know on a huge and rather dull project. I tried my best to get along with her, but I have become used to managing my own time and setting my own goals, whereas she micro-managed me, asking me continually where I was up to with things and criticising without fail everything I did, offering no constructive suggestions whatsoever. She was really annoying me, and my real manager didn’t do anything because she’s way more senior than him and he’s scared of her. Unlike any other time in my career, after 3 months of it I was having to drag myself into work every day. I was stressed, miserable and completely failing to see the bigger picture – that it’s only a job, this project won’t last forever, there are more important things, people in the world are starving etc.

It’s odd how difficult it can be to get out of that kind of mentality if you allow yourself to get into it. I knew I was taking it all too seriously when the wife started complaining that I was always irritable when I got home from work. I started to wonder what to do – walking out was tempting but in the middle of the worst recession since the 1930s it didn’t seem like a very good idea. I instead introduced a program of calm inducing measures, things that would help me unwind at the end of another awful day. One of the things I tried was downloading Don’t Worry Be Happy and listening to it with my eyes closed on the bus home every night. Unfortunately, for some bizarre reason, the wife also has an entirely irrational hatred of whistling, so it probably got me in more trouble than it was worth, but anyway, that’s the story of how Bobby McFerrin came to be on my iPod.

In 1988 Don’t Worry Be Happy became the first ever accapella number one single in the US, and also reached number 2 over here. It’s not just singing, in fact it sounds like there’s music, but there have actually been no instruments anywhere near it, just one man making strange noises. The song espouses a simple philosophy - essentially everything you need to know is in the title. It basically says that bad things may happen, and it offers some examples, but that worrying about them is no help whatsoever, and you can’t really argue with that. On the other hand, it may be happy, but it does all sound a bit defeatist too, although maybe in some situations that’s the way to be. It helped me.

Bobby McFerrin may well sound like a novelty act, and in many ways he is, but his achievements in life far exceed his one hit. Incredibly, he has actually won 10 Grammy awards over the years, including several for Best Jazz Vocal Performance. He also tours as an orchestra conductor, and has been known to conduct entire orchestras performing the William Tell Overture accapella, making the noises their instruments would normally make instead of actually playing them. Not sure that would be any help with stress, but I’d like to hear it.

Don’t You Want Me by The Human League
Human League singer Phil Oakey really didn’t like Don’t You Want Me, and was annoyed when the record label insisted on including it on the album Dare. He also was annoyed that they insisted on a fourth single being released from the album, and when he got over that he was annoyed that this song was the one which was chosen. After it was Christmas number one in 1981, sold 1.4 million copies in the UK alone, became one of the best sellers of the 1980s, and even went to number one in the US, I bet he felt a bit silly.

Don’t You Want Me is just one of those songs that everyone knows, a ubiquitous part of popular culture that seems to have been around forever. Bearing in mind those amazing sales (it is number 25 on the UK’s all time best seller list) I guess it’s hardly surprising that it’s achieved this status, but the thing with tracks like that is that its very easy to hear them without giving them any real thought. When you actually listen to it, this is a fascinating record.

The most obvious thing is that this record is like a master class in pop music. The verses are interesting lyrically but simple in structure, the chorus is very catchy and delivered with clarity and conviction in equal measure, and the “dum dum de dum dum” bass bit has you singing along even during the instrumental break. It’s not like this track does anything very different, but what it does do is almost completely perfect.

The lyrics are intriguing, and very memorable. It can often be fun reading the first line of a song to someone and watching them agonise, realising they know it but not remembering what it is. This song would be rubbish for that though – if you said “You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar” who wouldn’t get it?
One thing that I’ve always found amusing about this track is that it achieved such a lot despite one glaring flaw – the female vocals. The lady’s name is Susan Sulley, and she had been a backing singer for the Human League since Oakey met her in a Sheffield nightclub, but she’s not exactly someone you would immediately promote to sing a whole verse. I’m no singer myself but the line “that much is true” is delivered so flat that when I first listened carefully I couldn’t believe how many times I must have heard it without noticing. A song has to be genuinely great for the artists to get away with singing it badly, so it’s really a tribute to the brilliance of Don’t You Want Me that it doesn’t detract from the song at all.

Having said all that, her singing is no worse than my nephew’s who dueted with me on karaoke doing this very song at my Uncle’s birthday party earlier in the year. To be fair to him he stepped in at the last minute when the wife refused to be the waitress. Nothing odd about that at all.

Double Barrel by Dave and Ansil Collins
As a kid listening to the charts in the 80s, I was conditioned to think that reggae music was basically just pop music with a slightly Caribbean feel to it. The biggest exponents of all, UB40, even occasionally went so far as to make reggae music by simply covering pop and rock songs but singing them in what sounded to me like an imitation of a Jamaican accent. It’s not surprising that I thought like that, as even though reggae actually offers a huge wealth of different music from all sorts of different acts, very little of it has ever got near the UK top 40.

There is the odd exception though, and Double Barrel is a glaring one. In 1971, a time that I associate almost entirely with glam rock, prog rock and early manufactured pop, it defied all the odds and spent two weeks at the top of the charts. This sounds impressive, but is even more when you actually hear it, because although it’s a great record it is also really quite odd. I reckon if you didn’t know it already, and were asked what era it was, you wouldn’t have a clue.

Essentially, Double Barrel is an instrumental, with a man talking nonsense over it. If that description makes it sound like a rap record, it’s not, because he is actually talking, and sounds quite camp. He proclaims “I am the magnificent W.O.O.O.” several times, with the reverb turned right up, and the rest of it is no less mystifying. He repeats the word “mush” over and over too, before instructing the listener to “Enter the shack at the back of your soul baby”. It is inspired nonsense.

All of this is set to a bizarre soundtrack, with reggae beats (apparently the drummer on the track was 14 at the time of recording), organ that sounds like it was recorded using a single microphone several yards from the instrument across a large empty warehouse, and an incredibly infectious piano loop that reminds me of the badly recorded instrumentals by the likes of Winifred Atwell that were very popular when the charts first started in the early 50s. The over all effect gives the impression of musicians who either had no idea what they were doing or who had no idea what successful music in the 1970s sounded like, accidentally hitting on a winning formula. The truth is that Dave and Ansil Collins were really accomplished reggae artists who had much success in Jamaica already, but the fact that they broke out briefly and gave this track to the rest of the world is something to be very thankful for.

Down In The Tube Station At Midnight by The Jam
I fell in love with The Jam’s back catalogue at quite a young age. Unusually for a band this good, they actually had several number one singles in the early 80s, so I found out about them when I started collecting old chart toppers on 7” vinyl. I immediately wanted to hear more, so I bought a Best Of compilation on tape and virtually every track on there was brilliant.

Listening to these songs though it struck me that The Jam’s main purpose for existence was to convince people that the south east of England was not a very nice place. This song in particular paints a vivid picture of urban nastiness, and could only come from a band who have spent all their lives in or near London. The lyrics are from the point of view of a man who gets mugged and left for dead in the tube station of the title. The nastiness of it all makes it very plausible, and really brings home the danger that this character is exposed to as he goes about his normal life.

After a protracted introduction consisting of the sounds of a tube station, “the distant echo of far away voices boarding far away trains” as he puts it, he is approached by some men demanding to know if he has any money. His response, “I’ve a little money and a take away curry and I’m on the way home to my wife” results in being beaten up. I’ve heard the lines “they smelt of pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs, and too many right wing meetings” quoted in discussions about the best lyrics ever, and they’re even more powerful in their full context. Ultimately the thugs don’t just take his money, they take his keys too, and the song ends with him lying alone on the platform as the beating he’s taken renders him at least half dead, and he thinks of his wife, realising that his assailants will go to his house and when she hears them she will think it’s him.

When it was released, Tony Blackburn refused to play this track on Radio 1. He reasoned that pop music should be about nice things, and his listeners wouldn’t want to hear about someone getting mugged, apparently he stands by the decision even now. The idea that radio is escapism that should protect the listeners from the outside world seems a bit bizarre to me, especially as there’s usually a news bulletin every hour. I have a feeling this is not the only point relating to popular music that he and I would disagree on, actually.

I have never been a city person, and while I can see the advantages of being close to where things are happening, I personally like to keep a safe distance, it’s just not for me. This weekend I will be at the Brixton Academy watching the mighty Carter USM, but on Sunday night when the train leaves Euston I will be feeling, as I always do when I leave the capital, a slight sense of relief. I reckon listening to The Jam over the years is one of the contributing factors.

Drain You by Nirvana
The first thing I ever bought by Nirvana was Smells Like Teen Spirit on 7” vinyl, just before Christmas 1991. I played it so much that it was a while before I flipped it over and played the other side. That was Drain you, and it’s the combination of the two that made me realise I had to get hold of a copy of what is regularly called one of the best albums of all time.

I often find Nirvana tracks difficult to identify from their title, but know them instantly when I hear even a brief snippet. This tracks most distinctive feature comes in the first few seconds. There is no introduction at all, it just starts with the ultra cool opening line “One baby to another says I’m lucky to have met you”. That is delivered with absolute clarity, but followed immediately by the over-layered guitar sound that made Nevermind such a huge success. This means the listener has to strain to hear any more of the words as it’s all drowned out by the melodic metal sound that defined the grunge generation. Really though – “One baby to another says I’m lucky to have met you” – what more does anyone need to know?

While the style and tempo of Nevermind does alter at times (the slow acoustic sound of Something In The Way and Polly, the hasher punk of Territorial ****ings), Drain You is actually a perfect example of the balance that was struck between Kurt Cobain’s desire to make rock music which was not necessarily that easily accessible, and producer Butch Vig’s determination to make a hit album. The enormous success that resulted is partly because Vig did retain a level of accessibility with his tempered down production, and partly because the youth of America and then the rest of the world were ready to be challenged, they wanted to identify with the counter culture the likes of Nirvana represented. It was bad news for the old guard of eighties soft rockers (Bon Jovi etc), and as such was one of the best things that ever happened to rock music. Drain You was only an album track, so doesn’t have any great place in rock history on its own, but it is the sound of things changing for the better, and listening to it 18 years on that change still sounds just as powerful.

Dreadlock Holiday by 10cc
This is another song which I first discovered on 7” vinyl after making the decision in 1990 to start collecting number ones. 10cc have three of them in total, but prior knowledge of the first two, I’m Not In Love and Rubber Bullets, did not prepare me for this at all. There must be very few acts who have had big hits with three such different records.

Dreadlock Holiday is the story of a white man lost and a little scared somewhere in Jamaica. It is, I think, a reggae record. I say “I think” because it sounds like one, but somewhere in the back of my mind there is a lurking doubt about whether four white men from Manchester who made what was normally described as Art Rock music could actually make a record that was reggae. I mean, I know UB40 were reggae, but they are always at pains to explain that they were heavily influenced throughout their entire career by the music of the other people living in the mainly black area of Birmingham where they grew up. Maybe Dreadlock Holiday is a reggae pastiche.

In fact, come to think of it, Dreadlock Holiday is really quite an odd record. Although it is mostly the musical style that transports the listener’s mind to warmer climates, vocalist Graham Gouldman is called on not just to play the lost Englishman, but also the Jamaican mugger, for which he puts on a comically poor West Indian accent. Brilliant though this song is, that bit, as he sings “I like it, I want it, I’ll take it off your hands…” uncomfortably reminds me of celebrity racist Jim Davidson OBE (for ‘services to entertainment’ if you’re wondering – tell me about it!)

So in some respects, maybe Dreadlock Holiday has not aged terribly well, and was an odd idea in the first place, but none of that changes the fact that 10cc were excellent musicians, and this is really a very catchy pop record. The chorus lines “I don’t like cricket, I love it” have passed into legent and are regularly used and abused in TV commercials, and I have always been a particular fan of the way the song itself changes to “Don’t like Jamaica, I love her” near the end. On the one hand, this track is one of many examples to prove that the British have always preferred their own odd interpretation of reggae to the real thing, but when that results in songs this good does it really matter? I think not.

Dreams by The Game
The Game is the slightly odd stage name of American rapper Jayceon Terrell Taylor, and Dreams was an underrated UK top 10 hit (if that’s not a contradiction) for him in 2005. I once got in trouble for making my nephew sick by challenging him to have a swig of Irn Bru every time a famous person’s name was mentioned in this track. To be fair, most of it came out of his nose, and I was at least tasteful enough to cough loudly over the bit where The Game graphically describes what he’s dreamt of doing to R’n’B singer Mya. We all get dreams like that, but fortunately that’s not what the whole track is about.

Dreams is produced by Kanye West, and the chorus is based around a highly effective sample in a similar manner to his own single Gold Digger, with an elderly sounding American soul singer (in this case a guy from the sixties called Jerry Butler singing a song called No Money Down) complementing the rapper’s verses. It is smooth stuff, cleverly produced and well performed, and it succeeds in its apparent aim to give an over all feeling of nostalgia for hip hop’s past. The lyrics are occasionally quite funny, although I’m not certain they are meant to be. My favourite bit is “then my world turned black, like I was staring out of Stevie Wonder’s glasses”. Does Stevie Wonder have black glasses? I suppose it wouldn’t trouble him at all if he did, but wouldn’t he have to get them specially made? I don’t see the point.

Along with Stevie, the song mentions the achievements of lots of people I have heard of (Dr Dre, Martin Luther King, Eazy E, Jam Master Jay, Marvin Gaye, Whitney Houston) and quite a few I haven’t (Dave Maze, Frankie Beverley, Huey Newton, Eric Wright). Eminem and 50 Cent get referred to by their real names just to check you’re paying attention, and at the end of the track the whole thing is dedicated to “Yetunde Price the sister of Venus and Serena Williams who was slain
during a gang shoot-out in Compton, Sunday September 14th 2003”. The Game is from the same neck of the woods, maybe he knew her.

This seems to be a track that sets out with an important purpose, but I’m afraid it’s slightly lost on me, the truth is I’m not really sure what point he’s actually trying to make. If anything though, the slightly mystifying seriousness of it all just adds to the appeal. There are not many aspects to my life which I can relate to the ramblings of a gangster rapper from the inner suburbs of Los Angeles, but that just means I have to focus on the feel of the track instead of the meaning. This track feels like as much a piece of classic hip hop as it is a tribute to classic hip hop. It may seem like I’m exaggerating – it was apparently voted the 16th best hip hop track of 2005, but I doubt the other 15 are all on my iPod somewhere – but hey, it’s only my opinion. I know nothing else at all that The Game has done, but he doesn’t have to, this is good enough.

Drinking In LA by Bran Van 3000
Bran Van 3000 (or Bread Van 3000 as I still think of them thanks to Mark and Lard) are apparently an ‘electronica collective’ from Montreal in Canada. They released Drinking In LA in 1999 and it reached number 36 in the UK charts, but 12 months later after it appeared in a TV advert for bottled lager it made the top 3. An ode to being lazy and sitting around drinking beer in the sun, although I don’t remember the advert I’m sure it suited it perfectly.

Possibly because of its slightly unusual background (I don’t know of many bands from Montreal, and certainly not electronica collectives) this is one of those records that doesn’t sound in step with other music that was around at the time, but it would sound great any time. It begins with a radio DJ called Stereo Mike offering free tickets to see the band to any listener who can call in and name the lead singer’s favourite type of cheese, which sounds a little worrying but is pretty much the only really wacky thing about the whole track.

It turns out that the narrator has been hanging round LA and trying to get motivated to make a film, but instead is distracted by the availability of beer and the option of doing nothing at all. I was an under achieving student at the time this was released, and daft though it sounds Cornwall probably has more things in common with California than most other places in the UK. Lyrics like “but we did nothing, absolutely nothing that day” and “With my mind on my money and my money on my beer” had particular resonance at the time. I listened to this song a lot. There are hangovers “I got the fever for the flavour, the payback will be later” and the odd moment of clarity “What the hell am I doing drinking in LA at 26?”, but more than anything else there is the overwhelming pleasantness of days spent in the sunshine during which nothing whatsoever is achieved. I so deserved my 2:2.

The lyrics apparently tell a true story, about a time when the guy who formed Bran Van 3000, James Di Salvio, was sitting around in LA intending to write a film but getting nowhere. Unlike my degree grade, however, the results for him were unexpected but spectacularly good – he wrote this song instead. He claims it tells the story of “falling out of love with one medium and into the next”, which I guess is probably the way a lot of pop music comes about. Making a song about it suggests a touch of genius, although the complete absence of Bran Van 3000 from the music scene ever since suggests it was short lived. A wonderful track nevertheless.

Drop Dead Gorgeous by Republica
When I bang on about the mid nineties and how much fantastic indie music there was, I do tend to gloss over the fact that there was a large amount of dance music that was very popular at the time too. This is mostly because I don’t like it and even at the time tried to pretend it wasn’t there. Some proper bands embraced it though, mixing the sounds of dance and indie to varying degrees of success. One such band was Republica, and in the case of this track it really worked very well.

Republica apparently described their own sound as “techno-pop punk rock”, and if you consider each of those syllables separately while listening to Drop Dead Gorgeous you can definitely find a bit of each thrown into the mix. Pop is especially evident, as this is essentially a well written song with power pop verses and a catchy chorus. The rock is evident in the guitars, the techno I guess comes from the beats per minute being quite a bit faster than their indie contemporaries, and the punk? Well, she does sound a bit annoyed I suppose. Thinking about it the mixture of styles Republica were trying out sounds a bit like a few more recent acts, (Santogold springs to mind), I guess they were ahead of their time.

I’ve always found something slightly amusing about the singer in Republica’s accent. I’m not very good with southern accents so I can’t decide if, when she sings “Aaahy know, maaahy ex boyfriend laahys” she sounds incredibly Cockney or incredibly posh. I thought the fact that her name is Saffron pointed towards the latter, but it turns out her real name is Samantha Sprackling, so maybe not. Either way, she don’t come from round here.

The song itself is about the aforementioned boyfriend, and how despite his truth failure she can’t help forgiving him because he’s drop dead gorgeous. On the one hand that just demonstrates the fickle nature of youthful relationships and the fact that they are based more on lust than commitment, on the other hand if that is Saffron herself on the cover of the CD single she could lie all she liked to me and I’d still be putty in her hands. Mind you, I’m not sure I’d understand what she was saying anyway.

So Drop Dead Gorgeous is an interesting, diverting footnote in 90s indie pop, from a band who showed early promise but failed to live up to it. Still fun to listen to today, nothing earth shattering but well worth checking out if you don’t already know it.

The Drugs Don’t Work by The Verve
Urban Hymns was The Verve’s third album, and the first single to be taken from it, Bittersweet Symphony, was their first major commercial success. That single was released in June 1997, reached number 2 in the charts and was all over the radio for months. The release of follow up single The Drugs Don’t Work was widely seen as less of an event, as this track lacked it’s predecessor’s instant hook and was much more introspective in content. With its emotional vocal and layered, orchestral sound it was a undeniably a great track, and with the interest generated by the previous single anyone who was paying attention would confidently have predicted a mid-table hit.

Then something unexpected happened. On August 31st 1997, the day before this single was released, Diana Princess of Wales did the one thing that no one could have predicted, and died in a Paris car crash. Being an argumentative 20 year old at the time I failed completely to see why that mattered at all – she was simply some posh woman in whom I had absolutely no interest whatsoever. It’s especially sad when anyone with young children dies, but hey, it happens all the time, and to this day I fail to recognise anything she did to deserve anywhere near the level of coverage her death received.

This was not a popular view though, and the madness of enforced mass grief that followed her death presented radio programmers with a problem. Pop radio stations were not keen on maintaining a funereal theme for more than a day or so, but equally the chirpy likes of Will Smith, who was number one at the time, seemed a little inappropriate. (To me Will Smith is inappropriate at any time, but again that’s not necessarily a popular opinion.) The Drugs Don’t Work perfectly fitted the bill, it was modern and yet had a respectful feel to it, and ultimately seemed to be actually about death. The result was that one week after The People’s Princess departed this mortal coil, it was number one in the charts, the accidental beneficiary of a very strange and disturbing time in modern British history.

Although these odd circumstances gave The Verve a well deserved number one, it is kind of a shame to think of the track in this context, because it is so wonderful in its own right. The absolute perfection of Ashcroft’s vocals send a shiver down my spine even now. At the time he wrote this, his Dad was dying of cancer, and the lyrics are absolutely heartbreaking when considered in that context. This is a very powerful record, and when you listen to it 13 years on it completely transcends its connections to any mass outpouring of public grief. As much as any single can be, it is a very personal song and makes me think about the tentative nature of life. To be able to stay positive in such difficult times, and to be able to be so creative as to write a song like this about the experience, is talent indeed.

Dry Your Eyes by The Streets
The first single from the Streets’ second album, A Grand Don’t Come For Free, was Fit But You Know It. A bawdy, laddish anthem about a lads holiday which consisted largely of take aways, lager and girls, it was a great record, but couldn’t have been more different to its follow up, Dry Your Eyes. Fit But You Know It took The Streets into the top 10 for the first time, Dry Your Eyes went one better and reached the very top.

The great thing about the Streets is that more than any other modern artist, Mike Skinner makes it possible to identify with what he’s saying. It’s partly to do with the way he delivers his message, not exactly sung but not exactly rapped wither, he’s just some bloke talking to you. In fact, he’s like an incredibly eloquent and yet down to earth friend. That technique is especially effective in this track, because Dry Your Eyes is essentially Mike Skinner talking you through, step by step, the moment his girlfriend broke his heart. You don’t even have to offer him any advice because it’s there for him in the chorus “there’s plenty more fish in the sea… you’ve got to walk away now, it’s over”. His blow by blow account of the break up with the love of his life, including his pleading desperately with her not to leave, is absolutely tragic. Ordinarily, if this was someone you didn’t know, they would sound more than a little pathetic, but Skinner’s incredible ability to give you the impression he’s talking directly to you makes you empathise with his situation.

This is one of a few songs which, over the years, have made me very thankful that I’ve never broken up with someone I loved (Blur’s No Distance Left To Run is another one that springs to mind). I think about the wife and I just can’t imagine that ever happening, but although the relationship described here was probably a little less serious than anything involving marriage or children, this track still gives a dreadful insight into what that must be like. I don’t think I would handle it well at all. My youth was more spent dealing with rejection by women who were not that interested in the first place, which is much easier to deal with, and I had Morrissey to help me through that.

To take a song with emotions as deep and raw as this track to number one in the charts is no mean feat, and it is again probably largely due to Mike Skinner’s everyman approach that it had such broad appeal. This came at a time in the history of The Streets when so far everything they had released had been brilliant, I am a huge fan of their first two albums. Since them they have been a little more hit and miss, which is hardly surprising. For me though this still stands as the most famous moment by one of the best pop stars of the noughties, someone who nobody saw coming and who shaped popular music for the better.

Dumb by Nirvana
In Utero was unquestionably a much more raw and aggressive album than Nevermind. The commercial success of Nevermind seems to have taken Nirvana by surprise, and in Kurt’s case at least it was accompanied by an awful lot of unwanted attention. In Utero is widely acknowledged as being an attempt to get the focus back onto the music, by making it an album of tracks that are just not polished enough for a wide audience, not music you would expect to hear on daytime radio.

That’s the theory anyway, and certainly when you consider Heart Shaped Box, a song with a lyric about eating cancer, was the first single, and the track with the most feedback and the most screaming was called Radio Friendly Unit Shifter, it seems a bit of a no brainer. Scratch beneath the surface though and there may actually be more to say on the issue. Dumb, taken from In Utero, seems to have slipped through the net, displaying as it does many of the melodic and introspective qualities that made Nevermind such a success. It may be a little rougher around the edges than Polly or Something In The Way, but at its heart Dumb proves that no matter how much he disliked it, and whether he understood the reasons or not, Kurt Cobain’s song writing style tapped into the psyche of a whole generation.

Cobain’s bashful lack of self esteem that so many disaffected youths in America and Europe identified with is in full evidence here, as the chorus has him explaining “I think I’m dumb, or maybe just happy”. It’s certainly not hard to see how teenagers everywhere might have mentally applied this to their own state of minds, I was 17 when In Utero was released and I certainly asked similar questions of myself, on my better days anyway. The second verse’s suggestion that sniffing glue might be the route to some of the answers probably helped ensure the track is not one of Nirvana’s more well known songs, but the line at the end of that verse, “have a hangover”, repeated four times, has lead me to be humming it to myself on many weekend mornings over the years. I, of course, tend to stick to Boddingtons (and possibly gin) to get my kicks.

Dumb is a track that does not need the album surrounding it, heard out of context it is just as good. It did prove something of a paradox to me when I bought In Utero, because it was one of the few tracks which was instantly appealing, and made the album all the easier to listen to again, eventually encouraging me to love its less accessible moments equally. Any track that provides a way in to an album that good has to be a good thing in its own right too.

[SheriffFatman]

E=MC2 by Big Audio Dynamite
I heard this song on the radio some time when I was a teenager, not sure when, but I loved it straight away. I didn’t remember what the title was (either because I didn’t know much about the theory of relativity or because the DJ didn’t mention it) but I remembered it was Big Audio Dynamite, and when I saw their LP This Is Big Audio Dynamite in a second hand shop I took a gamble on it being on there, which paid off. I knew the track I was after as soon as the music started, and although I still have that LP to this day I don’t think I’ve ever listened to any other track by them. In fact I might put it on when I get home tonight.

E=MC2 (that’s “squared” not “two” by the way, but typing it correctly goes beyond the limit of my keyboard skills) is a synthesiser driven track with a fantastic squelching bass line and a really catchy hook, which would work perfectly well as an instrumental. It is covered in samples of dialogue from a film from 1970 called Performance. I have never seen it, but it seems to be set a gangster flick set in London as most of the quotes are in broad cockney, and often include threats and the sound of gun fire. “I don’t like music” and “why don’t you play us a tune, pal?” are placed suitably at the start of the track, while several others, including my favourites, “comical little geezer. You'll look funny when you're fifty" and “United we stand, divided we’re lumbered” are just dropped in seemingly at random, when there’s a gap between verses.

The actual lyrics, written and sung by Mick Jones of The Clash (Big Audio Dynamite was the band he formed after The Clash split), are apparently inspired by several films, of which Perfomance was presumably the main one, but which also included Insignificance, Don’t Look Now, Walkabout and The Man Who Fell To Earth. I’ve not seen any of them either, although I have read Walkabout, a children’s story about a brother and sister who are the sole survivors of a light aeroplane crash in the Australian outback. I don’t see much of that story in here, except maybe the line “don’t like no Aborigine”. This mish mash of strange influences gives the impression on paper of a whole load of nonsense, but I think that’s what originally appealed to me about the track, because put together they somehow work very well. Even the track’s title seems have only one sole reference in the lyrics – the word relativity in the chorus.

Over all, this is a muddled but incredibly likable track. Wikipedia reckons it was one of the very first examples of a commercially successful track containing samples, reaching number 11 in the UK charts in 1986. I think that may be over egging the pudding slightly – bits of stolen dialogue may technically be considered samples, but they hardly have the sophistication of tracks by the likes of M/A/R/R/S or Bomb The Bass which would appear in the following couple of years. Still, this track is fun and interesting in equal measure, and yet seems to have been largely forgotten, which is a shame. I suppose it was 23 years ago, but still, I would recommend it to anyone.

Easy by Faith No More
Lionel Ritchie is one of those people whose popularity mystifies me slightly, but it cannot be denied that he has certainly made his mark on the history of pop. He wrote this song and performed it as lead singer of seventies soul outfit The Commodores, who later went on to have even bigger success with the sappy chart topping ballad Three Times A Lady. Ritchie went solo in the eighties and his career went from strength to strength, peaking commercially with the incredibly twee Hello, a million seller in 1984.

Although I was vaguely aware of this song, as a kid I had understandably assumed that there would be nothing of any interest in the back catalogue of the man who gave the world Dancing On The Ceiling, but in 1993 this cover by funk metal outfit Faith No More came along and I was forced to reconsider my opinion. Weepy piano ballads are rarely my thing, but this is an exception, it is a great record. It just took a load of hairy unwashed men to cover it before I realised.

Easy is told from the point of view of a man in a failing relationship. The opening lines “I know it sounds funny but I just can’t stand the pain, girl I’m leaving you tomorrow” set the scene for the kind of open and honest assessment of feelings that we men are not supposed to be any good at. The fascinating thing about the lyrics is that the narrator is not leaving because his partner is cheating or because he’s found someone else, or any other major catastrophe that you might expect from such a song, instead he’s just going because he’s had enough. This relationship has been dragging on for a long time, he’s not getting anything out of it any more, and although he’s desperately sad to admit it he’s just realised he no longer cares either way.

This is not the sort of stuff that would make the Rikki Lake Show, instead it’s just a normal relationship going sour, the kind of humdrum story being played out in relationships all over the world at any given time. To make such a popular and memorable song on the subject is quite an achievement. It really is popular too – the phrase “Easy like Sunday morning” has passed into the language in its own right, a sure sign that a song has wedged itself forever in a lot of people’s minds.

One of the reasons this version was such a big hit was that people were simply surprised by it – Faith No More seemed about as likely to cover a weepy love song from the seventies as I did to like one. They clearly just recognised it was great though, and embelishing the sliding electric guitar instrumental break of the original gave them an opportunity to put their own mark on it.

Oddly, although The Commodores’ version was called Easy, my 7” red vinyl copy of Faith No More’s cover is filed under the spare room bed by the letter I, as they called it I’m Easy. For some reason iTunes seem to have changed the title back, which is a minor point but actually represents the difference between me reviewing it now or in 2011. It maskes no odds to me though, I’m Easy.

Ed-Ucation by Dr Dre featuring Eddie Griffin
Eddie Griffin is a popular American actor and comedian who has starred in a lot of films which I have heard of but which don’t sound very good. Ed-Ucation is a one and a half minute skit he performed on Dr Dre’s album 2001, on which he vents some spleen about single mothers. It is quite funny.

This subject is obviously a bit of a bug bear for Griffin, and I am pretty confident he fits more swearing into ninety seconds than anyone else on my iPod, but still gets his somewhat dubious point across very well. Essentially, his argument is that certain women have affairs with married men, and then when there is a hint that either guilt or common sense are driving their partners back to their wives they deliberately get pregnant, in an attempt not to be dumped. He goes on to suggest that when the man leaves them anyway, they proceed to bring the child up in the belief that their father is a bad person for being absent, as opposed to what he sees as the truth, which is that the child’s existence is all the mother’s fault for making herself excessively available in the first place, and the father is actually a good man, as evidenced by the fact that he spends his life with his “real family”.

I guess you could argue that it is not very common in popular culture that we get to hear the absent father’s point of view, so in that sense this track is quite refreshing. The gaping hole in his argument is that the male half of the scenario he explains obviously shouldn’t have been having an affair in the first place, he makes out like the man has no choice but to have sex with the woman simply because she makes herself available, as though an entirely feeble lack of self control is a male trait that should just be accepted.

From the point of view of this track though, Griffin’s morally questionable point of view is made irrelevant by the fact that his colourful way of expressing it is really quite funny. He talks about middle aged women telling their daughters to “get a man that got a good job girl. Get a man with a lot of money who can treat you good girl” before asking (well, shouting) “What happened to just falling in love with a ****** with a bus pass?”. I hate to say it, but on that at least he does have a point, and it suddenly becomes clear why the vocals are read over a sample from Diamonds Are Forever.

Ed-Ucation is a fairly silly track, with a point to make which I don’t agree with, but my iPod is a broad church, and who could fail to raise a smile at this manic character screaming that single mothers should tell their children “Moma was a ***. I was weekend *****”? Well, not me anyway.

Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles
As has become pretty clear by now, there are a lot of Beatles tracks on my iPod. At first I was a little concerned that this would mean I would run out of things to say, but so far at least they all seem to have enough individuality to easily warrant 500 words of their own, and that’s more than can be said for some songs by artists who are only on here once.

Although like all Beatles tracks Eleanor Rigby is credited to Lennon & McCartney, Paul wrote this one himself, with a bit of inspiration from all of the others after he sang them an early version of it. It was released as the double A-side to the single Yellow Submarine, and as a track on the album Revolver, on the same day in August 1966. The single was number one for four weeks, the album for seven, although the impact of both on popular music ever since kind of makes chart performance seem a little irrelevant.

This track marked a real turning point for the Beatles. At this stage in the sixties it was still quite unusual for a successful single not to be about the usual teenage concerns of falling in love. The Beatles had already moved away from that formula (Paperback Writer topped the charts earlier the same year), but Eleanor Rigby was something else. Here was a track that very openly dealt with sadness, loneliness and desolation, a song about the life of a person for whom life seemed to pass her by. The imagery of empty churchyards, priests darning socks and funerals which nobody attends may not be the stuff of phsychodelia which they produced later, but they are also a long way from the three minute pop songs of their contemporaries. The Beatles were growing up, and not just taking their audience with them, but the whole of popular culture.

Interestingly, Eleanor Rigby is the first Beatles track to feature none of the band playing instruments. Instead of the usual pop backing track, although thanks to the harmonies from John and George, Ringo is the only member not to feature at all. Instead of the usual pop backing track, the song features an orchestral score composed by George Martin and performed by session musicians. This really adds to the moribund overtones when the song ends with the title character’s funeral, an unusual route for a song to take and an unusual backing to match. It works spectacularly well, and the same technique has been used in many hit singles since (Annie Lennox’s Love Song For A Vampire springs to mind, but I’m sure there are better examples).

Essentially, this is just another example of why the Beatles were pioneers in pop music, and why they are still listened to over 40 years later. They were so consistently, spectacularly good that it almost gets boring pointing it out, but doing so track by track every now and again is making me listen to them in a new frame of mind, and I’m enjoying it.

Emerge by Fischerspooner
Back in the pre-download, pre-Youtube days when I would buy CD singles just because the sleeves looked interesting and they were less than £2, I spotted this in my local Virgin Megastore. It was clearly dance music, so normally I would have steered well clear, but it had 2 stickers on it that sealed the deal - one said “This year’s Zombie Nation” and the other simply stated “Best single ever”. I reasoned that whoever Fischerspooner were, you had to admire their confidence.

It turned out that they are an “electroclash duo and performance troupe” (thank you Wikipedia) from New York, formed by Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner. That description couldn’t exactly be applied to many of my favourite acts, but it is at least far more interesting than anything you usually find when looking into who dance records are actually by. (I firmly believe no good ever came from aspiring dance producers spending months working on computer programs in their bedrooms in Belgium, and sadly the pop charts since the late nineties are littered with the evidence to back this up.)

Pleasingly, Emerge is as interesting as Fischerspooner sound, in fact it’s really rather good. The Zombie Nation comparison is entirely justified, I quite liked that track too (actually called Kernkraft 400 and by Zombie Nation, it was ages before I realised that) and the underlying bass sound here is quite similar. Instead of that track’s manic, squidgy synth sounds though, Emerge is all Italian house piano, New Order style dead pan male vocals and an increasingly hysterical female vocal circa 1992. The lyrics are basically just the repeated assertion that “you don’t need to emerge from nothing”, which I have thought about at length and have concluded it would be impossible to do anyway. The man also occasionally says “Feels good, looks good, sounds good too” which is not very modest but almost certainly correct.

It’s a little bit experimental while at the same time remaining refreshingly poppy, not exactly like anything you’ve heard before but quite a lot like several things. There is also a crazy breakdown bit in the middle that sounds like it was inspired by the stylophone, a pocket electric organ operated with a pretend pen that I was first introduced to by something (I can’t remember what) presented by Rolf Harris. There’s just not enough of that in the charts these days.

Sadly, it seems that when I really get into a dance record, no one else does (and vice versa for that matter), as Emerge failed to dent the charts at all when first released. About a year after I bought it though is was re-issued, and reached number 25 in the UK charts. When I think of all the masses of crap that has been successful in the name of dance music, and then consider that this track missed the top 20, it just confirms for me that it is a genre I will never, ever understand.

Empire by Kasabian
I have to admit, music wise I took my off the ball a bit in the mid nineties. Saving for my wedding and honeymoon and yet getting into loads of debt anyway, I had no spare cash for record shops at all. My NME reading days were long behind me, and university friends who had been such an influence on my record collection were now scattered all over the country in similar positions to me. With internet access only at work, and work being in a small open plan office where I definitely couldn’t get away with spending half my day on Youtube, the only place to hear new music was on the radio. For new music the only choice on the airwaves was Radio 1, and their play list usually consisted of 10% songs I really liked, a further 20% that were OK but I wouldn’t buy, and the remaining 70% was music that I would rather never hear again. I rarely turned on the radio.

If I had been paying more attention I have no doubt at all that I would have really got into Kasabian. As it was I did buy LSF on CD single, but that remained the only track of theirs I owned until I downloaded Empire at the start of this year, almost three years after it was released as the first single and title track from their second album. The final decision to fork out 79p worth of iTunes gift vouchers on Empire was actually made after hearing it played quite loudly whilst waiting for the wife outside the changing rooms in Next. Quite how it came to this from buying the NME every week I am still trying to work out.

Kasabian seem to make music with festivals in mind. It’s like the word ‘anthemic’ (which my spell checker is insisting isn’t a word at all, but I’m sure it is) was invented for them, and that’s no bad thing. My main regret when I hear the line “We’re all wasting away-hey-hey-hey” is that I’m not surrounded by 100,000 other people hearing the same thing, it is perfect music for drunken indie sing-alongs. It seems to be about the folly of war, a subject that was very much in the public consciousness at the time this was released, and although the lyrics are a bit too indirect for it to be considered a protest song, it is nevertheless a noble subject on which to write pop music, so they score points for that.

Possibly the most intriguing thing about the track is the strange bit at the start before the music begins. I have been trying for a while to work out what that guy is saying, but it turns out no one knows. It is actually a voicemail left by someone who dialled the wrong number and got one of the band member’s mobiles. I quite like the idea, but I did wonder if the guy was ever identified whether he’s be entitles to performers royalties. There could be a big cheque in it for someone.

Enjoy The Silence by Depeche Mode
A while ago, while promoting something or other (probably a greatest hits collection I guess) Depeche Mode’s record company re-issued as limited editions all of their singles on CD. Looking at a display in Virgin Megastore I decided to buy a couple of them, they were £3.99 each or 3 for £10, but there was only 2 that I thought looked any good, and Enjoy The Silence was one of them. Funny to think a few years later I could download them for less than a quarter of the price.

Enjoy The Silence was released in 1990 and became Depeche Mode’s first UK top 10 hit for six years, and their only ever US top 10 hit. I remember at the time being slightly mystified as to who liked music like this, and reasoning that it must be people at least twice my age. I was 13 then and I’m 32 now, so it seems that maybe I was right.

Enjoy The Silence is technically perfect. Catchy enough to get in your head but not so much it’s annoying, the track has pitch perfect production and a faultless vocal. The guitar bit is masterfully simple but fits over the smooth synthesised backing to the point where you barely even notice the juxtaposition of synths and strings. The lyrics are memorable and meaningful in equal measure, managing to convey a sense of seriousness despite fitting only four syllables into most lines. There is just one problem I have with Enjoy The Silence – it’s ever so slightly boring, and although I realise this could be seen as contradictory, I think it’s the way this track demonstrates that striving for musical perfection leads down the route of boredom that makes me so interested in it.

The most obvious reason for all this is that music is an art form, not mathematics. Maybe this latter incarnation of Depeche Mode were going for a scientific approach to making pop music, but the flip side of all the perfection described in the paragraph above is that, in the end, it just sounds like they weren’t trying that hard. The vocals may be perfect for the track, but really it’s not exactly a challenging song to sing, it’s very flat. The way the guitar hook takes turns with it’s synthesised equivalent makes it sound like this was worked out in a spreadsheet, and the backing track never misses a beat, but maybe it should.

Having said that, it is of course a great record, an interesting curio in the footnotes of pop history, like an experiment which kind of worked but which everyone agreed it would be best if it wasn’t repeated. In case you’re wondering, the other Depeche Mode single I bought was the pop classic from much earlier in their career, Just Can’t Get Enough. That song was recently brought to a new generation via a cover by The Saturdays, but I won’t be holding my breath for their version of Enjoy The Silence.

Enola Gay by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
On first listen, Enola Gay is a catchy, cheerful tune with an odd title and lyrics which you want to sing along with but can’t quite make out. Although it made the top 10 in 1980, I didn’t know it until the late nineties when I bought a compilation CD called Electric Dreams. That album looked like it had lots of tracks on it from the 80s it which I didn’t know but ought to, and this definitely turned out to be one of them.

The song is named after the plane which dropped the first ever atomic bomb to be used during warfare, on the Japanese town of Hiroshima, thereby putting an end to the second world war. 80,000 people were killed immediately, and the death toll including those who died from radiation exposure was though to be as high as 140,000 by the end of 1945. This is, to say the least, a strange subject for an early eighties dance floor filler, and makes the song something of an oddity to say the least.

The lyrics are basically a criticism of the decision to drop the bomb, and although the second world war is a vastly complicated subject on which I have relatively little knowledge, on the face of it you can hardly argue with OMD’s sentiment. At the end of the chorus they sing “It shouldn’t ever have to end this way” and my gut feeling is that they are certainly right, although it’s worth noting that they don’t seem to have any other suggestions. Having said that, God forbid mankind should ever find himself in such a terrible situation of his own making again, but if it did happen I have a feeling we’d be just as safe with idealistic 80s pop stars in charge as we would with modern day politicians.

One of the things that fascinates me about this track is the thought about how many people will have heard it, even liked it, but not known what it was about. It really does initially come across simply as a genius synth pop song, easily as good if not better than the best of OMDs contemporaries like Soft Cell and the Human League, but you would never guess there was anything deeper going on unless you knew what the title meant or actually read the lyrics. I bet early 80s school discos were soundtracked by this infectious tune without the children or adults really knowing what they were listening to. Maybe that was OMDs intention.

The Bob Dylan fan in me can’t help thinking that if you’re going to make a song about the horrors of war then you should at least allow people to hear what you’ve got to say, but then again maybe that’s why this song is so good, and so different. The anti nuclear debate that went on in the 80s was put to music in this song, but if the music was all you were interested in it didn’t matter, you would like this track too.

Epic by Faith No More
This summer I was slightly drunk one night and watching the Reading and Leeds festival coverage on BBC3. Faith No More, a band who I didn’t know an awful lot about, were brilliant. The singer seemed to have the whole crowd enraptured, and especially during Epic. Jo Whiley (or was it Edith Bowman? Well, one or the other) said after this song that it had formed part of the soundtrack to her youth, and although I’d completely forgotten about it, I also have a feeling I may have heard it at the time and thought it was pretty cool.

The only thing I remembered clearly about Faith No More was that they did the fantastic cover of The Commodore’s Easy which I was reviewing last week, and after that I’d bought one more single by them, Digging The Grave, on 12” blue vinyl after seeing them do it on Top Of The Pops. Somehow though the line “You want it all but you can’t have it” which forms most of the chorus to Epic awoke a feeling of being in my early teens and a little confused about whether pure pop or heavy metal was the way forward, sometime before I was saved by indie.

I say early teens, but it was only just, as Epic, Faith No More’s first hit single, was actually released in February 1990, shortly before my 13th birthday. It reached number 37 in the UK, but was actually a top ten hit in America, at a time when the US charts were far more receptive to hard rock than ours, and before they became swamped with dull R&B. Far from being a straightforward heavy metal track though, this single was actually somewhat pioneering in that if you were pigeon holing it you couldn’t really avoid the fact that a very different genre seems to have had a major influence on it – this is actually Rock Rap. Lead singer Mike Patton’s delivery of the verses is essentially via the medium of shouting, making the over all effect here seem like the Beastie Boys but without the sampling. Bearing in mind this was only a couple of years after Fight For Your Right To Party, maybe that band were a big influence on Faith No More, because although their comedic tendencies are not in evidence here, their vocal and musical styles are.

Interestingly, all of the lyric websites that Google throws up when I search for this song are suggesting the call and response section near the end of Epic, where Patton shouts “What is it?”, suggest that the rest of the band are shouting back at him “It’s it”. That is both quite banal and slightly different to what I believe the crowd at Reading were shouting back at him earlier this year, which was very similar to “it” but just two letters longer. “What is it? – It’s it” seems to me a somewhat pointless exchange to have several times over, and hardly in the spirit of heavy metal. Regardless of what lyricsfreak.com claims, I think I will carry on shouting what I believe to be the correct response while listening to this song alone in the car. If someone else is with me I’ll stay quiet.

The Eton Rifles by The Jam
I mentioned while reviewing Down In The Tube Station At Midnight that when I first got into The Jam I got the impression they had been a one band crusade to portray the south east of England as an unpleasant place through the medium of post punk pub rock, and The Eton Rifles is another fine example. This time though, instead of an honest working man being mugged, we have all out class war.

This song was inspired by a local newspaper article Paul Weller read in 1978 about a fight that had broken out when a socialist workers’ demonstration in Slough was harangued by a bunch of public schoolboys from the title’s esteemed seat of learning, which is just down the road. Assuming the stereotype about posh people being soft would see them through, the demonstrators laid into the toffs only to find out that they were actually quite a force to be reckoned with (“All that rugby puts hairs on your chest” as Weller puts it). Much to their surprise the workers “came out of it naturally the worst”, and less surprisingly the police blamed their leaders for starting it in the first place.

What strikes me about this odd tale is that it is a particularly English scenario, where citizens at either end of the social, political and economic spectrum physically attack each other for no real reason, just because they’re different. Clearly neither group came out of this incident looking good, but what it reflects on even worse is English society as a whole, a place where, especially in the 1970s, simmering tensions over the extreme difference between the lower and upper echelons could so easily boil over into the kind of brainless violence which is never going to achieve anything for either group. The ability to take this concept which was both familiar and ridiculous at the same time and turn it into a genuinely catchy pop record is very typical of The Jam, and is a great example of what made that band so good. In the 1990s Blur displayed a similar ability, but I can’t think of any band since then who have even come close.

Interestingly, The Eton Rifles hit the news in 2008 when one of that school’s most well known alumni, David Cameron, spectacularly missed the point of the whole song, claiming in an interview that this song meant a lot to him and his pals when he was a student, as if he believed it was some kind of protest song which came down on the side of the public school boys. David Cameron, of course, would say absolutely anything to anyone if he believed it was what they wanted to hear, and while this may be a repellent characteristic typical of idiot Tories who plan to rob the poor to give to the rich, he does at least seem very good at it. He may well be appalling, but for the moment he seems to be getting away with it. His comments also serve as a healthy reminder that while rock music and politics may mix quite well, rock music and actual politicians should be kept apart at all times.

Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve Fallen In Love With)? by The Buzzcocks
As I’ve mentioned before, the starting point for me when trying to decide what to write about the songs on my iPod is often to work out when I first heard them. I have absolutely no idea when I first heard this song though, it’s just one of those tracks that always seems to have been there. I have it on 7” vinyl so I must have spotted it in a second hand record shop at some point during my youth, and I guess I must have already known it. I also have it on several different compilation albums, and in every case it’s always one of the best tracks on there. It’s status as one of the most recognisable rock records ever 31 years after it was released is all the more impressive when you consider it never actually reached the UK top 10.

If it wasn’t for Teenage Kicks by The Undertones, I would now be typing that Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve Fallen In Love With)? is the most perfect combination of teen pop issues and punk rock musical style ever committed to record. It still might be, I just find it impossible to decide between the two. It is one of those songs that tells you everything you need to know about it in the title, and indeed the chorus is simply an incredibly infectious, urgent repetition of the same eight words. It is also unique, I believe, in introducing the world to the word “shouldn’t’ve”, which I still sometimes stare at in wonderment when I see it written down. It sounds like it should be a word, and yet it looks ridiculous.

There is virtually nothing to dislike about this track. The innocent questioning of the title is instantly charming, and any song that deals with teenage emotions that seem so complex at the time always stands a chance of being a hit with slightly older people who feel like they’ve been through that and look back on those times with fondness. The song essentially has only two verses, and in the first one lead singer Pete Shelley sings to the girl in question “you stir my natural emotions” with all the naivety of someone who believes they’re the first person to go through such feelings. It’s all so simple, as is the tune he sings it to. There may be an element of post punk commerciality here, but it is really only a minor step away from early rock and roll, which is what makes the whole thing so entertaining, and why this song endures when so many punk tracks are viewed as ancient relics by modern music consumers.

You only have to look at where the song has cropped up over the years, from animated film soundtracks to romantic comedies and adverts for cosmetics, to recognise its universal appeal. Every now and then a song comes along which just seems to define the whole point of popular music, and this apparently throw away bit of pop punk, which has become an anthem for every generation since it was written, is proof that you can never really tell where that next spark of genius wilol come from.

Every Breath You Take by The Police
It’s ten to twelve at night at your cousin’s wedding, you realised over an hour ago that you have had far too much to drink and that the rest of the family have noticed, but now you sort of feel like with that behind you there’s nothing to lose. Keen to slow things down so he can start disassembling his equipment, the DJ has gone straight from Come On Eileen to Every Breath You Take, and you’ve decided the dance floor is the place to be, even if you are alone.

Working behind a bar at hundreds of wedding receptions as a teenager I have seen that scenario played out many times, and yes, it may even have me on a few occasions too. There is just something about Sting’s desperately sad, genuinely creepy ballad that makes the inebriated think if it’s been a bad night then maybe dancing alone to a song about stalking will turn it all around. It never does.

I have always been very sceptical about Sting, for as long as I remember he seemed somewhat aloof and behaved like he believed people ought to listen to his music for their own good. Even so, there is simply no denying that this song is brilliant, a sign that while he may not have always been in touch with the reality of his audiences’ lives, he did have a real knack for writing stuff that they could relate to. Guitarist Stuart Copeland apparently recorded the seminal guitar hook on this track in one take off the top of his head, which maybe goes some way to explain why Sting’s solo career was so creatively void of everything that made The Police so great. He may have been the perfect front man for an early eighties pop rock outfit, but a fair portion of the talent involved in their music seems to have been elsewhere.

Every Breath You Take spent 8 weeks at number one in America, and 4 in the UK. The music and the chorus also formed the main backing to Puff Daddy’s 1997 hit I’ll Be Missing You, which incredibly was an even bigger seller than the original. Sting will, I think, never be short of a few pennies. In my weaker moments (when I hear Fields Of Gold for example) I wonder if legislation ought to be passed to get it all off him, but bearing in mind the gift to mass popular culture that was Every Breath You Take, maybe I shouldn’t begrudge the old fella. However many times you hear it, and however awful the circumstances, this is a truly great song.

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic by The Police
Typical. You wait years for a Police song to come along, and then two come at once. Except you don’t of course, because regardless of Every Breath You Take yesterday it’s not that long since I was reviewing Don’t Stand So Close To Me. Also, does anyone ever really want to hear a Police song? I don’t think it’s ever occurred to me, which is odd because whenever I do hear one I usually enjoy it.

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic topped the UK charts in 1981, although Sting had written the majority of it five years earlier. It is a fairly standard song from them, with a strong melody, his distinctive vocals and minimal but still somehow prominent guitar, with the added extra of keyboards quite high in the mix, giving it a more polished feel than some of their other stuff.

The song itself seems to be, as the title suggests, the tale of a man smitten by a woman, which is actually unusually uncomplicated for a Police hit. I guess that could be a reflection of the fact that the lyrics were written much earlier than many of their other most well known songs. I have always been intrigued what, in the context of a mans’ love for a woman, the line “It’s a big enough umbrella, but it’s always me who ends up getting wet” might actually mean. In that sense the this song is a bit like several by Coldplay – it sounds on the face of it like very carefully considered prose, but when you listen a bit closer you realise it could just as easily be entirely meaningless. In my job I often meet people who try hard to give the impression of great intelligence and understanding when in actual fact there is not much going on behind it, I wonder if Sting is the same? I suppose if you can write a tune like this it doesn’t really matter either way.

Really, in terms of my iPod, this song is, unlike other Police songs on here, a bit of a filler. Always a pleasure to hear, but not exactly the most exciting 4 minutes you could imagine. The process of writing reviews, and therefore thinking a lot about individual tracks, has occasionally thrown up things like that, so maybe this track will soon be retired for a while. It is still pretty good though, so maybe not as well.

Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison
One day last year I was driving back to work from the dentists and heard an interview Jo Wiley was doing with Mika. She asked him if he had a musical guilty pleasure, and he got quite animated on the subject. He refuted the whole idea of guilt pleasures, saying that if you like a record then it must be good, and if it’s good you shouldn’t be ashamed of it. I do sympathise with his point of view, it makes sense, but I can’t help thinking things are a bit more complicated than that. For example, I know that pretty much everything about this track is spectacularly bad, but I still really like it, and I can’t really explain why.

Every Rose Has Its Thorn was a US number one single at Christmas in 1988, and reached the top 20 over hear a few months later. It is, at its heart, a country tinged rock ballad, unusual for Poison, a moderately successful American glam metal band with whom my sister was irrationally obsessed in the late 80s and early 90s. Funnily enough, considering I have always liked this track, it was not one of the ones she really liked, she preferred it when they were rocking as opposed to gently swaying.

The thing about this track is that it is entirely ridiculous. The lyrics are just laughable, but are presented in a way that is meant to be entirely serious. In Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure the main characters, in an attempt to demonstrate poetry of a standard that would be good enough to see them accepted into heaven, get one of the biggest laughs of the film by simply reading out the chorus. Tellingly, it works and they’re allowed in. The bit they read – “Every rose has its thorn, just like every night has its dawn, just like every cowboy sings a sad, sad song”- is simply so absurd you can hardly believe anyone even committed it to paper, let alone reached number one with it in a country that culturally leads where the rest of the world follow.

So why is it here? I think the answer to that lies in the absurdity – the notion that someone was naïve enough to think this was a good record, and then millions of people were naïve enough to agree, is actually quite charming. In fact I suppose Mika would argue that actually makes it a good record by default. This track effortlessly epitomises the exact same ridiculousness that The Darkness took years to carefully perfect before having one hit album and disappearing forever. They were joking, and the difference is that Poison clearly weren’t, but it’s such a fine line that I think you can like them both for the same reason. Every Rose Has Its Thorn may be hard to justify on this list, but its going nowhere.

Everybody Hurts by REM
What is music actually for? It’s a very simple question with no obvious answer. My initial thought is that it exists because people like it, but to take on the role of an irritating four year old the next question has to be why do they like it? Ultimately, I think the best music is music that elicits a response – hearing it might make you laugh, dance, or tap your foot – hell, it might even make you go to HMV to buy the CD. That is the test though – if music changes the way you feel or behave, then the artist is a success, they’re making a difference.

Everybody Hurts is really an amazing record. I know this because if I’m in the right mood, (or wrong mood I guess), and I really intensely listen to it, it makes me cry. I don’t cry that often, and I can’t justify why it would happen, but it’s true. There is just something about the mournful vocals, slow pace and orchestration here that make this an incredibly sad record. I can’t really explain it – it’s not like anyone’s died or anything – it just triggers something that makes me very sad. Maybe it’s the crushing inevitability of the title, maybe I empathise with the sentiment, or maybe I’m just a big softie. Either way, it makes me cry, and I console myself with the belief that a lot of other people feel the same way.

Depressing music is a strange phenomenon, as it’s intricately tied up with complicated human emotions which are very difficult to rationally understand. It’s easy enough to see why a person might like a song that makes them want to dance after a couple of beers, much harder to see why they might want to listen to something that makes them want to turn off all the lights and weep into a couple of beers. Proof if proof were needed that we are strange, irrational creatures.

I remember hearing Simon Bates play this track on his late morning show on Radio 1 around the time it was released in 1992. He tended to let it play for its entire five minutes, right to the end of the fade, before he started talking again, and he sometimes sounded like he might have been crying himself. It wasn’t long after that he was replaced by Simon Mayo.

Bill Berry, the guy who wrote Everybody Hurts, was REM’s drummer (probably still is come to think of it). He apparently wrote the song with deliberately simple sentiment, because he was aiming it at high school children, hence the uncomplicated nature of the ‘everything will be alright in the end’ theme. That makes my private emotional outbursts that result from hearing it seem even dafter, leaving aside the question of why you’d want to listen to something that makes you sad. Somehow it’s just a lovely song though, and there’s no harm in that.

Everybody In The Place by The Prodigy
When I was 12 years old my parents, bemused an exasperated by their inability to get me interested in anything at all except music, gave up and bought me a second hand set of record decks for Christmas. To say I went up to my room and they didn’t see me again until I was in my twenties is only a slight exaggeration.

I had a tendency to sort all of my singles into alphabetical order and play them back to back, over the course of several weeks. This would throw up lots of challenges in terms of mixing – fair enough, if one record ends fairly suddenly you can just start the next one, but what do you do with fades. I spent hours enjoying making records thrown together by fate sound like they belonged together, but I never did manage to move seamlessly from Everybody Hurts to Everybody In The Place.

Everybody In The Place reached number 2 in the charts in early 1992. Charly had been the big dance hit of summer 1991, but there was nothing at all about that track which suggested the relatively anonymous artists would be anything other than the usual dance music fly by nights who had one big hit and were never heard of again. Everybody In The Place, therefore, came as something of a surprise, especially as it was just as big as its predecessor, and actually went one place higher in the charts. Could The Prodigy buck the trend and actually become a viable chart act? The answer was a resounding yes, although they didn’t do it without losing a fair bit of the anonymity that so many other dance acts of the time tended to hide behind.

I have of course mentioned already my well thought out hatred of everything about dance music, only to continuously contradict myself by naming dance records I like. That does fairly neatly sum up my attitude to the genre though, because the enormous majority of dance music I have ever heard has been mind numbing drivel, but I still feel the need to acknowledge that just occasionally over the years it has been done very well. The Prodigy are, however, the only dance act who I have always wanted to hear what they’re doing. I don’t always like it, but I know there’s a chance I will, and even when I don’t it is still challenging and interesting.

Everybody In The Place itself actually comes from a time when I was still slightly on the fence with dance music, a more innocent time before Spanish people were outnumbered in large parts of the Mediterranean by people from Essex on 18-30 all you can drink holidays staggering around to the moronic sound of 9PM (Til I Come). Dance music in the first couple of years of the 90s was actually exciting, it seemed to be a constantly changing scene offering something which was mainstream and yet also quite edgy. Everybody In The Place epitomises that, with what seemed at the time to be an incredibly fast but insistent tune the like of which could never have been recorded in any other genre. It still sounds quite mental now, and that feeling of hearing something genuinely fresh and unique still comes back to me when I hear it now, which is why I like it so much. It is exactly the absence of that feeling which made so much dance music that followed it so bloody awful.

Every Day Is Like Sunday by Morrissey
I have always been a fan of good opening lines. I think if a song writer can grab you with the first few words of a pop song, then they have your attention for the whole thing. In this song, the lines “Trudging slowly over wet sand, back to the bench where your clothes were stolen” is almost completely perfect, setting the scene the rest of the track better than any other song I can think of, and call me sad but I do think about it a lot. This is one of my all time favourite songs.

Every Day Is Like Sunday is about the British seaside. Anyone who went to Rhyl for days out as a child will empathise with this song, (I know because I did), and I am sure the same could be said for many other faded Victorian holiday destinations around our coast. In my mind the British seaside and this song are now so synonymous that I start humming it involuntarily whenever I find myself there.

Brilliant though they are the opening lines are not actually my favourite part of the song – that comes in the second verse when he mentions postcards on the promenade and simply sings “how I dearly wish I was not here”. In those seven words Morrissey describes the crushing inevitability of boredom and disappointment in his subject, while simultaneously using language that fully exposes the hilarity at the heart of the aloof pomposity that makes people love him and hate him in equal numbers. I can hardly think of anything any song writer has ever written that is as good but also that seems so natural. You could argue that Morrissey is best when mocking tedium, and on this track he is doing it more than any other song of his I know.

Despite his absolute contempt for its subject matter, this song also exposes the fundamental weakness in the argument that Morrissey makes songs which are just miserable. It is actually quite hilarious – surely no one can take the line “This is the coastal town they forgot to close down, come Armageddon, come Armageddon come” seriously. I don’t think he’s actually advocating the deaths of everyone who lives at the seaside in a nuclear holocaust, he’s just using humour to make a point. If it doesn’t make you at least smile, that doesn’t mean it’s miserable, it just means you don’t have the right sense of humour to appreciate it.

Released in 1988, Every Day Is Like Sunday was Morrissey’s second solo hit, reaching number 9 in the UK chart. I genuinely think it might be my favourite song of his with or without The Smiths, and bearing in mind the quantity of their songs there are on this list that is high praise indeed.

Everything Is Borrowed by The Streets
After being a huge fan of The Streets first two albums, their third one, The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living, was a major disappointment. That record, which Mike Skinner described as a “guilt-ridden indulgence”, serves as an interesting case study of how much one bad album can damage an artist. Everything Is Borrowed is the title track and first single from album number four, and despite seeing Skinner back on top form it was a commercial flop, the single reaching number 37 and the album following up two number ones by peaking at 7. It deserved a lot more, but a lot of former fans had simply been put off by the last record.

Everything Is Borrowed finds Mike Skinner in reflective mood, opining that he “came to this world with nothing and I’ll leave with nothing but love”. It is full of his typically clever wordplay and a catchy chorus is sung over a backing which sounds familiar but occasionally takes you by surprise. He talks (or raps – I’m not sure that one has ever been properly settled) about simple pleasures like reading good books, getting married and the feeling of the rain on his scars. He sounds like someone who has done an awful lot of thinking and decided that ultimately he might as well just be happy. Lots of questions are raised giving the impression that he doesn’t know how he would react to different circumstances, but he’s looking forward to finding out, as with “when the wind of change whistles into play, will I blink or flinch away?”. Not knowing the answers seems almost like a challenge – “just when I discovered the meaning of life they change it”. That quote makes me wonder who “they” are.

Mike Skinner is someone who I will always want to hear every album he does, because he’s just so endearing as a person I’m always interested to find out what he’s thinking, or ‘where his head’s at’, if you will. On one of his earlier records he describes himself as “your local city poet”, which goes some way towards describing the almost personal relationship I as a listener feel like I have with him. Basically, listening to one of his records is like hearing him pour his heart out, and that always makes for interesting listening. Everything Is Borrowed is a case in point, this is him telling the listeners that he’s been through a lot and although he doesn’t yet have all the answers he is at least fairly content.

The critical reception to the album, and in particular this very radio friendly, inoffensive but still exciting single, is actually quite a sad indictment of the late noughties music industry. In the past, when the most highly acclaimed artists (David Bowie, Bob Dylan etc) had the odd dodgy album it was easily swept under the carpet in anticipation of the next one being much better. The Streets on the other hand won multiple awards for their first album and conquered the charts with their second, turning the early promise into large scale commercial success, but when the third album was a bit duff they were written off. Anything could happen next, maybe Skinner will be accepted back onto the Radio 1 A-list with the right marketing, or maybe he won’t bother trying. Either way, it is a genuine shame that a track this good has been lost to popular culture, it deserved far more recognition.

Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac
I have mentioned before that I am a fan of the website www.kissthisguy.com, which features misheard lyrics. This song was released as a single in 1988 shortly before my 11th birthday, and seemed to be on Radio 1 every 10 minutes. To this very day whenever it comes on I still sing the first line as “Can you hear me Colin?”. I now appreciate that she actually sings “calling”, in fact I think really that I knew that all along, I just think the song is much more fun if you think of the whole thing in the context of it being sung to someone called Colin. Interestingly, “Colin close the curtains” (actually “Go on and…”) from the start of Save Tonight by Eagle Eye Cherry is exactly the same, only even funnier.

Everywhere lives up to its title, as that is exactly where this song seemed to be when I was at school. For years I don’t think I even knew what it was, it was just that pleasant song off the radio with the catchy “Oh I…” bit at the start of the chorus. It was sort of ubiquitous, a song that was impossible to dislike but also quite difficult to focus on. It sort of took place around me, on the school bus or blaring from my sister’s radio, without me ever realising it was there. Years later, when I met the wife, I found she had a copy of Tango In The Night on CD. It had never occurred to me that I should own anything by Fleetwood Mac other than the seminal sixties instrumental Albatross, but it turned out I should have been paying more attention. It is a great eighties FM radio pop record, and I was amazed at how many of the songs brought childhood memories flooding back even though as far as I know I’d never heard the album in full before. Everywhere and Little Lies are my two favourite records on there, both as good as each other.

I do really enjoy writing these reviews, but occasionally I struggle, and when I do it tends to be with a track like Everywhere. It’s a great record, but there isn’t really an angle to approach it from, it just sort of floats along pleasantly, all synthesised backing and smoothly delivered, whispery vocals. ‘Nice’ seems to be a good word to describe it, although I have a niggling feeling that that’s not a very good word for describing anything. You can let Everywhere wash over you, it doesn’t exactly demand your attention, but not all music has to do that in order to be good. This really is good, and unusually that’s pretty much all I have to say about it.

Expectations by Belle and Sebastian
One weekend in the summer of 1999, I went to a record fair in Liverpool with a friend and my uncle. I had never been to one before, and wished as soon as I got there that I had a lot more money. After hours of looking through CD racks I left with a live Nirvana bootleg and a copy of Tigermilk by Belle and Sebastian. I had read about the album, and how the band were a bunch of music students from Glasgow who originally only managed to get 1000 copies of the album released on vinyl Every single critic had loved it, and although it never seemed likely to be a commercial success I was intrigued enough to part with £10 for a copy of the re-issued CD. I was also quite taken by the cover art, which shows a photograph of a woman breast-feeding a cartoon tiger.

Tigermilk turned out to be a melodic, quiet piece of wistful genius. There were only 6 months of the 90s left when I got into it, but it was still one of my favourite albums of the decade. The tunes are naggingly irresistible, but the real attraction is the lyrics. Each track is a fascinating insight into the fine detail of what is going on inside a character’s head, so well observed that you instantly feel empathy with these strangely troubled people.

Expectations is about a misunderstood school girl who doesn’t fit in with the other children or with the expectations of her teachers, and whose mother simply wants her to do well enough at school to be able to go on to work in a department store. Quite an odd scenario, and not exactly earth shatteringly relevant to the outside world, but it’s the way they tell it which grabs the attention. This girl is actually really interesting, but failing badly to deal with the expectations of the people around her to behave in a way which they deem ‘normal’. When asked about her future she said she wanted to be “remembered for her art”, a noble aim but not exactly what a school careers adviser wants to hear. The lyric “your obsessions get you known throughout the school for being strange, making life size models of The Velvet Underground in clay” fit perfectly into the context of the song while also being a fine example of the gentle observational humour that runs through the whole album. It is an absolute fact that the world would be a much better place if more school girls were into The Velvet Underground than manufactured pop, but I’m not sure many teenage girls would actually agree with that themselves.

Belle and Sebastian make lovely music and sing peculiar, interesting, quirky lyrics over the top. I’ve heard a fair bit of the stuff they’ve done since Tigermilk and not much of it has been anywhere near as good, which is a shame, but this unassuming track is a reminder that they really were brilliant at first. If you don’t know it, it comes highly recommended.

Express Yourself by N.W.A.
N.W.A. were a Californian rap group from the late 80s and early 90s made up of several rappers who would go on to have multi million selling solo careers and become household names in their own right (Dr. Fre, Eazy-E and Ice Cube among them). As a group they achieved huge sales of their second album, Straight Outta Compton, in the US, despite (or possibly because of) an almost complete lack of radio airplay due to controversial subject matters. It wasn’t so much the swear words that upset the radio programmers, they can be deleted, it was more the general themes. To give an indication, one of the album’s most well known tracks was called **** Tha Police, no exactly the kind of message the American authorities wanted to seep through to the youth of the day.

This was revolutionary stuff at the time, even if it all seems a bit tame now. The FBI actually wrote a letter in 1988 to N.W.A.’s label Ruthless Records stating that it took exception to “encouraging such action” (****ing the police, presumably), and as a measure of how much opinions on censorship have changed in the following 21 years, that very letter is now an exhibit in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Like any change in attitudes, that was brought about be people challenging the boundaries of what was acceptable, what could and could not be done. On Straight Outta Compton, NWA were not just creating Gangsta Rap as a whole new genre, they were actually changing popular culture forever.

Express Yourself is notable in this context for being entirely free of profanity, there is not a swear word in site, nor are there any sudden gaps in the vocals where a clever sound engineer has removed them. Instead, this is the group encouraging the rest of the world to do exactly what they are, it is an explanation of and justification for their right to free speech. Based partly around a sample from an early 70s soul record of the same name by the splendidly monikered Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, it is rapped by Dr Dre, an early example of the clear, determined style that would make him one of the most popular rap artists in the world a few years later.

The production on this track sounds a little dated, but in a way it is all the better for it, and easily bares comparison to the fantastic work Dre did on his later solo albums. The word play is really impressive, and it’s great to hear him sounding like he genuinely values the free speech that enabled the band to make statements like **** Tha Police, it proves that they were not just blindly trying to shock, they had a point to make. “It's crazy to see people be what society wants them to be, but not me” he says at one point, and you realise that if it wasn’t for visionary people thinking exactly that then much of the pleasure society has been given since the birth of rock and roll would never have happened. The world owes a big debt to people like N.W.A, and we shouldn’t forget it.

[SheriffFatman]

Eye Know by De La Soul
In 1989, indie music’s second summer of love was taking place, with the Stone Roses taking centre stage, and a whole host of other bands, mostly from Manchester, releasing critically acclaimed debut albums which would go on to shape the sound of British music for many years to come. In this climate, you would expect the NME, a magazine that has always positioned itself at the heart of the indie scene, to have a bit of difficulty choosing their Album of the Year. The fact that they chose an album of rap music by a trio of hippies from New York is testament to two things – firstly, the contrary nature of the journalists who work for that magazine, and secondly, what a brilliant record it really is.

I was 12 in 1989 and not much into buying albums, but I did buy (and still own) all of the singles from De La Soul’s 3 Feet High And Rising on 7” vinyl. They were amongst the first rap records I ever owned, and an absolute joy. Released at a time when the laws on sampling were somewhere between lax and none existent, the album is basically an incredibly creative mixture of a thousand different styles, brought together to create a relaxed, happy, peaceful sound. It doesn’t exactly sound typical of hip hop, and it really isn’t. While the likes of NWA (co-incidentally the subjects of the last review I wrote) were shaping the future of rap music, De La Soul were creating a different sound entirely, one that would symbolise a moment in time rather than defining an entire genre.

The differences between Eye Know and what might be expected of a mainstream rap record these days are stark. One of the trio introduces himself thus: “may I cut this dance to introduce myself as the chosen one to speak, let me lay my hand across yours and aim a kiss upon your cheek”. Two lines into a 50 Cent record you’re usually being subject to gang rapes and drive by shootings, this is like the extreme opposite.

All of this loved up niceness is set to an infectious whistle apparently sampled from Otis Redding’s laid back soul classic Sittin’ On (The Dock Of The Bay), although like much of De La Soul’s sampling, they splice different bits together in a way that makes the whole thing sound strangely familiar without actually allowing you to work out where it’s from. Unlike a lot of sampling in hip hop’s later days where a loop of an old record is created and a whole new track is performed over it, De La Soul used other people’s records like instruments, splicing unrecognisable snippets together to make whole new sounds. They then applied added their poetic musings to the mix, and created something lovely. In the long run it turned out there would be little room in mainstream hip hop for hippies, which is kind of a shame in a way. Personally, I’m not sure I’d say 3 Feet High And Rising is better than The Stone Roses, as the latter is one of my all time favourite albums, but it is incredibly good. If you like pleasant surprises and don’t already own it, I suggest it as a late addition to Christmas present lists, you won’t be disappointed.

The Facts Of Life by Black Box Recorder
Black Box Recorder are John Moore of 80s indie stalwarts The Jesus And Mary Chain, Luke Haines of 90s indie stalwarts The Auteurs, and his (now ex-)wife Sarah Nixey. The Facts Of Life is the title track to their second album, and was released in 2000. It remains one of my favourite songs of the decade.

The fact that I used the word ‘indie’ twice in the last paragraph is immediately misleading. This is quite simply a gorgeous pop record, with lush, expensive sounding production that wraps around you like a thick blanket. It is an incredibly sexy track, with Nixey’s hushed, clipped vocals spoken during the verses and sung in a knowing, lustful whisper during the chorus. The track is about the changes that happen to boys when they are teenagers and why they happen, not exactly the most obvious subject for a pop song. The clarity of the vocals, and the matronly certainty with which she explains every boy’s pubescent urges make the whole thing essential listening, I have rarely heard anything else quite like it.

Like so many songs on my iPod, I was introduced to this via Mark & Lard’s show on Radio 1, it was one of their records of the week when first released, and they liked it so much they also chose it as the first song on their last show for the station. 2000 was the year the wife and I started going out, and she has since told me she found it a little odd that a man who was an avowed indie music fan rapidly approaching his mid twenties would be listening to a pop song so much, and come to think of it I did used to play it over and over. A friend at the time even heard me playing it and said it sounded like Honey To The Bee by Billie Piper, which I genuinely wouldn’t know because I don’t ever remember hearing it.

It is this songs very oddness that I like so much though – the production is absolutely perfect pop genius, but the subject matter, and the way it is dealt with in such a factual manner, make it really unusual. I will admit it is clearly heavily musically inspired by a lot of other stuff near the top of the charts at the time. I might not know Billie’s back catalogue too well, but it does remind me a bit of Never Ever by All Saints, but can you ever imagine the Appleton’s singing about holding hands, wet dreams and the importance of maintaining “the distinction between fantasy and fiction”? Me neither, that’s what makes Black Box Recorder better.

Ultimately, despite the endorsement of Radio 1’s two top DJs, The Facts Of Life failed to set the world alight, peaking in the charts just outside the top 20. It’s the general public’s loss – I can barely think of a better pop record from the last 10 years. As the noughties draw to a close, this track is destined to disappear in the mists of time, but here’s hoping that the next decade can start with pop music this good.

Fairytale Of New York by The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl
I love Christmas. It almost seems a strange thing for a man in his 30s to admit – I get the feeling I’m supposed to grumpily dismiss it as over commercial and a lot of fuss about nothing, but I can’t help it, I’ve always felt the same. Without wanting to sound like that Monty Python sketch about Yorkshiremen, when I was little Christmas was a real treat because my parents didn’t have much, but they would always make a special effort. Family visited from far off places (some travelled almost 40 miles!) and everyone seemed happy.

As I’ve got older Christmas has become a time to relax. The TV is great, the food is great, I love spending time with my sister’s kids, I even enjoy seeing the in-laws for a few days. The whole time symbolises and indulgent and much needed break in what I see as my over-hectic life, a time to genuinely forget about work, money, and anything else that keeps me awake at night for the rest of the year.

Since I love music so much, Christmas music holds a special place for me, because it puts me in the mood for all the things I like best about this time of year. The problem with that is that so much of it is rubbish, meaning it’s a time of year when you almost have to suspend any notion of musical taste in order to feel happy. Fairytale Of New York is in a different class altogether though, one of the only records that’s ever really managed the twin aims of being both festive and actually good.

The problem with that is that it means however brilliant this record is, I can only really get away with listening to it for about 6 weeks of the year. In a way that makes it even better though. The first time I play it in mid November the first few bars of the piano introduction make my spine tingle, it is so good to hear it again. From that point on it’s played on my iPod most days until the end of the year, as well as being all over the radio and in every shop you go in. For me this song is just as Christmassy as turkey, tinsel and any other clichés about the festive season you can think of, it simply wouldn’t be Christmas without it. That seems to be born out by its popularity too – it currently sits at number 18 in the charts, the sixth Christmas in a row it has reached the top 20.

All this from a song about two old drunks who reminisce about when they met before trading insults including “you’re a bum, you’re a punk, you’re an old slut on junk”, before an infamous and much debated use of the word “faggot”. I guess it is the juxtaposition of the festive reminiscing and of the multi instrumental folky “da da da da da da” backing, with the bittersweet reality that has hit them as they got older, that makes this song a cut above all other Christmas music. It is a slice of reality in between the syrupy perfection of the imagery in so many other Christmas hits. Whatever the reason, today and every other Christmas Eve, there is nothing I would rather be listening to.

Faith by George Michael
Pop music is a funny old game. It’s certainly true that if you look at the career paths of the biggest of all the stars, the household names of the pop world, they’re all very different. Few are as full of changes and surprises as George Michael’s, and yet he remains one of pop music’s most famous faces. The strange thing is that I can’t help thinking there are a lot of people who’ve consistently made much better music but are now barely remembered.

So starting with Wham Rap and ending with that Christmas song he released a couple of weeks ago, how do you really sum George Michael up? I’m not sure I could even really say what sort of music he makes or who it’s aimed at, although the re-occurring Eastenders storyline about Heather Trott being obsessed with him does go some way to explaining to me why I might not be entirely in touch with his fan base.

Whatever you think about the concept of two smiling young men singing up-tempo eighties pop to teenage girls, one thing that you have to admit became clear from Wham!’s output was that George Michael is a good song writer. That’s what set Wham! apart from their 80s contemporaries who had the occasional big pop hit amongst several chart fillers, both in terms of popularity and sales. For a few years George Michael wrote and performed (and Andrew Ridgley danced to) several of the best pop songs of the time, having major success with hit after hit. It was bound not to last though, not least because of Ridgley’s periphery role. George Michael had a song writing talent and pop sensibility that stretched way beyond making catchy songs for kids, and it was only a matter of time before he grew up.

Unfortunately, the growing up process quickly saw him become a tiresome balladeer. I once tried to sit through the whole of Jesus To A Child, but after 5 rambling, tune free minutes I was sure either suicide or sleep were the only logical course of action, but I couldn’t decide which. The fact that it achieved a solitary week at number one in the charts stands forever as a testimony to the blind loyalty of some artists’ fanbases.

Having said all that, there was a very brief moment between teen heartthrob and dull old man with a beard that was actually quite good, and that was when he released the album Faith, from which this is the title track. It was better received in the US, spawning 4 number one singles, than it was here, but this was the high point. A church organ introduction gives way to a very simple and characteristically catchy guitar shuffle and lyrics about the importance of monogamy, which in retrospect is similar to the 8 times married Tammy Wynette advising women everywhere to “Stand By Your Man”. It doesn’t matter though, Faith is a great track, and with the exception of about 4 weeks each Christmas it is the only trace of one of this particular member of pop royalty anywhere on my iPod.

Fans by Kings of Leon
Time for these reviews to descend once again into geeky fandom, as I swoon (in an entirely non sexual sense) at the down right marvelousness of just about everything the Kings of Leon have ever done. Even that doesn’t do justice to Fans though, because this track is actually better most of their other stuff, raising it to a level of all time brilliance that goes beyond the superlatives that I usually throw at them into a realm where fantastic, wonderful and brilliant all used in the same sentence don’t quite get to the point of how much I like it.

OK, so I’m going over the top slightly, but really, this is a very good record. The second single from the band’s third album Because Of The Times, it was released in July 2009 and peaked at number 13, their biggest hit until Sex On Fire came along. It opens with single, a stadium filling strum on an electric guitar, before a perfectly understated but catchy tune on acoustic guitar (not often found on Kings of Leon tracks) starts the track properly. There is something about the combination of the sweeping electric guitar with the infectious tune of the acoustic version that makes me love it more every time I hear it, and although it doesn’t immediately grab you first time you hear it is one of my favourite musical introductions ever. I rarely hear this without subconsciously attempting some form of air guitar, even while driving.

So it’s already one of my favourite records before the singing even starts, but when it does that’s spot on to. Caleb Followill’s instantly recognisable vocal style, where the emphasis seems to be in strange places so the more times you listen the more you realise what he’s saying, is in full effect here, and giving full attention pays off because the lyrics are fascinating. I don’t know who “she’s got a hat and all that hat says is asshole” refers to but it is an excellent line. The last verse is even dedicated to the likes of me, with the band paying tribute to the place they first became popular by singing “all of London sing, because England swings and they sure love the tales I bring”. Based on this and the title of the song it seems that the band decided to give something back to their fanbase by writing a song about them, and the fact that it turned into one of their greatest triumphs, and a song that is hugely appreciated when they play live, is more than a little neat.

As I’ve said before, I’m hardly an unbiased, objective source of Kings of Leon based analysis, I think they’re great. If you’ve never heard anything by them though, or more likely have only heard Sex On Fire and Use Somebody and want to know more, Fans is a brilliant place to start. You’ll be hooked.

Fascination by Alphabeat
When I start writing these reviews I sometimes feel like certain songs will take more justifying than others. I shouldn’t think like that really – if I like a song then that’s enough – but I do, and this is one example.

I suppose part of the reason Fascination’s presence on my iPod troubles me slightly is that it seems a little uncharacteristic for someone who loves indie music and goes on a lot about how good The Smiths and Bob Dylan are to be singing the praises of a bouncy, pure pop record by six grinning Danes in bright coloured clothes. This really is a happy record too – the kind of full on, in your face cheerfulness usually only associated with children’s TV presenters or fanatical devotees of dubious alternative religion. Or, come to think of it, people from Scandinavia.

As with all the songs on here though it must be here for a reason, and on this occasion the reason is simply that this is a blindingly brilliant three minutes of pop music. I genuinely believe that if you try hard enough you can find examples of good music in absolutely any genre, and while many atrocities have been committed over the years in the name of making money out of attractive people singing songs for kids, this is where the idea actually comes to creative fruition. Of course most of those atrocities have been committed by what tend to be termed ‘manufactured’ pop acts, people who perform but do not any creative input, whereas Alphabeat appear to be a proper band. As is often the way with these things there seems to be very little information about them online but a lot of photos, so I can confirm little more than that they are five blokes and a girl whose average age appears to be late teens. They occasionally seem to be playing various instruments though, so unless there is an evil svengali in the background recording all the music and taking all the money then maybe I have hit on the reason that this is better than Steps / S Club 7 / Bucks Fizz etc.

So yes, this song sticks out somewhat amongst all the other stuff on my iPod. To say it is an unexpected ray of sunshine would be to make all the other music sound rubbish, but that does seem like a good description when you hear it. Also, one of the great things about music is that it unites people, and this is one of very few songs that me and my 13 year old niece agree on, which makes it very special indeed.

Fast Car by Tracy Chapman
I distinctly remember watching the top 10 run down on Top Of The Pops one Thursday when I was 11, seeing this song in there and wondering who on earth would like it. I wanted fast and exciting from my pop music, I had heard this one on the radio a couple of times but it just seemed dull. I thought at the time that it must be music for old people, and I guess by proclaiming my love for the song aged 32 I’m just proving I was right. I’ve actually done a bit of research, and the week this single peaked at number 5 Chapman was joined in the top 10 by singles from Bros, Glenn Medeiros, Sabrina and the Fat Boys featuring Chubby Checker, none of which seemed out of place to me at all. In fact I think I bought them all.

The thing that first draws you in when listening to Fast Car is the guitar hook. It is a quite sad sounding but strangely insistent, continuing throughout the entire track and cleverly getting under your skin. Several DJs and hip hop types have apparently used it to good effect on its own, and here the way it keeps coming back it perfectly compliments the mournful inevitability of the subject matter.

Fast Car is a brilliantly written song, telling a familiar tale about the cycle of working class poverty in the US from the point of view of a woman whose dreams and aspirations eventually prove fruitless, largely due to the men around her. It begins with her describing how she gave up her education to care for her jobless, alcoholic Father when her Mother left him. She works as a check out girl, saves her money and meets a man with whom she dreams of running away (in his fast car). Eventually they do just that, full of hope that they will “buy a big house and live in the suburbs”. It ends with the man having failed to get a job, drinking too much and seeing his friends more than his children. She still works in a shop and scrapes together just enough money to keep the family together, all her hopes dashed due to the very laziness and alcohol consumption she dreamed of escaping. The final lines encourage her partner just to drive away in his fast car and not come back – “you’ve got to make a decision, leave tonight or live and die this way”. She’s obviously given up hope for herself.

It’s an unusually gritty tale for a pop song, and doesn’t have anything like a happy ending. It is very well written though, especially the trick of having the lyrics from the main character’s point of view. Social commentary is often much more powerful when detailed by those involved instead of a third party, I guess it helps with empathy. To write a song like this but then produce it in such a way that it is a mainstream success (it was nominated for three Grammy Awards and won one) is quite an achievement. Chapman never repeated the success in her own right, and the fact that Boyzone had a big hit with another song of hers, Baby Can I Hold You, kind of counts against her in the credibility stakes, but she’ll long be quite rightly remembered for Fast Car.

Father And Son by Cat Stevens
Think about mid-90s Take That. If you take away everything that makes them interesting – the silly dance routines, Robbie’s attitude, Howard’s hair, Gary’s intermittent ability to write a half decent song – what are you left with? Five grinning, pretty-boy idiots who sway from side to side and sit on stools a lot. Or, to put it another way, Boyzone.

It was that very troupe of vacant Irishmen who I first heard perform Father And Son, and I instantly knew something was wrong. The problem was, I actually quite liked it. In fact, I even went so far as to buy it, which was actually a huge step for me. I genuinely feared what people would think if they knew, and went to Our Price especially because the guy behind the counter in my trusted local independent retailer was friends with some people I knew from college. I just couldn’t help it though, it wasn’t my fault it was Boyzone’s – somehow, for some unknown reason, they had recorded a good song.

Fortunately, the writing credits on the sleeve to the CD single revealed two vaguely familiar words to me, and before long everything was restored to normal. Even so, I must formerly admit I owe a debt of gratitude to Louis Walsh, along with Ronan Keating, the tragically departed Stephen Gately, and, er, the other three, as without them I may never have discovered the wonderful album The Very Best Of Cat Stevens.

On the surface, Father And Son simply sounds like a lovely song – it has a great, instantly hummable melody and lyrics that sound like they’re offering sound advice. That’s as far as I (and most people I imagine) got with the Bozone version, but there’s actually something a little darker lurking beneath the surface. As sung by its originator the song is really quite fascinating, taking the form of a deep conversation between the relatives of the title. The father is advising his son how to live his life, recommending not rushing in to anything, settling down near home, getting married and all the other things that parents say when struggling with the concept of children flying the nest. The son, on the other hand, has decided the way forward is to get a long way from home, and his reasons are mostly related to bitterness about the way he was brought up.

It’s pretty stirring stuff – lyrics like “from the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen” and “all the times that I’ve cried, keeping all the things I knew inside” make for a fairly damning indictment of the treatment received from the younger character’s parents. Stevens actually sings the son’s lines in a slightly higher pitch that the father’s, a technique which makes the song more understandable but also haunting. The over all feel of the track is really quite strange.

Cat Stevens didn’t originally release Father And Son as a single, but Boyzone’s saccharine cover of it reached number 3 in 1995. Then, for some reason, (money I guess), Ronan Keating recorded it again, this time in a bizarre sounding duet with Stevens (now known as Yusuf Islam), and released it at Christmas 2004. It reached number 2, failing to knock Band Aid 20 off the top spot but selling bucket loads in the process. If you want to hear it though definitely go for the original, it’s a unique moment in pop well worth a listen.

The Fear by Lily Allen
First I ever heard of this track was late in 2008 when Mark Radcliffe and Stuart MacConie were referring to it on their evening show on Radio 2. They didn’t play it but they were going on about how good it was, and I was immediately interested because they seemed the least likely people to ever be recommending a Lily Allen record. They were way ahead of their time as well – it was released at the end of last January, and spent the whole of February at the top of the charts.

The first thing I thought upon hearing The Fear was that it was a surprisingly understated record. It doesn’t leap out at you in a full attack on all your senses like you might expect from a pop song by a female vocalist whose opinions are constantly reported in the papers (Lady Gaga springs to mind). Instead the production has a slow building, slightly creepy feel to it, it’s disco music for people who are too cool to dance. In fact ‘cool’ is exactly the word that Lily seems to have been going for here – the wry, knowing, media savvy lyrics suggest she is trying to make it clear that there is far more to her than the continually blogging party animal caricature which you see if you “look in The Sun and… look in The Mirror”.

This, I have to confess, is where my knowledge falls down. Shamefully considering my BA Honours Degree in Journalism Studies, I have barely given either publication more than a cursory glance for several years. Quite frankly, while I may at one time have been vaguely interested in what parties Alex James had been to in any given week, I have not had any interest in any subject covered exclusively by newspapers with red mast heads for years. I don’t mean to be snobby, I really don’t, in fact the only newspaper I genuinely hate is the Daily Mail (the Daily Express doesn’t count because no one actually reads that). I just choose to get my news from the BBC website, BBC1, The Guardian and occasionally Radio 4. Not exactly a broad spectrum of opinion, but as it is a spectrum that does not include anything about the private lives of people I don’t care about it suits me fine. I must be getting old.

Anyway, the point is, I really like The Fear. There has been a huge amount written about how the lyrics are ridiculous because she’s slagging off the very organs that give her the publicity she requires in order to sell the records in which she slags them off, but I don’t really care about that. To Me, someone who has never been on her website, didn’t watch her TV show and couldn’t name a single 3AM Girl (do they still have those?), it has a witty, intelligent and actually quite sexy lyric, set to a killer bit of production, making it one of the best pop tracks of 2009. The follow up, It’s Not Fair, was much catchier, much ruder and a bit daft, but also not a bad record at all. She may not exactly have an outstanding singing voice, she might not even be that musically gifted, but Lily Allen is currently one of my favourite pop stars.

Fear Of The Dark (Live) by Iron Maiden
Heavy metal, the proper stuff with dirty, ripped denim, chains, engine oil stains and tattoos, is actually quite rare these days. For me, it was never more than a curiosity anyway, something to be looked on in amusement from afar. The music and its followers were such an easy target that ridiculing it became something of a popular past time for journalists and the like, but what you can’t do is dismiss its success. Iron Maiden, by far the genre’s most popular British exponents, have sold over 100 million records worldwide, a statistic with such a big number in it that it’s impossible to really appreciate the scale of what it refers to. Absurd they may be, but over the years, a lot of people have liked them, so that must merit some further investigation, right?

The first time I ever bought one of their records it was slightly begrudgingly – I was collecting number one singles, and they hijacked the top spot for two weeks in January 1991 through a series of clever marketing devices that encouraged their loyal fanbase to buy multiple copies of Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter. That single was a pretty dull slog through Maiden’s usual clichés about murder, blood and ritual violence, but as such it did provide a welcome change from the chart topper of the previous week, Saviour’s Day by Cliff Richard. For that reason, along with the possibility of upsetting my parents in the unlikely event that they were listening, I played it a lot. Happily, I didn’t exactly become a fan, but it did open my mind to the possibility that there may be more to this band than their loyal following of pale, sweaty, single men from the Midlands suggested.

Always an avid listener to the top 40 (the only daytime radio program where Iron Maiden ever got played), the following year I heard either Bruno or Mark announcing a new entry at eight for a live version of the title track from the current Maiden album, Fear Of The Dark. It was this song that finally confirmed to me that there really was something vaguely musical about them, they were not just all about pantomime horror and deranged record sleeve illustrations. It has all of the lyrical nonsense of any of their hits (the line “watching horror films the night before, debating witches and folklore” is very telling) but you just can’t escape the fact that it has a really great tune. The truth is, if you suspend normal reasoning for a few minutes, all this extra loud rocking is actually really good fun. During the instrumental break, thousands of denim clad oafs can be heard roaring “woh, oh oh woh oh oh wow” at the tops of their voices, and I defy anyone to have a listen and not join in at some point.

For some odd reason, iTunes refuses to sell this track as an individual download, you can only get their albums. A desire to hear it combined with a broken needle on my record player lead me to try Amazon, from where any number of Iron Maiden singles collections are available for around £3. I now, therefore, own more Maiden than ever before. What’s more, it turns out that a much earlier single from some time in the 80s, Run To The Hills, is also rather good. Just don’t tell anyone I said so.

Feel Good Hit Of The Summer by Queens Of The Stone Age
The first Queens Of The Stone Age track I ever heard was The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret, a blinding single with an odd title released in summer 2000. Feel Good Hit Of The Summer was the follow up, which despite causing reviewers to virtually proclaim QOTSA as rock and roll heroes, I never heard on the radio and never saw in the shops. When my music purchasing entered the digital age it immediately sprang to mind as a song that I would like to know, and now I own it I realise why it didn’t make the Radio 1 a-list.

The thing is, I don’t want to sound over suspicious, but I believe this track could at least in part have been influenced by the consumption of various drugs. My attention was first drawn to this by the lyrics, which are, quite simply, the words “Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol” repeated over and over with increased enthusiasm, climaxing occasionally with a stuttered “c c c c c cocaine”. And that’s actually it, those are all the words. Sounds great, doesn’t it? And it is.

Queens of the Stone Age make dirty southern rock music, similar to the Kings of Leon except that the Queens were doing it first, and they tend to stay a bit more earthy and less stadium oriented. You could argue that taking this pure, heavy rock music and very openly applying lyrics that are not just about drugs but actually are drugs is a little attention seeking, maybe even irresponsible. I would have to point out, however, that unlike a lot of songs which have been hugely successful the words don’t glorify or encourage anything untoward at all, they are simply a list. The listener is left to draw their own conclusions, and if they choose to try any of the substances mentioned they certainly can’t say Queens of the Stone Age told them to. Not on this track anyway.

Another point worth making is that if QOTSA are actually evil drug overlords with the intention of getting the youth of the world hooked on illegal narcotics then they failed miserably – this single may have gone down in rock folklore as something of a work of genius, but it barely sold any copies at all, missing the top 100 completely in the US and the UK. As such it is a bit of a lost gem, a genuinely catchy rock record that will probably never truly find the audience it deserves, but then again if the band had wanted mainstream success they could have just read out their shopping list or something instead. Having said that, maybe they did…

Fell In Love With A Girl by the White Stripes
I fell in love with The White Stripes as soon as I heard Hotel Yorba, which was the first single from their third album, White Blood Cells, their first commercial success in the UK (and anywhere for that matter). I bought the album as soon as it came out, and Fell In Love With A Girl was released as the second single. It was 2001, and in my heavily NME influenced opinion the White Stripes were rapidly over taking The Strokes as the most important band of the 21st century.

Fantastic though it was, the acoustic Hotel Yorba turned out to be not very representative of the White Stripes usual sound. Fell In Love With A Girl, on the other hand, is a perfect example of the simplistic but loud garage rock they do so well. When you think about it, gaining commercial success and critical acclaim with such a rudimentary sound (basically loud and fast electric guitars, drumming and screeching), especially when you’re a band with only two members, is quite an achievement. It is really a tribute to their excellent song writing, they seemed to make records that were so snappy and immediately catchy that they could get away with making no concessions where their recording style was concerned.

Fell In Love With A Girl proved this by being used all over the media. It was in a trailer for something or other on BBC1 so often that the whole country must have been able to recognise it at one stage, but even that doesn’t dampen its impact when you hear it now. It starts with a furious electric guitar solo, and the yelped lyrics are about falling in love with someone when you know deep down you shouldn’t have, a theme the Buzzcocks covered in a similar vein over 20 years earlier. The track only has two verses, the second of which ends “and I said it once before but it bears repeating” and is followed by the whole thing over again. Then, after one minute and 50 seconds, it ends abruptly, before even the most delicate of listeners gets fed up with the sheer volume of it all and demands it is turned off. In fact, it’s so short most people are more likely to demand to hear it again.

Interestingly, if Wikipedia is to be believed Rolling Stone magazine once listed this track as one of the 40 songs that changed rock history. It really is very good, but I wonder if that’s over stating it slightly. I don’t exactly hear an awful lot of new music that sounds like it’s influenced by this. I do wish I did though.

Fiesta by The Pogues
Something that I feel I should probably have known this prior to researching this song but didn’t is that ‘fiesta’ is Spanish for ‘party’. That makes this one of the most perfectly descriptive song titles I’ve ever heard of, because a party is what instantly springs to mind when you hear it.

I say instantly, but the truth is the track has a deliberately deceptive introduction, a lone, mournful saxophone giving no indication at all of what’s to come. It’s not long though before someone blows one of those funny party whistles with a stick in it and suddenly you’re in the middle of a float at a Latin American carnival. With a difference.

The difference being Shane MacGowan. The last thing you expect to accompany this gloriously happy, trumpet heavy party music is a sneering, raspy Irishman, but that’s exactly what you get, in the verses at least. It’s an odd juxtaposition, but not so much so that spoils the vibe, instead it actually takes what could have been a pleasant but not hugely challenging piece of music and adds a distinctly different twist, it makes you listen. When you do listen it is quite entertaining to find this mixture of English with Spanish references, followed by a verse entirely in Spanish, is being delivered in MacGowan’s trademark mumbly Irish accent. Having said that, I’m sure when I attempt Spanish I do it in an English accent, and that doesn’t sound funny to me at all.

The really entertaining thing about Fiesta is hearing how The Pogues’ traditional Irish sound is incorporated into something from an entirely different part of the world. Somehow, even though the impression of a Latin carnival is clearly what was intended, the track still retains something of a Celtic feel to it. It is far jollier than most Irish music, and has a liberal sprinkling of whistles, horns and people going “brrrrrrrrraaaaaaa”, but the accordion still has a slight sea shanty feel to it. I guess what I’m getting at is that it’s two types of music which are filed away in entirely separate places in the mind, simply thrown together to see what happens.

The result is pretty fantastic, and one thing that demonstrates this is that Fiesta is one of those tracks that everyone knows, even though they don’t realise they do. It was not a huge hit (number 24 in the charts in 1988) but ever since its release it has been used like on TV as a signifier of absolutely anything celebratory and even slightly Spanish. A combination of football programs, trailers and TV adverts have meant that even though the title of this track means little to most people, everyone knows the tune. The irony that the British public has a track by a bunch of Irish folk musicians forever lodged in their sub-concious as symbolising all things Latin is probably not lost on the TV producers that choose it, or on the band themselves. In all honesty it probably hints at something slightly depressing about the British approach to what record shops call ‘World Music’, but it is also a tribute to The Pogues innate ability to assimilate different styles into their own. They are an underated band, and this proves that brilliant though Fairytale Of New York is, The Pogues are for life, not just for Christmas.

Sorry, couldn’t resist that. I’ll try harder next time.

Fight For Your Right To Party by the Beastie Boys
Sometimes a track can be a massive success but there’s very little to say about it. Taken from the Beastie Boys’ debut album Licensed To Ill, Fight For Your Right on the other hand is a good example of a song that has caused far more debate over the years than its modest chart run (number 11 in the UK in 1986) suggests.

The track is basically a protest song, but of a kind that Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan might not entirely approve. The narrator is an American teenage boy, and his protests relate to the injustices he sees within his own life, namely his Dad (actually, make that “Pop”) not allowing him to smoke, his teacher berating him for not doing homework, and his mother (“Mom” of course) throwing away his “best porno mag”. The Beastie Boys themselves claimed that the whole point of the song was that it was meant to be ironic, they were lampooning the spoilt high school kids of America. Most of the audience, however, missed the irony completely and the track became an anthem for disenfranchised teenagers everywhere. I have this track on the Greatest Hits double CD The Sounds Of Science from 1999, and in the accompanying booklet one of the Beasties is describing his horror at the gradual realisation that the people moshing down the front at gigs when this song was played were the very people they set out to ridicule. Thus the Beastie Boys became a band who despised their own audience. I guess the lesson here is that American teenagers don’t always get subtlety.

Having said all that, I’m not the first person to be a bit sceptical about the Beastie Boys motives with this track. Their claims to be social commentators who became victims of dim people not understanding what they were getting at are more than a little undermined by the stage show they put on for their world tour after Licensed To Ill was released. The set included female members of the audience chosen to dance above the crowd in cages, and a giant motorised inflatable penis. A gig in Liverpool descended into a riot within 10 minutes and Adam Horrowitz was arrested on assault charges. This makes their latter day claims that Fight For Your Right was misunderstood sound like a band realising in retrospect that they were behaving like idiots and hoping it doesn’t damage their future career prospects.

They shouldn’t have worried so much though, for two reasons. One is that which ever way you look at Fight For Your Right it is an excellent record. Yes, the lyrics are from the point of view of a whining teenager who simply doesn’t appreciate how lucky he is, but hell, we’ve all been there. I doubt I’m the only person who can think back to a time when avoiding school work and reading pornography were two of my main concerns. Secondly, from a musical point of view, this was actually radical stuff. In America, Licensed To Ill was the first rap album to reach number one, and the best selling rap record of the 80s. For better or worse, the shouty rap metal they purveyed has been hugely influential too – would Limp Bizkit or Linkin Park have existed if the Beasties hadn’t paved the way for them? Fight For Your Right may have been a minor hit, but it marked an important point in rock history, and is still great for a listen. It is amazing how much fun shouting “paaaaaaaarty” along with it when alone in the car can be, I can vouch for that.

Finetime by Cast
Cast were formed in 1993 by John Powers, former bassist with Scouse indie band The Las who had a hit with There She Goes. Powers switched to lead guitar, and the rest of the band was made up of various musicians from around Liverpool. They toured to little acclaim for a while, then Noel Gallagher, a big Las fan, asked them to support Oasis on tour. At the height of Britpop anyone who Noel Gallagher even mentioned in passing during a conversation would be snapped up by a major label, and so it was with Cast. They did a deal with Polydor in 1995 and Finetime, their debut single, hit the top 20.

Cast basically sound like a slightly more up to date version of The Las. Like their contemporaries The Stone Roses, The Las had a very distinct sixties influence on their sound. With Cast the jangly guitars and simple melodies remain, but the sound is much more in the powerful indie style of the nineties. Finetime is a genuinely catchy song, but like so much music at the time, Oasis included, it doesn’t exactly stretch the imagination lyric wise. “You’ve gotta let it out if you wanna let it in” and “I just need to let you out to let you in with me” sound distinctly like lines which are there because they sound good, and set to a simple tune they are very easy to like as long as you don’t think about them too much.

The same theme ran through the whole of Cast’s debut album, All Change, especially the ballad Walkaway. I remember watching Top Of The Pops with my Dad when that was on. He hardly ever pays attention to any music at all, but even he was ridiculing the lyrics and the way every line seemed to rhyme with the title. It didn’t matter though, because the music was so good and the tunes were so catchy. Cast were, from the outset, clearly never going to be the best band in the world. Even so, they stood on the fringes of Britpop making records of a quality that these days would probably have them considered geniuses. Either that or no one would notice.

I had All Change on tape and would drive round listening to it on full volume in my ancient Astra, hoping that my peers at college (especially girls) would view my ability to look beyond Oasis and Blur for my guitar based thrills as signifying an interesting person. Looking back, I’m not sure Cast was quite the right choice, but Finetime remains here as a singalong reminder of a great time for both me and music.

Fire by Kasabian
I’ve mentioned before that I came to Kasabian a bit late, not because they weren’t my kind of thing (they really are) but because in the mid noughties, music wise, for the first time since my age reached double figures I kind of took my eye off the ball a bit. It was a busy time and there was very little spare cash, therefore not much time was spent in record shops. By last year, thanks largely to the introduction to my life of iTunes, I had started to realise what I had been missing. I’d downloaded several Kasabian tracks, and was keen to hear their new stuff. They didn’t disappoint.

Fire was released in June 2009, the first single from their album West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum. It received blanket airplay from Radio 1 and entered the charts at number 3, making it their biggest hit to date. A few more sales and it could easily have become the best number one single of last year.

In many ways it is more of a standard rock / pop record than some of their earlier output, with the words sung rather than shouted through a loud haler. They still retain the trick of overdubbing the vocals, as with several of their other singles, so that during the chorus you can choose which part to sing along to. It’s a really neat production trick that makes the song distinctly Kasabian without alienating anyone who doesn’t already know their back catalogue, and it works especially well as the main part of the chorus is simply the line “I’m on fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire”, so it doesn’t get too complicated. It is all very cool, and something about the way he hangs on that note during the chorus reminds me of The Doors.

The thing which really grabs the attention about this track though is the tune played on what sounds for all the world like a kazoo. The only instrument I have ever truly mastered myself, its use in any pop song anywhere reminds me instantly of Beer ‘n’ Sex ‘n’ Chip ‘n’ Gravy by the Macc Lads, which is actually more than a little unfortunate because this is a well crafted, masterful modern rock record, as opposed to a deeply offensive (although very funny) cheap punk record. Still, most people won’t get the reference, and the tune (which could actually be played on a keyboard I suppose) is highly infectious, I’m humming it all day once I’ve heard it. Proof if proof were needed that Kasabian have tapped into a mass market with this surprising record came on Christmas Day when, after them perform it on Top Of The Pops, my mother-in-law said she’d like their album. I don’t know if she ever got it, but I hope so.

I must confess, although I loved this track, I didn’t buy the album and haven’t heard anything else off it. I guess even in my life now there’s only so much time and money that can be dedicated to new music. Maybe I’ll put it on my birthday present list.

Firestarter by The Prodigy
I remember listening to the top 40 in March 1996 when Firestarter entered at number one. For some reason that I cannot recall I mustn’t have been listening to the radio much in the previous weeks because I hadn’t heard the track before. The idea of The Prodigy having a number one single at all seemed quite odd, but when I heard it I really didn’t know what to think. A bizarre mixture of warped guitar sounds, frantic beats and manic, deranged shouting, it certainly sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, and a world away from their previous output. Even so I wasn’t actually sure I liked it, in fact it had the slightly suspicious air of a track that sounded the way it did just to grab people’s attention.

Even so, I went straight out and bought the CD single, and played it a lot. I quite quickly realised that my initial reservations were unfounded. Riding high on a wave of enthusiasm caused by a once-in-a-generation surge in the quality of new British music, Firestarter didn’t just appeal to a small niche either, it managed 3 weeks at the top of the charts and was one of the year’s best sellers. The emphasis might have been on surly northerners with guitars, but Britpop was actually quite a broad church.

Looking back now, what Firestarter achieved is quite amazing. I have already written at length about my dislike of dance music, but as someone who’s always followed the charts my experience has been tainted by the seemingly endless stream of irritating, identikit europop rubbish that some demographic which I have never clearly identified seems to buy a lot of. Just think how many people’s lives would be infinitely better if they had never heard of Sash, ATB, Basshunter, Eric Prydz or Cascada – I don’t think I’ll ever understand why a market exists for such crap. Firestarter showed that it doesn’t have to be that way, it is possible to make creative, forward thinking, interesting, challenging music and for it to still sound good in a club. The world needs more Firestarters.

The Prodigy have certainly done their bit for the cause. I remember reading an interview with Keith Flint that after Firestarter left the charts he thought they would never again sell as many singles, then the follow up, Breathe, was released, went to number 1 and sold even more. They even convinced me to buy The Fat Of The Land, a great record that I still listen to occasionally and which to this day remains the only album of dance music I own. With its iconic video seemingly designed with frightening children in mind, Firestarter remains one of the most memorable singles of the 1990s.

First Cut Is The Deepest by Rod Stewart
Sometimes people get so famous that it’s hard to remember what they did to achieve their fame in the first place. For years now, whenever Rod Stewart is mentioned in the media it is hardly ever anything to do with his music. It is worth remembering, therefore, that he remains amongst the most successful artists in UK chart history, with 31 top ten hits, six of which, including this one, have reached number 1. Maybe a greatest hits album is due, but then again maybe no one in 2010 really wants to hear ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’.

I’m sure this comparison has been made before, but Rod’s career reminds me a bit of Robbie Williams’. They are both crooners who have somehow transcended the common trend of an early peak followed by years of rubbish that is only bought by fans, instead maintaining a steady stream of passable pop hits for many years, with the occasional genuinely bad records forgiven when the follow ups turn out to be at least half decent, and the occasional fairly good record celebrated as such. Also, neither has any problem releasing the odd well chosen cover version, and it’s done them no harm at all.

First Cut Is The Deepest is, first and foremost, a beautiful song. Written and originally recorded by Cat Stevens, it is a love song about being hesitant before starting a new relationship because you’re still badly hurt from the last one, or, as the lyrics are far too lovingly crafted to describe it, you’re on the rebound. It’s been covered by a lot of people over the years, but in the UK it’s Stewart’s version that has been the biggest success, spending four weeks at the top of the charts in 1977. His trademark rasp perfectly suits the whimsical tale of heartbreak, and whoever his band were at the time they do a great job of interpreting Cat Stevens’ original tune for soft rock stadium filling audiences the world over. For all his success Rod Stewart has never really been much more than a balladeer, a man who sings songs recommended by his management, but there is no harm in that when the results are this good.

I guess First Cut Is The Deepest is on my iPod mainly because of the song, not the singer. That said, the wife favours a version she found on Sheryl Crow’s greatest hits album, which to my ears sounds like a soulless over produced mess when compared to the tender acoustic guitar playing and earnest vocals on display here. This version also helps dispel the generally held belief that Rod Stewart’s only good record was Maggie May. That was his best record, but this one’s not bad at all.

The First Of The Gang To Die by Morrissey
Success wise, Morrissey’s pre-download era singles followed a very well established pattern. One would be released a couple of weeks before an album, and as it was new material unavailable anywhere else there would be a great deal of interest among fans, who would all buy it immediately. Thus it would chart high, often in the top 10, before disappearing altogether within a couple more weeks. The subsequent releases from the album would barely register on the charts at all, strictly purchases for people who were interested in whatever live tracks or demos the record company stuck on the b-side.

In 2004, as the promotion for the album You Are The Quarry began, this looked set to repeat itself. Irish Blood English Heart, the first single, entered the charts at number 3, surprisingly making it the biggest hit of Morrissey’s career, but then sank without trace. What happened next though was unexpected and entirely unprecedented. You Are The Quarry’s second single, The First Of The Gang To Die, actually started picking up airplay before it was released. Radio stations had been universally ignoring all of Morrissey’s new material for years, but this track actually made it onto Radio 2’s A-list. When it was released it entered the charts at number 6, giving Morrissey his first back to back top ten hits since 1989, and stayed in the charts for 7 weeks, his longest running hit ever. Morrissey’s music had been making his die hard fans happy for 25 years, but arguably for the first time in his career he had made a record that other people liked too.

So what makes The First Of The Gang To Die so different to his other stuff that ordinary people liked it? Basically, for reasons known only to himself, Morrissey eschewed his usual angular, awkward tunes and angst ridden, provocative lyrics to make what is fundamentally a great sing-along pop song. It is still indie music, the guitars are still in place and as doom laden as ever, but the chorus is full of light and very catchy. This is the stuff that adult contemporary rock radio stations dream of, and I reckon if it had been by someone else it might have been an even bigger hit.

Lyrically, the song isn’t exactly standard Morrissey fare either. It has apparently been interpreted by some as a commentary on street crime and its perpetrators, but taken literally it seems to be about a criminal gang somewhere vaguely Spanish. It is still quite funny and just as poetic as everything else he does, but far more abstract than most of his singles. The assertion “you have never been in love until you’ve seen sunlight thrown over smashed human bone” is debatable to say the least, but the chorus about someone called Hector being “the first of the gang with a gun in his hand and the first to do time” really sticks in your head. The revelation later in the song that Hector was also first to have a “bullet in his gullet” just underlines the fact that this song may be an unexpected combination of things, but it is still very Morrissey, and therefore very good.

Fit But You Know It by The Streets
The genius of The Streets has always been Mike Skinner’s ability to write lyrics that his audience can identify with. Other acts have huge success with songs on abstract subjects that are open to all sorts of different interpretations, but the style of pop music that The Streets single-handedly invented necessitates realism, his songs are honest and open accounts of how he feels and what he thinks. This was never more so than on his first top 10 hit, Fit But You Know It, set during a trip to a post-nightclub take-away on a foreign holiday.

Essentially, the plot revolves around Our Hero being under the mistaken impression that a girl he sees while queuing for chips is eyeing him up, when in fact it’s a guy behind him that she’s seen. He’s as charming as a girl might expect a drunk man in a chip shop to be - “I reckon you’re about an 8 or a 9, maybe even 9 and a half in 4 beers time” – although to be fair, this is all going on in his head, he never actually gets to speak to her. In the middle part of the record, for no obvious reason other than that it’s exactly what happens in such establishments, a fight breaks out. This is brilliant in itself, I don’t remember ever hearing a fight set to music before. It sounds like the kind of thing that might happen in an opera, although probably not in a chip shop.

Eventually the girl with “a bit too much fake tan” moves towards Mike with “the milkshake and that little doughnut in hand” which he assumes is her making a move. Sadly though, she brushes straight past him and “into the arms of that ******* white shirted man”. Disappointed but determined not to let the experience ruin the evening, Mike asks “what do I give a **** I’ve got a girlfriend anyway”, before going off to eat his burger and drink some more Stella.

Admittedly, as romantic encounters go, this track is not stuff of Celine Dion singles. Neither, however, are the experiences that most people have, which is what makes this so good. Personally, I just like the suggestion that a girl can be flawed by the fact that she knows how good looking she is. Earlier in my career I was supervising in a call centre and had a girl in my team who genuinely was incredibly attractive, but who was incensed that I actually expected her to do any work. It took me a while to realise, but I think she was simply used to getting whatever she wanted by smiling and saying the right things, which may work well in a lot of settings but not one with call recording and operator league tables. She didn’t last long in that job, but I remain one of over 600 of her friends on Facebook. I wonder vaguely what proportion are male. This song reminds me of her.

[SheriffFatman]

Fluorescent Adolescent by the Arctic Monkeys
Brianstorm, the first single released from Arctic Monkey’s second album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, was very good, but the rockier, harder edged sound made me wonder if the band’s ability to set their northern indie to brilliantly catchy melodies would prove a fleeting, first album only success. Fluorescent Adolescent, the album’s second single, completely swept all such concerns aside.

“You used to get it in your fishnets, now you only get it in your nightdress” is an incredibly telling, funny opening line, one of my all time favourites, and truly amazing from a band made up of people who had only just reached their twenties. It reminds me of the Rolling Stones song Play With Fire, in which Jagger sings about a woman who “gets her kicks in Stepney not in Knightsbridge any more”. I don’t know much about London boroughs but I’m guessing the underclothes analogy could be applied to her too.

Fluorescent Adolescent (one of the few songs on my iPod for which I am reliant entirely on the spell checker to get the title right) also reminds me of Pulp, maybe partly because both bands are from Sheffield. The Arctic Monkeys use the track to demonstrate their competency with the sort of subject matter that Jarvis Cocker is always most at home with, being as it is a lurid, working class tale of sexual encounters just below the thin veneer of respectability. I’m not sure if the lady in question is a prostitute (a subject matter the band already covered on the fantastic When The Sun Goes Down) but she has certainly enjoyed her fair share of men. I read on Wikipedia that this song was A-listed by Radio 1, and although I didn’t notice at the time I’d be fascinated to hear if they chose to censor any of it. There’s no actual swearing (unless you count the word “slag” in the chorus), but the lines “Likes her gentlemen to be gentle, was it a Mecca dobber or a betting pencil?” must have presented an interesting quandary for whoever decides what the nation’s youth are and are not allowed to hear on the BBC.

The Pulp / Arctic Monkey’s similarities, while mostly related to subject matter rather than musical style, leave me wondering if there’s something specific about Sheffield that makes people behave in this way. Or maybe sex obsessed suburbia can be found throughout the entire country, and the people of South Yorkshire are just more prepared to talk about it openly. This is, after all, the place that gave the world The Full Monty. I still don’t understand how those five guy’s underlying social and medical problems of poverty, unemployment and impotency could be solved by one night’s stripping in a social club. Perhaps there should have been a sequel.

Anyway, I digress. For me, Fluorescent Adolescent is the point where Alex Turner and co made it clear that regardless of their phenomenal early success, they were not going to fade into obscurity like so many before them. It is an absolute triumph, a very English song, and essential listening for anyone who looks back at the noughties and wonders what they sounded like.

Flux by Bloc Party
I first got into indie (or alternative, or whatever you choose to call it) music in the early nineties. An obsession with Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine lead me to all sorts of bands, mostly people that were featured in NME back in the days when it was a full size weekly newspaper with no staples. Before long a lot of these bands started having huge success, and in the mid 90s NME was just as likely to feature a band from that week’s top 10 on the cover as Smash Hits was. There was a lot of good music high in the charts.

I try hard not to start sounding like an old fart, but I sometimes look at the modern top 40 and wonder where it all went wrong. There have been a lot of changes – legal downloading has made music cheaper now than ever before, and bands make most of their money from touring rather than selling records. Downloading also slowed the charts down, and those few singles that make the top 40 these days tend to be by the same artists. (This week’s top 40 contains 3 records by Alicia Keys, and 2 each by Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Jay-Z, Black Eyed Peas, Glee Cast, Kesha, Mr Hudson and Timbaland. Not long ago a top 40 with the same artist in it twice was a rarity.) Also, sales are now so high that a single which made the lower end of the top 10 five years ago would struggle on the same sales to scrape into the top 40 in 2010.

So the market has changed immeasurably, but I can’t help wondering if the music has too. The likes of Oasis, Blur and Pulp don’t seem to have been replaced. Is there actually anyone out there now making good alternative music? The albums market has changed much less, but I don’t see that chart being dominated by young people with guitars either. It makes me sad.

I bring this up now because Flux by Bloc Party is a fairly recent, fairly alternative (although admittedly not exactly guitar heavy) single that is truly wonderful but was only a minor success chart wise, and has been largely forgotten since it’s brief appearance in late 2007. Basically a dance record with some guitars and an angst-ridden indie vocal, it sounds to me like the sort of record that could shape the future of alternative music, if anyone was to take up the mantle, but no one has. It’s like there’s no one listening.

I’m reading a book at the moment called Last Shop Standing, about the decline of independent music retailers in the UK. The author, Graham Jones, sites the moment Prince decided to give away his latest album with the Mail on Sunday as one of the major nails in the coffin of small record shops. Prince got £250,000 for it, far more than he would if he’d released it conventionally, and the newspaper got the highest sale in its history. Bloc Party did a similar thing with Flux, giving it away with NME on the week it was released, so its chart position (number 8) will have been seriously impacted by that. Great for the fans, but the problem is if indie music doesn’t make the charts then it doesn’t get the support of radio, and the music industry stops looking for more of it. That leaves me in the position I’m in now, with £30 of iTunes gift vouchers for Christmas but nothing I can think of to buy. I can’t be the only one, and that makes the future for the type of music in this list seem depressingly uncertain.

Fool’s Gold by The Stone Roses
Some songs end up transcending their initial status as a hit single to become something far more, and Fool’s Gold is a good example. Originally released in 1989, it has been a top 40 hit in the UK four times in various different mixes. That is extraordinary enough in itself, but it is the saturation of this track in other media that really makes it special. I don’t know if anyone has ever compiled a chart of the songs which have featured most on compilation albums, but I’m sure this one would be pretty high. It’s blanket use in films and on TV has been incredible too. The word Manchester only has to be mentioned in a BBC documentary for this to be on in the background, to the point where it’s almost got silly, and its appearance in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels soundtracked one of the defining moments of the film. There could be various reasons for this, including laziness on the part of compilation album and soundtrack compilers, but I think the main one is that it is just such an unusual track.

By late 1989, when the world was just beginning to wake up to the sheer brilliance of the Stone Roses debut album, the band themselves had already moved on. That record was eventually recognised as an era defining masterpiece, but its sales remained consistent over a long period rather than spectacularly high. (Incredibly, when price discounting at HMV saw the album make the top 10 in 2004, it was the first time in its 15 year history it had ever risen above number 19 in the charts). Fool’s Gold was actually not on The Stone Roses, it was only ever released as a single, initially a double a-side with What The World Is Waiting For. A blissful soundscape of wah-wah heavy guitar effects and oddly compelling, whispered vocals, it is perhaps closest in style to late 60s Beatles, possibly because they were taking the same type of drugs. It sounded nothing at all like the rest of the 80s had, and as that decade of electro pop mercifully drew to a close that must have seemed like a very good thing indeed.

It was hugely influential too. The band famously performed it on Top Of The Pops in the same week that the Happy Mondays performed Hallelujah, and many people have since said that it seemed like the new decade was being ushered in by a bunch of Mancs with an entirely new approach to making music, and for the next year or so the Madchester scene continued to live up to its promise. I bet a lot of the biggest players in the Britpop and dance music scenes of the 90s were at home watching TV that Thursday night.

Personally, I have always been a little unsure about Fool’s Gold. Certainly, it’s technically amazing and the vision that a band has to have to make a record like this is something that comes along very rarely. The issue I have is that I am a huge fan of the Stone Roses other stuff, and to me this is very different. As such it just seems a bit of a shame that when they hear the band mentioned, rather than think immediately of I Am The Resurrection, or Waterfall, or She Bangs The Drums, most people recall the one track they made that sounds like nothing else in their back catalogue. It’s a silly gripe really, because Fool’s Gold is clearly amazing, but it’s enormous and well deserved success has had the slightly negative effect of obscuring just how fantastic and how influential this band were. I still love it though.

For Lovers by Wolfman featuring Peter Docherty
I have to confess that prior to doing a bit of research online in support of this review, I had no idea who Wolfman was, but it turns out I’ve been singing along for the last six years to a song that is not just credited to him, but which he actually wrote. For Lovers was a top 10 hit in 2004, and I imagine I was like a lot of people who bought it in that I was originally drawn in by the co-credit. Even so, to this day, I have never seen the Libertines front man referred to anywhere else as Peter, although I guess it’s a formality that is a regular feature in court documents up and down the land.

Wolfman is a 42 year old singer and song writer from Kent, whose real name is Peter Wolfe. (I was sure that was a character from a children’s book, then I realised that is Peter Rabbit. And I didn’t even write that for comic effect, I actually had to Google it before I knew I was wrong.) He moved to London in the 80s intent on becoming a successful musician, and continued trying all throughout the 90s to no avail. Striking up a friendship with Docherty eventually provided him his break, as he agreed to record one of his songs for release as a single during the brief period when everything he touched turned to gold. Thus Wolfman had his moment of chart glory, although he has since failed to capitalise on this success.

As I suggested, I don’t know anything else by Wolfman, but if this simple, heartfelt song is anything to go by his lack of success hardly seems fair. Docherty’s vocals are unmistakable, showcasing the ever present uncertainty about whether he has a speech impediment or just recorded it while slightly drunk, or indeed whether neither are true but he wants you to think they are. Even so, there are several things about this track which clearly set it apart from the Libertines and Babyshambles tracks that we’re used to hearing him sing. Firstly, it is to all intents and purposes a fairly straight ballad, with the same wistful air as Docherty’s song writing but without the complicated lyrics and melodies he often employs. The chorus simply repeats the line “this is for lovers, running away” ending by replacing the last two words with “just for today”, which is incredibly simple but also quite effective, haunting even. It stays in your head. Secondly, this is not a really a rock record – For Lovers is more Elton John than Sex Pistols, although I really don’t meant that as a thing.

An unusual record then, a bit of a one off really. It’s greatness was emphasised in 2005 when it was nominated for an Ivor Novello award, quite an achievement considering it’s Wolfman’s only commercial success. I reckon I should check out more of his stuff with the spare iTunes vouchers I was mentioning the other day.

For Tomorrow by Blur
It’s strange, but several of the songs I consider to be vintage Blur, the ones that really remind me how great they could be, are the ones that were least successful. For Tomorrow is a good example - the first single taken from Modern Life Is Rubbish, it peaked at number 28 on the charts, marking the low point in their success between early 90s hit single There’s No Other Way and the global success that came following the release of their third album, Parklife.

In effect, what this meant was that fans who first got into Blur via Parklife could delve into their back catalogue and find that their previous album was just as good. I have to admit that I owned the third album first, although I do remember hearing the singles from Modern Life Is Rubbish on the radio. I think Radio 1 was a bit scared of indie music at the time so they weren’t play listed, but Simon Mayo would go on about how much he loved them. I kind of agreed that they were good records, but was too influenced by the top 40 back then and only tended to buy whatever the rest of the nation liked too. My loss.

So what makes For Tomorrow so good? Really, I think it is the sound of a band finding their feet, establishing their sound. At this stage they were leaving behind the influence other early 90s indie bands had on them, and establishing the singalong cockney indie which would become their signature sound. The cockney connection is important too – they may have all been from Essex, but their back catalogue is as firmly rooted in London as any band have ever been to any place, both lyrically and thematically. That started here too, as For Tomorrow is basically a love song dedicated to our nation’s capital.

Personally, London is a place that I really don’t have much first hand experience of, so my image of it has been largely formed by through consumption of popular culture. Blur are second on the list of things that have most shaped my impression of the city, below Eastenders but just ahead of The Kinks. (Carter USM are also in the top 5, and there’s been a recent new entry for The King Blues!)
Something else that occurs to me when listening to For Tomorrow is how much better Blur were than the Kaiser Chiefs. That mind sound odd, but I remember hearing an interview on the Radio with Ricky Wilson, and he was talking about when he first met Damon Albarn and joked with him “I hope you haven’t brought your lawyers”. That’s refreshingly honest of him, and when you think about it, the Kaiser Chiefs may have released a few excellent singles, but the majority of their output simply sounds a lot like Modern Life Is Rubbish, only not quite as good. I reckon success of the Kaisers can be explained more by the absence of Blur than by the quality of their own music.

Forgot About Dre by Dr Dre featuring Eminem
Recorded in 1999 and released in 2000, Forgot About Dre was the second of three phenomenally good singles released from Dre’s second album, which was confusingly called 2001. Between them Still D.R.E., Forgot About Dre and The Next Episode are what made me realise that I like hip hop. I’d bought a few big rap hits before, but Dr Dre is single-handedly responsible for getting me interested in the entire genre, and listening again to those three incredibly powerful singles I’m not at all surprised they had that effect. Ten years later they all remained near the top of a list I attempted to compile of my favourite songs of the Noughties.

To put this track into context, Dr Dre had begun to be criticised for his less than prolific output, and Forgot About Dre formed the response. Having been one of the founding fathers of hip hop as a member of NWA, he had begun the nineties with some successful solo work and produced for some of the biggest names in rap. In 1999 he launched Eminem on the world, but his own name had not been on the credits of any big hits for a few years. People in the rap world wondered if he’d lost it, but they were wrong.

As ever with Dre, the production on this track is fantastic. It opens with dark, ominous strings before a high pitched keyboard sound makes it clear this is not classical music. Then come the lyrics. The wordplay on this track is blinding, it just seems to fit together so well without once compromising the message, I just have so much admiration for anyone being able to write so well. The track perfectly makes anyone who doubted his ability seem ridiculous, by being both threatening and funny at the same time. He describes his critics as having “no cheese, no deals and no G's, no wheels and no keys, no boats, no snowmobiles and no ski's” and claims that they are “mad at me cause
I can finally afford to provide my family with groceries”. Later on, just in case we’ve forgotten, he reminds everyone what made him so good in the first place – “Who you think brought you the O.G.’s, Eazy-E's, Ice Cube's and D.O.C's and Snoop D O double G's, and a group that said ********** the police?” Take that, haters!

In the middle of all this is Eminem. Despite being a fan of a lot of his solo stuff, I genuinely think his rap on this track is the best thing I’ve ever heard him do. In full on Slim Shady mode, the content is largely a comic account of committing acts of violence against random members of the public and burning down houses, but the rapping is unbelievably good. Lines like “Slim Shady, hotter then a set of twin babies, in a Mercedes Benz wit the windows up and the temp goes up to the mid 80's, calling men ladies” just seem to trip out of his mouth, leaving the listener barely able to keep up with how good it is.

Truly this track showcases two men at the top of their game. Near the end Dre state “give me one more platinum plaque and **** rap you can have it back”. True to his word, he’s not released another album since. I read an interview in The Guardian in which he said he is working on another record. It’s hard to believe it could be anywhere near as good as this one, but I can’t wait to find out.

Foundations by Kate Nash
In summer 2007, I was six months into a new job which involved me being away from home quite often with nothing but dodgy hotel wireless connections for company, so I was becoming familiar with the concept of messageboards. One of the earliest threads I remember was about this record, and I was amazed how much it divided opinion. Personally, I always tend to like songs that manage to be a hit despite being a bit different to the other stuff that’s around at the time, because pop music is often at its best when a song is easily distinguishable from everything else. Just as many people seem to think that everything else sounds like it does because that’s what people want to hear, so making something different is just irritating. I can see their point, but I still think they’re wrong, and Foundations is a good example of why.

Released in June 2007, Foundations was Kate Nash’s first major label release, and a huge success, spending five weeks at number 2 in the charts. Amazingly, on two of those weeks it was less than 150 sales behind the number one, making it probably the most unlucky runner up of all time. The thing that seemed to upset so many people about it was the style of Nash’s delivery, in particular the fact that she doesn’t really sing any of it, just talks. It’s intriguing, because even though she doesn’t sing it’s also clearly not rapping, in fact it’s hard to imagine a less hip-hop single, it comes across more like a one way conversation. Strangely, it’s also very catchy, I often find myself talking along with her.

I think the appeal is largely related to the subject matter. The lyrics detail the kind of relationship breakdown that it’s probably quite easy to fall into if you’re not careful. He goes out with his mates too much, she finds him boring, they bicker in front of their friends, but neither of them has got round to actually ending it. She details the mundanity of their situation in a way that offers the listener a window into what would normally be a private situation, and the fact that she’s talking instead of singing actually enhances the feeling that you’re privy to some secret information.

As well as the style of the vocals, Nash’s accent seems to have upset a few people too. As I’ve mentioned before, my experience of the capitol of our fair nation barely extends beyond Eastenders, but I believe a lot of the young people down there are now choosing to end some words with a kind of sigh, as in “you said I must eat so many lemons, because I am so bittaaaah, I said I’d rather be with your friends mate ‘cos they are much fittaaaah”. I actually find that quirk quite charming if a little silly, but some people who know far more about these things than me have interpreted it as a posh girl pretending to be street. I have noticed that Whitney of Eastenders does the same thing. I wonder if she went to RADA?

Anyway, whatever the critical reception was, two and a half years later I am still not bored with Foundations, and they’re aren’t many big pop hits from the noughties that have remained in my affections for that long. It is worth noting that Nash didn’t repeat the success with any of the other singles from the album, and it’s taken a suspiciously long time for the follow up to arrive. It is on the way though, apparently it’s called My Best Friend Is You, with a lead single, Do-Wah Doo, due out next month. Speak-song haters, you have been warned!

Fragments Of Life by Roy Vedas
Another track now from The Incredible Sound Of Jo Wiley, a compilation album I bought in, I think, 1999. This one’s a bit of a mystery though, because I’ve never heard it or even any reference to it anywhere else. Furthermore, a Google search has provided me with nothing other that websites that will tell me the lyrics, show me the video or sell me a copy on imported 12” vinyl. I have no idea who Roy Vedas is, or if he even exists. It would be interesting to know where Jo Whiley heard it.

The whole thing just gets stranger when you hear the song. This really is quite a curious track, because it sounds sort of like a soul record, something kind of Gnarly Barclay-ish, but warped into oblivion by a computer. Whoever originally sang the vocals is now completely unidentifiable, as the production effects leave them sounding like a crazed robot, somehow flattening the sound while accentuating the different notes at the same time. Taking what is obviously a good song and mangling it in this way seemed completely bizarre and somewhat inspired when I first heard it. In retrospect though I guess it has lost some of its charm following the excessive use of autotune in just about every R&B single that’s been released in the last 18 months. Vocalists often no longer sound human, that’s become kind of standard, so the novelty of this track has worn off a bit.

Having said that, at the heart of Fragments Of Life is a great tune, and time isn’t going to erode that. The vocals are distended to such an extent that I was never really sure what the singer was on about anyway, but I am surprised to see from the lyric bearing websites that there are actually hardly any words, he just keeps repeating the same few lines, and they make little in the way of sense. “Something has observed me and my baby” he insists several times, before getting very excited about “falling back through the time, falling back through the light, falling back to me now”. The urgency of the vocals suggests that it means a lot to someone, goodness knows who or what. The instrumental break is even slightly more demented than the rest of the track, pitching itself somewhere between a church organ and a stylophone. It’s so unusual it is almost daft, but it certainly keeps you listening.

The sleeve to the compilation album says the track was licensed in 1998 and written by Frank Di Mauro and Maxi Trusso. There’s very little about them online too, so I guess the whole thing will remain a mystery. It’s a good song though, maybe I’ll send Jo Wiley an e-mail asking her about it.

Freakin’ Out by Graham Coxon
I have been racking my brains trying to work out where I first heard Freakin’ Out. It’s not like I’m always eagerly awaiting the release of everything Coxon ever does, so I must have heard this somewhere prior to release because I loved it so much I actually went to the trouble of pre-ordering myself a copy from Virgin Megastores. This was entirely necessary because, despite the release being in March 2004, many years after vinyl became all but obsolete, it was initially released only as a 7” single. That is a typically ridiculous thing for Coxon to do, the actions of a man who can afford to make a perfect pop punk crossover record and not even be bothered if anyone actually hears it.

Amazingly, the limited release of only 5,000 copies was so popular they must have all sold in one week, as it reached number 37 in the charts. This must surely make it the last record ever to hit the top 40 on vinyl sales alone. Such was the buzz around the track that seven months later, when the record company finally got around to releasing it on CD, it charted again, this time in the top 20, making it Coxon’s biggest ever solo hit.

Freakin’ Out is a great record for lots of reasons. It is incredibly simple, a short blast of energy that sounds like it should be a debut single by a bunch of 15 year olds, which is a remarkable achievement in itself for a man in his mid 30s who was the guitarist from one of the most popular bands of the last 20 years. The energy and enthusiasm on display are reminiscent of classic youthful pop punk moments like Teenage Kicks and Caught By The Fuzz, with possibly a bit of Song 2 thrown in as well. Coxon’s Cockney vocals remind me of Phil Daniels on Parklife, and altogether it is an excellent mixture. In fact the track is so derivative of other songs I wonder if I’m missing the point slightly and it is meant as a pastiche. It doesn’t really matter either way, it’s a great song. It is also the only solo track I think I’ve ever heard by Coxon, I should probably make an effort to listen to some more.

Free Nelson Mandela by The Special AKA
The great thing about writing these reviews is that I keep coming across songs that are different from everything else, and I love the fact that it forces me to think about them instead of just listening. I can think of about a hundred reasons why this track is so good, but first let’s put it into historical context.

Free Nelson Mandela was released as a single in 1984 and reached number 9 in the UK charts, when the titles’ South African anti-apartheid campaigner had been in prison for 21 years. I was 7 years old at the time and don’t remember anything about it, but I do recall being on the school bus and hearing Simon Mayo play the track on his breakfast show in February 1990, on the day Mandela was released. Even aged 13 I’m not sure I realised who Mandela was, or what apartheid was, but I do remember being impressed that this band was so passionate about the injustice of someone being in prison that they’d made a pop record about it. A catchy one too.

That, I think, is what makes Free Nelson Mandela quite different. In later years, having become a big Bob Dylan fan, I’ve become familiar with the concept of protest songs, but I’ve still never heard one quite like this. It is the celebratory nature of the tune, with a gospel choir and trumpets, that sets this track apart. The lyrics help to explain this too – “are you so blind that you cannot see?” – far from being a sad reminder to the injustice of his incarceration, this song actually celebrates how completely, unifyingly obvious it was that he should be released. The fact that it took another seven years is sad, but the fact that he eventually became South African president seems, bearing in mind the collective good will that made this song a huge success across Africa, somewhat inevitable.

Musically, this is a great track too. The Special AKA is essentially the same band as The Specials, but for reasons unknown to me, they tended to release music under both names. This is more of a straight pop reggae record than some of their more ska influenced earlier output, and considering how African the track sounds it is funny to think they come from Coventry. It is genuinely unusual to find a record in the top 10 with such an openly political message, the only other one I can think of is The Strawbs’ Part Of The Union, which nearly took the hip and happening subject of industrial labour relations to the very top in the early 70s.

It seems incredible now, but back in the 80s not everyone in Britain was entirely against the idea of a country being run on the presumption of ethnic superiority. Thatcher’s Tories never officially directly criticised the way the South African government behaved, and Queen were heavily criticised for breaking an unwritten rule within the entertainment industry by playing there. This proves that Free Nelson Mandela was not just opportunism on the part of The Special AKA, it was making a serious point. Any record that so specifically deals with a situation occurring at a certain point in time appeals to me, I just think chronicling current affairs in song is an interesting idea. In terms of alienating your audience it’s extremely risky too, but on this occasion it works brilliantly, and still sounds great 27 years later, despite Mandela himself now being both free and 92 years old.

French Disko by Stereolab
For the second time in three reviews I’m racking my brains trying to work out where I first heard this, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard it on daytime radio. I have a feeling I may have chanced upon it on a rare listen to John Peel’s show, or maybe I’m making that up because it sounds right. No matter, what I do know is that this is a truly brilliant track that most people have probably never heard. Wherever I heard it, I was suitably impressed to go into my local independent record shop and ask about it, and they sold me a 10” vinyl EP called Jenny Ondioline which had it on the second side. I guess this must have been January 1994, because I’ve just been on www.chartstats.com and discovered that one week that month it spent a solitary week at number 75 in the charts.

Stereolab were part English and part French, and there are not many indie bands you can say that about. Throughout their time together (1990 – 2009) they remained resolutely lo-fi, a band who people in the know spoke very highly of but who never seemed to sell many records, in fact they never even seemed to want to. Wikipedia describes them as “one of the most fiercely independent and original groups of the nineties”, and that certainly comes across in this track. The tune is just brilliant, it gets in your head and does not want to leave, pounding along in a way that is intoxicating, it’s the kind of record that you feel part of when you hear it.

All of this could make for a record that was a cast iron guaranteed hit, but instead the whole thing is drenched in extra loud fuzzy guitar and a really weird, creepy, clangy organ that sounds like it’s taken from a 1950s horror film. The vocals are as captivating as they are bizarre, a barely audible mumble with a strong French accent so far down in the mix they’re barely there at all. The singer’s accent warps English intonation so much that after I looked up the lyrics on the internet I refused to believe they were correct until I read along with the track. They are as odd as the rest of it, although I have to admit I can’t argue with the assertion that “though this world’s essentially an absurd place to be living in it doesn’t call for bubble withdrawal”. Good point.

I don’t know much else by Stereolab, but I definitely recommend this track. Most of the tracks on my iPod are well known, but this one is a real curiosity, and has been a talking point several times when I’ve been subjecting friends to my music collection.

UPDATE – Since typing this I’ve been on Youtube and found a performance of the song on The Word, which, as I was a big fan, pretty much rules out the John Peel theory. Good to see Terry Christian doing what he did best. Through all of the bodily fluids, drunken interviews and innuendo, I think it’s often forgotten how brilliant the music on that show was.

The Fun Lovin’ Criminal by The Fun Lovin’ Criminals
In the mid 90s there were a number of bands who somehow appeared to become successful on the fringes of Britpop, despite sounding nothing at all like the genre’s main protagonists (Blur, Oasis, Pulp etc). It is as though as well as suddenly producing music that the whole world wanted to hear for the first time in ages, Britain also became very receptive to all sorts of cool things from other countries which no one else had noticed.

So it was with The Fun Lovin’ Criminals, a band from New York who were dropped from their American label following the complete failure at home of their first two albums, even though both had been big hits over here. I guess that they just proved a little too eclectic for the tastes of their fellow countrymen, even though the tales they tell are full of references to their home city. In particular, I can’t help thinking that the hip hop element of their music might be what confused the American music industry. All of the American hip hop acts that I can think of are either black or consciously make an effort to sound like they are, whereas these guys are Latino and take rap somewhere entirely different.

With some bands who are unusual it is hard to pin down exactly what their influences are, but the Fun Lovin’ Criminals are the exact opposite, they are unusual because their influences are so wide. They are a kind of rap rock funk pop combo, and they regularly pulled together all these influences in a way that was both charming and exciting. Their influences clearly extend beyond music too, with their biggest UK hit, Scooby Snacks, containing samples of dialogue from Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.

On this almost eponymous track the gangster element is taken beyond samples and into the lyrics, which are threatening and funny at the same time, just like Tarrantino’s films in fact. Over a funky guitar and brass combination that had whole festivals dancing in the late 90s, front man Huey describes himself as the kind of cheeky character you can’t help liking despite their familiarity with the police. “I’ll scream, I’ll yell, I’ll bark, I’ll bite, I’ll hit you with an egg on a hot summer night” he claims, and daft as it sounds you believe him.

The Fun Lovin’ Criminal isn’t just a great record, it’s testament to the fact that sometimes in the UK we go through stages of being very open minded about what we listen to. It was not a huge hit (number 24) but the album was bigger and the band made a career out of this sort of stuff and are still together and still touring, largely because we were listening to them. With the steady onslaught of autotuned R&B and lazy hip hop that we’re currently getting, it’s important that we don’t forget how exciting music can sometimes be, even American music. This helps me remember.

Funky Cold Medina by Tone Loc
A while back I realised I wanted to increase the amount of old hip hop on my iPod. When I was a kid I occasionally bough the odd 7” single by American rap artists like Del La Soul and Dream Warriors, but I had always been aware that there was loads more I hadn’t bought which was probably pretty good too. I remembered this as soon as I saw it, a track as daft as it was good, a reminder of a time when rap music could be funny without being offensive. Well, not that offensive anyway.

Funky Cold Medina reached number 3 in the US charts in 1989, and scraped the top 20 here too. For a rap record it is a bit of a curiosity, in that the guy performing it didn’t actually write it himself. Tone Loc had a couple of big hits in the States before becoming an actor, but this track was written for him by Young MC, a British born New York based rapper who had a few hits of his own back then too. Based around a sparse drum beat and an electric guitar sample from a Foreigner track called Hot Blooded, it tells the somewhat implausible and, in retrospect, slightly disturbing tale of a man’s attempts at using an aphrodisiac to attract women.

It starts in a bar where Tone (or Mr Loc I suppose) observes a man who has a lot of women showing an interest in him. He asks him what his secret is, and he tells him his secret – “put a little Medina in their glass and the girls will come real quick”. I mentioned that in retrospect this track is a little disturbing, but if you can get around the possibility that the title may refer to a date rape drug then this really is quite a funny record. After all, the 80s were more innocent times.

Anyway, our hero is a little sceptical so decides to try the potion out on his dog, “then he looked at me and he licked his bowl and did the wild thing on my leg”. I wouldn’t mind betting that this quote is, to date, the only reference to canine ejaculation ever to make the US top 10. Impressed, he then decides to go the whole hog and slips some in the glass of a girl he meets called Sheena. Initially things seem to be going well, but when they get back to his place there’s a surprise – “when she got undressed it was a big old mess, Sheena was a man”. His insensitive approach may have alienated the global transgender community, but I forgive him because his protest to Sheena – “it is the 80s and I’m down with the ladies” – is my favourite thing about the whole song, makes me laugh every time. There are some further shenanigans involving a lady who, after being spiked with the potion, immediately starts planning their wedding, and then the track ends with a warning never to use it yourself.

In 2010 Funky Cold Medina sounds incredibly quaint, a throw back to a different time for music and for society. That seems an odd thing to say about a rap record, but it’s a sign that the genre has been around for so long. There’s been a lot of progress since it sounded like this, but it’s worth remembering there are some real forgotten gems in rap history.

Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolio featuring LV
There are still less than 90 singles which have sold over a million copies in the UK, and they make for a fascinating list. You can imagine the kind of thing that’s in there - records from TV talent shows (Will Young, Gareth Gates), children’s TV characters (Bob The Builder, the Teletubbies), artists that were popular because of films or TV dramas (John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John, Robson Green & Jerome Flynn) and charity records (Elton John, Band Aid). Nearly all of the tracks in the list are there thanks in part to promotion which doesn’t actually have anything to do with music, as if to gain that ultimate level of high sales good music alone is just not enough (and in fact, in a lot of cases, not necessary at all). In a round about way I think that makes the achievement of Gangsta’s Paradise, the UK’s 45th best selling single ever, all the more amazing. It indicates that this really must be quite a special record, and it certainly is.

Gangsta’s Paradise was released in the UK in October 1995, and spent a modest 2 weeks at the top of the charts, but hung around near the top until well after Christmas. Based around a sample from a Stevie Wonder track called Pastime Paradise, it was the first rap record in the UK to sell anywhere near that amount of records, although it has since been surpassed by tracks by both the Fugees and Puff Daddy.

I think Gangsta’s Parasise’s success lay in the fact that although it was clearly a rap record it kind of took the genre somewhere new, by dealing with the subjects of inner city crime and poverty with humility and careful consideration, not things that had widely been associated with gangster rap in the past. This was reflected in the religious overtones the track has too – it’s opening line is from a psalm, and the gospel choir in the background are a reference to a part of black American culture that rarely features in UK pop radio stations.

Personally, while I have loved this track ever since it came out, I have also always been quite fascinated by how a track can touch so many people who have absolutely no connection to the lifestyle it describes. One day while bored in college, I completely re-wrote the whole record so the chorus went “been spending most our lives living in the Cheshire countryside”, thinking maybe myself and a few other Northern yokels could take that point to its logical conclusion and get a record deal, aiming for the novelty market somewhere between The Wurzels and Morris Minor and the Majors. Nothing came of it though, and in retrospect I think Stevie Wonder might have been less keen to clear the sample for me as he was for Coolio.

I remember listening to the best selling singles of the year on Radio 1 at the end of 1995, and they had clips of famous people at the time saying what their favourite songs of the year had been. Jarvis Cocker chose this track, and while I can’t remember his reasons word for word it was along the lines of “it is nice to hear a rapper talking about something other than the size of his genitals for a change, and it’s good to dance to”. I guess that quite neatly sums up this songs success, and while Coolio’s career might not have come to much else this track lives on as one of the landmark moments in hip hop.

Gangsters by The Specials
Here is another definite entry in the Best Opening Lines competition that someone ought to hold here – “Why must you record my phone calls? Are you planning a bootleg LP?” – makes me laugh every time I hear it. The fact that a lot of music fans these days probably wouldn’t know what a bootleg LP was actually makes it even funnier.

Gangsters was the Specials first hit, making the top 10 in 1979. While later on they incorporated pop and rock into their sound, this is quite simply a ska record, with the requisite bouncy tune and largely indecipherable vocals. One contradiction I always find in ska music is that while the subjects can be quite dark and of a serious, grown nature, the music appeals a great deal to children. When I was a kid I had no idea what the lyrics were to this song, who it was by or what it was called, but whenever it was on the radio it always had me bouncing along to the jaunty bass and playing air guitar to the wibbly instrumental break. What the lyrics were didn’t matter at all, you could just go “laaa, la la laaa, la la la la” and it worked just as well. Years later I bought a cheap, supposedly 80s indie album called Rip It Up that I saw in Woolworths and bought just to get Golden Brown by The Stranglers. When I got it home and played the whole thing I did not know what to expect from Gangsters, by as soon as I heard it the bouncing and the “laaa la…” all came flooding back. It’s just one of those irresistible tunes that you feel like you’ve known forever.

While to me Gangsters was never really much more than a bit of fun, it would be wrong to over look its place in musical history. It was one of the earliest successes for the 2Tone record label, which in the late 70s and early 80s spearheaded the whole ska revival from its base in Coventry. At the time a some commentators were putting a lot of emphasis on the importance of this music in race relations amongst Britain’s youth, as many of the bands involved, The Specials included, were multi racial, something that until then had never really been seen in British music. Ska had originated in the 50s, but this new version was combining Caribbean rhythm with punk attitude, and so the music was very clearly racially mixed too. We should be grateful for the fact that all this seems a bit irrelevant now, but back then it was really quite important to a lot of people.

I guess the truth is that it might prove difficult to find much ska influence on the music scene in 2010. The music industry has moved on considerably from the days when an indie label from the Midlands could appear unexpectedly with a completely different sound to everything else that was going on at the time to the delight of the entire nation’s youth. Still, ska may have been a moment in time but a lot of the songs still sound great today, and Gangsters is one of the best.

Geraldine by Glasvegas
It is an unfortunate fact that the name Geraldine probably only makes most pop fans in 2010 think of one thing – the Peter Kay character who “won” his half-funny 2008 TV spectacular Britain's Got the Pop Factor... and Possibly a New Celebrity Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly on Ice. It’s unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly, presumably just because he likes earning cash, Kay released two singles under the name Geraldine McQueen both of which were awful (obviously, that was the whole point of the show), but were also perplexingly big hits. Secondly, only six months earlier, this absolutely gorgeous track dipped in and out of the top 20 so quickly that I think hardly anyone noticed. When you hear the name Geraldine, which would you rather think of – a fat man from Bolton in a dress pretending to have changed gender and faking a Northern Irish accent, or a heart warming, uplifting, poetic tale laden with gorgeous, swooping guitars and a tender Glaswegian vocal? Pop music can be very strange sometimes.

Glasvegas’ debut album is the kind of record I find it very easy to fall in love with. This was the first single, and I have to confess I never heard it until the bigger hit, Daddy’s Home, got me interested in the band. They have a genuinely different take on music to anyone else in the mainstream at the moment, and it is refreshing to hear a band who are not afraid to stand out musically. They are like a combination of Generation Terrorists era Manic Street Preachers, but with the politics replaced by poetry, and Motown style harmonies that on paper seem at odds with indie music but which in practise work incredibly well. Add to this a strong Glaswegian accent and it’s a heady mixture that takes the listener to unexpected places.

The lyrics to Geraldine are from the point of view of a woman offering guidance and help in life, and near the end of the second verse she announces “I will be the angel on your shoulder, my name is Geraldine, I’m your social worker”. If Wikipedia is to be believed (which it frequently isn’t) Geraldine herself is actually a real person, a social worker who gave up her job to tour with Glasvegas selling their merchandise. The lyrics read more like a poem than a song, partly because of the singer’s clever ability to fit a seemingly unfeasible number of syllables into one line, and it almost seems a shame to think this is a real person rather than some fanciful dreamt up tale. Having said that, the idea that a middle aged woman called Geraldine could be so taken with this band of young musicians that she gives up her comfortable existence to follow them on tour is pretty cool too.

Get Back by The Beatles with Billy Preston
The Beatles 16th UK number one single was the only one they ever released to credit another artist alongside themselves. Billy Preston was an American R&B musician who was a session man for a huge list of top recording artists during a career which spanned four decades and also included Grammy award winning solo work. Even so, I have to confess that if it had not been for his electric piano and Hammond organ playing on Get Back I would almost certainly never have heard of him.

Get back was released in April 1969 accompanied by a typically blasé press release in which Paul McCartney stated that the song was written beginning to end in a jam session while he and Lennon were just messing about. It must have been so frustrating to musicians at the time who were working incredibly hard to get public recognition for their work while The Beatles could knock off a near perfect, million selling, inspiring rock record which would influence generations to come in just a few minutes. I once read that Kung Fu Fighting took Carl Douglas 10 minutes to write and sold 10 million copies, which is a very impressive return on effort, but thankfully Lennon and McCartney were a little more inspired creatively.

As was often the case with songs written by Paul McCartney, Get Back focuses on interesting characters for its subject matter, quirky people about whom you hear a little bit of information about and spend many happy hours imagining the rest. The first verse is about a man called Jojo who moved from Arizona to California for some grass, (presumably not in the form of lawns but you never really know with McCartney). More interestingly, the second verse is about Sweet Loretta Martin who “thought she was a woman but she was another man”. Thanks to the likes of The Kinks and Lou Reed sexual ambiguity became a common feature of pop lyrics in the seventies, but I think this is probably the first time the subject was dealt with at the top of the pop charts, albeit in a passing reference that doesn’t seem to mean much.

Get Back proves that even at the end of their time together The Beatles were still pushing back boundaries and still effortlessly recording songs that would prove a huge inspiration to future generations. The only criticism you could possibly throw at the track is that it is almost like The Beatles had become so technically and creatively perfect it was boring. It’s certainly not in the league of I Want To Hold Your Hand or Hey Jude in terms of iconic status or representing the sound of the sixties as a whole, but then very few records are actually that good. This one is not far off.

Get In The Ring by Guns N’ Roses
Looking back I was quite a mild mannered teenager really. The petty theft, occasional truancy and tendency to sit alone in the dark were probably a little troubling for my parents, but all in all things could have been much worse. I respected my elders, was good with the kids my Mum looked after and, unlike so many of my peers, was never aggressive. To this day, I’ve never hit anyone in my entire life.

Even so, all teenagers need an outlet for the anger and frustration they feel at the growing realisation that the world around them is not as fair and perfect as their first few years on this earth suggested. Like so many people my age, I found venting these feelings easiest when listening to offensively loud music which contained a lot of shouting. Or, more specifically, I listened very often to Get In The Ring. This is the song that taught me how to swear.

Get In The Ring is the fifth track on Use Your Illusion II, which I bought on tape with money stolen from my sister on the same day in 1991 as Use Your Illusion I, the day they were released. The track is aimed at rock journalists who upset Guns N’ Roses over the years, a kind of answer to the lies that their fans had been sold by the American music press. I had, and still have, no idea at all who “Andy Setcher at Hit Parader, Mick Wall at Kerrang, Bob Guccione Junior at Spin” were, but to hear the addressed directly in a song in this way instantly made them equivalent to the Antichrist. If Axl Rose didn’t like them, then neither did I. And how did I know he didn’t like them? The lyrics contain the clues: “What, you ****** off ‘cos your Dad gets more ***** than you? **** you! Suck my ******* ****!”. I had never heard anyone swear that much before, and it was exciting.

Get In The Ring features a lot of crowd noise, which I always innocently assumed to mean it was recorded live, and how I wished I was at that gig. I have since read though that it was recorded in the studio and the crowd noise was recorded at a gig and added on. In a way though that just adds to the pantomime element of the track, which is all a bit silly really. At the end Axl announces that “this story is dedicated to all the Guns and ******* Roses fans who’ve stuck with us, through all the ******* ****”. The cynical 32 year old writing this thinks sarcastically “yeah, it must have been really difficult for them being international rock stars”. When I was 14 though that message went out directly to me, and I can still remember how that felt, which is why the track is on my iPod 19 years later.

Get Myself Arrested by Gomez
While at first glance the huge mid-90s explosion of indie success known as Britpop can seem like it was all about men who looked the same playing guitars and singing songs that all sounded the same, when you actually start to remember some of the detail it is amazing how broad the excellent music that was being made back then actually was. There were an awful lot of bands on the fringe of that scene who enjoyed moderate to major success that would almost certainly not have happened had Oasis not released Definitely Maybe, even though their own style was really nothing like that.

Gomez are a good example. Hailing from the Scouse seaside town of Southport, they signed to the independent record label Hut in 1997, recorded their debut album Bring It On, and released it to with very little fanfare. If such a thing happened now it would almost certainly get nowhere, but back then, with the music industry and the record buying public constantly clamouring to find the next big British band, Bring It On became a cult favourite and eventually went platinum. In 1998 it won the Mercury Music Prize, fitting recognition for a record that really was incredibly good.

One thing that made Gomez stand out from the many other bands plying their trade at the time was the relaxed feel of their music. While a lot of bands were making rock records that were influenced by punk and even glam rock, Gomez were far more chilled out. The indie look and sound were ever present, but these guys were stoners not revolutionaries. Their music always trod a fine line between being calming and boring, but when they got it right, as on Get Myself Arrested, the results were brilliant.

Judging by the tracks lyrics, they were not just stoners in terms of their style either. Singer Ian Ball’s vocal delivery is that of a man who has just woken up involuntarily, and when the track’s pace goes at one stage from dead slow to almost stopped he sings the line “he only grows for guys he knows and me” twice. It leaves little doubt about what it is he expects to get arrested for, and he doesn’t really seem that bothered anyway. The subject matter, sliding guitar and chugging beat may be sleep inducing, but that is only because they make such a blissful combination.

Gomez are still together, and released an album last year which briefly scraped the bottom end of the charts. Unusually, all through their career that have enjoyed moderate success in the US too, but I suppose the stoner culture is more prevalent over there. Ultimately, if you are male, a fan of what I am going to have to call ‘freaky cigarettes’ to get past the BBC censors, live in an untidy flat near the seaside, never get up before lunch time and spend your time bumming around surf shops, you will love this record. In fact, even if you aren’t any of those things you should still give it a listen, it’s great.

Get Off My Cloud by the Rolling Stones
It’s funny how, as time passes, most acts become remembered for one or two tracks in particular. I reckon a lot of people these days, when they hear mention of the Rolling Stones, think only of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. I didn’t know much more by them myself until I was a student and a friend went on and on about them enough for me to invest a small fortune (£14 if I remember right) in Hot Rocks 1964-1971, a double CD compilation of the biggest hits from the early part of their career. It was a fantastic buy, because there were so many brilliant tracks on there that I didn’t already know. Suddenly I was discovering that there was more to the 60s than The Beatles.

Released in November 1965, Get Off My Cloud was the next single after the aforementioned …Satisfaction, and followed it to number 1 in the UK and the US charts. The Stones recorded in a lot of different styles during their career, but this track is actually very similar in a lot of ways to its slightly more famous predecessor. A mixture of traditional rock and roll, sixties soul beats and Jagger & Richard’s typically confrontational attitude, it is a record that is very hard to sit down to, it demands some sort of manic dancing. Ever since the sixties pop stars have struggled to make party records in any way credible, but these guys managed it so effortlessly it was like they were born into it. There are very few other records I can think of which are so obviously mass appeal party tracks but which have lyrics you would actually like to pay attention to and understand; it’s a good reminder of what made that incredible decade so good for pop music. There have been very few people since with the song writing talent of Jagger and Richards.

The lyrics themselves are fascinating, pulling off another common Stones trick of seemingly fitting far more syllables into a single line that should be possible, making singing along to anything other than the chorus very difficult. However many times I try to keep up while singing in the car, the line “The telephone is ringing I say hi it’s me who is it there on the line” always gets jumbled up. My chances of following it with “A voice says hi hello how are you well I guess I’m doing fine” are virtually zero. I always try though.

Interestingly, the song even seems to touch on similar themes to …Satisfaction, with the opening verse referring to a man trying to sell Jagger detergent, in much the same way as the man on the TV telling him how white his shirts should be in the first song. Apparently, Jagger once said in an interview that it’s a “stop bugging me, post teenage alienation song”. Then again he also said that personally he never really liked it, and that the production was poor. Maybe he’s just heard it too many times and got bored. As far as I’m concerned it’s one of their best.

[SheriffFatman]

Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are) by Pras Michel featuring ODB and Maya
The Bee Gees are a strange band. Indescribably naff, they seem to have ploughed their way through pop music ever since the late sixties, oblivious to the fact that there have always been as many people viewing them with bemused distain as there have been buying their records. What fascinates me about them is the way they keep cropping up in the least expected places. In the 90s they had a several hits in their own right, and just in case the point about their naffness has not been rammed home hard enough, they also made the top 10 on a duet with Celine Dion.

Their modest tally of hits in that decade goes nowhere near explaining their influence on the pop music purchasing public during that time though. To understand that you have to check the writing credits on some of that period’s biggest hits. Acts of the calibre of Boyzone, Take That, 911 and Steps had some of their biggest hits with Bee Gees covers, and who can forget the world of dance music being flabbergasted when N-Trance followed up the still highly regarded Set You Free with a nonsense rap party version of Stayin’ Alive which sold nearly as many copies? Regardless of genre, there was a stage in the 90s when it seemed like if pop music was crap, there was at least a 50% chance the Gibb brothers were to blame.

Amazingly though it wasn’t all bad. Ghetto Supastar (not my spelling by the way, in fact I get a shiver down my spine every time I type it) has a chorus based heavily on Islands In The Stream, a song the Bee Gees wrote and which was originally a hit for Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers in 1983. (More recently, allegedly in the name of comedy, this was turned into (Barry) Islands In The Stream and became a number one hit for Vanessa Jenkins and Bryn West featuring Sir Tom Jones and Robin Gibb, but the least said about that the better).

Ghetto Supastar bucks the 90s Bee Gees related trend by actually being pretty good, although it did follow the previously mentioned tracks success wise, peaking at number 2 in the UK in 1998. Pras Michel’s ex-Fugees colleague Wyclef Jean has a unique ability to find pop and hip hop gold in the least likely places, and although I don’t know how much he had to do with this song it sounds like his influence is all over it. The Gibbs may get a prominent writing credit, but their influence is mostly restricted to the chorus which is sung perfectly by Maya, while Pras and the late ODB take turns on rapping duties. The whole thing is suitably ridiculous, especially ODB’s apparent call for rap unity, “it’s all together now in da hooooooooood” near the end of the track.

Almost all of the best rap / pop crossover hits over the years have bridged the gap with an element of humour, and whether it’s intentional or not the sheer unlikliness of Ghetto Supastar continues to make me smile every time I hear it.

Ghost Town by The Specials
Although pop music is transient and all about the latest new sound, occasionally a song can come to mean more over time than it ever seemed likely to achieve when it was released. Even though Ghost Town’s original success was very impressive, spending 3 weeks at number one in the summer of 1981, in a lot of people’s minds it now represents the soundtrack to an entire section of this nation’s political and economic history, more surely than any pop star could ever hope for when putting pen to paper.

Even more intriguingly for a pop record, it does not document happy times. While the likes of Wham! and Duran Duran documented the wealthy excess of a section of British society in the 80s, Ghost Town was at the far other end of the financial spectrum. Written about Coventry, the desolate wasteland of fear and police sirens that it brings to mind struck a chord with people in larger and smaller cities throughout Britain. This was music that the public identified with personally, and by a strange twist of fate it sat at the top of the top 40 as riots broke out in Bristol, Liverpool, London and eventually many other places. The youth of Britain was simultaneously buying Ghost Town and taking to the streets in violent protest against Thatcher’s government. Ska did not become the defining sound of the decade, nor did the working class anger and disgust at policies which favoured the rich and caused mass unemployment result in the collapse of the Tory government, but for a brief moment there it must have seemed like the two things were working in unison.

One of the key reasons for Ghost Town’s enduring popularity is that the song itself is really quite unusual. Ska was used often in the early 80s by the likes of Madness to portray a sense of fun, but here familiar elements, such as a catchy chorus and bouncy beat, were slowed down, giving a very different effect of mournful desperation and a sense of giving up. It was quite specific about the problems too – “no job to be found in this country, can’t go on no more, the people getting angry” they sang, and in the inner cities life imitated art. It is hard to imagine any track with such a directly political message being a success in 2010. There may be a lot of people out there talking about this week’s budget, but I doubt there are many writing songs about it, let alone good songs.

Ghost Town really is unique – its incredible ability both musically and lyrically to easily evoke a period in time that really had nothing directly to do with pop music means that it will be seared on the consciousness of this country for ever more. There have been many political song writers over the years, but few have managed this level of success with any of their output. Maybe Ghost Town’s secret lies in its simplicity, certainly when intending to have this kind of effect while writing a song it would be easy to over complicate things. Maybe The Specials got lucky too, and this just happened to be in the shops at a time when it meant something to people. Whatever the reason, it remains a firm favourite of mine and I reckon of the whole county’s – there really is nothing else quite like it.

Gimme Hope Jo’anna by Eddy Grant
It’s strange, but this is not the first time when writing these reviews that I’ve found that a song that by chance happens to be next alphabetically has some direct link to current events. Right now, thanks to a certain inescapable sporting event in which I have very little interest, the eyes of the whole world are on South Africa, with particular emphasis on the nation’s infrastructure and security. Meanwhile, here am I reviewing a song written about South Africa during a much less happy time in its history.

Gimme Hope Jo’anna was a top ten hit for Eddy Grant in 1988. My Dad had always liked reggae music, the only possible explanation I can offer for this being that it helped him imagine holidays that at the time he couldn’t afford but which later in life he enjoyed a great deal, and still does. In particular, although he wasn’t exactly a pop connoisseur, one of his favourite songs of the 80s was Grant’s 1982 chart topper I Don’t Wanna Dance. He’d been absent from the charts for 5 years when Gimme Hope Jo’anna was released, by which time I had become old enough to buy music for myself, and this release caused some excitement. Like Grant’s other stuff, it was a rock reggae crossover with a serious sounding message but a cheery, singalong chorus. For years that’s all it was for me, it was some time before I realised that Jo’anna was not a woman but actually Johannesburg, and the government which operated there.

You can hardly blame me for not picking up the references to South African politics, even if they were quite obvious, because I was only 10 years old. Listening to the track with some knowledge of Apartheid and what it meant for the people who lived under it is a very different experience though, even if it does still make me want to dance.

Grant’s angle on the system of government that kept the black majority at the very bottom of society is intriguing. He reports things as he sees them, commenting on the government’s manipulation of the media, the army’s incursions into neighbouring states and the clergy’s belief that the ruling classes can be overcome, but at no point does he really openly criticise, the listener is left to make up their own mind. Even the chorus and the actual title ask for nothing more than a glimmer of hope that things can change. A few years later they did change, and at the time the shift in power probably seemed more fundamental than anything Grant or anyone else could have hoped for.

That said, although I don’t know an awful lot about modern day South African politics, Grant played this song in concert last year in India and changed the opening line to “Jo’anna still runs a country”, so maybe the pace of change has been too slow for his liking. Maybe the message is still relevant, or maybe it’s more of a history lesson, but whatever you think about the lyrics this track is still great for all the same reasons I loved it when I was 10, and unlike a lot of other stuff I was into back then I still love it now.

[SheriffFatman]

Just a little light reading!

From now on the reviews will just appear one at a time, when I get round to writing them.

[borneoman]

ouch ouch this is gonna take some reading!!! maybe we can consider this some sort of 'archives'... looking forward to reading the regular ones

[-Big Dan-]

I would check out Graham Coxon's solo output. In fact, if you've got Spotify, I believe every solo album he has released is on there.

[o]

Blimey, I've only read the first few (I'm at work )
But glad you found A Punk, top tune, cant believe it wasn't a top 40 hit Their more recent stuff is disappointing though
I also have some Hives on my ipod, hate to say I told you so, two timing touch and broken bones and tick tick boom, brilliant, short and punky and loud, excellent!
The beatles - Across the universe, only just discovered this after a mate lent me some cds, love it, love it, as I do a few other tracks which I will list later. Carry That weight, In my life, Tomorrow never knows and While my guitar gently weeps, just pure class!
I'll try and read more later
Maybe 10 in a post would have been easier to read? Look forward to your recent reviews though