The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / Bingo Little’s 100 Favourite Songs Of All Time, nos 40-31

Comments

  1. 40. You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve – Johnny Boy

    I was ten years old when I first read P.G Wodehouse’s “Mike & Psmith”, plucking the copy from my parents’ bookshelves and losing myself in its buccaneering tales of public school derring-do. In short order, the titular Psmith, a silver-tongued pubescent dandy, replete with monocle and bewildering perspicacity, became my first hero.

    Psmith seemed at the time positive proof for an inkling I’d always harboured; that words were life’s glory and that, if correctly deployed, they could be used to confound adults and talk yourself out of almost any sticky situation. Wodehouse had reportedly based the character on Rupert D’Oyly Carte, the son of the Gilbert & Sullivan impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, saying of the former that he was “the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a silver plate with watercress on it”. I, in turn, based myself on Psmith, and he was but one of many things handed to me on a silver plate at that age.

    I revisit Mike & Psmith every few years and, with the passage of time, I’ve come to appreciate that Psmith was not the only character from the novel to have made a deep impression on me. Roughly halfway through the book, our heroes encounter Adair, an unusual boy whose relentless drive and enthusiasm for seemingly all aspects of school life had the effect of galvanising the institution, and who demonstrated a willingness to use his energies to bring together in union its various tribes.

    Whether I recognised it at the time or not, whether my affinity for the character was cause or effect, Adair embodied my own approach to Primary School. If the school was to be represented, I wanted to be part of it, and I wanted to take everyone with me into the bargain. It was my solemn desire to unite the tribes: the sporty kids, the nerds, the overachievers, the none of the aboves. I wanted them all in together with me, no barriers, no enmities. I wanted to use the power of my words to bring the whole place together and ensure no one was left behind. The heart of Adair with the mouth of Psmith, my platonic boyhood ideal.

    Time, of course, spun on, as it’s prone to do. I became a teenager, and then an adult, and I recognised that no amount of eloquence and charisma is ever going to permanently unite the tribes. That the divisions between, and indeed within, people are more profound than my rhetoric. I moved on. And then 20 years later, and nearing 20 years ago, I thought of Psmith and Adair again, for the first time in a long time.

    It was the day of my wedding, one of the better days of my life. The service had just ended and my wife and I turned at the top of the aisle, looking back at our friends and family as we prepared to walk on out. And I looked across the room, across all those smiling faces of the people I knew and loved, all of those friends who I’d somehow lucked my way into, spread across their various groupings, and I thought to myself just for a moment that hey, maybe I got there after all.

    And then You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve began to play and we walked back down the middle of the room, right through the centre of all those wonderful people, and out the door into what felt at the time to be perilously close to adult life.

    You Are The Generation is a puzzling song, in that it has the magic, but not the traction. With the stated aim of “rekindling the idea of Sandinista-era Clash”, it sounds like a massive Pop hit, a song that everyone should know, and yet it remains perpetually lodged just below the cultural waterline. Released in 2004, it trades on a classic girl group sound, but arrived around 18 months too early to ride the Winehouse/Mark Ronson/Duffy-infused wave that returned the style to popular appeal.

    The song opens with a direct lift from the Ronettes Be My Baby (and hey, if you’re going to steal, why not steal from the best), but it’s likely a third hand echo. Sofia Coppola’s breakout movie Lost In Translation had debuted the year before, featuring in its most pivotal scene the Jesus And Mary Chain’s Just Like Honey, which also begins with the same act of larceny. The opening is simultaneously timeless and of its moment. Early 60s and early millennium.

    Perhaps predictably for a not-yet fully recovered music nerd/snob, the soundtrack to our wedding was hotly negotiated; I would request tracks which either explicitly or implicitly thumbed their noses at the institution of marriage/everlasting love, and my wife would patiently explain to me that if I was ever going to stop being such a jumped little prick for one day, this should probably be it. The wedding DJ we unanimously granted full license: just play any of the hundred or so songs that people actually want to hear at a wedding disco, but the service was a battleground.

    Ostensibly, You Are The Generation made the cut that day for two reasons. The first was that, despite being a punchy three minutes, it possessed remarkable powers of acceleration, kicking in with those classic drums and then exploding into full bloom just prior to the minute mark, an endorphin rush that seemed to speak to the reputed rollercoaster we had just boarded. The second was that throughout the song there are what sounds very much like literal fireworks. And who doesn’t love fireworks. “Please commence your drinking” it seemed to announce.

    But there was a third reason to choose the song, and I kept it to myself that day. There we were, with all our wonderful mates, collectively heading into the next chapter of life, and wondering what was ahead. My wife and I were the first of our cohort to tie the knot, and even though we were knocking hard on 30’s door, it felt like a ludicrous practical joke that we’d even been allowed to go through with it. Perhaps it always feels that way, but I remember that when we both got back to our room that night, in the wee small hours after much singing and dancing and tomfoolery, we fell into one another’s arms and without so much of a word of explanation, both cried our eyes out, half from joy, and half from the fear and relief that we’d stepped through a door into a new maturity that we could never walk back, even had we the desire to do so.

    Looking out across my mates that day, I saw that we were all headed for that same door. Childhood was ending now, and adult life was upon us. There we were, the sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies and dickheads, about to assume the collective mantle of maturity, and to try, as each generation must, to make slightly less of a hash of it than our parents before us. “You are the generation that bought more shoes and you get what you deserve” felt apt in that moment, as I’d suspected it would: a fundamentally unserious generation, hoping to god that what we deserved would be good times and champagne, rather than it all blowing up in our juvenile faces. I picked the song because I loved the idea of all of us assembled there in one place, listening to Johnny Boy’s glorious propulsion, and heeding, even if subliminally, their prophecy. Should not have bought all those trainers, dammit.

    You Are The Generation is in many ways Common People, if Common People had failed to cross over. It’s an anti-materialist song you can dance to, steeped in the great British tradition of class antagonism. “Burberry beamer beakheads leaving Adidas sleek mystique reverse/Without a dream or scream between ‘em/Believing time does reimburse”. That was us, or some of us anyway: the happy yuppies who too often made their livings with words but had not a single book in the house, convinced we’d all get what we’d deserve, and that it would be good. “Believing time does reimburse” – god, if that doesn’t sum it all up: burning through what’s left of your 20s, work hard/play hard and trust it all sorts itself out if you just move fast enough. Diligent children of the end of history, we just couldn’t help believing.

    It’s a great shame that the song’s lyrics are so buried beneath the production – albeit the production is touched by absolute magic – because the lyrics are truly beautiful. “Winter sweeps the streets of evening/this frequency’s my universe”, amen to that all day long. You can miss it amongst the euphoric “yeah yeah”s, but this is a tune that’s telling you something, and what it’s telling you is that none of us knows what we’re doing, and that it’s chaos, so you may as well pray.

    Whenever I hear You Are The Generation, I’m right back in there in that moment. Stood there at the top of the aisle, next to the single best decision I ever made or would ever make, looking at the many people I loved and wondering what the future had in store for us all. An infinity of possibilities seeming to open up before us in that last moment before the dread hand of duty began to descend. The culmination of my mission to do as Adair did, bringing everyone together, no matter how little they had in common, to join in one last wave goodbye to our foolish hearts.

    Did we get what we deserved? Well, even now that remains to be seen, but on the evidence so far I have to say that we, the generation that snorts for tunes, have done better than might have been expected, and slightly worse than might have been hoped. We were kids then, and we’re still fundamentally those same kids now. Nothing changed as much as it had seemed it would that day, no childish things were put aside. The door, as it turned out, revolved.

    You Are The Generation reminds me of all of us, together. Not just on the day of my wedding, but on many other days and nights before and since. All trying to figure it all out, all hoping that we’d be dealt good cards in the final reckoning. It reminds me that I have been impossibly lucky with my friends, many of whom have been family to me on every level that matters. It reminds me to always wish the best for them, and it reminds me that I really could do with some new trainers.

    • Lovely writing. Funny thing music. For me this song is just a fondly, if barely, remebered indie number from back in the day which I enjoyed at the time but left little lasting impression. But, I’ve just listened again (possibly for the first time in 20 years), and I still like it!

      • Cheers, Guiri.

        The closer it gets to the top of this list, the clearer it becomes that – for me, at least – “favourite” songs have as much to do with the memories/associations they trigger as anything about the songs themselves. Glad to hear you still enjoy this one.

  2. I’ve barely known most of the songs you’ve chosen, this one being no exception, and to be honest most of them aren’t really my cup of tea. However, what makes these posts so fascinating is the compelling writing about your life, and yet again this one hits the spot perfectly.

  3. I have this on 7”! But muso nerd nonsense aside, do you really expect me to believe that Mike and Psmith were the biggest Wodehouse influence on a poster who calls himself Bingo Little?

  4. Have you plugged this song previously, BL (like about five years ago)? I downloaded a copy from somewhere, but could only have learned of it on this site. It’s a topsa bit of work.

  5. 39. Know Your Enemy – Rage Against The Machine

    Attempting to explain why you love a song is a curious business. Sometimes you sit and listen, the great unanswered “why” hovering provocatively somewhere overhead, and then emerge little the wiser. You love the song because it speaks to you on some level that maybe doesn’t lend itself readily to articulation, or perhaps it’s just been part of you so long that it’s like attempting to explain why you’re attached to a limb. And then occasionally you sit and listen and the “why” resolves itself before the damn thing even hits its first chorus. You look back at how the song entered your life, when it first captured you, and all the mystery just falls away entirely.

    Some time in early 1993, Rage Against The Machine performed Killing In The Name on The Word, my generation’s premier late night yoof TV chat/music show. By chance, I caught that performance, and the next day it was the talk of the playground: the apparent malevolence of the lead singer, the mind-bending volume of expletives, the cop-baiting lyrics, half the band ending up in the crowd. The sheer energy of the thing. In those days, when TV would slip past and be gone forever, it was immediately minted as a “were you there” moment, even though none of us was truly “there”.

    Rage had immediate and obvious appeal to both me and my peers. They sounded fantastic, they had a firm grasp of their own iconography and they were political at a time when many acts were leaning more into shoulder-shrugging ennui. We were 14 years old, and none of us had ever seen anything as exciting as this, never heard anything as profoundly thrilling and galvanising as that first “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” – a fully formed teenage manifesto in nine words, broadcast on national television. If adolescence tends to seesaw between long periods of patient waiting and occasional lightning bolts, this was very much the latter.

    Within days, copies of the album were in circulation, and we thrilled to its merciless piling of one great riff upon another, one bellowed slogan after another. The tightness of the band. The unapologetically apoplectic vocals. The relentlessness. Of all the albums of my youth, it’s the one that seemed to drop out of the clear blue sky utterly perfect: no real precursor in style, no room for improvement, no filler material at all. A brilliant idea for a band, perfectly executed, perfectly recorded, rendering everything that followed slightly redundant.

    Most of us immediately gravitated towards Know Your Enemy, the track that seemed to deploy Rage’s various strengths to their most fulsome effect, the tip of the spear. A series of strutting riffs, head shaking effects and preposterous solos, the whole track seemed to operate as a frame for Morello’s preposterous guitar work, and it captured the band firing on all cylinders. But it wasn’t just the sound that drew me to Know Your Enemy, it was the message.

    Rage arrived at a real inflection point in my life. Having been raised in a bohemian corner of South West London, my family had suddenly and unexpectedly transplanted to a small, conservative town in Kent, and it’s fair to say that the host body was rejecting the organ. Our status as a family with one foot in Yorkshire and the other in La Paz, that offbeat cultural mix that had served us so well and granted a sort of cache in the city, flipped entirely on its head and became a problem in our new environs. We had crossed the Brexit line before the Brexit line even existed.

    The issue had been exacerbated just over a year earlier when my mother took a job teaching Spanish at my school, and brought with her the full range of institutional provocation of which she was uniquely capable. Whether teachers or students, she was blessed with a seemingly unerring ability to locate bigots, to drive them from the undergrowth and to noisily confront them. To remind everyone, at all times, that she was unrepentantly South American and Feminist would not be standing for their bullshit. It was impressive to behold. And completely terrifying. A wrecking ball of truth and justice, straight through the heart of my teenage life.

    I once heard Tom Morello remark in interview “when you’re the only mixed race kid on the playground, you don’t find politics. Politics finds you”. Politics found me at secondary school, pretty much the day my mother arrived. The exposed son of a Bolivian in a virtually all white boys’ grammar school, it took less than a week for the racist remarks to begin: generally, but not always, the sort of low level stuff that might pass as banter, but enough to remind you that you don’t belong, as if you were ever in any doubt on that score. I punched the first kid, and then quickly realised that I wasn’t going to be able to punch everybody. This was an institution that did not take kindly to outsiders, and if I hadn’t been an outsider before, I was one now. And if I couldn’t fight them all then the only choice that left was to learn to endure.

    Looking back on it, the curious thing about the racism was the way it seemed to settle into the general background hum of school life. It wasn’t constantly expressed, but it was constantly felt, partly because once you’d established that it could come from any angle (including, frankly, the teachers) you began to live in expectation, began to pre-arrange your responses, pre-plan your counter-arguments, and partly because somewhere along the line it seemed that all racism became my racism.

    When the same person insults your mother for her ethnicity and then later makes a comment about another group, the two events become hard to disentangle, particularly when you’re already on guard, until eventually all such comments begin to wound the same way. Until eventually you reach the point where you struggle to discern whether the thing that was just said was legitimately offensive or just landed that way with you because you’ve become overly sensitized.

    By 14 I was already seething, prickled by the affront to my mother’s dignity, to my own dignity, and full of contempt for the institution that permitted it. I never spoke to Mum about the racism, never spoke to anyone at home, because I couldn’t figure out how to explain something so irrational, how to put it into words that made sense, and – perhaps saddest of all – how to explain that I was allowing these things to be said without proper physical retribution. How to explain the teachers who stood by and did nothing, and how to explain the weird guilt it left me feeling, as if I were complicit too.

    Know Your Enemy landed in my life at the precise moment I was grappling with all of the above, as I was trying to understand this sea change in my identity that had occurred seemingly without my having lifted a finger to provoke it. It sounded as furious as I felt, and I was still young enough that the lyrics resonated with me on an entirely sincere and non-ironic level. That the lyrics to this ludicrous Rap Rock song helped me make some sense of my turmoil.

    “Yes I know my enemies
    They’re the teachers who taught me to fight me
    Compromise, conformity
    Assimilation, submission
    Ignorance, hypocrisy
    Brutality, the elite”

    School was a warzone, the whole town was a warzone, and as I argued and snarked my way through, determined to leave no insult unanswered, those words rang in my ears. I wouldn’t be learning anything from these people, it was time to hit the books and educate myself. And so I did.

    Rage Against The Machine are a tough band to eulogise, because somewhere along the way they became a cartoon. The name didn’t help, and nor did the largely turgid legacy of Rap Rock that trailed in their wake – bands of far less talent and insight copying the look and feel, but not the substance. They’re a tough band to fully take seriously, because what they peddled, that flaming fury at the world, is fundamentally a teenage currency. But if you were a teenager when they arrived, and if you were furious too, furious to your absolute boots in a manner that you didn’t even know how to begin to express, they made so much sense as to be a force of nature.

    Just listen to Know Your Enemy again. The stuttering guitar intro, the now sadly unfashionable shout out to the year in which the track was recorded, the explosive riffery. The glorious sloganeering – “What? The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy” – a legitimate contender for the greatest single lyric of the 90s. Maynard James Keenan from Tool singing on the bridge. The way the whole track grinds to a halt before that repeated siren sound kicks it all back to life, the riff sounding like Led Zep’s Heartbreaker on experimental military steroids, Zack De La Rocha screaming that unforgettable coda. The close out: “all of which are American dreams”. It’s a track that has everything, absolutely everything.

    There’s a great video to be found on YouTube of Rage Against The Machine playing their first ever public show in front of a largely unmoved crowd. Towards the end of the set they play Know Your Enemy, and when Morello kicks in with that ridiculous opening guitar sound, the kill switch technique on top of the harmoniser, you see half the guys in the audience instinctively crane their necks to get a better view of his hands. What the hell is this guitarist doing? The shock of the new. That moment sums the band up perfectly.

    Looking back, the question isn’t so much how I came to fall in love with Know Your Enemy as how in the circumstances I might ever have failed to do so. It arrived at the perfect moment, bearing the perfect message. For my part, I did what I was always going to do. I fought my teachers, I flouted the school’s authority, and then went and aced my exams, partly out of pure malice against the place. I got out and never went back: no assimilation, no submission, no compromise. I knew my enemy, met them on the battlefield and defeated them. And as with all good soldiers, it was only many years later that I began to ponder the troubling question of what the battle had taken from me, and what scars the victory had cost.

  7. 38. Don’t Talk Crazy – Mark Mulcahy

    The first time I heard Don’t Talk Crazy, I didn’t think all that much of it. The song is so sparse, and so odd, that it felt difficult to find any real purchase with it. It slid by, just another of Mark Mulcahy’s thin but pretty tunes. Then I listened to it again, and again, and somewhere around the third or fourth time something shifted, the dam broke and an almost unbearable wave of poignancy soaked me to the bone.

    It’s been a curious feature of Mulcahy’s career that, blessed with a singular voice, so unusually warm and benign, he has gradually worked to strip away all the other elements which would normally surround it, leaving himself exposed and vulnerable. It’s a long way from the full band sound of Miracle Legion to his later work, often accompanied by a single, slightly unsteady sounding keyboard. Sometimes there’s been a sense that he’s playing a kind of sonic Jenga, removing the blocks one at a time to see if and when the whole thing will collapse, relying on the charisma of his vocals to defy gravity just a little longer.

    Don’t Talk Crazy arrived somewhere close to the zenith of those efforts. The instrumentation, such as it is, sounds like the mobile rotating over a baby’s cot, and Mulcahy duets with himself in both male and female roles. The keyboards twinkle and fade, the whole thing lives or dies on the human voice. It began life as a poem, rather than a song, and you can tell, because all the magic here is in the words and how they’re spoken.

    Telling the story of a man who goes to war and is badly wounded, of his guilt towards his family, his disgust at his own hubris, Don’t Talk Crazy is perhaps the most intimate and humanist anti-war song ever recorded. It concerns itself with loss, both external and internal, our wounded narrator waving aside all illusion of valour, his lover urging him to come home. For this man, laid flat out in his hospital bed, the fighting is over and the real conflict has perhaps only just begun.

    The narrator is wracked with grief because he recognises now what he has gambled and lost in departing for war and leaving his lover behind. “In my, blind romantic eye, I made a simple supposition/To go away and come back one day/Pick it up just where we left off/I was wrong/And you went along/Smiling and waving as the bus pulled out of town”. I love Mulcahy’s phrasing here, the blind romantic eye, the alliterative simple supposition, the way that “I was wrong/and you went along” gets right down to the nub of responsibility in just seven words.

    Don’t Talk Crazy is a song about romantic illusions, and where they can land you. The narrator is a war hero, he’s achieved what he presumably set out to, but he knows the medals don’t matter because of what he’s lost (“I’m just a part of what I was”), and because he never really deserved them anyway (“Honest to god, I was just trying to get out of the way”). War was not as he expected, and it’s only as he’s come to collect the tab that he’s realised he’s been dining in an establishment he could never afford. “Just come back to me baby, with that same look in your eye”. How many people make it home, but with that look gone forever?

    I sit here and ask myself why I love this song so much, this ridiculously fragile, seemingly half finished song, with the singer doing a funny high pitched voice on the chorus to denote that he’s now doing the female part, this song that has literally moved me to tears, and I think it’s partly the contrast between the innocence of Mulcahy’s voice and the import of the subject matter. The deep pathos in the knowledge that Mulcahy had suffered his own loss shortly before this was written, with the passing of his wife. That he’s essaying a lost soul here, presumably with some first hand experience, and that maybe, just maybe, he’s singing this to himself. The sense that this is a song about loneliness, about being cut adrift even as people try to haul you back to shore.

    But there’s a happier angle too, in that this song seemed to form the culmination of Mulcahy’s artistic ambition, his need to strip back and refine. Mulcahy himself said of Don’t Talk Crazy “I just love the – I love that it’s so complete, you know”, as if he’d finally accomplished his mission of building a beautiful tune with the absolute minimum of raw materials. It blows my mind that you can just write something like this, you can use your words and your voice to build this thing that feels so real and so true, so fully realised and lived, that you can stick a barely there keyboard behind it and you have a song, and that your song will move people. Don’t talk crazy, please.

    And really, I know deep down why this song gets to me. Why it’s so damn sad and beautiful, why it’s so affecting. At around the halfway mark the whole tune seems to find an extra gear; the keyboard becomes a little more assertive, the pace lifts, and Mulcahy’s voice swells: “Well maybe I feel the same way/after all this time/And now I aye aye aye aye/I’m just a part of what I was/I wanted to carry my daughter upstairs to bed at night”. And that part just kills me – absolutely kills me – every damn time, because this guy in his hospital bed is realising that he’s chased a dream, a dream of adventure and achievement, when really all he ever needed to be happy was right back home waiting for him. “I wanted to carry my daughter upstairs to bed at night” – the fucking privilege of that simple act.

    A few years ago I got to see Mulcahy play live for the first time. He hadn’t toured in a while, he’d been back home bringing up his kids, and you could see he was rusty, uncertain, the crowd willing him on at times. Towards the end of the show someone passed him a note and he announced that he’d been asked to play Don’t Talk Crazy, but wasn’t sure he could remember the words. Someone pulled them up on a phone and he performed the song in front of a spellbound, pin drop silent audience. It was a slightly halting rendition and it felt like it might all fall apart at any second, and that made it all the more perfect. It was beautiful: this one guy, exposed and alone onstage, singing a song he was struggling to remember, relying on his voice to carry the day.

    I went home late that night and looked in on my kids, watched them sleep a short while. Walked round the silent house, taking it in the way you only ever can when a home is still and quiet in the small hours. Felt, not for the first time, my own good fortune. To have all this, every day. To have it right here under my nose to the point where some days I don’t even notice it’s there any more, this great and abundant joy.

    Don’t Talk Crazy reveals a simple truth: that to love, and to in turn be loved, is the only thing that was ever really worth fighting for. That if you’re lucky enough to have a home full of people then you probably have everything you ever need, all the delights and triumphs that will sustain you. That the best songs can be simple, just like the best lives.

  8. 37. Self Control – Frank Ocean

    In any life spent listening to music, there are those moments where an artist arrives with whom you connect immediately and profoundly. Maybe they’re bringing with them a sound you’ve been waiting for your whole life, without ever realising it, or perhaps their lyrics resonate as if you’d been their intended target all along. These moments traditionally arrive most frequently in the early teenage years, when you’re first old enough to connect with something that doesn’t sit within your immediate physical proximity, but still young enough that your still unspoiled heart is open to the world, defenceless. You’re ripe to be spoken to, and ripe to listen. But such moments are not purely a feature of childhood and adolescence: it’s still possible to be stopped in your tracks well into adulthood, it’s just that it becomes a little more surprising, and perhaps unnerving, an occurrence as time passes.

    I first heard Frank Ocean a little over a decade ago, and immediately felt that same low rumble in the soul that I’d noticed the very first time I listened to De La Soul or Smashing Pumpkins or Jeff Buckley. Like this wasn’t music I’d discovered, this was music that had been waiting for me all along. Something in Ocean’s voice felt innate, like an itch being scratched, and he spoke to me, already in my 30s, with the same force those other artists had once spoken to me in my teens. He moved me in adulthood as they had in childhood: he made me excited about music, and about the act of sitting and listening as someone sings to me all their great truths and deceptions entwined. He made future music beautiful.

    At the time of writing, Ocean is on something of an undeclared hiatus. No new album in getting on for nine years, no new song since 2020; perhaps uncoincidentally the year in which his younger brother tragically died in a car crash. Ocean rarely tours, and even when he agrees to do so he rarely (or barely) shows up. But before he vanished off, he gave us Blonde, an album so far in advance of what he’d done before, so packed with ideas and invention that it really did feel like he was building a bridge to somewhere glorious. And at the centre of that album was Self Control.

    Self Control is a song about a breakup, like so many songs before and after it. It’s about knowing that the game is over and you lost, but hovering over the board, unwilling to forfeit just yet, hanging suspended between the dream of victory and the certainty of defeat. It’s a story as old as human beings, and yet Frank makes it feel like it’s the first time it’s ever been told. Self Control is full of extraordinary sounds, from the opening chipmunk voices on “Poolside convo, about your Summer last night”, voices which continue to sing harmonies throughout the song if you listen hard enough, to the ravishing guitar solo which cleaves the song in two. It’s full of stillness and space, only four minutes long but unafraid to take its time.

    This is a song of two halves, the first underpinned by plucked guitar redolent of – of all things – Extreme’s More Than Words – and direct address, as Frank implores his lover not to forget him: “Keep a place for me/I’ll sleep between y’all, it’s nothing”. That “keep a place for me” is the crux of the song – the relationship is over, all that’s left to play for is the memory. The tone is warm and friendly, but teetering on the brink of hitherto restrained emotion – the ludicrous, cartoonish upshifting of the vocal on “do we have time” a hint at what’s bubbling beneath the surface, the way Frank sings “you made me lose my self control” slightly off-beat, a sign that the mask is in danger of slipping.

    Then we get that solo, somewhere between a distorted guitar and a distorted human voice howling in anguish, and the song opens up like a flower. “I I I know you gotta leave leave leave/Take down some summertime/Give up just tonight night night/I I I know you’ve got someone coming/Spitting game, oh you got it”. One of the most beautiful codas to any song ever recorded, tucked away at the back there, almost out of sight, underpinned by Ocean’s voice harmonising with, over and under itself endlessly. If Ocean’s imperial phase was characterised by anything it was an obsession with the human voice, as if having been granted one of the most unspeakably beautiful voices of his own generation he was determined to see how far he could push it, how far he could mask it. Here, he produces from out of nowhere, from a song that on first listen felt like an unfinished demo, a vocal refrain so gorgeous it takes you aback.

    There’s a warmth to Self Control that makes me love it. This is a Summer song, a tune about failing Summer love, and it evokes perfectly the feeling of a warm, lazy evening with everything and noting to play for. Just listen to the lush keyboards which accompany the “Keep a place for me” line, or the strings which swell underneath the solo. Listen to the ambient noises echoing away in the background of the coda, the faint reverb on the vocal. The whole track is pitched like afternoon fun fading into warm evening, it puts you right there on the spot. The only other record I can think of with a similar ambience is To Sheila, the opening track of Smashing Pumpkins’ fourth album, the largely unloved Adore, which maintains throughout what sounds an awful lot like the faint chirp of cicadas and consequently sounds like the most melancholic BBQ you’ve ever attended. A track I remember listening to one June evening at the end of my first year at university, window open, the last rays of sun streaming in, and on the breeze the unmistakeable sound of a dozen social gatherings working their way to life across the great green expanse of the campus. Knowing that I would shortly be at one of those gatherings, with the sun on my face and the Summer stretching out ahead, waiting to be filled. A feeling I will never forget.

    Perhaps it’s that warmth, that sense of time and place, that makes Self Control feel so authentic, so unfiltered. Of all the many great songs on Blonde, it’s certainly proved to have the deepest emotional resonance for its audience, who grasped it immediately to their collective bosom as an anthem for lost love. There’s a brilliant recording somewhere out on Soundcloud of Frank playing the song live, in front of a crowd who join in on every word: they shout the “Poolside convo” section, they scream the verses, you can even just about hear them attempting to make the sound of the guitar solo. They positively live the Coda. The crowd shares the stage, the performance is communal, and that’s perfect for this song, this bizarre, oddly structured song that plays around with voices and sticks what should be the chorus right at the end, because this is a track through which people pool their personal sadness and pain until it becomes joy and comfort.

    When I first heard Frank Ocean, I heard within him a number of other beloved artists – I heard Prince and D’Angelo, and maybe some David Bowie in the arrangements. But it was Sam Cooke that jumped first to mind; the cleanness of the vocals, the way he transmits experience so effortlessly, the smoothness. And when I heard that live recording of Self Control, I heard Sam at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, playing Bring It On Home To Me to the crowd, with the crowd. The same sense of connection, only with a bittersweet melancholy emanating from the audience in place of the Harlem Square Club’s epic horniness. The same sense that this is an artist who can do whatever he wants, who can take you in any direction he chooses. Everybody’s with me tonight.

    Self Control is one of my favourite records because I still don’t know how on Earth Frank wrote it. How he took such a straightforward emotional message (“this can’t go on, but please don’t forget me”), and delivered it in such a fractured, iconic manner: how he made it feel so damn real. How he took a Jazz Guitar line, a Soul vocal and R&B production and blended them together to make this thing that really doesn’t sound like anything else, but feels like the future. A future he promised, but still has yet to deliver. I love it because of how dissonant and spare its first half is, before it hits you with all that unexpected beauty in the closing stages. I love the way it evokes the low hum of warm Summer evenings, and of being too young and too lost in your own dramas to really notice the Summers slipping by. The way it reminds us to celebrate always our past loves, and indeed our past selves.

  9. I always preferred his dad, Billy. Sort, cheap gag to make up the numbers, as I sense your choices are slipping out of the AW “mainstream”, however readable the narrative remains.

  10. Fantastic writing and these choices have made me listen to SO many artists I would not otherwise have come across, even if they don’t become favourites.

    Keep going!

  11. 36. Three Little Birdies Down Beats – Chemical Brothers

    While this is a list of a hundred songs, it’s albums that are the format through which I have chiefly understood, or attempted to understand, music for most of my life. Until relatively recently, when streaming services finally made the format begin to seem obsolete in the face of the now-dominant playlist, albums were the generally recognised common currency of music consumption. They were the raw materials from which your collection was compiled, the centre of discussion, the yardstick via which success or failure was determined. For most of my life, and certainly all of my adolescence, albums were the basic unit of musical measurement, even in genres which didn’t naturally lend themselves to the format.

    One such genre was electronic music, which was at the turn of the 90s (and is arguably to this day) a land where the individual track held dominion. When you’re dancing to an incredible tune, you don’t much need to care whether there are eleven other tunes exploring a similar theme with which it might easily be packaged. Perhaps as a consequence, it seemed to me in my teens that electronic music lacked an album culture. Perhaps as a consequence, the genre was often harder for people to understand if they were coming to it from an album culture.

    Things shifted in that department fairly definitively in the mid 90s, as electronic acts began to take the album more seriously, commencing the formation of a land bridge that would eventually bring in a more Rock-centric audience. Something changed for the Prodigy between The Prodigy Experience, which still felt like a collection of tunes thrown together almost casually, and Music For The Jilted Generation, which incorporated Rock elements (not least choruses), and had the organic flow of a proper album. Underworld released dubnobasswithmyheadman that same year; it seemed like a cohesive piece.

    And it felt like something was changing, but you still got the sense that this music was operating in its own sphere of influence, like it had an audience that did not fully cross over. Like to properly enjoy it you might need to be fleeing a warehouse party at 5am, pursued by the police and starting to wonder what your drugs had been cut with. It retained an edge. Something shifted around 1994; it’s quite possible that the much-loathed Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which brought the party to an end for the original motley coalition of ravers and new age travellers, opened up a space for a slightly more sanitised, slightly safer electronic sound. All that was needed was the right album.

    I first heard Exit Planet Dust more or less the week of release, Summer 1995. We’d all known it was coming: we’d heard Song To The Siren and all the remix works, and it was enough to know that the Chemical Brothers, formerly the Dust Brothers, formerly the 2370 Turbo Nutters, were off in the lab building something good. But it still created a sense of shock and awe when it finally arrived, because in that heady Summer of Britpop, when the whole UK felt like a party to which everyone was invited, Exit Planet Dust opened up a new front. This was accessible, non-threatening electronic music. Electronic music you could enjoy in the same sticky floored venues where you’d previously been dancing to Pulp. Electronic music with an engine that could run on pure alcohol, if needed.

    Exit Planet Dust was immediately considered, in the parlance of the time, a “proper album”. Its pieces were consistent, it had flow, and – perhaps most importantly of all – it had a proper album cover. To listen to the music, all bleeps and machinery, you’d have expected a bunch of fractals, maybe some polygons, perhaps an abstract image. Instead, we got the guy in the cowboy hat, the girl, the guitar. Classic Rock imagery, applied in a non-Rock setting; Ed Simons later said of it: “We wanted something a bit more romantic and otherworldly, with nice, soft colours. And it’s the wrong way round, intentionally”. That image, as much as anything, announced that the party had begun and that there would be no divisions: it didn’t matter what you’d listened to up until that point, this record was for you. For years, a poster of the cover hung on my teenage bedroom wall, reminding me every time I looked at it that the walls were coming down, just as I was coming of age.

    The sonics helped too. The Chemicals had minted a sound that was roughly approximate to Breakbeat, but at a slightly more moderate tempo, with accessible song structures and prominent bass. It was bombastic, rather than subtle, and it delivered its thrills tightly packed, with one explosive moment quickly following another. The drums weren’t nimble, like House music, they were gigantic and thunderous, like someone had fed John Bonham into the singularity. They were unapologetic Rock drums, and unlike a lot of what came before, the Chemical Brothers traded in feelings, rather than atmospherics.

    All of this was known; a year earlier I’d somehow laid hands on a bootleg copy of a Chems set at the Heavenly Social and been blown away by the sound it, the way it mixed Hip Hop drums with the electronic elements, the magpie sensibility that saw them pluck, polish and deploy assets from any source. That set sounded an awful lot like someone had stuck my dream record collection in a blender and it sent me back to the wide eyed wonder of first hearing Megablast on Xenon II. There was no mystery to this music, no sense of unbelonging; it wore its heart on its sleeve, and it wanted to be liked. It would perform any backflip necessary for your approval.

    So, we were aware the Chemical Brothers could spin, that they could take the music of others and weave it into something greater than the sum of its parts, but Exit Planet Dust was a surprise nonetheless, because here they showed they could create more or less from scratch, and that was new. They showed they could create a cohesive, standalone album, and that was new too. And, for me at least, Three Little Birdies Down Beats was the precise moment that all of these realisations set in. That the Chemical Brothers had delivered way over and above expectations, and that this music was opening a door.

    Three Little Birdies Down Beats is the fourth track on Exit Planet Dust. It was the first track name I noticed on the back of the CD, because it’s the first of three tracks in sequence with “Beats” as a suffix, and because “Three Little Birdies Down Beats” might have been one of the most gloriously enigmatic and epic sounding track titles I had ever seen to that point. Exit Planet Dust opens with Leave Home’s low siren, its samples from Kraftwork and Blake Baxter, before upping the tempo with the hyperkinetic In Dust We Trust and then the pulverising klaxons of the already familiar Song To The Siren. It was only when the album hit track four that it became apparent that all of this had been mixed seamlessly, that one tune was flowing into the next in a continuous mix. That this thing wasn’t going to let you breathe.

    I still remember my first listen to Three Little Birdies: the opening swell of choral voices as Song To The Siren recedes, the first interjection of the thumping beat that sits at the centre of the track, racing like a pulse, the locomotive power as the elements are brought together one by one, and then – finally – the first drop of that acid bird call that forms the soul of the thing. That extraordinary, sound, a digital pterodactyl screaming down towards its prey, redolent of the iconic whistle on Josh Wink’s Higher State Of Consciousness. The track landed the way a great club night feels, the way the sounds clash and coalesce, the sense of giddy disorientation, the sheer propulsion of its call to arms. It was spine tingling, music I’d been waiting for since childhood, finally here and now.

    Three Little Birdies is the centrepiece of the six continuously mixed tracks which open the album, and which act as a sort of mini album in themselves. While Exit Planet Dust was embraced by an audience that had grown up on guitars, those six tracks would have been something new for a lot of them – no vocal hooks, no obvious samples, no single element demanding greater attention, no single point of reference to latch onto. But they’re the core of the record, and they minted a structure that others went on to copy endlessly over the next few years: bangers up front, woozy, pretty tunes to the back.

    That suite of songs was an extraordinarily brave and exciting way to open an album that was obviously looking to travel across genre barriers, and it helped to demonstrate that there was a wider audience for entirely instrumental electronic music, music comprised of drum sounds piled one atop the other and undercut with weird and unidentifiable noises. It’s no coincidence that two years later the Chemicals were thanked in the liner notes for Homework, because they’d forged ahead and blown open the doors to the places Daft Punk needed to reach.

    For their next record, the Chemicals looked to take it a step further. Dig Your Own Hole was even more self-consciously a “proper album”. It had the cover art, it had the sequencing, it mixed in some 60s-friendly psychedelia. It took them fully mainstream. And yet, I’ve always found it hard to love, Private Psychedelic Reel aside. Maybe that’s because by that point I’d heard Homework, which seemed to make everything else around it feel so regressive. Maybe it’s because it lacked that shock of achievement that arrived in sidecar with Exit Planet Dust, and that it felt a little needy, a little more self conscious. Or perhaps it’s because at no point in the album did I find myself sat with my mouth open wondering how this thing was just getting better and better the way I did as Song To The Siren receded into Three Little Birdies Down Beats.

    Looking back on it now, Three Little Birdies Down Beats was a moment unto itself. It was the point at which it became apparent to me that all music exists on the same continuum. That my Drum & Bass habit was really no different to my love of the Stone Roses. That if you just change the cover art, all those borders begin to look as silly as they ultimately are. That it’s nice to be able to deliver a proper album, but a great tune is a great tune, and will always have an intrinsic value that extends beyond its format and packaging. Three Little Birdies was a moment of excitement, of awakening; it felt like introducing one group of mates to another, and watching them unexpectedly get on famously. All that Summer I played it loud.

    A couple of years ago, I finally, after many near misses, managed to see the Chemical Brothers play live. About halfway through the set, the unmistakeable opening swell of Three Little Birdies began, and as we waited for the beat to kick in I stood with my eyes closed, amidst that great sea of people, remembering what it was like to be 17 years old and to hear this thing for the first time. How exciting it had made music seem. How exciting music still seemed now.

    • Interesting comment on the units of music commodity. 7 inch singles dominated my early purchasing right into the early eighties. LPs started creeping in and then accelerated until I switched to CDs mid to late eighties. I used cassettes to create mixtapes. The twelve inch single was the unit of Disco and Dance music generally. I started buying those about 1975 and continued through to 1985. Those extended mixes were fabulous. CD singles never felt the same and neither did the albums expanded to over an hour long. The thirty-five to forty minute LP was perfect. Streaming seems to have reduced my attention down but I still listen to “singles”, “albums” and mixtapes”, though the genres I am more comfortable with lend themselves to albums.

      As for the music, my equivalent would be Chic’s I Want Your Love. I danced to them in my youth and again on my sixtieth birthday. I posted about the gig, far less eloquently than you, back in 2018. Feels like yesterday.

      • I think we are of similar age and that trajectory pretty much mirrors my own, except that now I consume nearly all music as singles or at least individual tracks, and rarely buy albums. I’m a pop music boy at heart, really.

      • I will seek out your post about that gig. Anything that makes us dance has to be good.

        I have to confess to having fallen out of love with the album. It feels a little redundant to me in the era of Spotify, and I sometimes wonder if it drags too much cultural baggage along with it in terms of our expectations of music.

        That said, you’re right that the shift probably hasn’t been great for our attention spans.

        • These days, I listen to Jazz and Classical more than anything, both suit the longer form. Beth Gibbons has released a true album this year and I’m hoping Nick Cave and Gillian Welch have too.

          • The Welch/Rawlings one is indeed promising, on an early dip. The Gibbons is superlative. I’m giving Cave a rain check as I have overbought him of late. I’ll await his positioning in the AW end of year. And I feel it is going to be the most diversified ever, if my contenders are anything to go by.

            • The new Welch/Rawlings album, Woodland, was indeed “released” yesterday … but only on streaming services.
              For those of us dinosaurs who prefer a physical product, when can we buy it? Answer 15 November. Charming. We have to wait twelve weeks, for no apparent reason. In my book, that’s a poor show by Gillian and Dave.

              • I have been waiting to buy the cd, preferring not to pay US postage and packing to UK, the only option until late pm yesterday. Resident records, my current non Bandcamp retailer of choice, only then acknowledged its existence, there not being even a pre- order option before. But, as you say, 15/11/24. I am uncertain whether Acony Records, nominally their own label, is a small cog in a bigger conglomerate, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

              • Quite feasible that they can’t get a slot for a vinyl pressing run until then, if it’s only a relatively small run. The likes of Taylor Swift will be taking up a lot of capacity.
                I wouldn’t have thought that’s such a problem with CD manufacture. Perhaps the label don’t want to have CDs out before the vinyl is ready?

  12. 35. Merchandise – Fugazi

    “The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don’t want to do” – Wall Street.

    If you listen to enough music, somewhere along the line you run into the vexed issue of authenticity. That’s because if you’re going to really believe in something, to invite it in and make it part of you, it feels important that the something in question should be genuine. That it should have some proper weight behind it. That it should be for real. No one wants to discover that their favourite tune, the one they relate to on a spiritual level, that they always felt was written for them personally, was constructed by a team of writers-for-hire consulting in depth focus group analysis. Because what would that say about you?

    For a long time, I thought that music needed to be authentic, that experience needed to be hard earned, and that the artist had to really mean it, man. Then I got older, and it all got a bit more complicated: life began to move faster, I had less time, and the question of artistic integrity became less pressing. Nowadays, I’m a sucker for a great tune, and my reasoning is that if I can happily listen to music made by literal murderers without sustaining permanent damage to my soul, I can probably cope with the suspicion that the singer didn’t really grow up hunting squirrels in the Appalachians.

    None of which is a concern with Fugazi, of course, because Fugazi were and remain the pinnacle of really meaning it, of following through, of never selling out. The ultimate band who walked the walk, who never struck a bargain with the world, never ended up making payments on a sofa or a girl. Fugazi had real integrity, they had real authenticity, and I love that about them. So I suppose what I’m saying here is that, while I no longer insist on authenticity in my music, I still appreciate it as a happy additive.

    Fugazi were a magnificent band. In fact, they were the bandiest band who ever banded, the consummate alternative act. The ran their own label, they operated their own shows, keeping them kid-friendly and cheap. They didn’t give interviews to publications that carried adverts they disagreed with. They created their own universe, with its own rules, its own commandments. And they never, ever sold merchandise.

    Ian MacKaye tells this story of his attempts to prevent people from making bootleg Fugazi t-shirts. “I managed to trace one design back to a fairly well-known t-shirt company in the Boston area, and I called to tell them to cut it out. I spoke to the main guy there, and, of course, he wanted to do a deal. And, of course, the answer was still no. Still, we had a nice chat. He was curious why we didn’t want to sell shirts, and after I explained our position, he seemed to respect it. About one month later, a friend at a record store alerted me to the ‘This is not a Fugazi t-shirt’ shirt. I traced it back to the same Boston dude. What a smart motherfucker he was! I called him up and said, ‘Okay, you’re funny and you’re creative, so let’s see how creative you are with accounting.’ I asked him to choose an organization doing good work in his community and give them what would amount to the band’s royalty for the shirts. I think he chose a women’s shelter up there, and as far as I know he sent them money right up until he quit the business.’”

    It’s important to note that MacKaye wasn’t chasing around behind t-shirt printers because they were cutting into his market share. He was chasing around behind them because Fugazi didn’t want there to be Fugazi t-shirts at all. They didn’t want to be packaged and sold, they didn’t want to be shrink-wrapped and shipped. You could keep your money, and they’d keep their values.

    And that’s what Merchandise the song , like so many other songs written by MacKaye, is all about. Featuring on Repeater, the band’s debut album proper and still my favourite of their records, Merchandise was the calling card for their DIY ethos, their hard headed refusal to ever sell compromise, and their sheer disinterest in money cheaply earned. Around about the time the song released, the chief executive of Atlantic Records had offered Ian MacKaye “the same deal Mick got”. But Ian MacKaye had no aspirations to be Mick Jagger. Ian MacKaye wanted to be something else: the anti-Jagger.

    Merchandise is a glorious racket. Held down by one of the better basslines you’ll ever hear, it’s the Punk track that has everything: the scratchy guitar, the clattering drums. The way it seems to take a couple of false starts to get off the ground, like it takes a little effort to defy gravity this way. The cathartic, defining roar of that final chorus, as everything seems to turn up to eleven. The final yelp of “No-con-trol” that punctuates the song.

    But it’s the words where the real action is for this one. “You are not what you own”. What a statement that is, what a rallying cry. The first time I heard it I stopped what I was doing and sat bolt upright, as if I’d just heard someone speak my native tongue for the first time – it cut through in the way that only a great lyric can cut through; by telling you a simple truth. And to hear MacKaye shout it, at the head of that great wave of cascading noise, was beyond stirring.

    There’s a famous video of Fugazi playing outside the White House in 1990. They’re stood in front of a banner proclaiming “There will be two wars”, and in front of them is a small army of devotees. It looks deeply, uncomfortably cold: so cold the footage appears to be in black and white, even though it isn’t. They play a great show, and somewhere towards the end they play Merchandise, and every time I watch it I look at the crowd, at the faces of those kids as they scream along and punch the air, lost in the moment, freezing cold, in a world before smartphones and the final triumph of narcissism, and I reflect on what a band like Fugazi can teach you about life.

    Because it doesn’t really matter that they didn’t sell t-shirts. Not in the grand scheme of things. It’s a nice detail, a nice bit of polish to their legend, but they could have sold merch and it wouldn’t have made the records any better or worse. Art doesn’t ultimately need authenticity, it just needs to work for you in the moment, whenever the moment may be. But I’m less convinced that the same is true of life, and life is where a band like Fugazi will teach their lessons.

    Merchandise is about that part of yourself that you don’t sell, because once it’s gone no amount of blood, sweat, tears and cash will ever buy it back. It’s about drawing a line and sticking to it, because it’s what you believe in. Values, in other words. And that’s a pretty valuable lesson for a teenager to learn, and a pretty valuable lesson to apply to your own life. You are not what you own. You are not what you do for a living. You are a person with an intrinsic value that extends far, far beyond all of that, and you should act in service to that intrinsic value wherever possible. What kind of world might we live in if we brought kids up telling them that, and particularly the boys? What traps and self-delusions might at least some of them avoid falling into?

    In Cameron Crowe’s 1989 movie Say Anything John Cusack plays a teenager named Lloyd Dobler. He’s kind of awkward, but sweet natured, and he doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. When he meets his girlfriend’s father for the first time he’s asked in front of a dinner party full of adults what he plans to do for a living, and he delivers the immortally goofy response: “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” That line kills me every time, and every time I hear it I think of Fugazi. Say Anything is my wife’s favourite movie, because Lloyd Dobler reminds her of me. I don’t think she’s given me many compliments better than that.

    Merchandise reminds us to draw our red lines, and to patrol them vigorously. That it’s good for the soul to say no to money once in a while, and to refuse on principle – if nothing else, it reminds you that you have principles, and that they retain their power. I’ve been very fortunate in my career so far, and have been able to do things I never dreamed I’d get to do, but looking back on it all my favourite moments at work remain the times I looked an employer squarely in the eye and said no. No, I don’t think I’ll be doing that. These moments don’t arrive that often, and it’s often scary when they do, but the thrill of passing that test anew, of standing up for a belief, is almost always worth the entry cost.

    So no, I don’t care about authenticity in art. I think it’s overrated. But I care very much about authenticity in life, where the goal is surely to get to the end of the road and still be able to look yourself in the mirror, and where the only way to guarantee being able to do so is surely to live according to one’s own values. Fugazi, among others, taught me that – they really walked the walk. And when you’re a teenager, watching someone walk the walk can be so inspiring, even though you may not appreciate until later quite how rare and precious such things are.

    Fugazi were brilliant because they wrote Waiting Room and Bad Mouth and Repeater and Bed For The Scraping and Full Disclosure. Because they had god’s own rhythm section and conviction by the barrel-load. Fugazi were brilliant, because – in addition to producing fabulous music – Fugazi made a promise to their audience and then kept it. And you look at them and wonder what if I made a promise to myself and kept that too. Wouldn’t that be something?

  13. 34. Blood Bank – Bon Iver

    Somewhere along the process of trying to accurately explain why you love a song, or indeed songs, you become acutely aware of the limitations of speaking only about the music. You can lean on the history of the artist, flag the best bits of the tune, try to find the words for how it all sounds, but none of that can ever fully account for why you, personally, love it. Eventually it becomes clear that the key landscape in respect of which you are obliged to furnish cartography is not the song, but the self. And that, regardless of how many maps you may draw, the self is a landscape that can never truly be known unless you’ve walked it.

    When I was a small child, I fell in love with words. Words that spun stories, words that got you into and out of trouble. Words that made you laugh, words that made you cry. I believed, to the very bottom of my soul, in the magical properties of words, and that if I could only learn to wield them properly, establish an absolute mastery, they would open every door for me, solve every problem. It was only later that I learned how much of life occurs beyond the limits of articulation. How much needs to go unsaid out of sheer necessity. How you can swallow the whole thesaurus and get yourself no closer to being able to understand, let alone explain. Blood Bank is a song about facing that challenge, of the things that can only ever be properly communicated somewhere beyond words.

    Bon Iver, famously, was the Millennial poster child for rootsy authenticity. His 2008 album, For Emma, Forever Ago, was an immediate word of mouth hit, and came with its own mythology attached. How Justin Vernon, fresh from not one, but two breakups (romantic and band), had headed to a remote hunting cabin in the woods of Wisconsin and emerged three months later with nine spectral sketches of songs. How he took the name “Bon Iver”, from the French Bon Hiver (“good winter”). How those recordings, intended as demos, would be immediately received as the finished articles; a collection of generational torch songs whose sparseness and unfinished sound would become his signature.

    For Emma, Forever Ago, was received as an immediate classic, partly because Vernon’s back story lent it a ghostly authenticity, partly because the risks he took with his vocals and the empty spaces left in the recordings set the sound apart. It’s a record that’s difficult to listen to now, because it’s so culturally freighted; in many ways it recalls Portishead’s Dummy, sharing the same frigidity and ubiquity. It also posed for Bon Iver a tricky question: where next? How do you recapture lightning in a bottle?

    The Blood Bank EP, released a year after the album, gave us our answer. It points backwards, in that it contains songs which did not make it onto the album, including the title track, and forwards, in that it ends with Woods, a song which would quietly go on to become as influential as anything Vernon has recorded to date. Leaning harder on the existing penchants for minimalism and vocal experimentation, Woods is essentially comprised of Vernon, multi-tracked and auto-tuned to within an inch of his life, repeating the same line over and over again, almost entirely acapella. It mints a raw, primal emotionalism that others would draw on (not least Kanye, who sampled it on Lost In The World and tilted his sound in a similar direction), and its textures would in time filter their way down through the Indie scene, through Hip Hop and into Pop music.

    On first encounter, Woods felt like a deliberate provocation, an attempt to shed the crushingly earnest expectations of an audience whose only clear desire was for Vernon to return to the proverbial cabin and produce more of the same. Real instruments, real emotions, real life. Proper music. No one had expected Vernon to respond to the demands of his new position by brazenly wielding auto-tune, the musical signifier to which all that tedious authenticity was diametrically opposed. Woods was an exciting track, in that it seemed to strike out for a frontier further than those Wisconsin woods, a real sit up and take note moment. And yet, for me at least, it still wasn’t the most affecting song on the Blood Bank EP.

    There have been maybe half a dozen occasions in my life where I’ve been physically frozen by a lyric, have heard something that pierced me, unexpectedly and immediately. Blood Bank was perhaps the most pronounced of those moments. Out grabbing some lunch, stood in the queue and suddenly confronted by the song’s chorus. Stood there as the lights went out around me, and all the movements blurred, a great pall sweeping across me. That moment where the song’s chugging guitars drop out and Vernon sings, clear as a bell: “That secret that you know/That you don’t know how to tell/It fucks with your honour/and it teases your head”. Reeling. Heading back to my desk, trying to work out why it had upset me so much. In balance one moment, off kilter the next.

    Blood Bank represents one of the great quiet provocations of my music listening life. What was the secret that I knew and didn’t know how to tell? Why did the mere mention of it take me aback? I asked myself that question for a long time after.

    There’s a little of Bruce Springsteen in this song; a short story told in fragments. A couple go to give blood. They return to their car, freezing cold, and kiss. They glimpse the future. It’s a lyric about that other side of falling in love that is far less celebrated in song: intimacy. About letting someone know you well enough that they can recognise your blood, because they’re in your bloodstream (“You said “see look there, that’s yours/stacked on top with your brother’s/see how they resemble one another/even in their plastic little covers”). About sitting in a snowed in car with your lover rubbing your hands to keep them warm.
    It’s a beautiful song, with a dynamic that isn’t so much quiet/loud and quiet/quieter, a tidy line in memorable couplets (“You said ain’t it just like the present to keep showing up like this/as the moon waned to crescent we started to kiss”) and a tone that evokes a snowy night with the flakes swirling around you.

    As always with Bon Iver, I like the minimalism of the composition, the way the guitar simply cuts out for emphasis, the less is more ethos. I like the way the “I” on “I know it well” glides like a car skidding on ice.

    It took me a long time to figure out why the song hit me so hard that day, but eventually I got there. Blood Bank is a song about the painful foundations of lasting love, about the process it entails. About the way it requires letting another person really see you, all of you, and how shit scary that can be. If life is all about trying to solve the riddle of oneself, love is a process of showing another human being, carefully and over time, one’s workings so far. In which case, the secret in question is you.

    Blood Bank upset me that day because it revealed a painful truth to me, that I’d come to suspect but hadn’t yet been ready to accept. That was is no explaining me, or what was going on inside me. Not over a long dinner, not in late night conversation. Not with a witty bon mot, an anecdote or even by reference to a favourite song. The only way another human being was ever going to fully understand me was to live alongside me, to watch me over time in my best moments and my worst, in an ongoing process that I would not be able to elide or gild with a few honeyed words here and there. And that thought scared the shit out of me. After a life spent believing words could dig me out of any hole, talk me out of any corner, ease my passage and clear a path ahead, cure the sick and heal the lame – that words were my superpower – Blood Bank was the moment I realised that I didn’t really have the words at all. Not for this. A secret I didn’t know how to tell at all.

    I suppose, in retrospect, Blood Bank marked the start of a process of letting go. Of recognising that so much of what’s good in love occurs beyond words, and that even if you could pin it down and explain it you’d only remove some of the integral magic. Of accepting that life is not, ultimately, a group project, and that you’re the only one who will ever really understand the way the whole thing felt. Of releasing that idea that words would be my sword and shield, and recognising that I had to surrender a little control in the process. Surrender the idea that this was a secret that could be resolved in its telling. Because the glory of love, or at least a certain variety of love, is not in the telling. It’s in the not having to tell at all.

    The first verse of Blood Bank: “That secret that you know”. The second is the same. The third verse: “That secret that we know/that we don’t know how to tell”. Love unfolding, the riddle of the self shared.

    There is one other moment in Blood Bank that reserves it a place in my heart, and causes it to place so high on this list. When I first started dating my wife there were a couple of moments, very early on, where it felt like we both caught a glimpse of something that we might yet share. As if just for a fraction of a second the future opened itself to us. Probably a trick of those early days endorphins, but it left an impression. In Blood Bank’s final verse, the two characters catch a similar premonition: “what’s that noise up the stairs, babe/is that Christmas morning creaks”. As their lives merge into one, as their secrets conjoin, they glimpse a shared future family life, and it is beautiful. I think of that line every year as my own house stirs awake on Christmas morning, and of all the letting go that brought me to where I am today.

    Blood Bank is a very pretty song, perhaps the last time Bon Iver sounded like that classic, early stage Bon Iver. It’s a song about relaxing, and letting someone in, and about how glorious and challenging that can be. About the way it warms you from the inside to be seen and known in that way. When I listen to it now, I hear it differently – the question of the secret feels so much less pressing, its weight shared, its riddle resolved. Having spent so much of my life trying to find the right words, I now see that sometimes it’s really the silences that speak the loudest and most profoundly. That the silences are beautiful too.

  14. 33. How Will I Know – Whitney Houston

    A few years ago, I was sent on a residential work course. Lots of coaching, networking, leadershipy vibes. All a bit LinkedIn. On the first day of the course my employer got a consultant in to talk to us about purpose. The importance of purpose to your career, how being “on purpose” at work could supercharge your performance, and so on.

    At the end of his spiel the consultant asked the room whether anyone could define their purpose, and to my surprise I discovered that, in what was a room full of ostensibly Type A, tragic overachiever personality types, I was the only one who had apparently given this question prior thought.

    I knew what my purpose was before the consultant had even opened his mouth, before he walked in the room. I’d spent long years thinking about it, refining it, until it made sense as the fundamental “why” of my existence. And, unhelpfully given the context, it had only a little to do with work, and as a bonus made me sound like I was on horrible new age drugs whenever I tried to express it.

    My purpose was to transmit life force. To walk around, check things out, enjoy the universe and be grateful for all the various good things in it, and then to try to convey some of the resultant joy to the people around me. To be open to the world, give the best of myself to others, and to send out good energy. In my best moments, it’s an aspiration I think I’ve got close to. In my worst, it’s the thing I try to remember I’m supposed to be doing. Generally adding to the gaiety of nations, and so on. A state of being, rather than a definitive end goal.

    Sharing good energy: A noble aspiration. The consultant was impressed that I had such a thoroughly reasoned and articulated response to his question, although I sensed a note of nervous concern as to how any of this might realistically be expected to contribute to our EBITDA.

    Looking back on it, I could probably have saved us all the embarrassment of the moment by simply extracting my phone from my pocket and cueing up How Will I Know. Because no song, and certainly no vocal, trades in life force and good energy to the same preposterous extent as How Will I Know.

    This was Whitney Houston’s second single, and her breakthrough moment, but it wasn’t written for her. Penned by George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam of Boy Meets Girl (who later had a hit with Waiting For A Star To Fall), the track was originally intended for Janet Jackson.

    Indeed, it took some persuading before Merrill and Rubicam would even agree to allow the still largely unknown Whitney to perform it. Which is a funny thought, in retrospect, because I struggle to think of any single piece of music that has been so fabulously electrified by the human voice. Whitney takes the track, with its super 80s production, chintzy spaceship noises and squelching bass line, and elevates it to something completely timeless, because she immediately seems to locate the joy at the very heart of the thing, locks onto it forever and never lets go.

    From the initial, exuberant cry of “there’s a boy, I know”, to the “mmm-hmmm” that punctuates the first line, to the moment she duels with the soaring saxophone solo, Whitney is in absolute control here – it’s the sound of someone arriving at a destination that’s been meant for them their entire life. There’s a lot of gospel in her delivery, in the preposterously jubilant yelps and whoops and soaring high notes. “My love is strong, why do I feel weak” she asks, sounding anything but as she deploys her unearthly gifts in service of the tune, an erupting volcano of exhilaration.

    Whitney positively radiates life force here, her infectious enthusiasm turning the tune into what can only accurately be described as a euphoria bomb. She completely goes off, selling the emotion of the lyric, sounding like she’s utterly caught up in this dazzling, world shattering crush. Like she’s feeling everything for the first time and transmitting it all on a higher frequency. No one has ever sounded like they were having a better time singing, no Pop vocal has conveyed personality more immediately and in such an undiluted fashion. Whitney is profoundly and effervescently “on purpose”.

    How Will I Know is one of the greatest examples in all of music of someone taking the joy inside them and broadcasting it to the world. It’s perfect Pop with a Gospel sensibility – because as Houston herself told us “all music comes from Gospel music” – and every time I hear it I’m blown away as if it’s the first time. And the first time is what it was: extraordinarily, the recorded version of How Will I Know was Houston’s first take. Handed a song that wasn’t even written for her, that wasn’t tooled to her strengths, she produced this performance straight off the bat, with her own mother providing backing vocals. If you want to get a sense of quite how good the singing is here, check out the isolated version of the lead vocal, which can be readily found online. Or alternatively, watch a video of the track being performed live, and you’ll discover that this was no miracle for Whitney Houston, this was just something she was able to do at will. As she famously said: “God gave me a voice to sing with, and when you have that, what other gimmick is there?”.

    There are very few songs I associate more closely with a single voice, because Whitney nails it so hard here that no real room is left for further addition. All covers are largely redundant, although I would spare a word for Evan Dando’s performance of the track. The Lemonheads’ cover begins predictably enough, in that way that acoustic renditions of classic Pop bangers always seem to: by wrestling to the ground something hitherto magical and forcing it to sound like every other acoustic strumalong ever recorded. But then somewhere along the way Dando locates the joy, and you sense he’s starting to have some actual fun; his voice lifts, his tone becomes more effusive. And what you’re hearing there is an echo of Whitney, because Whitney made it all but impossible for anyone with a functioning soul to encounter How Will I Know without the sugar rush of happy recollection. It resists the turgid strum.

    How Will I Know lights me up every time I hear it, because it reminds me of who I’m trying to be. It’s a song ostensibly about uncertain love, but it bubbles and overflows with exuberance. There have been a ton of Pop songs that have given me happiness over the years, some of which came very close to making this list: Like A Prayer, Call Me Maybe, Fantasy. But no one, and I mean no one, has ever rendered singing such an act of joy as Whitney Houston. And the knowledge of what her life would become only adds a topnote of pathos to that evident joy.

    Whitney followed How Will I Know with arguably the biggest of her great Pop bangers, I Wanna Dance With Somebody. And that’s another great song – not least because it includes arguably the single most defining and elevating moment in the Houston oeuvre, in the “dontyouwannadancesayyouwannadance” section and the incredible cry of exultation that precedes it. But ultimately it’s Merrill and Rubicam trying somewhat self-consciously to recapture the magic of How Will I Know, this time leaving additional space for the voice to do its work.

    It’s unquestionably the track that lifted Whitney to her ultimate cultural status, that of being the closest thing the Americans have ever had or will ever have to a Lady Di figure. And yet, for me, it’s fractionally weaker; fractionally less organic, not least because it’s a track about joy that sounds joyous by design, rather than a track about uncertainty that sounds joyous because the singer was so overflowing with the stuff that it couldn’t be any other way.

    There was a period of about 20 years where music magazines (remember them) would sporadically publish their lists of the greatest singers of all time. Invariably, the peak of the list would be occupied by people who happened to be the singers of the classic Rock bands favoured by the journalists at the magazine. If they were feeling generous, you might get Marvin or Otis in the top 10, maybe Aretha, but it was mainly the same Rock vocalists. And every time I saw one of those lists, every time without fail, I would smile and say to myself shit these people are going to feel pretty silly when they eventually hear Whitney Houston. In 2023 Rolling Stone published one of their lists and Whitney placed second, behind only her mentor, Aretha Franklin. I guess someone over there must have finally heard her in the end, because that voice is an elemental force that will not be denied. Because a life force that powerful can permeate anything. Because ultimately joy is the only purpose that really matters.

  15. My God she was great, wasn’t she. Try singing along to that, or I Wanna Dance… without breaking into a big grin, or perhaps some terrible dance moves (still with big grin attached). You can’t.

    Positive life force? Check. Take me to the clouds above? You bet.

    • Whitney’s live performances are well worth checking out, particularly the early ones.

      Invariably she strides out onto an empty stage, completely alone, and proceeds to deliver an even more extraordinarily jaw dropping version of whatever the song. She drops in ad libs, changes the intonation on the fly, and essentially looks like she’s having an absolutely brilliant time, because if you could sing like she can you’d be having an absolutely brilliant time too.

      In this clip she carries on singing even after the music fades and you get the sense she might not have stopped if the applause hadn’t begun. An absolute legend.

  17. I find female vocalists are better able to tap into unrestrained joy far more easily than white rock singers. Janet Jackson, herself, is pretty amazing on When I Think Of You (that giggle at the end!) and how about Kathy Sledge singing on the latter half of We Are Family.

    Sometimes, you can have too much po-faced rock.

    • There have been magnificent Rock vocals down the years, and some of my favourite performances have been by Rock vocalists. But it never made a great deal of sense to me having the Rock guys at the very top of those lists.

      It may just be my own impression, but I feel it’s less often they’re asked to properly carry the song than in other genres (Pop, Soul, etc) – invariably it’s more of a team effort, with a few exceptions. I wouldn’t expect a list of the greatest drummers to feature many people from the world of Pop, for similar reasons.

      Obviously, the lists have always just been grist for the mill, and I think the writers have eventually woken up to how daft their approach was, but it’s funny to look back just a few years and find articles like this: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/100-greatest-singers-of-all-time-147019/mary-j-blige-4-35089/.

      Whitney just about squeaks in a couple of spots above Neil Young: I’m sure it was a close run thing :-).

      No knock to Neil Young – he has a very affecting voice with the right material, but I’m fairly sure that even in his wildest moments he wouldn’t claim to sing better than Curtis Mayfield, Mavis Staples and Luther Vandross. And just to show I’m not picking on Young, I don’t believe Lou Reed and Iggy Pop are better singers than Mariah Carey either. Their strengths lie in other areas.

      • I was talking specifically about unrestrained joy. I guess Jon Anderson manages it on The Yes Album. By contrast, Robert Plant embarrasses me when he tries. Very few Rock vocalists have that particular emotion in their locker.

        • Probably less prone to unrestrained joy, but there are a few examples that spring immediately to mind.

          Springsteen has a bunch of them, not least Rosalita and Born To Run (which surely packs about as much unrestrained joy as any Pop record). Livin On A Prayer, Alright, All The Young Dudes, about half of Queen’s stuff. Bits of T.Rex. As a rule of thumb, it’s probably a department staffed mainly by the less cool and posturing end of Rock, isn’t it?

          • I’ll accept all of those, except All The Young Dudes. I was fourteen when I bought that single and it matched my angst perfectly. I didn’t hear any joy in it back then and, today, I mourn for that lost boy.

            • There’s joy in them there Beatles singing what with the woos and all that, although you could say there was less of it when they got more rock. Even Lou Reed on Rock ‘n’ roll got as unrestrained as he was capable of with. Also Sweet Jane I think.

  18. Suppose you’d expect this from me … Whitney, power ballads, over emoting – nope, no thank you. Lowell George singing “20 Million Things”, that’s me in the corner .
    Great writing as usual Bingo – when’s the book out?

  19. 32. Scentless Apprentice – Nirvana

    In all of recorded music there are few moments so thoroughly dissected, yet still retentive of their original magic, as the forty seconds before Bob Dylan’s performance of Like A Rolling Stone at the Manchester Free Trade Hall on 16 May 1966.

    The entire bootleg of the show is an exercise in push and pull between audience and artist. From the reverent hush which greets the seven acoustic tunes in the first half, to the growing discontent as the performance turns electric in the second, it’s a fast percolating war for the performer’s artistic soul. As the mood shifts from outright worship to slow handclaps and graduating murmurs of discontent, will he buckle and give the people what they want, or will he hold firm and continue to follow his own personal tambourine man?

    The conclusive answer, of course, arrives at the show’s climax. A moment of silence, the iconic cry of “JUDAS”, delivered like a punch to the nose, a jeering roar from the crowd that makes you question whether these can possibly have been the same people who participated in the pin-drop quiet of the opening leg, wild applause for the accusation, and a couple of additional but incomprehensible heckles thrown in to boot. Bob Dylan being put in his place: shut up and be the voice of our generation, won’t you please.

    There follow several long seconds in which the crowd lulls, awaiting a response. There’s a hum, but nothing further is shouted, and as the guns fall silent it’s tempting to wonder what Dylan must have been thinking in that moment, up on that stage with his audience in open revolt. Of course, we get our answer soon enough: that gloriously feline “I don’t believe you….”, the counter-accusation “you’re a liar”, the instruction to the band “play fucking loud” and then the skipping, ascending introduction of Like A Rolling Stone, surely played as beautifully and forcefully as could ever be physically possible. The artist comprehensively and iconically enjoying the last laugh, every single difficult choice he has made to reach this point granted immediate and eternal validation. Check and mate.

    Now, let’s skip forward a mere 27 years. It’s September 1993, a few days after I’ve turned 15 years old, and the man who is the erstwhile voice of my generation, just as surely as Dylan was the voice of my Father’s is about to engage in his own game of push and pull with his audience. Only this time, the roles are inverted: all the neurosis about authenticity and proper art is emanating from the stage, rather than the crowd. The cry of Judas is coming from inside the building.

    I can remember vividly sitting down to listen to In Utero for the first time. A lot had changed since Nevermind, not least that Nirvana had become the biggest band in the world, and attracted far more attention that they’d notionally ever gone looking for. Kurt Cobain was visibly uncomfortable on his throne, visibly struggling with his newfound station, and the question which hung over the band was not so much whether they could repeat the trick, as whether they might be able to hold it together at all. Rarely had a musician looked so thoroughly nonplussed by their own success, rarely had the contents of an album been so hotly speculated over and anticipated. Much at stake.

    In Utero begins in relatively predictable, if self-effacing, fashion. Serve The Servants is a perfectly serviceable Nirvana tune: it showcases the band’s tightness and way with melody, although it doesn’t pull up any trees. With a different vocal it would have fit very neatly on the first Foo Fighters album. It is less than ferocious, although it does signal right from the opening line Cobain’s intent to meet the vexed question of his own fame head on: “Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old”. The elephant in the room, spear-gunned on first sight.

    I can see why Nirvana chose to open the album with Serve The Servants. It has a great opening line, it’s possessed of a certain self-confidence, bordering on uncharacteristic swagger, that I don’t believe they ever replicated elsewhere in their music, and it nails the prevailing mood: here we are, the biggest band in the world, listless, distressed and sick of being surveyed and judged.

    But when I think of In Utero, of the shock and awe of In Utero, it isn’t Serve The Servants that jumps to mind. Or Heart Shaped Box, or Dumb, or even All Apologies. It’s the second track, Scentless Apprentice.

    Written about Perfume, Patrick Suskind’s tale of an 18th century Parisian murderer born without a sense of smell, Scentless Apprentice is the absolute peak of a certain version of Nirvana, the version of Nirvana I prefer to remember. Furiously abrasive, bordering on openly hostile, the track sees all three members of the band thrashing out the same rhythm in unison, while Cobain screams what passes for a chorus (“Go away”) as if he’s dying. The song is deliberately simple, deliberately basic, and it poses a challenge to its own audience: you want more Nevermind? Try this. No melody, no catchy quiet/loud dichotomy. Just loud all the way through. Loud and angry. It’s an electric band going more electric still.

    As a teenager, this stunned me. You become this monster act, everyone loves you, and your first instinct is to deliver this almighty riposte. Dylan looking out across his audience and expelling the Judases in the crowd before they can ever get started on him. The song is an exercise in unresolved tension, a gateway drug to heavier music, an articulation of rage and helplessness at one’s own inarticulacy. It captures the tremendous power of peak Nirvana, their capacity to deliver sheer, brutal force in their music, and it sets the expectation for the rest of the album. After Scentless Apprentice you can hardly say you weren’t warned as Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle, Radio Friendly Unit Shifter and Tourette’s deliver one challenge after another: songs you do not hear at NFL games. Songs with which you studiously avoid eye contact.

    Ironically, Scentless Apprentice was not a tune with which Cobain was initially enamoured: “It was such a cliché Grunge Tad riff that I was reluctant to even jam on it”. He nicknamed it “Chuck chuck fo fuck”, in tribute to its troglodyte thrash, and initially played along on it solely to pacify Dave Grohl (who delivers here some of his finest drumming), later coming to love the song enough that he unsuccessfully campaigned for it to be In Utero’s second single. Some of that love was the result of a sense that the track lifted a weight from his shoulders: Scentless Apprentice is the only song on In Utero credited to all three members of Nirvana, signposting a potential future where the burden of creation might not fall so heavily on a single individual.

    When I listen to Scentless Apprentice, I hear Pixies, the band to which Nirvana have been frequently and often uncharitably compared. The song has some of the same pounding intensity, the same drum-lead propulsion, as the verses of Bone Machine, while the chorus is redolent of my favourite Pixies track, Tame. And yet, it’s wilder and more ferocious than Pixies, more totalitarian in its abrasion, less willing to give the listener breathing space. And it’s one thing to sound like this when you’re Indie darlings, quite another when you’re newly minted Rock royalty.

    The song’s crowning moment, the moment that took me aback on that first listen, arrives just before the three minute mark: the spitting of the words “You can’t fire me, cos I quit”. If you could take everything Kurt Cobain ever wrote and distil it all down, those seven words would be what you’d be left with. They sum up Nirvana, they sum up his life, they sum up his death. They sum up being a teenager: that shoulder shrugging, you can’t make me engage obstinacy, that sputtering failure to collude with the world when there’s still just a little time left to resist. Cobain was very clear that he never claimed to speak for his fans, yet his unerring ability to inadvertently do so was the root of so many of his anxieties. It was the job he never asked for, the job that would not accept his resignation, no matter how forcefully he expressed it.

    You can’t fire me, cos I quit. The line haunted Dave Grohl from the moment he heard it (“If there’s one line in any song that gives me chills, it’s that one”),and it only gained tragic pathos with the events that would follow. Scentless Apprentice sounds like a wounded animal thrashing around, because in a very real sense that’s precisely what it is: the musical red flag of all musical red flags.

    Scentless Apprentice blew me away on that first listen. I loved its rawness, how unexpected it was, how brave and perhaps even foolhardy it felt. I loved the way the drums propelled the whole thing, the way it juddered into life like a lab-grown monster taken its first steps. The searing quality of the main riff. The way Cobain’s voice is buried under guitars on the verse, the way it cracks on the chorus, like he’s overloading the recording equipment.

    Much as I’d loved Nevermind, something in the production had been just a little too slick for me, a little too vacuum packed. This felt like the shackles had been taken off, like the band just opening up, full bore, and giving it to the world unfiltered. This was the Nirvana I’d been waiting for, and it’s the Nirvana I miss the most: violent, contrary, cathartic. Channelling global misfit energy and unloading it back onto the mainstream in a seething laser beam of pure spite. The Nirvana that was ready to watch the world burn. I listen to the song now, and it reminds me of being young, feeling a misfit. Of wanting to scream and not knowing quite how to do so. Of hearing Kurt scream, not for us but for himself, although what’s the difference ultimately.

    A few years after In Utero, I heard that Manchester Free Trade Hall recording for the first time, and as I listened to that iconic battle unfold between Dylan and his audience, it reminded me instantly of Scentless Apprentice. That push and pull. That raging desire for the right of self-definition. Dylan looking out across his audience, knowing full well that that they hadn’t lost him because they’d never had him to start with. You can’t fire me, cos I quit. Play fucking loud.

  20. 31. Gloria (In Excelsis Dio) – Patti Smith

    It takes precisely sixteen seconds for Patti Smith to have you squarely in the palm of her hand. Mournful, after-hours piano sets up the pins for Smith’s opening line, almost certainly the greatest in the history of Rock & Roll, to immediately knock them down: Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine. It’s a statement that’s probably lost a little of its original heretic frisson with the passage of time, and yet still: what a greeting, what a rebuke. What a way to open the conversation, last orders at the bar, cards on the table.

    Zack De La Rocha of Rage Against The Machine called those opening sixteen seconds “one of the greatest moments in American music”, and he was not wrong. No other opening sets such an unexpected and singular tone so quickly. No other cover version successfully departs from its source material so immediately and fundamentally. No other record so swiftly grabs the listener by the throat.

    I had grown up on Van Morrison, grown up on Gloria. Part of the day-to-day soundtrack to my early life, ringing in my ears probably before I was even born. I knew it inside out and upside down, it was in my blood, part of my cellular infrastructure. This did not sound like Gloria. In fact, this didn’t sound like it was even hailing from the same continent as Gloria.

    That opening line was, of course, taken not from Gloria, but from Oath, a poem written by Smith and performed at her first public reading in front of a crowd that included Allen Ginsberg and Sam Shepard. “Christ died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”, she intoned, a giant kiss-off to her upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness. “Christ, I’m giving you the goodbye, firing you tonight”. The poem caused a stir in the room; it would take another half a decade to work its way into Gloria and find a wider audience still.

    Smith formed her first band in tandem with Lenny Kaye, who would go on to collate the legendary Nuggets compilation. Along with Richard Sohl, they would jam together, keeping it simple, nothing more than three chords, a neat blank canvas for Smith’s words and Kaye’s improvisations. Soon enough, they were drawn to Gloria, a song described by Kaye as “the national anthem of Garage Rock” and “a song so simple a child could play it”. The trio would audition guitarists by playing Gloria for forty minutes to see how long it would take them to drop out. Then they would jam around it to see what ideas it might spark. Gloria became a key part of the group’s DNA.

    The song’s great inflection point first arrived in 1974. Having purchased Richard Hell’s old bass guitar for $40, Smith was keen to make use of her new instrument. She stood in the practice room, hit a big E note and went back to the opening line of Oath for the first time in a while, before the band resumed their ritual of moving into Gloria, the great elastic wonder that could accommodate all their eccentricities. “To me, Gloria is the greatest of them all”, Kaye would later say. “It’s got a great sense of release, and when it hunkers down on those chords, you can do anything. I can take a solo, you can spout on about the night. It just lends itself to everything”. Gloria, as it transpired, was more than capable of incorporating Oath, and Smith was more than capable of spouting on about the night.

    “Melting in a pot of thieves/Wild card up my sleeve/thick heart of stone/my sins my own/they belong to me/me”. Virtually every line in Gloria is quotable, and maybe that’s the benefit of having a poet as your lead, but it’s the delivery that makes it transcendent. The way Smith mangles the word “melting”, the emphasis she places on that vital, repeated “me”, the screech of her “oh she looks so fi-ine”. The way she incorporates and embodies the work, even as everything accelerates and accelerates around her.

    Patti Smith’s heroes were Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Jim Morrison. She’s doing the latter here – it takes almost no effort to imagine Morrison singing this version of Gloria, bringing the same ultra-magnetic charisma to bear, exuding the same highly tuned libidinal charge. Riding the waves of tension and release. It’s part of what makes the song so curious and truly timeless: in Gloria, we can detect elements of the 1960s in the arrangement, which is pure Velvet Underground, and the vocal, and yet it’s very clearly not a 60s song at all, because there’s some Johnny Rotten in there too, and all the seeds of Punk Rock in the nakedly confrontational tone. It’s like a capstone to the decade just passed and a gateway to everything that lay ahead.

    It’s also one of the greatest examples of the raconteur’s art in all the history of Rock music. Aphorisms aside, Smith is telling you a story here, a story about pursuit and capture. About knowing that you’re so great that the rules don’t actually apply to you, and about seeing what you want and taking it. About taking the big plunge and hearing those bells chimin’ in your heart. She’s telling a story about boredom and lust and all the things that made Rock and Roll what it was up to that point, and the story gets quicker and quicker as she tells it, like a racing pulse until you can’t tear yourself away.

    Smith sings the song from a male perspective – on that, she has been clear. “I always enjoyed doing transgender songs”, she said in 2005. “That’s something I learnt from Joan Baez, who often sang songs that had a male point of view. No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences. It reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist”. And that male perspective seems important in retrospect, because it gives an insight into how Smith viewed the men around her at that time.

    In the script for Kill Bill, Tarantino included the observation that Clark Kent, as Kal El’s attempt to blend in with the locals, functions as Superman’s critique of humanity: weak, unsure of himself, a coward. Here, Smith seems to be pulling a similar trick: she plays the male role, and she does so with a cartoonish glee, swinging back and forth on a very fine line between parody and triumphalism, simultaneously spearing Rock & Roll and delivering the ultimate Rock & Roll performance. She out-alphas the Alpha Males, but she pokes fun at them while doing so.

    The song is about a bored man setting his sights on a woman, capturing her, possessing her: “I’m gonna tell the world that I just made her mine, made her mine, made her mine, made her mine”. There’s no intimacy, and the woman is assigned little or no personality beyond her pretty red dress and her value as an object of acquisition. Just listen to the way Smith sings it: the echo of Elvis in the delivery of “sweet young thing”, the way her “oh, I’ll put my spell on her” is delivered straight from the groin, the “uh, uh made her mine” that’s as horny as a Tex Avery wolf. It all has the feel of gentle, affectionate but pointed, mockery: this is how you guys look to me – utterly dick lead.

    There’s a famous video of Smith performing Gloria on Saturday Night Live that I always find mesmerising, and that is for me the defining version of the song. The look of defiant intent on her face as it begins, the glare into the audience, challenging them to challenge her. The way she bounces along with the band during the opening verse, tracking the song as it accelerates to warp speed. The obvious glee of all five of them as they hit the first chorus. That almost sexual release. Patti Smith is lost in music here, just as surely as Whitney and Otis. She embodies this song, in a way that makes it almost impossible to imagine anyone else ever singing it again. And then, the kiss off: the way she delivers that final, endlessly delayed “but not mine” and wishes happy Easter to CBGBs. Happy Easter indeed.

    What Patti Smith is doing in this performance is self-actualising. She’s demanding the right to live life on her own terms, unbeholden to the expectations of others, to play whatever role she sees fit. To not be exclusively the girl in the pretty red dress, or the guy watching her, but to be set apart, neither and both, watching the entire transaction going down and seeing it for what it is. She’s demanding the right to contain multitudes, as should we all.

    When she sings “the words are just rules and regulations, to me”, as if rules and regulations are trivialities beneath her feet, you feel that shit in your heart. There’s an awful lot of that SNL performance in the early career of Madonna (who, not uncoincidentally named Smith as an inspirational figure) – that same confrontational energy, that same “and who’s going to stop me” vibe, albeit a very different wardrobe. Another adopted New Yorker channelling the city’s prevailing attitude in their music.

    Gloria is an anthem to self-definition. To being as sexual or asexual as you want, as masculine and/or feminine. As profane. There’s a minor Pearl Jam song of which I’m a big fan: I Am Mine. It contains the couplet “I know I was born and I know that I’ll die/The in between is mine”. It’s a lyric I fell in love with immediately, because it expresses precisely how I feel about my own life, about my own identity. I get these four score years and ten, and they’re mine, and I will do with them as I will. And it’s the same message that I hear in Gloria, in spades. Forget the self-flagellation, forget the labelling: be your own lord and saviour. No guilt, no shame, no penitence: I am mine, you concentrate on being you.

    I don’t know of another cover version like Gloria. It is the same song as the original, and yet it isn’t. It contains some of the same lyrics, but most of the best stuff is new. Them’s Gloria takes thirty seven seconds to get to the chorus. Patti Smith takes three and a half minutes to do the same, and when she gets there the epic sense of release is more than worth the extended wait. And release is this record’s currency of choice, because in Smith’s performance there is this pure joy, pure joy at being free. And when you listen to Gloria you get to taste that freedom too, and to imagine being on that stage and being so liberated, so complete, as the music swells around you, its pulse quickening with every passing second, rushing towards those open cell doors. Art as a jailbreak.

    • Sorry Bingo, but all your literate, erudite and heartfelt prose can’t disguise the fact that Patti’s Gloria is without a single doubt the most pretentious “arty”, up your arse drivel ever ever recorded. I’d rather listen to the Birdie Song on repeat whilst hungry sparrows pecked at my shrivelled and pathetic member than endure more than two seconds of this.
      I’ll still buy your book mind….

      • Haha – can’t say fairer than that! It would be a boring old world if we all loved the same things, with the exception of the things I love, which should of course be mandatory.

      • Trust me Lodey you wouldn’t want to listen to the Birdie song on repeat, I was at a wedding reception once it was played four times at least, I had to go outside in the end. I could still hear it but at least it was muffled.
        Any more and I’d have given up the secret submarine plans.

Leave a Reply