"Every Breath You Take"

Old loves.

We fall in love for a variety of reasons, but they could be summed up thus: "because he/she has something I want", be that beauty, brains, talent, humour, vulnerability or just a nameless chemical that speeds through our receptors and lets off a grenade in our head. Our love poses a question that we can answer, or it answers a question that we've been asking all our lives. But rarely does our love answer ALL those questions or ask precisely ALL the questions we have the answers to.
And when, or if, love fails, some of us fall to measuring each inch of the quantum leaps that brought us together and then pulled us apart. Some of us are analysing, some of us are ignoring; we're either obsessing sweatily over the whys and wherefores or perfectly happy that it's over.
This is a song for those of us who are never satisfied with the conclusions we draw.
It's a dark, angry, peevish, whiny song, even though it deosn't sound it. We're perfectly aware that we're onto a loser here, that our obsessions will never be rewarded, but we need to let that person know we're still there, that we care, that we're retreating, shrinking into a hard nugget of bitterness and that we can't do a damn thing about it. If we had the time, we'd be standing outside their window watching, drawing the strength to go on from the injustice and anger, the sheer unfairness that we feel.
The insistent monotonous beat, the pulsing bass, the utter simplicity of this song speaks of a single-minded pursuit, the discarding of anything but the essentials. This is a dangerous song, a threatening one: "Every move you make/Every vow you break/Every smile you fake/Every claim you stake/I'll be watching you", as if to say, "you betrayed me; but I'll be watching, chronicling all your future betrayals" as if that will somehow lessen the pain.

It's never simple, is it?

"Love and Affection"

Early morning on the last day of the holidays, I sit on the front porch, look at the sunlight beginning to run thickly down the trunks of the beech trees, pull out my iPod and consider the possibilities for a song to describe that slightly hollow feeling that accompanies the end of something special, the memories freshly-minted that now have to be put away, folded and stored in the last corner of a bulging duffel bag before we head back to our real world.
Bitter-sweet, because we go from one happiness to another, from the head-back, wide-eyed shocked laughter of a child being caught by surprise by a large splashing wave, to the head-back, wide-eyed smile of bliss on seeing a loved one again. And, for a while at least, we'll close our eyes from time to time and remember a moment, an afternoon, a joke, a face that we treasured all too briefly on our travels.
So why have I come to this song? Partly because the love I feel for my old, spiritual home is something that drills so deep inside me that it feels like a living, breathing person who has walked beside me for many years. I can look out towards the hills and say to them: "Thank you/You took me dancing/Cross the floor/Cheek to cheek," remembering the days I have spent clambering to their summits. I can stand at the harbour's edge and silently say goodbye to the fishing fleet as I would to a friend who I'll hope to see again.
And all the while, I will be looking forward to saying hello to a new love that awaits me at home: "Just take my hand and lead me where you will." Fresh, renewed, cleansed, this is a song for new beginnings, old friends, warm memories and the aching chasm of hope.

"Madame Helga"

There's something unashamedly indulgent about a song that stands four-square in the box marked "testosterone", that wears its colours on its sleeve and doesn't feel the need to apologise for being a serious boys-only song. Think of the Faces' "Stay With Me" or Paul Kelly's "Darling It Hurts" and you get the picture. This is the Stereophonics jumping feet-first into the deep end of the pool and pulling every single axe-hero pose, every fist-pumping chord-change out of the box of tricks. It's a wonderful, swirling, lazy, vaguely menacing slab of sound. Kelly Jones must have applied the extra-coarse sandpaper to his vocal chords for this: his voice is Rod Stewart on steroids, raw, tearing at the edges, reaching for that last scrap of power to push the song over the edge. The song's about a mysterious woman the band met in Sri Lanka; but they've painted a whole slightly acid- or alcohol-fuelled fantasy around her: there's the waking up in an unfamiliar place, the strange faces passing by in a blur of overindulgence, the desperately unsettled feeling of being someplace where you don't feel one hundred percent safe. The song pushes on, gathering momentum as the dream blows hot and cold, the chorus suggests the sort of out-of-body experience we've all had when we find our limits, and by the end you're slightly sweaty, wondering if you'll ever get home to see your local pub again.

"Stay With Me"

*REWRITE ALERT* This SongWithoutWhich was first blogged 22 March 2004.

There's a moment about thirty seconds into this song as the intro comes to an end, where the band changes time signature and goes from standard rock riffery into a snaky, slinky shuffle that is one of the most perfect moments in rock. The sheer confidence to do that, the chutzpah and the musical chops, speaks of a band that *knows* it's hot. It helps that Rod Stewart sounds about as good as he ever did, and that Ron Wood could play a bit. This is a misogynistic, lewd, lascivious pole-dance of a song, a sort of disreputable uncle to Aerosmith's "Pink". If you have a problem with enjoying good-time party music like this, may I suggest a hip transplant.

"When Will You Make My Phone Ring"

Regrets. No matter how much time passes, how much water curls beneath your own private bridge there is always something, or more pertinently, someone that you can't quite close the book on. If you've walked away, perhaps you feel fewer of those regrets, but when you find yourself catching your breath from the sharpness of that memory, then you realise you aren't clear, you haven't broken free. And those sharp jabs, those laughing careless reminders, they draw you backwards, till you're walking over old ground, peering beneath stones and leaves to see if you missed something, a clue, a hint perhaps that might have changed everything. Ricky Ross has the voice for this job, the raw, slightly damaged rasp of experience, able to express the bewilderment of being caught out: "I want you in everything/In everything/In anything I do/When will you make my phone ring/And tell me I can't give you anything/Anything at all now."

"Luna"

A ghost of a love song, chasing shadows and barely glimpsed flashes of light in the midst of the carnival long after midnight, where the echoes of the carousel's music ebb and flow around you as you creep tentatively through the darkness. This could be an obsessive's song, a whining, scratching lament from the outer edges of abandon, or it could be that ghost song, that memory revisited in the small hours of the night; the one that makes you break into a sweat. Either way, this is not comfortable, no matter how gentle the melody. This is disturbed, hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck stuff. Just enough suggestion to take you as far as you dare, but not enough information to let you relax. Tom Petty's voice wavers uncertainly, the song seeks refuge in the simple, creaking refrain but it's lost, afraid, at its wit's end.

"Pump It Up"

Here's a song that grabs you and refuses to let go. You're kept on the balls of your feet, doing little pogo jumps through the verse as you wait for the relief of the slam-dunk chorus. It's edgy, nervous, speed-fuelled, in-your-face stuff, the acceptable face of punk. Elvis Costello always stood slightly apart from the whole new wave thing, always just that bit more thoughtful, his songwriting just that bit more complete. And this song is as good an example of how far beyond his contemporaries he was: "She’s been a bad girl/She’s like a chemical/Though you try to stop it/She’s like a narcotic/You wanna torture her/You wanna talk to her/All the things you bought for her/Putting up your temp’rature." His references were always more erudite than the rest of the new wave, and it's no surprise that his career has morphed from songs like "Watching the Detectives" to covering - beautifully, mind - Charles Aznavour's "She" and working with the Brodsky Quartet among others. But for a while, he was the clever epicenter of the furious squall that was punk and new wave.

"Movin On Up"

*REWRITE ALERT* This SongWithoutWhich was first blogged January 23 2004

This is truly special: gospel dance rock by Primal Scream. If Sly Stone got religion, took downers and discovered guitars all in the same afternoon, he might have come up with something like this. It's loose and yet tight as a drum, the choir giving the song real punch while there's a whole lazy, sub-Rolling Stones groove going on. It's a requiem, it's a song for getting high, it's a song that reaffirms life from the middle of the dancefloor, it's a bit of everything. There's a hint of "Sympathy for the Devil" about this one, and those gospel voices and that looping guitar suggest drugs may have been involved.

"Werewolves of London"

Well, this is probably the only Warren Zevon tune that anyone's ever heard of, and normally I wouldn't have blogged it, except that I came across a live version recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon (back in the days when it still WAS the Hammersmith Odeon) that is really, truly excellent. For a start, the intro is an extended piece of semi-classical improvisation on the keyboard from the man himself; a spare, beautiful piece of cascading, climbing, Oriental-tinged wizardry. And just when you think you may have the wrong track, he ever-so-gently leans into the piano intro to "Werewolves" and before you know it, we're off and running into a solid, meaty rendition of his (sadly) signature tune.
Why "Werewolves" came to be a so-called novelty hit is still beyond me. It's not the best song he ever wrote by a long way, it's not even the funniest, but it is clever. Jackson Browne, who produced the album, said this song is all about young well-dressed gigolos preying on old ladies. He said the whole song is wrapped up in the line "Well, I'd like to meet his tailor". It sounds far-fetched, but then far-fetched was pretty normal in Warren's world. And so listen to this now with the benefit of insight and enjoy its dark humour, enjoy the spontaneity of the live recording and raise a glass to a wayward genius.

"Rhythm Nation"

Yes, I'm kind of perplexed by this one too. I don't normally have any time for Janet Jackson or her ilk. And I have no doubt that there are hundreds of songs that could be usefully interchanged with this one. So when it comes to explaining why this is a SongWithoutWhich, I'm sorry, I got no words. Maybe it's the squiggly bass figure, the hurry-up drums, the guitar sample from Sly & the Family Stone's "Thank You", the vaguely martial feel to the whole song. More likely than not, it's a tip of the hat to the producer who assembled all the parts and made this puppy fly.
And perhaps that's the point of this song. To show us how music has gone from four boys standing around a single mike in a recording booth in Memphis, to the multi-tracked, EQ'd, computer-massaged, tweaked and primped confection that we consume today. Now I'm not necessarily saying it's bad - I mean, look what George Martin did for the Beatles - I'm just saying it's different. O tempora, o mores, as our forefathers in Rome would have said.

"Drive"

If ever a single song defined a moment in history, this may well be it. Live Aid, twenty years ago last month; David Bowie introduces a video clip from the stage at Wembley, and the next four minutes pass in a blur of tears, of shocked numbness. According to Bob Geldof's autobiography, he was approached by a Canadian Broadcasting Corp camera team in a hotel in Addis Ababa with a video collage they'd put to a song by The Cars, of an infant waking up and trying to stand on emaciated, hollowed legs. They thought he might be able to use it as part of his fundraising effort.
When the video was broadcast that June afternoon, it went around the world like a single bolt of lightning. Everyone I have ever spoken to about Live Aid remembers the video, remembers the painful tightening of the throat and the involuntary sobs of pain it wrought, and the lasting, shocking memory.
Before Live Aid, this was already a dark song, a song from the edges of someone's reason: "Who's gonna pick you up/When you fall/Who's gonna hang it up/When you call/Who's gonna pay attention/To your dreams/Who's gonna plug their ears/When you scream/You can't go on/Thinking nothing's wrong/Who's gonna drive you home tonight." I remember watching the original video for this, watching Paulina Porizkova flipping from a laughing, happy child to a screaming whirlwind in a moment, and wondering just how far into the eye of the storm this song was meant to take us.
Now, even this long after Live Aid, I find the song is still hijacked, adopted, given a whole new life and meaning. It's not a source of regret, rather an acknowledgement by me - and I hope also by the writer - that something bigger, more important, claimed ownership.

"Beat Surrender"

What a way to go! With the benefit of hindsight, this was a perfect hint of what was to come from Paul Weller. The Jam were always about vignettes of London, snatches of life at the wrong end of the Tory food chain, serious, earnest and biting. But as The Jam's career wound to a close, there were signs of what was uppermost in Weller's mind. And in this final song he came closest to that crossover point. The urgency of the Jam, coloured and textured with the brassy soul that was to be the trademark of the Style Council.
This song is a farewell, a valedictory. It's triumphant, secure, refusing to look back and keen to continue its journey. It's a clarion call, a rally to the flag of youth and energy, an invitation to lose yourself in the moment. It's hard not to be sucked into the seductive simplicity of the lyric: "All the things that I shout about (but never act upon)/All the courage and the dreams that I have (but seem to wait so long)/My doubt is cast aside, watch phonies run to hide/The dignified don't even enter in the game." It's about the feeling of power, the potential, and knowing that whatever you do, you will remain strong.

"The Needle and the Damage Done"

*REWRITE ALERT* This SongWithoutWhich was first blogged May 1 2004

There's a thread running through Neil Young's career - no matter how many incredible songs he has written, and Lord he has written more than a few - often you'll find someone else has done his songs better justice than he has. I'm not saying he can't sing or play, because he clearly can: his "Rocking in the Free World" is as savage and angry as anything that came out of punk, and "Cortez the Killer" can't be matched by anyone.
But songs like "Wrecking Ball" or this one seem to have gained something in their interpretation by others. This version, by The Icicle Works and Pete Wylie, is suffused with soul in a way Neil just couldn't do. The harmonies are sensational, the atmospheric production, the echo, the touch of slide guitar, all are perfect for the bare bones of a song that pays tribute to the boneyard that is drug addiction. The voices, though, are what make this; searching, mourning, wasted: "I've seen the needle and the damage done/A little part of it in everyone/But every junkie's like a setting sun." The final chorus raises the hair on the back of your neck as Pete Wylie reaches for the high notes in the background before the aching harmony closes the book.

"Laid"

From the burst of enthusiasm and joy of confirmation to the edges of obsession and mania, the snail trail of dysfunctional love can be taken at a run or at a crawl. From "this bed is on fire with passionate love/The neighbors complain about the noises above/But she only comes when she's on top" to "My therapist said not to see you no more/She said you're like a disease without any cure/She said I'm so obsessed that I'm becoming a bore" seems to happen in no time at all. Does this progression, the potential for it, live at the heart of any relationship, or do some people not get affected to this extent? Do we fall to experimenting with each other as a way to keep from going stale, or is it an honest attempt to learn more about each other?
For a band, James were particularly aware of our collective and individual frailty, in some cases drawing on that as the root of our strength ("Sit Down"), but more often than not seeing through our attempts at bravery and resilience as a paper-thin wall that separates us from our darker impulses. If we weren't being so noble about it, we'd be running amok, they suggest: "Caught your fingers in the till/Slammed your fingers in the door/Caught your hand inside the till/Fought with kitchen knives and skewers /Dressed me up in womens clothes/Messed around with gender roles/Dye my eyes and call me pretty." So which is more honest?

"Biko"

*REWRITE ALERT* This SongWithoutWhich was first blogged April 24 2004.

The death of a man can hardly have been reported on with such dignity, yet with such a sense of indictment and outrage as here. Steven Biko was an activist and lawyer in South Africa during the apartheid era, who was killed in police custody. His death sparked much of the anger and outrage that swept the rest of the world. Peter Gabriel was among the first to react to Biko's death, and there can be few more thrilling, yet dignified tributes to a man's life and death than this.
The segue from "Nkosi Sikelele Africa" into the intro is totally compelling. The threat of the fuzzed guitar, the inevitability of the funeral drumbeat, the gentle, hoarse reminder where this happened. And the lyrics: so simple, so effective: "September 77/Port Elizabeth, weather fine/It was business as usual/In police room 619." It's fascinating to listen to the various ways in which politically-active artists demonstrate their anger or commitment: listen to this, and then play Little Steven's "Sun City". Peter Gabriel doesn't need to sloganise; he lets the song's images do the talking, while Little Steven has to keep reminding us that he "ain't gonna play Sun City". Which works better?

"Waterloo Sunset"

*REWRITE ALERT* This SongWithoutWhich was first blogged October 27 2004.

If you wanted to create an image in your head of what London was like at a certain point in time, say, around 1970 give or take a couple of years, you could do worse than close your eyes and listen to this. "Waterloo Sunset" is like being on the London Eye, looking around from a great height at 360 degrees of this fantastic city, yet being able to peer through the curtains, close-up, at the life of everyone that makes up the whole story. While bands like The Who told the story of disaffected youth, the ones who set themselves apart and dared to try to resist The System, The Kinks tell this story about those who conformed, who bent to the task of carving out a living in what was a fairly monochrome place back then: "Every day I look at the world from my window/Chilly chilly is the evening time/Waterloo sunset." It's like watching a film of London taken from a very great distance, and then drawing closer, closer, until you're focusing on Terry and Julie, meeting near Waterloo Bridge on a Friday after work. There's such love in this song, such solidarity and empathy for the lives of the millions of us who go largely unnoticed.

"No Matter What"

*REWRITE ALERT* This SongWithoutWhich was first blogged December 3 2004

If you were looking for some sort of guide, a textbook on how to write the perfect pop song, you'd have to have a chapter on Badfinger. This is alarmingly simple stuff: the production is as flat as you can get, no washes of sound, no echo, no nothing, just guitar, bass, drums and voice. But the song itself is what comes steaming through, the casual brilliance of the tune, the open-goal opportunities for soaring harmonies, and then, half way through, the oh-so-clever trick of making a guitar sound like a Hammond organ and the descending staircase of background harmony that hangs like a sumptuous velvet curtain behind the chorus. It's low-rent simple, but high-life perfect.

"Whole Wide World"

*REWRITE ALERT* This SongWithoutWhich was first blogged April 19 2004.

I love this. Wreckless Eric's a big star in France, which sinks the notion that the French have no sense of humour for a start. He's got a voice that suggests pub karaoke after just a couple of pints too many, but underneath, if you care to pay some attention, is a terrific song: "When I was a young boy/My mother said to me/There's only one girl in the world for you/She probably lives in Tahiti." Humour, pathos and a typically punk-era no-frills production that suits the voice and the story. It's tunefully tuneless, a love song for closing time.

"Ray of Light"

I've had a little trouble with Madonna. No, nothing for her to be ashamed or worried about. I have to make a conscious effort to divorce myself from everything else that comes associated with her music: she's been so well-packaged that it's nearly impossible to listen to her music without a host of images and stories crowding the moment. Happily, much of what I listen to is uncomplicated by spin and filters, but this pleasure is coming under threat from what we shall call the New Business of Music - that multimedia assault on our senses from artists who have worked out they stand a greater chance of achieving lasting fame and fortune if they give us more ways to consume them. At least, I can't find any other way to explain J-Lo.
Luckily, there is some talent at work where Madonna is concerned, if only the ability to pick better songwriters than the rest. This is relentless hardcore dance music, but hardcore only in the sense that it really drags you in. This isn't a song that needs serious bass or a pounding beat that will sterilise small animals, it's just busy, bustling, whirling and so much fun. An innocent pleasure, a moment of harmless abandon.

"Italian Plastic"

Love can make you goofy, can magnify the smallest things and confer upon them huge importance. The manner in which a gift is received, the way in which we represent our relationship to the outside world, the smallest detail of a letter or a phone call. Here's a song for the clown in all of us: "I bring you plates from Rome/You say they look fantastic/I say we're having fun/Nothing like that Italian plastic/I bring you rocks and flowers/You say they look pathetic/You pick me up at night/I don't feel pathetic." You have to be able to look at yourself and laugh, the songs seems to be saying, despite the importance, the depth, the bigness of being with someone. And insecurity can make that very, very difficult to do. "When you wake up with me/I'll be your glass of water/When you stick up for me/Then I'll be your bella bambino, your man on the moon/I'll be your little boy running with that egg on his spoon/I'll be your soul survivor, your worst wicked friend/I'll be your piggy-in-the-middle, stick with you to the end." Every line is puffing itself up and then pricking the balloon.

"Nothing Ever Happens"

There's a desperate ordinariness about everyday life, when the things you do fall readily into the pattern that has evolved over weeks and months of your life. The French have a saying for it: "Metro, boulot, dodo", or in English, "Subway, work, sleep", a relentless drumbeat of sameness and habitude that deadens the faces of the people whose eyes you meet on the way to work or home. Here's a song that puts that ordinariness, that quotidian routine on a large poster and hangs it on the wall for us all to look at, see ourselves reflected in its patterns, the tiny dots that, as you move backwards, resolve themselves into a photograph of our lives.
"And by five o’clock everything’s dead/And every third car is a cab/And ignorant people sleep in their beds/Like the doped white mice in the college lab", sing Del Amitri. "Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all/The needle returns to the start of the song/And we all sing along like before/Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all".
Today, of all days, I just wish this were the case.

London, England.

"Motorcycle Emptiness"

Another song that probably deserves the title "epic", and one that I often bandy about when talking about the Manic Street Preachers. But I can't think of any other way to describe the canvas they seem desperately to want to paint on. For me, this is a case where the song absolutely works, even if the lyrics mean less to me than they should. I read somewhere that the group were trying to out-do Guns 'n Roses' "Sweet Child of Mine" with this, and it's easy to see what they were going for. But "Sweet Child" is all about honking great signposts and instructions: "Feel sad here" or "Feel all choked up here", it seems to point you to what it thinks you should be feeling. "Motorycle Emptiness" is far more subtle... it doesn't reach for the highest highs, it's content simply to play itself out and let you sip from it, drink from it, gulp it down as you please. Where "Sweet Child" is "connect-the-dots", this song is "do it yourself".

"Man of the World"

Some songs are robust; strong, well-built, made to endure plenty of abuse and repetition. Then there are those that stick around for a while, do what they're supposed to for a while, until the software is corrupted or the microchip inside melts, and they're gone. And lastly, there are those songs made from materials so fine, so well-wrought that they have to stay under glass, temperature-controlled, or they'll simply collapse under their own weight. Thinking about that, I realise you could also say the same thing about the writers of such songs. In this case, Peter Green, whose health just seemed to buckle under the strain of, well, being Peter Green? Or was it writing songs such as this? Either way, this is a fragile web of a song, spun out of air and gossamer, conjured out of nothing. You can almost hear the walls creaking, the foundations eroding, as this song of loneliness unravels its tale. This is almost too painful to listen to; one man's mind gently casting adrift.

"Lust For Life"

Definitely a song for joggers, this. It lopes along the pavement at a cracking pace, cymbals splashing in all the puddles, stealing glimpses into the shop windows along the way. It's one of those moments when you don't care that you're out of breath, that you're on the ragged edge, because that's the feeling you're looking for, that semi-abandon, the endorphin rush that's better than any drug. And you know that when you stop, when you're panting, bent over trying to relieve the ache in your chest and the stinging in your legs, you'll be laughing out loud with the sheer life of it all. A lot like Iggy Pop, really.

"Dream a Little Dream of Me"

Think of the greatest harmony singers and the Mamas and the Papas will turn up at some point. They're sadly forgotten these days except for perhaps the luminous "California Dreaming", though this lazy, gentle moment is the equal in every way. A soft, caressing rhythm, Mama Cass' extraordinary voice and a song from another time. There's honky-tonk piano, some marvelous drumming and a lyric that wouldn't be out of place next to Louis Armstrong's "Wonderful World": "Say nighty-night and kiss me/Just hold me tight and tell me you'll miss me/While I'm alone and blue as can be/Dream a little dream of me." This is a song for those bucolic afternoons when you and your love can lie side by side, carelessly tangled as you look up at the sky and wonder where you're headed.

"Love Rears Its Ugly Head"

This is miraculous: a seething, boiling cauldron of about five different styles with a stinging lyric that just shoves you back into your seat and demands to be heard. What can we call this? Funk/rock/metal/soul? It's got the lot. Living Colour seem perfectly at ease straddling the genres, easing from one style to the other, throwing down a fearsome backbeat and constructing a wall of thudding guitar, while the lyric just punctures one balloon after another: "I always thought our relationship was cool/You played the role of having sense/I always played the fool/Now something’s different/I don’t know the reason why/Whenever we separate/I almost want to cry." And the reason? "Oh no, please not that again/Love rears up its ugly head." Another slice of everyday life, framed and hung at exactly the right spot on our wall, accusing, knowing, ironic. Vernon Reid's voice hangs above the song like a foghorn, a hog-caller, a nervous, funky swain, half-chuckling at his own perceived weakness, while the band weaves back and forth from funk to metal flame-out. This is clever, clever stuff.

"Stay (Faraway, So Close!)"

This is a 4 a.m. song, perhaps one for when you're walking alone in the city long after the loving is over and the regrets have started. A song which you pull tight to your chest and try to bruise your skin with. It's an intimate moment, this song, one that lets you into its secret before it steps back and shouts that secret to the world. "Faraway, so close up with the static and the radio/With satellite television you can go anywhere/Miami, New Orleans, London, Belfast, and Berlin." It's everywhere and right by your side at the same time, a song that lifts you out of place and deposits you at the limits of your imagination. "Three o'clock in the morning/It's quiet and there's no one around/Just the bang and the clatter as an angel runs to ground/Just the bang and the clatter as an angel hits the ground." U2 have learned over the years that a quiet conversation is just as effective as a heaven-bound anthem.

"Gimme Shelter"

For me, this song is all about the intro, a slow-burning brushfire that gets slowly whipped up by the wind and breaks into a roaring, rushing wall of destruction. The backing voices sound a warning siren as the dried wood of the old world crackles and consumes itself before the songs kicks in, a lazy, threatening, apocalyptic slashing noise. "Oh, a storm is threat’ning/My very life today/If I don’t get some shelter/Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away." The Stones were pretty apocalyptic in their pomp, Their Satanic Majesties indeed. This is how music can be used as a force of nature, a frightening glimpse into the heart of the monster.

"Everybody Hurts"

As many others are doing this day, I'm watching the Live8 concert, watching bands struggle to turn their work into an appropriate statement about the way the world is run today. It's clear that the stream of awareness that was turned on in the 1960s has dwindled to a trickle when famous performers are unable to express a thought, an emotion that hasn't got something to do with self-gratification, no matter how well they dress it up. It takes an extraordinary person to strip away the layers upon layers of therapy that society throws at us in one shape or another and remember the basics. And it's not something facile like "I love you" or "I'm hurt" or "Aren't we great", either. Michael Stipe probably thinks more about what he says than just about any other performer I can think of, and to have written a simple, elegant, heartfelt celebration such as this - because it IS a celebration, this song - is an achievement that dwarfs so much of what has been created over the years.
"When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone/When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life, well hang on/Don’t let yourself go, everybody cries and everybody hurts sometimes." And it's not just the words; it's the plaintive, wailing chorus, the plangent, wavering keening overdubs and the sheer simplicity of the melody. This is the world's healing prayer, the ultimate statement of solidarity and empathy. The Who once sang: "The simple things you say are all complicated". Not in this case.

"Turn! Turn! Turn!"

Finding myself in the midst of a period of advanced workaholism and not being able to drag myself away from my job for long hours, has made me appreciate the time I can give myself even more. The precious hours when I can sleep without my subconscious keeping a weather eye on the alarm clock, when I don't have to stumble to the shower and wriggle myself onto the public transport system at an indecent hour, are the ones I spend with the most care. Yes, it's about self-preservation, but it's also about mental administration, the time when I can tie up loose ends, sweep away the cobwebs from the less-used parts of my life and think about those people that I find myself drifting away from in this squall of activity. Or, as the Byrds would have said, "A time to build up, a time to break down/A time to dance, a time to mourn/A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together." Pete Seeger wrote this, well, adapted this, but the Byrds with their soaring harmonies and ice-clean guitars are the definitive take. It takes a song like this to bring us back to earth and to realise that in some ways, the Bible is the greatest self-help manual ever written.

"Lazy Sunday"

Listen to this song and you'll understand where Britpop came from. Instead of the standard trans-Atlantic vocal mannerisms, Steve Marriott unleashes the full force of Cockney cheekiness and turns this into Parklife: the Prequel. For much of the 60s a Cockney accent wasn't at all what you wanted to hear from a popular beat combo; you wanted cool, leather-tainted American-ness. After the Beatles, though, a British accent was de rigeur. To be fair though, Steve's taking it a bit far on this track, playing it up like Phil Daniels does on "Parklife". And the vocal works, the cheeky delivery matching the lyrics perfectly: "'Ere we all are, sitting in a rainbow/Cor blimey hallo Mrs Jones, 'ow's your Bert's lumbago? (mustn't grumble)." The Small Faces were perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities of the 60s, and everything that was good about them is on this song.

"How Soon Is Now?"

There's something vaguely hypnotic about this - the phased guitars in the background, the whining guitar upfront that roars by from fore to aft like a sports car beneath a bridge, yet all the time there is the monotone air of a song that's not interested in harmony, but rather its own deadpan path. This is an anti-song, and it's fantastic. Morrissey goes off on a tangent about self-absorption, desire and the search for love, while the rest create a whirling, pulsing platform, a solid wall of driving rain. It's loose, floppy in a teenage-hair sort of way, totally wrapped up in itself and probably very very honest.

"Perfect Day"

I was a fan of this when Lou Reed wrote it but for some reason, when the BBC commissioned a special "various artists" version to coincide with a fundraising campaign, the song took on a whole new dimension. On the surface, this is so simple, so beautiful, so elegant. A paean to the joys of summer, a quiet day when the noise and the immenseness of the city roll away from you like an ebb tide, and you create a world, a moment, a day that's just for you. Magically, life contracts to a small space inhabited just by you, your dreams, the sensations of warm grass on bare feet, the slow burn of hot sun on your back, the prickle of sweat and the occasional noise of passing children. And all the time, the song reminds you of what you're enjoying until, as if too much of a good thing tips the scales, it gently points out that this perfection doesn't come for free.
At one or two points, the song strikes a darker note: "Just a perfect day/You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else/Someone good", and the refrain "You just keep me hanging on." Hanging on where? Why? Maybe it doesn't matter. There's a sense of wonder, of bewilderment at the construction of such a wondrous moment and perhaps, just perhaps the fear that it might not come your way again. Perhaps the best moment of all is Courtney Pine's extraordinary sax solo, that lends the song that sense of wonder, of reaching out behind us to grasp and hold onto the moment. But by the end, we're reminded of the aching sense of joy the day brought, and we decide to count our blessings.
A song for summer, a song for love.

"Prelude/Angry Young Man"

For a start, you're not going to hear much better pop piano than "Prelude", which is dizzyingly fast at one moment, then beautifully restrained the next. But this is just a taster, an intro to the main thing, which is another one of Billy Joel's character songs, in this case, the angry young man of the title. It's not the James Dean or Marlon Brando type, but the urban political warrior: "There's a place in the world for the Angry Young Man/With his working class ties and his radical plans/He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl/And he's always at home with his back to the wall." The sly digs start later: he "likes to be known as the angry young man", he never learns from his mistakes, he'll "go to the grave as an angry old man" while the rest of us have "passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage". Basically, we've found found "that just surviving is a noble fight." And eventually, the Angry Young Man has become a bore.... All of this wondrous story-telling is wrapped up in a skittish, go-faster rhythm that drives onwards to the end, when the Prelude reappears and gives that Angry Old Man his send-off. Try not to think of Billy Joel as the purveyor of sugary slush but rather, like Elton John, as someone who really had "it".

"The Dean & I"

Sometimes you run into a band that's just fizzing with ideas, with creativity and with the sheer ability to do just about anything. That's 10cc. These guys could do anything, absolutely anything. The wonder of it all is that they actually managed to make coherent records at all. Listen to this song: there are about fifteen different, brilliant ideas all fighting for space within three and a half minutes of song. They've thrown in a bagful of fantastic hooks and some clever and amusing lyrics: "In the eyes of the Dean his daughter/Was doing what she shouldn't oughta/But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do/The consequence should be/Church bells, three swells, the Dean, his daughter and me." The styles shift at a dizzying pace, drifting from one pop orthodoxy to another in the blink of an eye, so that by the end you feel as if you've just got up from a twelve-course banquet. Very filling, very satisfying.

"Couple Days Off"

Why doesn't anyone complain about their job when they're skipping out of the office at 6 pm? Easy; they're listening to this. Huey Lewis never pretended to be pushing the boundaries of music in any direction; his gig was just good-time music, preferably accompanying a few beers at the end of a blue-collar day. There's a lot of love in songs like this - the sheer joy of making a fantastic noise, harnessing a driving beat, every musician perfectly in sync - that make them such a pleasure to listen to. This is your standard work-related complaint song - like Johnny Paycheck's "Take This Job and Shove It" - matched to an absolutely unstoppable tune, driving beat, rock-solid guitars, the works. I defy you to hear this and not start to sway in time on the bus home.

"Step On"

We're loving this. It's got that lazy, shuffling, swaggering beat, you know, the kind you can only achieve when your jeans are so baggy and loose that they impede your movement. It's not so much a song as one long cruise down the street on a Saturday afternoon, high-fiving your friends, giving some cheeky chat to the girls in the Top Shop, talking in code, impromptu dancing on the corner by the off-licence, sharing some skunk, necking an alco-pop and generally not giving a flying fuck. This is a lazy, saggy, seriously casual song for a seriously loose moment. It drifts in and out of focus beautifully, just like the Happy Mondays did.

"Perfect 10"

In praise of normal women.

Let's not get into a debate about the merits of stick-thin bodies versus the average, more generous figure. I think we can safely leave that to the Beautiful South. Or, as they put it, "I like to hold something I can see". This is all hip-swaying, earthy rhythm, it's sex by music, the shock of surprise when you see a girl dancing in just such a way that makes you react in just such a way. "She's a perfect ten/But she wears a twelve/Baby keep a little two for me/She could be sweet sixteen/Busting out at the seams/It's still love in the first degree." There's liberation here, relief and a sense of freedom, like a belt being loosened. The song tells us to lose our own inhibitions and preconceptions and frankly, when the beat's this good, you'll get no argument from me.

"She Knows"

A breathless Goth love song, if there could be such a thing. Balaam & the Angel were a brief glimmer at the tail-end of the black-clad 80s; they barely rippled the charts and before I could blink they were gone, it seemed. But this pearl of a song fell out of the murk and rolled to my feet, and it's been with me ever since. It's got the kind of guitar sound the Cure would have killed for, like water running off your face as you stand in a waterfall, and the vocal is strained, uncertain yet happy in its precarious position. After all the games, the toying, the teasing, the songs says: "She knows/Just what to say/She knows/Why I feel this way." There's celebration, wonder, joy, a healthy dose of bewilderment and the hint of something a little darker; it's as if he's saying "you're taking me outside my comfort zone, but it's OK." After all, love involves risk as well as security, doesn't it?

"Top Jimmy"

...meanwhile, on the other side of town, where the heavy metal kids hang out, Van Halen is in the house. This is emphatically NOT your average turn-it-up-to-11 crunch-a-rama. It's a shuffle, dammit, a relatively underplayed dose of rhythm and a shedload of talent at work. The guitar is mostly clear as a bell - which is rare for Edward v. H. - and the drumming is just fantastic, a splashy-cymbal, chugging, totally unstoppable twelve-cylinder affair. Yes, there's the obligatory guitar solo, but admirably restrained, which is not something you'd associate with these guys. Van Halen in blues shuffle shock!

"Wherever God Shines His Light"

This has long been a favourite of mine. The plain, simple, piano figure that drives the song is just fantastic, the beat is infectious in a quiet, shimmying sort of way, a pulse of air that gets your hips twitching gently, and the voices - Van Morrison and (gasp) Cliff Richard - work really well together; Van is reaching out for those extra notes, those little jazzy, shouty flourishes, while Cliff is as straight and un-souly as.....well, as Cliff Richard. It's a simple, elegant song, worth enjoying.

"Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)"

Once again, a song from the other perspective. There's no end of songs about your cheatin' man, the double-dealing no-goodnik from the other side of town who's been stringing a girl along, while all the time he has a girl at home. This time, Tom Petty's been on the receiving end: "Strange voice on the telephone/Telling me I'd better leave you 'lone/Why don't somebody say what's going on/Uh-oh I think I've been through this before/Looks like I'm the fool again/I don't like it." From a guy's point of view, though, this is about anger. When a woman sings about this, it's all about heartbreak and disappointment. Tom's voice is all broken and busted here - he's bitter, and his hoarse cry of "I don't like it" can only have come after some serious howling at the moon.
Let's not get into a debate here - this sort of thing cuts both ways, but Tom's in a real state here. His line "It's good to see you think so much of me" cuts very, very deep.
Once again, at the outset of his career, Tom and the Heartbreakers were such a stripped-down, spare sounding band, but the addition of a wash of strings in the background steers this song straight out onto the Ventura Highway, driving very very fast indeed despite the song's medium pace, as if the song has to run away from someone for their own sanity.

"Don't Touch Me There"

Whatever happened to the archetypal Phil Spector wall-of-sound? All those sweet-singing soul groups who bravely stood out in front of his rolling, all-devouring monolith of sound have gone, the producers who engineered the miracle aren't working any more, and so an entire genre of candyfloss drama has gone by the board. Happily, The Tubes remembered the sound, the operatic vastness of it. They took it out of mothballs, opened up their high school yearbooks and created this duet, a satirical masterpiece: "Ooh baby, you give me the chills/Whisper low in my ear/Let me know how it feels/Just to know you are near." This is all about heavy breathing, hands shaking, foreheads popping with sweat, until.... until..."The smell of burning leather/As we hold each other tight/Our rivets rub together/Flashing sparks into the night/At this moment of surrender, darling/If you really care/Don't touch me there." This is so perfect, the younger, nastier sibling to all those pure, virginal Ronettes songs: "I love your sweet, sweet lips/I love your salty taste/I love your fingertips/But when I reach for your waist/Oh no....."

"Sorry Mr Harris"

Tom Robinson must have been a particularly difficult guy to have a quiet drink with in the 70s. He'd have arrived at the pub wearing a long coat, collar up, a hat pulled way down over his face. He'd have wanted to sit way at the back of the pub, next to the jukebox, back to the wall, and he'd have jumped every time the door slammed. Maybe that's what being an agit-prop singer did to you. In any case, after the youthful anarchy of his first album, the second one was a dark, paranoid affair, no more so than here. He sings in character, as a friendly policeman in charge of interrogations, so that's got to be unique for a start. His jolly, Oxford-educated sounding officer clearly has a distaste for the work: "I'm sorry if the soldiers had to hurt you Mr Harris/You haven't really left them any choice/This must be quite a trial, not having eaten for a while/I wonder what's the matter with your voice." But as time goes by, the persuasion gets ratcheted up: "That fellow Charlie Jones you were detained with Mr Harris/I'm afraid we found him hanging in his cell/So we've asked your little brother to assist with our enquiries/I hope he won't be difficult as well." Beyond the lyric, there was never a huge amount to recommend Tom's work, but he did have the great luck to have a terrific guitarist - Danny Kustow - who really did know how to tear it up. It's a nostalgic pleasure to come back to this once in a while, to remember the whole era and wonder how the guys at Guantanamo Bay are doing.

"Jerusalem"

This is quite possibly the most pompous, ridiculous, over-the-top piece of self-indulgence it's been my pleasure to listen to. Start with a band that was the ultimate in overblown pomp-rock - Emerson, Lake and Palmer - and then fill their heads with ideas of being proper "artistes" with Things To Say. Give them every noise-making implement known to man and lock them in a studio, and boy, do they deliver. Trying to do justice to one of the most famous hymns ever written, the music is completely massive, suitably martial; the band throws everything at you, all manner of twiddly bits, fills and runs. It's as if they're competing with a particularly impressive church organ and they know they're losing. And, in a strange sort of way, it actually works. What doesn't sadly, is Greg Lake's voice. While he sounds great on tracks like "Karn Evil No 9", on this he's just not up to the bombastic, full-on production and his voice just gets lost.
Having said all that, I have a huge soft spot for ELP, and I can't help but like this. One of those moments in music where the band fell just a smidgen short of the job.

"Dream Police"

Cheap Trick may not have invented "power pop" but by God they define it. There's such a fine line between power pop and proper rock that you blink and you've gone from Cheap Trick to Boston. Cheap Trick's art was to know how to ride that line. Sure, they played rock too, but they knew how to keep it under control. And you just couldn't take seriously someone who played a six-neck guitar. Rick Nielson couldn't write a duff song if he tried (but don't test me on that), he just ladles on the gorgeous hooks, aching harmonies, steamhammer beats and rabble-rousing choruses and cooks up fantastic tunes. "Dream Police" was probably their last truly great album, jam-packed with hummable songs, arena-sized singalongs that you could play just about anywhere.

"I Try"

How good is Macy Gray's voice on this? It's a husky, breathy, rough-edged smoker's voice that slowly wraps you up and refuses to let go. A proper 60s soul diva voice with just the merest hint of anger behind it. "I Try" is a proper torch song, all desperation and need, vulnerability and surrender: "I may appear to be free/But I’m just a prisoner of your love/And I may seem all right and smile when you leave/But my smiles are just a front/Just a front, hey/I play it off, but I’m dreaming of you/And I’ll try to keep my cool, but I’m feenin."

"Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't Have)?"

There's no messing around here. From the moment the song just materialises at full speed until the final note, this is a jittery, straight-ahead, clattering pop-punk classic. in fact, you'd be hard-pressed to call it a punk record at all: the pop sensibilities are too good, the harmonies (harmonies? on a punk song?) are terrific and the lyric is just perfect: "You spurn my natural emotions/You make me feel like dirt/And that hurts/And if I cause a commotion/I run the risk of losing you/And that's worse." And ever since this song, the boys-needs-girl thing has been a rich vein for writers to tap. Pete Shelley's voice is completely non-punk. It isn't a pop voice at all, in fact, but the beauty of punk was that you didn't have to have any kind of voice to sing. It's a vulnerable, whiny, needy kind of voice which means it fits the song like a glove. Two minutes and forty-three seconds of bliss.

"You've Got My Number"

Just to let the world know that The Undertones didn't just write one perfect three-minute rock song; they went and did it again, just to prove "Teenage Kicks" was no fluke. This is sharper and more polished, but there's no mistaking the same inspiration. Fantastic drumming, a great chorus and an inspired ending.

"Rock and Roll Music"

There are probably about twenty songs that just about every band in the world started out with in their repertoire. You know the sort of thing: three chords, easy choruses and a heavy beat. This is probably one of those twenty, but when a really great band get their teeth into it, like the Manic Street Preachers, the song just takes flight and becomes something bigger, better. The Manics' version has just about the greatest guitar sound I've heard - a great, big, fat chewy wall of sound - and fantastic vocals, the sort you get when the singer doesn't care that he's shredding his vocal chords - think John Lennon in "Helter Skelter". Throw in some proper biff-bang-pow drums and two perfect rock 'n roll screams and you have a perfect package. This is for raising your heartrate, feeling the rush run up and down your spine and throwing yourself around a padded room.

"Who Are You"

After blogging The Clash yesterday, I happened to listen to The Who and realised that here, possibly, were the roots of punk. Four guys with serious attitude -- and The Who were about nothing if not attitude in their youth -- and a catalogue of dizzyingly varied songs. Listen to "Pictures of Lily", "I'm a Boy", "My Generation" and you get a complete picture of angst-ridden teenage confusion and alienation. To see them in their time would have been as electrifying as to have been at the 100 Club to see the Sex Pistols in 1976.
Skip forward twenty years and The Who have gone from sulky teenagers to grumpy old men, a whole lot wiser but still angry, still brash. This track proves it. There's an menace to Pete Townshend's guitar, as there always has been, and Roger Daltrey summons up a hard-edged roar that hasn't been heard since he was stuttering on "My Generation". And the lyric... maybe the preoccupations have changed with time, but the alienation, the rage is still there: "I stretched back and I hiccupped/And looked back on my busy day/Eleven hours in the Tin Pan/God, there's got to be another way/I spit out like a sewer hole/Yet still recieve your kiss/How can I measure up to anyone now/After such a love as this?" This is snarling, spitting, swearing, proper vitriol, which just goes to show that we don't always grow old - we just pick our fights better.

"I Love L.A."

Only Randy Newman could write a song called "I Love L.A." and turn it into a stinging rebuke on yuppies and the whole Californian 80s age-of-excess thing: "Hate New York City/It's cold and it's damp/And all the people dress like monkeys/Let's leave Chicago to the eskimos/That town's a little bit too rugged for you and me." Instead, he prefers to drive the Pearl Highway, soak up the hedonism and revel in the mindlessness of cheap thrills and perfection. But then, there's a sting in the tale: "Look at that mountain/Look at those trees/Look at that bum over there, man he's down on his knees/Look at these women, ain't nothing like them nowhere" as if to say "Sorry, no time to stop and think about important things, I have a lifestyle to complete." Just wonderful.

"Police On My Back"

Ask anyone who was around in the late 1970s who was the most influential punk band and eight times out of ten they'll say The Clash were. While it may have been the Sex Pistols who crashed through the door and did the donkey work of raising expectations and outraging the bourgeoisie, it was The Clash that documented the fizzing, heady, anything-is-possible firework mood. Unlike the Pistols, who lived the punk ethos every waking hour of their life, The Clash watched all, saw all, took themselves off to the studio and created the soundtrack: all of the anger, frustration, paranoia and outrage that punk threw up is there in every Clash song. This comes from their fourth album "Sandinista!", a sprawling record that heads off in all directions. "Police" was originally a reggae tune written by Eddy Grant, but The Clash do something extraordinary to it by yanking out any trace of reggae and crash-landing a squad of guitars on top instead. The main guitar figure is the siren, the drumming is the footsteps running, it's tight, sharp and encapsulates the whole period perfectly. The Clash were sharp operators, having experienced and understood the power of reggae in the cities, but this goes beyond simple appropriation - they pick the original apart like an old car and rebuild it as a hot rod.

"The Rain Song"

After the party's over, after the tumult and the excitement has ended, we all need time to sit back, take stock, remember and reflect. This is Led Zep's morning-after song, their moment of calm amid the storm that was the velvet-clad fist of their "Houses of the Holy" album. Of course, it's not a totally laid-back song, it swells and grows, ebbs and flows, borne on waves of strings, a lovely melody and the eternally amazing musicianship. Even on a song as pensive as this, John Bonham's drums still sound like tree trunks being laid against brick walls, and Jimmy Page's guitar grows from the gentlest strumming to properly electric howls. While yet again, Robert Plant reaches into his grab-bag of mysticism and comes out with something that makes more than a little sense: "These are the seasons of emotion and like the winds they rise and fall/This is the wonder of devotion - I see the torch we all must hold/This is the mystery of the quotient - Upon us all a little rain must fall."

"This Is the Sea"

This song has "rites of passage" written all over it. I'm still trying to work out just how many different ways you could apply this song to life in general: coming of age, leaving home, getting married, getting divorced, giving it all up and running away to Thailand, having children, retirement, getting out of jail... the list goes on. The Waterboys were very, very good at this kind of sense of yearning and ambition. Every song I hear seems to be packed full of cheap 'n easy metaphors for both students and lateral-thinking middle-aged ponderers. Yet for all that, this is a song of empathy, a song of understanding. It rattles along at a stately pace, driven by what seems like an orchestra of acoustic guitars, woodwinds and Mike Scott's folk-gypsy voice cruises through the middle of it all, burning with conviction and the urgent need to persuade us all that everything's all right: "Now if you’re feelin’ weary/If you’ve been alone too long/Maybe you’ve been suffering from/A few too many/Plans that have gone wrong/And you’re trying to remember/How fine your life used to be/Running around banging your drum/Like it’s 1973/Well that was the river/This is the sea!"

"It's About Time"

I love this. It's quirky, charming, interesting and off-the-wall enough to make me stop and listen to it every time I hear it. The Lemonheads didn't cross my radar an awful lot, apart from their excellent cover of "Mrs Robinson", but when I heard the off-beat lyric, the 60s vaguely Beach Boys influence, I was hooked. I would almost call this the California version of Britpop, a gentle, late afternoon kind of song with something not quite normal going on way down underneath.

"Funny How"

I just googled the chorus for this song. Judging by the number of times it's been written about, there's something universally appealing about a song that lays out the basic rules for going about finding yourself a girlfriend: "It's funny how the girls you fall in love with never fancy you/Funny how the ones you don't, do/It's a pity how pretty girls don't take the time to talk to me/Just walk away whatever I do." Now that I think about it, I can't remember hearing a song that dealt with the disappointment, the insecurity, the crushing humiliation of it all quite as well as this. Most songs in this genre tend to focus on a single rejection, a particular person, rather than a syndrome that seems to accompany us boys in our breathless, anxiety-riddled teenage years.
I never did hear another song by Airhead, but looking at Google, I'd say their immortality was assured in a hundred million teenage bedrooms.

"Parklife"

The explosion that was Britpop was one of the most enjoyable phenomena since the boil-lancing that was punk. All of a sudden the air was full of canny, sharp, intelligent music, drawing heavily on the late 60s influences of bands like the Kinks, the Small Faces, new wave groups like the Jam and giving the occasional nod to the Beatles as well. It was such a pleasure to hear guitars again in all their glory, harmony choruses, from the light-as-air "There She Goes" to the wall of rumble that was anything by Oasis. And in between, with a cheery wink, throwing shapes like a ducking-and-diving wide boy, were Blur. Perhaps "Parklife" is a bit of a cartoon, but it's a perfect picture, drawn in wonderful shades of attitude and thumping East-End charm, a little like a Chas & Dave singalong down the pub. I like that they brought in Phil Daniels to do the vocal, slightly weary yet optimistic, cynical yet fresh-faced. You can see a hundred faces in his voice as he brings the song to life: "I get up when I want/Except on Wednesdays when I get rudely awakened by the dustmen/I put my trousers on/Have a cup of tea/And I think about leaving the house/I feed the pigeons/I sometimes feed the sparrows too/It gives me a sense of enormous well-being/And then I'm happy for the rest of the day/Safe in the knowledge/There will always be/A bit of my heart devoted to it."

"Synchronicity II"

This is a bit spooky. Towards the end of their active career, the Police were getting into some pretty off-the-wall stuff. Think of Stewart Copeland's "Miss Gradenko" or Andy Summers' "Mother", but for some reason Sting's oddness never made itself felt in the music. The words were pretty thought-provoking, though: "Another working day has ended/Only the rush hour hell to face/Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes/Contestants in a suicidal race/Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance/He knows that something somewhere has to break/He sees the family home now looming in the headlights/The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache." How dysfunctional do you want life to be? The gimmick here is the split-screen vision of the gradual descent into chaos and madness of the average family, while far away a primordial monster is coming alive and getting set to wreak havoc. Clever writing, a properly chilling image...

"No Sell Out"

This is a little like "found art" - someone's trawled through the archives for recordings of Malcolm X's speeches and chopped and edited excerpts over a fairly lean dance track. Think of Paul Hardcastle's "19" or Les Patriotes' "C'est La Vie Charlie" - great fun to dance to and with crunchy, nourishing content too! Malcolm X, for you young 'uns out there, wasn't the star of a film by Spike Lee, but rather a passionate equal rights activist in the US who broke from Martin Luther King and took the principle of resistance to extremes and paid the price for it. As he says "I was in a house last night that was bombed - my own. It isn't something that made me lose confidence in what I'm doing." Belief in a cause like that deserves to be celebrated, even though we sometimes might wince at the methods that are used.

"Heart As Big as Liverpool"

There must be thousands of songs written to celebrate a hometown: think of "New York State of Mind" or "Welcome to the Jungle", "Sweet Home Chicago", "Dirty Water"... thousands of them. These are not quite love songs, because they're not writing just from the heart, but from the gut and the head as well. You can lose a girlfriend but you can't lose your hometown.
There are so many other things wrapped up in this song as well. Pete Wylie is one of rock's harder-luck stories: shedloads of talent but awful, awful luck. But he's bounced back every time, fresh, optimistic and refusing to be cowed by the slings and arrows. That refusal to lay down shines through brightly here, in the great surging chorus that proclaims his allegiance, his pride in himself as well as in his town: "When all the lights go out forever/Somewhere near the end of time/The noise will pass and the dust will settle/And you'll be on my mind."
Pete's always known how to build a song that will stand the test of time, and this is no different. "Heart" clocks in at a good eight minutes, building and swelling like an opera, bathed in sympathetic strings, absolutely chock-full of hooks and fist-raising, arm-pumping moments: it's no surprise that this song gets a lot of airtime at Anfield whenever Liverpool are playing at home. After some of his kitchen-sink overkill productions like "Come Back", "Heart" is mellower, older and wiser but no less passionate, and it's all the better for it. There are songs made to be remembered, and this will probably be one of them.

"Here Comes the Flood"

Peter Gabriel seems to get a mixed press. To half of us he's an eccentric, mumbling mad-professor type with a penchant for world music and we vaguely remember he had a couple of off-beat hits and did a wicked video. To others, though, he's a miraculous songwriter on his day. A lot of other folks will remember him for "In Your Eyes" with its soaring, epic guest vocal from Youssou N'Dour, or his gentle, dramatic duet with Kate Bush, "Don't Give Up". But this song, this song, comes from somewhere only he's been to. There are two particular versions that I enjoy; the first, from his first solo album gets the full, intense epic treatment, with a chorus that reaches up to his personal muse and tries desperately hard to leave this world. The second, a blindingly personal, vulnerable rendition with just his voice and a piano at the forefront: a stately, low-key but painfully powerful version that completely eclipses the original in many ways: "When the flood calls, you have no home, you have no walls/In the thunder crash, you're a thousand minds, within a flash/Don't be afraid to cry at what you see/The actors gone, there's only you and me/And if we break before the dawn/They'll use up what we used to be."

"Hello It's Me"

The first song I blogged here was Todd Rundgren's "I Saw the Light", and this is probably the right moment to write about his other sure-fire, slam-dunk contender for the Ultimate Three-Minute Pop Song. This is Carole King, Neil Sedaka, The La's, the Beatles, Stevie Wonder and Lord knows who else, wrapped up into one shining lump of perfection. The best songs are the simplest, and they don't get much simpler than this, you'd think. But if you listen a few times, there is so damn much going on in here... the melody is straight out of the Brill Building circa 1965, the harmonies are so good it hurts - listen to the voices singing "Think of me" at the start of the third verse, and I swear you'll not find a better harmony moment. This is a fallen-out-of-love-song, but one that can't quite let go: "Think of me/You know that I'd be with you if I could/I'll come around to see you once in a while/Or if I ever need a reason to smile/And spend the night if you think I should." And, being the anorak I am, I enjoy the fact that this song was recorded live and both before and after the song, you can hear the musicians laughing, joking, fluffing the beginning. One of the backing singers confesses at the end: "I think I'm falling in love with the singer." What better song to fall back into love to?

"Kamikaze"

Now here's a topic which can't have been used all that often for a song. Somewhere I still have the old Thompson Twins album "Quick Step and Side Kick", which is one of those fifty-fifty albums where you quite like the memories attached to the songs, even one or two of the songs themselves, but it's not something that's going to be right up there at the top of your Desert Island list. But this track just seems to slide sideways out of the discard pile and into the "pretty damn good" box. It's totally out of character, in the same way that "Being Boiled" wasn't representative of the Human League's later output. A dark, almost brooding lament, played at a stately, funereal pace. Oh it's pop all right, plenty of stacked chorus and fab production, but it is still.....dark. At one or two points there's a deep, throbbing synth bass line that almost sounds like an old piston-engine, carrying someone off to their rendezvous with Valhalla. Sadly, the lyric is almost, almost spoiled by the last line: "Feeling alone/Flying above you/I'm not coming home/Now I know, now I know that I love you." But you can't have it all.

"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"

It's quite possible there has never been a love song quite this perfect. Proper, pure, almost metaphysical in its plainly-expressed, heartrendingly-sung beauty. There's not a single thing out of place here. Led by a wispy bass, with reflective taps on a hi-hat to punctuate the solemn, early-hours-of-the-morning feel, and then Roberta Flack's voice that grows from a gentle murmur to a soaring call, and then drops back to a gentle valediction. You could listen to this anywhere: on a beach at sunrise, in your bed at three in the morning while your love sighs in their sleep next to you, in a roadside cafe in the middle of nowhere or in the depths of despair. It works every time.

"Das Boot"

Here's a change: a film theme. You know how film soundtracks tend to be completely nonsensical when they're taken out of context? While the track may have sounded sensational while the film was going on, you try to listen to it at home and it's utterly pointless. There are some exceptions, mostly by Ry Cooder I find, but this is terrific. "Das Boot" is probably one of the finest war films ever made, a claustrophobic epic set on a German submarine, a warts-and-all, honest-to-goodness account of what it was like 600 feet down. A good movie theme will take you right into the story, deposit you among the characters and leave you feeling as if you have been part of the story. This track works in spades; you hear the thrashing of propellers, the ping of the ASDIC, the dense of depth and closeness and the slow, deathly inevitability of everything that happens. And when the track winds up to its conclusion, you feel the relief of breaching the surface, of having cheated the deep once more. Atmosphere (or lack of it), tension, fear, frailty and death, all wrapped up in one brief piece of instrumental music.

"Calypso"

One of the frustrating things about being a devotee of Jean-Michel Jarre is coming up against a generic prejudice against instrumental or electronic music. Too much of it sounds like widdly, droning techno-boffin crap, you might say, and hell, there's enough out there to suggest you are probably right some of the time. But this kind of stuff has been going on since the 60s, even with bands like the Beatles and Pink Floyd, who started playing around with primitive synthesizers and sequencers and tape loops well before the advent of transistors and computers. So it's not exactly new, even if "new age" is what people often call this music. Jarre at least has the merit of having a classical musical background, and so more often than not he's composed something that has structure and texture. Anyway, to "Calypso": this is a steel band wig-out. Steel bands might not be to your taste, but Jarre's upped the ante here and got them to play at 100 mph. The band swaps the lead back and forth with the synthesizers until before you know it, you're dancing. This is holiday music, pure and simple, it's like letting a Caribbean carnival into your sitting room for nine minutes.

"Sit Down"

I've waited long enough to get to this one. "Sit Down" was a baggy anthem when it first came out, in the same welter of guitar-based dance music that brought us the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses, but for some reason, James always seemed to stand slightly apart. Maybe because they were more literate, less party-oriented animals, maybe because they seemed to hook into a pop tradition more easily. This has possibly one of the greatest lines written: "Now I've swung back down again/It's worse than it was before/If I hadn't seen such riches/I could live with being poor". This is a solidarity song, one that tells us it's alright to be human, to be weak, because we're in the majority: "Those who feel the breath of sadness/Sit down next to me/Those who find they're touched by madness/Sit down next to me/Those who find themselves ridiculous/Sit down next to me". It's one of those quiet classic songs that will stick around for a long time: a simple message, a seductive melody.

"Snake Oil"

Thinking about Dr Feelgood down there took me on to Steve Earle, who's probably the country version of their straight-ahead blues. "Snake Oil" is just about as good a song as he's ever done: yup, it's political, because Steve is a political animal, but damn, he rocks! This song starts off quietly, just a honky-tonk piano and Steve rambling over the top about nothing in particular. Then, in comes the muted guitar and the first verse and the country influence is already clear. But there's a little something more solid, more rock creeping in as well. By the time he launches into the song proper, all hell breaks loose and things get particularly funky. Fantastic guitar that wouldn't be out of place on an early Elvis track, piano being battered into submission, slide guitars filling in the spaces, this is literally exhausting to listen to. You just *know* they were having an absolute ball making this. And at the end, as the dust settles, Steve calls out: "I knew there was a first-taker on this album somewhere!" Just as well: I don't think they could have done this twice.

"Go Your Own Way"

Some songs get taken completely out of context and find themselves appropriated for totally inappropriate reasons. Think back to Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA" being used by Ronald Reagan for his re-election campaign in 1984: the collective glossing over of the song's subject matter is one of the great examples of society turning a blind eye to something so painfully obvious. Anyway, I digress. But "Go Your Own Way" must be right up there in the same list. It's a painful, bitter song about the break-up of a relationship: "Loving you/Isn’t the right thing to do/How can I ever change things/That I feel/If I could/Maybe I’d give you my world/How can I when you won't take it from me?" Heck, the whole of the "Rumours" album is about four musicians in relationships falling apart. It's a rare experiment in reality, if you like. Everyone wrote songs about each other, except Mick Fleetwood, who sat at the back behind the drums and kept the whole thing going. Even his drumming on this track is fantastic, solid without being flashy. What constantly amazes me is how so few people tend to listen to this song, this album, and not recognise or at least acknowledge what an immensely painful experience it must have been, and what an incredible achievement it was to even put a record out. Even the optimistic song(s) on the album is/are infused with the same bleakness. And remember Bill Clinton standing up in Little Rock in 1992 while they played "Don't Stop"? Full circle. I thank you.

"Down at the Doctor"

Once in a while it's good to stand up at the cliff's edge and feel the elements in your face, to open yourself to the wind, the bleaching sun and let nature's simple but immense force wash over you. Similarly, after years of over-produced, tweaked, EQ'd and glossed music, one in a while it's good to get back to basics: rock and roll, played loudly without a hint of irony or pretence. Which is where Dr Feelgood come in. Nothing sophisticated here, just good old fashioned straight-ahead blues, sung in a sandpaper voice that's harder than brickwork, guitars that slash like an alleyway switchblade and a thudding, solid rhythm section that isn't going anywhere but straight ahead. This is all about sweaty clubs way after closing time, smoke hanging in the air, wet floors, a crowded stage and blues bouncing off the walls in all directions. You'd be a hard person not to get caught up in the moment here; this is loud, brash, fun music with a rhythm that starts in your guts and spreads through you until your ears hum and you can feel the bass at the bridge of your nose. If you thought the "Blues Brothers" was about the blues, then you need to hear this.

"Love Me Two Times"

This is, by the Doors' standards, a really taut song. I can't help but compare anything the Doors performed with some of their more rambling, unfocused epics like "The End", which is just about as self-indulgent as any band could ever get and never fulfils the aching promise of the opening minute. This however is just fantastic, a dark, brooding blues - could a song about sex ever be as dark as this? Drummer John Densmore does some of his best work here, driving the song with tight little rolls and some excellent fills, and Ray Manzarek's keyboards are honky-tonk in just the right way. But of course it's Morrison we all focus on. His raw, hoarse voice is losing its power and this gives the song just a hint of despair (as perhaps the Lizard King was losing his mojo in real life?), and you can sense what a struggle it was for him to reach the final codas. There's a lack of confidence in that voice, a lack of the strutting, preening peacock who set the tone for the late 1960s. He's human now, and it scares him. There's a real irony for you: as Morrison starts to come apart at the seams, the rest of the band comes together to pick up the slack and carry him just a little further.

"The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys"

This is about as close to jazz as I am ever likely to get. Which probably qualifies me for at least a seat right by the band in hell, but hey, we don't make our own choices in these things. Traffic was Stevie Winwood's big sixties supergroup thing, the grown-up, experimental band he had after the Spencer Davis Group and well before his 90s resurrection with "Higher Love", "Valerie" etc. Incidentally, that Eric Prydz song that's been annoying the top of the charts of late is nothing more than the "Valerie" chorus beefed up, isn't it? Long live creativity.
Back to Traffic. This is epic stuff. No, "epic" here doesn't mean loud, passionate, bombastic or even huge. It's a low-key, winding, twisting, beautifully-performed track, with one of the best choruses I have ever heard, and some seriously sixties lyrics: "The percentage you're paying is too high a price/When you're living beyond all your means/And the man in the suit has just bought a new car/From the profit he's made from your dreams/But today we just read that the man was shot dead/By a gun that didn't make any noise/But it wasn't the bullet that laid him to rest, it was/The low spark of high-heeled boys." The song is long enough for plenty of solos, for recapitulation, for all the stuff that music and composition teachers teach us is important. It's something to play when you have time and space to really live "in" the song, to try to delve into it, understand it.

"Casey Jones"

I'm not a Deadhead, never have been, but for many years I lived among folks that were pretty obsessive about the Grateful Dead and got to see something of the subculture that surrounded the band. I guess you could say they were precursors of the "slacker" generation, just living till the next time the band rolled through town (and you could be sure they would) or packing up and driving however many hundred miles to see a show. There used to be a pizza restaurant in my hometown that had literally thousands of bootlegs of Dead shows in cabinets behind the counter; you could walk in, name a gig you'd been to seven years earlier, and they'd have that show on tape. We're talking SERIOUS obsession.
But when you listen to the studio albums, the one thing that strikes you is how laid-back they all were. The songs meander, they tend to shift in and out of focus (probably not surprising given the heroic drug intake). But they're great songs! Which is why I've tended to go for cover versions rather than the original. One of the best to my mind is this Warren Zevon/David Lindley version of one of their most famous songs. It's got a proper driving rhythm, it's focused, the musicianship is sharp and clear. "Trouble with you is the trouble with me/Got two good eyes but we still don't see/Come round the bend, you know it's the end/The fireman screams and the engine just gleams." A good song for driving.

"Follow You Follow Me"

I get confused by Genesis. On the one hand, there was this large, unwieldy eighteen-wheeler of a band that created songs that started off when you were leaving for work in the morning and were just about winding up when you got home from the pub at around midnight: songs like "Supper's Ready" with a cast of thousands, usually all played by Peter Gabriel. Though he might well have left the band by then. See? You needed one of Pete Frame's Rock Family trees to keep up with the personnel. Then there was the second Genesis, the spare, stripped down commercial outfit that was basically Phil Collins and two anonymous bandmates that produced "Abacab", "I Can't Dance" and other chart hits. Between these two versions of the band, there was a bright, brief moment when they managed to combine the eccentricity of the former with the commercial nous of the latter: the "And Then There Were Three" album, from which this song comes. Now, everyone has probably heard this, and more than a few have failed to connect it to Genesis, I'll bet. This is just great: the intro is probably one of the most recognisable moments in rock, the synth washes over the chorus like a cleansing shower, and the whole song is so underwritten that it passes beneath your radar until you're caught up in the emotion and you realise it's probably Genesis' first proper love song: "Stay with me/My love I hope you’ll always be/Right here by my side if ever I need you/Oh my love." And the chorus, which is one of the best written for a long time: "I will follow you will you follow me/All the days and nights that we know will be/I will stay with you will you stay with me/Just one single tear in each passing year."

"Easy On My Soul"

It's a Sunday morning, the excesses of the previous night are still echoing a little in your ears, so while you're waiting for the water to boil you need a little something to calm the stomach, soothe the spirit and slowly open your senses. Something that just sits in the air, wafts a gentle breeze over your heart and starts your day slowly. So I'm recommending a song by Free, best known for "All Right Now" and other 70s rock standards. You don't understand? Listen to this! Paul Rodgers' voice is reined in to a gorgeous blues whisper, almost, the song is driven by a repeated piano arpeggio that lifts, lifts your heart, the guitars are muted -- we're thinking of your hangover, you see -- and if you close your eyes, you're seeing a vast beach at low tide, a sunrise, smooth white sand and seagulls wheeling at the water's edge. This is a song for contemplation, for a quite moment on the sofa, perhaps with your love at your side, for saying nothing. "Some say love is/Some say what is love/Some say in love is love/When you're around me/I really want to know." It's not a song to make you think, but a song to make you feel, a song to make you stretch out and revel in your freedom for just a few moments.

"Hole-Hearted"

Time for an intelligent love song. You know, one that eschews the "oh baby, I love you *that* much, now let's get intimate" and goes for something a little more robust. Extreme seem to flip between two pretty different noods; on the one hand they can be as funky and rock as you like (viz. "Get the Funk Out"), but then they can create a mood of utter tranquility that draws you in and sets your soul at rest (viz. "More Than Words"). But this one for some reason straddles the two poles. The beat reminds me a little of the Proclaimers, a steady marching that won't take no for an answer, acoustic guitars duel on top and then the lyric comes in to set you to thinking: "Life's ambition occupies my time/Priorities confuse the mind/Happiness one step behind/This inner peace I've yet to find/Rivers flow into the sea/Yet even the sea is not so full of me/If I'm not blind why can't I see/That a circle can't fit/Where a square should be." This isn't a love song, per se, but rather a song that's about waking up and realising how life can be that much better when you can express everything that's in your heart and mind: "There's a hole in my heart/That can only be filled by you/And this hole in my heart/Can't be filled with the things I do."

"Fire"

Relationship advisors talk about "chemistry" without really offering much of a definition: is it sexual chemistry, the kind that reduces the two of you to drooling, humping canines for twelve hours of each Saturday and most weeknights as well? Or is there something more mental, emotional at work? Nobody seems to know, particularly the Pointer Sisters on this version of Bruce Springsteen's original. It's all sidelong glances, half-moves towards each other, playing coy and reserved, "but when we kiss......fire." Maybe the chemistry here is of two fairly inexperienced lovers, who still play the games of youth. "Late at night you're taking me home/You say you want to stay/I say I want to be alone/I say I don't love you/But I can't hide my desire/Cos when we kiss/Fire." Delicious, pent-up, and such great voices to drive it all home.

"Nick of Time"

Rock and roll has always been a young person's thing. Popular music is designed to go against the grain of the older generation, to cause outrage and huffing and puffing from the Establishment. But somehow, things have begun to stick in recent years. Perhaps it's the influence of the media, making megastars of people who haven't had a hit record in years, and keeping them in the public eye. Or is there another reason the Rolling Stones keep touring? Nostalgia has become big business, when twenty years ago you'd hardly remember the names of the stars of your youth. What is this about? Perhaps it's the generation of the 60s and 70s, who are probably thinking "when I was a kid, songs had proper tunes and all", voting with their feet and wallets. In any case, the theme of time passing is one that's taking a front seat in the minds of a lot of Baby Boomers these days.
Which brings me to this song by Bonnie Raitt: "I see my folks, they’re getting old, I watch their bodies change/I know they see the same in me, and it makes us both feel strange/No matter how you tell yourself, it’s what we all go through/Those eyes are pretty hard to take when they’re staring back at you." There are all kinds of ways to measure the passing of the years, but this is perhaps the most personal, the most visceral sign of age. It's a soft, gentle, reflective song that touches on those sensitive spots, backs away, and leaves you warm and somehow reassured.

Intermission

Seeing as how I've reached 200 songs on this blog, I thought it might be time to provoke controversy and outrage by suggesting some favourites in various categories. Not that I believe in these lists or anything, but just in case anyone's being anorak-ish about it..... Now, the categories are hotlinks to the actual entry, so try and guess in advance what it's going to be. Amuse your neighbours! Horrify your kids!

Best Torch Song.
The Best Song to Play When You're Bouncing off Walls.
The Best Guitar Intro, Ever.
Best Lullaby for Grown-Ups.
Best Pop Song, Ever.
Greatest Weepie.
The Best Closing-Time Mumbled Anthem.
Greatest Kitchen-Sink Opera.
The So Damn Infectious You'll Need a Hip-Replacement Special.
The Greatest Song Never to Make it Absolutely Huge.
The Song That Taught Me To Love the Rave.
The Song That Proved Punk's Not Dead.
The Best Prelude to Sex.
The Greatest Moment of Self-Indulgence Ever Written.
The Song that Proves The Future's Not as Bleak as We Oldies Think.
The Song That Proves R&B's Gone Terribly Wrong.
Possibly The Most Intelligent Songwriting of the Last 20 Years.
How To Be Unpleasant to an Ex.
And the Greatest Love Song

"Bela Lugosi's Dead"

You want mood? You want atmosphere? Right this way, sir and ma'am.... meet Pete Murphy and Bauhaus. If you ever wanted a song to perfectly convey a mood, a time, a place, even a person, this song does it all. Nine minutes plus of scraping, looping, chiming guitars, monotone vocals that rise to a howl, a gentle insistent beat; and a million and one images of shadows flitting across castle walls, candles flickering, everything those late-night Hammer Horror films strive to achieve....is perfected here. "White on white translucent black capes/Back on the rack/Bela Lugosi's dead/The bats have left the bell tower/The victims have been bled/Red velvet lines the black box/Bela Lugosi's dead/Undead undead undead." This is sensational. It always was, and always will be the ultimate Goth song.

"Stainsby Girls"

This is a love song to bygone youth, to the memory of things that were so vital, so all-encompassing and important at one time, but which have mellowed with time and bring a wry smile to the lips instead of a grimace of pain or balled fists of ecstasy. For forty-somethings who've taken a more relaxed attitude to life but who remember their fast-paced days, this is a gentle, bittersweet reminder. I love Chris Rea's laid-back, blues-inflected style, his hoarse, tired voice and squealing slide guitar - so rarely heard these days. This song starts so gently, so quietly, as if it were a gentle reflection that begins to solidify, to take shape in front of your eyes. The guitar kicks in, the drums shortly afterwards and before it, you're rocking along: "Now some had games that you had to play/Making rules along the way/Strange attractions newly found/Pride and passion kicked around/Some girls stole your heart/Like most girls do/But a Stainsby girl could break it in two." There's no shame here, no furtiveness, no embarassment at remembering. The time has come to grow up, this song is saying, and there's nothing wrong with that.

"Detox Mansion"

Once upon a time, rock stars were larger-than-life characters, living expensive yet grubby lives at 100 mph, partying all night, doing industrial quantities of drugs, drinking till their livers imploded and, for a few years at least, living to tell the tale. Sadly now, more and more of those titans from the edge are being gathered as their youth catches up with them. They're being replaced by clean, polished, PR'd, corporate kids, who are more concerned with the long-term yield on the investments they made off their first album, whose sound, image and look is carefully focus-grouped until it meets the very widest possible demographic. Compare and contrast Led Zeppelin defenestrating televisions from the Edgewater Inn in Seattle with Robbie Williams' tours being underwritten by corporate America. Hmmmm.
And when these new, young stars do go off the rails, as in the case of the Libertines' Pete Doherty for example, their descent into the time-honoured tradition of excess is documented in salivating detail by the media. I don't recall any headlines reading: "My Drug Hell, by Jimmy Page", for example. And when Doherty got packed off to the Priory, or whatever detox centre it was, we all travelled with him.
"Detox Mansion" is Warren Zevon making more or less the same journey as Pete Doherty, but a tad more anonymously: "Left my home in Music City/In the back of a limousine/Now I'm doin' my own laundry/And I'm gettin' those clothes clean/Growin' fond of Detox Mansion/And this quiet life I lead/But I'm just dying to tell my story/For all my friends to read." There's a howling sense of irony all through this song, an amused outsider's perspective, as if it were being told to a journalist: "Well, it's tough to be somebody/And it's hard not to fall apart/Up here on Rehab Mountain/We gotta learn these things by heart."

"The Distance from Her to There"

Can you sing country without being "country"?. I'm not sure Lambchop are really country, anyway. Their record company website describes them as "Nashville's most fucked-up country band". I have a hard time explaining why I love this song. Maybe it's the gentle, wafted intro, borne ashore on waves of a brushed drum, or it might be Kurt Wagner's warm, deep half-spoken lyric: "so shy tonight I'm told you were/I'm in the thick of it/I've been a dick with it you're just not used to it", before he breaks into a fragile falsetto chorus. It might be the various noises and whistles that murmur gently in the background, filling the spaces in what is a fairly laid-back, sparse tune. Or it may just be the attitude of the song, which is "I'm me and you're you, so maybe we will get it together or maybe we won't". Oh, and thanks CJ for reminding me about this!

"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!"