"Our House"

Don't think I've written about Madness before. If there ever was a musical Poet Laureate of Eastenders, then these guys would collectively have the job for life. I can't normally pick any single song of theirs that stands above the rest; each one is so perfectly-observed, with the joy coming from the detail and the emotion that shines out from both the lyric and the relentlessly optimistic, jaunty music. This particular song wins for me for just a couple of things: the harmony bursts of "aaah" that come right after the lines "Sister's sighing in her sleep" and "Sees them off with a small kiss", and the jerky, bass-led instrumental break half-way through, not to mention the sheer violence of the opening bass slap. And of course the subject matter is something that eases beneath our skin and brings the kind of warm nostalgia that is like a drug sometimes.
Madness were cheeky but cuddly; Squeeze were cheeky and knowing. Grannies could love Madness, but they'd always be made uncomfortable by the dark underbelly of Squeeze's stories, even though the musicianship was equally catchy in both bands. There's been a great tradition of taut, danceable music since the new wave spread across the land: the Blockheads, Pigbag, Squeeze, then Madness.

"Looking For the Next Best Thing"

Envy seems to rule our lives these days. We don't celebrate losers in our twenty-first century go-faster, 24-hour culture. Our admiration is reserved for the one that crosses the line first, that scores that number one hit, that marries the supermodel. Only in our more enlightened moments do we glance outside that narrow band to look for the ones who make do with their mortal best and who manage to derive fulfilment and happiness with less than the absolute maximum.
Think of someone famous, popular, rich, successful. We covet only the parts of his or her life that we can see, the surface flash, the red carpet, the limo, the fancy clothes. Do we envy the arguments with their partners, their insecurities, their high-rolling risks? Hell, no, but we conveniently forget all those.
I'm put in mind of this false idolatry because there's a song I listen to that makes me confused: "I worked hard, but not for the money/I did my best to please/I used to think it was funny/Till I realised it was all a tease." Which is fine in itself: a lack of ambition, a desire to do good by others or just a lack of direction? We all suffer this from time to time, or longer in some cases.
"Don Quixote had his windmills/Ponce de Leon took his cruise/It took Sinbad seven voyages/To see that it was all a ruse." Now we're getting more complicated - someone's gone through that whole adulation and gratification business (as a recipient or idolater, it doesn't matter which), only to come out the other end and see if as being hollow and cheap.
"That's why I'm looking for the next best thing/I appreciate the best but I'm settling for less." And here it all comes undone, to my mind. Why is accepting your human, limited best a defeat in some way? If we can come back from the jagged cliffs of envy and dissatisfaction, like some contestant on Pop Idol who realises, at long last, that they really cannot sing, then we can close that particular book and move on.
There's a tiredness about this song, a hoarse fatigue that speaks of long journeys taken in fruitless pursuit of false gods, and it's that timbre, that quiet acceptance that puts the hook in here. It's time to move on.

"Lose Yourself"

I don't buy rap. Not generally. I'm not comfortable with the casual misogyny, the glorification of violence and the apparent lack of connection to the inner self. Perhaps it's just rap-lite that I prefer; the more familiar, less dangerous world of Run-DMC or De La Soul for example.
But for one reason or another, I sat myself down and listened to this song, looked up the lyrics (because ironically, rap is chiefly about the lyric) and was properly stunned. I've never quite understood why so many people, musicians included, have expressed such respect for Eminem's work, but now I do.
What amazes me first and foremost is how complicated and yet how simple the rhythm of the words is. It slinks, weaves and pole-dances around the beat, sometimes falling half a beat behind, but gathering itself in time for the payoff.
What grabs me second is the sheer power of the vocabulary. Like a lot of middle-class white guys, I have looked down on rap in general as a genre that struggles to express itself. Perhaps it does....on my terms. But on its own terms, it says a shedload.
The lines come one after the other, falling over each other in their rush to get out. And if you try to understand the lyric through just reading it, you won't get it. You have to hear this, to wonder at the rhythm, the cadence, the sheer weight of the emotion, the way the words mould themselves to Eminem's accent and rhyme in a way you can't see on the page.
A revelation.

"Don't Let Us Get Sick"

Once in a while, while we're busy occupying ourselves with our own needs and concerns, eyes cast down, ears closed to the world around us, we'll be caught unawares by an event, by some news, by a word that gets through the filters and barbed-wire that we erect around ourselves.
Perhaps our rational, selfish self is irritated by this piece of news, because it proves to us that all is not always well, and tears down our desperate need to block out the unpleasant. Perhaps the news is so painful or sad that we can't face up to it or perhaps we simply cannot work out how to react.
Here's a simple prayer to help us all get through those moments. It's a frail, weak, faltering request from the bottom of the deep, dark well: "Don't let us get sick/Don't let us get old/Don't let us get stupid, all right?/Just make us be brave/And make us play nice/And let us be together tonight." It might be too late, or it might not; this song ain't saying. But it's offering us that chance, the cracking open of a door and the knife's-edge-narrow shaft of light which we can stand in if we choose: "The sky was on fire/When I walked to the mill/To take up the slack in the line/I thought of my friends/And the troubles they've had/To keep me from thinking of mine."

"Fergus Sings the Blues"

Sometimes music is all a song needs to be about. Sometimes you don't need any more reason to listen and live a song than its joy, its circling, swooping rhythm and its irresistible draw. This song does that for me. Deacon Blue celebrate the beauty, the power and the sheer life-force of soul music, the longing most of us have to open our mouths and make that beautiful noise: "Cause I look
in the mirror/And it throws back the question/And I whisper in words/That beg an answer/Tell me/Can this white man sing the blues?"
At one point, the backing singers swoop down behind Ricky Ross' voice, singing "Sweet soul music" with such purity, as if to underline, underscore and emphasise the beauty that voices alone can produce, just by doing it. The song longs, reaches out and tries to capture the excitement, the infectious attraction and all-embracing nature of a great, great moment.

"Ain't So Easy"

Relationship songs are never easy listening. They're usually written from the distant perspective of loss, abandonment, frustration or despair. You know the sort of thing: standing in the rain, howling at the moon or staring at the bottom of a glass of whisky. Think of Bridget Jones singing "All By Myself" in her bedroom after a bottle of wine and you get the general idea.
This is a far harder kind of song to listen to. This is trying to forestall that ending, to make things right just as they're going wrong. This is pleading, promising to get it right, acknowledging the errors: "I'll find a way to make amends/It's only that sometimes I've got to break before I bend." There's a tacit admission of past wrongs, a hint at darkness, but also a brief picture of the best possible future: "I'll kiss your face/Attend to your aches/I swear that I can make you happy/And you'll rub my back/Forget the past/And baby I know that that ain't so easy."
David & David only ever produced one album as far as I know - "Welcome to the Boomtown" - but it's a dark masterpiece of observation and human vulnerability. Not your everyday listening, granted, but for those moments when you're re-evaluating, starting over, brimming with good intentions, it's a handy reminder of where you're coming from and where you're trying to go.

"Try a Little Tenderness"

Let's celebrate! Let's testify! Hold your lighters in the air, sway to the quiet, contemplative intro. Hear the beat gently walk round the corner and watch it come up to stand in front of you, hips twitching, a knowing smile on its face as it watches you slowly, inevitably, become helplessly hooked by this supreme moment of soul.
This is one of those songs that are utterly impossible to ignore, to skate over. It demands your attention, it co-opts your heart and drafts your hips until you're singing along at maximum volume, waving, not drowning. As with so many other great soul songs it's about redemption, affirmation, acknowledgement of a higher power. It's a moment for diving head-first into the mystery of love and maybe, just maybe if you're lucky, understanding a few things. It says "yes, men and women are different but really, we're the same." It's one of those impossible conundrums, like, how did Otis Redding get the beat to be so insistent yet so modest? How did he know when to let that utter cacophony loose half-way through the song and push the whole thing to another plane? How did he know that the second half of the song could be one long chorus, repeated over and over but more powerfully each time? And that we'd love it?

"Fearless Boogie"

I'm not the world's greatest fan of country music. Which probably explains why this song hasn't actually got a lot to do with Nashville. But Hank Williams III is pure country royalty, so maybe this counts for something.
This is a rapid-fire blues/country workout, a steam train at full speed. The beat's underpinned by the wheels clacking on the lines and a drum that rolls and pumps like nothing else, blues harp assaulting your ears like a really bitter slice of lemon in your drink, and guitar adding some home-cooked grit. It's totally unstoppable, the band's as tight as you like, with a deft, daft lyric to match: "They call me a Pontiac/The red in my neck/They call me a Cadillac/They call me a wreck/Now Im not afraid/And I'm not scared/Now I ain't gonna lose it/No, I'm not afeared/To do the fearless boogie." Another kitchen-hour classic.

"Bohemian Like You"

For an old 70s relic like me to keep up with "the kids" these days is an increasingly forlorn task. One of the perks of growing up is that you're less worried about your peer group - you have your own row to hoe. Believe me, it's a perk. But once in a while, a song bubbles up from the increasingly foreign-sounding soup on the radio, captures the imagination and updates your cultural references. Like this one. It's a complete caricature of a subculture, a snapshot of a moment in time, perfect, crystal-clear and recognisable: "You got a great car/Yeah what's wrong with it today/I used to have one too/Maybe I'll come and have a look/I really love your hairdo yeah/I'm glad you like mine too/See where looking pretty cool/Will get ya."
Doesn't hurt that the song itself is terrific, too. Incredibly catchy, a chorus you can sink your teeth into and a rumble of guitars that, if you play this loud enough, will loosen your fillings.

"Ain't No Sunshine"

The emotion of missing someone covers such a lot of territory; from the simple, open, warm missing a good friend who's moved away; through the deep, abiding, unchanging loss of a favourite grandparent (or parent); to the dark, forbidding and vaguely obsessive missing a lost love. To say "I miss you" is such an open-ended statement, as we each carry a portfolio of loss as wide as the horizon through our lives.
I guess a lot of songs cover the last of those emotions: the loss of someone you love dearly, the emptiness of a place or a heart without them. But this song treats the loss in a gentle, contemplative way: "Ain't no sunshine when she's gone/It's not warm when she's away/Ain't no sunshine when she's gone/And she's always gone too long anytime/ She goes away." It acknowledges the basic truth and stands there, arms apart, accepting the weight of loss and promising to bear it: "Hey I'll leave the young thing alone/But ain't no sunshine when she's gone." How many of us would have the grace and the equanimity to do that?

"I Will Not Go Quietly"

I love this. This is a tall, tense, shuddering nightmare of a song, a wake-up-at-3 a.m.-with-the-cold-sweats song. It's defiance, vulnerability, determination and despair wrapped into a jarring, stop-start, wailing scream at the world. What was Don Henley thinking about when he wrote this? "Woke up with a heavy head/And I thought about leavin’ town/I could have died if I wanted to/Slipped over the edge and drowned/But, oh no baby, I won’t give up so easy/Too many tire tracks in the sands of time/Too many love affairs that stop on a dime/I think it’s time to make some changes round here." This is a song for those moments when you raise your fist at the world, at your own weakness and faults, at the injustices committed and opportunities missed.
What pushes this song over the edge for me is Axl Rose's wailing screech in the chorus, a mad-eyed, thousand-yard stare of a vocal, floating just beyond the boundaries of sanity: "I will not go quietly/I will not lie down." In fact, if you go away and read Dylan Thomas' immortal poem: "Do not go gentle into that good night.../Rage, rage against the dying of the light", you'll see exactly where this song comes from.

"Going Down to Liverpool"

I've always had a sweet tooth. It comes and goes, this craving for confection. I'll be trundling along doing whatever occupies my time and I'll pull myself up short, thinking "I could really use some sugar around now." And I'm off to the candy store. A quick burst of chemical sunshine, a fizzing mix of natural and unnatural substances and my blood sugar is up, I'll look out at the world with a renewed smile. Hey presto.
This is the aural equivalent. Such a simple little tune, something the harmony groups of the 60s might have whistled up in during their mid-aftenoon snack. This smells of California, eucalyptus trees, a warm evening and a gentle breeze whispering through the garden.
What's a little disconcerting is how this is a song about having no hope, about being unemployed: "Hey now/Where you going with that load of nothing in your hand/I said, hey now/All through this green and pleasant land?" The contrast is complete, a harmless little bear-trap that grabs your ankle quite gently and suggests how easy it is to dress up the uncomfortable realities in a lattice-work of spun sugar, like cotton candy. After the sugar is gone, you're left with the stick.

"More Than Words"

Actions speak louder than words, they say. Which is slightly ironic, given the heavy bias towards lyrics in this blog. But there are moments when words just won't do the heavy lifting. Is this because so many of us struggle to find the right words to fit the moment? Or is this because, as the cliche goes, "talk is cheap"? In any case, here's a case study, if you like: "More than words to show you feel/That your love for me is real/What would you say if I took those words away/Then you couldn't make things new/Just by saying I love you." So Extreme are saying maybe we shouldn't sweat over the problem of saying the right things, but instead focus on doing the right things. It's not a lesson that's always easy to learn: I mean, think of Shakespeare's Hamlet, who talked and thought himself into circles until the moment to act had long passed, and compare him with Macbeth, who acted without thinking too much. I know, they both bit the bullet in the final scene, but you get my point? At least Macbeth had his day in the sun.

"Fine Line"

What a little gem this is, and thank you Natalie for bringing it to my attention! For a split-second you think you've fallen into an Abba retrospective, when the keyboards tumble into view, but before long, Paul McCartney's voice, that comfortable, friendly instrument we've all grow up with, kicks in and takes over. But what really, really makes this song fly is the incredible piano riff that runs through the chorus and lifts the final coda onto another plane. The Beatles, when his songs were at the forefront, were always pleasant, fairly easy-listening exercises in perfection. This, likewise, is a perfectly-formed pop diamond. The closing coda echoes Jeff Lynne and the Electric Light Orchestra, which is only fair really, because ELO was nothing if not a Beatles tribute band. But that piano just takes everything somewhere slightly different, that minor chord is just so unexpected, so ..... right, that nothing else matters. Sometimes, songs are made by a single note, a single chord, and this is one of them.

"Walking in Memphis"

Once in a while a song comes along that burns, literally, with soul, love and a respect so deep for tradition that it takes you back in time to that nameless era when everything was just.... right. When you could access that soul and express it in such a way that you radiated love for your fellow man, when legends walked the earth and when you felt so powerful that you could stretch your arms out and cradle the moon.
At the right time, this is that song. Marc Cohn tapped into something so basic, so fundamental here that he raised music up into something primeval. A force that cures, that revives, that strengthens. "Saw the ghost of Elvis/On Union Avenue/Followed him up to the gates of Graceland/Then I watched him walk right through/Now security they did not see him/They just hovered 'round his tomb/But there's a pretty little thing/Waiting for the King/Down in the Jungle Room." He invokes the healing power of music, he celebrates it, he lives it in this song, and for just a few minutes you eat from the table of the immortals - Elvis, Al Green, gospel, the Delta Blues legends - until you too feel that nothing is impossible, that all is right with the world. Cohn's deep soul voice fits the song in a way that Cher's can't, resonating with the power and the inner strength that music, good music, can bring. This is like going to church every day of the week.

"Suite: Judy Blue Eyes"

Crosby, Stills and Nash were arguably the first-ever "supergroup", formed by musicians who were already stars in their own right. David Crosby came out of the Byrds, Graham Nash from the Hollies and both Stephen Stills and Neil Young (who was an occasional fourth member) from Buffalo Springfield. While these groups were all highly-regarded, they were modest compared to what CSN were to become.
Forming in 1968, they captivated the masses with this gorgeous, rambling piece of harmony and guitar. If ever a song epitomised the whimsy and idealism of the hippy culture, this is it: "Remember what we've said and done and felt about each other/Oh babe, have mercy/Don't let the past remind us of what we are not now/I am not dreaming/I am yours, you are mine/You are what you are/And you make it hard." The harmony singing is as good as any there has ever been, the acoustic guitar strong enough to hold its own against the weight of the voices. The thrilling closing coda, with the close harmonies racing towards the end as Stephen Still sings in Spanish, is one of the most recognisable moments of the '60s catalogue.

"Good Times, Bad Times"

From time to time I get caught up in debates about the true origins of heavy metal. Where did the first headbang take place and how long was the hair? What was the riff that planted the seed? Some folk maintain it was Iron Butterfly's "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida" that started it all off, others mention Jimi Hendrix and his very heavy blues, while the British maintain the Kinks, the Who and Cream were the source. Some even point to the Beatles' "Helter Skelter". It's probably impossible to pick one name, much like it would be impossible to point to the particular fish that leapt out of the ocean and started walking on its flippers as being the origin of man.
Notwithstanding the debate though, I'm pretty convinced myself that the first band that could be properly called heavy metal was Led Zeppelin - of course they didn't plant the seed themselves. But by taking the blues and amplifying it to the limit, by bringing the rhythm section to the forefront, by using sound as a blunt instrument at times, Zeppelin took out the patent on what was to come.
We're a million miles away from those early steps now, but once in a while it's properly refreshing to revisit songs like this. Compare it with pretty much anything that's been issued since 1990 and be struck by how clean and lightweight it sounds. Jimmy Page's only slightly distorted guitar, the clean, spare bass, Robert Plant's restrained voice and John Bonham's immense, heavy yet agile drumming.
The musicianship is right there too, front and centre. The beautifully syncopated drumming, the hard-as-nails riffs interspersed with the delicate fills, the aching harmonies, it's clear from the start this is no ordinary band.
To put it another way, this song is Track One, Side One of Led Zeppelin's career, and of heavy metal. It starts here.

"Roadrunner"

Sometimes the most revolutionary ideas come in the smallest packages.
Way, way back in the mists of time, rock was a simple thing; a limited number of chords, a simple drums-bass-guitar-voice set-up and a single microphone hanging from the ceiling.
After a while folk got ambitious and started stacking other things on top: a second and even third guitar, a keyboard or two, some brass, some harmony, while the guys behind the recording studio console struggled to keep up. So we went from Bill Haley to Emerson, Lake and Palmer in a staggeringly short period of time.
1976 has a lot to answer for - not just the blast of phlegm from the punks and their desire to outrage and confront, but also the stripping away of all those layers of sophistication and pretention. And if any one song best exemplified the move back to basics, it's this.
Jonathan Richman is revered as a combination of faux-naif, idiot-savant, fey flower child and rocker. His songs are...eccentric, off-the-wall and totally individual. For this, he took just two chords and strung them together with a driving biff-bang-pow drumbeat and a stream of consciousness about driving around Boston and hey presto, an instant classic. This song doesn't seduce, threaten or cajole. It just gets on with it and if you're happy to ride along, so much the better.
Oh, and there is a third chord. Right at the end of the song.

"With a Little Help From My Friends"

And I'm not talking about the Beatles' original but Joe Cocker's flaming, rambling, incoherent live performance at Woodstock in 1969, which you can still find on the film "Woodstock". If ever a live performance encapsulated a time and a place, this was it. Woodstock was three days of idealistic hedonism, a toga party on an epic scale, a flash-in-the-pan version of the Paris Commune that brought together around forty of the top acts of the time. The event fell into chaos very quickly - the organisers couldn't keep people from sneaking into the venue and a rainstorm turned the fields into a quagmire and the organisers' resources simply melted away in the face of a tide of humanity. But on the other side, the event passed relatively peacefully - unlike the Altamont festival a year later - and there was some great music.
Joe Cocker's performance is one of those moments you watch from behind your hands, half-incredulous, half-admiring. Lurching all over the stage, eyes screwed tight, hands fiddling emptily or playing air guitar, arms flailing, Cocker looks as though he's performing a drawn-out death scene. But then he opens his mouth, and a drunken, spastic, gargling howl emerges, a sound that you know is being dredged from the very bottom of his gut. It's a noise that goes beyond soul, beyond blues and onto some higher, animal plane. He's not worried about getting the lyrics across - at one point he stops singing for a moment and then lets loose a scream that would give Tom Waits nightmares - he's in his own chemically- or alcoholically-assisted universe, where the song becomes a living breathing demon, to be fought to a standstill. In fact the song hardly matters, except as a platform for Cocker's visceral, full-contact vocal; it's not what he's singing, but how he's singing that matters.

"Hollywood Nights"

Here's a song that really should be a film. Preferably a silent film, with no sound but this song to accompany it since Bob Seger's words are more than sufficient to tell the whole story. It's a huge, cavernous, monstrous cliche of a story, but one that romantics everywhere would probably appreciate: "She stood there bright as the sun on that California coast/He was a Midwestern boy on his own/She looked at him with those soft eyes so innocent and blue/He knew right then he was too far from home." Perfect! The whole story is right there, as clear and unambiguous as it could be. You know how it's going to progress, how it's going to be a tale of obsessive, all-consuming passion, riddled with stereotypes and cliches, but what the hell, you say, when a story's told this well....
And of course, you know how it's going to end as well: "Night after night and day after day it went on and on/Then came that morning he woke up alone/He spent all night staring down at the lights of LA/Wondering if he could ever go home." It's a song and a story as big and wide as the highways and beaches it populates, and Seger wraps it up in a driving, hammering song that doesn't let up for a moment, that reflects the urgency, the raw need and the eventual despair that plants your foot on the gas pedal to get you as far away as possible from your addiction.

"Always the Last to Know"

Another can't-let-go song. I have a lot of respect for Del Amitri: it can't be easy being as miserable and lovelorn as they are most of the time. But we've all been to this particular place: we've fallen out with someone because of some stupidity and we live on in the hope that by being generous, by letting them go, they might just come back. It's a hell of a gamble to pin so much hope in one place, but we do it willingly. We live that time in some high sierra of heightened senses, enhanced awareness, where we see everything so clearly, sharply, we collect evidence - the occasional phone call or text message - to fuel those hopes and we are strangely contented. And yet... and yet we're not even close. "I hear you’ve never felt so alive/So much desire beyond control/And as usual I am the last to know/The last to know if you’re happy now/Or if he’s cheating on you like I cheated on you/And you were the last to know." At which point the whole construction come tumbling down, doesn't it? We deny our own transgressions only to be hanged by them. The clever sting in the tail here is what makes this song more than just another torch-type affair, and what probably makes it more honest as well.

"New York Minute"

With the benefit of hindsight, there is something almost preternaturally spooky about this song. The chorus - "In a New York Minute/Everything can change/In a New York Minute/Things can get a little strange" - has been associated with the events of 9/11 almost from the moment it happened, but what's spooky is how so much of the rest of the song is relevant to that day as well. Don Henley sings of the Wall Street banker who disappears one morning, leaving his family forever asking questions: "One day he crossed some line and he was too much in this world." Then there are the sounds: "Lying here in the darkness/Hear the siren's wail/Somebody going to emergency/Somebody's going to jail." The memory of thousands of notes stuck to walls, seeking lost loved ones is conjured up too. It's as if Henley was channeling Nostradamus, and it raises a lump in the throat; not just for the memories we all carry of that terrible day, but because the song itself paints a picture of such desolation, such emptiness that we cling like limpets to the half-hearted promise of hope in the line: "You find somebody to love in this world/You better hang on tooth and nail/The wolf is always at the door."

"Regrets"

As anyone who's ever switched on a stereo knows, music is about all sorts of things, and love and sex are never far from the top of that list. And those categories run the full range of expressions from the simplest "I love/want you" to "I particularly love/want you when you do this" to "Why haven't you done that for me lately?" to "Damn, I wish you were still around to do that again". Sometimes a song even does away with the love part and focuses on the sex. I've dealt with more than a few that go straight to the nether regions but for me, this one is just a little bit more special than the rest.
Firstly, seek out the "Touch Dance" remix album by the Eurythmics, rather than the rather anodyne "Touch" album. Secondly, dispense with any thoughts of love, emotion or whatever cuddly bunny-wunnies you may have hiding in your bedside table. This is a song that brings to mind the more experimental aspect of physical relationships, wrapped up in a subtle, steady yet unstoppable mix of melody and suggestive noises. "I've got a delicate mind/I've got dangerous features/And my fist collides/With your furniture/I'm a highway Mohican/I've got a razor-blade smile/So don't come near me/I've got singular style/Fifteen senses/Are on my plate/All the things/That you love to hate/I'm an electric wire and I'm stuck inside your head."
This song lends itself so easily to a visual interpretation that it's positively indecent, and if you let yourself get carried away just a little you'll find yourself dressing in PVC and carrying a whip, a candle and some chocolate butter. Annie Lennox's singing is utterly salacious, her tongue rolling so lasciviously around the 'l' in "like" that you find yourself wondering if she can tie a knot in a cherry stalk with that same tongue. If you compare this song to, say, Aerosmith's "Pink" - another song that wants to get you in bed - you might find that while "Pink" is full of humour, sly winks and nudges like a "Carry On" film, "Regrets" is a song that takes its sex seriously.

"Blackbird"

Certain songs occupy a special place in our lives, in our hearts and in our memories, endowed as they are with a master key to our emotions. To some people, it's the song that they shared with their first great love; to others, it's the song that they got married to, or that their first child was born to (my daughter was born to Prince singing "Peach", which is a bit of a double-edged sword if you ask me); to others, it's the song that they played endlessly through the dark, stormy autumn of a broken heart.
Then there are songs that by some chemical happenstance conjure up emotions from nothing; they cook up a fearsome broth of powerful associations, whisking you instantaneously to some far-off place in your past, to some long-forgotten room where all you can do is wallow in the excess, or the complete lack of...... of something. You find yourself short of breath, fighting a heavy lump rising in your throat, bewildered by a kaleidoscope of "something" that you can't quite put your finger on. You find yourself attracted yet repelled by this, perhaps exultant that you can feel such a powerful emotion, yet frustrated and angered that you can't nail it down, classify it, name it, associate it.
So you spend some time revisiting this song, this place, trying for all your worth to put some sense into this blank. Sometimes you get close to a name, a time, a face or a place, but it's never a complete picture and the next time you try, you're back at square one. After a while, the obsession dies away and your life regains a level playing surface; but once in a while, when you hear that song again, all the symptoms reappear and you find yourself short of breath again, eyes glistening, overcome by an intense feeling of..... of what, dammit?
For me this is that song.

"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."