"Police On My Back"

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

"The Rain Song"

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

"This Is the Sea"

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

"It's About Time"

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

"Funny How"

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

"Parklife"

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

"Synchronicity II"

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

"No Sell Out"

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

"Heart As Big as Liverpool"

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

"Here Comes the Flood"

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

"Hello It's Me"

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

"Kamikaze"

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

"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"

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

"Das Boot"

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

"Calypso"

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

"Sit Down"

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

"Snake Oil"

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

"Go Your Own Way"

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

"Down at the Doctor"

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

"Love Me Two Times"

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