Honest Twenty Five

I wrote an honest list of the songs that have most coloured my life. They're not my favourite songs. They're not all cool. But they're a sort of aural map to how I got here. 

I wrote it for something but it was never used, so here it is, unwasted.  

25

Just my curtain. Looks nice though. 

 

1)      “Fight!” The Theme from “The Flashing Blade” 

     There are four big theme tunes that dominate my childhood. Monkey Magic by Mickie Yoshino, Rentaghost by Michael Staniforth, The Water Margin by Godiego and The Flashing Blade’s theme by Alex Masters, which is a pretty tough name, though not as tough as Ian from The Krankies, whose real name is Ian Tough. The themes have lyrics, which seems to be the thing I latched onto, even though the Water Margin’s were in Japanese. I think I always needed to have someone standing at the front of the song, officiating. A ring master, a celebrant. I’m old and boring now, and listen only to a cocktail of post-rock, classical and jazz. But I was a pop kid, and I liked hooks, I liked lyrics, and I liked a friendly voice. I wanted to know what the song was about, otherwise music was chaos.

     I have subsequently embraced the chaos.

 

2)      Scorpios – Adam and the Ants

      Prince Charming was the first album I ever owned. On cassette, because I didn’t have a record player. I was a cassette guy all the way until CDs came in. I had very little vinyl, and what I did have has now disappeared. Adam Ant was my first pop crush. I was obsessed, as influencers say nowadays. Scorpios is the first song on Prince Charming and sets you up for how odd that album is going to be. It’s like the BBC light orchestra attempting Lalo Schiffrin! It’s a 60’s spy theme, all brass and lilting, listing flutes, while Michael Caine is backflipping down Ocean Drive in the best Bakelite frames you’ve ever seen. I must have listened to this song hundreds of times but, given Adam’s strangulated, garbled delivery, I don’t think I know what it’s about at all. Though I’m absolutely certain he mentions Diana Dors at one point, and there she is, playing his Fairy Godmother in the Prince Charming video. Adam manifested it.

     My favourite thing about the Prince Charming video – apart from everything – is, when Adam is swinging from the chandelier, he is clearly mouthing the word “shit” and properly shitting it too.

 

3)      Duel – Propaganda 

     The first single I ever bought. Yes, it is cool. Thanks. In my mind, I bought it on the same day I bought Prince’s Paisley Park, which also seems very cool, but I would say this: I was thirteen and these were the first singles I’d ever bought. I’d survived my entire childhood without ever buying a record. Your proper pop kid, a Bob Stanley or Morrissey, would be surrounded by paper-sleeved 7 inches from birth. I managed perfectly well with Radio Two being on in the kitchen – I Am a Woman in Love by Barbra Streisand and Heartbreaker by Dionne Warwick remain touchstones – and repeat listens of the only album I owned, even though Adam had rather gone off. I should also say I bought these singles, but they were not for me, they were birthday gifts for my brother Barry, who had expressed no interest in either artist, but my funds were limited and I thought I should try to get something out of the deal. So, I bought two singles I liked, gifted them to Barry, and quietly stole them back again. He didn’t give a shit.

     They’re both still fantastic singles. I stand by my duplicity. Soz, Baz.

 

4)      Rain – The Cult 

     Rain by The Cult is not the first song I ever sang in public. That honour belongs to Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits. Cool. But Rain was in the set, alongside Mr Pharmacist by The Fall, minus the fast bit, because we couldn’t do the fast bit. It was an eclectic band. It was a mess. We were fifteen, and I was learning about music because I was in a band and it seemed to be the right thing to do. I had no older brothers or sisters, and my parents stopped listening to music just prior to Elvis embarked on his military service. So, I was on my own and, for the duration of the Love album, The Cult became my band. I didn’t know they were ludicrous. I didn’t know what they were ripping off. I didn’t know that Big Neon Glitter was a shit name for a song. They sounded big, epic, searching, self-important, and there’s nothing more attractive to a 15-year-old singing in his first band than being self-important. Besides, She Sells Sanctuary is a great song, and Phoenix, while fucking ridiculous, is big, jolly fun. I still like the idea of 15-year-old me singing the lyrics to Rain: “Hot, sticky scenes, you know what I mean.” I didn’t know what I meant, and wouldn’t for another three long, barren years.

     When their next album came out, the hilariously titled Love Removal Machine, I dropped them like a slippery turd. It was rockist and I had evolved into an indie kid proper. No solos. No singing.  

 

5)      Girl Afraid – The Smiths 

    People always assumed I loved The Smiths because I bore a slight resemblance to Morrissey and because I exploited that slight resemblance to the very hilt. I wore dead men’s suits, and blouses from D H Evans, and there was a hole in the ozone layer directly above my sculpted quiff. It followed me about like an evil halo. To accidentally resemble a pop star was incredible. The 11-year-old me could never have looked like Adam Ant, even when I sent off a postal order for “leather-look” trousers. (They ripped me off and I never received my Jim Morrison strides, luckily. Plastic trousers on a pre-teen is a guaranteed pasting at your school disco)

     But I worried about looking like Morrissey. We were both in the same profession, after all, but he was the voice of a generation. He’d done his homework, weaponizing loneliness, awkwardness, staying in, and never trying. All the things I was good at and he’d got there first. Was there room for both of us? I was arguably the better singer. We were told he was a lyrical genius, but was he?

     No.

     It’s easy to see that now. And it’s easy to hate Morrissey. He makes it so simple with everything he says and does. He’s taken all the effort out of it. But back in the day, before all the unpleasantness…he was alright at lyrics, like Edwyn Collins without the sunniness, and the self-pity ramped right up. And I loved the self-pity. I too was a victim or something, for some reason. I loved the misery. Morrissey went through a generation like polio, knackering us all for years. We all thought the line, “Prudence never pays, and everything she wants costs money” was the cleverest thing we’d ever heard. It’s the sort of cleverness that impresses stupid people. But I was happily stupid then, and I loved this song.

 

6)      Love in a Car – The House of Love 

     Around the time this record came out I was having a lot of sex in cars. In Eastrop Park car park, usually. For that reason, I’m very fond of this record as I was very much enjoying myself. Also, I was dressed exactly like the band were, for about two years. Terry Bickers is sort of doing me on the cover of that first record. Not Guy Chadwick. I was a pretty boy. Chadwick looks like E.T. trying and failing to get served at the bar.

 

7)      Pink Frost – The Chills 

     I got into the Chills through my friend Robin. I got into most music through my friend Robin. He taped me Doledrums and a couple of others, then Pink Frost. What a strange, haunted, short story of a song it is. Like Kate Bush’s Under the Ice. I hate the beginning, the horrid, chiming guitar hurrah. The song is in the bass and the tinny, skittering drums and the lonely voice. Its muffled and ominous and sad and odd. The “she’s lost”s are peppered with weirdly mundane, Kiwi accented, “Byes”. I know what you’re thinking: it’s another song about a man murdering a woman. But this isn’t Hey Joe. She hasn’t done him wrong, thus triggering his fragile masculinity to the usual murderous conclusion, usually down by a river. Martin is asleep when he kills her. He thinks he’s dreaming. (Why is he dreaming about murdering his lover, John? Do you think that’s normal? Er. No.) The whole song has the hazy quality of a dream and is shot through with dread and horror and remorse. And yet it’s strangely funny. At the end, when he realises what’s happened, he vocalises “OH NO!”

     Well, I think it’s funny.

 

8)      Walking in the Dark – Throwing Muses 

     In the late 80’s, Throwing Muses were my band. I wasn’t in them. I mean they were the band that meant the most to me. I idolised Kristin Hersh. I also really fancied Lesley Langston on bass, so that was convenient. Listening to songs like Delicate Cutters on the debut album, or Garoux de Larmes* from The Fat Skier, I was transported to a more vivid, more visceral world than my own, my grey suburbia flashing violent red in three-minute bursts. Kristin Hersh’s voice was an articulation of a raw and terrifying lived experience. Life lived with hackles up. This song, with its straight-backed piano, sounded stately and elegant, but had the qualities of a nightmare. The words “a round bottomed beaker” have never sounded so sinister, so charged with occult mystery.

     “You can make me cry, you have a right, I can see you live, I can’t forget you died.”

     I stole her magpie-chatter screams for my band’s live performances and was called “Goat Boy” for my trouble.

     I once stood behind two short blonde American girls queuing to get into a venue off Oxford Street. They were chatty and animated and turned out to be Tanya and Kristin. Queuing outside the venue. For their own gig.

     Now.

     Is this real? Did this actually happen? Did I dream it? I remember it, vividly, but I can’t imagine a set of circumstances where this could ever happen. I am an unreliable narrator, even to myself.

*Werewolf of tears? Really?

 

9)      The Storm – World of Twist

     On the cusp of the 90’s I was in a fashion fix. I was resistant to getting a loose fit. Knacker-strangling jeans had been my trouser of choice throughout the 80’s, and I didn’t want to deny the world the pertness of my buttocks. But flares were coming back. Manchester was baggy. I liked the first Stone Roses album, though it only seemed to have about four good songs on it, but what I really loved were Happy Mondays. I’d had Squirrel and G Man taped for me – Russell is still a banger – and then Bummed came out, and it sounded like nothing I’d ever heard. But they looked shit. They wore sports gear, flares, trainers. The singer had curtains and a goatee like fucking Shaggy. And I thought if you were going to have a bloke who just danced in the band, I much preferred Wojtek from The Blue Aeroplanes. Then I found World of Twist, and it was the perfect combination, a magical twist of the two. They sounded like a bubble-gum Hawkwind. The singer looked like Rigsby from Rising Damp and sang from the back of the stage on a raised rostrum like they used to on Top of the Pops. They had revolving fag packets on stage and the guitarist, who had the had long straight hair and, seemingly, no face, had the best Glam Rock name – Gordon King* – I’d ever heard. But it was this song that really sold me. It starts with a recording of a storm, which is always a good start, and then a glitching electronic voice, telling you again this is The Storm. We are better storm prepared than the sandbaggers of the Dawlish coast. The song is wrapped round a tight bass groove, as synths chatter and churn and guitar fires off atmospherics like the aurora borealis. There’s an Irmin Schmidt keyboard solo and one of the greatest screams in all pop music. And I’m a fan of screaming. There’s an unlikely reference to the musical Camelot, and then we’re done.

     World of Twist made one album which I loved and they hated. Oasis was very nearly called Sons of the Stage after one of their songs. But please don’t hold that against them.

*Roy Priest from Sweet Jesus also had a very good Glam Rock name. 

 

10  Bonita Applebaum – Tribe Called Quest 

     I got into hip hop in the late 80’s: Eric B and Rakim, Roxanne Shante, Public Enemy and, especially, the Native Tongues collective. Three Feet High and Rising remains a glorious, sunny, joy to the world, but it was Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm that I listened to forever. When I went away to art college, I had three cassettes with me: People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, Heaven or Las Vegas by Cocteau Twins and Violator by Depeche Mode. I was having a truly miserable time, living off campus in a family’s spare room, hating my course and the work I was doing, so I spent long hours lying on my single bed with a Space Ranger duvet, imagining the glorious coolness of being an MC or producer, sculpting these winnets of majesty out of other people’s records, with panache and elegance, with autonomy. Bonita Applebaum was basically a repurposed Memory Band by Rotary Connection, but I didn’t know that then. People, particularly the people being sampled, always forget that sampling is a really good way to find music you would never find out about on your own, especially if you’re lying in your lonely cot in Cambridge.  But I suppose they like to get paid, which is fair enough.

     Minnie Riperton does the originally vocals on Memory Band and I don’t know why she’s out of tune and singing like a five-year-old. But she is. It was a choice. It makes the song sound like it was part of a particularly funky Dario Argento soundtrack.

 

11  Cherry Coloured Funk – Cocteau Twins

     Liz is singing this in her lower register for the main part, though there are still the octave tickling trills when she wants to come over all crystalline. But it was that deep, rich, warm, comforting tone I was craving. Even though she was enunciating a lot more clearly on this album, I didn’t understand a word. I didn’t want to understand a word. As I lay listening to this on my Walkman, staring up at the polystyrene squares on the ceiling, I just wanted her murmuring and sobbing. It was like I’d invited a ghost in, just for the company. Liz sounds warm and wise and maternal and sexy here, and I felt held every time I pressed play.

     Them was rotten days alright. But there was always Liz.

 

12   After The Flood – Talk Talk 

     I don’t remember why I listened to this record. I’ve picked After the Flood, but really the whole of the Laughing Stock album is one thing, and you could say that Sprit of Eden and Laughing Stock are also the same thing. The same process, the same eclectic musicianship, the same editing, the same aesthetic. This music gets called post-rock, but it’s a kind of jazz, the same way Robert Wyatt is jazz. Miles Davies with folky textures and random spurts of atonal noise. Miles Davies then. It’s like Can too: improvised and assiduously edited. It’s sculpted noise. I love Can, but I love these Talk Talk records more. They’re softer, foxed, ribboned. Inviting you in, not knocking you down.

     I love this piece. You have to refer to these songs as “pieces” really, though I imagine it would piss Mark Hollis off. These albums aren’t a complete reinvention. The ghosts of Talk Talk songs of old flicker through, sudden flavours: wraithlike harmonica, rippling organ, all of it nailed into place with a solid, break-beat drums, anchoring the whole thing. It’s satisfying. It’s rich. Listening to Talk Talk is like sitting down to a sumptuous meal at sea, against the undertow, the swell. It’s a banquet full of lots of little things you haven’t had to order. They just keep coming. You’re never full, just marvelling at the myriad flavours, dancing on your tongue like an angel on the head of a pin.

     In the 80’s I liked songs with a good story, funny jokes, a nifty chorus and a memorable turn of phrase. In the 90’s when I was listening to this and Cocteau Twins, I didn’t give a shit about someone else’s narrative. I wanted to be subsumed, eaten up by this music, swallowed by the greedy sea.   

 

13   Hell is Round the Corner – Tricky 

     I still like trip hop. It seems embarrassing to a lot of people now. Small, grubby, provincial. Silly name. Yes, well it does have a silly name. And it was bowdlerised and besmirched and piped into gastro pubs and eateries in a refined, gelded form for years. But the sheer weirdness of hearing this record for the first time: the surface crackle, the closeness of Tricky, his insinuating, drawling voice. You can hear the shit eating grin. It’s like being propositioned by the snake from the Garden of Eden, all mouth, swallowing the tree of knowledge and taking you with it. Or it’s like being chatted up at a bus stop by Fred West. Same difference. The slowness of the groove seemed new, the deliberation of the descending chord sequence and Martina’s chirruping cockneyisms. It was new and weird and exciting. This was not the 80’s. There was no leather-lunged bellowing here. It wasn’t Bono clambering down the mountain in his stack heels, clutching the tablets to his leather waistcoat. This was something new, something intimate, hip hop that was quiet, seductive and deeply untrustworthy. It was nasty and tempting and would wear you down. An anthem for groomed youth.   

 

14  Sour Times – Portishead 

     I first heard this on the radio. I was painting a wall. I think it was Children in Need night, so I was doing something, anything other than watching Hale and Pace Do the Stonk. I thought it was a remix of a 60’s song for about a second, with all the Ipcress File cimbalom rattles, (it samples Lalo Schifrin’s Danube Incident) but reasoned if it was an old song I’d have already known it because it was just so good. Beth Gibbons is a strange singer. She’s never herself, which was another big break from the authenticity of the post-punk alternative 80’s scene. Beth’s always in the shadows, always swapping hats. There’s never a “and this is me” moment. On her solo record (with Rustin Man) she’s a different singer on every track. Here, she’s a sort of tobacco-stained Violet Elisabeth Bott from Just William, singing “Nobody loves me, IT’S TWOO!” She never had that lisp again. It’s just for this song. She’s a method singer.

 

15  Born To Love Her – Spain 

     This is just a lovely song. I’ve often sung it and I’ve always meant it.

 

16  Chanson Pour Que Tu M’aimes Un Peu – France Gall 

     I like French music. All sorts. Toutes Sortes. I don’t know why. I’ve been a lifelong Francophile with the caveat that I’m an English Francophile and therefore have never bothered my arse to learn the language. I can just about read a menu. This song is by France Gall, whom Serge Gainsbourg once humiliated by getting her to sing a song about blow jobs in the Eurovision Song Contest. She didn’t find out until afterwards. What a cool guy.

     This song is soft and folky, with a lumbering bass, and a half-whispered verse. The title translates as, “song that you might like me a little bit”, and it’s shy and backward, until you get to the chorus and she practically shouts it.

     It’s a sad, awkward, lovely song for sad, awkward, lovely people.

 

17  Nos Mots D’Amour – Polnareff 

     It’s hard to work out equivalents in French music. You shouldn’t anyway, because it’s reductive and inaccurate. But, just to be reductive and inaccurate for a moment, I guess Claude Francois is the French Cliff Richard, and Johnny Hallyday the French, what? Tom Jones? Jacques Dutronc made a load of hard garage records in the 60’s and played a lot of divorced architects in 80’s films. He’s what would have happened if Adam Faith had been in The Flies. But what of Michel Polnareff? Who is he? He was twig thin with massive sunglasses, and a sort of boho Dylan figure for a while. Then he became a sort of romantic orch pop balladeer, like a French Scott Walker. Which must have pissed off Scott Walker, who would have loved to have been a French Scott Walker. I lose sight of him in the 70’s, when the sunglasses achieved Timmy Mallet proportions and he got a Pot Noodle perm and started getting his arse out. 60’s Polnareff is my guy.

     This is a swoon of a song. It’s a big French yearn. It’s a series of chords that get increasingly minor until they disappear into ellipses. It has that high, muscular 60’s session bass, and what sounds like a 12-year-old drummer, just about hanging on in there. There are brass stabs, wafting piano lines and perhaps my favourite orchestral arrangement on any pop song. And on top of this Polnareff sighs and sobs, his voice permanently on the edge of cracking in two.  

     It’s bliss. C’est le bonheur absolu.

 

18  C’est jens la – Jacques Brel 

     It means “That lot over there”. This is Jacques at his most stripped back – the song is basically two notes played on an upright bass for most of its duration, over which he is spitting in your ear about the pig shit people round here. At one point Jacques does an impression of a toothless old simpleton eating soup. You can hear him dribble. Brel is a bit of a sprayer at the best of times, but it’s integral to this song. He really hates these fuckers. That changes when he talks of his impossible love, and suddenly the orchestra is in multi-hued bloom and he’s bellowing passionately about how amazing she is until…we’re back to the doleful two note figure and he’s still stuck there with that lot over there. It’s a proper story in a song. It sounds amazing. And Jacques Brel’s mouth could swallow the world. It’s Jacques’ mouth – we just live in it.

 

19   Storm in a Teacup – Lynsey de Paul 

     This was the first dance at my wedding. Not this version, our one was by The Fortunes. But this will do. I like Lynsey de Paul. She’s massively underrated. There’s more to her than just her rock bottom.

 

20  Javelin Unlanding – Bill Callaghan 

     This whole album – Dream River – is brilliant, as is the ex-Smog man’s entire catalogue, really. I’m listening to some right now. He’s so clever and funny, so sad and his voice lugubrious and cavernous. He forces the adjectives out of you. Callaghan is a kind of throwback to the sort of music I liked when I was young: literate, witty, guitar-based and pale. But there’s more going on here than in drear 80’s indiepop. It’s warm, sexy, fully of rippling Michael Karoli guitar and trilling flutes. I hardly ever listen to modern music, but this was new when I first heard it and I felt a deep and real connection to it. It sounded like it had been made for me. Perhaps it was.

    Call me, Bill.

 

21  Who? – Odyssey 

     This is brilliant. It’s a disco hit by Vangelis but sung by F. R. David, of Words fame. Demis Rousos does a version as well, but I prefer this one. I love Demis, like all right-thinking people, but I prefer F.R.s spooky little voice on this. He’s barely there. He sounds like he got massively intimidated in the studio and his vocal just squeaked out like a piping fart. The production is perfect, the keyboard solo barely played – Vangelis has nothing to prove – there’s a bit of smoky sax and the drums are simple and clever at the same time. And it doesn’t hang around. It’s a perfect pop record. I don’t think it gets better than this.

 

22  Requiem pour un con – Serge Gainsbourg 

   Serge could be a bit of an arse, an ancien terrible, but he was also very brilliant. There are lots of songs I could have written about, the Melody Nelson album, of course, or his long string of ineffably cool post Ye Ye sides, his duets with Bardot and Birkin. But this weird postmortem diss track, casually inventing hip hop on bongos, is pretty much the bomb. As we used to say in the 80s.

 

23  Breathe and Stop – Q Tip 

     This is just made out of noise. I don’t think there are any identifiable instruments. Well, there are hand claps and Q Tip’s voice, but everything else appears to be heavy goods vehicles reversing and people leaving M & S with the tags still on their wine. The sort of analogy a classy bitch like Q Tip would be down with. He does his whole shop there, not just his bits. Though the song appears to be created from building site noises and the final whistle, it includes three samples, one of which is from Darkness and Newborn Light by Urszula Dudziak and Adam Makowicz. Which is a bit of a deep dive. I have no idea what this song is about. Yoga? Curing hiccups? Probably not. It’s probably not very nice. But it sounds great.

 

24  Golden Lady – Jose Feliciano 

     It has to be the Jose version. Obviously, the Stevie Wonder original is technically better on every level. Of course it is. It’s Stevie Fuckin’ Wonder, c’mon. But Jose’s mangled, dinner-flamenco version is both sophisticated and unhinged. Listen to that Rhodes piano, the marimba, the subtle orchestration, Jose’s histrionic madness, his flailing guitar solo. There are some light entertainment covers that extend further than the parameters of conservatism and politesse and reach a point of true madness. I like Going Nowhere by Neil Sedaka, but it never gets to the hare-eyed power of the Lena Zavaroni version. The hairs on my arms were on end. She meant it, man.

     I once invited someone to dinner and played Golden Lady on repeat, so it would be playing when she arrived at the front door. We’re still together after fifteen years. Thanks, Jose.

     Also, he sings “Looking at your hands” and it sounds like “looking at your arse” in his accent. Which is great.

 

25  Sing Swan Song – Can 

     It starts with bubbling water and the band floats in on top of it, like they’re punting a gondola through mist. This is a dream, another swoon on a sunshiny day. The song keeps changing, the volume fluctuating, new colour and detail added and subtracted. It features that instrument I don’t know the name of, but which is there to indicate the presence of a ghost on Scooby Doo*. The song seems to vibrate out of Holger Czukay’s two fingered bass tickling, and an unusually splashy Jaki Liebezeit. The keyboards buzz like insects. Michael Karoli appears to have disappeared. Above it all, keening like a ghost who is resigned to being a ghost, is Damo, singing his swan song. The song is all languor and ease, it begs you to lie in a meadow, a bottle of Reisling tied to your toe and chilling in a nearby brook. The sunlight turns your eyelids to hazy, pink tartan.

      A song for a sunny day that promises the possibility of sunny days to come. What more could you want?

 

*I’ve looked it up. It’s a flexatone.