"Dancing The Night Away"

Pub rock.
C'mon, you know. Dr Feelgood. Eddie & the Hot Rods. Brinsley Schwartz. Ducks Deluxe. Kursaal Flyers.
No? You don't? Then you can't be just the wrong side of 50 years of age, then. And from north London.
If ever a musical genre belonged to a particular place and time, it was pub rock. A scruffy rebellion against the (somewhat) cheesy low-rent camp of glam rock, and not quite marginal enough for those who became punks. We're probably talking about a two-year phenomenon from 1973 to 1975, before Malcolm MacLaren found a way to splice the whole New Yorks Dolls/Suicide/Television strand with simplified pub rock, and a lead singer to sell it to the masses.
Punk historians (and there are a few of them) claim that punk was all about tearing down the self-important bloated carcasses of prog rock and disco, but really, that process was begun with bands like Dr Feelgood, who hooked themselves all the way back to the R&B era, and gave it a wax-job of 1970s depression. Lee Brilleaux, Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds probably did more to puncture the egos of the likes of Emerson, Lake and Palmer than John Lydon ever did.
Listen to the track, possibly the finest piece of airbrushed pub rock there was. A gorgeous riff, a positively glam-rock chantalong chorus, and yete, and yet, you can't shake the impression that this was born in the back rooms at the Hope & Anchor one fuggy night in October.
While the Feelgoods and even Ian Dury were busy being forensically authentic (and I use that term with reverence) pub rockers, the Motors were all about being chart-friendly, casting one envious eye at the sort of teen adulation their forebears had enjoyed, rather than the cynical, faux-grudging acceptance that was about to become the hallmark of punk. And they clearly absorbed all the right lessons. This is a power pop classic, with just enough grit to keep it honest.
Such a good song, in fact, that Cheap Trick were driven to cover it. And if that's not a seal of approval I don't know what is.

"Fooled Around And Fell In Love"

One of the pitfalls of being a Rock Snob is that you really think you know it all. And when you combine that with a gadfly mind in which every field of your knowledge is an inch deep and a mile wide, there is so much scope for error.
For example, if someone were to bring up the topic of the mid sixties flourish of progressive music, I'd jump right in and start yammering on about obscure releases on the Harvest label, not having done the requisite research to know that Harvest was only launched in 1969, or that prog rock really only took off around the same time. More than once I've wished I could crawl into a hole and die as my utter amateurism was ruthlessly exposed. There may actually be some bands or genres where I know my stuff, but as time and experience have passed, I've learned to be circumspect about claiming any expertise. Still doesn't stop me from making a total fool of myself from time to time.
This song has always been familiar to me: it's a staple on radio in the States, it's got a fantastic white soul vocal, a fantastic guitar solo, and it just swings oerfectly. I love the fact that it starts as if it's going to be something vaguely middle of the road, something easy, until the voice joins in and we're taken to another plane. The harmonies, the Hammond organ, it's all perfect.
So for the last 35 years I've always thought that Elvin Bishop was one of the great lost vocal talents of our times. On this record he sounds like Paul Rodgers' long-lost twin brother; just like Rodgers, he pushes his voice just to the point where it's about to fall apart, but no further, in exactly the way Rod Stewart didn't. Not that I dislike Stewart's voice - but they're different instruments.
Back to the Rock Snobbism. Imagine my surprise when in preparing to blog this song, I discover that Elvin Bishop's the guitarist, and that Mickey Thomas is the singer. You getting some heat from the screen as you're reading this? That's nothing to the heat coming off my cheeks, let me tell you.
Anyway, I put two and two together and went off in search of my copy of Jefferson Starship's "Freedom At Point Zero" album, where Mickey Thomas sings on "Jane" and Lord, his voice is just as good there. Maybe he's been to the requisite hard rock singer school where they teach you to reach those really high notes (think Ian Gillan on "Child in Time" from the "Made in Japan" album - dogs will come running), and maybe he's lost a little of the soul that he has on "Fooled Around", but it is so clearly the same voice. And you can also see how Mickey Thomas made such a good replacement for Grace Slick.
Sorry. I'm meant to be blogging a song, but it seems now that I'm doing a Mickey Thomas appreciation. Take a look at his page on Allmusic.com and look at the artists he's performed with. Perversely, I sort of wish he'd tarted himself around a bit more; there are so many songs I can imagine he'd have sung so well.

"Wichita Lineman"

One of the questionable benefits of 24-hour mass media (of all kinds) is that we are never more than a keystroke or away from our heroes. We can watch them, *consume* them if you like, whenever the spirit moves us. Want to know where Rihanna left her clothes last night? Look! Here's a picture of her dressing room floor. Was that one of Dire Straits I walked past on Dulwich High Street last night? Oh here, yes it was, here he is on Facebook (some details have been changed to protect the innocent).

As this new age of connectivity spreads far and wide, it will absorb ever more details, it will log more "appearances" and "sightings", and it will store ever more photographic evidence. Hurried phone camera pictures, fragments of German supermarket tabloid reports, gossip website entries.

Face it, we're going to grow up right next to our heroes, online. We'll be able to check ourselves out in the mirror every morning as we grow up and older, and then check *them* out to compare. We'll be able to pick up anti-ageing tips, fashion ideas, all perfectly appropriate for our age group. We already follow blogs, tweets and Facebook updates: we're living their lives too! At some point we'll have to draw the line. Somewhere around Tommy Lee, I hope.

One of the sadder parts of being so well-connected is that we learn many things that we wish we hadn't. I read a feature about Glen Campbell not long ago, in which he talked about the onset of Alzheimer's Disease and how he has made one more album as his farewell to the business.

It made me think of Brian Wilson and Johnny Cash: the first because he's been a wounded songbird for so very long; the latter because he decided not to "go gently into that good night." These are, were, old men, old in precisely the way Paul McCartney or Mick Jagger aren't, or at least, don't appear to be. Does that make sense? We're not conditioned to think of Paul McCartney as "old". He still *looks* young, dammit. Mick Jagger may have a couple hundred more lines on his face now, but we still think of him as the prancing, preening live-wire.

The difference is, I think, that we haven't been treated to the sort of performances from Jagger and McCartney that suggest their age. We've seen Brian Wilson looking vaguely vacant at the keyboard while performing the "Smile" album, and we've squirmed in our seat, maybe. We've seen the video for Johnny Cash's electric version of "Hurt" and it's as plain as day that he was an old, ill man when he made that last clip.

Cash excepted, who grows old gracefully in musical terms? Bluesmen, maybe. B.B. King may be ancient, but he still looks as merry and full of life at 86 as he did thirty years ago. He may not move much, but he can still wring that guitar's neck. Jazz musicians can grow old gracefully too; look at Herbie Hancock.

But these artists choose to continue performing - they feel they can still hack it and often, they can. But does an artist really ever "retire"? Usually they're "retired" and when I say "retired" I mean Joplin/Hendrix/Morrison "retired". Or Buddy Holly/Stevie Ray Vaughan/Duane Allman "retired".

Maybe retirement from the music business is reserved for those that could walk away, for whom it wasn't enough, for whom it was too much, or who found it wasn't worth it any more. For every artist who's been performing in their 60s and later, there must be several hundred who left in their 30s.

None of this has anything to do with why "Wichita Lineman" is in my list of SongsWithoutWhich. It's here because of the ineffable romance of long straight roads that go nowhere for ever. It's here for the casual, absurdly conversational line "I know I need a small vacation/But it don't look like rain", and for the shattering, pained, utterly gorgeous line "And I need you more than want you/And I want you for all time."

But most of all, it's for the almost unnoticeable vocal trill that can just about be heard when Campbell sings "is still on the line" in the chorus. It's little things like that which make a sing perfect.

"I'm In Love With a German Film Star"

I make no apologies for repeating some of the songs that were first featured, oh, a lifetime ago. When I started out doing SongsWithoutWhich, I was more interested in creating lists, in just getting through my collection of songs as fast as possible, adding only the briefest of comments. In the intervening seven years (sevenfuckingyears? holycow) as you might observe, the style has loosened up a little, and the content wanders all over the place, which is, of course, just fine. But many of the first hundred or so songs I blogged are deserving of more... consideration. Or at least a longer ramble.

Since this blog started we've had Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, the Blogger vs Wordpress debate, several wars, a few hundred natural disasters and two (or is it three?) recessions. Since this blog started, we've had some good music created. And some really, really bad music. I suppose it's customary for every generation to discuss the Infinite Monkeys Theory and try to establish whether we have, in fact, experienced all the good tunes. Of course, that's a preposterous suggestion. I mean, there are notes out there that nobody (with the possible exception of Hendrix) has even tried to play yet. So we're good for another fifty-odd years, right?

Most of the songs I've put up here are in my list because they're great tunes, wonderful lyrical confections, or because they just make me Feel Something. They're outside time, if you like. But others are here, in part, because they are intimately connected with a particular place, a particular time. I can't listen to "Electricity" by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark without being transported back to a dark, chrome-and-plastic emporium near Leicester Square where, with a couple of friends from school, I would spend hours Trying To Be Cool. Failed dismally, of course, but that song seems to chronicle the depths of adolescent insecurity for me.

*This* song is another such. The moment the opening chords gently loom out of the speakers, I'm taken to a damp apartment in Paris, where I spent a year studying and pretending to be a writer. I remember this song being in heavy rotation on a local station (95.2 FM, it was) and I liked it so much I recorded it off the radio onto a flaky mix tape. I seem to remember this track segued into "Rock & Roll Girls" by John Fogerty. Hey, that's just the way it fell.

There are a whole slew of songs that I still enjoy from that year, most of them French: "Dans la Rue" by Polnareff, "Tombe Pour La France" by Etienne Daho, and in particular, "No Sell Out" by Malcolm X and Keith LeBlanc, and the French version which had old clips of Charles de Gaulle speeches over some fairly anonymous techno stuff. Les Patriotes, I think the group was.

But they all fade into relative obscurity next to this song. This is so studied, so rehearsed, so....artificial. And for all that it's perfect. The idea of feckless teenagers, or even disaffected 20-somethings, copping poses and attitudes is not new, but it's never been better expressed in a musical medium than this. The vocal is just this side of bored (check), the lyric admires a suitably exotic and foreign artist (check), the song is spare and laid-back (check), with plenty of moody echo (check). If you ever wanted a song that encompassed the whole concept of the teenage search for identity and peer group acceptance, then this is it.

The best part for me is that this song first came out in 1981, while I heard it repeatedly in Paris four years later. Which suggests that the French were not really all *that* when it comes to catching on to something good. Nor was I, for that matter.

"Quark, Strangeness and Charm"

There are more than a few bands who have been fated to occupy the margins for their entire careers. The ones that persevere on the pub and club circuit for years on end, that perhaps accumulate what the music press are pleased to call "a devoted following", but which never quite translate their particular charm and quality into a record contract, widespread acclaim or fame.

Then there are bands who, either by chance, by design or by sheer bloody-mindedness, manage to carve out a successful career without ever troubling the sharp end of the music charts. Maybe they're not mainstream but in fact are very well-regarded in their particular niche, whatever that be. They make records without the aid of a major label, they work their socks off to distribute and promote their work, and they sell enough to make the whole business worthwhile.

i can't work out whether it's easier or more difficult to exist on the fringes of the "mainstream" music business these days. Back in the 1960s and 70s music was a simpler and dare I say it, cheaper business to be in. Bands formed, practiced, recorded a demo and booked themselves gigs in gradually larger and larger venues, until the "business" couldn't ignore them any more.

Nowadays all the work goes on even before a band's sung a note or made an appearance. (Notice I didn't say "played a gig" - nobody in the mainstream seems to "play gigs" any more, just as so few artists seem to be able to play instruments any more. But then I'm old, and I've earned the right to be grumpy.) The stylists are brought in, the publicists and songwriters are hired, the website's set up (or at the very least the URL is reserved), and all before anything like "music" has happened.

And when we *do* get to the music, it's clear 99% of the time that the song and the performer have only the tiniest relationship. It's hard to shake the impression that performers these days (those that don't write their own material, but occasionally even those that do) are merely viewing songs as a means to an end. There's nothing in the song that really needs to be *communicated*: no great idea, no intelligent information, no message.

Look at the top 40 this week. At least 30 songs are about relationships, physical attraction or just overweening egotism. Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, even Billy Bragg might as well have never been born. Even so-called alternative artists are merely oddly-dressed - once they open their mouths you can't tell the difference.

So, in the spirit of grumpiness and with a healthy disregard for music-as-commodity, I offer today a song that comes from a band that for a heroic 42 years, has followed its very own individual path, has had moments of both notoriety and popularity, and has survived because it has always had the resources and the will to do things its way. And continues to this day to have a devoted following.

"Einstein was not a handsome fellow/Nobody ever called him Al/He had a long moustache to pull on, it was yellow/I don't believe he ever had a girl."

As soon as you hear this, you already know we've left the main road and we're out among the tumbleweed.

"Copernicus had those Renaissance ladies/Crazy about his telescope/And Galileo had a name that made his/Reputation higher than his hope/Did none of those astronomers discover/While they were staring out into the dark/That what a lady looks for in her lover/Is charm, strangeness and quark."

It's upbeat, clean-sounding, irrepressible. There's a lack of bass in the sound that suggests that these guys were making a conscious effort to tone it down. Maybe they left the bassist at home. There's no feedback, the drums are positively restrained, it's pop! Who'd have thought it?

And because the subject matter is treated with humour, with intelligence and with .... charm, the whole makes for a very satisfying listen. It's hard to say that about everyone you hear these days.

"Cigarettes and Alcohol"

Machinery is simple. People can be too.

A machine is, at its most basic, a fairly binary application of force. Like a lever. Pressure on one side is translated into pressure on the other. Complicated machines are arrays of simple ones: take the internal combustion engine. A force (the explosion that results from combustion in the cylinder) is applied to the piston, which in turn applies force to another machine, and so on.

As we humans became more sophisticated, we found ways to link ever-increasing numbers of machines together, miniaturising them to the point where the internal combustion engine can be as small as a fingernail. Even computers are nothing more than an immense accumulation of binary machines. 10101 etc etc.

Nostalgists like steam-train enthusiasts wax lyrical about the simplicity, and at the same time, the complexity of the object of their affections. They take pleasure in the engineering developments that turned Stephenson's "Rocket" into the Eurostar. And yet, at the root of their passion is still, always, that simple machine.

When we are very small children, we're exposed to machines in a gentle, cartoonish fashion, like Thomas the Tank Engine, or Cars. We don't understand what a machine represents in terms of physics or engineering, but we're taught that they're harmless, helpful, occasionally recalcitrant, and we vaguely understand that we're in charge of them.

There are times, particularly when the world is in an unusually violent state of flux, when we individual humans can feel like machines at the heart of a much bigger, much more complicated one. What with Libya, Syria, Eurodebt, wars, Tea Parties and the like, the world feels like an immense whirling cloud of machines that's spiralling out of control.

And so at times like this we revert to the simple, binary things like finding a quiet spot to drink a tall, cold glass of orange juice, or reading a book that takes us back to a simpler, happier time. When Ronald Reagan talked of the America he knew and understood, he was harking back to a time that his entire generation (and the next three or four) could readily identify with - 5-cent Cokes, Burma Shave advertisement hoardings, casual racism.

So, we come to a simple musical machine: Oasis, who always knew that less/simpler was more.

"Is it my imagination, or have I finally found something worth living for/
I was looking for some action, but all I found was cigarettes and alcohol."

Even the intro: a dull hissing, a careless whistle, and the simplest, the very most basic of guitar riffs, tells you that you're dialling the 21st century right back, stripping away the sheen and the unnecessary treatment that songs today are drowned beneath.

Liam Gallagher's vocal comes across as careless, sloppy even, but it's a statement of intent. No airbrushed American intonations here, no concessions to pop's mainstream, just an honest Mancunian slur. It's simple, it's the machine of communication he uses every day, not the more sophisticated, false one that advisors or PR consultants would have wanted him to use.

Cigarettes and alcohol, too, represent the most basic machine of leisure that we often have in the 21st century. No time to sit back and reflect, no time for contemplation. We have to cram our relaxation into the precious few hours we have between quitting time and bed time - a snatched takeaway and the last tube home.

Honesty demands simplicity and you don't get more honest than this.

I might go as far as to suggest this is the sort of song that Thomas the Tank Engine would have listened to in his rebellious teenage years.

"Lithium"

Marshall MacLuhan was supposed to have said "the medium is the message". Well, I'm not so sure. In this era of spin and presentation, of focus groups and of carefully-crafted diplo-statements that say precisely nothing, or precisely everything depending on the placement of a comma, it's become the norm not to believe what you read, or hear, until someone has helped you work it out.
Back in the day, we took the words of the great and the good at face value. When Churchill said "we shall fight them on the beaches", you knew he had precisely that in mind. When Marie-Antoinette said "Let them eat cake", it was so preposterous that you know she really meant it.
And when the great and the good invoked the name of their, our our, particular deity, our first instinct was to believe that they believed.
These days, the media and an almighty assortment of consultants, spin-doctors, Special Advisors, backroom manipulators and bloggers are on hand to interpret, peel away the chaff and tell us what Churchill *really* meant. Every newscaster finishes his to-camera piece and then turns to the suit at his side with a "So, Bradley, what exactly did Herr Hitler mean?" And Bradley will tell us.
So, on to Nirvana.
All those years ago when I first heard this song, I took it at face value. I thought: "OK, a rather weary, rootless, cynical view of religion and its presentation of itself as a cure-all for the downtrodden." I could imagine a shiftless, bored youth reacting like this after being canvassed by members of his local congregation. They'd say "Come down to church, man. We're not out to sell you anything, just help you get some peace of mind." And he'd mumble an excuse and wander off, thinking "yeah, right".
And that's what this song is. It's a "yeah, right" to religion, a shrug of the shoulders and a dismissive middle finger.
Or at least, that's what I thought it was, in Nirvana's hands.
But to hear the Polyphonic Spree sing it, takes us further, much further into the dark heart, into the Marxian opiate-addled trance.
Where Kurt Cobain mumbles and whines, where his screams of "yeah yeah yeah" in the chorus sound so bored and dismissive, the Spree sound positively diabolical. Where Nirvana's rhythm lumbers from bone-shaking thud to bone-shaking thud, the Spree give the song a lightness that is so such more seductive, and yet so much more menacing.
Maybe it's because they understand that religion, or cults, are at their most dangerous when they're not trying overtly to recruit, but when they're focusing inward on their own membership. It's the take-it-or-leave it nature, the idea that if you're so blind you can't see a good thing by yourself, then we're not interested in you joining our club. *That's* what the Spree does. It has a damn good time performing this song, and if you can't tell what fun it is, then it's clearly not for you.
Both versions of the song say the same things, but whereas Nirvana need an interpreter, a spin-doctor, to convey the full sense of what they're saying, the Polyphonic Spree give you the full Coles Notes with added context for good measure. Maybe there's room for both.

"Etude, Opus 10 No 1"

Virtuosity.

— n , pl -sos , -si
1. a consummate master of musical technique and artistry
2. a person who has a masterly or dazzling skill or technique in any field of activity
3. ( modifier ) showing masterly skill or brilliance: a virtuoso performance

It's an important word in music. To be the master or mistress of your instrument to such an extent that you leave your audience dumbfounded, open-mouthed at your skill.

In popular music, for a long time, there's been a subculture within virtuosity (if I can put it that way) which suggests that if you look like you're working hard, then you're not really that great. So for every rock god that screws his eyes shut, pulls faces, adopts the legs-apart stance and wields his axe like it was a broadsword, there's a "proper" muso hunched over his fretboard, poker-faced like Robert Fripp, just getting on with the business of being really, really good.

Ah, some of you might say, but the whole posing, facial expressions and whatnot are just a manifestation of an Artistic Temperament. It's the Artist Getting Into His Work.

And that may be. I mean, Joe Cocker wasn't doing all that... that... *stuff* he did for adulation. I hope.

Case in point (though it is fictional) is the guitar duel at the climax of the otherwise awful film "Crossroads", which starred Ralph Macchio and, in the critical scene, Steve Vai as Jack Butler, the Devil's own lead guitarist:



Jack Butler's all over the place, dancing round the stage, pulling faces, sticking out his tongue, doing the whole cod-Hendrix showmanship schtick. Meanwhile, The Kid (Macchio) just lets it happen, lets his talent do the talking. And when the duel reaches its end-game, The Kid..... pulls out the classical joker. Game over.

And that's where I'm headed here.

For some reason, at some level, the classical repertoire still, to this day, trumps modern music as a test of virtuosity, of the physical mastery of one's instrument. Stretching a point, a guitarist would go as far as flamenco as a true test of ability.

I realise it's not all a matter of how many notes per second one can play, that it's also about tone, colour and the rest, but that's precisely why the classical repertoire is still a standard. Not only does a classical pianist need to be able to play this:



...but they also need to be able to play this:



Nobody gets as excited about a rock guitarist playing a love song as they do about an uptempo number. Compare Eric Clapton playing "Layla" and then "Wonderful Tonight" - which one gets more fanmail?

Having got *all* of that off my chest, the SongWithoutWhich I wanted to blog today is this:



As long as I can remember I have wanted to be able to play this. To me this piece, all two minutes of it, is a glorious, complete whole, a combination of bombast and delicacy. It explores the range of expression you can achieve on the piano, and it represents one hell of a manifesto for anyone who reckons themselves a bit of a keyboardist. Get one note wrong, the whole thing falls apart. You can't hide behind a wall of sound from the rest of the band: it's solo.

It's also properly virtuoso. You can't Autotune your way through this, you can't "hide it in the mix": if you're good enough to play this, then you're good enough.

Shameless fun

Starting tonight, we're going to put each and every SongWithoutWhich up on Twitter, linking to a video (original wherever possible, best quality live as a second choice, and whatever we can find as a final option) and to the blog entry as well. Fire up your Twitter clients and look for @SongsWoutWhich, tweet-fiends! Though I suspect "trending"is the last thing this collection will do...

"Don't Believe a Word"

One of the institutions that we in the UK are spoiled by is the BBC: a public service broadcaster whose reach and whose repertoire extends beyond the dreams of even the most megalomaniac of media moguls. A true multimedia behemoth. What we in this country tend to forget is just how trusted the BBC is around the world as a paragon of accuracy and of impartiality. Its motto is "Nation shall speak peace unto nation", but it might as well be "Truth is the only safe ground to stand on." Whether you're in Kinshasa or Kentucky, it's reliable, regular as clockwork and impartial.
For so many years it was the only "live" record of the UK's history, in documentaries, in light entertainment, even in vox pops on the evening news. Only now, through the internet and through painstaking efforts by curators, archivists and historians, is the BBC's real importance really becoming evident, through a never-ending stream of archive recordings that shine a light not on the world-changing events of years ago, but on the everyday components of life.
I'm not here to start an argument about the value of taxpayer-funded broadcasting; all I can say is that for my part I think I've got out much, much more than I've put in. Thanks, Auntie. Oh and thanks also for that Thin Lizzy retrospective the other week.
One of the things you tend to do with the BBC is use it, but forget it's there. You switch on the radio, you turn on the television and chances are you're tuning into the Beeb. Chances are the program that draws you in, piques your interest, or entertains you is on the BBC. But you'd be hard pressed the next day to remember what channel you were watching or listening to.
Sadly (or not), the same was the case with Thin Lizzy. Too often, if you're a rock fan you can be seduced by the sheer technical wizardry of a guitar virtuoso like Jimmy Page or Richie Blackmore, or the vocal calisthenics of an Ian Gillan, or the polyrhythmic genius of a Ginger Baker. Too often, bands rely on one individual's skill or talent to push them out of the ordinary. You remember their songs for a solo, for an outstanding vocal.
With Lizzy, that wasn't the case: you remember their songs because they're irresistable, unstoppable. Two great guitarists, a superb drummer and a sublimely talented bassist/singer/songwriter meant that the band was always perfectly balanced. And though Phil Lynott was the undoubted star of the band, he didn't outshine the rest of the band in the same manner that other stars have. They were all just as good as each other.
The reason I was comparing Thin Lizzy to the BBC was because, for many years they were as reliable and solid as the Beeb. Albums got better and better - the five albums from "Fighting" to "Live & Dangerous" are as steep a quality curve as you'll find anywhere in rock - they refined their sound until the twin-guitar harmony attack was absolutely perfect, and they managed to walk the narrow path of hard rock without it becoming heavy metal pastiche. In this they were undoubtedly saved by the Irish heritage and Lynott's mournful voice. He's not your typical hard rock singer, nor are his lyrics archetypal rock - his songs seem to come from Springsteen territory rather than the edges of self-indulgent oblivion. "The Boys Are Back in Town" comes across like a statement of criminal intent, but it's really just about any Saturday night.
*This* particular song is probably the best example of the band's ability to marry the sound and attitude of rock with surprisingly sensitive and thoughtful lyrics. Lynott's voice is at its most mournful, the lyric is as open and honest as anything a wannabe bad boy ever wrote, self-aware and full of the sort of rogue-ish charm that Lynott was known for.
It's short, sweet and as good a way to remember this much-missed man.

Of course it's hard to think of Phil Lynott without a smile and a chuckle for his immortal line: "Is there anyone here with any Irish in them? Are there any girls here who'd like a little more Irish in them?"

"Lido Shuffle"

I've been toying around with an entry here for about six months. I started out planning to pick my favourite blue-eyed soul performance (not *singer*, just *performance*), but that spiralled completely out of control; before I knew it I was juggling Lowell George, Todd Rundgren, Boz Scaggs, Tom Johnstone and Michael MacDonald, Robert Palmer, Paul Rodgers, Rod Stewart, Jack Bruce, Dan Zanes of the Del Fuegos and about a hundred others.

See, if this blog teaches me anything, it's that there is no science to this music appreciation business. I can't be one of those pipe-smoking critics who talks about the technical aspects of singing, traditions and the like. I either like a song or I don't. If I like it, watch out! I start reading up, doing my research on Wikipedia, AllMusic etc until I know just about everything there is to know about a song.

Somewhere I remember reading a quotation on trying to analyse humour: "It's like dissecting a frog," the quote goes; "It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process." And sometimes I feel like that about my occasionally obsessive approach to the simple, harmless act of appreciating a work of music.

Why analyse, why obsess?

Having said all this, what I seem to be describing is an extended teenage phase. I mean, we all lay on our beds with the headphones on and the lyrics sheet in our hand when we were teenagers, right?

So this is normal. It's dragged on a bit, but it's normal.

So, as part of the intense research I described at the start, I have spent a lot of time listening to Messrs Marriott, George, Palmer, Rundgren et al over the past few months, in an effort to try and pick what I think is the best blue-eyed soul performance of all.

Any great soul voice has something unusual about it: Rod Stewart had his sandpaper, Lowell George had the beautiful southern inflection (just listen to the way he sings the word "southern"), Michael MacDonald has his falsetto, Steve Marriott had his passion. They all *work*.

That's the reason they're all SongsWithoutWhich. Because they travel with me all the time, they come around on random shuffle at the strangest moments and they make me smile, sway, tap my feet. I just have to stop being anal about it.

And for that reason I wimped out. I can't pick a favourite: I'd choose a different one every time. But what I *can* do is share a performance that I treasure. I remember loving this when it was first released, enjoying the idiosyncratic vocal (it sounds vaguely gargled, doesn't it?), and the unstoppable rhythm.

Boz Scaggs hasn't been a prominent mainstream name, unless you're into Steve Miller or Donald Fagen, but by God he has a voice.

The first video shows how much fun you can have making music, even if it isn't the best performance of the song.



The second is an older, wiser Boz and a slower, much more menacing version. I cna't imagine how many years separate the two performances - a lifetime, it seems, but they're both fantastic.

"One Day Like This"

Not that it's relevant to anyone apart from myself (and one or two others), but I got married three months ago. In doing so I drew a line under the last decade - the noughties - put a lot of baggage in the dumpster, and so on and so forth.

As I was dressing on the morning of the wedding, my daughter plugged her iPod in and started playing tunes as we zipped around the house, collecting things, fixing hair and straightening ties. We'd taken a guest cottage not far from the wedding venue, a house overlooking a green Irish field that slopes down the ocean.

At one point I became dimly aware of a gentle melody and of an insistent lyric. I stopped what I was doing and sat down to listen to this song. It was perfect. In every way. The lyrical Mancunian accent, the rolling strings, the stop-start rhythm, the rousing fade-out.

"What made me behave that way?/Using words I never say/I can only think it must be love/
Oh, anyway, it's looking like a beautiful day."

It's a love song, a song about growing old together, but one without illusions; a song that starts, most likely, with a drunken one-night stand and ends with a slow sunburst of awareness. One that makes the quantum leap from here to eternity in one simple verse:

"When my face is chamois-creased/If you think I'll wink, I did/Laugh politely at repeats/Yeah, kiss me when my lips are thin."

As the wedding day unfurled I found myself humming this song from time to time; it summed up the best day of my life, it offered a glimpse into the future, and restored all the childish optimism that years of rough-edged experience scrapes away.

"Throw those curtains wide/One day like this a year'd see me right."

Not surprisingly it's become one of my very favourite SongsWithoutWhich, but for more or less the same reasons as every other one on the list.

The original video is superb - watch it here,

or enjoy these versions; they're both excellent:

Nimrod

Throughout the entire 500-odd songs that I've written up on this blog I have, with one exception to date, been listening to modern popular music, that is, music created any time since 1950 and probably 1960. I'd have to go through the whole list to check but right now, on this freshly-laundered spring afternoon, I'm too blissed out to care.
I've been listening to one single piece - a fragment, almost - of what you'd call classical music for a few days now. I call it "classical" only to differentiate it from "modern", but that word almost has a pejorative ring to it. As if it automatically means "old", "uncool", and tragically undanceable. And this one piece of music has set me off on one hell of a tangent.
How does music go beyond the personal? How can it reach out to encompass a society, a race, a country? How is it that one piece of music can achieve the same results in the ears, minds and hearts of a million people at the same time?
If you were living in the UK in 1990, you may remember how the British television coverage of the football World Cup that year used the aria "Nessun dorma" from Puccini's opera "Turandot" as its theme.

It was stirring stuff, calculated to tap into patriotism, football fan-dom and the excitement of big competition and fold them into one lung-busting blast of .... what? One-ness? A sudden rush of national awareness? What, exactly?
I mean, Turandot was written by an Italian.The opera is set in China. There's nothing inherently British about it. And yet it's become one of the country's favourite pieces of classical music - if it wasn't already, but pre-1990 classical music preference polling data's a bit thin on the ground.
What sort of music, then, could theoretically act as a personal, emotional, intellectual or even social touchstone for an entire nation? Every country has a national anthem, sure, but they tend to be little more than rather tasteless, blood-thirsty 18th century PR for the most part.
For example, do Frenchmen feel uplifted by an anthem whose opening verse includes the lines "Do you hear, in the countryside/The roar of these savage soldiers?/They come right into our arms/To cut the throats of your sons and your wives"? Do Americans feel their hearts stirred by singing about the war their forefathers had to fight to preserve the infant nation? "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air/Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there."
When we sing our national anthems, are we thinking of the entire boxful of virtues, events and achievements that brought our country to where it is today?
I doubt it. To sportsmen and women, who are in the business of representing themselves and/or their country, these anthems do mean something, but to most of the rest of us, our national anthems are a reflex action rather than a conscious, positive commitment.
So maybe then it's time to think again about how music represents us as collective peoples. Each of our countries has its own history, its own cocktail of virtues and vices, those stereotypes that we all cling to in jokes and in prejudices. How should we represent those?
Put it another way: imagine your country has just stepped into the street, but suddenly spies a truck bearing down on it at top speed. In those final few milliseconds before impact, what images would flash through your country's mind? *That's* what an anthem should bring to mind.
So, not wishing to spread myself too thinly and come up with 200-odd anthems, since it would quickly fade into parody and bad taste, I'm going to stick to one. At the same time I'd suggest that anthems shouldn't be sung but played, and that we should all sit or stand in reverential contemplation of the history, of the composition, of the country we call home.
Music used to be so good at "summing up", reaching out in every direction at once to grasp and express myriad elements almost at the same time. Composers of old seemed to have such a wide palette of colours to paint with, while today we seem to need a piece of music to zoom in and focus on a particular thing with microscopic precision. And any country, any society has become too big for words to encapsulate. Let music alone do the job.
So sit back and listen to this piece. Close your eyes, let it take you on your journey, wherever that is. There are hundreds of pieces of music out there that could do the same job of transporting you, setting you alongside your fellow-men and highlighting what it is that brings you together as a society. This is just one of those hundreds of pieces. For me, it fits the bill perfectly. It defines what it means to live where I do, and the attachment I have to the country in which I live. Surely that's all you need when it comes to an anthem.

Variations on an Original Theme for Orchestra, Op. 36, No. 9 ("Nimrod")

"Daydream"

We're getting a taste of summer this week. The sun's bright, the streets are humming and there's a welcome breeze blowing outside. Hemlines are edging their way north, overcoats are being left at home, and lo and behold, people are smiling! Perhaps it may also have something to do with the blissful silence in the skies above.

And as if by karmic instruction, this song pops up on my iPod, as if my inner devil was telling me to take the rest of the day off.

"I'm blowing the day to take a walk in the sun,
And fall on my face on somebody's new-mown lawn."

But before I do skip out of the office, there's time to finish this.

Back here, I was saying that Evan Dando has this effortless ability to write terrific tunes. Well, I stand by that, but I have to add John Sebastian to the roster of "impossibly talented songwriters."

"Summer in the City," "Do You Believe in Magic," "Welcome Back," "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice".... each one so simple, so elegant and irresistable.

I'm sure we each of us know an irrepressible optimist, a friend for whom the glass is always more than half full. Someone whose laughter we've almost come to hear in our sleep. John Sebastian is probably one of those. First guy in the bar, first one to crack a joke...

In an age where rage and discontent seem to own more than their fair share of the landscape, it's a real treat to have a friend like that.

"(I Never Loved) Eva Braun"

Do we like Geldof?

It seems a million years ago Bob Geldof was a new wave singer, another snotty streak of piss with an attitude, a mouth and a truckload of ambition. All of that seems to have been overrun by his involvement with famine relief, third world development, peace, butter mountains, and for a while by his personal life.
These days, the Geldof brand is being marketed by his daughters, who certainly seem a chip off the old block in some respects.
Back in the day though Geldof the singer (the real one, not the daughter) was the real "enfant terrible" of the new wave. When Johnny Rotten retired to become John Lydon and work at being taken as a serious musician, Geldof was right there, stage left, waiting to take over.
But where Johnny Rotten was all about outrage for outrage's sake, Geldof was always more thoughtful, if sometimes a little clumsy. Like Sinead O'Connor, Geldof had issues with some of the hard-dying traditions in Irish society, the influence of the Church, and he used his position as a pulpit from which to attack.
Even his music reflected more thought. While the Pistols were throwing as much manure at the wall to stink up the place, The Boomtown Rats picked their subjects with a little more care, even if shock was still on the agenda. "I Don't Like Mondays" got itself banned in the US for dealing with a schoolyard shooting (20 years before Columbine), and "Mary of the Fourth Form" and "She's So Modern" skewered the rapidly-unwinding tradition of schoolroom innocence, like The Police would do later.
But one song, to me, stands head and shoulders above the rest of their material.
if you're setting out to shock and undermine you can do it, as the Pistols did, with a blunt instrument. Or you can subvert the process and have a little fun. I have no doubt that, as unpalatable as the subject matter is, Geldof had a lot of fun writing this song.
"I never loved Eva Braun/Though a thousand people say I did/She was just some girl who was on the make/Boy she wanted to be so big."
Okay, so we're already coming at the subject sideways. Listen to song! Not only are the Rats twisting our tail, they're taking the mickey by hauling in ancient references (the "Are you really going out with Adolf?", the "oh no?"/"oh yeah?"/"yes we see" are pulled straight from the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack?").
I never heard all the screams (oh no?)/I never saw the blood and dirt and gore (oh yeah?)/That wasn't part of the dream, (yes, we see)/Of maps and generals and uniforms."
To be honest, it's a sick, twisted song, but from the safe distance of thirty-plus years, we can see that it's entirely in keeping with the Geldof way: be outrageous, be subversive, take the accepted truth and play with it.
And it's helped by a truly great chant-along chorus that spins faster and faster, right to the final ringing chord, and the whispered, awed, "Gee!".
Maybe it's not songwriting on a par with the Neil Youngs of this world, but it's as in-your-face and provocative as Geldof ever was.

Apologies for the video... minimize the window if you must.

"Ezy Ryder"

I'm taking a night class in creative writing - sort of scratching an ancient itch of you like. While I write for a living, journalism isn't exactly creative: the plot, the characters, the dialogue, it's all laid out there for you and all you need to do is arrange it so that it makes sense. Creative writing is conjuring something out of thin air, something that didn't necessarily happen to people that don't necessarily exist.
And as any teacher will tell you, a story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. And as I'm finding out, a good beginning is a real challenge.
Which brings me to songs, and how a great song begins. The only problem here is that there are so many great intros to choose from.
I've already listed more than a few songs that have magnificent intros: the Stones' apocalyptic "Gimme Shelter", Hendrix's unstoppable "Ezy Ryder", the Allman Brothers' spic "Whipping Post", CSN&Y's gentle, perfect "Find the Cost of Freedom", Arlo Guthrie's gorgeous "Gabriel's Mother's Hiway Ballad No. 16 Blues", the list goes on....
But then, it's not necessarily *what* you start a song with, but *how* you start it that matters. So a song with no intro at all can be great - the Buzzcocks' "Orgasm Addict" kicks off with lyrics before the music starts, while Catatonia's "Road Rage" puts Cerys Mathews' voice well to the fore, so you've heard two lines of lyric before you've even worked out what the tune is.
At the other extreme you can spend one and a half minutes listening to Traffic get their so-laid-back-it's-horizontal groove on before Stevie Winwood starts singing in "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys". And Pink Floyd were never ones to mess up a perfectly good piece of ambient soundscape with nasty, human lyrics until it was absolutely necessary (usually around ten minutes into the piece). Besides, you had to let the sustain on Dave Gilmour's guitar fade away before there was room for a vocal...
So what this is all gathering itself to say is that there probably is no perfect, or even right way to start a song.
Great. Now, how about ending a song?
I mean, do you let it gently fade away into nothingness, like the Beatles' "I Am The Walrus"? The Fabs irritatingly stuck so many bits and clips onto the fade-out, forcing me to spend many long evenings gradually turning the volume higher and higher in an effort to work out what was being said (as I recall the final sentence is "Sit you down, father; rest you").
A side question here - how long do you think Cream extended the thrash-out at the end of "Sunshine of Your Love" *after* the recording fades out? I bet that was fun. And who left the tapes running on "Helter Skelter"?
Alternately, you can run a song into a brick wall to end it, like Blur do on "Song 2", or Roxy Music on "Do the Strand", or Faith No More on "We Care a Lot!".
Most songs, if they don't fade out, just bring everything to a neat and tidy end, so tidy in fact that it's almost unsatisfying. It takes a particular kind of cussed nature to cut a song off in its prime and leave the listener wondering what the hell happened to the neat ending.
So, picking my favourite intro hasn't been easy - it's taken many weeks in fact. But I come back, time and again, to Hendrix's Ezy Ryder. It's not delicate or sensitive: Jimi's hammering hard on the strings to get those choked chords out, but nonetheless they flow, they grow, they swirl until the intro's built up such an immense head of steam that you cannot resist or obstruct the launch of the song proper.
The rest of the song ain't so damn bad, either.



For my favourite ending, I'm reaching way, way back to the 70s to the chaotic implosion at the end of "White Punks on Dope": the chorale fades, drunk/stoned musicians ask "as that alright?" and then cackle with maniacal laughter, a toilet flushes, and finally a voice intones something Spanish. More Dada than Dada.

There's no video of the full version of the song sadly. The single was chopped and edited to bits, faded out and generally sanitised. But grab a copy of the Tubes' first album and don't ever let it go. Totally fab.

"The Older We Get"

Do we get harder as we get older?
I mean, do we grow a tougher skin, do we become more uncompromising, more.... for want of a better word, ruthless?
Think back to teenage years, when everything matters, where every sense, every sensation is magnified by our unfamiliarity with it; where everything we feel, from the unutterable joy of a favourite song to the intense disorientation of the afterglow of a romance, is just so damn big. Does that magnification fade, dwindle, as we grow into adulthood or do we simply develop better ways to deal with it?
I suppose what I mean is how we as humans, both young and old, deal with stresses in our lives. From the shock of realising that we are entering "The World" after the cotton-wool basket of infancy and childhood, to the vast untested horizon of independence and responsibility, these are massive stresses that we face as children and teenagers and even into our twenties.
Later, as fully paid-up adults, we face essentially the same dilemmas but because we have told ourselves there is more at stake, or because in fact there *is* more at stake, we feel that the potential costs are so much greater.
Do we find our strength and resilience in simply growing tougher and more ruthless in handling our errors, our choices, or do we try to absorb them, feel them to their fullest potential and absorb the lessons so that next time we will confront them with the same optimism but just make the right decision first time?
It's an often-repeated piece of conventional wisdom that the three most stressful events we face in our lives are marriage/divorce, moving home and changing work. These are all adult events, but just rearrange those events into a teenage context and the stress is just the same.
So it's how we handle these events that must change. In our youth we dive in head-first, experience everything to its fullest and emerge on the other side bruised but still whole.
It's as adults that we are more prone to breaking rather than bending, I think. We are more set in our ways, less willing to make the adjustments, the compromises that we once believed were the better approach.
"As a child touching age, we think that it's so:/That life, love and everything is easy to know./The old, they can't reach us/Their ways are not ours/Though they furrowed our futures/Our freedom they bore."
I'm not sure how to wrap this up, except to say that when we take the luxurious moment to stop the clock and look backwards in generous spirit, I think it's important that we try to remember how much more *life* we can experience if we open ourselves to the possibility that imperfect is the natural state of things, and that stress and disappointment is normal. To allow ourselves to dry out, to stiffen and to be prone to breaking rather than bending is to remove ourselves from this world.

"Stay With Me"

Many, many years ago, I got to live a dream. Through my brother, I met a guy that ran a pirate radio station - no, perhaps *the* pirate radio station - and he asked me to work as a DJ for this station.
Understand, this was in the mid to late 1980s, before the wholesale liberalisation of the airwaves, when pirates still contributed something to the agenda (perhaps they still could today).
Naturally, I jumped at the chance, and one Valentine's Day I found myself shivering on the deck of a tiny fishing boat as it ploughed its way offshore. I landed, seasick and disoriented, on a 200 foot ship parked in the middle of the English Channel, and three hours later, I was doing my first show.
At this distance of years, it is a fond, warm memory, a consolation even; and I classify as one of my more "rebellious" acts. As a non-Britisher, I risked being tossed out of the UK for good if the authorities came after me. So I lived those few months extra-hard. I drank in every moment, even when the weather chased me into the darkest bowels of the rusting, tired old ship. I watched St Elmo's Fire dance around the aerial masts, I learned to drink coffee and tea with salt as well as sugar, I even got to taste horseflesh.
And I spent hours, days, listening to music. A kid in his early 20s, a music nut, let loose among 15,000 or so records, with copious facilities to play, record, mix and enjoy.
I got to know real strangers, the motley assortment of characters who were drawn on board simply to play the music they loved for hundreds of thousands of people they'd never meet. Some of us were serial offenders, jumping from pirate station to pirate station, others were kids with the DJ bug who just had to get into "the business" and for all I know, still are in the business.
We'd watch for supply boats when the beer and cigarettes ran out, we'd wave at the ferries passing every day, we'd even flick a finger at the Air Force jets that once in a while would buzz the ship.
But most of all, we sat together and each of us chortled inside at cocking a snook at The Man, at our daring and naughtiness, reveling in the companionship that comes from a shared risk. And when my time was up, I left without a backward glance.
Last week, I went to see "The Boat That Rocked", Richard Curtis' film based on the pirate station that I once worked on. It wasn't the ship, the time, the atmosphere that I remembered - it was long before, in the station's heyday, but the ethos, the feeling was the same.
Yes, there was nostalgia, some sadness that the era has passed, but most of all, a warmth in remembering the oh-so simple act of rebellion that took me out to sea.
I still have about ten cassette mix tapes that I made on the boat, songs that I discovered for the first breathless, delicious time in the warm cabin that served as the record library. Many of them are SongsWithoutWhich and are chronicled here.
But this one isn't. It's actually a song from the film I saw last week, and so I can't claim it was a selection based on my impeccable taste, nor a song that resonates with personal meaning. It's just a wonderful song, whose chorus I recall dimply from some radio show many years ago and which, when it cropped up in the film, gave me one of those "ahhh" moments when a long-forgotten memory comes streaking to the front of your mind.
I won't ever associate this song with my time on the radio station, but I do now associate it with my act of remembrance of that time and so it is, tangentially on one level at least, a SongWithoutWhich.
It doesn't hurt that Lorraine Ellison has a voice that does both the caressing and the paint-stripping in equal measures, and that it is a simply fantastic song. 'nuff said.

"Downtown Train"

What's happened to the love song over the years is a pretty exact mirror of what's happened to society at the same time. Everything becomes more explicit, more obsessive, more dysfunctional. And so have the songs.
Let's review somoe evidence. In 1950, Nat King Cole sang "Mona Lisa" which went a little like this:
"Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you/You're so like the lady with the mystic smile/Is it only 'cause you're lonely they have blamed you/For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile?"
Beautiful, isn't it? Elegant, restrained, and with a hint of sadness beneath. Textured and literate too.
So now we fast forward a decade, and here are the Beatles:
"Something in the way she moves/Attracts me like no other lover/Something in the way she woos me/I don't want to leave her now/You know I believe in how."
Equally elegant, equally beautiful and George Harrison's little guitar break is gorgeous.
But then, later in the song comoes this:
"You're asking me will my love grow/I don't know, I don't know/Stick around, and it may show/But I don't know, I don't know."
Suddenly love, commitment and the desire to cleave to one another became conditional, or at least uncertain, as the changes wrought in the 1960s filtered through into our very simple view of ourselves and our emotional relationships. Suddenly the world eas more of a playground and we didn't need to cleave to our partner quite as much as our parents did.
Now we hit the 1970s. For the purposes of demonstration, I'll take Billy Joel:
"Don't go changing, to try and please me/You never let me down before/Don't imagine you're too familiar/And I don't see you anymore."
Lordy! Suddenly the love song has admitted to the possibility of codependency, and that we have to really, really work at being just right for our partner. Why? Because they have an alternative now. Anyone who's read Tim Harford's "The Logic of Life" should understand: relationships have become a bargain struck in the market place. We take someone on because we calculate the costs and the benefits of being with them and for a while at least, the costs outweigh the benefits. For a while.
Still with me? On to the 1980s, then:
"I wanna know what love is/I want you to show me/I wanna feel what love is/I know you can show me."
Geez, talk about projection. So now we've all become emotional illiterates who can't identify our own feelings?
1990s:
"If I should stay/I would only be in your way/So I'll go, but I know/I'll think of you ev'ry step of the way."
What, so now we didn't know we loved someone until we split up? Big oops. (And yeah, I know it was written a lot earlier.)
Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that the love song has mirrored our own emotional decay, to the point where love songs these days are more about obsessive codependency than soulful paeans to the one we purely, simply, love.
And I will now present to you what is, to me, the ultimate love song.

It's simple, it's real. The characters and the situations may not be pretty, but they're real. Honest. "Downtown Train" is a story rather than a shopping list of one person's lusts and insecurities. The line "Will I see you tonight/On a downtown train" could have come from a black & white film, a bygone era.
There's desire, sure, but it's emotional desire and not physical. The song aspires to something better, greater than so much of what we are forced to listen to these days. And it gives not a fig for codependency, obsession, need. It's generous, open, properly loving. And in a day, a time like this, it's a consolation to know that there are people who still love like that.

"In Every Dream Home a Heartache"

I've been dropping references to art-school rock from time to time, usually to point out how punk and new wave really weren't the snotty, street-level phenomenon that we all thought they were at the time, but instead a fairly carefully choreographed effort at testing the collective boundaries of post-permissive society. Ten years after "free love", LSD and all that jazz, it seemed the only way to outrage the bourgeoisie was to swear at them. Even the hippies didn't do that...
Anyhow, I didn't really think much of the references to art schools until I rocked through the Rs on my collection and came slap bang up against these guys.
I suppose if you were looking for an exemplar of the whole idea of art students as rock musicians, you could do a whole lot worse than Roxy Music's first two albums (yes, the ones with Brian Eno).
They made a visual as well as aural statement - Bryan Ferry had his immaculate coiffure and louche elegance, Eno looked like Riff-Raff's mild cousin, Phil Manzanera like a biker who'd just had his annual shower, all very eclectic - just like art school.
And so with the sound. From the frantic joyous romp that is "Virginia Plain", the out-to-lunch weirdness of "Ladytron", on through the lively chaos of "Do the Strand" and then...this.
It's a masterpiece in two halves. The first is all menace, sullen glitter and empty wealth: "Open-plan living/Bungalow ranch-style/All of its comforts/Seem so essential." A dangerously seductive mood, half-despairing, half-drunk at the pleasures of excess, quiet and menacing. The story evolves, spins slowly in from its wide-screen view to the story of a man and his inflatable doll. And by the time anger begins to flare ("Inflatable doll/Lover ungrateful/I blew up your body/But you blew my mind"), the song has seemingly built up unsustainable pressure and all hell breaks loose.
Sheer genius. A decade before Adam Ant was pulling the whip out of his valise and getting so physical, Roxy Music had already mapped out the territory.
But because art students back then didn't swear on TV, the bourgeois didn't make a fuss. And by the time Adam Ant was a memory, Roxy were still in business.