"Pretty Vacant"

History plays funny tricks on us all. From the safe distance of a decade or two, our perspective seems to slip sideways, so that we view major events a little from the side, rather than seeing them as they were at the time - up front, wide and tall and long, in full relief.
This is why I think the era of punk rock has slipped from being, as it was seen at the time, a threat to civilization as we know it and a disgusting boil on the face of the entertainment industry, to a charming little sideshow when young people played at being snotty-nosed dropouts.
But anyone who remembers the newspaper headlines at the time will have no problem remembering the shock, the confidence, the blast of fresh air, the extravagance, the clearing away of the old debris, that punk represented.
This song for me encapsulates the moment when punk first arrived on our doorstep. Oh yes, it had been breeding for a while in places like CBGB's in New York or the 101 Club in London, but "Pretty Vacant" brought punk to the masses.
The song begins like a crackling Tannoy announcement, a clearing of the throat - the distorted guitar intro, the tribal drums (later used to such good effect by Adam & the Ants) kick in, before we're held up against a wall by John Lydon's bored, sneering voice. His voice was the real aural image of the Pistols: despite their best efforts, Cook and Jones were not much more than your average pub rock band, but Lydon's voice was another thing altogether.
And the lyrics! When had we ever heard a song using lines like: "There’s no point in asking us you’ll get no reply", "Oh don’t pretend cos I don’t care", "I got no reason it's too all much"... and the immortal shout of "And we don't care!"
It was a manifesto for the bored, the disenchanted and the pissed-off. A lot of punk bands -- the Sex Pistols included -- tried deliberately to shock, but very few of them (The Clash, the Stranglers) had the wit to write songs that shocked but that also actually described things as they were at the arse-end of the 1970s.
Seen from the safe distance of 27 years, punk may not seem like a lot compared to the thugocracy of rap or the pubescent porn of Cristina Aguilera et al, but at the time it was an earthquake, and nothing since then has moved the goalposts with quite the same deliberate, violent determination.

Today's TasterWithoutWhich is Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis. Another SongWithoutWhich from way back, this is a mellow yet spooky piece of ambient-before-ambient-was-invented. The voice is terrific, the atmosphere is suitably space age and you're left feeling a little weightless at the end

"No Surprises"

I've spent the last two weeks on jury duty, spending long hours in a crowded room waiting for a case, and then sitting in airless rooms listening to barristers loving the sound of their own voices. I spent a good deal of time getting to know my iPod again and hanging out with some of my very favourite songs; hence Johnny Cash last week.
This week I sat in on a case that involved a young black girl. She'd been accused of nothing really bad -- she'd made some mistakes in the heat of the moment and got herself into a position she really shouldn't have. She was only 21 years old, had managed to pull herself up and out of a tough childhood and was -- it seemed -- making her way in the world. So being dragged into court must have been both a shock and a depressing backward slip towards some distant childhood memories she thought she'd left behind.
For three days she sat in the dock listening to her character being blackened by one smug middle-class white guy, while the other tried to blacken the character of her accuser. Nobody really rode to her rescue, nobody thought for a moment that she might feel like a great trapdoor was opening beneath her. No family sat nearby to boost her.
This song quite precisely describes the look on her face for those three days. A mixture of helplessness, resignation, sadness, fleeting fear but most of all, utter despair.
The quiet, childhood-singalong guitar notes at the intro let you know you're in for something special here: what's so good about this song is that it once again proves the maxim that less is more. Everything about it is restrained, tasteful and muted. This is a song that's almost completely bereft of hope. And yet it's a song that you'll listen to again and again, marveling at Thom Yorke's ability to create such a completely hopeless picture but marveling even more at how seductive it is.
"A heart that's full up like a landfill/A job that slowly kills you/Bruises that won't heal/You look so tired and unhappy/Bring down the government/They don't, they don't speak for us/I'll take a quiet life/A handshake of carbon monoxide/No alarms and no surprises." Yorke's voice doesn't soar, doesn't reach almost beyond the stars here as it so often has but instead just caresses us, consoles us and persuades us to accept our fate with whatever shreds of dignity and resignation we can muster -- just like the girl did, sitting desolate in court.

"Hurt"

I'm in awe of this song.
"I hurt myself today/To see if I still feel/I focus on the pain/The only thing that's real/The needle tears a hole/The old familiar sting/Try to kill it all away/But I remember everything."
Everything about this song speaks of the end. It's like King Lear: a man abandoned, persecuted, resigned; a man that fought all the wars that he had to and came out the other side old and tired, raising his head one more time, remembering the force of his youth and channeling it one last time. "What have I become?/My sweetest friend/Everyone I know/Goes away in the end/And you could have it all/My empire of dirt/I will let you down/I will make you hurt."
This is utterly hypnotic. At times, the song itself takes over from Johnny Cash's voice and builds up into a raging, clanging crescendo of noise, as if he's engaged nature itself as an ally for his last battle.
A few songs don't need much of an entry here, just a listing: they do their own talking.

"A Hazy Shade of Winter"

This could be a crime. As if it weren't bad enough to prefer a cover version of a song to the original, but to prefer a version by The Bangles over an original performed by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel will, in certain parts of Massachussetts, mark me down for instant death.
Well, whatever, folks. I'm here to say this song, along with "Head Over Heels" by Alanis Morissette, has just about the greatest drum sound ever, the best guitar riff and a terrific mood. With a Simon & Garfunkel song, you know what you're getting in terms of lyrics: coats buttoned up against the autumn chill, monochrome shadows somewhere near Harvard Yard, pessimism and bags of portentious ambience.
As I said, well, whatever. The Bangles take this song around the back of the bike shed, kick a few whiny lumps out of it, mess up the overcoat and then drag it back to the front for a top-fuel burnout. Why they ditched a sound like this for dreck like "Eternal Flame" I'll never understand, but then the same thing happened to the Go-Gos so it must be some unwritten rule in the music biz that great girl bands must sell out no later than the third album.
Anyway, play this back-to-back with the original and I hope you'll agree there's no comparison.

"Are Friends Electric?"

Remember this? Back in 1979, when we were just wiping the dust of the punk revolution off our clothes, wondering what the hell was goin to come along and top THAT, along came this. Imagine, right after punk - the second era of the three-minute single - comes a slow, leaden-paced piece of electronica that clocked in at five minutes 22 seconds. A song about students, bedsits, shoegazing loners and pretentious arty references. And it made number one.
It was like punk had never bloody happened!
What this song did do, though, was usher in possibly the most sartorially-challenged decade of the last two hundred years. After Gary Numan came Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Ultravox and a whole cosmetics counter's worth of floppy-haired, tight-trousered, transistor-plucking art-school dropouts. Hey-ho.
It's hard to describe exactly what makes this a SongWithoutWhich: there's the industrial instrumentation, which comes over like a cross between a steam train and an air-raid siren, the narcoleptic beat - I believe only Black Sabbath have ever performed songs with fewer beats per minute - but most of all, it's the utterly impenetrable lyric, which you'll have to fathom for yourself. twenty-seven years on, I'm still working on this one.

"New Sensation"

We're all watching the Winter Olympics at ChateauWithoutWhich, marveling at the tiny fractions of seconds that separate the greats from the also-rans, the feats of derring-do by those certified lunatics on the luge/skeleton/bob run and the unfeasible aerodynamic properties of Finnish ski jumpers.
What is also evident from these and all other Olympic games is how important it is to peak at just the right time, to ensure that you're working at your maximum output at exactly the right time. And this is equally true of music.
For example, how else would music writers talk about "the difficult second album" syndrome, and how do some musicians escape it? My theory is that inevitably, a band's first album will include songs that have grown over time, matured, been honed, while a second album will be rushed out in time to cash in on the exposure.
But over time, bands do learn how to manage the process, and here's an utterly fantastic tune to demonstrate. INXS spent years slogging around Australia, building a solid fanbase at home and refining their unique brand of danceable rock. By the time they got to "Listen Like Thieves", you can hear the sound is almost perfected. But then came "Kick" and the roof blew off.
This is probably INXS' finest moment - the performances are tight, the blasts of synth as good as any Memphis brass section, and the drums drive the song along as surely as a V8. Michael Hutchence tones down the fey heterosexuality of some earlier performances and instead concentrates on giving the lyric a proper, red-blooded kick in the pants. Everything just clicks into place, as if years of training and practicing have suddenly paid off in the Olympic final. This is the sound of a band that are at the very top of their game, and they know it.

"Tubular Bells Part 1"

Occasionally, in my moments of weakness and nostalgia, I revisit my teenage ambitions and dredge up what little musical talent I have. A tinkle of piano, a strum or two on the guitar, even - hey! rock and roll! - a toot on the flute. I play a pretty convincing air-piano and I've been known to knock out a mean drum solo on my desk.
But despite teenage dreams of stardom, chicks and gold discs, I ran up against my lack of talent, of ambition in that particular direction, and the of confidence to put it all on show. But I also blame people like Mike Oldfield.
I mean, listen to this record! No content with having talent for one particular instrument, Mike had to go and be a whiz at something like 30 different ones. And what's worse, he had to write an intriguing, beguiling mix of folk and rock, in a classical format; and in doing so, created two of the more memorable tunes of the last 30 years. You could quite reasonably give Mike credit for writing the first ambient album.
Another thought: this is the record that launched (Sir) Richard Branson's career.
Pah.
Seriously, though, this is amazing stuff. It ebbs, it flows, it grows and develops, pulls you in different directions and makes you actually think about what you're hearing. From the menacing opening -- maybe it's menacing only because it was picked up and used as the theme for "The Exorcist" -- through the pastoral middle section, all mandolins and flowing keyboards, and onto the majestic, titanic finale, listening to this is like being put through a wringer. Again I say that just because a piece of music has no lyrics, doesn't mean that it can't be involving.
Having said that, the punk generation had no time for this kind of music. Intellectual, they called it, which I think was some sort of code for "boring". But listen to the last eight minutes of this and there's no way on earth you can call it boring. A simple theme, played first on one guitar; then, one by one, more instruments are piled on top, each one introduced by the late, great Vivian Stanshall, until the whole juddering, top-heavy construction casts loose and floats away into the ether.
It's not often that you have to consciously separate a piece of music from the effort involved in making it: music should be easy, we think. But when the music is as inspiring as this, then the effort, however much it was, was clearly worthwhile.

"Run Baby Run"

There's something so ineffably romantic, so attractive, seductive and yet so utterly heartbreaking about the image of a child of the 60s left to its own devices in the harsh, neon unforgiving reality of the 90s and 00s. That naive idealism that came to the fore on the road to Birmingham, Alabama, at the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC where Martin Luther King had his dream and at Woodstock just seems so expensive, so indulgent and so misplaced in this age of go-faster, market-driven entrepreneurship. Sometimes it's almost as if the 60s were a confession and an apology for what went before and what was to come.
Here's a song with a back-story, a timeline born in 1963, "the day Aldous Huxley died." It's a memorial, an elegy that lives on in every child who's turned 45 and who can't reconcile their 21st century struggle with the values their 60s parents brought them up with.
"And her mama believed/That every man could be free/So her mama got high, high, high/And her daddy marched on Birmingham/Singing mighty protest songs/And he pictured all the places/That he knew that she belonged/But he failed and taught her young/The only thing she's need to carry on/He taught her how to/Run baby, run baby, run baby, run."
How many are out there still, holding desperately onto the belief in the essential goodness of man despite reams and reams of evidence to the contrary, hoping against hope that one day we'll all realize that all we need, as the Beatles sang, is love. Not romantic love, but respect, kindness, trust.
"She counts out all her money/In the taxi on the way to meet her plane/Stares hopeful out the window/At the workers fighting/Through the pouring rain/She's searching through the stations/For an unfamiliar song/And she pictures all the places/Where she knows she still belongs/And she smiles the secret smile/Because she knows exactly how/To carry on."
Where is that place she's picturing? How can she hold onto that hope? And why does she keep running? Just how much pain and heartbreak does it take for an entire generation to realise it's been chasing a dream that we're not smart enough to earn?

"Beautiful Love"

Sometimes I have to spend a long time flipping through my music collection before some song jumps out at me and demands to know why it hasn't been written up. Days, weeks sometimes... either I've been too distracted to really listen to whatever is playing, or I simply can't harness the feeling and wrestle it onto the keyboard. Hence the last two weeks or so. But never fear, Julian's here.
I've got absolutely no idea what to make of Julian Cope. He's a genius, a madman, a child, a wispy cosmic flower child and a frothing anarchist all at once. I get the idea that he lives life on his terms, or rather, on Nature's terms, and from that life come occasional statements from the margins, records that have only a passing acquaintance with the rest of the music business.
What I can't for the life of me understand is how such a gentle, happy, optimistic and generous song as this could ever have got lost in the shuffle of radio executive playlists and marketing departments' brainstorming sessions. It's so simple, so elegant and yet so fresh at the same time. It's the song you'd sing halfway through a rustic getaway holiday, bounding out of bed into the fresh air, leaping into the clear river at the bottom of the garden, hearing the laughter of children and the whisper of a warm breeze through the trees. This is a song for that moment when you say to yourself "Life just doesn't get any better." And, for most of us, even three minutes of feeling like that is going to do us a power of good.

"Days"

Saying goodbye is one of those things that we have to do. All of us. Whether we get to say it in person or not really doesn't matter: we either say it in person or in spirit.
What's hard to do is to prepare yourself to say goodbye. No matter how you try to steel yourself, it's impossible to come to that moment and remember what you promised yourself you'd do or say.
And so it all comes out wrong, or inappropriate, or you break down when you swore you'd stay strong.
Ray Davies clearly kept his promise to himself at some point, if this song is anything to go by: "Thank you for the days/Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me/I’m thinking of the days/I won’t forget a single day, believe me/I bless the light/I bless the light that lights on you, believe me/And though you’re gone/You’re with me every single day, believe me."
It's graceful, loving, calm and celebratory, a sort of "Perfect Day" for the departed; a song that pushes us gently towards reflecting on the good times, the happiness, rather than dwell on anything negative.
But sadly it still doesn't stop you breaking down at the key moment....

"Wild Side of Life"

'Cos I'm going to be away for a few days, and because I'm a generous soul, I thought I'd throw another log on the fire here and make sure things keep ticking over till I get back. Ahem. Scratch that. What I mean to say is that I've been short of boogie of late and this song came along to pick me out of the slump.
There's not a lot I can say about Status Quo to anyone from the UK that hasn't already been said, laughed at, dismissed out of hand and generally ignored. As of 2006 the Quo are half national institution, half national joke, four guys who wear denim 24/7, play battered old Fender Strats and, incredibly, haven't learned any new chords since 1971. They're a bit like the Queen Mother used to be; someone who you tend to forget about most of the time, but when the call goes out for a particular kind of atmosphere they're there, lending their own particular charm.
Status Quo songs aren't demanding, aren't new and they aren't necessarily clever, but they are good at what they do. Solid, driving rhythms, decent harmonies and some pretty decent guitar. A lot of people make the joke that their songs are repetitive, but they're missing the point. A lot of what Quo did was pretty damn solid. This particular song never appeared on a studio album, but I remember listening to it during the summer of 78 (or thereabouts) and enjoying its unapologetic 12-bar simplicity. This is a great song to drive to, sing along to, potter to, you name it. It fits in so neatly to the pattern of our lives. It doesn't demand the earth, but if you care to pay some attention, you can have a whale of a time with it.

"Sylvia"

Time for a cliche. Time for a visit to the Natural History Museum, to the dinosaur room. Look! There's the fossilised skeleton of Diplodocus. Huge, lumbering, slow, ponderous. What's that sign say? "Progressive rock musician. Believed to have roamed the surface of the earth in the late 20th century. This specimen has been dated to 1971."
If you ever feel the need to jump into the deep end of prog rock, you could do worse than start here. Focus was a Dutch band made up of some rather talented individuals with jazz and classical training: pretty much the starting point for all prog rock, as it happens. Before the genre became obsessed with classical scope, volume and scale (see Emerson Lake and Palmer), people were trying to cross-match rhythms and styles and see what they could cook up.
"Sylvia" is a triumph of good taste, utterly crammed with what later became cliches; gorgeous great washes of Hammond organ, jittery minor-chord riffs that sound like they could have been culled from later prog-pop epics like "Pinball Wizard", smooth guitar passages that rear up and shout "virtuoso" -- and this in the day before guitarists became stars in their own right -- neo-classical flourishes and vaguely insane operatic background vocals.
It's hard to dislike an innocent, involving and ambitious song like this, despite the self-indulgent bastard child it created. Be kind, be generous to this song, because it really did help to start a whole new sound.

"I'm Sorry"

Here's a lesson in how to make an apology. Doesn't matter what you may have done, who you did it to, why you did it, this song covers it all: "I didn't know when I hurt you/I didn't know when you cried/I didn't know when you screamed Lord/I didn't know when you stopped to cry/I didn't know when you called/I didn't know when you hurt/I didn't know sweet Mama/I didn't know I should." See? It's all there.
And what's better, it's a song that doesn't hunker down in a dark place or a crouch in a corner of the room and rock back and forth in misery. This is a song that takes it to the streets, that makes a joyous noise unto the Lord, that kicks butt from here till next Sunday. It's got great big ladle-fulls of gospel, a rakish charm that only an Irishman would know how to conjure. It's infectious, it's irresistible.
This song puts me in mind of "Try a Little Tenderness": the same sea of humanity surging back and forth, borne on a tide of utterly unstoppable rhythm, real, honest soul-baring emotion and sheer exuberance. You cannot ignore this song. And maybe that's the best way to make an apology.

"I Wanna be a Boss"

So another working week comes to an end and we drag our tired asses back home to start the process of intensive recovery. I've been very lucky in that the jobs I've had have all been really enjoyable, challenging and almost well-paid. Yet that in itself doesn't always take care of the nagging feeling that someone, somewhere is having an even better time than I am. And more often than not, it's the boss who's in clover: "Well, I've been doodling on this notepad/And I've been taking telephone calls/I can tell that this job's at the end of line/And I'm ready for the fall/But I've been watching the boss carefully/And he always seems to be having a ball/Then I scratch my head and wonder why I'm down here and he's up the hall."
And so we all develop the focus of our discontent (real or perceived) on the poor sap who happened to float to the top. We can construct lazy daydreams about being a world dominating uber-boss, a magnate, a Master of the Universe, where we can live out the dream of perfection and power.
Thank you to Stan Ridgway for crystallizing the whole thing in one neat song... this is a fairly straightforward bit of wish-fulfilment, but it covers EVERYTHING, dammit. From riding in a limo with tinted windows, to handing out thousand-dollar bills, to building executive amusement parks, to watching "Ice Station Zebra" in the nude (a big shout-out to Howard Hughes there), to buying the planet Mars...it's all here. Thanks, Stan: I don't think you missed anything off MY list, anyway.
Happily though, he remembers the little folks too, and urges us to follow our own ambitions: "I want to take a two-week vacation/26 times a year."

"Wear It Like a Cape"

I've waited a long time to blog this song.

Back at the tail-end of the sixties, Country Joe MacDonald claimed to have invented something he called "rock and soul music" which was, to be frank, an amalgam of rock and soul. All well and good, and a fine sub-sub-sub-genre it was too. However, one day, while trawling through the radio station's record library during a stint as a DJ, I happened upon an album by the Del Fuegos called "Stand Up", and pretty much there and then the genre was completed re-invented for me.
This is proper soul music. In fact, you wouldn't credit four ugly white guys from Boston with coming up with a sound as downright soulful and funky as this. Nasty blasts of brass, one of those weird keyboards that sounds like it's being played underwater, a slow, sensual rhythm and a very dirty vocal. People called them garage rock, but they're about a million miles wide of the mark. There's real grass-roots soul at work here, a proper guitar- and bass-based groove but it's not quite rock either.
In fact, it's another one of those songs about sex, I suspect. I've already been through that here and here, and this is another take on the same thing, only ... only different. And maybe better: "Everybody needs someone/To help them get in the groove/Yes and I believe I found the one/Honey when I found you/Seems to be a reason why we try so hard/Try to keep it showing/In between the sheets we keep the heat/We keep it going." Like Aerosmith's "Pink", there's a salacious element and like the Eurythmics' "Regrets" there's the hint of something kinky going on, but unlike both of those, there's an emotion here too.
And as the song winds up, there's some utterly fantastic backing harmonies, a deep, deep baritone and some sharp female cat-calls from the back of the studio, just to bring Detroit a little closer to your bedroom. This is a song for a lazy Sunday in bed and out, a day when there's nothing more to do than get lost in each other.

"Life's What You Make It"

Inspiration can be hard to find in daily life. The paradigm in the western world seems to be to flatten out the curves, to smooth those sharp edges and file down the interesting little imperfections that make our individual lives so unique. Which is why the blog world is often so attractive: we can all peek through each others' curtains and find solace, take joy in, and inspiration from the fact that there really are a lot of folks out there who are bucking against the deadening weight of 21st century culture and society. We all want to be treated as individuals, as someone special in our own right, and if we can't force the institutions out there to do so, well, we'll just have to make it so in our own lives. Blogs are our way of proving to ourselves and to the world that we really are more than just a set of demographic data on some corporation's database.
Somehow, this is meant to bring me to Talk Talk and "Life's What You Make It." I'm sure you follow the connection. It's a simple enough song: a lovely stop-start beat, mechanical almost, like an industrial process, over which Mark Hollis sings in the sort of voice that suggests he's got a lump in his throat. "Baby, life's what you make it/Can't escape it/Baby, yesterday's favorite/Don't you hate it/Baby, life's what you make it/Don't backdate it/Baby, life's what you make it/Beauty is naked." The background refrain of "Everything's alright" soothes and calms, while the guitar makes liquid, oval shapes, like comforting pillows. It's OK to be yourself, the song seems to be saying, it's OK to forge your own path.

"Tenderness on the Block"

Throughout my single life I really, really had no idea what having a child was going to be like. Yeah, yeah, I know none of us really do, but I'm talking with the benefit of hindsight here. So take it from me: I knew nothing.
So when my daughter arrived I did that goofy thing that guys do when a daughter comes along - I fell totally, irretrievably and utterly in love with her. Now I can speak with authority on the reasons why girls are always Daddy's Little Princess, believe me.
When my son came along, I did exactly the same thing -- sheesh, you'd have thought I'd have learnt by then. And don't let anyone try and convince you that guys can't love their sons with the same fierce, angry passion that they do their daughters. Bullshit.
But I digress.
Soon after my daughter came along, I listened to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, and found myself in tears after hearing "She's Leaving Home"... I still find it hard to listen to that song today, ten years later. Because, as any fool knows, our children are only loaned to us: we'll have to watch them go one day.
Later still, I heard Shawn Colvin sing this old Warren Zevon song and, dammit, it did the same thing to me: "Mama, where's your pretty little girl tonight/Trying to run before she can walk - that's right/She's growing up/She has a young man waiting/She's growing up/She has a young man waiting/Wide eyes/She'll be street-wise/To the lies/And the jive talk/She'll find true love/And tenderness on the block."
There's something optimistic in the whole idea of having children that this song manages to express in exactly the way that "She's Leaving Home" doesn't. And for that we parents can be grateful.

"Paris, Texas"

One of the miracles about music is how a single sound from an instrument can evoke such powerful responses in us. For example, I happen to think the drum sound in Alanis Morrisette's "Head Over Heels" is perfect, a dry, flat "pow" that gets me right in the pit of my stomach. If I could make my heart beat with that sort of sound, I'd be a lot more sporty....
For evocative sounds though, I suspect there's nothing quite like a steel guitar, played with a slide by Mr Ryland Cooder. No matter how you slice it, slide guitar conveys America. A flat, tinny sound will speak of bleached wooden shacks in Mississippi, thick undergrowth and rusting cars by the side of the road.
But hit the "echo" button and all of a sudden the sound opens up, the vegetation vanishes and you're trying to thumb a lift on a single lane of blacktop somewhere in northern Texas. The blaring sky reaches down to slowly draw the strength out of you, a puff of wind bowls tumbleweed across the parched ground and you're not sure if that shimmering blob of darkness on the horizon is a car or a cow.
Ry Cooder's instrumental music is for closing your eyes and taking a trip. Let the walking-pace melody lead you, let each mournful yet menacing note build you a character from a John Ford western or a Jim Jarmusch fable. Whatever happens in your daydream, you'll not be wanting for atmosphere.

Shameless Plug

It's not often that we all, as individuals, hold firmly in our hands the reins of democracy.

Equally, it's even less often that when we do hold those reins, we feel the temptation to crack the whip a little and gee those horses up to gallop a little faster than they otherwise would do.

So look upon this post as an anabolic steroid in the body of democracy.

You may or may not know that SongsWithoutWhich has been nominated -- and shortlisted for -- an award at The Best of Blogs!! Yes!

So that I can add a cute little icon to this page that says "Award-Winning Content" or some such thing, I'm encouraging you to vote for this li'l ol' website in the category "Best Music Blog." Vote once a day!

I urge you to look at the other excellent nominees for the various awards on offer (at least three of which are linked from here) and see if, indeed, my site is worthy of being in their august company. You may eventually decide to vote for someone else; I'm sure I don't mind.

But I'm trusting to the inherent goodness, generosity and -- let's face it -- downright corruptibility of man in hoping you'll vote for this site.

Why? Because I need to get a life, and if I win this award, I promise to get one.

"Heartattack and Vine"

There are only a few voices that can be considered to be really unique. That's unique: u·nique (adj.) (1) Being the only one of its kind. (2) Without an equal or equivalent; unparalleled. And perhaps the most idiosyncratic (that's idiosyncratic: idi·o·syn·cratic (adj.) peculiar to the individual.) voice out there must be Tom Waits'.
Most of the time it's not so much a voice as a gargling, scraping, sandpapered howl. It sounds like a 4 a.m. bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, the 400th cigarette of the day, Rod Stewart's worst nightmare and the gurgle of sewers all rolled into one. If Charles Bukowski wrote the book on the underbelly of the American Dream, then Tom Waits was meant to read it.
Just sample some of the lyrics: "See that little Jersey girl in the see-through top/With the pedal-pushers sucking on a soda pop/Well I bet she's still a virgin/But it's only twenty-five 'til nine." Or: "Better off in Iowa against your scrambled eggs/Than crawling down Cahuenga on a broken pair of legs/You'll find your ignorance is blissful/Every goddamn time." And the king-daddy line of all: "Don't you know there ain't no devil/There's just God when he's drunk." Priceless.... it's like watching the staging shots in an urban police drama but not catching the main storyline: the camera pans swiftly over a tramp here, a domestic argument there, a break-in at the end of an alley and a knifing in a dark doorway.
The tune is every bit as off-the-wall as the lyric: a narcoleptic strolling blues that operates like a broken-down old merry-go-round, coming around again just in time to catch the next set of jaundiced observations. You can almost imagine this song being performed on stage by a pick-up band of tramps and hobos - rarely has a song inhabited a world as completely as this one does.

"Time"

I've just finished reading Nick Mason's entertaining history of Pink Floyd. Despite being an international rock superstar, he's so quintessentially English in his modesty, his brushing aside of any plaudits for what he has achieved.
And reading his account of the creation of the "Dark Side of the Moon" album, I hope I began to understand a little about the dynamics of this most unusual group: the Floyd was always a one-man show, whether it was Syd Barrett in the early days, or Roger Waters latterly. Their respective creative visions, be they lyrical or musical or both, really drove the group.
After Syd was sacked, Roger Waters' concerns and visions began to take over -- culminating eventually in the pseudo-solo album "The Final Cut" -- and the first sign that he really had assumed control was the "Dark Side" album, where the entire work has the sort of wholeness that can only be achieved when one person's thought processes are determining the content.
What this album achieved, however, was a perfect balance between Waters' lyrical thrust and the brilliant musicianship of David Gilmour and Richard Wright. I've already written about what is to me the finest track on this record, but "Time" comes a close second.
The simplicity of the opening minutes -- a wonderful combination of clock and heartbeat as a drumbeat, simple guitar notes and Mason's clear, spare drums -- takes some beating, but the lyric is what matters here. It's simple, almost schoolboyish in fact, but it's inescapable and that's what I like: "And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking/Racing around to come up behind you again/The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older/Shorter of breath and one day closer to death."
Sometimes it's the simple things that make the biggest noise. This song's one of them.

"Slave to the Rhythm"

It's not often a song appears that just reeks of money. You know, the song that wears a big neon sign above its head that says: "no expense was spared in the making of this record." The kind of song written by the most A-List writers, performed by the most in-demand hired guns in session-land, produced by the most talented bods ever to sit behind the console and drenched in effects, orchestration and an enormous blizzard of top-quality cocaine.
When Grace Jones made the transition from model to singer, I'm pretty sure the conversations between her manager and the record company bosses involved the words "money", "no" and "object". This record is utterly loaded, obscenely wealthy. Even the echo chamber sounds like it was coated in some rare metal in order to achieve exactly that effect.
But hell, it's a terrific tune, comparable in some ways to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Welcome to the Pleasuredome" - the slow-burning groove, the luxurious effects and well-dressed synth effects and the crystal-clear voice, enunciated to the last degree. Jones' voice is quite something - it occupies some no-man's-land between male and female, yet here it's as pure, clear and unsexy as can be. Maybe all that money couldn't buy her soul.

"The Promised Land"

Looking back through the 300-odd SongsWithoutWhich I've amassed here so far, I'm amazed I didn't get around to Chuck Berry two years ago. Similarly, I wrote just a couple of days ago about the Beatles and was trying to list five bands who've changed music forever. I'm going to have to revisit that list and expand it, oh, just a little.
Every time I hear Chuck Berry I'm reminded of the scene in "Back to the Future" where Michael J. Fox plays "Johnny B Goode" to a stunned high-school 1950s audience and Chuck Berry's cousin has an idea.... Perhaps Chuck had that sort of impact when he first arrived on the radio; I guess you had to be there. But he's a hugely under-appreciated influence on rock and roll music these days.
I could blog any one of twenty of his songs, but I like this the best - it's the alternative version of "Route 66", a road-song in which the names come thick and fast and conjure up images of silver Greyhound buses, propeller-driven airplanes and men who wore hats and dressed sharp: "We had motor trouble, it turned into a struggle/Half way 'cross Alabam'/And that hound broke down and left us all stranded/In downtown Birmingham/Right away I bought me a through train ticket/Right cross Mississippi clean/And I was on that midnight flyer out of Birmingham/Smoking into New Orleans."
The sound is sheer nostalgia as well: the opening riff is the entire history of rock and roll in three seconds, the honky-tonk piano pounds the chords with sheer abandon, and the guitar sounds just like guitars used to sound before the technicians discovered bass and sustain - tinny, twangy and infinitely precious.
Bear in mind this is a guy who was one of the very first to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who's had Bruce Springsteen and Steve Miller play for him and who was voted 6th best guitarist of all time in 2003. Not bad for a guy who'd written his best stuff before 1959. Respect is due.

"Planet Claire"

I love this. It's as if Kraftwerk had discovered guitars and cheap science-fiction novels while watching a crime series on American TV. As I've described elsewhere, there are two different groups called the B 52s: this is from their first incarnation as a trashy, beehived suburban punk dance band. It's a stripped-down, bare sound that suggests jerky, geeky dancing at a frat party. As with most of the B 52s' early stuff, it's got this fixation with outer space: "Planet Claire has pink air/All the trees are red/No one ever dies there/No one has a head." Clearly we're not talking Neil Young here, but it's got bags of atmosphere and it just sounds so damn good - it's like you've wandered into the sound effects studio while they're putting the final touches to a Hammer horror film.

"Spooky"

Ain't love grand? You're in a permanent state of nerves, you're paranoid-obsessive, your moods shift wildly, in short, you're unstable. And that's what this song is all about: "You always keep me guessing/And I never seem to know what you are thinking/And if some fella looks at you/It's for sure your little eye will be a-winking/I get confused cause I don't know where I stand/But then you smile, and hold my hand/Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you."
What I enjoy most is the laid-back groove that accompanies the plaintive, disturbed yet uncomplaining lyric. It's as if the guy doesn't mind his torment, and to prove it, he lays down a jazzy, easy-listening, West Coast tune, the sort of song you might see folks dancing to, but in a very relaxed, swaying sort of way, rather than a dedicated, concentrated frugging.
To be sure, this song is California writ large: it's gently waving palm trees, the scent of sensimilla in the air and a rum punch in your hand. Even the instrumental solo wears dark glasses and too laid-back to hog the spotlight - this is a mood song, pure and simple. I'm not sure it's a love song, though...I'm not sure there's room for that in a song like this.

"Two Princes"

New Year, new crisp, clean sheet to write on. There has been the odd moment when I wonder when I'll run out of SongsWithoutWhich - after all, they do say that all the great tunes have already been written and what's going on now is merely re-arranging the order in which the notes are played.
But having been away for a swift break in Uncle Sam's backyard, I've returned with a head full of songs culled from the hours spent listening to the radio while tooling along President Eisenhower's fine interstate highway system. Let me tell you, sitting in a well-upholstered car while letting I-95 unroll beneath you is a great way to unwind. Kudos to the guy that invented cruise control.
To kick off the year, this is an irrepressible piece of swagger and rhythm that's guaranteed to get your heartrate boosted. The Spin Doctors have sort of come and gone, sadly, but they were a sort of bluesy, rootsy version of the Hothouse Flowers - the same abandoned, freestyle, raucous vocal, the same excellent musicianship and the same heart on the sleeve. You can't help but dance to this song: it's got a serious backbeat, a terrific stop-start rhythm that sucks you right in, and the lyric is all about laying your worldly goods to one side and just opening your heart. The fun part about the lyric is that the alternate lines are just plain old scat, just throwaway lines to emphasize the previous one: "Said one, two princes kneel before you/That what I said now/Princes, princes who adore you/Just go ahead now/One has diamonds in his pockets/That's some bread, now/This one said he wants to buy you rockets/Ain't in his head, now." They kick the song along, give it some weight and give it all its attitude. Happy New Year, y'all.

"Pretty in Pink"

When the film "Pretty in Pink" came out I thought it was just about the coolest thing going - to see kids my age or so having the confidence to follow their own muse, listen to their own music and not follow the fashions. Having endured the fairly rapid succession of fashion fads that swept through the country in the 70s and 80s, I took from the film a sense of validation that it was OK to be somewhat off-beat and have one's own personal style... which has stood me in pretty good stead ever since, right down to the motley collection of songs on this here blog.
For some reason I tend to think of this song as a pair to "I'm in Love with a German Film Star" which appears elsewhere here -- and which, by the way, is probably the most-searched song that leads to SongsWithoutWhich. There's the same sense of vague ennui, aching hipness and worldly unconcern: "All of her lovers all talk of her notes/And the flowers that they never sent/And wasn't she easy/And isn't she pretty in pink/The one who insists he was first in the line/Is the last to remember her name."
It's about posing, about fastening onto an image that you want to project and working towards it, just like the line in "German Film Star" - "sitting in a corner in a perfect pose/Trying not to pose". I like the idea that we all, as kids, had to work so hard to achieve the appearance of what we all come to have naturally much later. I'm not for a moment suggesting we're cooler now than we were back then - most of us probably were cool at some point... but that air of ennui, of world-weariness that we wanted so much back then, comes so easily to us now. And with that, Happy New Year.

"The Green Manalishi"

Before the days of "Rumours" and Stevie Nicks' witchy-woman fetish, Fleetwood Mac was a sharp, sharp blues group with just the faintest trace of psychedelia going on, Peter Green was a thinking fan's guitar hero on a par with Syd Barrett, and songs like "Albatross" were a million miles away from "Don't Stop" or "Go Your Own Way".
I love the barely-contained menace and unsettling paranoid feel of this song. The riff is crunchy, steady, plodding even, like an unstoppable force stalking you up the blind alley of a waking nightmare, there's a cackling echo to add to the Halloween vibe, and an otherworldly howling ever so far down in the mix to make you feel just that little bit more unsettled.
It's a song for obsessives, for depressives, for repressives - chock-full of dysfunction: "Cause you're the Green Manalishi with the two-pronged crown/All my trying is up - all your bringing is down/Just taking my love then slipping away/Leaving me here just trying to keep from following you."
And it's a song that isn't afraid to take on those devils - the extended, spooked instrumental at the end just eats itself up in a frenzy of slow-burning mania, revels in its evils, if you like. You say you've had a bad day? You don't need Daniel Powter, you need this.

"Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End"

There's not nearly enough Beatles in this blog.

If you have a spare afternoon, write a list down of those artists that have substantially, irrevocably and completely changed the nature of popular music. I can come up with about five: Robert Johnson - the touchstone and the source, Elvis - the first taste of the social impact of music and its performers, Hendrix - for bringing the counter-culture into the fold, Eminem - for making music that cut across all manner of social divides, and the Beatles - the ultimate marriage of songwriting and musicianship.
I'm sure that most of us of a certain age can name more Beatles songs than we can songs by any other artist. Most of us can hum or sing along to each one of those songs as well. And for the generation that grew up in the 60s and 70s I don't think you really need to say much more than that. The Beatles redefined songwriting, stretched the boundaries of what was possible more than anyone else. If you think Pink Floyd's tape loops were something new, listen to Revolution No 9. If you think heavy metal was Hendrix's love-child, listen to Helter Skelter. Etc etc.
I'm blogging this suite of songs off the Abbey Road album because it has just about everything in five short minutes. Golden Slumbers is as gorgeous a melody as you could hope to find, a lullaby to moisten the eye and bring a lump to the throat. Carry That Weight is a curious two-part invention that starts off as a football chant, morphs back into Golden Slumbers for a moment and then -- I think -- rocks out before it turns into The End. I say "I think" because I've never owned the CD and so can't tell when one track ends and the other starts...
I'm constantly amazed by the inventiveness, the sheer other-worldiness of the talent involved here. To be able to turn from heart-melting sweetness into downright funk and then, as if it were a throwaway moment, to write one of the greatest lyrics ever: "And in the end/The love you take/Is equal to the love/You make," just takes the breath away.
I know it's not an obvious choice for a Beatles blog, but it's the one that always sits at the back of my mind. Comforting, really.

"I Believe in Father Christmas"

With the music channels all showing variants on the theme of "The Best Christmas Album....Ever!" I've had a good opportunity to review the evidence - from David Bowie and Bing Crosby's "Little Drummer Boy" right through to The Darkness' bit of seasonal Queen-U-Like. And I was right - there is such a tidal wave of tosh released each year. Which means my other top Christmas tune is still this wonderful piece of overblown hymnery by Greg Lake.
I've blogged Emerson, Lake and Palmer already. And this isn't a whole lot different, except that this time the music doesn't drown the vocals. The lyric is what really grabs me.... "They said there'll be snow at Christmas/They said there'll be peace on earth/But instead it just kept on raining/A veil of tears for the virgin's birth." As the song progresses, the pomposity gets ratcheted up until there are two or three full choirs, a phalanx of percussionists, a few orchestras. But at the start, it's a delicate, very seasonal tune.
I like the idea of a song that questions our motives, our cultural habits and our ability to gloss over the unpleasantness that pervades life. I don't always mind being reminded that things aren't wonderful, especially at a time like Christmas, when we're all suddenly bathed in a family-values golden glow. "They said there'll be snow at Christmas/They said there'll be peace on earth/Hallelujah, Noel be it heaven or hell/The Christmas you get you deserve."

"A Fairytale of New York"

It's that time of year. The TV advertisements are reaching deep into our pockets, shaking loose our spare change and selling us images of happiness and enjoyment. We're encouraged to overreach ourselves when it comes to hospitality, generosity and credit, we're subtly told that if we don't indulge ourselves and others to the utmost, we're somehow not taking part in this carnival.
Even the music tries to boost our morale. This is the time of year when the record companies traditionally reach to the very bottom of the barrel for that lowest common denominator that's going to connect with teens and grannies alike. Everything is presented as crisp, clean, shiny and somehow new, as if we hadn't come across this or that particular collection of songs before. I mean, just how many times is Island Records going to repackage Bob Marley's greatest hits?
Christmas songs, too, are insufferable in the main. Each year, we're guaranteed to get any combination of: a pink-cheeked choirboy singing something traditional in an impossibly high, pure voice; a hoary old rock group reaching into their back catalogue; a boy-band or five with something vaguely festive; some teenage apprentice diva; and Cliff Richard.
But once every decade comes along a song that subverts the genre, that transcends the immense pile of crap we have to wade through in search of a decent tune. For me, there are two Christmas songs that rise head, shoulders and torso above the rest. Here's the first.
Who would have thought it? Shane McGowan, a shambling hangover of a man, blessed with the ability to write immense, rabble-rousing yet sweet music; Kirsty MacColl, the unheralded first voice of British song; and the only song that McGowan could have written for Christmas. It's a bitter, bitter sweet argument of a song, remembered through the soft-focus of nostalgia. McGowan's sodden, wandering mumbling contrasts with MacColl's sweet, pure folk tones, like peanut butter with mayonnaise, but together they conjure up romance, sadness, fleeting moments of joy. The lyric time-travels through a doomed relationship: from "When you first took my hand on the cold Christmas Eve/You promised me Broadway was waiting for me" through "You scumbag, you maggot/You cheap lousy faggot/Happy Christmas your arse/I pray God it's our last" to "You took my dreams from me/When I first found you/I kept them with me babe/I put them with my own/Can't make it all alone/I built my dreams around you."
Why does this song lift us? The sweet, sweet music, MacColl's wondrous voice, the rambling, helpless and romantic lyric, they all come together for one eternal moment of sadness that smiles through the pain, the heartbreak, and finds something good to hold onto. And it's the kind of performance that could, in another world, have gone so horribly wrong but here, it simply, beautifully soars.
No bah, no humbug. Just perfect.

"Born in the U.S.A."

I've mentioned this song elsewhere as the great example of how misunderstood a song can be. But for anyone who doesn't remember or wasn't there, this song came out in the middle of the Reagan presidency in the US and was immediately co-opted by all sorts of companies, causes and interests. Even a large part of the general public in America took this song to their hearts as some sort of statement that "We're Number One" - you know, the my-country-right-or-wrong crowd, who stick the finger up to the rest of the world and continue to confuse France with Australia on world maps.
This song is as angry as any I can remember hearing. It was the first really sharp look at the downside of life in the Promised Land: "I got in a little hometown jam/So they put a rifle in my hands/Sent me off to a foreign land/To go and kill the yellow man." So far, this is a story that's been told many times before, but the next verse goes somewhere totally new: "Come back home to the refinery/Hiring man says "Son, if it was up to me"/I go down to see the VA man/He said "Son, don't you understand?" To anyone who remembers how America reacted to Vietnam, there's confusion, pain, heartache, rejection, anger and bewilderment in them there words.
Right there, Springsteen draws a knife along the scar that split America for so many years, and draws a picture of the abandonment of an entire generation. His chorus of "Born in the USA" is ironic, sure, but it's also a cry of pain from the men and women who came home and were rejected by their country: "Down in the shadow of the penitentiary/Out by the gas fires of the refinery/I'm ten years down the road/Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go." We were born here, they're saying, we were just doing our duty. To this day, some Vietnam veterans have never been able to come to terms with being insulted, spat on and abandoned.
And the wicked cynicism of the political class that tried to adopt this song as a statement of pride, as a badge of values, should never be forgotten. Nor, for that matter, should the blind ignorance of those individuals who did the same.

"Walk the Dinosaur"

OK, this is ridiculous. From the very first "Boom, boom, acka-lacka-lacka boom", through the idea of watching cars drive by while on a prehistoric date, right through to the chorus "Open the door/Get on the floor/Everybody walk the dinosaur", this is just plain silly.
But the beat is completely addictive, the song is as tight as a drum, the band are playing their asses off, and it's a total joy to throw yourself around the dancefloor to this song. But I've never managed to reach the same heights of abandon with anything else by Was (Not Was)....
Why is it that you can take two songs with almost identical beats, the same tight musicianship, the same sense of joy and silliness, and one will lift you up to a better place while the other will just leave you cold and flat? Makes no sense.

"Sparks"

Back when rock music was still finding itself, when artists were still stretching their arms and not yet touching the walls of limitation, Pete Townshend dreamed up "Tommy", a rock opera that touched on all manner of subjects but seemed most at home when it was dealing with fame, fortune, acclaim and the isolation that comes with it. Call it the original text for Pink Floyd's "The Wall", if you like.
This is an instrumental track from the album, something that sounds so unlike The Who that when you first hear it you spend an age racking your brains to work out who it could be. After a while, though, it becomes very familiar, that Who guitar sound coming to the fore and Keith Moon's loose, circular drumming driving it all along.
The opening minute, the intro, though, is where this track really does it for me - simple chords, with an echo of screeching feedback in the background: as if someone's just opened a door into a parallel universe and you can't quite take in the magnificence of what's laid before you. Anyone who remembers their first discovery of rock and roll will remember the slightly breathless feeling, the churning in the stomach and the instinctive rsponse to a new rhythm.
And that's the joy of rock's huge history - there's always a new discovery around the corner.

"Find the Cost of Freedom"

Sometimes it's good to strip away the layers of production that go into the making of a song and see what lies beneath - what the components are. Take away the echo, the EQ, the strings, the various washy keyboards that make sure you're not listening to anything like dead air, and what do you have left?
Voices. Maybe a guitar or two as well, to add some counterpoint. But really, there doesn't have to be a lot more.
Here, for example, we have a two-minute song, the first of which is a delicate, intricate dance between two acoustic guitars, two hands picking their way across a bed of thorny roses, the melodies winding in and out of each other.
The second minute is a quite fantastic piece of harmony singing by three guys who probably define close-harmony singing. David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash bring three separate instruments together, lay them one next to the other and create an other-worldly blanket of comfort and strength such that all that you're left with after their voices fade is an aching, echoing silence.
"Find the cost of freedom/Buried in the ground/Mother Earth will swallow you/Lay your body down."
This is the song to play at the end of along day, your personal valediction to the trials and tribulations of the last 24 hours, your shrugging off of the cloak of care.

"Wonderwall"

I've come to love this song. Not because it says anything, but precisely because it doesn't say anything. Listen to it! It's swarming with frustration, bursting with unfulfilled eloquence. The music is perfect, an open-goal for someone with something serious to say, something that drills right down to the diamond-hard essence, the truth.... of something. But for all the wonderful hard work in setting up the song for a moment of lyrical clarity, the whole construct just falls short - its reach can't match its ambition. Perhaps the best line in the song is: "There are many things that I would like to say to you/But I don't know how." Exactly.
This is a song for the emotionally repressed. Every individual line is great - it's just that they don't make up a whole that's larger than the sum of their parts. Every line is leading somewhere, but the journey suddenly stops, cut off in its prime. It's as if we know what we feel but we can't find a way to express it. As if emotion and communication have become completely disconnected. The song, the melody speak of something intense, personal - right up there with "Unfinished Sympathy" - and just like The Verve, the lyric can't keep up. It promises so much more that it can deliver.
And perhaps that's why I like this song so much. It's forever reaching, striving for something that we have just lost the habit of accessing.

"Held Up Without a Gun"

Once in a while Bruce Springsteen goes a little crazy. If you've ever seen him live, you'll know what I mean. He'll take one of his faster-paced songs and, to put it politely, he'll tear the living crap out of it.
But what happens when the default take of a song is already nuts-crazy-bastard out of control? Then you have this song. Originally recorded as part of the sessions for "The River", this song has been one of his live favorites and after one listen you're easily persuaded why. It starts at 100 miles an hour and never lets up for one second. You're thrown headlong into cacophony, the drums splashing joyfully alongside the guitars and brass, galloping breathlessly in every direction while Bruce shouts over the top in his best hog-caller's hoot. There's even a micro-instrumental break that must have taken about ten seconds to organise.
The whole thing sounds like a frat party, a night out on the town: "Now it's a sin and it oughta be a crime/You know it happens buddy all of the time/Try to make a living try to have a little fun/You get held up without a gun." At the end you're left exhausted, shaking, feeling the sweat prickle through your pores; and you've just been sitting down.

"Ebben, andro lontano"

I had the very great fortune to live in Paris for a year in 1984-5, when the second new wave of French cinema was going on. I spent a fair amount of time in darkened rooms watching "Subway", "Betty Blue", re-runs of "Diva", just drinking in the visual style and the matchless "cool".
I remember the first time I watched "Diva", and the first time I heard this aria. Now, when it comes to emotion and despair, I have always tended to believe that blues is the appropriate medium in which to express one's feelings. But watching and hearing Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez perform this not once, not twice, but at least five times throughout the film, I came away with renewed respect for opera, and indeed classical music.
I don't suppose I can discuss this aria in the same way I blog about popular songs, but, hell, it's all there in the voice. The sense of oblivion, emptiness, fear, and sheer pain. There's no out-of-control wailing; no raw, hoarse, rasping whisper of an utterly drained spirit. Instead, there's a pure, soaring voice that climbs further and further, as if making the desperate climb to the top of the mountain before hurling ones self off the edge of the precipice. The pain gathers momentum, the sadness encompasses all until with a final, incredible, defiant note, all turns to darkness. I defy you to hear this and not have to comb down the hairs on the back of your neck afterwards.

"Hanging Around"

There was punk, and there was menace. On the one hand you had a bunch of snotty kids who'd flashed on an attitude, a wardrobe and three chords; and on the other, you had musicians who were already there, already making music with an edge and who really were punk. While the Sex Pistols threw out streams of word-association calculated to outrage (think "Holidays in the Sun"), the Stranglers were already knee-deep in the filth ("Down in the Sewer", "London Lady"), producing tales of real life, delivered without hyperbole or facial tics. Four guys who'd seen it all, thought it all and who really didn't have to make it up.
The gulf between snotty-kid punk and grown-up punk was never wider than when Dave Greenfield cranked up his keyboards and started throwing warp-speed arpeggios in our faces ("Grip"), or when Hugh Cornwell uncurled his lip and showed John Lydon, Joe Strummer et al what a real sneer sounded like.
The intro to this song must be one of the most thrilling ones in rock - a jittery scrape along the strings of a guitar, a nervous, speed-fuelled slash across the face of all the pretenders who were only throwing shapes. The Stranglers were the real street-fighting men.

"Ca Plane Pour Moi"

Most of us probably first met punk rock when the Sex Pistols and the Bromley Contingent were slouched all over a talk-show, casually outraging the bourgeoisie and causing high blood pressure in suburbia. Then we were aurally assaulted with "God Save the Queen" during the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations, and everything just grew from there.
For me, the fascination of punk stopped when this song came out. Oh yes, I was still a fan, bought countless records and rejoiced in the new freedom of expression and studied amateurism that punk ushered in. But when this song hit the charts I figured the party was over.
It's not that this is a bad song, but it's so clearly a cartoon, a Left Bank intellectual's attempt at being outrageous, that it fails to be "punk" by a margin as wide as the Channel. It's funny, for all that, to hear French street slang chanted over the top of a completely banal wall of guitars. And what self-respecting punk would ever have done that "oooo-weeeee-oooo" in the chorus?
The best part is that Plastic Bertrand isn't even French: like all the best things Francophone - Tintin, Maigret, Eddy Merckx, Front 242 - he's Belgian.

"Creep"

This is another blog about a moment, a precious instant when a song rises out of the category of "very special" and into something akin to "immortal". "Creep" is already a fantastic song; the jagged shards of guitar that lead into the chorus are just...perfect, while the lyrics are a painful trip back to the days of youth and awkwardness and self-loathing.
But when Thom Yorke's voice rises away from his falsetto "She's running out again" and grows, stretches and reaches into a gaping, howling scream of pain, the song has suddenly burst the banks of earthbound majesty and headed into the ethereal. That moment, that fraction of all the pain we're ever going to feel, is so perfectly-expressed that we're left open-mouthed, willing the moment to repeat itself.
I know it's a sin to try to boil down a band's entire work into one song, or even one moment of one song, but if Radiohead are ever remembered, then they'll surely be remembered for the moment Thom Yorke unzipped his innermost agony and scattered it over this song like solar dust.

"Shout!"

I'm a fan of lists. You know, the kind of lists you read in music magazines, or watch on Channel 4: the Top Twenty Greatest whatevers... I enjoy the discussions these lists invariably provoke and the passionate advocacy they generate. And after all, this whole blog is my ultimate list.
I've already mentioned a couple of songs that I think have the greatest intros - Hendrix's "Ezy Ryder" and the Stones' "Gimme Shelter" - but I've so far steered clear of mentioning what I think are some of the great guitar solos. You could suggest Joe Walsh's epic solo on "Hotel California", Billy Gibbons' tear-stained wailing on "Rough Boy", Stevie Ray Vaughan's stupendous "Scuttlebuttin'" and probably any number of others, but I'm going to go for this one as a first entry.
Tears for Fears don't exactly say "guitar solo", do they? But if you happen across one of the many different remixes of this song, you'll come across one of the simplest, most elegant, yet powerful guitar solos it has been my pleasure to hear. It arrives out of nowhere, like the crack of a whip, and forces everything else to one side, insistent, very plain in sound, yet commanding your attention. It's vaguely martial, a stately-paced moment, like catching glimpse of a funeral procession from the window of a passing car, and then it's gone, overtaken by the chorus that marches back into view, a solid, angry block of stone.
You have to want to listen to this song, to feed from it, derive your strength to carry on. There's no bright-eyed impenetrable optimism here, yet it's a song of solidarity, of shared experience and understanding; a song that holds us all together for a moment.

"City of New Orleans"

Believe it or not, America was once a place of romance, an endless horizon of hope, anticipation, dreams and fulfilment. Ronald Reagan understood this better than most people and his homely, down-to-earth charisma, his harking back to a simpler, happier age managed to lull the people of the US into a semi-coma of nostalgia while all around the wars, the corruption and lies tore the heart out of the 1980s and set the stage for all that has come since.
This song might as well have been used by Reagan as a sort of soundtrack to the kind of America he longed for and made people long for as well. A simple, rusty, rhythmic ode to the age of Kerouac, drifters and hobos: "All along the southbound odyssey/The train pulls out at Kankakee/Rolls along past houses, farms and fields/Passin' trains that have no names/Freight yards full of old black men/And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles."
The images come to life slowly, easily, powerfully and you feel the seductive pull of the simplicity of a life spent riding the rails, an age when the railway was the height of ambition, the most exciting thing to small-town American, with its long list of waypoints, destinations and simple pleasures: "And the sons of pullman porters/And the sons of engineers/Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel/
Mothers with their babes asleep/Are rockin' to the gentle beat/And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel."
Yet even then, the typhoon of progress was being felt even in the heart of the heartland: "And all the towns and people seem/To fade into a bad dream/And the steel rails still ain't heard the news/The conductor sings his song again/The passengers will please refrain/This train's got the disappearing railroad blues."
It's a simple celebration, this song; a modest elegy, tender and very rose-tinted. And sometimes those pleasures need to taste just a little bitter among the sweetness.

"Cuyahoga"

I spent a week once at Little Bighorn, the site of Custer's Last Stand - the final flourish of the Indian nations before they bent to the white man's yoke and were shuttled out of existence. The battle was never properly documented and not one American soldier survived, and so the only accounts of it are pieced together from rumor, Indian pictograms and more recent forensic research.
When you walk the battlefield, waving your hands among the tall grasses that wash past you like waves, rising and falling with the breeze, you feel the ghosts, the souls who were never properly laid to rest in the fury of the battle. Stone markers denote the passage of battle, anonymous gravestones, single ones at first, then in ones and twos until finally, at the end of the bluff, you face a black iron fence that surrounds a cluster of forty or so markers, the soldiers who made it to the last stand. And in the middle, inlaid with black, is Custer's grave, the last great American "martyr" to their unjust cause.
So passed the American Indian - or should we say "Native American": that is, the ones who were there first, who got railroaded, cheated, force-marched, swindled, lied to, subverted, massacred and finally reservationed, stripped of dignity by the greedy, hungry, lustful, covetous, blind sons and daughters of Europe. "Let's put our heads together/And start a new country up/Our father's father's father tried, erased the parts he didn't like," sings Michael Stipe. "This is where they walked, swam, hunted, danced and sang/Take a picture here, take a souvenir."
As an indictment of the devastation, the genocide the American people wrought, this is not an angry song; it's a gentle, left-field lament for the innocent and a long, sad look at the savage ignorance that followed in the wake of the continental "clearance" - a reference to the pollution that caused the Cuyahoga river to literally burn in the late 1960s - but most of all, it's a timely reminder of the ignorant wickedness that was committed. "Rewrite the book and rule the pages, saving face, secured in faith/Bury, burn the waste behind you."

"Rednecks"

If you're any sort of music anorak, you'll probably know about the musical "argument" that Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd had in the 70s on the subject of the Southern states of the US. Neil Young wrote "Southern Man", in which he sang: "I saw cotton and I saw black/Tall white mansions and little shacks/Southern man when will you pay them back?/I heard screaming and bullwhips cracking/How long? How long?" Pretty passionate stuff.
Skynyrd decided they'd reply to this blast in their own idiom, so they created "Sweet Home Alabama": "Well, I heard Mister Young sing about her/Well, I heard ole Neil put her down/Well, I hope Neil Young will remember/A southern man don't need him around anyhow." To his eternal credit, Neil Young enjoyed the response and said it was a better song than his.
Now that was a polite exchange of views. But how is anyone supposed to respond to this? "We got no-necked oilmen from Texas/And good ol' boys from Tennessee/And college men from LSU/Went in dumb, come out dumb too/Hustlin' 'round Atlanta in their alligator shoes/Gettin' drunk every weekend at the barbecues." Randy Newman really doesn't leave a lot of room for a snappy retort in whatever he writes. He ups the agenda to the point where the soft-skinned liberal politically-correct folk get so aerated they can't even formulate a decent reply: "We're rednecks, we're rednecks/We don't know our ass from a hole in the ground/We're rednecks, we're rednecks/We're keeping the niggers down." The southern folks just go a deeper shade of red and put another couple of Dixie flags on the front porch. Meanwhile the rest of the world gets a belly laugh out of the whole thing.

"They Don't Know"

Let's go back to our teenage years, to the time when everything that happened to us as happening for the first time. Each experience was a huge step forward: bigger, wider and more important then the one before, each lesson learned had its impact immediately, and our first steps along the winding path called love was a wide-eyed, breathless, heady experiment in being grown-up. Remember how important it all seemed? How much each kiss, each promise mattered?
Along with Nick Lowe's "Tonight", Kirsty MacColl's "They Don't Know" must rank as one of the simplest, purest expressions of teenage love: so clear, fresh and pure that it could never be sullied by the kind of relationship dysfunction we all develop or uncover as we grow. The relentless carefree optimism, the certainty, the commitment, all those things that we've cast aside later in our lives as the demands of adulthood start playing with our priorities, shine so brightly through Kirsty's pure, ringing voice, her almost melancholy tone: "You've been around for such a long time now/Or maybe I could leave you but I don't know how/And why should I be lonely every night/When I can be with you, oh yes you make it right."
As with the Nick Lowe song, the songwriting is as simple and as elegant as it could ever get, but the honesty, the brilliance means you could never laugh, only smile with the nostalgia, the remembrance of a better time. "No I don't listen to their wasted lines/Got my eyes wide open and I see the signs/But they don't know about us/And they've never heard of love." It's a Sixties song, a bubble-gum song from an age of innocence, something to warm our hearts in this cold world.

"Mohammed's Radio"

It's not just religion that's the opiate of the masses these days. In fact religion's long gone as a manipulator and a muscle relaxant of any influence. What do we have instead? It depends on the culture, I suspect, but in the developed world, it's going to be popular culture, be it radio, television, newspapers, you name it. From New York to Tokyo the kids will be tuning in to MTV and getting all their references, their wardrobes, their slang updated. But what about those places where religion places more restrictions on what people are allowed to see?
Go anywhere in the Middle East or northern Africa and all you hear is radios. Hanging from the rear-view mirror of a taxi, leaning against the mirror in the barbershop, propped up against the open doorway. Cranked up till their tiny speakers overload, they broadcast a mix of keening music, frothing diatribes against the Great Satan, the call to prayer. They're the mouthpieces of the state, the cracking whip of the clerics and the closest thing most people in that part of the world get to MTV or anything nearly as exciting.
Not only is radio the placebo, but it's the virus: American learned early on in its engagement with the rest of the world that media was a great way to get its message across. Hence this song: "Everybody's restless and they've got no place to go/
Someone's always trying to tell them/Something they already know/So their anger and resentment flow." But then comes the warm rush of calm, of insidious guilty pleasure: "But don't it make you want to rock and roll/All night long/Mohammed's Radio/I heard somebody singing sweet and soulful/On the radio, Mohammed's Radio."
One can only wonder at how the warm flow of sweet music and soft, caressing reassurances can calm the restless spirit, the yearning soul. And how simple it is, has been, to sneak in a message of hope and revolution among the crowded airwaves.

"Government Cheese"

Protest songs aren't often properly angry. And when I say angry, I mean properly spitting with rage. I can think of plenty of songs that "raise concerns" or "express disapproval", but it's not often that you run into a sing like "War", one that's sung with as much wrath as conviction.
I've blogged the Rainmakers before, and noted that they're considerably more literate and eloquent than your average band, and this song just rams that point home: "Give a man a free ticket on a dead end ride/And he'll climb in the back even though nobody's driving/Too Goddamned lazy to crawl out of the wreck/And he'll rot there while he waits for the welfare check/Going to hell in a handbag, can't you see/I ain't gonna eat no Government Cheese."
You'd be forgiven for thinking this is a neo-conservative rant and, to be honest, I'm not 100% sure it isn't. But for those who take an interest in these things, it seems just a little too easy to pigeon-hole this. Bob Walkenhorst writes too cleverly, sings too passionately to take this at face value. "Give a man a free lunch and he'll figure out a way/To steal more than he can eat 'cause he doesn't have to pay/Give a woman free kids and you'll find them in the dirt/Learning how to carry on the family line of work."
It's an unpleasant, in-your-face song; Walkenhort virtually screeches some of the lyrics while the beat just keeps coming like a particularly ponderous hammer-drill. Yet I'm left thinking by this song, trying to work out just where he stands, what he really believes, despite the heavy-handed message. Is it just a hoax? Are they messing with our heads?
Knowing something of the Rainmakers' background, the only lines that ring true, that seem to come from the heart, are: "It's the man in the White House, the man under the steeple/Passing out drugs to the American people." Funny how Marx made it all the way to Kansas.

"Running On Empty"

I feel a little awkward about posting this song. It's one of those songs that I first heard as a teenager, something that seemed to encapsulate just about everything I felt at the time - alienated, confused, in search of something - and it has stayed with me to this day. "Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels/I don't know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels/I look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through/Looking into their eyes I see them running too."
It wasn't appropriate for that time and age, and I've slowly realised it's more appropriate now, a song about hitting a wall of realisation on all sorts of levels. "Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive/Trying not to confuse it with what you do to survive/In sixty-nine I was twenty-one and I called the road my own/I don't know when that road turned onto the road I'm on."
Jackson Browne seems to have led that sort of life - the sort of life where you get caught up in the here and now to such an extent that you don't get a chance to step back and regain a sense of perspective; and if you do, it's not always a pretty sight. It can feel a bit desperate at times: "I'd love to stick around but I'm running behind/You know I don't even know what i'm hoping to find/Running into the sun but I'm running behind."
This is another one of those "testify" songs that we all hide somewhere in our life or home, and when we're alone we bring it out and let ourselves feel vulnerable. Like the old Latin saying, "Quis Custodiet Custodes Ipsos? (Who Will Watch the Watcher?), we all need a moment of safety when we don't have to be grown-up, but we don't often find that person who'll play the role of grown-up while we're goofing off.

"Harvest for the World"

It's not often in my limited experience that soul music has tried to deal with "issues". For every "What's Goin On" there must be ten thousand "Summer Breezes". And both songs are truly excellent. But when I think of soul music, I'm not thinking about social commentary or protest songs. Which is probably why the aforementioned Marvin Gaye song and this particular track always stick in my mind.
Maybe the message is made more seductive by the fabulous dance track beneath. Maybe it's the Isley Brothers' voices - right up there with Stevie Wonder's - that make it an insistent pleasure, a song that you can't help but move to. And the lyric - so simple, so clear, so powerful: "All babies together/Everyone a seed/Half of us are satisfied/Half of us in need/Love’s bountiful in us/Tarnished by our greed/Oh, when will there be/A harvest for the world."
Whatever the reason, this song works: it's one of the great almost-protest songs, a heartfelt plea sung so wonderfully that it's always been a SongWithoutWhich.

"Shake Some Action"

Before I started to write this blog, I googled the song and found a version by Cracker that, while being good, doesn't really add anything to the original. And that sort of derailed my train of thought and led me into what might become dangerously like a rant.
I appreciate the curiosity and dedication that leads bands to find these old treasures, and I also agree with them that some songs are so good that you have to revive them, bring them to a whole new audience.
But having said that, I'm left with a question: have all the best songs already been written? Will we ever see another Beatles, another Kraftwerk, another Hendrix, people who shake up the preconcieved notions of what can constitute a good song?
These people were true revolutionaries who just about started afresh. Anyone who's heard "Dear Prudence" or "Third Stone from the Sun" or "Autobahn" must surely see the fault line, the literal point of departure for a whole new interpretation of popular song.
And the grumpy old man in me looks at the charts today, sees the preponderance of cover versions, the relative lack of songwriting talent that's being given a chance to flower, and just gets depressed. Every freshly-airbrushed pop moppet that's had a hit, has had that hit on the back of someone else's work thirty years ago.
Sure, the music industry has had to embrace efficiency and cost-cutting like every other industry, but to this extent? Warming over great music and presenting it as new?
So I did rant. And I really didn't want use the Flamin' Groovies' finest moment to rant. They deserve so much better. This song came out in the early 70s, a sort of throwback to melodic pop-rock during the afterglow of the late 60s that threw up glitter rock, etc. There are nods to the Beatles, the Stones, it's pure pop. I came across it around the same time as Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds were leading the pub-rock explosion, and it fits in there just right: this is a song for a raucous, jumping back-room gig. It's an original.

"Lawyers, Guns & Money"

Some things we do are bad ideas, from the very moment we think of them, through the initial burst of enthusiasm, and the hungover, dry-mouthed aftermath..... "I went home with a waitress/The way I always do/How was I to know/She was with the Russians too?"
There are people out there who make a career out of these gut-wrenchingly, catastrophically wrong choices. The guy who agrees to carry the package through customs; the teenager who can't pass an open window; the hipster in his Porsche who thinks he can fit through that tiny gap between the truck and the school bus. "I'm the innocent bystander/But somehow I got caught/Between a rock and a hard place/And I'm down on my luck."
There's the white-collar criminal whose dream of one big score has just gone up in flames, or the would-be strongman who plans a coup: "And I'm hiding in Honduras/I'm a desperate man/Send lawyers guns and money/The shit has hit the fan."
And then there's the smug idiot who knows all the time he's doing the wrong thing, making the wrong choice, and when it's all played out and he's flat out busted: "Send lawyers, guns and money/Dad, get me out of this!"
Once in a while, it's worth remembering that there but for the grace of God.....

"Tunnel of Love"

A versatile man, Bruce Springsteen. He's written great big wide-screen soap operas, Everyman anthems for youth, scared and lonely vignettes from the dusty edges of the American Dream. Now he's growing up, feeling the invulnerability of youth give way to a crazed mirror of doubt as he struggles with the same feelings that he was so sure of just a few years earlier.
It starts so easily, as it always has done....."Fat man sitting on a little stool/Takes the money from my hand while his eyes take a walk all over you/Hands me the ticket, smiles and whispers "Good luck"/Well now cuddle up angel, cuddle up my little dove/And we'll ride down into this tunnel of love."
But it's not long before the cracks appear: "I can feel the soft silk of your blouse/And them soft thrills in our little fun house/Then the lights go out and it's just the three of us/You me and all that stuff we're so scared of." And anyone who's been there, who's taken the journey from laughter and simplicity to bewilderment and anxiety, knows just what he means. It takes some sort of genius to boil it all down to that feeling we all experience, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, with our fears and lack of answers yawning wide before us: "There's a room of shadows that gets so dark brother/It's easy for two people to lose each other/In this tunnel of love."
And Bruce isn't above a little complaint either. "It ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough/Man meets woman and they fall in love/But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough/And you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above/If you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love." So true, so open, so raw. If loves starts out so well, so optimistic and confident, he seems to be asking, what happens to take us from there to here?

"Open Your Heart"

Opinions are sharply divided about the 80s and the music that decade brought us. For some, it began with a sartorial car-crash and only got worse - think Steve Strange, for example. Musically, it was the apogee of the transistor, the era when electronics made it possible for anyone to make music as long as they had enough time to learn how to program a drum machine.
For others, it was liberation, fun, freedom of expression, the works. Men wore makeup, women found new and more exciting ways in which to back-comb their hair and the ozone layer staggered under the weight of all the extra CFCs we sprayed on our heads.
To me, the Human League were the 80s. Maybe because they seemed to do it better than anyone else, marrying the image with the music so well. When the first few New Romantic singles began to make an impact ("Are "Friends" Electric?", for example), the whole scene seemed to be cold, distant, slow and ponderous. But then the Human League brought it all down to a more human (sic) level, their songs imbued with real emotions, real soap-opera dramas.
This is my favourite song of theirs; the sympathy, the solidarity, the killer chorus, the sheer force of emotion overcoming the cold, robotic, computer-perfect music. It doesn't hurt that the drum machines drive the song along at a clattering pace, that Phil Oakey's voice just about holds onto the song, and that the lyric was just made for lifting spirits: "And if you can pass the test/You know your worst is better than their best." A little bit of stardust among all the calculation.

"Sympathy for the Devil"

A while ago I blogged the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" and likened it to a force of nature, a fire that consumed the old order and ushered in something new and dangerous. This could well be part of the same process.
There's no subtlety here: Jagger-as-Satan assumes responsibility for the critical moments in human history, from the crucifixion right through to the assassination of John F Kennedy, with a long-suppressed sense of pride, as if the time has come for him to be acclaimed, accepted and even thanked.
The music is suitably diabolical too: what seems to start as a call from the depths of the jungle, a witch-doctor's lunatic chant gives way to an irresistible tribal dance, as if all civilisation has broken down and mankind is forced back to his basest instincts, bodies leaping around a fire built of old bones and old rules: "I stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was a time for a change/Killed the Tzar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain/I rode a tank, held a general's rank when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank/I watched with glee while your kings and queens fought for 10 decades for the gods they made/I shouted out "Who killed the Kennedys?" when after all it was you and me."
If I had to pick another song that came close to the feeling, the emotion that this song extracts, it would be Primal Scream's "Moving on Up". Liberation, anarchy, fear, power, it's all here. Possibly Jagger and Richards' finest moment.

"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.