"That's Entertainment!"

I've already blogged "English Rose" by The Jam, and to my mind, this one is right up there alongside as one of the best songs to come out of Britain in the 1980s. If you wanted one song to tell you about what living in Britain was like in the 80s, you could do no beter than this. If I recall rightly, Cocaine Jesus blogged this a while back, and it's that good a song that it deserves all the exposure it can have:
"A smash of glass and the rumble of boots/An electric train and a ripped up 'phone booth/Paint splattered walls and the cry of a tomcat/Lights going out and a kick in the balls".
There's no hidden meaning, no grand metaphor, just the facts, ma'am. It's real, it's harsh yet tender: "Two lovers kissing amongst the scream of midnight/Two lovers missing the tranquillity of solitude" and it's brilliant.

"Once in a Lifetime"

Probably one of the more thought-provoking songs I've blogged, this is one of those moments when you can't decide whether to dance or to sit and ponder life's eternal verities. Talking Heads do this to me. Every song of theirs I've heard and enjoyed has been a tussle between my hips and my head. What is this about, anyway? Is it the realisation that time passes and you'd better not let a day go by without grabbing life by the short and curlies? A sort of midlife crisis? Are Talking Heads poking fun at the archetypal American "perfect life" of the 50s and 60s? Or are they talking about nuclear power? The melting ice-caps? Deforestation in the Amazon basin? Does it matter? There are probably as many interpretations to this as there are copies of the album knocking around. And that's just fine.

"Sunset Grill"

This is a very definite song about a very definite time and place. You're sitting in the front window of a bar, probably in Seattle, and very likely the Victoria Inn near the Pike's Place market. You're having the last latte of the day or the first beer of the evening, and you can't think of anywhere else to go, or anything else to do. Life is happening all around you, people passing in blurs of fast forward and stopping, freezing just for a second in front of the window to let you in on the secret of their lives, before they pass and the moment, the insight is lost. You came from somewhere depressing to this point, and you're waiting for the next current, the next eddy, to carry you on your way. in the meantime however: "Let's go down to the Sunset Grill/And watching the working girls go by/Watch the basket people walk around and mumble/Gaze out at the auburn sky/Maybe we'll leave come springtime/In the meantime. have another beer/What would we do without all these jerks anyway/And besides, all our friends are here." One of Don Henley's better days at the office.

"Sign o' the Times"

Let's go back and re-examine the theory that Less Is More. This is so spare, bare and simple that it feels, and almost sounds, like nothing at all. Yet it's probably Prince's best song: trembling with suppressed rage, anger and frustration. He doesn't let it show in his voice, which is a gentle and fairly laid-back drawl. The beat doesn't betray anything either - it's a slow, evil, snaking thing. It's in the lyric, which just lays it all out in front of us:

"In France, a skinny man died of a big disease/With a little name/By chance his girlfriend came across a needle/And soon she did the same/At home there are 17-year-old boys/And their idea of fun/Is being in a gang called The Disciples/High on crack and totin' a machine gun/Hurricane Annie ripped the ceiling of a church/And killed everyone inside/U turn on the telly and every other story/Is tellin' U somebody died/A sister killed her baby cuz she couldn't afford 2 feed it/And yet we're sending people 2 the moon/In September, my cousin tried reefer 4 the very first time/Now he's doing horse - it's June."

I make no apologies for quoting so extensively: this is as powerful a lyric as you're likely to come across, and by playing it absolutely straight, and by using such a minimalist musical approach, Prince makes this bold, heartfelt statement ring loudly. By some curious irony, the song that came up on my jukebox right after this was Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA". Now there's a pair of styles to compare and contrast!

"Devoted Friends"

At the other end of relationships, now. After everything has gone as wrong as it could, after you've parted ways for whatever reason...you can't let go, but you can't hold on either. "If you have to leave after all that we've/Been through, been through/I can't be a friend if your heart has the end/In view, in view/Because lovers never can be/Just devoted friends/How can we meet on a day in the week/And be true, be true/And how can I speak and pretend that I'm happy for you/For you, for you". Wang Chung never floated my boat in general, but this song just leapt out and grabbed me. We've all been here, right folks?

"You and Me Song"

There are almost too many songs that try and glorify love by talking about the first flush of a romance, the passion that kicks off a relationship, the can't-keep-our-hands-off-each-other obsession. What's harder to do is find something trancendent in the mundane, to lift up the every-day currency of being with someone and try to show how special it is: "You tell me I'm a real man, and try to look impressed/Not very convincing, but you know I love it/Then we watch TV, until we fall asleep/Not very exciting/But it's you and me always and we'll always/Be together." The Wannadies hit the nail perfectly on the head with this song: the verse is a gentle, summery whisper, a softly-spoken "I love you" in the perfect silence of a Saturday afternoon in the park, while the chorus is the burst of realization and confirmation, the moment of passion that returns, time and again, to refresh and invigorate. "Always when we fight, I try to make you laugh/Until everything's forgotten, I know you hate that/Always when we fight, I kiss you once or twice/And everything's forgotten, I know you hate that/I love you Sunday sun, the week's not yet begun/And everything is quiet/And it's always you and me always and forever." I'd rather listen to this than to a thousand dance-floor smooching songs.

"Living in the USA"

Another song that has an irresistible grip on the hips, this is all about shuffling backbeat, blues blasts on the harmonica and fantastic soul singing from the Space Cowboy himself, Steve Miller. This is probably the best place to point to when you're discussing the blues-rock crossover. While James Brown may have patented "Living in America" and glorified all that is great about the nation that brought us obesity, mutually assured destruction and corporate fraud, Steve Miller is a little more down to earth here: "I see a yellow man, a brown man/A white man, a red man/Lookin' for Uncle Sam/To give you a helpin' hand/But everybody's kickin' sand/Even politicians/We're living in a plastic land." And frankly, if the dancing's as good as this, you're almost tempted to forgive America its sins if they keep the beat coming. As he sings on the fade-out: "Somebody get me a cheesburger!"

"Hot Pants Explosion"

There are two different bands called the B 52s. The first is the edgy, parallel-universe group that surfaced in the 1980s and produced spare, stripped-down dance music for frat parties, songs like "Planet Claire", "Private Idaho" and of course "Rock Lobster", low-fi electronically-assisted beats. The second band is the B 52s that resurfaced after the death of guitarist Ricky Wilson, a polished, more commercial and highly camp beach-party wig-out band. They'd found funk, they'd found power chords, they'd found slick producers. They still had the alternate universe thing going on, particularly in the way they looked and the subjects for their songs. "Hot Pants Explosion" is probably the best example of the second coming of the B 52s. There's absolutely no shortage of camp: "I'm in shipping, if you're receiving/'Cause what I see I ain't believing/The longest legs in the shortest pants/You got me doing a mating dance/Pant pant/You got me panting like a dog/Pant pant/Ooh I'm a hot pants hot dog." This is unashamed good-time music, something the B 52s always knew how to do, but it's polished, meaty, relishing its own naughtiness like Kenneth Williams rolling his eyes and saying "Oooooh, matron!"

"Revolutions"

Imagine you're walking through a north African souk, feeling breathless in the heat and slightly light-headed from the sun, the smells, the blinding whitewashed walls. You're being pushed this way and that, losing your bearings from time to time and struggling to keep up with the sea of people ebbing and flowing in and out of the squares, the narrow streets and courtyards. You hear the feminine wailing of the muezzin echoing in your head from the previous evening, you hear drums and gradually a beat begins to form around you, a tense, insistent patter of percussion that presses against your head. You're getting dizzy and the people, the market stalls, the houses are beginning to spin around you.....and you find you're the one spinning around, losing yourself in the insistent seduction of the music.
But then you come to, and realise you've been smoking opium and listening to Jean Michel Jarre in Finchley. Bah.

"Buddy Holly"

Over on Cocaine Jesus' blog, he reviews "Teenage Kicks" by the Undertones and quite plausibly calls it "one of the best singles ever". I suggested a couple of others that might vie for that accolade, but CJ reckoned they're a bit too "Beatlish", which is fair enough. So it set me to thinking what more recent tunes could arguably be called one of the "best ever".
And then I played "Buddy Holly". Weezer have got it just about 100% right with this: it's got perfect pop roots, a snappy chorus, great harmonies. But better yet, it's got the buzz-saw guitar favoured by grunge and the lyric is just off-centre enough to be a love song with a difference: "What's with these homies dissing my girl?/Why do they gotta front?/What did we ever do to these guys that made them so violent?" It's vaguely dysfunctional, disaffected, but there's no hiding the fact that underneath lies a great, great pop song.

"Snuff Rock"

Some time in the late 70s, Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias recorded the now-infamous "Snuff Rock" EP; four tracks about death, recorded as a spoof on the punk movement: "I don't give a damn/I don't fucking care/Gonna kill me mum and dad and pull out me hair/Fed up with the dole and the human race/Gonna cut me liver out and shove it in your face." If there has ever been a set of songs - "Kill", "Gobbing on Life", "Snuffing Like That" and the reggae rip-off "Snuffin In A Babylon" - that better skewered the whole New Wave attitude, I can't think of it. The Albertos went on to do the same to heavy metal with "Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie". But these four tracks are perfect: the music is a perfect pastiche, the vocals are spot-on, in fact these songs are better than most punk output. Even the reggae is right: "Snuffin in a Babylon/All de people/Dropping like flies/Nobody left 'cept I an I."

"I Touch Myself"

There's something abandoned about this song, something of the obsessional: "I love myself/I want you to love me/When I´m feeling down/I want you above me/I search myself/I want you to find me/I forget myself/I want you to remind me." This song is half-clothed, utterly spent after an intense night of passion, carelessly caressing a cup of coffee at the kitchen table and staring blindly out the window while trying to make sense of a storm of emotions. It's all in the voice here; the song bravely tries to keep up with the lyric, but it's doomed to fail. What's sad is how the Divinyls never topped this.

"S-s-single Bed"

I can't help but think of this as the musical equivalent of a clumsy, half-cut fumbling in the back of a taxi after the company Christmas party. You know the idea; you've drunk a glass or two too much, you've ended back up at her tiny flat, you've listened to some music, drunk a bit more, clumsily kissed and made very hazy love in the sitting room. There's just a single bed, so you have to sleep on the sofa, and tomorrow morning, you're both going to turn up in the office and try not to be too obvious. Noosha Fox's voice is half-apologetic girl, half not-at-all-apologetic seductress: "Ain't it a shame/You missed the last train/Cos all I've got/Is a single bed/There ain't no room/For your sweet head." Jittery and funky, a stop/start beat, this is enjoyable in a nudge-nudge kind of way.

"A Design for Life"

"Libraries gave us power/Then work came and made us free", and ever since then we've been on a colossal bender, according to the Manic Street Preachers. "I wish I had a bottle/Right here in my dead face/To wear the scars/To show from where I came". Evidently the life of leisure that 21st century progress has afforded us is being wasted, misspent, pissed against the wall round the back of a nightclub. Once again, you have a chorus that reaches for somewhere up near Jupiter, soars as high as our drunken aspirations, borne away on some most un-Manic strings, and you just wish for a moment, sadly, that this was a song about love, children or peace, and not about the fetid blast from our inebriated lungs. But for all that, it's a massive, huge song.

"We Care a Lot!"

Faith No More were still an unknown band when this came out, a raw slab of thudding bass and a slash of guitar -- a bit like a tribute to Killing Joke -- and singer Chuck Mosley chanting relentlessly: "We care a lot!/About disasters, fires, floods and killer bees/About the NASA shuttle falling in the sea/About starvation and the food that Live Aid bought/It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it!" This is a caustic, ironic, angry look at compassion fatigue, at the efforts of celebrities to parlay their caring into bigger sales, and the state of things in general. This is as angry and vital as the Sex Pistols or the Clash when they first burst into view, but it's not the unfocussed scatter-gun aggression of punk, or the shoe-gazing squall of grunge. It's taking careful aim and letting rip.

"Here Comes My Girl"

Once in a while you hear something that manages to capture the defiance, the spirit, the raw courage that life sometimes needs. This does that job beautifully. Tom Petty does the swagger and aggression of gunslinging youth so well, and his shout "When I got that little girl standing right by my side I can tell the whole wide world to shove it!" is one of the great in-your-face moments in rock, like Roger Daltrey's scream at the end of "Won't Get Fooled Again". The redemption of love, the relentless optimism of youth, the certainty of the here and now, it's all here.

"Albedo 0.39"

Utterly spooky, totally out there. This comprises nothing more than gentle electronic patterns, over which a man's voice recites various characteristics of the earth:
"Maximum distance from the sun: 94,537,000 miles
Minimum distance from the sun: 91,377,000 miles
Mean orbital velocity: 66,000 mph
Orbital eccentricity: 0.017
Obliquity of the eccliptic: 23 degrees, 27 minutes 8.26 seconds
Length of the tropical year, equinox to equinox: 365.24 days
Length of the sederial year, fixed star to fixed star: 365.26 days
Length of the solar day: 24 hours, 3 minutes 56.555 seconds in mean solar time
Length of the mean sederial day: 23 hours 56 minutes 4.091 seconds in mean solar time
Mass: 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes
Equatorial diameter: 7,927 miles
Polar diameter: 7,900 miles
Oblaqueness 1/298th
Density: 5.41
Mean surface gravitational acceleration of the rotating earth: 32.174 ft/sec/sec
Escape velocity: 7 miles per second
Albedo is defined as "The fraction of incident electromagnetic radiation reflected by a surface, especially of a celestial body."

Don't say you never learn anything from this blog!

"Lemon Incest"

I'm making no apologies for blogging this. Serge Gainsbourg was one of the most provocative artists of the 20th century, never settling for anything less than controversy in all he did. But people tend to be blinded by the provocation and tend not to look beyond the surface. For a start, he was one of the wittiest writers going, and if you have even a basic understanding of French, you'll see what I mean. This track caused an immense furore when it appeared: a duet with his daughter Charlotte. Obviously, he's doing his best to outrage. But in French "Incest de citron" sounds awful close to "un zeste de citron", or, a zest of lemon to the cooks out there. And the song itself is an arrangement of one of Chopin's finer moments. I'm sorry, but I'm prepared to give the man some latitude. Look beyond the deliberate attempt to upset morals, and give him some credit for seeing humor where it might not always be evident.

"Disorder In the House"

This is a song with a story. In September 2003, Warren Zevon was diagnosed with inoperable cancer and given weeks to live. In the time he had left, Warren decided to record some more music with his friends. By the time he got around to recording this, his senses were so dulled by painkillers that it took him innumerable takes to sing in time: the video footage of this final act of defiance is heart-wrenching, as Warren's co-writer Jorge Calderon tries to help him with the beat.
Given that background, this song is an incredible achievement. The fact that it's up to Warren's life-long standards of wit and intelligence is beyond incredible. "Disorder in the house/All bets are off/I'm sprawled across the davenport of despair/Disorder in the house/I'll live with the losses/And watch the sundown through the portiere". The incendiary guitar is courtesy of Bruce Springsteen, who does his friend proud. Warren lived for a year after his diagnosis, saw his final album released, and left this world a better place for his work.

"Rough Boy"

This song never fails to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. It's a slow, stately blues, something you can wallow in, powered by an insistent drum machine, but lifted into a totally different plane by two of the most plangent, simple, tearing guitar solos I've ever heard. They say Jimi Hendrix could make a guitar cry, but when he met Billy Gibbons he must have passed the secret on. There's a moment close to the end of this song when the guitar, which has been crying for a couple of minutes already, breaks out into a jagged sob, and it just kicks the whole song into that final, ethereal plane.

"Three Lions 98"

Here's an odd one. Every time the World Cup comes around, and football fans around the world go collectively gaga, the music industry takes it upon itself to provide musical encouragement to the national teams. Over the years, there have been some pretty dreadful efforts which I won't detail, though "World in Motion" by New Order was pretty special. But, for some unfathomable reason, this effort by the Lightning Seeds sticks in my head. Partly it's because of the awful record the England team has compiled in major championships since 1966, and partly it's the relentless optimism of a nation that won't give up hope. Musically, there's little to recommend this, but STILL I have a soft spot for it. Maybe it's the radio commentary spliced into the mix, but mostly I think it's the fact that this, reissued version of the song also mixes in the sound of the crowds chanting the chorus - recorded two years earlier when the song was originally issued. Some of the singing is pretty awful and the lyric is a little impenetrable to non-fans, but there's an enormous sense of pain and regret, hope and anticipation, that never fails to raise a small lump in the throat.

"Every Day is a Winding Road"

This is wonderful. The congas stutter into gear, a bass comes rumbling up from somewhere near the center of the earth and is joined by what I can only describe as a guitar that sounds like it's plugged into a racing engine, and then the whole thing is off and running. A wonderful, hip-shaking backbeat and a kooky, marginalised lyric that opens out into a chorus as wide as sunset in Texas. Off-beat observations, and Sheryl Crow's voice sounds like it's always reaching for something more... "I hitched a ride with a vending machine repair man/He says he's been down this road more than twice/He was high on intellectualism/I've never been there but the brochure looks nice."

"Night Moves"

I remember seeing the animated film "American Pop" many years ago, in which this song played a pivotal part. One of the characters has long wanted to make it as a singer-songwriter, and plays this song as his audition piece. It's a gentle, moody song, reeking of experience and dust, of harsh lessons learned and electric, humid summer days when the thunderclouds lie close to the ground. It's one of Bob Seger's most atmospheric songs and one of his best. The kid got the gig in the film, by the way, and became a huge star.

"Isn't It Time"

More pure pop heaven. The Babys weren't around for long, just long enough to showcase John Waite's voice -- later heard on the AOR staple "Missing You". This reminds me a little of the Raspberries; an orchestral rock ballad, with all parts present and correct: the piano riff that hooks you, the brass blasts that kick the chorus into touch, the strings hanging on for dear life and the female backing vocal that comes back, time and again, to warn you that this whole love thing is a hell of a risk.

"Tiny Dancer"

This song has undergone a bit of a renaissance in recent years, perhaps due to its climactic "appearance" in the film "Almost Famous", but almost certainly because millions of music fans have realised that, before he dove head-first into high camp and Liberace-like excess, Elton John really could pen a fantastic tune. He's not quite a singer-songwriter, given that the lyrics were almost always by Bernie Taupin, but he had a gift for finding the killer hook or the aching chorus. And lyrically, too, here's an aching chorus for you: "Hold me closer tiny dancer/Count the headlights on the highway/Lay me down on sheets of linen/You had a busy day today". Wonderful. Like Billy Joel, Elton John has/had a knack for writing a chorus so high and wide you could drive an 18-wheeler through it. There's an almost-hippy air to this song, as if he's chronicling something he remembers from a decade or so earlier, but at heart it's a song about the music business, touring, groupies. Which is probably why it was a shoo-in for the "Almost Famous" soundtrack.

"Pretend We're Dead"

I love the guitar sound on this. It's like a dentist's drill recorded at 78 rpm (for you under-30s out there, look up "gramophone" at www.dictionary.com) but played back at 33 rpm; it just reaches into your head and literally tickles your ears from the inside. I don't know a great deal about L7, but I know when a song is hitting the spot: "Turn the tables with our unity/They're not a moral nor majority/Wake up and smell the coffee/Or just say no to individuality." This is either grunge power or girl power, but it rocks.

"25 or 6 to 4"

OK, hands up who gets this song. It's either a bad acid trip or random word association, but it's a nervous, jittery song, like a panic attack. I have masses of respect for Chicago, seeing how long they've survived in the business and what great songs they've produced, but I just do NOT get this. The skittish drum pattern sets the tone, while the short, sharp blasts of brass drive home the worried, sweaty feel. I have no idea what "25 or 6 to 4" means, but I'll bet it's a drug reference. Please correct me if I'm wrong. And please someone, explain to me how Peter Cetera went from singing this to singing the execrable "Power of Love" 20 years later.

"Life in the Fast Lane"

The Eagles, again. This is probably the clearest explanation of what the whole "Hotel California" album is about: "They knew all the right people/They took all the right pills/They threw outrageous parties/They paid heavenly bills/There were lines on the mirror/And lines on her face/She pretended not to notice/She was caught up in the race/Out every evening/Until it was light/He was too tired to make it/She was too tired to fight about it." Pure unadulterated hedonism that started to take its toll way too quickly. "He said call the doctor/I think I'm going to crash/The doctor said he's coming but you got to pay in cash". The fact that this song still sounds even vaguely country is a testament to the fact that a good musician is still a good musician no matter how many drugs he's taken.

"Riders on the Storm"

There seems to be a healthy debate concerning the Doors and particularly, Jim Morrison's status as a cult god. Was he an unutterable wanker who faithfully inflated his own sense of self-importance before expiring in a haze of his own overextended imagination? Or was he really a poet-genius who simply couldn't control his impulses? When the Doors were restrained, when they held themselves in check and when Morrison wasn't allowed to run riot, they were a pretty damn decent band. This track is probably the best example of low-key Doors, minus the Ghormenghast of Morrison's indulgences (such as "The End"), or their occasional forays into straight-ahead rock. It's almost jazz in some ways, delicate keyboards and a gentle but insistent beat, and you can almost forget the lyric as the melody swirls around you like smoke in a crowded club. This really works.

"Gimme Some Lovin'"

Remember when dance music was just that - music you could dance to? Nobody talked about hard house, old school, garage, trance etc... hell, dance music nowadays has more genres than jazz. Better yet, it didn't matter if there were guitars to the fore; as long as it had a beat you could move to, you were out there on the floor shaking your stuff. Well, this is one of those wonderful, genre-defying songs that I remember getting totally overexcited to in the days before the United Nations forces told me I didn't know how to dance and therefore shouldn't try to. When you hear the Hammond organ stutter into gear like a twelve-cylinder engine and the unstoppable bass rhythm leads you into Stevie Winwood's soul-drenched yelp, you know you've entered the happy zone.

"Angel Dressed in Black"

"Sitting on a sofa/Sucking a bowl of crack/Thinking to myself about my/Angel dressed in black." Paranoia, hallucination, inertia, fear, the hint of self-harm, this song is holding a kitchen knife behind its back. There's a cheery, drug-fuelled dismissal of all the possible Bad Things that could have happened to her while she has been away: "She might have been arrested/She might have been attacked/She might be lying dead somewhere/My angel dressed in black" and then the suggestion that she may well be just a hallucination anyway. Listening to this is like having a rambling, confused conversation with someone who's picking the yellow M&Ms out of a large bowl, scratching their arms uncontrollably and muttering to themselves about nothing in particular.

"Bad Company"

There's been plenty of songs written about gunfighters, bad boys, cowboys gone wrong, but I find that most of them romanticise, mythologize if you like. The Eagles' "Desperado" is a good example. This, by Bad Company, has a gloomier, altogether more dirty feel to it, like a sepia portrait that's been slashed once too many times. There's no redemption here, no happy ending, no triumph of good over evil, just a stately piano, gentle washes of cymbal, and Paul Rodgers' tired, aching voice, almost pleading for an end to the running, to the fear. "Now these towns/They all know my name/Six gun sound/Is our claim to fame/I can hear them saying/Bad company/And I won't deny it/Bad company/till the day I die".

"Girls and Boys"

From what I can work out, this song is about androgyny, unemployment, dumbing down, sex as a commodity, holiday romances, sexually-transmitted diseases and the lack of original thought. It's a sneering look down the nose at the lumpenproletariat in the same way that Pulp's "Common People" isn't. I didn't think the class divide was quite as entrenched as this. Or perhaps it's not class. Maybe something else has taken over as the main yardstick in judging our fellow humans. Our aspirations? Our thoughts? Our sexual preferences? In any case, Blur were terrific observers and chroniclers of the Brit life in the same tradition as the Who and the Kinks were in their time. The song is vaguely hypnotic, perhaps suggesting the mindless follow-the-leader thing that the lyric suggests. And the chorus is sung with an uncomfortable amount of relish...

"Temptation"

There are some songs that are just unstoppable in the same way that a gang of thugs backing you up against a wall in an alley is pretty irresistible. This is one of those songs. We're not talking about volume, but a stomping beat and a wall of voices in your face. Heaven 17 were, despite their pop sensibilities, pretty far out for the 80s. They broke out from the same electronic underground that spawned the Human League, and were a massive club success when "Fascist Groove Thing" came out. This song is all about winding you up into a ball of tension, taunting you with the starts-soft-but-gets-louder chorus and the general sense of abandoning yourself to a higher groove.

"Dignity"

I've got issues with this song. It's a fab song, but it's too damn straightforward, too simple in its message. According to the lyric, an old streetsweeper dreams of his retirement and buying a boat which he's going to name "Dignity". Even a ten-year old's going to get that... And compared to the rest of Deacon Blue's output, this is pretty entry-level stuff.
Or am I being too fussy? Maybe Songs About Issues shouldn't always make you think, maybe a straightforward message is good enough. All right, there's a pretty neat line in there about reading Maynard Keynes (hello, Mrs Thatcher) but all in all I'm left wondering whether Ricky Ross could have tried just that little bit harder....

"In Your Eyes"

Sinead O'Connor called Peter Gabriel "completely barking" mad once. Fair enough, he's worn some pretty strange stage costumes in his time, but at the same time he's produced some pretty astounding music. O'Connor's fairly thoughtless comment just makes one wonder whether sanity really is a prerequisite for art. Anyone who's heard the epic, elegiac "Here Comes the Flood" or "Don't Give Up" will testify that the man could draw tears from a stone. The difference with this track is that, for me, the emotion doesn't come so much from the beautiful sound the song makes, but rather from the closing vocal solo by Youssou N'Dour: a soaring, wailing, joyous sound that skips around the chorus like a child, absorbed in its own intricate patterns, a sound of innocence and redemption at the same time.

"Sebrina, Paste & Plato"

I think the best pop songs have to have an element of the ridiculous about them, a whiff of fantasy and unlikeliness. And this is just chock-full of al of that. Put aside the gorgeous harmonies, the perfect chorus and the outstanding musicianship, and listen to the whole thing and you get the impression you're at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, where things are not quite as they should be. "Chesney's looking dapper in his brand
new dunce cap/Strolling down the runway to an "F" (never has he looked so lovely)/With all the others watching, eating paste and Plato (the one and only)/He fights the urge to run and kiss the chef". As the t-shirt would say, "Dude, WTF?" Jellyfish are sorely, sadly missed.

"Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?"

"Looking like a born again/Living like a heretic/Listening to Arthur Lee records/Making all your friends feel so guilty/About their cynicism/And the rest of their generation/Not even the government are gonna stop you now/But are you ready to be heartbroken?"
Sorry? You lost me around Arthur Lee, Lloyd. And what's with "Pumped up full of vitamins/On account of all the seriousness"?
But never mind, I can forgive the slightly obscure cafe society literary thing, because the song's so damn good. And possibly because I envy Lloyd Cole's ability to whistle up a song as lovely as this over a latte in some Camden bar and grill....Delicate guitar, what sounds like an accordion that's just right for the mood, and a voice that betrays not one bit of sympathy for the victim of love, but instead just a hint of guilty pleasure, as if someone you'd been in love with from a distance for a long time had been crossed by a lover, someone who never loved them nearly as much as you do.

"They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"

Inspired by the film of the same name, this is an existential lament only it doesn't quite know it. It's a slow, seductive, round-the-dance-floor-at-the-end-of-the-party sort of song that has so many layers of interpretation it's dizzying. Just like the film. I never heard another song by Racing Cars again, but after this, I don't suppose I need to.

"English Rose"

Not many love songs have the merit of being as simple and straightforward, yet as plangent and ethereal as this one. Anyone who remembers The Jam and their angry indictments of modern day injustice and unpleasantness was probably as surprised as I was to hear this. Like Nick Lowe's "Tonight", this is as simple as ABC, yet it's packed with all the pent-up, raw, pure, idealistic emotions that we've all felt, whether 18 or 80. Paul Weller had the wit to write a song that takes us out into the depths of the universe, and yet brings us right back home in the next line which, to me, is what love feels like.

"Hoo Dee Hoo"

I was walking home this evening, listening to this song and it struck me how many good lyrics are obscured, hidden behind the music that's supposed to be the more important part of the synthesis. Here's a great case in point: the Rainmakers were one of the most literary bands to come out of the mid-West during the guitar revival of the 80s and 90s. This is a fairly martial rock workout, but the lyrics take it to another level entirely: "Well one year it was the factory, and one year the farm/We heated with wood and the house caught fire/I reached for a figure through the smoke and the sparks/But which one did I save, the girl or the guitar?" And then: "I made a lot of good money, got a lot of good press/Writing paperback novels like a man possessed/Every name was changed, every story was true/Every priest was me, every stripper was you/And we danced like angels cast out for being lovers/And I wrote their life story on a matchbook cover". Now THAT'S story-telling!

"The Indifference of Heaven"

"Time marches on/Time stands still/Time on my hands/Time to kill". There's something wanky and pseudish about this, you say? Hush, you're listening to a genius at work: "Blood on my hands/And my hands in the till/Down at the 7-11." As far as lyrics go, this song is perhaps as good as you'll get: "They say everything's all right/They say better days are near/They tell us these are the good times/They don't live around here/Billy and Christie don't/Bruce and Patti don't/They don't live around here." It's not a self-pity song so much as a world pity song. Things are bad all over, for you and me as well as Warren Zevon, and it doesn't hurt to sometimes point this out.

"Driving With Your Eyes Closed"

As you might have guessed by now, I'm a sucker for an interesting lyric. Don Henley doesn't often deviate from Worthy and Important Global Statements, but on this track he's more relaxed. It's a spare, stripped-down song, in which he drops in a wonderful couplet: "Some guys were born to Rimbaud/Some guys breathe Baudelaire" among other observations.

"Rise"

I never knew quite what to make of Public Image Limited: John Lydon's tilt at being taken seriously as an artist or just cashing in on the cachet of his reputation as a serious shit-stirrer? In any case this song, for me, outed Lydon as someone who could actually sing. I mean, listen to the chorus: He's in tune, dammit! And the rant: "Anger is an energy!" just seems to make sense in some inexplicable way.

"Life's Been Good"

If you're Joe Walsh, life has been damn good to you. First, you're part of The James Gang, who write two classic rock songs, "Funk #49" and "Walk Away". Then you go solo and write another great, great song, "Rocky Mountain Way". If this isn't enough, you get a call from The Eagles who need a new guitarist, and your first job is to stick a nifty solo into the title track of their new album. That album's called "Hotel California". So, while you're counting the money and reaping the plaudits for one of the most recognised solos in rock history, you whistle up another solo album and hey presto! Another classic! This track is a funny, knowing look at being a rock star, nothing too introspective or self-obsessed, just good "clean" fun. You have to enjoy a guy who titles an album "The Smoker Your Drink, The Player You Get".

"Fall At Your Feet"

Another very sexy song, but in a completely different way to Aerosmith's Pink which I mentioned a few days ago. This is a slow-burning, intense and passionate love song, prepared to let go with hope. Crowded House seem to be a thirty-something pleasure, not "vital" enough for the kids, but when you can create a mood such as this, and write lyrics like this, there's no shame in being appreciated by a more mature audience...."The finger of blame has turned upon itself/And I'm more than willing to offer myself/Do you want my presence or need my help/Who knows where that might lead?"

"Keep On Rocking in the Free World"

There's a word to describe Neil Young: curmudgeon. Uncle Neil is like your original Angry Old Man. He's pissed off with the State of Things, and he doesn't care who knows it. At least, he is these days. Time was when he produced whimsical hippy-type odes like Old Man, Heart of Gold and After the Goldrush. Then the seventies got a bit ugly, and he began to see the dark side. Albums like "Tonight's the Night" and the great, great "Live Rust" showcase his gradual descent into chronicling the essential nastiness of man: "There's colors on the street/Red, white, and blue/People shuffling their feet/People sleeping in their shoes/There's a warning sign in the road ahead/There's a lot of people saying we'd be better off dead/Don't feel like Satan, but I am to them/So I try to forget them any way I can." He's not afraid to address The Issues and climb on that soapbox to make us listen and think, and for that he should be a Canadian National Monument.

Get well soon, Neil.

"Shipbuilding"

There are two versions of this song that seem to have two completely different emotions and interpretations. Elvis Costello wrote the song, and his version plays for quiet dignity and a clean, strong production. But Robert Wyatt's spare, jazzed-down take goes beyond dignity and achieves utter pathos, due mainly to his shaky, reedy voice. And for me, this is much the more powerful version. The economic and social devastation wreaked by successive years of Thatcherism is laid bare, exposed not so much by direct accusation but more by implication: "Is it worth it?/A new winter coat and shoes for the wife/And a bicycle on the boy's birthday/It's just a rumour that was spread around town/By the women and children/Soon we'll be shipbuilding." And the simple, plain facts: "With all the will in the world/Diving for dear life/When we could be diving for pearls." This isn't a song that gets you caught up in righteous rage, but one that lays a hand gently on your arm and points you in the right direction.

"Stop Dragging My Heart Around"

Stevie Nicks has, on the whole, been very clever in choosing her duet partners. Lindsay Buckingham, Don Henley (probably the best), and this one, with Tom Petty. There's something very catchy about the way their voices meld together: Nicks' bewitching, beguiling, soul-inflected call and Petty's keening nasal whine, but what probably tips the balance here is the fact that it's a Heartbreakers song, rather than one of Nicks' gossamer-clad occultist weirdnesses. This is important: too many misguided people think Nicks wrote this. There's no nonsense in the tune, led by Mike Campbell's trademarked chime, while Petty does anguish, as he always has, so damn well. A dark, angry, cathartic song.

"Misty Mountain Hop"

After seeing "Almost Famous" and hearing this song playing as the band arrive in New York to the memorable line: "Welcome to New York. It's OK to be nervous", I can't help but think of the dark underbelly of late 60s and early 70s so-called "innocence" whenever I hear this. Before, I had always enjoyed the back-beat, the hardcore opening riff and Robert Plant letting it all go: "Baby, baby, baby do you like it?". But I've read enough rock star biogs to know that there was just as much unpleasantness as there were God-like moments in front of a stadium crowd. There's something about the heavy-as-fuck beat -- perhaps it was the sheer size of Bonham's drumsticks -- that reminds me of ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down" (or should that be the other way around?) and makes me wish I had been around to hear this when it first came out, rather than filtered through history and a hundred and one pastiches.

"Saturn 5"

Today's lesson is how to mix 60s keyboard perkiness with crunchier-than-kitty-litter guitars and a hellacious beat. So ironic that this peach of a song should come from the dying days of the Inspiral Carpets' career: but sometimes the death throes produce the best work. You can dance your most abandoned, E-fuelled dance to this, you can strut across the bathroom like a lizard with the horn, or you can just howl along with the trippy lyrics: "Lady take a ride on a Zeke 64/Jerry wants to be a Rockette/There's a popular misconception/Says we haven't seen anything yet/Laying down the lifeless corpse of/President 35/The lady crying by his side is/The most beautiful woman alive." Happiness!

"Boy Crazy"

Everyone has their guilty secret, their embarassing baggage. Mine is that I was -- and to some extent still am -- a huge fan of the Tubes. They never really scaled the heights of chart success, they never had the critics swooning in the aisles, but they were sharp as hell, great musicians, and when it came to live shows, there are few bands that have ever come close to them for sheer spectacle. They trawled the bottom of the barrel of human experience for a good few years, with songs like "Mondo Bondage", "White Punks on Dope", "Smoke" and this sniggering dose of teenage libido: "Wasn't Jimmy's fault/On your first date/Promised Mom you wouldn't be home late/At the drive-in you climbed in the back/Skipped the movies and forgot the snack/Petting heavy didn't bother you/Your eighth grade teacher showed you what to do/Failed your English and biology/But you learned the facts of life from A to Z".

"Pink"

To me, Aerosmith fall somewhere between the cock-rock of Led Zep and the eternally nudge-nudge double-entendres of ZZTop. They can turn on the metal when the mood takes them, but I get the impression they sometimes prefer to be hoary old bluesmen with a nifty line in crotch-grabbing rhythms. I have an image of Steven Tyler as a properly randy old goat, all furry haunches, hooves and a nifty pair of horns, lasciviously licking his lips and smoothing his hair as he prepares to debauch yet another unsuspecting shepherdess. This is one of those good old-fashioned sex songs, crammed to the gills with groans, pre-orgasmic intakes of breath and a healthy dose of hip-pumping rhythm. If words and intonation get you hot, then this song is for you.

"Let's Work Together"

Canned Heat were yet another band who pleased the critics but who just didn't translate that into pan-galactic success. They should have been massive, the biggest blues band ever. Certainly, Bob Hite was one of the biggest blues singers ever, all umpty-seven stone of him, but from that enormous frame came a voice that could do just about anything: his reedy falsetto on "Going Up the Country" and "On the Road Again" is quite unreal. But on this track, he lets it all hang out - a deep throaty growl that just says "blues". Happily, the rest of the band sounds as individual, unique as Hite does. The fuzzed guitar makes you think of Formula One engines; the spare, driving bass is like an enormous elastic band drawn taut. Do not be fooled by Roxy Music's inferior, renamed take on this ancient classic: despite Bryan Ferry's howls and yips, they just don't understand what is needed here. Canned Heat, blues fanatics and record collectors, did.

"Classical Gas"

This was a one-off hit that came out of nowhere and disappeared the same way, yet it lives on in the theme music from pretty much every sports show I've watched, half-time shows by marching bands at US colleges, and any number of friends who've learned to play the guitar. The main theme is utterly fantastic and I only wish the song lasted longer.

"Welcome to the Pleasure Dome"

Along similar lines as the previous song, was ever a band formed around a single, simple concept...like sex? No matter how hard I try, I fail to see much more to Frankie Goes to Hollywood. That's not to say their stuff was bad: far from it. But their whole work seemed to be shot through with a salacious, tongue-in-cheek, knowing wink and sly tweak of our collective arse. I get the feeling that all they really wanted to do was fuck themselves silly. Sure, there are no end of artists who spent an inordinate amount of time pondering sex, but to be so one-dimensional, so obsessed about it was something I found totally new and somewhat limiting. This is an immense re-mix of the title track from their debut album, thirteen and a half minutes of it, but it's a fabulous cross-dressing, genre-bending epic. At one point Holly Johnson intones the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", replacing the word "decree" with a lascivious, tongue-rolling "erect!", and you realise that even when the're trying to be serious, they're sending the whole game up. There are hot, sweaty jungle sounds in the background, a hip-entrancing beat, the whole experience is meant to set you up for what follows on the album: it's the Frankie Manifesto. Free your ass and your mind will follow.

"Love The One You're With"

Now, I'm an admirer of Crosby, Still, Nash (and Young). Some of their harmonies are heartbreakingly beautiful, many of their songs are lifelong favourites of mine, and Neil Young is a veritable God. As far as CSN are concerned, though, the whole is definitely more than the sum of its parts, with virtually the sole exception of this song, by Stephen Stills. And even with this one song, despite its bustling optimism and washes of organ, I have an issue. Stills exhorts us to "love the one we're with", even if we can't "be with the one we love": "Turn your heartache/Right into joy/Cos she's a girl/And you're a boy". Now there are a hundred and one songs about being betrayed by the one you love, but there aren't that many songs that encourage the screwing around that inevitably leads to the heartbreak. And here it's presented so innocently, like some hippy utopian ideal that will make the world a better place. But as events proved, stripping away the old-fashioned mores of our parents' society didn't turn us all into happy, contented commune-dwellers who were happy to share out possessions and our partners. All of which goes to date this song horrendously and turn it into some sort of sociology exhibit.

"The Fletcher Memorial Home"

Anyone who's ever despaired of tyrants, politicians and self-important nobodies peering into the recesses of our lives and making decisions for us will probably feel some empathy with this song. Towards the end of their lifespan, Pink Floyd Mark 2 were really just a vehicle for Roger Waters' grandiose concepts, none more so that the "Final Cut" album from which this comes. It comes over as a mini-opera, with Roger-As-Narrator butting in on this track to express the fervent wish that all World Leaders should be locked up. It's a fine sentiment, eloquently expressed, but for me the clincher is Roger introducing various characters as if they were arriving at a grand occasion: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome/Reagan and Haig/Mr Begin and friend/Mrs Thatcher, the Paisley/Mr Brezhnev and party/The ghost of MacCarthy/And the memories of Nixon/And now, and in colour/A group of anonymous Latin American meat-packing glitterati". I may be a ghoul, but I think the reference to Latin American dictators as "meat-packing glitterati" is pretty humorous.

"I Wish"

When the bassline just ups and starts walking all over your head, you know you're in for a good time. This song takes absolutely no time at all go straight to your hips. Stevie Wonder has scaled the heights of magic and he's produced some unutterable dross, and here he is at his finest. I can't decide, between this and "Superstition", which is the finer track. And who cares? The joy, the funk, the sense of freedom and fun just blasts from the speakers, and that's about as good as music gets.

"She Still Loves Him"

No, not one of those remembrance-of-times-past nostalgia songs, but a bittersweet, no-nonsense song about falling out of love and domestic violence. This comes from Jellyfish, who've given us "All Is Forgiven" and "He's My Best Friend", so this wasn't what I expected them to produce. The gentle piano intro is rudely interrupted by a jarring guitar riff, and the story takes over: "He writes her a letter, tells her he won't be home soon/She still loves him/He lost his temper and belted his love 'cross the room/She still loves him/Drinks when he's sad gets happy then mad at the world/She still loves him/Never remembers that day in September when wed/She still loves him". I like to think I can see the look on someone's face that tells of a life that's gone this way: pear-shaped, but that tiny spark is still busy shining away at the bottom of the pain: "I know some day this will all work out/She'll never face this alone/The light in her eyes may be flickering dim/But she still loves him". Tragedy, optimism, love: all human life is here.

"One Of The Boys"

Growing up in the era of punk and the new Romantics, I was only dimly aware of the whole Glitter Rock thing. But isn't TV grand? I got to see and listen to all those romper-stomper bands: Slade, Sweet, Mud, Gary Glitter and eventually I got round to Mott the Hoople. I reckon Mott were the crossover point between glitter and rock; they had the crazy outfits - roll upon roll of aluminium foil and stack-heel Doc Martins, customised guitars, big hair, big attitudes. But they also had a fair amount of rock and roll working for them: it wasn't all shoutalong bovver-boy choruses with Noddy Holder's eldritch scream. Instead, they had the nous to write from a wider perspective, songs like "All the Way From Memphis", "The Golden Age of Rock n Roll", "The Ballad of Mott" for example. More literate, more far-seeing than "Mama We're all Crazy Now". But "One of the Boys" is probably their best nod to the glitter rock craze: "I'm one of the boys/I don't say much but I make a big noise." It trundles along at about 5 mph, there's plenty of heavy, fuzzed-up guitar, it's the sort of song that the bovver boys could stomp along to without breaking too much of a sweat. But the Glitter Rock wasn't about subtlety....

"Overnight Sensation"

Right up there with Badfinger as the Band That Almost Made It Hugest, The Raspberries had everything: irresistible tunes, perfect harmonies, all the requisite Beatles-meet-Beach-Boys talent and inspiration. This is probably the best way to meet them; five and a minutes of just about everything the band could think of in hooks, flyaway choruses, clever production tricks. It's power pop, it's chart-friendly in a 1970s way, and it's the sort of song that should never be unearthed by some ambitious Pop Idol band that wants to showcase its talent, because they'd never come even close to the original.

"Blinded By The Light"

Sometimes you don't hear a song, but instead you hear a torrent of words that whirls around your head like bathwater and refuses to go down the drain until you sort out exactly what it's all about. "Madman drummer bummers/Indians in the summer/With a teenage diplomat/In the dumps with the mumps/As the adolescent pumps/His way into his hat/With a boulder on my shoulder/Feeling kinda older/I tripped a merry-go-round/With this very unpleasing/Sneezing and wheezing/The calliope crashed to the ground." It's been well over twenty years, but this song is still up there in my head looking fr a way out. You would hardly credit these words came from Bruce Springsteen. But after a while listening to this, you can sort of see where he was going, on his way to "Born to Run".

"FM"

I have a sneaking regard for Steely Dan. They write such well-constructed, restrained, literate songs, mature in an I-don't-go-out-clubbing-anymore-but-I-can-still-let-it-all-hang-out sort of way. And there's the major jazz influence as well, so the general vibe you always get is a relaxed, late-night drinks, chill-out lounge thing. Steely Dan's music reeks of money, warm weather, privilege, insider knowledge and an utter lack of trendiness. It transcends trends, it's a pleasure you can revisit at age 28, 38, 68, whenever. As long as you've a full wallet and the top down on your Mercedes.

"Teenage Dirtbag"

More bubblegum with amplification, but very tasty this is, too. Wheatus sort of came and went in a hurry, but they left behind this fantastic song, filled to the brim with hummable, danceable hooks and one of those everlasting boy-fancies-girl-from-a-distance storylines that appeal to the kid in everyone. "But she doesn't know who I am/And she doesn't give a damn about me".

"Authority Song"

I forget the name of the film, but someone asks James Dean what he's rebelling against, and he replies: "What you got?". There are no end of songs that deal with teenage rebellion, but this one sort of sums them all up. John Cougar Mellencamp has been labouring for most of his career in the shadow of the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Bob Seger as sort of heartlands troubadours, glorifying the simplicity and honesty of the midwest US. I don't buy that myself, but I do buy Mellencamp's honesty and ethic. This is almost a cartoon song, trying to encompass as many perceived teenage injustices as possible, but it's neatly wrapped up in the chorus: "I fight authority/Authority always wins", and lines like: "I call up my preacher, I say "give me the strength for Round Five"/He says "You don't need no strength/You need to grow up, son"/I said "Growing up leads to growing old/And then to dying/And dying to me don't sound like all that much fun". It's all strung over a vaguely rock/country/billy beat that chunters along in a gunslinger sort of way, and you get the feeling that Mellencamp wrote this one in front of the mirror in his bedroom.

"5:15"

As if by magic, a clever counterpoint to "Every Picture Tells A Story" . Where Rod Stewart's song followed the middle classes off on their travels around the world, The Who's "5:15" sits on the commuter train with those unlucky enough to be forced into work at an early age, where recreation is restricted to cinema dates, weekend trips to the coast or the country, or hanging around on street corners. After Roger Daltrey asks "Why should I care?" in the intro, the song dives straight into a blast of brass, a driving rhythm that suggests the hectic, dedicated pursuit of pleasure in those few free moments stolen from a prospect of drudgery: "Magically bored on a quiet street corner/Free frustration in our minds and our toes/Quiet storm water m-m-my generation/Uppers and downers, either way blood flows". And the plaintive, angry chorus: "Inside outside, leave me alone/Inside outside, nowhere is home/Inside outside, where have I been/Out of my brain on the five-fifteen". Along with Ray Davies, Pete Townshend seems to have captured the essential drudgery and frustration of homebound youth and found it a wellspring for fantastic, life-affirming music. It's one of those contradictions that you can spend a long time trying to come to terms with.

"Every Picture Tells a Story"

I guess the days are past now when a kid could leave home and travel the world with a guitar and a backpack, hang out in exotic places that hadn't been discovered by the masses, become an adult the hard way and come home with a treasure chest of stories and experiences to sustain his or her old age. Must have been a 60s thing. Anyway, Rod Stewart seems to have written a load of songs on the back of this kind of experience - Maggie May, Stay With Me, for example - and this, which is a true classic and serves to remind us that he was, once, a serious songwriter with huge talent. I don't suppose we should begrudge him his comfortable dotage, so that he can reflect on his well-spent youth. This song fairly gallops along with the occasional pause for sober reflection, underpinned by a beautiful-sounding acoustic guitar and Rod's younger, less-ravaged soul howl. There's sadness, nostalgia, joy, the ebullience of youth and wisdom all wrapped up in six minutes. What more can you ask for?

"Voices Carry"

Love songs are twenty a penny. Everyone writes them, everyone sings them, and we all have our favourites. But this love song, by Til Tuesday, comes with a twist, the kind that brings you up short and makes you think just a little. It's an affair song, a bit-on-the-side song, sung from the bit-on-the-side's perspective. "In the dark I like to read his mind/But I'm frightened of the things I might find/Well, there must be something he's thinking of to tear him away/When I tell him that I'm falling in love, why does he say/Hush, hush/Keep it down now, voices carry." And later, "He wants me/But only part of the time/He wants me/If he can keep me in line". Confused, sad, bereft, an innocent cast into the shark-infested waters of dating.

"American Idiot"

Yeah yeah, so sue me. At least Green Day remember how to write a great three-minute pop song. You're never too old to pogo round your kitchen!

"Will We Be Lovers"

There's a point in a relationship when danger is uppermost: when things could go either way, when you're not sure if you're going to make it, when there are still so many choices facing both of you. And then you agree to a second date.......
I like this track's nervous energy, the hesitant menace, the vaguely feline chorus. Deacon Blue aren't most people's idea of fashionable, but this is a real treat. Ricky Ross has the edge of the blues in his voice, the tired, raw edge that gives the song extra punch, while the girls in the chorus mock him gently: "Will we be lovers/Or will we still be......?"

"The Load-Out/Stay"

There's no end of songs about touring: any band worth its salt has written about the hard-luck days living out of the back of a van, humping amps and eating at greasy-spoon roadside shacks.
But when a band or artist makes it, they get to relax, travel in a little more style, and have people to do things for them. Personal managers, cooks, you name it, they're on the road these days. But one group has always been there, the backbone of any touring act: the roadies. "Now the seats are all empty/Let the roadies take the stage/Pack it up and tear it down/They're the first to come and the last to leave/Working for that minimum wage/They'll set it up in another town."
There's something about live, solo performance that is more compelling than any amount of studio production. Call it courage, call it chops, but that's when you really find out if an artist can hack it. This song is an ancient Jackson Browne track, a tribute to the road crew, to the audience, to the whole romance of being on the road. He strips away the bravado, the whoremongering, the attitude and the dirt of touring, leaving just the essentials: performance, hard work and travel. And it's proof positive that he has one of the great, pure voices. He doesn't need to hide.

"Hold On, I'm Coming"

One of the things I like best about the blues is the ramshackle, pickup way in which songs can start. One person's just noodling along, riffing quietly to himself, and then someone else steps in and offers a counterpoint, perhaps a syncopation, there's a hesitation, a moment's juddering halt, and finally the drums and bass step up to bring structure to the whole thing.
Another thing I like about the blues is the sound B.B. King's guitar makes: I can only call it limpid, pure, like droplets of water falling into a pool of mercury. No wailing, flying divebombers of feedback like Hendrix, but simple straightforward playing. Watching King, a big bear of a man, wring the neck of his guitar to produce these clear notes is a great great pleasure: he's perhaps the last of the great original bluesmen.
This track is from an album he made with Eric Clapton, and in listening to the whole CD you get a sense of the reverence Clapton has for King, and the cameraderie that exists among bluesmen. They know the language, the shorthand, the riffs, and they can talk to each other with just a little flick of the wrist along the neck and strings. They're proud of their traditions, but not too proud to let the blues grow.

"Neon Lights"

If you read the liner notes on Queen's album "Night at the Opera", there's a proud statement at the end: "No Synths!". Today that statement sounds a bit like Canute trying to hold back the sea. Queen's album was made back in the late 70s when electronics were only just beginning to sweep across the music business, and there were a few sturdy artists pioneering the use of synthesizers. Probably the greatest of these was Kraftwerk, four Germans with a complete concept for the coming electronic age: down with the histrionics and mass-adulation gymnastics of the guitar heroes, away with the screwed-up faces and emotions of the misunderstood lead singer, and who needs a circus animal for a drummer anyway? Kraftwerk were precise, controlled, they knew what they wanted to say and they knew how they wanted to look while they were saying it. Throughout the mid-1970s they created a host of absolutely seminal sounds that showed the way for the New Romantics and after. "Neon Lights" comes from what is probably their finest, and most remote album, "The Man Machine": it's a gentle, hypnotic, dangerously emotive song, coming as a total surprise when set against the ice-cold lust of "The Model". And that's where they genius of Kraftwerk may well lie: the medium is not the message, it's just the medium.

"Asleep In The Desert"

One thing that annoys me from time to time is the careless dismissal of rock musicians for being merchants of sheer volume. You know the sort of thing - headbangers can't be artists because they can't play their instruments... well, whenever I do come across something that refutes that argument, I rejoice loudly (sic). And here's one that does just that. ZZTop are more or less caricatures these days, two bearded guys and a clean-shaven dude (called Beard), who like to boogie, who aren't always the epitome of political correctness, and who do have a penchant for outlandish silliness. But, every once in a while, they sit down, get serious, and remind us just how damn proficient they are. This track is a lullaby, an instrumental lament, a quiet night by the campfire; glorious, delicate guitar, soft textures and lots of space in which to ruminate.

"White Rabbit"

There's a fantastic, dark feel to this, a vague, unsettling menace. I'm not at all sure where the danger comes from here. Perhaps it's the first looping rush into an acid trip, perhaps it's the martial snare drum, like the approach of the army of playing cards in "Alice in Wonderland". Maybe it's the lyrics, which are clearly from the depths of someone's addled reading of Lewis Carroll. Magic mushrooms, white mice and above it all, Grace Slick's foghorn voice soaring like some modern-day Valkyrie. It's short, perfectly-formed and builds into a terrific climax with Grace shouting "Feed Your Head!" It's almost as if this song, rather than Altamont, was the moment the 60s died. This was when innocence tipped over into overindulgence.

"Foreplay/Long Time"

Hell, everyone hates Boston these days. Overblown, indulgent guitar frenetics, they call it. Pompous orchestral self-gratification, they sneer. Bugger that. For one album, one moment in time, Boston was everything you needed to know about AOR/MOR/FM rock. This is a meaty, sweaty air-guitar must-have. Yeah, most people go for "More Than a Feeling" and its soaraway chorus, but this is far, far better. "Foreplay" is like listening to the Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture with amplification and extra cannons, pure classical filtered through Marshall amps, and "Long Time" is just that bit more. You can almost see Tom Scholz hard at work at his kitchen table, plotting every last second of this epic, grandiose song, down to the last drum fill, the last hi-hat. More often than not, a song is "epic" because of the sentiment, the passion of the performance, but this is a "planned" epic, a carefully-crafted piece of virtuosity. The guitar sound is the by-now standard Boston squall, complemented by heavy work on the cymbals, and Brad Delp's contained vocal resting easy on top of the wall of noise. But it WORKS! For some reason, this is the ultimate driving song, the perfect tennis-raquet-and-bedroom-mirror workout, with two or three great guitar solos for that special wig-out.

"Bad"

Ah, U2. Spiritual uncles to the Manic Street Preachers. Another band that can't walk past a rabble-rousing riff the size of Texas, another group that fell in love with the Big Idea, the Grand Gesture. And however many millions of us loved them for it. This song is probably best remembered in the context of U2's messianic effort at Live Aid, when Bono-As-Jesus wrapped us all up in his loving eyes-screwed-shut-with-the-intensity-of-it embrace. Hell, I can't even be nasty about them. They have The Knack, the same joyous ability to lift whatever they perform into the realm of the ethereal. This one is driven by a soft but insistent patter of drums and The Edge's patented clear-as-a-bell guitar, while Bono just riffs over the top. The words don't really matter here, though they're well-chosen for that stadium anthem touch. It's a Big Song with a Big Heart.

"Total Control"

One of those rainy-night obsessive songs that steals up on you so stealthily, grabs you in a velvet headlock, and just doesn't let go. Martha Davis' voice just settles gently over an achingly slow, stately beat, persuading you ever so quietly that love is one of those deals where you do have to have all or nothing, and that if it's the last thing she does, she's going to have it all from you. It could almost be a love song from a stalker but it's saved by the break in her voice, the almost pleading note she sometimes hits.

"Journey of the Sorcerer"

You'll probably know this one as the theme to the BBC Radio version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. One thing that it never fails to do for me, is put me in mind of "Love Reign O'er Me" by The Who, particularly the intro. Now, the Eagles aren't to everyone's taste; some folk think they were a little too country in their early days (from which this comes), while others reckon they ended up as nothing but a bunch of drugged-out dinosaurs. But that's neither here nor there: we're talking about their musicianship and songwriting ability here. Bernie Leadon didn't hang around to see in those Hotel California years, but he did create this masterpiece which, if all things were equal, would stand right up there alongside "Hotel California", "The Last Resort" or "Wasted Time" as songs the Eagkles are best remembered for. But as justice and record sales would have it, Don Henley's agenda won out (bless him anyway, you'll be hearing from me about him later) and so The Eagles played soft rock with a conscience. But, if you strip all that away, you're still left with a bunch of guys who knew how to play.

"Video Killed the Radio Star"

Now, I'm not adding this song because I feel my life would be immeasurably poorer without it. But I did hear it recently, and was paying attention to it for once; maybe the lyric doesn't particularly make sense, but there is a feel about the song that I tapped into, a sort of grumpy-old-man vibe.
We music fans don't really have an awful lot of influence when it comes to what we get to hear. I mean, how often is it these days that a band gets together in someone's basement, practices hard, gets some gigs and builds a following to the point where the Record Industry can't ignore them any more? And, more relevantly, how often does a band get signed up on the basis of its talent rather than its looks? Let's assume the present-day values of the industry were relevant thirty or forty years ago: would we have got to see Janis Joplin? Richie Havens? Mama Cass? Canned Heat? Carole King? Would the business sign up four older guys who can really play their instruments and write their songs? Well, the Stranglers got signed, and they're no oil paintings.....
I'm aware this is probably stretching things a bit far, but when the industry wants you to see a musician before you hear them perform, then things aren't right.
Thank you. I'll be in the corner, crushing Will Young CDs....

"Rollin' Over"

This is about as funky as rock gets.... snaking around your nether regions like a polecat on heat, and a gloriously out-of-control vocal from Steve Marriott. I defy you to crank this up and not think about doing the horizontal tango. Everything's been turned up to 11 on this, the cymbals splashing over the whole thing like testosterone on tap, and the requisite brass section hooting provides the final kick up the backside. It's one of the great tragedies of rock that the Small Faces were managed by Don Arden, who probably pissed off more people than was strictly required, hence never realy giving the band their full chance. But so many bands down the years have cited the Small Faces as a major influence that maybe they've been given their due...

"Well, Did You Evah?"

Oh what fun it must have been to make this. Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop romp joyfully through this Cole Porter standard. It's like being at a rock n roll cocktail party in some swish district of New York. It's hard to work out whether they're improvising some of the time, which makes it all the more fresh and fun. Debbie's vaguely bored voice and Iggy's throaty chuckles, combined with a bog-standard backing track make this a little delight.

"Lullaby"

I have no idea who Shawn Mullins is, and I forget when I first heard this: probably driving across Texas on a hot spring day. It's a hard luck story of a song, with a gritty vocal and a chorus that rises above the mundane. I just like it.

"Anarchy in the UK"

I suppose you were wondering when I'd get around to punk. And yes, it's one of those safe, middle of the road choices. But hey, growing up in London and not being totally hip to what was going on in the clubs, this was pretty much my introduction to the new wave. The crashing intro, Johnny Rotten's satanic cackle, and the sudden realisation that you didn't have to sing in tune to convey an idea, that was quite a moment. I bought the album as soon as it appeared and to this day, I still get a thrill from the wall of rancid, squalling guitar, the vitriolic, knowing, cynical tone of voice, and the carefree smattering of acronyms - MPLA, UDA, IRA - which place the song firmly in time.

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"

As any proper folk music fan knows, the first ingredient of a good song is a good story. Usually you need star-crossed lovers, insurmountable obstacles, death and sacrifice. And a highwayman or two comes in useful too. But in the absence of those, a plain old shipwreck will do just fine. "When suppertime came the old cook came on deck, saying "Fellahs, it's too rough to feed ya/At seven p.m. a main hatchway gave in, he said "Fellahs, it's been good to know ya." But, as someone who's always loved the sea, the line that gets to me is "Does anyone know where the love of God goes/When the waves turn the minutes to hours?"

"What a Waste!"

For a few years, Ian Dury was the closest thing we had to a musical Poet Laureate. He wrote terrific lyrics, and fronted one of the tightest bands around, The Blockheads. His two albums from the period - New Boots & Panties and Do It Yourself - were stuffed to the gills with catchy, funny and clever songs that you could dance to. He's probably best-remembered for "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll", but I prefer this one. "I could be a writer with a growing reputation/I could be the ticket man at Fulham Broadway station", he sings. "I could be the catalyst that sparks the revolution/I could be an inmate in a long-term institution". Good old fashioned eccentric English songwriting. Shame we've forgotten it.

"International Velvet"

I'm amused by the fuss and hype that's surrounding Joss Stone at the moment. She's got an absolutely terrific voice, granted, but the poor kid's barely old enough to have had her first kiss, and people are calling her a soul or blues singer? She needs to be let go for a while, allowed to grow up, experience life's bumps and burns. It's like when Whitney Houston first appeared: lovely instrument, girl, now go learn to use it properly. Which brings us neatly round to Catatonia. Cerys Matthews has the same voice, but by the time this song came out, she'd done the living as well, and you could hear it. If you wanted to know what Janis Joplin would sound like updated into the 90s, then look for Cerys, not Joss. Part of the joy of good blues singing is hearing the singer "let go", confident that the voice will feel its way through. I love this song: for a start, it's almost all in Welsh, which is fine by me even if I don't understand a word of it. Secondly, the chorus is magnificent; it illustrates perfectly what so many folks lack by not having a visceral attachment to their nation. This should be the Welsh National Anthem.

"A New England"

God bless Billy Bragg. He's become a bit of an institution, a "have guitar, will travel" kind of Queen Mum to the UK music scene. Never less than 110% committed to the cause, never less than 110% excellent, one man and his guitar. This song is perhaps where it all best came together, when instead of polemics, he simply let the song tell the story. But rather than Billy's version, I much prefer the late Kirsty MacColl's. I could write a whole chapter about her voice: it didn't soar, it held a close conversation with you. It was an understated, husky instrument, almost anonymous (which probably explains why she could do harmony overdubs so well), with a vulnerable quality that shines so brightly on this song; "I saw two shooting stars last night/I wished on them, but they were only satellites/It's wrong to wish on space hardware/I wish I wish I wish you cared."

"Slap and Tickle"

For a while in the 80s, Glen Tilbrook and Chris Difford were regarded as the new Lennon and McCartney, and listening to this, you can almost see why. A rattling, urgent beat and rapid-fire lyrics tell the story of everyone's teenage dramas: "He put his hand on her leg/You should have heard what she said/He tried again much later/It seemed to aggravate her/He drove home in silence/Avoiding more violence". Kitchen-sink operas like this and "Up The Junction" or "Pulling Mussels from a Shell" are what made Squeeze so special, in the same tradition as the Kinks. Sadly, Difford and Tillbrook mellowed out with age and couldn't quite seem to find the spark again, though they did create some beautiful music.

"Uneasy Rider"

It's a crying shame that Charlie Daniels has been co-opted by the good ol' boys of the American right as some sort of cheerleader for all that is conservative and Dubya about the USA. At one point he was a fantastic musician and a nifty songwriter. Yes, he worked in a country vein, he had fiddles and yee-haws, but he had an enormous sense of humour. This is a five-minute piece of joyous doggerel skewering the redneck culture, filled to the brim with laughs. It's sort of the redneck version of "Alice's Restaurant": "Just when I thought I'd get out there with my skin/ These five big dudes come strolling in/With this one old drunk chick and some fellow with green teeth/I was almost at the door when the biggest one/Said 'You tip your hat to this lady, son'/And when I did, all that hair fell out from underneath." It's ridiculous, hilarious and Charlie Daniels should be ashamed of what he's done since.

"Virginia Plain"

When music and art school came together..... you got bands like Roxy Music. What I like about this song is the lack of pretension about the pretension, if you see what I mean. They're not afraid to do eccentric, arty things like stick an oboe in there, make references to up-market holiday destinations (populated no doubt by exotic models drinking unpronouncable cocktails) and you just know that these guys are not short of a buck. I like the vaguely drug-fuelled paranoia about the song: it's skittish, unsure, a bit delicate and eager to get on with it. And the classic, abrupt ending, as if they were distracted by someone cutting monster lines of coke on the designer glass table in the studio. It's classical, it's pop, it's rock, it's "Vogue" magazine, it's completely Jerry Hall. And it's fun to sit for a while and wonder what exactly a "Harzog mane" is.

"Alright"

A snapshot from the imaginary life of a Supergrass fan:

"Dad, can I borrow the car?"
"Gary, the last time you borrowed the car, you stuffed it into a hedge. The repairs cost over a thousand pounds. You said you'd pay half the bill, you'd get a weekend job, but have you done anything? No, of course you haven't."
"Aww Dad, I don't need to hear this crap again."
"Fine. Then live up to your responsibilities and pay for the damage. Then you can borrow the car. Hand me the newspaper, please."
"But I need to get up to the city on Saturday. Supergrass are playing and I promised I'd drive the boys up."
"Well, you'd better take the train: after all, you're the one who's always banging on about saving the planet and reducing greenhouse gases. Aren't those jeans toxic as well?"
"Come on Dad, the train's not cool."
"And a Ford Mondeo is, I suppose?"

"Let Me Entertain You"

In which Robbie Williams borrows "Pinball Wizard" in its entirety and assumes the mantle of entertainer par excellence. Whatever else you may think of the guy, he does know how to put on a good show. OK, so there isn't an original thought in here, the lyrics are thrown together without any thought, but it just.....works. Part of it comes from his own energy, part of it is the colour-by-numbers rock that also doesn't break any new ground, but that's not the point! It's a crowd-pleasing singalong that doesn't let you down. OK, all together now with those lighters and scarves........

"Captain Jack"

Before Billy Joel went mellow and AOR, he had a bit of an edge, even though the presentation may still have been kind of polished. Songs like "Root Beer Rag" and "Roberta" from the "Streetlife Serenader" album are terrific, honest cuts, so I was so happy to listen to "Angry Young Man" many years later, which harked back to the early days of a guy who had things to write about that made sense. He does "slice of life" songs so very well. This is a huge thumping drug-references song, with an eight-mile wide chorus that he drives harder and harder to the end, and wry little observations like: "Your sister's gone out/She's on a date/You just sit at home/And masturbate".

"Information"

Why oh why aren't the Rainmakers massive? Another lost treasure here. Bob Walkenhorst has a really unique voice, sharp, biting, and he can wail - well, scream really - when he needs to. They came out of the same middle-America roots-rock wellspring as Jason & The Scorchers, the Long Ryders and Lone Justice, but were always a little more....cerebral. The songs are all clever, thought-provoking and heartfelt, no more so than this wonderful track: "And yes I know my brother well and the company he's keeping/Yes I know my brother well, he sings a different tune/Yes I know my brother well, I've heard it said he's queer as hell/Pray that he's in love as well, higher than the moon".

"Caroline, No"

If you still think the Beach Boys were all about upbeat, impossibly handsome Californian kids heading off the the beach in their woodies for some surfing, think again, dammit! Music may never have come up with a more beautiful, gentle, heartbroken lost-love song than this: "Could I ever find in you again/Things that made me love you so much then/Could we ever bring them back once they have gone?" Aching harmonies, perfectly-arranged instrumentals, this is the Beach Boys' finest and simplest moment, their "Blackbird" if you like.

"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"

A shambling, rambling, tumbledown log cabin of a song, yet stately and dignified at the same time. There's a certain stubborn pride that pours forth from this and other, similar songs about the North-South divide: check out Neil Young's Powderfinger or Warren Zevon's Renegade, both of which are mentioned elsewhere on this blog. I never really properly understood The Band: they were roots-folk with rock influences, but this song seems to sum them up entirely. It's a bitter-sweet, lyrical ode to times past, delicate yet strong enough to withstand the slightly ramshackle arrangement. I love the stop-start intro, the fluffed beginning, and finally it cranks into gear. You can see why Bob Dylan appreciated them so much.

"Finishing Touches"

Talk about the lost treasure of the Sierra Madre. I'm going to be revisiting Warren Zevon's work frequently. For those of us who are fans of cinema noir, or novels set in the darker half of the human experience, Charles Bukowski for example, Zevon is the essential soundtrack. He doesn't shy away from telling it like it is: "I'm getting tired of you/You're getting tired of me/And it's the final act/In our little tragedy/So don't feign indignation/It's a fait accompli/You can screw everybody I've ever known/But I still won't talk to you on the phone". You can't BUY that kind of bitter, knowing, resigned yet outraged acceptance of humankind's essential beastliness. Yet at the other end of the scale, he'll produce a sweet, sweet paean to the better angels of our nature. Zevon was an optimist at heart, but one who took his umbrella with him. This is straightforward rock, so much the better to showcase his incomparable command of language and his ability to sum up an entire life, a whole relationship, in half a dozen words.

Oh, and can you think of any other song in which the protagonist confesses that his cock is sore?

"I Want To Take You Higher"

Imagine you're wearing the sharpest clothes in all Creation, made out of all sorts of spacey fabrics and colours, moving like a snake with the serious horn, showing off all your fine booty and emphasizing just what a tip-top lover-man or -girl you are. You're sipping on fine wines, dropping 'bon mots' like confetti and generally feeling just about as good as you can. OK. Got that? Well, you may just be cool enough to hang out with this song. Sly & the Family Stone were a riot of colour, rhythm, noise, space and light. They threw great big house-parties of songs, crowded funk-outs that were always this short of spiralling out of control, rhythms falling over one another... this is for dancing like you just don't care.