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  1. 20. Tin Soldier – The Small Faces

    It’s tempting to believe that each of the songs on this list was an authentic discovery. That I went out and found each and every one of them, that I made a series of carefully considered judgements that lead me to fall in love with each of these tracks. But the trouble is, when you actually stop and give any material thought to that love, when you take the time to trace it back to the root, you often discover the rather less appealing reality: you didn’t find the songs, they found you.

    It would have been 1991 when I first heard the Small Faces, in my mother’s car on the morning school run. I’ve always looked back on the encounter as a kind of happy accident: the cassette just suddenly showing up in the glove compartment, ready to transport me. But then as I look back now, I see the inevitability of it all so clearly: Mum had only just learned to drive, so she went shopping for music to listen to. The tape was in the car because poor Steve Marriott had died a few months earlier and the band were enjoying a brief moment back in the spotlight. I was coming off the back of my Blues Brothers obsession, which left me susceptible to a great Soul vocal, even where transplanted to a Rock band. I was missing London, and here were Cockney accents aplenty. I didn’t choose Tin Soldier, Tin Soldier chose me. Utterly inevitable.

    I loved the Small Faces from first listen. I heard them on record before I ever heard the Stones or the Beatles, and they were everything I wanted from a 60s guitar group. They defined what I expected from a 60s guitar group. That warm organ sound, the messy clatter of the band, the sense that they were having a good time all the time. The way the leant right into the whimsy, leant right into the accents. The knockabout, throwaway nature of many of the songs. The lack of piety or po facedness.

    I remember sitting in the passenger seat listening to Rene, The Dockers Delight and wondering at its careless bawdiness. I remember catching a clip of the band performing HappyDaysToyTown on the BBC, all clearly wankered and having a whale of a time even as the credits rolled and presenters attempted in vain to shoo them from the stage. The Small Faces were fun. They made being a band look fun. When you listened to Lazy Sunday it was impossible to miss what a great time Marriott was having singing it: the great cries of “oh yes”, the way he seemed to add an “ah” to the end of every line as behind him the band chanted “tiddly-bay”. There was no chin stroking here, no artistic pretension, just a bunch of guys getting together, banging out music and enjoying themselves while doing so.

    In some ways, it felt like normal rules did not apply here. I’d grown up singing 60s songs in assembly at my liberal hippy Primary School, and was well familiar with the coded drug references which were part of the vernacular of Pop music in that period. The first time I heard Marriott bellow “I got high” on the chorus of Itchycoo Park my skin prickled. His voice sounded so joyous and he was so utterly flagrant. It felt like watching someone pick a pocket right in front of you and stroll off whistling. Utterly weightless.

    A few years later, when Britpop rolled around, a lot was made of the scene’s debt to the Small Faces. I never heard it in the music – maybe a few cockneyisms, perhaps a smidge of the same Music Hall here and there, but certainly none of the R&B – but I did detect some of the same energy in Supergrass, who seemed to carry with them the same youthful exuberance, the same mischievous nose for possibility. The same sense that they too were having a great time, as would you be in their shoes.

    The great dichotomy of the Small Faces of course, was that this bunch of chancers could do fun, but they could also do pathos, because they had Steve Marriott and that gorgeous, earthy voice. If I was first drawn to the band by the sheer entertainment factor, what sealed the deal was the love songs. All Or Nothing, Afterglow (Of Your Love), Tin Soldier. Marriott singing his ass off on each of them. It was the vocals that gave the sound a reference point I could understand: beneath it all, this was Soul music. The band had cut their teeth playing covers of James Brown, Ben E King and Smokey Robinson, and it showed – they could switch it on when they needed to.

    I could very easily have picked All Or Nothing for this list. The sound of the organ is warm as a roaring fire, the vocal full of passion and flame – Marriott going full send with that almighty roar of “I ain’t tell you no lie girl/so don’t just sit there and cry”, those yells of “you gotta/gotta/gotta keep on trying”. It was the song I originally nominated for first dance on my wedding day before being brutally shot down: I know it’s a breakup track, but what a perfect message with which to begin a new life together. All or nothing. I thought you’d listen to my reasoning.

    Tin Soldier is the one I’m going for here, because above all this band’s records it’s the one that means the most to me, a perfect Small Faces track. Marriott wrote Tin Soldier about Jenny Rylance, who he would later marry, but who at the time was Rod Stewart’s girlfriend. The song had originally been intended for PP Arnold, another of Marriott’s paramours, but ultimately he demurred and Arnold had to settle for providing the memorable backing vocals. I wonder sometimes what that must have felt like: singing a song written by you ex for the person he really loves.

    What’s striking about the song’s opening is that it begins by adding each instrument in turn: the organ, then the drums, then the guitar and finally the voice, like Baba O’Riley in microcosm. We get that memorable opening line “I am a little tin soldier that wants to jump into your fire”, so unusual in its odd passivity, and almost certainly inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”, about a toy soldier who falls in love with a tin ballerina. The song is full of slightly offbeat lyrics: “you are a look in your eye”, “I just got to make you, yes my occupation”. They don’t make sense on the page, but they take flight when sung.

    Characteristically, Marriott throws everything against the song, probably the best of his many great vocals. He sings the lyric brilliantly, but just listen to what he’s doing round the edge of it, the great Soul wail he’s giving in all the gaps, the cries of “cmon”, the way he seems to be ranting to himself in the off beats. He’s sweet and tender on the verses, raw and unyielding on the choruses. And the song builds and builds until it climaxes with his glorious “I just want some reaction/someone to give me satisfaction/all I want to do is stick with you/cos I love you”. He hits that final “I love you” about as well as anyone has ever sung those words, and then we get what sounds like a drumkit toppling down some stairs. The Small Faces, in all their glorious, emphatic, irreverence, all in 30 seconds. Marriott about as direct address as music can possibly get while the track clatters its way to oblivion behind him, too drunk to stand.

    It’s difficult to think of Tin Soldier without calling to mind the famous video of the band performing the song on TV. Marriott giving it loads in his frilly yellow shirt, Arnold swaying in her purple dress. His manic energy, her benign smile. The shock and awe of this great big voice emanating from his tiny frame as he hammers on his guitar like it owes him money. You can see both sides of the band in evidence in that clip: the way Marriott puts his hand to his mouth as it begins, as if he’s been caught in the middle of some more important scheme, the ridiculously overstated bow at the end, and then all that passion in between. Ducking and diving and feeling it all forever.

    Except, obviously, it wasn’t forever. The Small Faces were together for a grand total of 4 years, and didn’t make it to the end of the 60s. Marriott went off to form Humble Pie, the two Rods came aboard to form first Quiet Melon and then the Faces. Plenty of wonderful music was made by the various factions – shout outs here for Debris by the Faces, Harvest Home by Ronnie Lane, How Does It Feel by the Majik Mijits and, most of all, Marriott’s fabulous cover of Lorraine Ellison’s Stay With Me Baby – but the moment for the Small Faces came and went. They flamed out. But that’s OK, because look at what they left behind. No other band ever sounded quite so simultaneously emphatic and facetious, no other 60s band has ever spoken to me in quite the same way. Steve Marriott lit his cigarette and settled down onto the sofa, and somewhere a few months down the line, off the back of that tragedy, I was bequeathed all this great joy. The pleasure is very nearly guilty.

    When I think of the Small Faces, I think of Tin Soldier, and it makes me smile to myself. And I’m smiling because that vocal is so full on that it’s impossible not to be charmed by it, because of the knowledge that poor, troubled Steve Marriott wrote it for a woman who wasn’t even his, but who would presumably make him happy for a while. But I’m also smiling because to me this band is the authentic sound of mischief. Of life fully lived.

    Listen carefully to Tin Soldier. Listen beyond the twisting organ line and Marriott’s frantic emoting. Listen deep into the background and you’ll hear a sound recurring throughout the song, a sound that does not belong. It begins as Marriott sings his first line: “I am a little tin soldier that wants to jump into your fire”. It sounds like someone beating on an old tin roof, like metal on metal. It’s not a drumbeat, and it doesn’t even follow the rhythm of the track, but it’s there, and I have no idea what it is or what it’s doing there. Mischief.

    But every time I hear that sound, every damn time, I’m sent right back to the passenger seat of Mum’s car, first thing in the morning, bleary eyed and heading to a school I did not like, but captured by the renewed certainty that there is magic in this world, and that being in the right band at the right moment might even allow you to touch the stuff. To me, that banging noise is the sound of endless possibility: of refusing to take life too seriously, even when it seems to demand you do so. It is the sound of freedom.

    The Small Faces lifted my spirits at a difficult time. They made me believe in music, and magic and cockney accents and stupid dances. That it doesn’t all have to be great art. That life is just a bowl of All Bran: you wake up every morning and it’s there. Looking back, I can see that what brought them to me and me to them was probably inevitable, that confluence of events and influences, and maybe that’s life at work too: utter mundanity and wild romance all at once and intertwined. A fire that roars without heat, a flame that burns without pain. Safe travels, Steve and Ronnie, wherever you are.

    • Ian McLagan is magnificent on this track, and for The Small Faces generally. Patricia Ann Cole, aka PP Arnold, is wonderful too. The musicians who transitioned into Faces seemed to deteriorate, as though Ronnie Wood contaminated them. They lost their inventiveness, the mischief as you put it, and became much more straight forward. Alcohol played a role, too, and they made more money, so who am I to complain.

    • A Pedant Writes – it starts with electric piano, THEN the organ comes in. That little niggle apart, great appreciation of what would be close to Number One in my 100 Favourite Songs Of All Time. It’s always a toss-up between this song, Waterloo Sunset, Strawberry Fields Forever and River Deep Mountain High.

      • I think we had a very mild disagreement some years ago, Mousey, where I suggested P.P’s vocals were slightly pitchy and you leaped, quite rightly, to her defence. I love the song, but my opinion stands!

        And Bingo, I’ve always been fascinated by the off-beat clanking metal! The closest analogue I can think of is the duelling sabres in the background of Search and Destroy on Raw Power (more audible on Iggy’s mix).

        • I’ll be honest: for a long time now my working theory on the clanking metal has been that it’s a bit of a dirty joke: the little tin soldier and the tin ballerina consumating their relationship somewhere off in the background.

  3. Wonderful writing as always Bingo. I rarely comment but always read and invariably enjoy. I remember reading elsewhere some time ago a chap proposing the idea that Tin Soldier pretty much encapsulates the ideas and sound that Paul Weller has striven over the years to achieve. What do you think?

  4. Wonderful. Was waxing lyrical about this song the other day. Re Steve and PP I thought he was besotted, took her home to the folks and all but twas she who ended up pulling the pin on things.

  5. 19. Intl Players Anthem – UGK

    How many songs are transformed by a single piece of magic? One decision of genius that bathes the rest of the track in new light, takes it to that next level.

    Bobby Hatfield running back from the pub and convincing his producer to let him take one more run at Unchained Melody because he’d realised he needed to go higher on that great crescendo (“I can sing it better”, “no – you can’t”). Jonny Greenwood sabotaging Creep with those sarcastic, crunching guitar stabs. Merry Clayton showing up in curlers to see if a female vocal might add a little something to Gimme Shelter.

    The entire story of Intl Players Anthem is unlikely. In 2006, Texas duo UGK were Southern Hip Hop legends, but they hadn’t released an album in 6 years. In the intervening time, one half of the group, Pimp C, had served five years in prison for parole violation, and the sound of Hip Hop had moved on.

    When UGK released their comeback single, The Game Belongs To Me in August 2006, to distinctly muted response, it seemed that the jig was probably up. Into their 30s – at that time positively pensionable in Hip Hop – it was quite clear that whoever the game now belonged to, it was categorically not UGK. A few months later they dropped Intl Players Anthem, and everything changed again.

    Originally conceived as a link up between UGK and Three 6 Mafia, the latter riding a wave of success after Stay Fly, Intl Players Anthem was built around a sample from I Choose You, Willie Hutch’s contribution to the soundtrack of the 1973 Blaxploitation classic The Mack, a much loved and much sampled cinematic ode to the life of the pimp.

    The lift from Hutch was an immediately stirring confection; lush strings, backing singers cooing “I choose you” and Hutch’s great, escalating Soul wail. It sounded warm and romantic, and pulled off the great Hip Hop trick of stealing another song’s best aspect and completely recontextualising it. Improving it, evolution in action.

    Fatefully, Intl Players Anthem was tied up for several months by record company red tape, and for once we can be thankful for bureaucracy, because the delay opened a door for magic. Outkast heard the nascent version of the song, asked to hop on, and suddenly Intl Players Anthem was a legitimate posse cut. Possibly the greatest posse cut of them all.

    The final version of Intl Players Anthem is arguably some sort of absolute peak for Hip Hop to date. A world class sample, four absolutely fire verses from four super distinct MCs, one of the great beat drops in all of music. Unusually for a song that is ultimately about pimping, it’s possessed of a rich romantic streak, and full of contrasts. But what makes this one of the best Hip Hop records of all time and one of my favourite songs of any genre? It’s the opening verse, from OutKast’s Andre 3000, and – bringing us all the way back to the start – that’s the point at which the magic comes in.

    Andre 3000 wasn’t originally meant to be on this track – he came to it late, requested to join. He was sent a copy of Intl Players Anthem and invited to add his own contribution to the start, and what he sent back was genius: drums withdrawn, an a capella freestyle over the Hutch sample, just Andre stripped bare with horns and backing vocals.

    He’d also flipped the intent of the track: where the other verses were about pimping and womanising, Andre took that iconic “I choose you” as his starting point and went in the precise opposite direction, to his own future wedding day: “I don’t know why I went to marriage as a topic, but I guess that’s the ultimate version of “choosin’.” The marriage and the reaction from guys and girls was the focus.” He’s telling the story of a man turning his back on other women to be with the one he really wants, in the face of strong opposition from his friends.

    The André 3000’s verse at the start of this song is quite conceivably my favourite in all of Hip Hop, and only he could have pulled it off. “So, I typed a text to a girl I used to see/saying that I chose this cutie pie with whom I want to be”. His voice is so rich and full of character, he inhabits the story he’s telling so fully, and his use of language and phrasing is gorgeous. The verse lasts just over a minute, but it is absolutely chock full of memorable moments, moments that you’d never really heard on this level in a Hip Hop track before, from the dad joke wordplay (“then I CCd every girl that I’d see see round town”) to the Gladys Knight gag, to the sheer ruminative bravado of “I’m no island, peninsula maybe” to the way he enunciates the word “space ships”. It’s impossible not to laugh at André’s friends begging him “don’t do it, reconsider” or ultimately surrendering the fight with the line “you know we got your back like chiroprac”. And all of it leads to the grand, romantic climax:

    “I know you ain’t a pimp
    But pimp remember what I taught ya
    Keep your heart, Three Stacks
    Keep your heart
    Hey, keep your heart, Three Stacks
    Keep your heart
    Man, these girls are smart, Three Stacks
    These girls are smart
    Play your part
    Play your part”

    It kills me every time, the sheer depth of feeling he brings to these bars, the way he hits that final “play your part”. In a genre not known for its evocations of love, this is about as tender and sensitive as it gets. Don’t give your heart away, you’ll get hurt. And he does it anyway.

    When Andre returned his verse, it was not immediately well received. UGK’s Pimp C was furious: “Fuck Andre, man. How the fuck is he gonna send my shit back and take the drums out? Fuck that”. He only calmed down when it was pointed out to him that his own verse would come next, and as a consequence of Three Stacks’ decision he would be getting the beat drop.

    The glory of Intl Players Anthem is in its contrasts. We get this incredible verse from Andre 3000, all romance and sacrifice, ignoring his mates to marry the love of his life, and then, immediately, we get the other perspective, from those self same mates. The beat drops, Pimp C leads off with the immortal couplet “My bitch a choosy lover, never fuck without a rubber/never in the sheets, like it on top of the cover” and the sheer whiplash in sentiment sends an electric jolt through the whole record. Something so coarse after something so lovely: even when he’s trying to praise his partner it comes out so utterly twisted. His inarticulacy a foil to André’s way with words.

    In the verses that follow, Pimp C, Bun B and Big Boi treat us to one memorable line after another. Easy as A, B, C/simple as 1, 2, 3/get down with UGK/Pimp C, B-U-N-B. We tryna get chose. Ask Paul McCartney/the lawyers couldn’t stop me. Slippin is somethin I don’t do, tippin for life. Everywhere you look, everyone is bringing their absolute A game, and their styles are so distinct that listening to them attempt to one up the other is the most tremendous fun.

    Intl Players Anthem is a track that has everything. It slaps, it’s moving, it’s funny. It has both real heart and a sense of humour, and you don’t often get both those things together in the same piece of music. But it works the way it does because of that André 3000 verse, the juxtaposition of which in contrast to the tone of all the others only serves to further accentuate its sincerity. It’s a single lover in the midst of a room full of fighters, choosing to go his own way, and it’s truly beautiful. Its rhyme scheme is unconventional, and by removing the drums it’s intimate, vulnerable and directly oppositional to the bravura of what follows. It is the greatest verse in all of Hip Hop, and he delivers it perfectly. Keep your heart Three Stacks, keep your heart – it brings a lump to the throat if you’ve listened to enough of this sort of music to know how unusual and exposing it is that he would choose to do otherwise.

    It’s impossible to talk about this song without also addressing its video, because the two are indivisible at this point. An absolute who’s who of new millennial Dirty South Hip Hop, the video is notionally set at Andre 3000’s wedding and immediately recalls Guns N Roses’ classic November Rain. Only where November Rain is all po faces, serious piano action and cliff top guitar solos, Intl Players Anthem has Pimp C in his insane fur coat and hat, Andre in a kilt and beret, female guests fighting, cake being thrown, T-Pain leading a choir, and members of the Goodie Mobb as groomsmen. It’s light hearted, gently self mocking and has the slightly bonkers, offbeat but intimate energy of a real wedding. It’s also a time capsule of a lost era, before Hip Hop went spinning off in strange new directions, the last of the 90s energy dissipating into the atmosphere above the guests as they party.

    Intl Players Anthem was a swan song in many ways. Pimp C died later in 2007. Outkast more or less stopped working together after this, the great farewell. The following year, I campaigned unsuccessfully to have this track played at my own wedding as we walked back down the aisle (hey, we got Johnny Boy instead – probably the right decision). And now it’s nearly two decades later, and the track is a beloved favourite of many, and reportedly a mainstay on the playlist of Millennial weddings.

    Looking back, it’s truly wild the change that opening verse must have brought to the track. It takes what would otherwise have merely been a pretty great Hip Hop tune about treacherous women, flips the script and lends it genuine heart and soul. Gives depth to what would otherwise have been quite shallow. Provides us with one of the greatest deliveries in the whole genre, and does it all without drums. Play your part, play your part.

    So, why’s it so high on the list? Well, I guess it’s a mix of nostalgia for a really golden period in my own life, but also pure appreciation for the way this song weaves together so many seemingly disparate elements, elements you’d never have imagined would work together. For the way it addresses male vulnerability, that macho inability to ever drop the facade and say what you feel in simple terms, for the mad shit that sometimes comes out when people try (“my bitch a choosy lover”) . For that first beat drop, a slap across the face to snap you out of all your amorous illusions. But most of all for the way it takes a song about pimping, based on music from a movie about pimping, and improbably turns it into one of the most beautiful love songs I’ve ever heard, a self-parodic rebuke to the inherent coarseness of so much of Hip Hop, a wild flower brought to us from dirt.

  6. It is indeed a great track but like much hip hop I can’t hear the lyrics, or understand a lot of them when I can, so even when they’re deeper than a mere diss or a brag I lose a lot of their meaning. As demonstrated with this example.

    • Nowadays, I generally prefer not being able to hear the lyrics, but I’ve always found part of the pleasure of this music to be trying to understand what they’re on about. So much of it is typically couched in slang or in jokes that you almost need a glossary, and that adds to the fun: I enjoy it when people mess around with language.

      That said, I think this one is pretty clear and direct. The Andre verse is about love, the Pimp C verse is about lust, the Bun B verse is about pimping and the Big Boi verse is about the perils of getting the wrong woman pregnant/child support.

      The only bit that might not immediately be clear is the Paul McCartney reference, which concerns his then-recent divorce from Heather Mills, who rather took him to the cleaners.

  7. 18. Geek USA

    When all is said and done, there are two ways and two ways only that a song ever soothed a fevered teenage heart.

    The first, a great intimacy: you are not alone, I am here with you – receive my signal and exhale. The outer world brought within. The second, an anthem: all that electric passion flowing through you isn’t an error, it’s a life force – let’s expel it together. The inner world brought outside.

    I was 28 years old when My Chemical Romance released Welcome To The Black Parade, perhaps the first true teen anthem of the new millennium. As I watched a legion of doomy, melancholy kids clutch it to their collective bosom I felt the warm flutter of recognition, because Welcome To The Black Parade, with its racing guitars, military drumming, distinct sections and overwrought lyrics – Welcome To The Black Parade that so badly wanted to be a Queen record at heart – spun me immediately back to my own teenagerdom, to a bedroom at the end of the universe, and to Geek USA.

    Geek USA was a true teen anthem – was my teen anthem. Where Mayonaise spoke to my loneliness and made me feel less alone, Geek USA spoke to my powerlessness and made me feel more powerful. Geek USA was the sound of one of the great maximalist, joyfully tasteless bands of my generation cutting loose and giving it the kitchen sink. Listening to it felt like meeting the only other kid in town as daftly, pointlessly intense as you, like rattling the windows together.

    Smashing Pumpkins were a true guitar band at this stage, and Geek USA is their ultimate guitar track. One great riff after another, one Olympian peak after the next, Billy Corgan in the centre of the maelstrom, playing everything, coordinating everything, plump faced and gawky, the misfit guitar hero. Billy Corgan who could never be cool, who wanted it far too much to be cool, but who could lift his clenched fist to the heavens and call down thunder. Who made you feel that you could call down thunder too. That you had that power within you.

    Billy Corgan named the track Geek USA to reclaim a slur. “That’s what i’ve been told I am my whole life. A freak, a geek, whatever that word means is what I am. I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. Long ago I found out that I couldn’t be fashionable if I tried. You begin to revel in your own lack of ability to be cool. It was like that in Chicago. We were this band of complete idiots, playing long guitar solos that everyone considered passe. We’d play at home and people assumed we were from out of town.”

    We open with some characteristically martial drumming and one of the distinctly parabolic riffs in which the band specialised. We get Corgan’s feline whine, and so far it’s just another great Siamese Dream track to file alongside Rocket, Hummer and all the rest, finding that sweet biting point between punk energy and 60s psychedelic rock. Channelling Metal and My Bloody Valentine and Shoegaze and every other outsider guitar sound to ever make the instrument roar and coo all at once.

    And then we hit the two minute mark, a switch gets flipped and we’re off into the song’s underwater section. The guitars fall away, the bass takes over, the drums are distant and echoed. It’s trippy and abrupt and sort of a cheap trick, but effective nonetheless. The band dropping from feral snarl to heavy lidded ennui on a sixpence. The guitars bring us slamming back to the surface, regal and spiralling, as Corgan cues up the guitar solo, and it’s from here on that the track really, properly takes flight.

    Geek USA’s guitar solo was perhaps the first I ever heard to truly spark something inside me. It was so preposterously fast, so fabric-shreddingly gnarly that it almost felt like self parody – so over the top that surely you had to laugh as you played it, as you channelled that electricity from your fingertips. Surely it couldn’t be serious?

    That solo is the point at which the track fully comes off the rails, at which the band slip the leash, at which all remaining sense of taste and decorum melts away and at which all my teenage dreams suddenly felt within reach. The noise of that guitar spoke deeply to me in that moment, in its virtuosity, its overwrought thrashing, its hysteria. It sounds like Tom Verlaine with industrial strength ADHD, brought up not on the great poets but on Batman villains and Saturday morning cartoons. It sounded like a teenage scream. It sounded like freedom. And even as Corgan is playing it, he howls Geek USA’s single best and most nakedly teenage line: “words can’t define what I feel inside/who needs em”.

    The impact of listening to Billy Corgan play that solo and scream those words was seismic. It triggered something in my own inchoate sense of self, put its finger squarely on a painful delta that had opened within me. On the one hand, my own deep love of language, my abiding childhood belief that I’d been blessed with the magic gift of words, words to get me into and out of any and all trouble, words my pass to anywhere I wanted to go. On the other, the mounting adolescent realisation that the currency in which those words were held could seemingly not be redeemed in or around the territory of the heart. The panic and confusion of that awful realisation. Who needs em? Me, Billy, and apparently I’ve not got em where it actually counts.

    We’re nearing the end now, but the song has one final twist, one final body swerve to sell. The solo finally, eventually abates, the guitars receding to a low hum of feedback, before the drums kick back in with genuine ferocity and trigger one final riff, a malevolent, runaway 18 wheeler of a riff that comes barrelling down the middle of the road and sends us into the track’s brutalist fourth section, and across the finish line.

    A word here for the drums. Siamese Dream is a guitar album, but Jimmy Chamberlain is absolutely on fire on several tracks and never better than here. Described by Butch Vig as “one of the most amazing drum performances I’ve ever heard”, Chamberlain anchors everything, seamlessly shifting from monstrous, troglodyte beats to light, jazzy fills. Always the odd man out, seemingly drafted in from a far heavier band, he brings a distinct Led Zep quality to Geek USA, brutal and propulsive. Push come to shove, one of my favourite Rock drumming performances of all time – it’s got absolutely everything, he’s playing like his life depends on it.

    There’s a truly great clip that can be found on YouTube of the Pumpkins playing Geek USA live some time in the mid 90s. The track is even faster than on record, which is how they typically liked to perform it. Corgan clearly cannot quite deliver the vocal, which is again not atypical. And the stage on which they’re playing is covered in circus clowns. Clowns dancing, clowns crowdsurfing, clowns headbanging. And amidst the clowns, it’s clear for all to see that Smashing Pumpkins, a band famous for their internal acrimony and sulkiness, for their adolescent fury, are having a fucking fantastic time.

    I think of that clip all the time, because for me it sums up the teenage condition. All that rage, all that angst, all that energy with nowhere to go, in danger of turning inwards. But also the utter ludicrousness of the condition: neither a child nor an adult, but cursed to wander in between, preposterously raw to the world. So serious and so stupid, all at once. So preposterous you had to laugh on the inside even as you scowled on the outside.

    Geek USA was my teenage anthem. Even as I first listened, I knew you shouldn’t really be this over the top, this excessive. You shouldn’t have an underwater section and all these different riffs, shouldn’t play your guitar so quickly and so needily. Shouldn’t show your workings so readily.

    But I didn’t care about any of that. Because Geek USA marked the first occasion on which a guitar sound truly spoke to my soul. Because Geek USA was my favourite band turning everything to eleven and doing Stonehenge. Because Geek USA was giving me something I needed and recognised immediately: a battle cry in my native language. Which is to say: a battle cry in no language at all.

  8. 17. Protect Ya Neck – Wu Tang Clan

    Before there was ever music, before there were even books, there were comics and chess.

    I would have been 4 or 5 years old when my Mother first started to purchase for me the outsized reprints of classic Marvel Comics which were being made cheaply available in UK newsagents at that time. An avid consumer to that point of as many bedtime stories as I could wring from my parents, comics marked the first occasion on which I was introduced to a discrete source of fantasy beyond my immediate domestic sphere, a development I welcomed with open arms.

    Sat poring over a Howard The Duck or an X-Men, I strained to recognise unfamiliar words, had my mind boggled by the cosmic prose of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s incredible artwork. Comics were the first occasion on which I realised that I could attempt to replicate the sunshine hit of those bedtime stories independently of my parents. Sometimes I ask myself the uncomfortable question of how much of my life – all the books and movies and video games and so on – has been one long attempt to chase that same dragon. To get outside my own mind on someone else’s creations, to process reality by vacationing elsewhere, long and often. To delay the night a little longer.

    A few short years later, a new headmistress materialised at my Primary School, seemingly overnight. Supernaturally young and progressive, she played her acoustic guitar in assemblies and lead us through massed singalongs of 60s standards. But she also brought with her a further innovation: chess. One fateful day, I was called, along with a small number of peers, to her office and informed that henceforth we would be playing and competing at chess. So it proved; within 6 months virtually every child in the school was a participant, a spot on the chess team became as coveted as its equivalent in the football XI, and weekends were being spent in tournament against other schools, other districts and occasionally against grown adults.

    I fell in love with chess hard. Partly, it was that I recognised and approved of the force with which this new broom was sweeping through the school, but mainly it was the game itself, which coupled an utterly rationalist sensibility with an enticing frisson of roaring lunacy. My school improved, we became national champions, and I began to spend my evenings reading chess history: Capablanca, Mikhail Tal and, of course, the ultimate chess hero of the age: Bobby Fischer. Another new universe of incredible stories drifting within my event horizon.

    Fast forward on another five years or so, to my first encounter with the Wu. The then Newcastle Utd striker, Andy Cole, asked by either Shoot or Goal, some time in early 1994, to name his current favourite musical act and replied with a simple “Wu Tang Clan”. A preposterous name, and doubly so in an era where footballer responses to such questions still rarely strayed beyond Spandau Ballet and Simply Red, but memorable all the same. And when further investigation revealed a Hip Hop act seemingly obsessed with comic books and chess, my teenage curiosity was well and truly piqued.

    Everyone has their own story of the first encounter with Enter The 36 Chambers. Raw and unschooled, it’s a record that seemed to skew Hip Hop – then stratified between what remained of the Daisy Age/Conscious Rap and the low, menacing Swing of Snoop and Dre – on its very axis, presenting a new frontier in which gritty realism commingled with preposterous feats of the imagination. And it was those preposterous feats that drew me in immediately.

    Chess and comics were the hook. Hitherto unlikely twin stylistic affectations for an early 90s Hip Hop act, and perilously close to my own heart. But what truly sealed the deal with the Wu as I sat and listened to 36 Chambers was the sense that underneath the blood curdling threats of violence and tales of street corner life, these were really just kids like me. Bedroom kids chasing the same bedtime story high, the same propensity to cope with the world by finding its seams and slipping through them to worlds fantastic. The Wu Tang brought with them this odd combination of deep grit and wide-eyed innocence, this sense that the buccaneer spirit of childhood can survive even in the most trying circumstances, and I, like so many others, loved them immediately for that. Just as Batman made you believe that with enough emotional incentive and uninterrupted focus you could become an apex version of yourself and go fight crime across the rooftops, the Wu seemed to offer proof that with enough concentration of effort you could take all your little idiosyncrasies and private obsessions and use them as raw material for transformation into something far greater than the sums of its parts. That you could convert lead into gold, Staten Island into Shaolin.

    The architect behind the extraordinary act of transmogrification was, of course, Robert Diggs, aka RZA. RZA, who first trained himself to become the master of his chosen instrument, the Ensoniq ASR-10, then began chopping and mixing beats that sounded like nothing that had come before. RZA who convinced first his cousins Genius and ODB (the original All In Together Now crew(, and then six other associates to hop on board, put their faith in him, adopt their alter egos and form the Clan. RZA who talked each member into chipping in $100 to book a single day at Boerum Hill studio, The Firehouse, from which meagre down-payment emerged Protect Ya Neck.

    It’s worth taking a moment here to reflect on quite how unlikely the success of the Wu must have appeared at this stage. Virtually all its members had either been turned down or released by major labels. Virtually all of them were knee deep in street life, operating on final warnings. RZA was still “Prince Rakeem”, ODB had only recently stopped operating as “the Specialist”. The recording of Protect Ya Neck – a few thousand records pressed and sold from the trunks of the cars of Clan members, pushed on pals at radio stations – was one final swing for the fences, at the insistence of RZA. A swing that ultimately cleared the stadium walls entirely and paved the way for several lengthy and still ongoing careers.

    36 Chambers hit me like a bomb. It didn’t sound like any Hip Hop record I had ever heard: the grimy menace of its horrorcore textures, the sheer variety of MC styles. I’d alway been a sucker for a posse cut, and on this record virtually every track fit the bill: one vocalist after another, each trying to one up the guy before. The martial arts samples, the sounds of swords swinging. The finger clicks on Bring Da Ruckus. 36 Chambers had Punk Rock energy and arrived with its own irresistible mythos and complex lexicon: a completely perfect debut album that nailed a fresh new sound while simultaneously sounding like a greatest hits package.

    I could realistically have gone for any number of tracks from 36 Chambers here. They’re largely indivisible; a single, seminal moment for all the 90s kids with functioning ears who wanted to get a sense of how exciting the future might yet be. Chessboxin remains the strongest track on the album, but I’ve gone for Protect Ya Neck here because I still remember running into it the very first time: 10 tracks deep, jaw on the floor, convinced that surely the energy level of this record had to start to taper soon, that the preceding track (Method Man) had to be the start of a slow down. Only for Protect Ya Neck to form an improbable new peak.

    Protect is 36 Chambers’ ultimate calling card, containing virtually every element that made the Wu so special. Loaded with hooks and memorable vocal moments, featuring performances from 8 of the group’s 9 MCs, backed by a typically inventive RZA production, and fronted by what is probably the greatest pre-song intro of any Hip Hop track ever recorded. Maybe any track of any kind. So let’s start with that intro.

    When an awful lot of people think of 36 Chambers the first voice they think of isn’t the RZA, or Genius, or even Meth. It’s the unnamed kid who called in to an interview the Wu did on Washington DC radio station WPGC, excerpts from which are sprinkled across the album. In a record packed with memorable one liners and vocal bits, our caller – in under 20 seconds – drops one absolute bomb after another. “Yo wassup man. Chillin, chillin. Yo, you know I had to call you – you know why right? Because. Yo, I never, ever called to ask you to play something before. You know what I want to hear, right? I want to hear that Wu Tang joint. Ah yeah, again and again”. Take any single sentence, quote it at anyone of a certain age who loves Hip Hop. They’ll fill in the rest for you. Utterly iconic, a keystone moment of its entire decade, and that intonation of “because” is completely unbeatable. Completely inspired.

    I laughed out loud the first time I heard that sample. Ah yeah, again and again. As effective a hype man as you could ever ask for, and it fell right in their laps. And of course, the sample wasn’t on the original pressings of Protect Ya Neck, it was added for the album – the kid is calling up to ask for another spin of the single, not realising that in the process he was adding its crowning glory. Wild stuff.

    Wilder still is that, for all that fanfare, the track somehow manages to rise to meet the praise. The punchy-kicky sample, the cry of “Wu Tang Clan comin at ya”, Meth’s throwing away of what would plausibly have been in less capable hands a perfectly serviceable chorus (“Watch ya step kid”), simply to build the mood. And then, of course, the opening verse.

    Famously, Inspectah Deck’s opening goes about as hard as anything on 36 Chambers: “I smoke on the mic like smokin Joe Frazier/The hell raiser, Raisin hell with the flava/Terrorise a jam like troops in Pakistan/Swinging through your town like your neighbourhood Spiiiiiider-Man”. In all my many years of listening to albums, I don’t believe I was ever so completely bewitched, so entirely charmed, as when Deck hits that extended pronunciation of “Spider-Man”. It felt like the entire endeavour was just on fire: one incredible track after another, one memorable line following the next, all leading to this. Absolute peak Wu, the moment when it seemed they might do anything. A moment I’ve relived a thousand times since, basking in the happy memory of that original wide eyed joyride.

    The rest of Protect Ya Neck is, of course, no slouch. One great verse follows the next. We get that fabulous whistle sample from The J.B’s The Grunt (the same one that Public Enemy’s Rebel Without A Pause is built off), we get Rae’s superb entry (“rhymes rugged and built like Schwarzenegger”), we get Meth’s immortal “moving on your left” and U-God’s ”Can I get a suuuuu?”. We get ODB’s “first thing’s first man you’re fuckin with the worst/I’ll be sticking pins in your head like a fuckin nurse” and RZA’s “turn the other cheek and I’ll break your fuckin chin”. If you’re listening to the album version we get the guitar noises over some of the swearing. Everyone is spitting absolute fire, some of the greatest verses the Wu ever produced, an extraordinary range of styles on show, and then at the end GZA comes in to clean it all up with an ice cold rebuke to the labels who had failed to recognise all that talent when it had first been presented to them.

    Protect Ya Neck is the track that launched the Wu Tang Clan. They signed to Loud, re-released the single and followed up with the album. It was proof of concept for the RZA’s original vision of a larger Hip Hop group whose styles would conflict and gel together, who would go their own ways and then re-form like Voltron. But it was also evidence of his own extraordinary talent, because these vocals were originally recorded over an entirely different beat before he whisked them off into the lab and changed the arrangement, painstakingly constructing the magic in post-production. Enhancing and elevating.

    When I listen now to Protect Ya Neck, I am of course spun straight back to the 90s. To my youth. To being stood outside the school gates with this extraordinary, life affirming ruckus in my ears. To believing that perhaps I too had this kind of magic somewhere inside me, and that listening to the RZA might one day teach me to externalise it just as he had. To feeling that the Wu Tang were my own personal discovery, because no one else I knew was listening to them (yet).

    But I’m spun back further still. To all my childhood obsessions, most of which have abided into adulthood in some form or other. To chess and comics and football and movies and music and video games and the way these things are – ultimately – if not the building blocks of great art, then at least the building blocks of a life fully lived. To the way these things can become a part of you – the way an album can become part of you, a song can become part of you.

    I struggle to think of any other track, by anyone, that brings the same degree of energy as Protect Ya Neck. Another track in which space is cleared for eight separate participants to bring their respective A games, and on which the vast majority duly oblige. Every single aspect of the song, from the opening sample on down, feels tapped by the lucky stick: like the entire group collectively entered the same flow state, unable to put a foot wrong if they’d tried. A flow state so potent that even callers to radio shows fell within its gravity. It’s prima facie evidence for the world moving power of a small group of mates retreating to a room and working hard to impress and amuse one another; a formula that is as responsible for as much of the last century’s great art as any other. It is a near perfect song from a then still perfect act, and its manic cartoon energy seems entirely undiminished by the passage of time.

    So, you ask me why Protect Ya Neck makes this list, and I could give a thousand reasons. Its excellence of conception and execution, its force of personality, its apparent validation of my childhood thesis that the divide between lives real and imagined should be kept thin. I could list for you all those reasons and more besides, but – really – the answer to your question is right there under both our noses. And that answer is an emphatic, still perfect and unimprovable: because.

  9. Ace choice. The flow of all the MC’s combined with the ground-breaking sound is spellbinding. One hip-hop record that makes me actually want to know what the lyrics are.

    Have we had anything from Nas yet? Based on what’s appeared so far in the list I’d put money on him appearing somewhere.

    • It says a lot about the quality of the verses that I forgot to mention the bit where Meth actually rhymes using a cough. You can tell how much fun they were all having at this stage.

      Nothing at all from Nas on this list, I’m afraid. I feel a bit guilty about that, because he’s an artist who’s brought me a lot of joy down the years, but it’s been more of a volume thing than a close relationship with one or two tracks. Plus, I was ever so slightly late to him, which probably made a difference.

      That said, bubbling just under this 100 would be Halftime and Made You Look. The latter is a track that unites a group of mates I love very dearly, and should probably have been on here somewhere.

      There’s actually only one more Hip Hop track left to go, which is probably for the best as they’ve generally proved to be the hardest to write about.

      • I bet to differ. You appear to have no difficulty writing about it. 😉

        When I first heard Protect Your Neck, I was delighted. It struck me as an expanded De La Soul backed by the Bomb Squad.

        • Far too kind.

          The difficulty I’ve found with Hip Hop is that the best stuff just sounds great, and it tends to hit the gut, rather than the heart and soul. Trickier organ to write about.

          • Oh I like a bit of poetry and humanity in Hip Hop. I get turned off by gangsta. However, someone getting really fired up over a banging beat is just great as far as I’m concerned.

  10. 16. Say It Ain’t So – Weezer

    Mark Twain once famously wrote that grief can take care of itself, but that to get the full value of a joy you must have someone to divide it with. There’s a lot of truth in that statement, and since music is a joy it only stands to reason that it too must be in want of proper division.

    When I was 15 years old, a dear friend I’d grown up with came to visit, catching a short train journey out into the winter of my commuter belt discontent. The stay was notable in that usually I was the one making the pilgrimage up to the city; the reversal was novel and greatly appreciated. But it was also notable because he had brought with him a lifeline.

    Three C90 cassette tapes, with labels written in his usual cartoon scrawl, in green neon ink. An album on each side, the sequencing indelible in my memory: Safe Sex, Designer Drugs & The Death Of Rock & Roll by Baby Chaos/Smash by Offspring, Homegrown by Dodgy/Dookie by Green Day, The Blue Album by Weezer/Pisces Iscariot by Smashing Pumpkins.

    I listened to those cassettes endlessly in the months that followed, partly because they contained some great music, but mainly because of what they truly represented: a letter from home, a link back to the motherland. A joy divided.

    As I listened to those albums, I felt I was gaining insight into the theoretical life not lived, the road not taken. The road on which we never moved away, on which I stayed a city kid, with my city kid mates, and we sat around on parks on sunny days and listened to interesting guitar music, rather than the apparently endless sea of Jamiroquai in which I was awash.

    Through that repetition, I fell in love with Pisces Iscariot and Dookie and Homegrown, each of whose songs became a part of me. But it was the Blue Album for which my most fervent passion was reserved, because the Blue Album was, to my young and still unlearned heart, perfect. From the pretty opening guitar line of My Name Is Jonas, to the final breakdown of Only In Dreams, to every minor Pop masterpiece in between. Not a dud track, perfect.

    The Blue Album was the answer to the pressing question of what would happen if the math club became obsessed with Kiss at a young age, went to work at Tower Records and received detailed schooling in the Beach Boys and Pixies. Produced by Rick Osacek of The Cars, the record arrived in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death and seemed to tell a similar story of disaffected youth, only from a markedly different perspective. The nihilism of Grunge with many of the rougher edges removed, the early 90s from a nerds-eye view, rather than a voice from under the bleachers.

    I heard Weezer before Pixies, and it’s impossible now to listen to the record without seeing that band’s fingerprints everywhere. The guitar churn of The World Has Turned And Left Me Here, the wonky, spaced out opening of Undone – The Sweater Song, the demented Surf Rock thrash of Surf Wax America. All that’s missing is the screaming and the Spanish.

    But if I hadn’t heard Pixies at that stage, what I had already heard plenty was Nirvana’s Sliver. And it was through Sliver that I immediately absorbed and internalised the Blue Album’s absolute highlight, Say It Ain’t So.

    Sliver, of course, had started life as a non-album single at the turn of the decade, but had demonstrated a surprisingly long tail, in that it was the earliest example I ever heard of one of Gen X’s peculiar lyrical peccadillos: obsessive attention to childhood micro-trauma. Telling the tale of a young Kurt Cobain’s unwanted stay with grandparents, the song climaxed with the memorable, deeply pained coda “grandma take me home”, and paved the way for many, many other hands to proceed with their own mining of the infant id.

    It’s tempting to speculate over the market conditions which had prompted this wave of petty grievance. Perhaps a consequence of growing up at two generations remove from the more authentic trauma of a global conflict? Maybe when you’re living in the notional end of history you have to work a little harder to find something to complain about? Or simply the fruits of the creeping therapisation of the American middle classes?

    Regardless, Sliver made a deep impression on me, and a deep impression too on Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, for whom it represented a formative first encounter with Nirvana, while still working the racks at Tower LA: “As soon as I heard ‘Mom and Dad went to a show,’ I immediately started dancing around. It was exactly how I felt, and they were putting it to music. It inspired me to do the same thing.”

    Say It Ain’t So, Cuomo’s childhood tale of finding a beer bottle in the family fridge and immediately descending into deep anxiety that his stepfather would succumb to the same alcoholism that had caused his father to flee the family home years earlier, is one of the great songs of the 1990s, a generational touchstone for those of us who grew up listening to music of this kind, and it could surely not have been written without Sliver. Or perhaps I would not have received and absorbed it so rapturously had Sliver not cleared the path.

    As is often the case when you look too closely at these things, in retrospect the appeal of the song seems so obvious as to be a little embarrassing. It’s a lovely piece of work, all crunching power chords and impassioned vocals, with perhaps a little debt to Jonny Greenwood in those big, crunchy guitar stabs on the chorus. But it’s also a song about fretting that your family might be about to fall apart, and I was, back then, a kid constantly anxious that his family might do just that. It wasn’t a conscious connection I made until years later, but in any analysis of this type it feels too glaring a coincidence to ignore.

    So, Say It Ain’t So reminded me of my old home, it gave me license to dream of escape and it crystallised my deepest fears. But it’s also a wonderful song too. That opening riff, so oddly familiar it felt like it must be stolen from somewhere, the way the verse tracks Where Is My Mind by Pixies. The many instantly memorable lyrics: the goofiness of the opening “somebody’s heine, is crowding my icebox”, the gloriously playful intonation of “something is a bubb-a-li-hi-hi-hi-hin behind my back”, the way the line “when I say, this way is a water slide away from me that takes you further every day” trips so beautifully off the tongue, while being so brutally painful and truthful. The crescendo of the song, kicked off with “dear daddy, I write you…” and climaxing with that cathartic series of “yeah yeah”s.

    Say It Ain’t So is a song that had evident love poured into it, a song of tiny details: the little “hey” after “takes you further every day”, the growl on “like father, stepfather, the son is drowning in the flood”. The skanking bassline. The weird way it mixes the desperation of the vocal – a child pleading with an adult not to let them down – and the triumphalism of the guitars, with their epic, pounding power chords. Weakness and strength, two sides of the same coin, two sides of any human heart.

    When I was a kid I remember hearing classic Soul records on the radio – Tracks Of My Tears, (What A) Wonderful World – and marvelling at their sheer efficiency. The way the sections fit together so smoothly. I had the same reaction to Say It Ain’t So as a teenager: the way it assembled its components so cleanly, how easy it makes songwriting look. The immediate, visceral appeal of a line as stone cold as “my love is a life taker”.

    Latterly, Say It Ain’t So has become one of my absolute favourite songs to sing. At any given karaoke night, if the participants are of a certain age, I will stick it on and because it’s one of those tunes that tends to unite a certain demographic, others will inevitably join in, howling the line about drowning in the flood at the absolute tops of their voices, relishing those “yeah yeahs” the same way I do. Taking that escalator up together, punching the air in time to those power chords. Losing ourselves in that wonderful build and peak. Lifelines all over again.

    There’s a kicker to the story of Say It Ain’t So, and it makes me love the song even more. A few years ago, Cuomo discussed the song with his mother, who revealed that not only was the stepfather nowhere close to alcoholism, the departed biological father had been a zen Buddhist who didn’t drink or smoke at all. As a kid, Rivers Cuomo had seen a photo of his real dad goofing around, holding a beer, and concluded that it was alcohol that destroyed his original family, then later seen a single beer in the fridge and convinced himself that alcohol would also destroy his new family too. All of it in his head.

    And maybe that’s a fitting encomium for Gen X as a whole: a tribe occasionally prone to getting lost in our own navel gazing, individual and collective. A generation perhaps a little more self aware than their parents, but not savvy enough to recognise that sometimes self awareness is a luxury product with a high price tag. That grandma take me home is a champagne problem. And so maybe this song helps remind me not to get too lost in all the bullshit of my own invention, that sometimes kids get the wrong end of the stick, sometimes a beer is just a beer, sometimes life is just life.

    Cuomo has said of Say It Ain’t So: “I was an angry young man, typical generation X. Quick to point the finger… now I’m a father I’ve forgiven my parents”. And that’s what this whole ride is about, isn’t it? You’re young and brittle, and then eventually you gain a little perspective and you forgive. You forgive your parents, and if you’ve really cracked it you forgive yourself into the bargain.

    This record reminds me of all of the above, and that even now, in an era of bottomless music, sometimes a song has the most value of all when it’s brought to you unheralded, by someone you dearly love, on an old cassette tape with a handwritten track list and the warm halo of recommendation. That music is best when it’s both personal and shared, that the sharing brings us closer together, maybe even saves us a little. I’ve never told my friend what those tapes meant to me, and he’ll probably never read this, but god, if I wasn’t lucky to have him and them. God, if I don’t owe so much to this one divided joy.

  11. 15. Storm – Godspeed You! Black Emperor

    What is the single most joyous, punch the air and thank god you’re alive, tell all the people that you meet my life’s complete, piece of music ever recorded? The song that best encapsulates the heady adrenaline rush of being alive and aware, right here, right now, in this – the present moment – a territory which so many other fellow travellers never lived to see, and upon which our ancestors will only ever be able to speculate?

    Ain’t No Mountain High Enough? One More Time? Born To Run? I Want You Back? For thrills like these you’d probably look most naturally to Pop music, or Soul, or maybe EDM. But what if I told you that the most euphoric, life affirming piece of music isn’t to be found in any of those genres, but in the first 12 minutes of the sophomore album by a doomy Canadian Post Rock band who rarely give interviews, don’t do photos and are best known for a track featuring the immortal line: “The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel/and the sewers are muddied with a thousand lonely suicides/and a dark wind blows”.

    Godspeed You! Black Emperor made their name with F#A#∞, their debut album proper, picking up on Slint’s dark, slow burning properties and building out further with a cinematic sensibility, strings by way of Morricone and an almost tangible sense of impending apocalypse. A deeply sombre and brooding record, F#A#∞ arrived at precisely the right moment: 1997, just as Britpop’s dayglo enthusiasms were curdling into something harsher and harder, just as pre-millennial tensions were starting to hove into view. Then, unlike now, the music did not feel like a soundtrack for the times, it felt like a furtive glimpse behind the curtain: what might have been had we not the good sense to be born in days so endlessly safe and secure. A Guernica for the Sixth Form lounge stereo.

    There was a thrill to this music back then; to imagining buildings crumble, because you had not yet seen buildings crumble. A fascination in imagining a world in which things could still go wrong at scale. The following year, the box office was topped by Armageddon and Deep Impact: the appetite for disaster was growing, as if we were collectively willing into existence something perverse and counter to our own interests. As if comparative peace and prosperity is a state not tolerable to human beings over the long term.

    Or perhaps the reality was that even then, in that interregnum between the wall and the towers, things weren’t as peaceful and prosperous as they seemed. Certainly, the prevailing attitude of GY!BE right from the start appeared to be a sense of profound disgust at the world and its demands, a teenage mindset blown out to Imax scale. The band were almost painfully thoughtful, painfully determined not to engage with any potentially corruptive influence. They made Nirvana look like Moby. Long before the creeping realisation that globalisation was also manufacturing its own discontents, Godspeed were visibly struggling to balance their obligation to create art that would unite people in hope with their evident belief that the world was aflame and it would be all downhill from here.

    Being in my late teens, I lapped all of this up at the time. The refusal to give interviews (“If other bands choose not to question the inherent reductionist tendencies of contemporary Rock criticism, then that’s their decision… our few nervous encounters with Rock journalists have left us feeling regretful”), the epic levels of spite (“If I wanted to have a painful and pointless conversation about things I take to be entirely self-evident, I’d call my parents”), the suspicion of authority so profound that even within the band no real power structure could ever be established (“there are nine people in our band; for us to come to agreement on anything often involves laborious discussion and debate… it’s a struggle for us to find a unified voice musically”). The albums that arrived with charts connecting record companies to arms manufacturers. The placing of principle over absolutely everything else, in a world where seemingly most things were for sale. God, it was all so alluring, and it lent the music, with its tang of post-apocalyptic wasteland, an extra charm. Godspeed You! Black Emperor had the whiff of doomed romantic poetry about them, and I was carried along by the scent.

    Looking back on it now, it’s striking that the band were probably well ahead of their time. For all the doe eyed, self-fellating talk of long arcs of history bending towards justice, the arc of our own universe seems to have other ideas. Within two years of F#A#∞, protestors were clashing with police outside the WTO conference in Seattle and Naomi Klein released No Logo, a book whose title encapsulated perfectly the prevailing ethos of a band who seemingly could not permit themselves to be attached to any signifiers at all: famously, the amps at their shows have borne the slogan “No flags”. You could feel an echo of F#A#∞ as the banks fell, and it was impossible to watch the Occupy Wall Street protests, with their frantic disavowal of hierarchy, their stubborn refusal to coalesce around any clear demand for change, and their perpetual sense of momentum being slowly and steadily burned over a bonfire of heavy principle, without thinking of GY!BE. It was as if they’d written the soundtrack for a world that was being born in front of us.

    For my part, I found a heroism in the band’s sheer retentiveness, their steadfast insistence on withholding everything but the music. And maybe that was a product of circumstances, since I was coming to the end of university, and beginning that struggle common to all those forced to fly the nest of education and commence the messy business of agreeing some form of rapprochement with the real world. The situation posed the burning question of how to best move forward without surrendering yourself. How to receive without giving too much in return. How to locate the joy in life without drowning in the tears. Growing up, in other words.

    By the time the follow up to F#A#∞ arrived, 2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven, I’d left university and, in want of any clearer direction, wandered my way into law school. Enron was still standing, you could still board a flight carrying an axe and without taking your shoes off, but the world felt a little darker than before, because now I was actually living in it, rather than contemplating it from afar. Whereas my previous studies had been largely in the pursuit of wisdom and/or pleasure, now I learned how to read a balance sheet, how to commence litigation, how large a blade you’re permitted to carry in public. This was learning not for its own sake, but for the sake of vocation: the type of learning I’d always previously tried to avoid, but to which I was now reduced. The walls of my bubble growing thinner by the term, the new millennium had arrived. Reality was at the gates, and beating hard.

    Lift Your Skinny Fists is a double album, nearly 90 minutes long and comprised of four movements. If the title is intended to invoke protest at higher powers, the music itself is intended to chart the path of humanity’s selfishness and propensity for self-immolation. Somewhat improbably, given these weighty themes, the album was recorded in just nine days in Chemical Sound Studios, Toronto. While it is a very good album, it is not as good as its predecessor – not as cohesive in tone, not as efficient in delivering up its pleasures.

    I bought Lift Your Skinny Fists in Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, on my way home from the latest in a series of law lectures which made me seriously doubt this was a subject I had any will to pursue. Mood bleak, I got the record home and raced upstairs, ready to wallow in another fittingly torrid account of the world’s slow-motion collapse. I lay on the bed, cued the music, closed my eyes and braced myself for a wasteland of howling winds and babbling vagrants. And what I got was…. not that.

    The opening twelve minutes of Storm, the first track on Lift Your Skinny Fists are – improbably, unexpectedly, unbelievably – the twelve most glorious, life affirming minutes of music I’ve ever heard. This doomy band, this group who can’t agree on anything and who see the bad in everywhere, had somehow gone away and come back with something so preposterously majestic and triumphal that you were forced to question whether some serious change in their diet must have occurred between records. Were these even the same people?

    Contrast is everything in music. Godspeed You! Black Emperor knew that. By the time they came to record Storm, they’d heard early Mogwai, and it shows, that act’s willingness to trade in quiet/loud/quiet, their sense of propulsion in the “loud” sections, right to the fore. The opening of Storm slow-builds from silence one of the noblest, most glorious sounding rackets you will ever encounter, and then Godspeed kill it dead before proceeding to do it all over again, this time building to a peak that dwarfs even the first. Beethoven with strats and studied indifference.

    But it wasn’t just the contrast in the music itself that made the magic happen for me here, it was the contrast in expectation. Never have I been wrong-footed so thoroughly: heading through the door expecting misery and being served intense jubilation, the band taking the gloominess of F#A#∞ and juxtaposing it with all this roaring beauty. Those twelve minutes took me somewhere else entirely, and delivered me home changed: my mood corrected, my sense of connection to the world renewed. Because – really – how could the world be bad if it contained things as graceful and unanticipated as this? If it could make me feel like this?

    Storm opens with a faint but lovely guitar line and a single, mournful trumpet. The instruments join one by one, slid into place by the rising strings, and when everyone is finally assembled we take first flight: that rat-a-tat martial drumming the cue for a surging, bubbling tumult of guitar. Like Daft Punk’s Homework, it shows you the pieces and then joins them together to make something greater than the sum of its parts. At the four and a half minute mark a counter-melody emerges, and the song continues to spiral upwards, outwards, everywhere; mounting in urgency, imploring you to recognise all this great and wasted beauty, before an escalating drum beat kills us stone dead just after the six and a half minute mark.

    We fall to near silence, strings swirl and murmur. And then from that ether, a guitar part rings out, clear and true, a flagpost around which the other elements are invited to gather. What follows is sublime: a slow, stately build to a sound that can only be described as Jesus walking on the water. A soundtrack for a miracle. And as you listen, you know it’s a cheap trick: all strings and effects pedals, those old charlatans, but it’s a trick you’re buying, because this track is taking you somewhere higher, somewhere you’ve not been before. At ten minutes, the main guitar line kicks in, harder and more assertive. And then at 11 minutes and 40 seconds we reach the peak, drums announcing its arrival, as out of the maelstrom emerges the sound of someone playing Amazing Grace on the electric guitar, and the strings rise to meet it and holy fuck what is this music, is this even still music, what am I feeling here?!

    And that’s where the track drops away, collapsing into an ominous swirl of drones and guitar, brutally truncating the glory that came before. It’s there for a purpose: Lift Your Skinny Fists is a quasi-biblical tale of man in his native state, corrupted and destroyed by the dark forces of early 21st century capitalism – a Garden of Eden parable by way of Chomsky – but dear god if the cutting short of the Amazing Grace section doesn’t feel like a loss, like something beautiful has been ripped from you personally. And you wait and hope that the album will rally and deliver another similar peak, that the band will rally and deliver another similar peak, but it never does and they never do, because childhood is over and it’s time for the real world now. You sit and listen to the dejected piano playing itself off into some unexplored wasteland, and you know it’s gone forever. And then you’re listening to a field recording of a gas station’s public address system, and it’s like it never happened at all, like you’re marooned in some afterlife supermarket, with all life’s colours drained forever.

    Storm is a weird old track. It’s about the destruction of innocence and joy, but its invocation of innocence and joy is so powerful that I return to it constantly when I’m seeking those feelings. It’s the track I play when I need a lift, when I need to feel full of purpose, and of my own potential. It’s the track I play when I encounter friction with the world and need to be reminded that it’s not such a bad old place. It’s the track I play when I need to thank my chosen deity that I’m alive and living in the here and now. The first time I heard it, it moved me like no song ever had before: to create a single piece of music so beautiful and then abruptly terminate it is one thing, but to perform the same trick twice? Its twelve minutes felt an eternity, and I felt changed on the other side of them.

    Godspeed You! Black Emperor, of course, rumble on. They’ve made some other excellent albums, and are responsible for a number of track titles that have made me laugh out loud they’ve been so thoroughly on the nose, including the frankly unbeatable “Bosses Hang”. I suspect that young lawyers were never their target audience, and that the idea of being used as motivational music by the servants of capitalism would disgust them to their core, but that’s OK. Their disgust continues to fuel some fabulous music, and I take comfort in knowing there’s someone out there this aggrieved on all our behalf. A group who could find a cloud in every silver lining, who will never become inured, never become complacent, never grow up. Who have never reached that accommodation with the world that so often is the cost of happiness.

    And Storm? Storm remains a song I reach for regularly, and a song that brings me great joy. But it’s a singular joy: this isn’t a track I share with other people, or that I play at home, or have ever sung or danced to. It isn’t a shared favourite, it isn’t a communal experience. It’s a song that speaks to my own relationship with a broader life, and with that world that seemed so threatening when I was first tasked with emerging into it. It’s a song that reminds me that no matter how complicated things get, how dim the prospects may seem, this whole experience is full of radiant beauty and that it would be an insult to forget how lucky I am to be participating in it. That life is good. Which is a curious conclusion to keep reaching off the back of an album that is largely telling us that the world is bad, but then maybe that’s just how contentment operates: a compromise position in which we accept the negative because the positives are so very sweet.

    I have listened to Storm a number of times over the last seven days. Even now, at a remove of nearly a quarter of a century, having heard the thing literally hundreds of times, knowing its every nook and cranny, sensate to its every cheap trick, to the way it is teeing you up for disaster, when that guitar hits at eleven forty, and the strings come in behind I am gone. Just absolutely gone. Life is good and the world is beautiful and there is no pain, for anyone, anywhere. It works every time, and without fail. A return to innocence, a call to jubilation. A perfect storm.

    • I’ve said before that I find it difficult to comment on these posts, because they are so complete in and of themselves that saying “I like this record too!” seems to be superfluous at the very least. But I couldn’t bear to see Godspeed sitting here without any acknowledgment at all, so yeah, I like this record too.

      • I’m conscious that I’m not doing the usual thing of ending these posts with a conversational prompt, hence the difficulty in responding. They’re statements, rather than question marks.

        In this case I’ll make an exception though, because I’m dying to know: what’s your favourite GY!BE track?

        • It’s Moya, and for reasons somewhat close to yours for picking Storm. It’s one where they leave off the apocalypse and the massing dark clouds in favour of a thing of shimmering beauty. It’s light in the dark, an acknowledgment of the possibilty of grace in a failed world.

    • I love this track. It’s an expansion of a brief sung prayer segment from F#A#oo (‘lead us from the coming storm, under –something something–) – they take that tune and then make it into this emotional, religious, spiritual and angry/but hopeful thing.

      I love them. The new album is also tremendous – BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD (deliberately all caps) is a contender for their best. Stunning.

      • New album is wonderful. I would never have expected them to have the staying power they’ve had, particularly in the last decade or so. I guess the world is giving them plenty of material to work with.

  12. 14. Who Knows Where The Time Goes – Fairport Convention

    I couldn’t have been older than 8 or 9 years old when my Mother, entirely unbidden, first produced an acoustic guitar from some distant cupboard, sat down and began to play it in front of me.

    To a small child, this had the effect of witchcraft. It revealed a new aspect of Mum, which I could not have imagined, and gave further evidence to the rumour that she may have had a life before my brothers and I. That she had been a complete person of her own. That she had been young.

    I can still close my eyes now and picture Mum playing that guitar, her hair dark and flowing, her fingers moving deftly across the strings. The joy she brought to the act of playing, the look on her face as the music transported her back to some vanished land. And, of course, I still hear her voice too, and the song she is singing is Percy’s Song, by Bob Dylan.

    Percy’s Song is a track that had to travel to find a home. Originally written by Dylan in 1963, but left off The Times They Are A Changin and rarely performed live, the song took four more years to find a wider audience when performed by Joan Baez in Don’t Look Back – almost certainly the version that Mum had in mind that day, given the cadence with which she sang.

    I never asked Mum what song she had played, or why. I did what children often do when taken aback by a new development; played it cool and stored it away to think about later. And think about it later I did. How did Mum learn to play the guitar? Why had she never played it in front of us previously? And what was that song, all cryptic stoicism and bucolic fatalism?

    Years later, sat watching Don’t Look Back, I got my answer to that final question. And then a few days later, browsing the racks at HMV, I came across a copy of Unhalfbricking by Fairport Convention, spotted Percy’s Song on the track list and bought it on the spot. Finally, an opportunity to take ownership of a childhood mystery. To trace Mum’s passion for this music back to its roots.

    So I sat and listened to Unhalfbricking, which is of course a brilliant record, and by the time I made it to Percy’s Song I had quite forgotten what I was even doing there in the first place – quite forgotten that it was Percy’s Song for which I had made this journey. Because right before Percy’s Song on Unhalfbricking was another song called Who Knows Where The Time Goes. And Who Knows Where The Time Goes was, quite immediately, one of the most beautiful and haunting things I had ever heard.

    Sandy Denny was born, funnily enough, in the hospital at the end of my road, less than 50 metres from my current front doorstep. Who Knows Where The Time Goes, written when Denny was just 19 and originally entitled “The Ballad Of Time”, concerns itself with ageing. With coming to some sort of accommodation with the knowledge that this too shall pass. It is beautifully sung, almost painfully poignant, and preternaturally ruminative. Improbably, it was both the second song Denny ever wrote and the very last she would ever publicly perform; singing it at a village fundraiser for her local school shortly before her death in 1978, aged just 31.

    Who Knows Where The Time Goes is a song that should not require much introduction. You’ve almost certainly heard it, and in the unlikely event you haven’t you should rectify that omission immediately – restitution for such crimes ought to be a far more urgent concern than reading what follows. Very few songs address the human condition so acutely, very few songs play so well across the breadth of a life.

    Who Knows… is generally regarded as melancholy – indeed Rufus Wainright memorably described it as “one of the saddest songs ever written”. But I have never found that to be the case. It’s the passage of time itself that is sad, and the song encourages only peace with that phenomena. In fact, that’s what makes it moving; the contrast between the somewhat bleak observed imagery of the lyric (“all the birds are leaving”, “sad, deserted shore”) and the narrator’s impassive contemplation of the same.

    Sat watching the birds leave, the seasons change, the storms of winter and the birds returning in spring, the world seeming to accelerate away, and simply accepting it all. The song’s title either a statement or question, depending on your preference. The narrator letting it all go, their brazen statement of the ultimate liberation: “I have no fear of time”. This is not a sad song, or a happy song either. It’s a song about acceptance; accepting the world as it is, and your place within it. A song about not worrying too much where the time goes and simply enjoying the time you have. And that is beautiful.

    But it’s also optimistic, and I see that a little as I age myself. Because ageing is loss, and not a little pain, and no amount of poetic stoicism will change that simple fact. I see it in my parents and their friends, and I sense for the first time that I too will not be immune. I listened to Who Knows Where The Time Goes earlier this year and, lovely as it is, for the first time I thought to myself: “yes, this was written by a 19 year old”. Because although it hides its youthful idealism well, it can still be detected: the idea of old age being a matter of sitting on some park bench, your lover beside you (“until it’s time to go”), watching the world unfold and your own place within it drift away, entirely at peace with it all. Anaesthetised.

    A few months ago I heard for the first time what has been my favourite new song of this year: Alone by The Cure. And in it I detected a sort of dark echo of Who Knows Where The Times Goes; a song about ageing written not by a 19 year old for whom loss was still just a word, but by a 65 year old. A song in which birds do not leave in Winter and return in Spring, but instead simply fall out of the sky, in which the elderly toast with bitter dregs, to their emptiness.

    Alone is a lyric about age and loss. Actual loss, survived loss, not hypothetical loss. Where Who Knows Where The Time Goes posits the dreams of the young – yes, the world will change, but I will stand resolute and unchanged, the pole around which it all revolves, unbowed and unafraid – Alone paints a picture of love falling out of our lives, and taunts us with “we were always sure that we would never change”. The implication being that “we” did, and that to expect otherwise was pretty silly. Sandy Denny gives us Who Knows Where The Time Goes, the question an idle daydream on a Summer’s day. The Cure ask us “where did it go”, a far more urgent query, seemingly posited in the midst of a long, dark night of the soul.

    None of which juxtaposition makes me love Who Knows Where The Time Goes any less. In fact, if anything it makes me love it all the more, because for all that acknowledging that nothing escapes the ravages of time is accurate, it doesn’t really lead us anywhere. It’s a point at which you are deposited by force, rather than an end goal. Who Knows at least sends us back to our origin, to the days when we could state “I have no fear of time” and really mean it. So I find it an optimistic song, imbued with the confidence of youth, a song that takes me back to the start.

    But there’s another, more pressing, reason that I love this song. On the night my Daughter was born, this was the song playing in the room as she made her entrance into the world, popping up purely by chance on a randomised playlist through one of those great flukes of timing. About as perfect a soundtrack as you could ever hope for: welcome to the world, kiddo; it’s some ride, but if you can find peace in the chaos it’s a beautiful place. If you can hang on to that idealism it’s a truly beautiful place.

    And the song was still playing as the nurses moved her, pink and screaming, to a side table, and as I walked over and spoke to her, and she turned her head at the sound of my voice and stopped crying. This song playing in the background as all the anxiety – that I wouldn’t be a good father, that I wouldn’t know what to do, that I was exposing my heart once again to potentially fickle elements – just fell away in a moment. Because she knew my voice. She made me feel ten feet tall in that instant, like I knew her already and this had all been written from the start. I will always be grateful to her for that.

    My daughter is one of the most genuinely remarkable people I know. She loves people and life, she is kind and decent and brave and she has her Father’s gift and curse of seeing through everyone except perhaps herself. When I hear this song I think of her, and of that first night, when my world turned on its axis and I discovered what I’d been put on the planet to do. I think of my hopes for her, that whatever path she takes – and I sense that path may be winding and take in uneven terrain – she finds a way to that inner peace that Sandy Denny sings of so beautifully here. She has taught me so much, and I feel I have taught her so little.

    It’s a funny experience listening now to Who Knows Where The Time Goes. It’s a song that links me back to the start, to watching my Mother playing the guitar and believing that all things in life are possible. It’s a song that was literally playing in the room during one the great defining moments of my entire life. It’s a song that portends a certain vision of the future, to which I pin my hopes. That I should be so lucky as to stumble into that peace.

    But it’s also a song in which I find so much strength, a song for all seasons. Because as the music swells to meet the chorus and Sandy Denny’s voice rises, clear and strong, fully of certainty, to proclaim that trilled, repeated “who knows where the time goes”, it’s impossible not to feel your heart swell a little with it. To think of my Mother and my Daughter and all the other people I have loved, all the others with whom I’m on this latest trip around the Sun, and of the common thread, articulated here, which binds us all. This too shall pass. And if we’re lucky we get to sit on some park bench and watch it do so, safe and content in the knowledge that we loved well, and were loved well in return. That in the face of such love, we need have no fear of time.

  14. 13. Let Me Drown – Orville Peck

    Why do you love a particular song? Is it a function of the work’s innate properties, its sheer brilliance, its singular genius that should be clearly evident to everyone? Or is it because the song speaks directly to some part of you, some stage of your life, some aspect that renders you particularly susceptible to its charms?

    Most of the songs in this list have ticked one of these boxes. A few have ticked both. It’s generally been pretty clear from the outset into which category each entry was most likely to fall.

    Let Me Drown is something of an anomaly in this regard. Released just over two years ago, it is the newest song on this list: survivor of an unwritten rule operative in the compilation which weighed against pleasures still novel, still likely to fade as fresh pleasures so often do.

    As a consequence of that same newness, Let Me Drown is probably the song here I understand the least. I have spent fewer years in its company, rolled it over in my head a little less fulsomely, incorporated it a little less comprehensively into some artfully fabricated, ready-to-serve personal mythos. This passion remains in its first flushes, where proper analysis is always elusive. As I begin to write this entry, I do not have a clear line as to why I love this track as much as I do; why it is placed so highly here. So – I’m just going to write, and speculate, and see if I can’t wander my way to some insight.

    Let’s start at the top then. Let Me Drown is brought to us by Orville Peck, a South African Country & Western singer who performs in a fringed mask. It is a power ballad, par excellence, Peck’s stirring baritone, redolent of Country greats of the past, spinning a tale of lost love and submission to solitude.

    Peck’s love for country music developed after hearing Johnny Cash’s live album At Folsom Prison for the first time, with Dolly Parton also an early influence. In a sense, his work combines aspects of both artists: Cash’s flair for storytelling, his voice that seemed to echo back at you from eternity; Dolly’s wide open charisma and flair for the theatrical. Plus maybe a little of Patsy Cline’s melancholy into the bargain.

    But when I first heard Orville Peck it was an entirely different, non-Country, artist who jumped out at me, whose essence I heard in that great, booming voice and wide open heart. And that artist was Cher.

    I first encountered Cher as an actress, rather than a singer, drinking in her roles in Mask, Mermaids, and particularly the Witches of Eastwick. In each movie, she played a quasi-maternal figure with a nonchalant lack of regard for the sensibilities of those around her, an archetype with which I was already very well acquainted from my own domestic life. And then I heard her sing, that late 80s/early 90s Cher, all soft rock and power chords, and I was blown away. For someone so effortlessly insouciant to commit so hard, to lose themselves so entirely in whatever song they happened to be singing… it was inspiring. That combination of a suit of armour and bottomless passion; normally you choose one of the two, but she seemed to have both.

    I listened to her sing I Found Someone – another near miss for this list and the song most immediately recalled by Let Me Drown on first encounter, and – still too young to be put off by the Soft Rock accoutrements – I marvelled at the sheer joy she seemed to take in the performance. I wondered that she’d somehow provided backing vocals for the Righteous Brothers, Darlene Love (Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) no less) and the Ronettes, and then gone on to win an Oscar in the 80s. Cher seemed to have been around since the dawn of time, but she didn’t seem tired at all – in fact, if anything, she seemed to have too much zest for life – and that was appealing. She also came with a full arsenal of devastating quotes: from an awestruck young Madonna witnessing her dealing with a journalist who shouted “Hey Cher, where’s Sonny” as she swept into an awards ceremony (her split second response: “At home, fucking your mother”), to her riposte to her own mother asking her why she didn’t just marry a rich man: “Mom, I am a rich man”.

    But it was her voice that appealed most of all. A ludicrous, quasi-androgynous contralto, Cher’s voice was so unusually deep that radio DJs had initially refused to play her debut single because they were convinced she was a man singing a love song to another man. For my own part, the very first time I heard Suspicious Minds, I’d confused a section of the Elvis vocal for another improbable Cher backing spot; “Oh let our love survive/I’ll dry the tears from your eyes/Let’s not let a good thing die”.

    And if her voice was unusual, the way she used it was even more so: Cher seemed to attack every song full bore; no grace, no subtlety, no fucks given. She was constantly outre, constantly pushing, constantly uncool, and I have always been a sucker for anyone who is all heart and no shame.

    So, it was Cher that I first heard in Orville Peck, and particularly in Let Me Drown, a vocal performance that dials it all up to eleven and which isn’t afraid to lean fully into the melodrama. The song is one grand, soaring peak after another, from that first “only one knew my name/nothin left but the Summer rain” to the closer: “I figured we were the same/but as I get older I get more afraid, let me drown”. It’s not subtle, and it’s not particularly stylish, but there’s something in its blunt force histrionics that speaks to me, perhaps in that it seems like such a grand release. Just letting it all flood out, at the top of your voice.

    Full disclosure; Let Me Drown has become my favourite song in the world to sing. On my own or with friends, a Capella or with the strings in behind, it always delivers, Peck’s vocal through line serving up one delight after another: the way he extends the word “well”, the pride and defiance in “never knew where was home”. Let Me Drown lets you sing a cowboy love song about towns not being big enough for the both of you now, and sun getting in your eyes as you ride on out, and it invites you to sing it as if you were Cher: without restraint.

    But if the song is full of fun moments, moments that invite you to be as dramatic and overwrought as humanly possible then – even as I write this – it becomes glaring to me that there is one line that stands out amongst them all if we’re making any kind of serious attempt to establish why I really love this thing so much. And that line is “I slept a lifetime alone”.

    Let Me Drown is a song that soars, and swoops and swoons, but it’s also a song about intense loneliness, and that’s by design. Orville Peck once explained how his music has been inspired by his grandfather, a horseback sheriff in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, and his father, who he describes as “a very free-spirited, open man who’s always been extremely sensitive and taught me about sensitivity and kindness”. He added: “I just always had this kind of admiration and sort of obsession with cowboys. I saw them as these outwardly facing strong figures, but inwardly they were really sensitive and sort of heartbroken and maybe lonely. I started to fall in love with the idea that these characters were outsiders and they were lonely, but that was their power and their strength, rather than their weakness.”

    Which, of course, is where Let Me Drown is pitching its tent. It’s a ballad that evokes the imagery of the West, of men who are men, and crushing loneliness, and self defeating restraint, and then parlays it into this grand display of vocal emoting. The magic of the song minted in the crucible of that juxtaposition. Stoic melodrama. It’s what gives the track its inner tension, what makes it so unique, and what makes it so much fun to sing, because all that restraint implicit in the lyric only ratchets up further the release in the voice that sings it. A song that is somehow camp and sincere all at once.

    And for someone like me? Who once felt so very lonely but who never spoke to anyone about it? Who escaped the loneliness and finally, eventually, found his place in the universe? Well, is it any wonder that I sing this song in a room full of friends and I hit that line – that “I slept a lifetime alone” – and I feel myself go a little? That it moves me, and scares me and reminds me how much I have to be grateful for? That the act of being able to sing it, at the top of my voice and without constraint, is pure catharsis?

    Let Me Drown is improbably high on this list. It’s too new, too simple, too lacking in sophistication. But none of that matters: it’s a track that spoke to me the very first time I heard it, and has continued to speak to me since. Loneliness has shaped my life. I am grateful every day that I am no longer lonely, and I cannot resist running to those in whom I sense a loneliness. I will never forget what it felt like – that searing question of whether the issue was with me or the world – or how good it felt to learn that the answer was neither. I just had the wrong audience for a little while and, in this game, audience is everything.

    I love what Orville Peck is doing. I love the co-opting of the cowboy archetype, the way he does it with such evident affection, the mystique of the mask, the power of the voice, the homo-erotic undertones. I love hearing him cut loose here – the way he holds those long notes – and the way it sounds like liberation. Because I guess that’s what I heard in Cher all those years ago as well, that elusive quality I’ve been chasing ever since. Liberation; no fucks given, this is how I feel, Mom I am a rich man. A rich man indeed.

      • I had an edit to that rather snarky-appearing comment but Firefox swallowed it. Basically I bought this song after it appeared on one of your “songs of the year” lists. I like it very much, enough to buy the album.

        I definitely see the karaoke potential here, but it’s a trifle niche for genpop, I feel. Definitely also see the Cher touchstone too.

  16. 12. Run Away With Me – Carly Rae Jepsen

    Joan Didion once wrote of self-respect: “without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home”. There’s a lot of wisdom in that statement, but the reverse can also be true: with enough self-respect one can not only find oneself at home, but be invited in for a lavish meal and a backrub.

    I went travelling, alone in my early 20s. In many ways, my travels were typical: I did not set out to find myself, merely to have a good time, see a bit of the world and take advantage of that last draft of freedom before being claimed by professional life. And they were typical too in that, despite having no ambition to find myself, I still returned home feeling, perhaps a little self-consciously, that I had to some extent done so – because that’s usually the inevitable effect of several months in unusual environs with time to think and reflect.

    In my own case, the discovery I made was very simple: I was not, after all, the problem. Away from everything I knew, stripped of all my usual relationships and habits, it transpired that I am a tranquil soul; I don’t need much to be happy, I like my own company and I enjoy the company of others even more. With no one around that I loved, there was no one to worry about, no one from whom to anticipate a sudden explosion, and consequently I was free. At the time, this was an eye-opening revelation, and it empowered me: the knowledge that if life ever went wrong I could simply hop a plane to another country, find new friends and start again. That it was other people’s baggage that was weighing me down. That I could run away and lean on my own self-respect.

    A short while after I came home from that trip, Carly Rae Jepsen appeared on the TV talent show Canadian Idol, placing third. She released a Folk-tinged debut album before finding her metier and going full on Pop in 2011, with the release of Call Me Maybe, a record that went to number one in 19 countries and made her a global star. Call Me Maybe is one of those records that became for many thoroughly dulled by ubiquity, but which is nonetheless always worth revisiting for one more attempt to understand how such a thing could come to be: a completely perfect 3 minute Pop song, obnoxiously flawless and entirely timeless.

    Call Me Maybe’s stabbing keyboards and joyous cry of “where’d you think you’re going baby” positioned Carly Rae Jepsen as a coming force in popular music, but she fumbled the ball, taking three years to release follow up material and allowing public interest to drift away. When she did come back, with Emotion, one of the great Pop albums of its generation, the momentum had already been squandered; the album made little headway with the mainstream, but found an improbable second life among the sorts of people who wouldn’t normally dabble in such things. Serious music people with serious record collections loved this album, and in particular its opening track, Run Away With Me. And I was (still, just about) one of these serious music people, god help me.

    Run Away With Me is completely perfect Pop music. It opens with a distorted, reverb drenched sax line that sounds like some great beast calling you to disco Valhalla, it has a fabulous build and a preposterously infectious drop. The details deliver the magic: the steady heartbeat of the drums, the crash that announces the chorus, the offbeat “hey”s of the backing vocals, the slight delay on that “Every. Single. Minute”. It is a precision engineered, lab-grown earworm par excellence, its charms undeniable. It sounds like the Dr Who theme has eaten a glitterball, and in its infectious energy and weird innocence we can locate the last hurrah of pure Bubblegum Pop of the sort they really don’t make any more: pitching its artist somewhere between Cyndi Lauper and Kylie.

    There’s an interesting comparison to be made here between Run Away With Me and another of my favourite Pop tracks, How Will I Know. How Will I Know is all about the voice: the song is pretty great, but it’s Whitney’s ability to sell it that’s the story: the sheer pleasure she evidently takes in singing it, the way she fills its open spaces and makes it her own to the point that it’s really difficult to imagine anyone else ever touching it. The force of personality is coming from the artist. Run Away With Me is the polar opposite: CRJ is – it goes without saying – not a vocalist on Whitney’s level, but she doesn’t need to be, because this track is all about production magic, and particularly that sax sound, which is this track’s signature and with which so many of us fell in love. That sax sound: my favourite riff of all time. Whitney takes How Will I Know and transforms it into a Pop classic. Run Away With Me would be a Pop classic if they’d got Gilbert Gottfried to sing on it.

    None of which is to take away from Carly Rae Jepsen’s performance here. Perhaps my favourite Pop star of them all, she has neither the best voice or the best dance moves, but she’s so gloriously relatable, so warm and open in her vocals, that she takes Run Away With Me, in all its sonic perfection, and renders it a little more human. Takes this track – that feels like a team of scientists have perfected 80s/90s Pop music, all unbeatable hooks, innocent vocals and raw innuendos – but perfected it 20 years too late, and gives it the necessary animus. In other hands, the sheer vastness of that sax line would have translated as imperial ambition, a statement of artistic ascension, but in Carly Rae’s the sound is rendered warm and open: we’re all going to have a party now, and I’ll be down on the dancefloor with the rest of you. She trades you a great voice for a warm heart.

    I’ve seen Carly Rae Jepsen live half a dozen times now, and that openness is very much the vibe – there’s no them and us, no sense that the onstage world is glamorous and separate. She’s a shameless crowd pleaser, an everywoman in high heels and a feather boa, and her relatability has brought her an audience that is communal and adoring, ready to join her and have a good time all the time. In a sense, the live performer she always calls to mind is Andrew W.K; neither artist has any great interest in any notion of cool or in proving their artistic chops, they simply come out onstage looking to reach every single person in the room, even the one at the back with their arms folded who isn’t quite sure what they’re doing there. They don’t expect you to come with them, they go to you, and I love that about them both.

    Run Away With Me is a pure, unadulterated sugar rush. There are a lot of songs that have brough me joy down the years – in fact, many of them are featured on this very list – but I really struggle to think of another track that has delivered to me such pure, unfiltered happiness as this one. And that’s partly because of its glorious, punch the air quality: the sheer hugeness of that chorus when the sax drops back in and the drums are going widescreen and the backing vocals are swirling and she’s punching that every single minute line, but it’s also partly because it’s soundtracked so many happy days in my life.

    This is the song that gets played at every party in my home. It’s the song I’ve introduced to friends – the song that has elicited the most “wait – what’s this” reactions out of any I’ve ever played. The secret Pop gem that should have been another Call Me Maybe, another classic tune globally renowned and then dulled by ubiquity, but which somehow escaped that fate and is instead passed along by word of mouth.

    It’s the song my kids love, the song that has soundtracked a couple of dozen people silent discoing in my back garden, and loud parties in the living room. And it’s the song I’ve thrilled to see played live, stood beside some of my closest friends, my best mate, my wife. Run Away With Me is the soundtrack to my life, even as it’s being well lived. It makes me think of good times and all the people I love: hold on to me I never want to let you go.

    Carly Rae Jepsen remains an absolute favourite artist. She disappeared after Call Me Maybe and then came back with this sound, this career, that no one would have expected her to have. She’s released one straight Pop banger after another, with seemingly no desire to materially change up her sound, chase greater credibility or court controversy. Her whole deal is giving people a really, really good time, and her music reflects that. It’s such a simple mission statement that you wonder why a few others don’t try it: selling sunshine.

    But there’s one more reason I love Run Away With Me. It’s a song that makes me think of my wife, who is not normally massively moved by music, but who loves this song even more than I do, and with whom I’ve shared so many of those good times discussed above. I wrote previously that Tom Baxter’s A Day In Verona was the first dance at our wedding, but it could never really be “our” song, because it’s too downbeat, too slow for a life we’ve built to be fast. Run Away With Me is the song that better fits the bill: it’s the perfect soundtrack to our over-caffeinated existence, full of too much joy and too little sleep.

    Every once in a while during that life, when we’ve filled the diary too fulsomely, and our ascetic and sometimes self-jeopardising work hard/play hard tendency has depleted our batteries almost entirely, one of us will look at the other and say with a weary smile “run away with me”. And we both know exactly what that means: that, fun as all this living is, we could always walk away from it entirely and still be happy, so long as we went together. In those moments, when we share that thought, I am at perhaps my most content, as it reinforces the good fortune I’ve enjoyed. Because it’s one thing to have the safety net of knowing you can be happy alone, but it’s another entirely to share that safety net with another person. To know that where one of you goes, the other will follows, and that it will be good simply by virtue of that fact.

    So that’s what I feel whenever I hear that preposterous, iconic sax. The warming knowledge that I will never run away to find myself and find no one at home, because home is a place I share now, and it will never be empty. That it will be noisy, and bright and exhausting and that we’ll figure it out together. That if we can’t figure it out, we’ll run away together, hand in hand. And – really – what could ever possibly make you love a humble Pop song more than that?

  17. 11. Bring It On Home To Me (Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963) – Sam Cooke

    Sam Cooke. The greatest voice there has ever been, the catalyst for so much of the music I have loved. Bring It On Home To Me, perhaps his finest vocal, bar perhaps the one that counts the most.

    I was trying recently to pin down when I must have first heard Cooke’s voice. Childhood, certainly. Perhaps Dennis Quaid lip synching to Cupid in 1987’s intravenous adventure movie, Innerspace. Or maybe around the same time towards the back end of Adventures In Babysitting, a Chicago-set caper featuring the memorable line “nobody leave here without singin the Blues”. Or maybe I just heard What A Wonderful World floating out from some distant radio, and swooned as so many in the decades before me have swooned, and so many in the decades after will surely follow.

    Still in Primary School, repeated screenings of The Blues Brothers had lit the fuse of my love of this music, and now I was hearing it everywhere, one glorious voice after another. Otis. Aretha. Marvin. Al. Ray. And even amidst that esteemed company, it was Sam Cooke’s voice that stood out immediately. Sam’s voice that made singing seem like the most natural, luxuriant and illuminative act a human being could perform.

    Sam Cook, born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Delta blues birthplace at whose crossroads Robert Johnson purportedly sold his soul to the Devil, was – of course – a natural. His voice was smooth as silk, his singing effortless. He wasn’t showy, but he was always connective, always able to take an audience by the hand and lead them wherever he needed them to be. I loved Otis, but I never felt that he was like me. It was Cooke’s gift to be universal, a voice that needed no access codes, just functioning ears. He could sing the birds down from the trees.

    Cook, steeped in the church, grew up performing in his father’s choir, before making his way through a number of Gospel groups to become the lead of the Soul Stirrers. He went solo in 1957, adding the “e” to his name to denote a new beginning. His act was clean cut: conservative enough to be sold to White audiences, and quickly drifting to the secular, leaving his Gospel roots behind. He quickly built a repertoire of some of the greatest Pop songs ever recorded, and in 1962 followed up with Bring It On Home To Me.

    The rendition of the song I’m picking here is, of course, the live version, but we must speak first of the original recording, because it is equally remarkable.

    Bring It On Home, originally the B side of Having A Party, was a landmark for Cooke in that it saw him come full circle, finding a way to reconcile his Pop sound with the Gospel elements from which he had drifted: most obviously in the song’s glorious call and response segment (the word “yeah” has never sounded better), but also in the arrangement, which presages the music shortly to flow from the studios of Stax and Motown. Where songs like “Twistin’ The Night Away” and “Having A Party” hinted at the Gospel fervor, “Bring It” brought it wholeheartedly and unreservedly. On a track ostensibly about returning home, Cooke is calling out to his past, while simultaneously building the future; the Gospel/Pop hybrid that became Soul music.

    The song is lyrically bold – how many African American singers would have dropped the line “I will always be your slave” in 1962? How many would have stretched the final word the way Cooke does here? But it’s also one of the most beautifully sung records there has ever been; Cooke and his old friend Lou Rawls delivering an absolute masterclass in harmonising.

    The track was originally recorded with multiple voices on the backing vocal – a deliberate call to Cooke’s time with the Soul Stirrers – before it was eventually determined that Rawls should be the only echoing voice, and what an echoing voice he is. You can sit and listen to the two men trade back and forth here, Sam’s tenor duelling with Lou’s baritone, and just drown in the majesty of it; I doubt two human beings have ever sounded better together. Ever sounded more thoroughly airborne.

    It probably helped that the track emerged from a notably sozzled recording session. Cliff White, who played guitar in Cooke’s band, recalled that the group had completed 13 takes of Having A Party when, during a break, “Sam brought in a couple of jugs, you know. And these guys got full of that yocky-dock, man. And by the time they got around to doing Bring It On Home To Me, I think that was one of the things that gave it its flavor.” To which one can only reply; thank god for the yocky-dock.

    There’s a grit in the way that Cooke enunciates the word “ever” in the first line of Bring It On Home To Me that feels a departure from Chain Gang and Just For You. A rasp in the second line that denotes a stirring of the loins. You can hear Otis Redding here – Otis, who worshipped Sam – and Marvin Gaye too. You can hear the germ of Van Morrison, who readily admits that his whole approach to singing is modelled on Cooke. You can hear Rod Stewart, who once described Sam Cooke as “my one and only influence”. You can hear any number of the songs on this very list, any number of the artists who have enriched my life and the lives of millions of others. You can hear sex and politics and revolution and the fabled 60s being born. You can hear Sam Cooke shedding the straightjacket of his prior image, closing in on his final form. His death just two short years away. His finest hour only a few weeks less.

    But for now we’re in January 1963, at the Harlem Square Club, a 2,000 capacity building in the “Little Broadway” district of still segregated Miami. A venue in which, according to Newsweek, “Liquor was sold from a caged enclosure by a bartender armed with a shotgun.” We’re present for a show the recording of which won’t see the light of day for over two decades, due to concerns about the protection of Cooke’s wholesome image. A show in which he’ll shed the last vestiges of his disguise, combine his clean Pop material with his Gospel roots and his grasp of lascivious Soul future, and take the roof off the place completely. It’s the 1am set that’s immortalised on tape, and closer to two o’clock in the morning by the time he plays Bring It On Home To Me.

    Before the song begins we get two and a half minutes of slow build; an outright tease to the crowd, who can be audibly heard urging Cooke on. He’s become noticeably freer with the ad libs as the show goes on, finding his groove, off in some other place where he can’t be touched and everything he does on stage will work by property of some newly summoned gravitational law. The “ha ha”s, the cries of “I want my baby” and “operator”, the band gamely playing along. There’s a glorious moment, if you listen closely, where Cooke reports “I finally got my baby on the telephone, and I say hello” and a lone voice in the audience shouts “hello”. He has them in the palm of his hand, they’re entirely with him on every word.

    There’s an interesting counterpoint here to be made viz another great live album recording – Dylan at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. Both great live documents, but in such different ways. The second half of Dylan’s show has the electric crackle of imminent confrontation, twinned with the comfort of knowing, from a distance of 60 years, that it all works out OK.

    Listening to the Free Trade Hall show recalls that moment in the movie Titanic where Kate Winslet’s character argues with those around her as to the value of the Picassos in her collection; the audience is in on the gag. We know that this is great art, that she’s right, they’re wrong, and we’re able to bask in the warm glow of watching these philistines be so very incorrect so very confidently. We know that Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a timeless masterpiece, just like we know that anyone who heckles Ballad Of A Thin Man and then catches that righteous version of Like A Rolling Stone right to the face for their troubles is a witless heathen. Could never be me.

    Live at the Harlem Square is the precise opposite; no conflict, all harmony. The crowd are about as on board with what they’re watching and hearing as it’s humanly possible to be, to the point they’re part of the show. These people love their Picasso. You can hear them screaming, shouting, shifting, moving. You can hear them singing along like they’re part of the band and had rehearsed with them beforehand. There is no other live album of which I’m aware in which the divide between artist and audience is so paper thin, because Sam Cooke has demolished those barriers. No Judas, only Jesus.

    Back to the recording. At the ninety second mark Sam begins to tease the crowd, offering up a series of “you send me”s, each more impassioned than the next, working the expectation that he’s about to drop the tune that first broke him half a decade earlier. He isn’t really singing the song, he’s deconstructing it down to its base components; he barely gets past the title. You can feel the temperature in the room raise as he revs the crowd like an engine, over and over again, his voice bold and imploring, before he arrives at that one final cry of “Lord”, that extends out to about 15 syllables and ends on a high note of such ludicrous excess that you can barely believe he attempted it. The 1950s are about to pass the baton to the 1960s; Sam Cooke is on fire here, absolutely on fire, and the song hasn’t even really started.

    “I want you to listen to this song right here for me” he cries, and the band crash into Bring It On Home To Me, their perfect swing rising to the occasion. I won’t essay what follows, because you really just need to listen to it. Listen to it for the first time if you’ve never heard it before, listen to it once more if you’ve heard it a thousand times. A performance as stirring, charismatic and soulful as you will ever hear anywhere, any time. And so wrapped in catharsis; the clean as soap Soul superstar finally cutting loose and releasing all that intensity inside him. The crowd responding.

    There’s no Lou Rawls here, no backing vocal at all, but it doesn’t matter, because Sam’s voice, Sam’s personality, seems to expand to fill the void. He sings his ass off, and you can tell how much he’s enjoying himself, how much he’s enjoying the simple act of being this irrepressibly talented in public. That grit in the word “ever” on the recorded version is everywhere here, the after hours version. It’s 2am and even the bartender has put the shotgun down for this one.

    The interaction with the crowd reaches some sort of fever pitch as Cooke works them, over and over. “I’ll give you jewellery, I’ll give you some of that money too/but that ain’t all, that ain’t all Sam’ll do for you” he cries “one more thing I gotta tell ya/listen to me right now”. And then the absolute peak: “Everybody. Everybody’s with me tonight. Listen. Let me hear you say yeah”.

    Something inside of me gives a little whenever I hear that line, that “everybody’s with me tonight”. What a beautiful, glorious, generous thing to cry out right as you’re at the peak of your powers, what a way to read the mood of the room. What a beautiful philosophy of live music, and of life. And the idea that this show was buried for as long as it was, Cooke’s true self deliberately obscured from view. It’s all just a little too moving. If you were to ask me what music is, to pinpoint one precise moment in the history of recorded song and hold it up as a peak, it may well be this one: the greatest singer who ever lived, having the time of his life and taking his people with him, all swept along by song.

    The audience, of course, oblige. Cooke leads them back and forth in a round of call and response, the cries of “yeah” pinging between floor and stage, gathering force as they go. You can pick out the individual voices, and you can also hear them as a whole; actual magic happening in the room, sweat dripping from the ceiling, privileged to be at what must surely be one of the greatest shows ever performed. The song crashes to a close and the listener lights a cigarette. You have just been present at the performance to end all performances.

    This version of Bring It On Home To Me is a moment in time. A moment when Soul music is busy being born. You can hear all the elements, present and correct; you can hear the Gospel and the Pop, and you can hear the sex and politics too. We’re in the South, smack bang in the middle of an increasingly militant civil rights movement, and Sam Cooke is a year away from refusing to play a segregated show. He’s also serving live music so potent you feel it to be capable of collapsing any barrier.

    But even beyond that, you can hear the germ of what would eventually draw millions of others, myself included to Soul. The fact that this is devotional music, aimed not at a higher power, but inward, at yourself. Follow no man, follow the god within. Soul music takes what is inside you and makes it beautiful, makes it holy, makes it worth shouting to the heavens about, and nobody ever shouted to the heavens better than Sam Cooke.

    If you listen closely to this version of Bring It On Home To Me you can hear a sporadic thumping, almost certainly the sound of Cooke pounding his own chest with the microphone. And it’s that sound which stays with me the longest, even amidst the thousand other magical things happening here. That glorious declaration of self, of existence, of worthiness. Secular music that makes the world feel divine.

    The critic Hilary Saunders once memorably wrote that Live At The Harlem Square throws “the party of the century on the eve of destruction”. Six months after its recording, Cooke’s 18 month old son would die in a drowning accident. Six months after that, Cooke would be gone too. Gone, but never forgotten, his extraordinary voice, his extraordinary songwriting forming the bedrock for so much that was to follow. These events cannot help but add pathos to what we’ve just listened to, a sense of music history’s sliding doors.

    And for my part? Well, I was just some kid among a million other kids, but I heard this music and felt ten feet tall. Felt like what was inside me was worth something, like music could save your life, and like life without soul might not be worth living at all. I felt like if I was ever alone, this music would keep me company, would keep me strong. Sam Cooke blew the doors wide open, and he made me a believer. Because you hear a man sing like this and you’ll believe a man can fly. And not just him: everybody. Everybody’s with Sam tonight.

  18. Well now, I’ve not heard that. But I will seek it out.

    Since you asked, my favourite live LP is Bill Withers Live At Carnegie Hall, and it sounds like he’s talking to you all the way through.

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