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  1. 49. Lover, You Should’ve Come Over – Jeff Buckley

    Sometimes the right music shows up at precisely the right moment. I first heard Jeff Buckley when I was 19 years old, and I fell hard.

    Oddly enough, it was the Christians who turned me on to him. A very dear friend of mine was raised in the church, and Grace had found its way into his social circle: the young and unfashionably religious finding themselves spoken to by Hallelujah, as the rest of us shortly would be. I borrowed his copy of the album and found what I’d been waiting for.

    If a committee had designed a musician to appeal to me at that tender age, it would have been Jeff Buckley. I was a sensitive soul, still (just about) in my bedroom phase, combing my way through classic Rock and Rock journalism. Still burdened by *taste*, still lost in my own head. Buckley had it all; the soaring, undeniable voice; the chops; the whispered tales of long acoustic sets packed with tastefully chosen covers ranging from Nina Simone to Van Morrison, the diva voice in the Mystery White Boy body, and the easy good looks of Drugstore Cowboy era Matt Dillon. Buckley was beautiful, and he had that rare gift of direct address, of making the listener feel that he was talking to them and them only. He spoke to the poetry of my teenage soul.

    There followed a period of a couple of years in which the obsession ran deep. Bootlegs were collected, biographies were pored over, lyrics were contemplated amidst much chin stroking. Somewhere in my loft is a large, glossy original photo of Buckley, apparently caught off guard in a moment of characteristically dishevelled contemplation, all cheekbones and tousled hair. He was the platonic ideal of the wandering troubadour, and he had the temerity to arrive at the absolute apex of my good taste, complete with all the right references. He was very probably the last musician I ever truly loved, because he came to me at the last point I was capable of truly feeling music on that cellular level. The last point before the exterior of my life finally began to outpace the interior.

    When I listen to Jeff Buckley now, I think of World War 1. Of how the conflict arrived at a time when men still believed in the romantic ideal of war; of plumed helmets and cavalry charges, of personal valour and epic poetry. Of how those fantasies, built on sand as they always were, found themselves shredded by the brutalism of mechanised, 20th century combat. That curious tragedy specific to the Great War whereby the fantasy ran hard into reality. Grace came into my life shortly before I fell properly in love for the first time, shortly before I began to learn some of the heart’s hard lessons. Consequently, I received the album’s deep romantic streak without filter, in a manner that would have been impossible even two years later. My romantic illusions were still intact, unsullied by the trench warfare of failed love. I was an open door, and Grace sailed right on through.

    Lover You Should Have Come Over, like most of Buckley’s best work (shout outs here to Satisfied Mind, What Will You Say, Mojo Pin and – particularly – Morning Theft), is an exercise in histrionics. In taking everything you feel and blowing it out to 11. In letting that incredible voice soar free. It is completely overwrought, practically hyperventilating with the wild tenderness of itself. It is my favourite Jeff Buckley song, amidst stiff competition, because it’s so lacking in restraint.

    Written for former flame Rebecca Moore, Lover… recounts an evening spent at home waiting fruitlessly for the phone to ring, flailing at the tail end of a dying affair. It’s about a relationship that has entered its purgatory phase: that point where you’re at your most bruised and weary. Too young to hold on, and too old to just break free and run. In my mind it’s a spiritual sibling of Morrissey’s I Know It’s Over (a song frequently covered by Buckley), only where I Know It’s Over is overwhelmingly self aware, revelling in the preposterousness of self pity, Lover… is the precise opposite. It doesn’t raise a contemptuous eyebrow at the vicissitudes of lost love, it positively wallows in the stuff.

    We open with a harmonium playing out what sounds an awful lot like a funeral dirge. Straight into the hyperbole: “oh mother, I can hear the soil falling over my head”. The harmonium is simultaneously pretty and full of foreboding, and in that sense sets the tone perfectly. It also segues beautifully into the opening lyric: “Looking out the door I see the rain fall upon the funeral mourners/parading in the wake of sad relations as their shoes fill up with water”. Parading in the wake of sad relations; what a wonderful turn of phrase.

    There’s a curious dichotomy to Lover You Should’ve Come Over. The actual instrumentation, harmonium aside, is fairly nondescript: standard Folk Rock with a grungy hint to the guitars. It’s merely window dressing: all the action here is in the vocals, and what vocals. Many of Buckley’s finest moments occur here: from the soft, bedroom eyes croon of “but tonight… you never know”, to that first glorious, valiant “it’s never over”, he sells every line, lives every moment, lost in the music. Lover… is fundamentally a Soul record; the vocal performance here may lean more falsetto, but structurally it would sit just fine on Otis Blue – just listen to the furious and unrestrained emoting of the last 90 seconds, where words begin to fail our hero entirely and he’s reduced to a series of plaintive cries of “lover” before that too disintegrates into a wail. It’s the white boy Try A Little Tenderness.

    But there’s one passage in particular on Lover… that cements its greatness. Skip to just past the song’s halfway mark, to the point where the music begins to lift and Buckley’s voice starts to swell: “My body turns/and yearns for a sleep that won’t ever come…”. What follows is majestic:

    “It’s never over, my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder
    It’s never over, all my riches for her smiles when I slept so soft against her
    It’s never over, all my blood for the sweetness of her laughter”.

    Listen closely to the backing vocals here. Delivered Gospel-style, they underpin Buckley’s theatrics beautifully and at the song’s absolute pinnacle, that fabulous “all my blooo—ood for the sweetness of her laughter” they suddenly pitch upwards, as if acknowledging that this is as good as it gets, lending extra emphasis to the line. That sound as they pitch upwards is something I don’t recall hearing on any other record, a moment of pure magic; I could listen to it forever and swoon every single time I do.

    That passage hit me like a truck the first time I heard it. Too gorgeous, too rich in pathos. It’s an extract from a teenage diary performed without shame or regret, every drop of emotion wrung from the pages. It doesn’t just express sentiment, it positively luxuriates in it, wallowing in the stuff. Even now, as an adult, having lived a little, my head knows how trite the sentiment is, how over the top the performance is, how callow he sounds. But none of that matters, because this song takes me back to a time when my heart was running the show, when I was young and open and allowing myself to feel everything all the time. It lets me tap back in to that kid, who believed so profoundly in the grand romance of everything, but only in theory.

    Jeff Buckley was every poem I ever wrote, every belief I ever had that music should be unbridled and touch the soul. He was a reminder of how it feels to be young, touched by life but not yet hardened.

    That was what drew people towards him: the sense that, even in his late 20s, he was still connected to that thing we all have to lose along the way, that sense of feeling it all for the very first time. And that’s something it’s easy to mock – because what could be more preposterous than an excess of feeling when you’re hidden behind now thickened skin – but doing so fails to recognise that there’s glory in feeling. Glory in drinking it all in, all the joy and the pain and the in between, glory in following your heart. When you watch the footage of Buckley’s solo performances now, what’s striking is the silence of the crowd. They’re silent not just because of the talent being unfurled before them, but because they’re being confronted by something they’d forgotten. Something vital.

    Buckley died at 30 years old, swimming in a tributary of the Mississippi River. Swept under by the currents, fully clothed, even his death was in the grand romantic tradition. He never got to make a follow up to Grace, never got to chase that preposterous talent into maturity. And he suffered the ignominy of inspiring all the wrong musicians: everyone heard him, everyone wanted to sound like that, to open their mouths and have sheet lightning strike, to spit that unrepentant poetry. But his was a high bar to clear, so we ended up with a good deal of music that sounds like the instrumentation of Lover… but not the vocal. Which is to say: the receptacle, absent the magic.

    I will love this song to my grave. No matter how much I grow, how much I mature, how much I harden. I will listen to that great lost voice, that immortal, operatic howl and fall hard every time. I will delight in the heartbreak, safe in the knowledge that – all being well – my own heart will never be broken again. All my blood for the sweetness of her laughter. I mean, fucking hell, if you’re not going to fall for a line like that then why bother with love at all?

    • I have to say, Bingo, that that is as fine a piece of writing that I’ve read on here for some time. It even prompted me to listen to Grace on a cold, drizzly day here yesterday. My conclusion is the same as when I first heard it in 1994: it sounds marvellous but the songs aren’t quite there. Still very good for a debut album.

      • Thank you – that’s very kind.

        I actually agree with you about Grace. It’s a brilliant sounding record and I go back to it frequently for all the reasons above, but it’s impossible to listen to without feeling that this is an album upon which Buckley would have improved.

  2. Goose bumps. Thank you so much.

    For me, those swoon moments were served up to me by Morning Theft (“Meet me tomorrow night, or any day you want, I have no right to wander just how or when…I miss my beautiful friend”) and Everybody Here Wants You (“I know they all look so good from a distance but I tell you I’m the one”.) Also, the moment in Grace when he lets out a piercing, lung draining vibrato yell, holds it until you think there’s nowhere else he can possibly go, then instead of taking a breath, swoops up into the most beautiful soulful exclamation.

    But yes, Lover… has all the swoon moments you mention too. When I hear that harmonium I’m not thinking funeral dirge… I’ve always imagined a tall ship gradually appearing out of the fog. I’ve no idea why, it has nothing to do with the lyrics, it’s just the picture it conjures for me.

    Anyway, I’m going to listen to it now, re-read your post and feel all the feelings. Thank you again.

    • I love this – Morning Theft was a whisker away from featuring on this list, and the moment you’ve pinpointed above is the reason why. The way the whole song just builds to that crescendo, and the clarity with which he enunciates “I miss my beautiful friend”. Such a beautiful song.

      I also know what you mean about the harmonium, I’ve had exactly the same thought and conjured the same image. What is it about that opening that sounds like a ship cutting through fog?

  3. 48. School (Live at Reading, 1992) – Nirvana

    The crowd are already cheering as the singer, kneeling in the middle of the stage in his surgical gown, starts to play his guitar.

    It’s a simple riff, just a couple of notes, but it’s played with buzzsaw indignation, a fuzzed out rebuke to the world. The riff hits the crowd and the cheering goes up a level, an extra wave of noise spilling over the top of what was already there. So begins Nirvana’s performance of School at the 1992 Reading Festival.

    School was an oddball from the start. Originally conceived as a joke, its lyric concerns Kurt Cobain’s experience of dropping out of Weatherwax High School and then returning to work there as a janitor. There’s a sideline in snark at the juvenile insularity of the Seattle grunge scene via the line “you’re in high school again” (indeed, the song was at one stage entitled “The Seattle Scene”), but that’s about it for deeper meanings, on the page at least.

    School is two and a half minutes long, comprised of a grand total of two chords and 15 words. Some of the most basic songwriting you’ll ever see. In technical terms, it’s the runt of the litter, yet it was Nirvana’s most-played song live, because it was the perfect delivery capsule for the band’s most potent weapon: the absolute bone crunching brutality of their live sound.

    Listen again to the opening seconds of that Reading performance, to that churning guitar, and what do you hear? A machine revving – raw power being brought to bear. It’s insanely heavy, and that’s before Dave Grohl’s drums come clattering in to join the party. That was the essence of the band: three human beings onstage channelling all their collective fury at the world into a sound that feels like it’s being made by a small army.

    School is my second favourite Nirvana track because it tells you almost everything about the band you ever need to know. That you need to listen to the live version to really understand the song, that they were dealing in energy, how tight they played for a band with punk roots. The lyrical concerns around the inequities of childhood. Nirvana were the world’s longest and heaviest tantrum, what better chorus to sum it all up than that pained yelp of “no recess”? Cobain once remarked of School that “It was a joke at first, and then it turned out to be a really good song.” And that’s because of the way Nirvana played it.

    School is an exercise in power. It’s taking a lyric that is almost impossibly slight and daft and then lending it an almost ridiculous level of import by the sheer heaviness and savagery with which it’s delivered. That ominous droning riff, the unrepentant sincerity of Cobain’s vocal, the wild, scratched out guitar solo. The final, larynx incinerating scream of “you’re in high school agaaaaaaaain” that I always expect him to duck on the live recordings, but which he never does. You listen to Nirvana play it and the realisation sinks in that this band is completely feral – they could probably play nursery rhymes and still sound like the end times.

    Nirvana’s performance of School at Reading is their peak. Their Mount Olympus moment. Specifically, the peak arrives at the song’s conclusion, when Cobain spits that final “No-Re-Cess”, the three syllables forming a punctuation mark, the band, by this stage fully lupine and bloodlusted, about to launch straight into Sliver, School’s non-identical twin. Cobain stood there in his gown, the heaviest, weirdest, truest “biggest band in the world” there has ever been or perhaps ever will be. The school janitor improbably and uncomfortably crowned Prom King.

    Nirvana were the ultimate outsider band, because they transcended outsider status while fiercely maintaining an outsider identity, an almost impossible trick to pull off. They were able to achieve this because they traded in a currency that is universal, and that currency is power. School is Nirvana at their most powerful, turning water into wine through sheer force of personality, and the extent of the magic trick is only really apparent in the live versions, almost all of which are great.

    For my part, this song landed squarely in an obvious sweet spot. I had loathed secondary school. It was the only place I had ever felt truly outside, truly other. I could never understand what the issue was – maybe arriving from out of town, maybe the aggressively foreign mother, or maybe there was something innate in me that my teachers and peers had sensed but to which I had no access. Maybe it was that I was so obviously going to leave town. Or maybe I was just hard work at that age, and hadn’t yet learned how to smooth the rough edges.

    Either way, when I watch Cobain stood onstage singing School, this fabulous howl of rage and anguish with its nightmare refrain “you’re in high school again”, it unlocks something inside me. Some catharsis. That skinny kid with his blonde mop and his guitar, in that big open space, in front of that huge crowd, owning everything around him. It’s like the final scene of Carrie: the victim flipping the script, up onstage for all to see, revealing their dark magic. Revealing the power that sits inside each of us, even at our lowest moments.

    Nirvana loved to play School, and it showed. The song unlocked the best of the band, that out of control 18 wheeler energy they frequently delivered onstage but which never quite made it onto their studio albums. The element that made them great.

    School shows us how simple music can be, how what’s down on the page is sometimes just a vessel for the higher forces of performance. How powerful it can be to watch a man howl his truth out into the void, no matter how small that truth may be, while behind him guitars and drums churn and roil and detonate with the fury of a dying god. With the fury of a misunderstood teenager.

    • If it’s your second favourite, are Nirvana going to be the only act with two songs in your top 100?

      I was a bit too old to fully appreciate Nirvana. I think their appeal particularly hit home for the late teens/early twenties, the torment of youth. Pixies, though. Now, you’re talking! They provide torment for all ages.

  4. 47. Marmalade – Julie Byrne

    It’s been a great cliché of war movies for almost as long as there have been war movies. Soldiers sat around during a lull in fighting, discussing what they’ll do when the conflict is eventually over. A poignant glimpse of the lives many of them will never get to live.

    Invariably, there’s the one guy who has plans for a business he wants to start, another who’s dreaming of going to Hollywood, and then the conversation turns to the guy in the corner, who gets that far away look in his eyes and declares that when he gets home all he wants is to find a girl and a little patch of land and settle down in peace for the rest of his life. And when you’re young you look at that guy and think god, what a rube, what a hick. What kind of dream is that? Well, a pretty good one, as it turns out.

    When my wife and I first had kids we took a bit of a step back from our social lives. In fact, for a little while we more or less dropped off the radar completely. We were the first among our friends to become parents, even though we’d left it until nearly 30 to do so, and it felt like we needed a bit of time and space to figure out how to do this thing. How to be a family. About a year in, we moved from our bustling street in North London down to an area a little further out of town, with more green space and schools and family nearby. We bought a house with a school at the end of the road. It needed a lot of fixing up, but it was on a road filled with young families, and we had time.

    The next few years were spent slowly but surely renovating and redecorating, paying eye watering sums to fix problems that had been almost entirely invisible. Waking up early to sit and watch Zingzillas, making up stories and playing games. Changing nappies and creeping back down hallways in the wee small hours, trying to avoid the creaky floorboard. Just the four of us, in our little bubble, off away from everything – a little ecosystem with a climate all its own. The kids were tiny and the place was a mess. It was always noisy and chaotic. We hadn’t seen our mates in months. We never got enough sleep, and between the mortgage and the renovations, most of our money was strolling out the door. They were some of the happiest days of my life.

    Julie Byrne’s Marmalade is the song that brings the memories of those days flooding back. That’s partly because it’s a song we played a lot in that period, but partly because it evokes a little idyll all of its own. It has the cadence of our little spell in self-imposed exile, and the gentleness of nurture. It’s a song that seems to have a deep impact on me whenever I listen to it, and so I listen to it relatively sparingly these days.

    Marmalade opens with a gorgeous plucked guitar, which shortly gives way to a pretty, strummed melody. When Byrne’s vocal arrives, it feels like it’s coming to us from beyond the grave, soft and slightly deeper than you expect. Somewhere in it, I detect a hint of Joan Baez, and it sends me back to my own childhood too, to my mother strumming the guitar and singing Baez’s music to us. To our own little bubble that also couldn’t last forever, to the completion of that circle.

    “All I want is a brick house
    With a porch that wraps around
    All I want is land enough
    For my children to run
    And in the highest pitch of grace
    The end of trial and gratitude
    It was for you that all others I did forsake
    For you all others I will forsake”

    It’s so simple, and yet it gets me every damn time. “In the highest pitch of grace, the end of trial and gratitude”. God, if that doesn’t say it all. There’s something about the song that speaks to a kind of innocence that’s only available to you at certain points of life, an innocence that arrives when you realise that what you need from life is so much simpler, and yet infinitely more complicated, than you’d ever previously dreamed.

    When I listen to Marmalade, I’m transported back to that short spell where we could still be the entire universe to our kids, and to one another. Where we had so much time, the great currency we’ve come to lack in recent days, and where we worked out how to divvy up domestic life and make it work for us. Where we built the foundations of what we have now. I’m stood outside in the garden putting the second coat of paint on a pair of chairs we found in the second hand shop round the corner. I’m reading endless bed time stories and making pillow forts. I’m putting up shelves and trying to figure out how to get the foxes out from under the decking. The war is over, and I’ve found my girl and my little patch of land and it’s so utterly glorious that I can’t really see how anyone could have dreamed of anything else. It’s such a happy ending.

    Only it’s not the ending, because once you’ve somehow lucked into all this stuff, all this happiness, you eventually look up and realise that now you have to maintain it forever, and that forever is a long time. And things begin to change. The rhythms of family life alter, imperceptibly at first and then later with some force. As space opens up, your social life resumes and all the people you put on pause are there waiting for you, ready to pick up the conversation where it was left off. The house gets fixed up, and it’s beautiful. The kids get bigger. And bigger. One happy ending gives way to another. And then another.

    And all of that is great, all of that is progress. But some days, just occasionally, you stand in your beautiful kitchen and remember when it was awful, and you look out at your garden and remember when the grass was so long a child could lie down in it and hide from sight. You remember the photo of your kids out there, one running through a sprinkler with a look of pure impish glee on his face, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, the other stood in the background, arms aloft to the heavens in absolute triumph, stood beside the ancient shed you’d painted in candy cane colours to try to spruce it up, and in front of that fence panel that used to sway in the wind. And you realise that for all the progress that’s been made, all the brilliant things that have come into your life in the interim, you can never have those times again, and that in all the renovation and improvement a few things have been lost along the way.

    That’s the thing no one ever warns you about with happy endings – they’re not static. That even as life gives you so much, you scatter a little along the trail. That a child isn’t just one kid, they’re multiple kids; each iteration giving way to the next, improving as they go, but shedding their now defunct magic at every stage. It’s beautiful to watch, but god it can be bittersweet.

    I’ve been listening to Marmalade a lot the last few days, and it sent all of the above thoughts rattling around my head. And then over the weekend, I went out into town with the kids – my wife is away with work at the moment – and we walked in the sunshine, and joked around, and looked at some great art, and ate some great food. They’re two brilliant human beings who invariably make me laugh, and make me think and make me proud. The time I spend with them just gets better and better, because they just get better and better.

    As we made our way home, I reflected on everything that’s changed, on the progress we’ve made, on the way we left the bubble and made our way back to the world, bringing the kids with us. And I realised how preposterously, overwhelmingly lucky I have been, to have set out expecting to live my life alone, to have fallen backwards into all of this love and joy, and to have the luxury of bemoaning that each joy is impermanent and must give way to the next. It’s the absolute definition of a charmed life.

    So, I listen to Marmalade, with its pitch perfect description of those gorgeous family days (“And it is with them that we spend our nights/Laughter that tides us through the rest/But I liked it best when the morning had not left/And wake was not yet in your eyes”) and I reflect that all such days must pass, even and especially the ones I’m living through right now, and that you don’t gain anything by trying to make it otherwise. That the transitory nature of your joy is what makes it so precious. That there is no path to happiness, because happiness is the path. And it makes me feel so fucking sad, and so fucking fortunate, and so fucking full of joy, all at once. And that is some trick.

  5. Beautiful, beautiful, Bingo. Your last six lines brought tears to my eyes, partly because I read them after having coffee with my 23 year old daughter, partly because I have ADHD and my handle on time passing and time to come is sketchy, and partly because you’ve poetically captured what Epictetus and his stoic pals were harping on about all those years ago. There’s something to be said here about Daniel Kahneman’s concept of the remembering self and the experiencing self, and the interplay between them, but that would render it all a bit prosaic. Lovely stuff.

  6. 46. Kozmic Blues – Janis Joplin

    When I was a little kid, my Primary School – like many others – used to hold these big morning assemblies. The newly appointed Headmistress, still young for the post, would stride to the front of the room with her acoustic guitar and strum along as we belted out Streets Of London, This Little Light Of Mine, Give Me Oil In My Lamp, and other pedagogical bangers. On a good day, the whole atmosphere in the room would approach a kind of organised chaos, each of us howling along at the tops of our lungs, sensing that we were making a small contribution to a collective magic.

    I loved those assemblies. That feeling of being in the middle of it with my mates, of being allowed – encouraged even – to be as loud as I wanted, of my voice disappearing into a maelstrom that was bigger than me, but of which I was a part. Of taking something that was inside me and projecting it out into the world.

    In adulthood, I’ve been able to locate a similar joy in regular karaoke nights. It’s the same sensation, lived again: you’re there with your friends, who you love, arms over shoulders, faces titled to the ceiling, all decorum scattered to the winds. You’re doing what human beings are meant to do, what they’ve always done since they first formed communities and built fires to dance around: taking a voice and sending it out into the universe. Sending it out loud and free.

    Karaoke, as with those school assemblies, offers an opportunity for one of the most powerful experiences human life has to offer: abandon. Wild, reckless abandon. Those moments where you stop thinking and simply let yourself be, without inhibition or restraint. The best performances aren’t delivered by the better singers – in fact, I’ve seen really good singers deliver god awful, note perfect, mood-killing karaoke. The best performances are delivered by people who take a song and bring something of themselves to it. By people who aren’t afraid to really go out there and live that shit. All of which brings us to Kozmic Blues.

    I have heard better singers than Janis Joplin. I’ve heard people sing with greater technique, greater clarity, greater soul. But I know of no song with a greater abundance of that precious quality of abandon than Kozmic Blues. No vocal so ludicrously maximalist, so gloriously unrestrained. So thoroughly human.

    Joplin sings Kozmic Blues like she’s never going to be allowed to sing again. She’s like a kid performing in front of a mirror: she takes the song and throws absolutely everything at it, as if no one else is listening. I recognise that this is a double-edged sword, that it’s possible to listen to this performance and wish that Joplin had, in fact, considered that others might listen, and that some decorum might therefore be in order. But in this instance, it’s simply not what I come to this song for. I come to this song because I want to hear a woman sing from her absolute boots.

    It all starts off tastefully enough; that tinkled, descending piano intro sparking the band to swing into life. Even the vocal: the opening line, “time keeps moving on”, is gentle, almost hushed. The phrasing is, admittedly mental – the word “friends” is somehow strung out over 4 or 5 seconds, but otherwise there is little sign of the hurricane to come.

    It’s on the first chorus that it becomes apparent that this will not be an exercise in restraint. It’s kicked off by one of the greatest “oh”s in recorded music: croaked from the back of the throat, falling away from the microphone as it emerges. Horns flare and we’re away: “It don’t make no difference babe, no no, and I know that I can AL-WAAAAYS try-yyy”. The way she sings the word “always” absolutely kills me every time: there’s a wild joy in the soaring of her voice in that moment that is so full of character, so full of life, and so redolent of what’s to follow. It’s like watching someone in the process of discovering they can fly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, you never hear her hit that same note on any of the song’s live recordings.

    From that point on, the urgency just builds and builds. The stretching of the word “whoa” beyond all recognition. The rasped “Twenty five years, honey just one night, oh yeah”, so full of pain and pleading. She hits the second chorus even harder than the first, somehow crowbarring in an extra line: “There’s a fire inside of every one of us”. If there’s a lyric that sums up Kozmic Blues, that’s it. There’s a fire inside of every one of us – mine’s an absolute inferno and I’m here to let you feel the warmth. I’m here to combust.

    And combust she does – the last 90 seconds are a free form mix of singing and ranting, words flowing in an unstoppable torrent simply because they must. And then suddenly, words aren’t the point at all – in the closing moments, she begins to pare it all back, switching first into a series of cries of “woah yeah”, until ultimately she slips the shackles of language entirely and simply howls. Gloriously, the record then fades out while she’s still howling, as if – having worked herself up into this elemental frenzy – she’s just going to carry it on indefinitely, somewhere out of earshot. And who knows, maybe she is.

    That closing run in is arguably the single most “lost in music” moment in all recorded history; Joplin is alight. She is completely free.

    Whenever I listen to Kozmic Blues I’m struck to wondering how it must have felt to sing like that. To open your mouth and just release everything. So much of human life is spent struggling to find the words to explain what’s really inside you, but Joplin doesn’t bother to explain – she simply shows you. All the power, all the glory, all the fragility. All right there in the vocal, nothing held back. What must it feel like to be so completely of the moment that words dissolve entirely and leave you wailing.

    Janis Joplin only wrote a handful of songs in her short life. Kozmic Blues was one of them. Perhaps that helps explain the extent to which she inhabited the song, that willingness to throw herself into its arms so comprehensively. The lyric is depressive, conjuring a life in which happiness is transitory, relationships always turn sour and everyone lets you down eventually. It’s a sad, painful song, born of personal trauma, but the vocal makes it joyous by the end. Joyous because if everything is transitory you may as well revel in the moment, and in this moment she’s full of passion and power.

    Kozmic Blues is one of my favourite songs almost entirely because of that vocal. Because it’s someone we know to have been in a good deal of pain, apparently finding some sort of catharsis through music. Someone achieving that great ideal of abandon. Of letting it all go and just being there in the moment, only this moment happens to have been recorded forever. I think about this song all the time, about the way Joplin just belts it out, and I find it life affirming. I think about that fire inside of every one of us, of that fire inside me, and it makes me want to go out into the world and make as much noise as I can for as long as I can. And so that’s what I do.

  8. 45. Stakes Is High – De La Soul

    De La Soul. My first love. The first music I ever truly connected with that had nothing to do with my parents and their tastes.

    I was ten years old when I stood in Our Price, cash gripped tightly in hand, trying to decide between 3 Feet High & Rising and Betty Boo’s Boomania. Obviously, I had no idea what either record sounded like, but I did have a sense, even then, that this was a significant purchase. That I was about to make what felt like a potentially defining decision in my still tiny little world. The coin toss landed De La side up; ultimately, the lure of the Spanish band name was too strong, and I had half an eye on the dayglo CND De La t-shirt I’d spotted next to the counter.

    I took 3 Feet High & Rising home that day and fell instantly in love; in love with the album, in love with De La Soul, in love with Hip Hop. The record felt like it opened up a new frontier, a lawless land that dovetailed perfectly with my own burgeoning sensibilities: vibrant, chaotic, full of joy in words and the speaking of them. Listening to it made me feel powerful; it reaffirmed my already firm belief that my child soul could prevail deep into life’s journey. If Pose, Mase and Trugoy could sneak into adulthood, three kids giggling under a trenchcoat, then so, eventually, might I.

    I saved my money and in due course went back for the t-shirt and the Betty Boo album, but it was 3 Feet High that shifted the ground beneath my feet. I had made the right choice, and the album soundtracked the sunshine era of my final years of Primary School, its breezy production providing all the e-numbers I would ever need.

    Fast forward seven years, and we’re in a very different climate. The Daisy Age is over, supplanted by the New York horrorcore of the Wu Tang, the menacing swing of Dre, East Coast/West Coast beef and bodies piling up on both sides. Hip Hop isn’t the place to go for sunshine, and, accordingly, De La Soul are struggling for relevance. I can relate, because I’m struggling too: the joy of my childhood has given way to an uneasy teendom, which I’m in the process of navigating gracelessly. I’m in a school I don’t like, and plotting my escape; a daring leap over the barbed wire with high grades and a raised middle finger. I just need to survive the place long enough to get the bike working.

    Stakes Is High, released in 1996, is an album that meant everything to me as I navigated small town life, my A levels and the prospect of a future outside the troubling bubble in which I found myself. I listened to it on the way to each and every one of my exams, partly for comfort and partly to remind me of what was on the table: I needed to ace these tests so I could escape the sucking vacuum of small town life and get as far away as possible. Stakes Is High.

    De La Soul had been my spirit animals as a little kid, the act who’d made me feel I could do anything, be anyone. Now, with perfect timing, they’d returned to me, just when I needed them, only they’d returned changed – and their uncertainty, their sense of questing to find their place in an altered world, now matched my own. They accompanied me in anomie, just as they’d once accompanied me in joy, and I loved them all the more for that.

    De La Soul changed their whole sound for Stakes Is High. For the first time, they parted ways with Prince Paul, farming out production to a range of associates who took them deeper and darker. The flow remained unchanged, but beneath it, everything shifted; fewer samples, fewer laughs. Heavy on Funk, Soul and Fusion samples, backed by sticky, thumping drum loops. Party paranoia music, forming a direct land bridge between the Daisy Age and late 90s Backpack Rap (Mos Def and Common each make an appearance), and full of jams (Wonce Again Long Island, Super Emcees, Dinnit, Long Island Degrees – classics, one and all). Despite the schism, Stakes Is High remains Prince Paul’s favourite De La Soul album.

    The record is shot through with ambivalence and disorientation. As much as 3 Feet High is a classic, it turned out to be something of a blind alley – its studied quirkiness arguably hasn’t aged well, it inspired few direct copyists and by the mid-90s De La had found themselves comprehensively outstripped by their peers A Tribe Called Quest. All of which left De La as a monolith, rather than figureheads of a movement: by the mid-90s their Hip Hop legacy was unclear. Money worries began to creep in, and the troubling question arose: what is De La Soul for? That obsession with the issue of legacy is shot through the lyrics across the album (most directly: “My ass was no long mass appeal/Oh shit, I guess that was all the famed I was allotted” on Wonce Again Long Island), but it finds its ultimate expression on the album’s title track.

    Stakes Is High is De La Soul’s Hip Hop State Of The Nation; three elder statesman looking out across the landscape and curling a lip at the way the world has moved away from them. The violence, the materialism, the stupidity – all of it. Sick of award shoes, sick of name brand clothes. Darker in mood and more confrontational, it’s simultaneously self-aggrandising (“Every word I say should be a Hip Hop quotable”) and sad (“I think that smiling in public is against the law/cos love don’t get you through life no more”). The track has super strong get off my lawn energy, and formed a natural anthem for a teenager not enjoying his own environs. De La Soul joining me outside the mainstream, looking in.

    But while the lyrics are some of De La’s finest (“Gun control means using both hands in my land”), it’s the production that elevates Stakes Is High to the Hall of Fame. Stakes was the very first time I ever heard a J Dilla beat (then still trading as Jay Dee), and it immediately felt like something I’d been waiting for my whole life. That characteristic drag, the weird low key urgency: it was a beat that sounded anxious, like it had deep feelings. It made me believe in Hip Hop all over again, that this music could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. In as much as the lyrics cast a caustic eye across the present, the beat made me excited for the future.

    Brilliantly, it’s also self-referential. Stakes Is High is built on two key samples. The first, a three second snippet that appears fully eight minutes in to Ahmad Jamal’s Swahililand, provides the stabbing, accusing loop that recurs across the record and which provides so much of its dark energy. The second, the distorted cry of “vibes” which punctuates the loops, is taken from James Brown’s Mind Power. In both cases, the artists being sampled (Jamal and Brown) were at a crossroads in their own careers not dissimilar to that confronted by De La; seeking new sounds that would keep them relevant, trying to find a way back in. The samples held up a mirror to the artist, and the resultant air of unease is perhaps no coincidence.

    Ironically, it was only through sleight of hand that De La landed the beat at all; it was originally passed to Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest, who played it to Pos and asked for his thoughts. Pos later recounted: “When them horns came I’m telling you, three seconds in I said, ‘I cannot tell Q-Tip this shit is dope. I started picking at it. He went to the next track, started playing it. I said, ‘That’s dope. Can I use your bathroom real quick?’ I go in the bathroom, pull out my mobile phone, call Dave and was like, ‘Yo, it’s this fucking track Q-Tip just played for me from Jay Dee. It’s ‘Stakes is High.’ This is what we need.”

    De La Soul, out there hustling for beats. It all adds to the mythos. And it’s mythos they badly needed at this juncture, mythos that was clearly on their minds as they recorded this album. Stakes Is High begins with a series of programmed voices recounting their first experiences of hearing BDP’s seminal Criminal Minded, the first time most people ever heard KRS One. A patchwork of memories sending people back to their youth, in many ways not wildly dissimilar to my writing all of this.

    “Seventh grade, battlin’ this other emcee.”
    “I was on my way to a family reunion in a car on the Long Island Expressway when I heard it”
    “I was at this party, this hype party, when I heard KRS”

    It’s an opening that harkens back to a golden age of Hip Hop that was only a decade prior, an opening that speaks to finding a place in that same firmament. And it’s bookended by the album’s closing, on the final seconds of the track Sunshine, where a voice comes from nowhere and exclaims “Yo, when I first heard 3 Feet High & Rising, I was….” – the sentence trailing into nothingness, an invitation for the listener to fill in the blanks with their own memories. It’s a plea from De La Soul: notice us, define us, and for god’s sake please don’t forget us as we tread forward into this great uncertain future.

    And that’s why I love Stakes Is High. That precise vibe. Harkening back to a golden age, trying to figure out where you fit in now and might fit in the future. Pos, Mase & Trugoy were like big brothers to me; they jumped around the living room with me when I was a kid, and when I became a surly teenager they held my hand through that too. Stakes Is High is a brilliant track; fabulous production and a sensibility in diametric opposition to the then prevailing winds of the genre in which it operated. It helped me find light in past, present and future all at once. It kept me company when I needed it most.

    • Brilliant stuff!

      With De La Soul, 3 Feet eclipses them all for me. Strip out the quiz show skits and the songs still hit my sweet spot and I was over thirty years old when it first came out. I much prefer it to The Stone Roses (ducks).

      I’ve listened to all of the later stuff but none of it landed as effectively. It’s 3 Feet I keep going back to.

  9. 44. Love In This Club – Usher

    It’s June 2004, and I’ve just got off a flight from Buenos Aires to New York. I’m tired and utterly broke, and I am buzzing. Like everyone I know, everyone who grew up on expensive movies, cheap music and good books, I’ve wanted to visit America since I could spell the word. Wired and giddy, I’m out of the airport as fast as my legs will carry me, dragging my outsized rucksack up to a hostel bed in Harlem.

    I arrive alone, but I make friends quickly; I’ve been travelling long enough that I’m open to the world, both receptive and attentive – the sweet spot for meeting new people. I fall in with a large gang of touring medical students and walk up and down the length of Manhattan with them, goggling at the size of the buildings, the food, the people. America seems simultaneously more and less than I’d expected: it lives up to the fantasy, and yet it’s mundane at the same time, the uncertainties of a post-9/11 world mixing high empire with a curious sense of torpor.

    On the 4th of July, we schlepp down to South Street Seaport and watch a spectacular firework display erupt over the East River. I’m stood in wonderment watching the fireworks reflect simultaneously in the waters flowing beside the Brooklyn Bridge and the windows of the vast skyscrapers of the island when a familiar drum beat kicks up over the crowd noise. Born In The USA. The whole energy of the event lifts another level – people start to dance, heedless (as ever) of the lyric, lost and unabashed in the apparent joy of simply being American. All the cynicism and uncertainty of recent years washed away for a precious moment. It’s impossible not to be swept along by the sheer maximalism of it all, the sound and colour and naked self-celebration, undercut by the self-criticism of the song’s words. It’s America in a nutshell.

    As my group wend their way back up to our hostel, drunk on spectacle, I reflect on how Born In The USA operates as a sort of alternative national anthem, capturing perfectly the texture of the nation as it appears to me. That there can be no song more quintessentially American, no song that will capture more accurately my initial experience of the place. I reflect this with no little certainty. And yet, within a fortnight, I’ll realise that I was entirely mistake, because there’s a song more American than Born, and that song, in Summer 2004 at least, is Usher’s Yeah!

    I visited America a number of times in the years after that first trip, and for a good decade it seemed impossible to go anywhere, do anything, without hearing Yeah!’s distinctive opening klaxon dancefloor call. I observed that it had a similar impact on large American crowds to Born In The USA that night at South Street, only Yeah! brought its own fireworks into the bargain. Yeah! was a perfect vehicle to deliver unity: it located, possibly for the first time, the mythic sweet spot parked equidistant between Pop, R&B and Hip Hop, it was simultaneously super tight and sloppy, and it sounded like the young, multi-cultural America that wasn’t thinking much about Vietnam or Reaganism and wanted to party before the party ended. It positively shimmered with energy and intent.

    Yeah! became utterly enmeshed with my memories of that first trip to the States. It was everywhere that Summer, booming out across Times Square, emanating from passing cars, audible each night as I lay in my bed trying to sleep. It was on my clothes, in my hair and under my fingernails. And as it settled there, it felt like the peak of something; maybe a certain version of America that was striving and failing to emerge in that odd, weightless period between the towers falling and the 2008 financial crisis, or perhaps a certain version of myself, right before I settled down and joined the working week. The last of the youthful exuberance, perhaps. Or maybe the last time that either of us would be so open.

    But despite all that, Yeah! is not my favourite Usher record, because in 2008 he released Love In This Club, and Love In This Club is a preposterous, unthinkable masterpiece of which I will never tire.

    By 2008, Usher had not released an album in four years. His previous release, Confessions, had spawned countless hit singles and sold over 10 million copies, making him quite conceivably the biggest pop star on the planet. Confessions was an absolute lightning bolt of a record, and the problem with lightning bolts is that they’re difficult to follow up. Usher needed another Yeah!, and hence Love In This Club retreads many of the key beats of that tune, somewhat self-consciously.

    Now, objectively, Love In This Club is no Yeah! It lacks the imperial scale, the sense of artist seizing moment, of superstar velocity being attained. But what Love does have going for it is a curious determination to lean super hard on Usher’s status as a sex symbol, and to push those symbolics way beyond the bounds of good sense. In addition to which, it’s a song born from a slightly preposterous source: the synth loop and arcing beat with which the track are synonymous are available as presets within Garageband (see: “Euro Hero Synth 2”). Garageband presets. That’s about as humble as it gets.

    The glory of Love In This Club lies in the odd dichotomy between those lush, romantic synths, the lyric, which is entirely and unapologetically about fucking in a nightclub, and the vocal, which artfully bridges the gap between. Love In This Club is brilliant because it’s simultaneously beautiful and very funny indeed; the sheer level of carnal intent is so pronounced that it passes way beyond seduction and into a territory marked “demented threat”. If the line “the way I’m staring at you got me wanna give it to you all night” doesn’t chill the blood, then how about “it’s going down on aisle three/I’ll bag you like some groceries”?

    The love-threats, and indeed the song itself, reach an apex with the unforgettable line “Let’s both get undressed right here/keep it up girl and I swear/I’mma give it to you non stop/And I don’t care who’s watching”. I honestly laughed out loud the first time I heard it, and I’m pretty much still laughing all these many years later. Four months after Love In This Club was released I got married, and my wife forced me to exclude this lyric from my side of our wedding vows. The missed opportunity of all missed opportunities, it would have translated so beautifully to a spoken word reading.

    Fabulously, not only does Usher fully commit to each and every one of these lyrics, he sings them beautifully. Listen to the way he hits that “All night”, or even the “I don’t care who’s watching”. Or the way the statement “I promise that I’m gonna keep you coming all night long” is leant a preposterously telescopic extension. It’s absolute peak millennial R&B – total filth being sung with the voice of an angel. And it’s a song on which there are voices coming from all angles; Usher’s vocal lines swooping over and under one another throughout, in and out of the mix.

    When I listen to Love In This Club, I hear an echo of Sam Cooke. The smoothness and apparent guilelessness of the vocal, undercut by the seamier underbelly and borderline hysterical audience reaction. Love In This Club is the spiritual successor to Cooke’s immortal night at the Harlem Square club; women singing along, sweat dripping from the ceiling, voice soaring far beyond. Usher can’t sing as well as Sam Cooke, but he gets far, far closer than most.

    Love In This Club is blessed with a glorious opening: Euro Hero Synth 2, shimmering like a mirage on the horizon before the bro-d out chorus of “ayyy” kicks the beat in proper. Its production is peculiarly regal throughout. It features one of my favourite Usher vocals, it’s so goofily and unrepentantly horny as to be more or less undeniable, and it’s very, very funny. In addition to all of which, Young Jeezy contributes a perfectly judged guest vocal (check the way the tongue trips beautifully along the line “Have you ever made love to a thug in the club with this sights on/87 jeans and a fresh pair of Nikes on”).

    Love In This Club catches contemporary R&B right in the moment before it began to be deconstructed and rebuilt from the ground up. Before it became artier and more experimental. Before it moved from a perennial drive for more to a perennial drive to less. Before the lust was diluted, the maximalism shelved.

    Six months after the song was released, we awoke to the news that Lehman Brothers had gone down in flames, and it was possible to feel in the air a sense that history was now lurching off in a new and hitherto unexpected direction. The era of American certainties, already wobbling post-9/11, was coming to an end. The era of Yeah! was passing, and Love In This Club was its death rattle, the final debauched hours of the party when all that matters is finding an empty bathroom stall and someone to join you in it.

    I will always retain a massive soft spot for this song. It’s bound up in my love for Sam Cooke, my happiness during this entire period of my life, and in the joy I take from Usher’s voice. It still cracks me up every time he hits that “I don’t care who’s watching” and then sings the word “watching” eight different beautiful ways. Usher fuses the truth with the lie so thoroughly that it becomes impossible to separate them, that his insincerity becomes sincere. That dissonance is what keeps me coming back, half expecting him to burst out laughing every time. He never does.

      • I completely agree with you – Yeah! is the better song on virtually every front. It just ain’t my fave.

        Also: everyone who enjoys Yeah! should listen to Houston’s I Like That. Came out a few weeks later, fresh off the xerox. Still slaps.

  10. 43. Mayonaise – Smashing Pumpkins

    When all is said and done, it’s pretty tough to be a teenager.

    Cut adrift from childhood, but still some way from whatever harbour adulthood provides, full of intense feeling, self-certainty and self-doubt. How anyone ever makes it look easy I will never know.

    For my own part, make it look easy I did not. Having navigated childhood’s landscape with insouciant ease, I fumbled the map for teenage life. Awkward and ungainly, I could never quite seem to get my balance; school was a litany of conflict and outsiderdom, and home a pressure cooker threatening an imminent and terminal eruption that never came. Even as I lived those years, they felt designed to be endured rather than enjoyed. In time honoured teenage fashion, the frictions of my exterior life saw me lean more heavily on an already well developed inner life of books, comics and movies. And records.

    I was 14 years old when Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream was released. Too young to understand the album’s various limitations and missteps, but precisely old enough to grasp its emotional core. Amidst the blitzkrieg guitars and thunderous drumming I immediately discerned a fellow outsider, looking around and wondering when childhood had ended and what the missed memo announcing its passing must have looked like.

    Siamese Dream arrived at the peak of my wanderings in the teenage wasteland, and it matched perfectly where my head and heart were at in a way that no album has before or since. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is also the single most teenage album ever made, an hour long tantrum against everything and nothing, all bungled grace and shouted innocence. It was an absolute beacon in the darkness, a signal that someone out there was feeling things as deeply, inconveniently and preposterously as I was. That they were as furious and dislocated and sad as I was at that time.

    Billy Corgan had grown up in an unhappy household, dreaming of an escape into stardom. When he was 9 years old he’d reportedly stuck his head in his parents’ stereo speakers to try to get closer to Tony Iommi’s guitar sound on Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality. He grew up loving wrestling and baseball and all the wrong bands. And amidst the early 90s Grunge scene, a scene notionally comprised of oddballs and outcasts, he stood out like a sore thumb, an outsider even among outsiders.

    Corgan’s lyrics were almost preposterously self-pitying, his voice an intolerable feline whine. He gave bitchy interview press and generally rubbed people up the wrong way. Including his own band mates, whose guitar parts on Siamese Dream he famously went and re-recorded because he knew he could do it all better. Corgan’s desperation was visible and offputting; he was awkward and ungainly and he wanted it far too badly. “As long as I can remember, since I was a little kid, I wanted to be famous,” he told Rolling Stone. “My myth was rock god-dom. I saw that as a means to become one who has no pain.” One who has no pain. Yikes.

    Corgan was inspirational, because he seemingly could not deal with adult life at all, on pretty much any level, but he’d gone into the studio and emerged with this incredibly over the top album, built on an absolute storm of squalling guitars, an apparently comprehensive rejection of taste and restraint and a deep vein of stunted romantic energy. Siamese Dream was everything turned to eleven, not least emotionally; full of sound and fury. It was the precise noise I dreamed of making at 14 years old, but never could have.

    There are any number of songs from Siamese Dream that could have found their way onto this list. I can think of few album openers that engaged me so immediately and completely as the martial drumrolls and skate ramp rapture of Cherub Rock, so few lyrics that cut right through me on first listen as comprehensively as Disarm. But ultimately, Mayonaise makes the list because I can remember, with an almost eerie vividness, how it felt to walk down the street at that age with the line “I just want to be me” howling in my headphones, every single difficult teenage emotion I’d ever felt, every moment of self-struggle, every doubt, everything I could never find the language to articulate, compressed into those six monosyllabic words.

    Mayonaise opens with a guitar solo, because of course it does. Nostalgic and flutteringly pretty, it unfurls itself across the opening minute before the inevitable tower of flaming guitars kicks in. Heavy stones cast into tranquil waters. The guitar sound is almost comically epic, comically heroic. One foot on the amp, eyes closed, triumphant in the pain. It’s a guitar sound that leaves a jetstream behind it, the sort of epic power fantasy that resonates when you’re feeling particularly powerless.

    The song’s lyric is built on a series of gnomic one liners strung together. “Pick a pocket full of sorrow/run away with me tomorrow”. It’s super on the nose stuff, and it addresses the experience of waiting. Waiting for your exile to end, waiting for life to really begin. The default status of the misunderstood teen. “When I can, I will/try to understand/that when I can, I will”, howls Corgan, the clear implication being: right now, I can’t. I just can’t.

    The song’s apex arrives in the following lyrical passage, guitars corralled for one final glorious death charge up the mountain:

    “Fool enough to almost be it
    Cool enough to not quite see it
    Old enough to always feel this
    Always old I’ll always feel this
    No more promise, no more sorrow
    No longer will I follow
    Can anybody hear me
    I Just Want To Be Me
    When I can”

    Stuck there in my small town stasis, plotting my glorious escape, these words thrilled me to my core. It would take me years to understand why they’d done so; at the time, I just knew that they rang a bell, and that the histrionics hit home. I didn’t know who the “me” was yet, or quite what that guy would look like. I just knew I was in a hurry to get from here to there, from me to him.

    Of course, looking back, the song is ridiculous. I was being ridiculous. The lyrics are trite, obvious, and my problems really didn’t amount to all that much more than being a teenager who was juggling some stuff and who didn’t know how to properly express his emotions. Looking back, I see so clearly how angry I was, and how I would tap that anger and use it as fuel to drive me on in my various endeavours. How effective I found that to be. How addictive and self perpetuating.

    I grew up, of course, as we all do. I left school and left that town and didn’t look back. I found my proper place and figured out how to fit in, how to reduce the once uncontrollable friction between myself and the world. I stopped being a teenager, grew thicker skin. When I could, I did: I became the “me” I’d sensed I had to locate.

    But I didn’t forget, and nor did I want to. I listen to Mayonnaise now and it’s still viscerally compelling to me every single time, because it pays a little tribute to that lonely teenager, raging away in his bubble. Because it makes me remember, with crystal clarity, how it felt to be that kid, to have so much I wanted to say, needed to say, and no means of doing so. Because even as I travel further from that location I never want to forget what the view was like. Always old, I’ll always feel this.

    Smashing Pumpkins were a ridiculous band, a band who constantly over-shared and under-edited. But they were my band, in every meaningful way; they arrived at the perfect moment and made music that made the world seem to make a little more sense. They helped me to better understand myself then, and they help me to remember myself now.

    Mayonaise is a pretty daft song, all told – from the goofy title (“My Own Eyes” – geddit) to the “oh no, my secret diary” lyrics and the guitar overkill. And yet I love it as much now as I did when I was a kid, because it’s an umbilical connection back to a way of being I long since moved beyond, but never want to forget. Because sometimes, just every once in a while, I listen to it on the way home late at night when no one is around and as Corgan hits that climactic “I just want to be me”, I punch the air in celebration of that kid I left behind. In solidarity with his tortured teenage soul.

  12. 42. Dream House – Deafheaven

    “He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love In The Time Of Cholera

    What is identity? Is it the root of self, the anchor that enables us to hold firm against life’s grand hurricane? The fairy tales we tell ourselves about the content of our own souls? Does our sense of identity liberate us to live authentically, or is it a tall fence that keeps us penned in: I can’t do x, because I’m y.

    Having a clear sense of who I am has helped me to weather bad times, but it’s also occasionally lead me to establish boundaries where no boundaries were required. One of the great surprises of the last decade or so has been the frequency with which I’ve tried things once judged “not for me”, and discovered that – actually – I apparently have no bloody idea who I am or what I like. That either my identity was a fabrication, or some part of it had shifted while I slept. Each and every time, it’s been an uneasy joy for a kid who always built his fortress on self-certainty; am I straying too far from base camp, or have I simply outgrown it?

    In music, genre presents us with many of the same quandaries. It can help us to navigate and understand what’s out there and why we enjoy it, it can help us discover wonderful artists, and it can also sometimes constrain us. And that brings us, eventually, to Dream House, the tip of the spear for Deafheaven’s 2013 opus, Sunbather.

    Sunbather is as close as I’ve come in adult life to another Siamese Dream moment: another album that immediately and categorically spoke to me at the atomic level. It’s also a polarising record that strikes many as unlistenable and which profoundly irritated some of the grandees of its parent genre. It’s a record that carves an identity outside the established perimeter.

    Deafheaven are/were, ostensibly, a Black Metal band. As such, their reference points should have been obvious: fast drums, distorted guitar with tremolo picking, a pronounced emphasis on atmosphere and screamed vocals about war, death and destruction. According to convention, they should have been burying their clothes in the woods, wearing corpse paint, leaving their lank hair unwashed and plotting one another’s murders on the down low. They should have been misanthropic at best, in thrall to Satanism at worst. Because that’s what Black Metal was. That’s what made Black Metal awesome. And those are the borderlines that Sunbather casually transgressed.

    From the album’s layered arrangements that blend Black Metal with Post-Rock, Shoegaze and Pop, to its pink, sun-kissed front cover, to its yearning, humanist lyrics, Sunbather took everything that was fabulous about its host genre and then exploded it to the far horizon, insular music turned inside out. Even the band’s clean cut appearance was a surprise; short hair, white t-shirts, the suspect hint of a healthy glow about the cheeks. The first time I clapped eyes on them, having heard the noise they made, I was reminded of an observation once made to me by an old friend: that if Slipknot and Coldplay exchanged their aesthetics both bands would be exponentially improved.

    Deafheaven were, quite simply, that most glorious of things: a sound I had not heard before. The screamed vocals low in the mix, played out as if feedback, an instrument like any other. The way the various sections of each song seemed to jump moods, the poetic introspection of the lyric. They surprised me at every turn, even as they attracted haters from their own scene.

    Deafheaven were accused of making Black Metal soft, when in reality they simply opened it to the world – drawing in unusual references that carved out fresh pathways. The guitar coda on Dream House is a deliberate play on U2’s Where The Steets Have No Name. Later, they’d steal from Champagne Supernova. They were so completely unabashed, so unwilling to be hidebound by genre convention that it was impossible not to admire them. They made music that was simultaneously heavy and pretty, and their made scene provincialism seem so small and self-defeating.

    A year before Dream House, Deafheaven had covered Punk Rock/Cody by Mogwai. That was my personal way in: I was intrigued by the idea of covering those particular tracks, what it might even sound like. I was even more intrigued when they swapped out the distinctive Iggy Pop sample which effectively embodies the original version of Punk Rock for, of all things, William Faulkner’s Nobel prize acceptance speech: “The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” The Mogwai reference helped me grasp Deafheaven’s approach to dynamics, Faulkner’s words some of what they were looking to convey.

    If Punk Rock/Cody set out the grand promise, Dream House was the first song to fully deliver upon it. The sense of acceleration in its opening minute, its escalating build into a mad gallop, as if the band are trying to play all the instruments in the room at the same time and as hard as they can. They had me fully within that first minute, that unbridled charge at the guns of convention, no holds barred, an echo of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s expansiveness, twinned with the savagery of Metal. There’s a desperation to the way the song opens, the way it ramps before nosediving into chaos; a yearning quality that made it immediately irresistible.

    Dream House is a fundamentally millennial song. You can’t really make out the lyrics, but they’re about walking home and peering into the million dollar apartments you pass along the way, nose pressed against the glass of a life you’ll never live, the first generation at the start of a prospectively long downslope.

    On Sunbather’s title track, our narrator drives through an affluent neighborhood, only to become depressed at the sight of a young woman, the titular sunbather, lying on the grass among the green trees. Black Metal that longs for life in that sunbeam, wondering what it would be like to live carefree, to transcend your place in the world, to escape your identity. Wistfulness for a past you never even got to live.

    Dream House is born of Post-Rock dynamics, but underpinned by powerhouse drumming, switching between frantic blast beats and an occasional swing. The band lock into a groove at the ninety second mark, brief order from chaos. A glorious counter-melody intrudes at two and a half minutes, accompanied by what sounds like cowbell. The sheer freneticism of the song, its resistance to sitting still, its vast quantity of tightly packed ideas, is both inspiring and catnip to my personal brain chemistry. George Clarke screams his way through, incomprehensible and yet audibly desperate to be heard, to be understood. Dream House is trying very hard indeed to connect, trying hard to share. It’s a lush, romantic record that sounds like the end of days.

    At the five minute mark, the song seemingly begins to wind down, fading along to spidery guitar lines seemingly pulled from Mogwai’s Come On Die Young. Dream House falls entirely silent and then explodes back into life, shocked back to the surface by powerhouse drumming and triumphant guitar. And over the top of it all, Clarke is screaming, repeatedly, the song’s final and glorious coda:

    “I’m dying
    Is it blissful
    It’s like a dream
    I want to dream”

    This, to me, is poetry. The sheer, delicious drama of the sound of the damn thing, the nakedness of the emotion, the shameless romanticism of the text. “I want to dream”, howled over and over again until you’re right there with him, running hard into the walls of your life and attempting to transcend into the dream. To become more than you are. Faulkner’s human heart in conflict, laid out for all to see. It’s a beautiful moment, and it moves me every time.

    Dream House is an abrasive, confounding, beautiful record. It felt like it arrived almost entirely out of the blue, pushing beyond a traditionally conservative genre to deliver something that made me think differently about how music communicates and connects. It’s a song that should sound misanthropic, should establish distance, and yet it’s almost preposterously intimate and connective. Preposterously human.

    In Dream House’s opening charge I see every face I have ever known, every kindness I have ever traded, every moment I have ever shared falling away from me at pace. It is the sound of life – all that is good and worth preserving – accelerating away from you, defying preservation. The suburbs as a dream/the suburbs as death. And Dream House, in its chaos and its catharsis, sees all this and looks you in the eyes and reminds you, as Faulkner did before, that the basest of all things is to be afraid, and that music will remind us of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of our past. It will remind you what it is to be human, and to want to dream.

    Dream House made Deafheaven famous, but it also provoked considerable backlash. They were sell outs, traitors, false metal. They had strayed beyond their prescribed identity, wandered too far from base camp. It didn’t stop them. Their next record, New Bermuda, is their true masterpiece, and several tracks from it could comfortably have made this list. But it’s Dream House that first harnessed that epic, wordless poetry, Dream House, the record that gives birth to itself, over and over again. Dream House that connects.

    And it’s Dream House that reminds me, whenever I listen to it, to allow myself to dream, and that those dreams should be untroubled by the trivialities of who I am and where my boundaries lie.

  13. 41. The King Of Rome – The Unthanks

    When my kids were little, I used to wish their bedtimes would last forever. Their tiny frames, clad in pyjamas and dressing gowns, hair still wet from the bath and dusted with magic, curled up alongside me as I them read story after story, until their eyes began to roll in their heads and sleep crept across them.

    I remember my daughter’s shout of “check on me after every five minutes” as I’d leave the room, a largely redundant inducement to return to her over and over again, as if I had any intentions otherwise. I remember my son tucked alongside me as I read aloud from Jeff Smith’s Bone, pointing to each panel in turn and trying to keep the characters’ voices straight. And I remember singing King Of Rome to them both, because how could I forget? How will I ever forget?

    I treasured those long, magical bedtimes even as I lived them, because I knew they wouldn’t last forever. When my daughter was a year old a neighbour with an alarming resemblance to Keith Allen stumbled over to me at our annual street party, clearly a few drinks deep, and asked if he could hold her for a moment. I said he could, and as he cradled her in his arms he got this faraway look on his face and slurred “My daughters are both off at university. I’d give anything to have them this close to me again”. I never forgot the way he said those words, how deeply he seemed to feel them. Every moment was precious, because the moments were so intent on slipping by, just another song vanishing on the breeze.

    I sang King Of Rome to the kids because it was simple enough for them to understand, but deep enough that it might one day have deeper resonance if they thought of it a little more. Written by David Sudbury in 1988, it tells the unlikely story of Charlie Hudson, a gas lamp lighter and resident of Sudbury’s native Derby, who in 1913 saw his favourite pigeon score an unlikely victory in a thousand mile race from Rome to the UK.

    The King Of Rome is a simple song, its lyric playing on the contrast between Hudson’s very ordinary life, and the high romantic drama of The King Of Rome’s victory. It’s about hopes and dreams, about how they can sustain you, and about the way that even a victory comparatively small in the grand scale of things can light up a life.

    I’d been aware of the song in my own childhood via June Tabor’s version, but it was The Unthanks’ performance at the 2012 Folk Music Awards, accompanied by the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band, that sealed the love affair for me and, I’m sure, many others. Something in the slow build of the brass, and in Becky Unthank’s perfectly pitched lead vocal spoke to the quiet dignity of a regular life, and of the moments that illuminate a regular life.

    Slower and more stately than Tabor’s comparatively jaunty reading, the Unthanks’ King Of Rome creates the space for pathos to really blossom. You listen to it and you think of Charlie Hudson, of hope in the face of adversity, of the simple magic that can explode in ordinary events when they’re freighted with enough meaning. The lead vocal is superb, so measured, so warm, teasing out the song’s emotional core, varying its pacing for emphasis. Soothing and soaring by turn.

    The atmosphere of the recording is additive too; the audience falling to pin drop silence as the brass begins, the explosion of joyous applause at its end. A moment shared between act and audience that would live in the memory. A celebration of a regular life, and of regular lives.

    The song’s apex arrives in the penultimate verse, as the pigeon, presumed lost, is spotted above, perched upon Charlie’s roof. Everything decelerates, adding extra emphasis to the lyric’s most beautiful passage:

    “Come on down, your majesty
    I knew you’d make it back to me
    Come on down, you lovely one
    You’ve made my dreams come true”

    The slowness and stillness with which those lines are delivered sees them hang in the air, and their tenderness touches me every damn time. “Come on down, you lovely one” – almost unbearably beautiful.

    And with that, the brass swells again, building and building until a trumpet solo and clashing cymbals send us to the very peak, truly gorgeous, a fitting accompaniment to the glory of the moment. Come on down, your majesty.

    It was this point in the song that I would invariably stumble over in my own renditions. When I was younger, I somehow convinced myself that I would never find proper love, never have kids, that relationships would come and go, but that my path would be solitary. That’s the thing about an intense loneliness, it leaves you feeling marked, and as if that mark has separated you permanently from life’s normal path. Not for you, these things – best to accept it.

    And then I met my wife, and she made such thoughts seem as completely nonsensical as they really ought to have been all along. And we had kids, and they were instantly and astonishingly wonderful. And I got to experience all this unexpected joy, all this love, that I had thought I’d have to do without. And these are small things in the context of the wider world, but big things in the context of a human life. These people, these little people, were giving me more than I’d ever hoped for. These little people had made my dreams come true. And as I sang to them at bedtime I would of course stumble over that last line, that “you’ve made my dreams come true” because of how much painful and beautiful truth lurked behind it.

    Obviously, those days are passing now. My kids aren’t tiny any more, although they still bring me the same joy even as they grow and change before my eyes. I am a step or two closer to the shoes of my neighbour, a step or two closer to that faraway look that so spooked me way back then, when I had it all ahead.

    The great ritual of those bedtimes is behind us – they read the stories to themselves these days, and I don’t sing to them before lights out any more, because god Dad, that would be embarrassing. But I kiss them goodnight and watch them head up the stairs, and I try my best to tamp down this enormous emotion that lives only inside me, this huge gratitude to them both for everything they’ve already given me. And then I listen to King Of Rome, to the lilting Geordie accents of the sisters and the Yorkshire brass underpinning them, and the joy of it all rolls across me in great waves, as if I were feeling it for the first time. The way your roots keep your feet on the ground, even while the magic of life surprising you with your own heart’s desire grants you wings.

    So, I still remember those older days, when bedtime would come around, another precious day down, and I would tuck my kids into their beds and sing “The Pigeon Song” to them. And as I sang I’d look down at them, their little faces soft in the fading light, their own lives and hopes and dreams all ahead, and I would feel this great surge at the enormity of it all, the great tapestry of which we have the absurd good fortune to be part, of my own good luck to be here and now, with them. And they would look back up at me, these little miracles, and only occasionally ask, with the howling indelicacy that is the stock in trade of small children “Dad, why are you crying”.

      • You know the funny thing, Tigger? As I went to write this reply I realised for the first time that, for whatever reason, I’m already telling myself I’ll never get grandchildren. My own little voice in the head: “Charlie, you’ll lose that bird”.

        It’s so weird how these things self-perpetuate. Let’s hope I’m as wrong as usual.

        • Lovely writing. Nobody told me that as a parent there is a form of kind of grief as your kid(s) get older. Leaving behind childish things, it’s slightly heartbreaking.

          My daughter officially becomes an adult this month …

          • Son (23) moved out with his girlfriend a couple of months ago, daughter (very nearly 21) at uni but back for the extensive holidays. Goodness, this house is big and empty for more than half the year…….

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