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  1. 60. Enfilade – At The Drive-In

    “I’ll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh… and, uh… heartless manipulators, about music… that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it’s a… it’s a term that’s based on contempt; it’s a term that’s based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that’s rotten about rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t know Johnny Rotten.. but I’m sure, I’m sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. You see, what, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise… is in fact… the brilliant music of a genius… myself. And that music is so powerful, that it’s quite beyond my control. And, ah… when I’m in the grips of it, I don’t feel pleasure and I don’t feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn’t feel anything, and you didn’t want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?”

    Iggy Pop, Interview with Peter Gzowski on “90 Minutes Live”, March 1977

    The above quote, a sample of which kicks off Punk Rock, the opener of Mogwai’s still excellent Come On Die Young, says more about a certain strand of music than I could ever hope to. The idea that “a big load of trashy old noise” can stir something in the human spirit that sends you right outside yourself, beyond your own body. The ancient Greeks had their Dionysus Frenzy; wine, dancing and sex used to access a state of ecstasy and wider perception. We have loud guitars, shouty skinny kids and repetitive beat music. It’s all the same energy flash.

    At The Drive-In were a Post-Hardcore band from El Paso Texas who flared and flamed out in short order at the turn of the Millennium. They were a schizophrenic act from day one, somehow combining and balancing Punk Rock ferocity with Prog Rock virtuosity and a side order of border town weirdness and paranoia. They were fronted by vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, and the combination of the pair’s luxuriant afros and the urgent, strident style of the music drew immediate but misguided comparisons to the MC5.

    It took ATDI 3 studio albums to properly find their sound, which was to say it took them 3 attempts to capture the frenzy of their live performances. They were an unusual band; tight but chaotic, out of control but in the driver’s seat. Every band member thrashing their instruments like their lives depended on it, mic stands flying, cacophony achieved without loss of clarity. The first two albums couldn’t quite land it – they sound thin and reedy – but 2000’s Relationship of Command saw them finally land the plane in some style.

    Relationship Of Command is one of the most intense guitar albums you will ever hear. Every song sounds massive, every song sounds like the last the band will ever play. The production, by Nu-Metal’s Ross Robinson and Andy Wallace of Nevermind fame, is glossy and colossal. The whole thing is a monument, and it contains a number of brilliant, eviscerating songs; ugly, discordant riffs supported by a juggernaut rhythm section. The guitar is math rock on speed, the lyrics are gibberish. It’s the most beautiful and transcendent nervous breakdown you’ll ever hear.

    About those lyrics. Bixler-Zavala favoured a Burroughsian cut-up technique, which in practice meant that virtually nothing he sang made any sense at all, even if it was all delivered with total conviction.

    “Shackled the grapple and the sentinels found / binoculars watch cardboard towns”

    “Circus carny guarding / the gates of heaven / like stuck in limbo induction”

    “Orchestra influenza / drawn and quartered pets / it dwells and grows”

    But that nonsense quality is part of what lent the band their power. The songs are sung as if the vocalist has moved beyond language, as if he’s possessed by some deeper force and is simply spilling words out into the universe in whatever order feels most comfortable. There’s no deeper meaning, no subtext. None of it makes you think, it simply makes you feel – it’s all textural. Bixler-Zavala was fond of encouraging his live audience to go listen to The Fall, and it shows: another fractious band whose energy fed on an inner chaos and whose lyrics felt like they’d been assembled at random.

    What makes Relationship of Command a great record is how close to collapse it is, the sheer volume of disparate, apparently non-complimentary parts grinding on one another as they’re forced at high speed into the same funnel. Shortly after the album’s release the band literally tore itself into two pieces: Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez went off to form The Mars Volta and make weird, experimental 12 minute long guitar epics with time signatures you need an enigma machine to decode, the rest of the band formed the more meat and potatoes Sparta. Relationship Of Command is the sound of those competing energies being forced to co-exist. And that makes it a perfect summation of the band themselves; a mess of contradictions inexorably borne along by the raw power of those dark forces alluded to by Iggy way back in 1977.

    Enfilade is the centre-piece of the album, and my favourite track. It opens with what passes for a quiet moment on Relationship Of Command; Iggy Pop reading a cryptic ransom note (“I’ll be the hyena, you’ll see”) down a crackling phone line, a nice nod to ATDI’s debt to the bomb-throwers of late 60s Detroit and The Stooges in particular. The guitar, once it arrives, is spacey and chiming, the chorus an absolute monster. “Sacrificed on railroad tracks/freight freight train coming/freight freight train coming”. The barked “ay ay” after the second repetition kills me every time. It’s the perfect chorus for this band, because they were a freight train. A freight train barreling down the tracks, brakes failing, bits falling off everywhere, engines howling their agonies to the night skies, a penny somewhere down the track waiting to derail them.

    Even by the standards of the band, Enfilade is a weird, weird tune. The kidnap motif suits the cut up lyrics and ATDI’s underlying air of violence. That taut, off-kilter sense of imminent violence from unexpected angles that you often find in small towns. There’s a moment right before the chorus kicks in where we suddenly get some Salsa. There’s what sounds like a melodica solo. None of it makes any sense, but it’s all so urgent you barely notice. If you can just go fast and hard enough, reason will probably take care itself.

    There’s an instructive video of At The Drive-In which captures the essence of the band. They’re playing Arcarsenal, Relationship’s opening track, at The Big Day Out in 2001, just a few weeks before they split. The band is going absolutely fucking nuts – guitars are being swung, very skinny men in very skinny t-shirts are twitching as if the stage were electrified, lyrics are being howled into the faces of the audience. An audience forbidden to mosh – one of the great ironies of this band is that despite playing some of the most violent-sounding, high energy guitar music you’ve ever heard, they wouldn’t permit slam dancing or other violence at their shows; the contrast between band and audience forming just one more contradiction to add to the pile, one more vector of tension and release, a relationship of command if you will.

    Rodriguez-Lopez hammers on his guitar like it owes him money, Bixler-Zavala literally grabs the insides of his own cheeks and pulls on them as if he’s trying to figure out how to release his soul from his body. They’re the living, breathing embodiment of that Iggy quote, and – watching – you wonder not so much whether this band could have stayed together, but how they had the energy to play more than one song at this tempo. It’s one of my favourite live videos, a testament to quite how powerful music can be.

    Three years after that show I was travelling across the US on my own. When you travel solo you get in the habit of talking to anyone who falls into your orbit, or maybe you just present as a little more open to conversation than normal. Regardless, sat in Chicago’s recently opened Millennium Park, I got chatting to a bunch of high school kids. We compared notes on music and discovered a shared love of ATDI. Excitedly, they informed me that they were a newly formed band, and that they’d just played their first live show at their high school, including a version of Arcarsenal. A few weeks later I received an email from one of them attaching a video, and there it was: these polite, skinny, eminently middle class kids going absolutely fucking batshit onstage, throwing their bodies around with utter abandon, rolling on the floor, apparently feeling no pleasure and no pain. Punk rock.

  3. Oh man I love that album so much. Well, I love about three quarters of it – after track 8 the intensity becomes too much for me, and I bow out after the second Iggy guest-spot, Rolodex Propaganda. But those first few tracks deliver the biggest sonic wallop of any music I’ve ever heard. If I ever need to wind myself up for whatever reason, particularly if I’m out for a run, that’s what’s going on (although it does have the drawback that it’ll make me randomly sprint).

    I find myself making up my own lyrics – “BUCHAREST! FRED WEST!” – and that becomes canon in my own mind. But then I always have done – Trash by Suede goes “Enya tattoos yer hide” and I won’t have it any other way.

    Speaking of Suede, I’m convinced that Enfilade was more than a passing influence on their recent album track Shadow Self: https://youtu.be/wIlOWyAfNFc?si=RVCO59s5-lDvOEoo

  4. 59. I Want You – Bob Dylan

    It began on a long car journey. My father’s best mate was turning 40, and throwing a big party to celebrate in his palatial home in the middle of nowhere.

    Dad had known this guy forever. A noted artist, with a temperament to match; you couldn’t take him anywhere without a guarantee he’d offend someone or cause some sort of scene. Perhaps surprisingly, this seemed to delight Dad; as with my Mother, he seemed to find his greatest joy in people whose emotional control valve was at the furthest possible extreme to his own.

    As we drove through countryside, en-route to whatever carnage was planned for the evening, Dad popped a cassette into the player. His gift to his mate that night was a massive Box Set of Bob Dylan obscurities, and he’d been unable to resist giving it a listen himself before he handed it over. The first song to play was I Want You. After a minute or so of that jaunty tune and Dylan’s characteristically nasal vocal I erupted from the back seat, drawing myself to my full height of sneering teenage condescension: “what is this shit”? It was the first time I’d ever properly heard Dylan, and I was not impressed.

    As we arrived that evening, Dad handed over his gift and I made a show of apologising to the birthday boy’s kids, who were about my own age, for the sonic atrocities that would soon be defiling their ears. I don’t recall a great deal else of that evening: we sang Livin’ On A Prayer at karaoke, I was probably social awkward around the more confident rich kids, and we headed off to a nearby B&B at the end, Dylan box set safely deployed elsewhere.

    My Dylanphobia didn’t last long. Within a few months a cassette copy of Bringing It All Back Home appeared in Mum’s car, and clicked immediately. She Belongs To Me: “She can take the dark out of the night time/and paint the day time black”. The junior poet in me was green with envy; what a glorious confection of words. It was enough to make the silly voice tolerable, and to recognise what Dad had been on about that night in the car. “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” Seven years? Try 7 months, Sam.

    I worked my way steadily through the Dylan catalogue, one great album after another. I consumed the mythos, pored over the lyrics. Marvelled at that 15 month imperial phase where he released three unbelievable albums one after the other, the Country detour, the 70s comeback, even the Christian rock experiment. I was 18 when he returned with Time Out Of Mind, and it fed the mania even further.

    I understood my trajectory through his lyrics, and religiously listened to the Albert Hall bootleg as I wrote my late-night university essays. Just being in proximity to that fabulous recording, with its brooding gumbo of reverence, sacrilege and history occurring on the fly always made me feel a foot smarter.

    I don’t listen to so much Dylan these days, but looking back on it all, I feel I can better recognise his singular genius. He’s the ultimate blank canvas onto which you’re invited to project your personal wants and needs. His art isn’t just in the music, it’s in the creation, nurture and projection of Bob Dylan the idea. Where virtually every other major artist has at some stage cracked and allowed access, bowed to the needs of 24 media and omnipresent social media, Dylan has continued to plough the same awkward furrow, completely untroubled. We’ll never know what he really thinks, what he really feels, or what any of the lyrics actually mean, because he understands perfectly well that what he’s selling is enigma by the barrelful. I highly doubt we’ll see another cultural figure like him.

    At some stage, music became the medium through which Dad and I communicated in the years when we were really struggling to communicate. Knowing his tastes, I’d gift him CDs for his birthday and Christmas, some of which stuck. He recommended acts to me, some of which stuck. Eventually, we went and saw Dylan live together. It was everything I’d hoped for – perverse and truculent and utterly in refusal of any obligation to serve the audience, the songs or any power higher than the artist himself. A magnificent fuck you to all expectations – you don’t know me and you don’t know these songs at all. Excellent.

    So, Dylan has been important to me, and there are several dozen Dylan songs that might easily have made this list. But I’m going for I Want You, because – perversely, given where we started – it’s my absolute favourite Dylan vocal. You can go to Dylan for a lot things, but simplicity and directness are not typically among them. Even on what are generally assumed to be his more straightforward, personal songs there are layers of obfuscation and misdirection. As a consequence, there’s something really moving about the way he sings the chorus here; that plainly stated “I want you/I want you/honey I want you/so bad”.

    The verses are, of course, positioned in diametric opposition. They’re full of embellishments: an accomplished smooth talker trying to slide his way into the bedroom on gilded skates, including via deployment of some absolutely classic negging: “The guilty undertaker signs/the lonesome organ grinder cries/the silver saxophones say I should refuse you”. Oh, I just bet they do.
    The interplay between verse and chorus provides the song’s tension and release: lies and honesty, lies and honesty. A bullshit artist exploring every possible angle, and so utterly duplicitous as to occasionally even try resorting to the truth.

    But there’s more in that chorus. Dylan sounded like an old man from the first day he found his way to a microphone, but here he sounds as boyish as he ever did. Susan Sontag once wrote that capitalism fetishises youth because youth is “the state of wanting”. This is Dylan, the permanently aloof electric poet of his generation, in direct address and wanting as clear and true as he ever did, even if the wanting is purely carnal. And the carnality is interesting too – somewhere deep in I Want You I always feel like I can hear the germ of Hot Love, the same lustiness, the feyness of the vocal.

    Beyond the voice, there’s plenty more to enjoy. The stuttering opening – the heart skipping a beat as you lock eyes across a crowded bar, the joyfulness of the arrangement, the sensation of tumbling downhill at speed. The middle eight, swearing off love. It’s a song with a lovely sense of descent and ascent; it’s built into Al Kooper’s organ, which sits in dialogue with so many of the lines and which sounds like it’s asking a repeated question with increasing urgency.

    I Want You was the last song recorded for Blonde On Blonde. Kooper was desperate to record it, to the point that he reportedly taught the other musicians to play it behind Dylan’s back. Dylan, of course, refused to touch the thing until they ended up recording it at 7am after a long night’s work. One more tease, one more seduction.

    As I listen to it now, it’s strange to think back to that car journey all those years ago. This music that made no sense to me; the ridiculous singing, the rinky-dinky arrangement. The apparent unseriousness of it all, the lightness – so unbecoming of what I’d expected from a figure of Dylan’s reputed importance. I got it all wrong, absolutely all of it. I Want You isn’t, ultimately, one of Dylan’s very best songs, but it’s the one I looped back to in an arc of one hundred and eighty degrees. It’s the one that laid the foundation stone for some sort of understanding with my father, that opened my eyes to a whole world of glorious music, and that showed me that Bob Dylan could do it all, even great Pop songs. It’s the song I still listen to all these years later, woven forever into the tapestry of my life.

    Sadly, Dad’s mate passed away last year. He’d been ill for a long time, but it was still a shock; he’d always seemed so rambunctiously full of life that it was impossible to imagine him slipping across to the other side. He’ll never talk about it, but I know it set Dad back a great deal – they’d been best mates for 60 years.

    In the final reckoning, perhaps that’s one more reason I hold this song so dear; because in the youth of Dylan’s voice I hear a fading echo of the youth of my parents, and of their world even as it slowly and inexorably erodes, one brick at a time. As the wanting fades and fades until all you’re really left asking for is just a little more time together.

    • Brilliant work.

      I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Dylan and this song in particular. There are times I can’t listen to anyone else and times I can’t be bothered with his arch air of mystery. A great wordsmith who doesn’t seem to say anything. Sometimes, Blonde On Blonde is the most amazing album ever recorded. Sometimes, I want to chuck it in the bin.

      • I’ve come to enjoy the words for what they are, the imagery, how they fit the music, and don’t worry about the meaning, although the meaning can also be clear and direct, usually a sneery put down like on Positively 4th Street.

        • I think that this is the best approach.

          You’re also quite right that the meaning is often pretty clear. For every Desolation Row there’s an Every Grain Of Sand, a John Wesley Harding, a Lay Lady Lay, a Most Of The Time, a Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright, a To Be Alone With You, etc, etc.

      • I know exactly what you mean.

        These days I prefer to experience Dylan as a Pop star, rather than a poet. Some of the words are completely gorgeous, some I suspect he just threw together because they sounded good. It doesn’t really matter either way; what matters is how they intersect with the music, and what that does to you. And pretending it’s all completely profound can be part of the fun too.

        • For me it was Visions of Johanna and “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” Is it poetry? Is it just a sting of words? Brilliant? Profound? Doggerel? Taking the piss? I still don’t know. That’s what makes it great.

  5. 58. The Fever (Aye Aye) – Death Grips

    Somewhere just over a decade ago we passed a tipping point without anyone even noticing. The internet was full of dark, scary corners, but its town square was still well lit and full of optimism. People still believed that technology would answer our problems; that the faster flow of information would lead to a better educated populace, that it was possible to change the world for the better online, that if we all just exchanged thoughts and feelings long and hard enough we could wring some sort of progress from our efforts.

    For an extended period covering most of my lifetime those expectations had largely been met. Every other year brought a new and indispensable gadget, a new free online service that seemed to make life better. Social media emerged to connect us all more closely than ever before. People forged new and deep friendships online, exchanged thoughts across oceans and went about their digital business in a largely unguarded fashion. We’d shed the early suspicion of online life without yet learning the painful lessons that lay ahead. We were basking in an imagined future that was never going to arrive.

    Somewhere in the half dozen years after the iPhone launched, that all began to change. Digital life accelerated, tribes formed, conspiracy theories proliferated, and the flow of information became faster and increasingly inescapable. The tone of discussion soured and curdled, we divided rather than unified. The internet seemed to accelerate, and that acceleration quickly burned away our Utopianism, leaving behind a scorched path of cynicism, anomie and irony. We were now internetting at a velocity our brains simply could not handle.

    Death Grips’ The Money Store is the optimal soundtrack to all of the above. It’s too ranty, too scattered, too twitchy, too memeable, too malevolent, too much. Far, far too much. It’s also to this day quite possibly the best experimental Hip Hop album ever made.

    Death Grips were one of the first online-native bands I ever encountered. They seemed to immediately and instinctively understand the creeping id that powers the internet from below, and they weren’t afraid to embrace it. Most of us encountered them for the first time via the video to Guillotine; a single shot of MC Ride sat in the passenger seat of a moving car, drowned in inexplicable static, twitching and ranting, but – and here’s the genius – still wearing his seatbelt. Discovering it for the first time felt like stumbling across the video from Ring – like that seatbelt was the only thing holding Ride back from crawling out of the screen and eating you. The clip ran wild on Tumblr.

    The Money Store picks up where Guillotine left off. Every song is packed with wild ideas and sounds, with crazy unexpected pivots and deranged, ranting vocals. It’s an unbelievably aggressive sound, but unlike most Hip Hop the aggression isn’t flowing from the lyrics, it’s flowing from literally everything else. And yet structurally most of the songs have a strong Pop gene – they’re full of hooks under all the fidgeting and distortion and that unsettling haunted Casio sound.

    Take Hustle Bones, which has the sonic properties of a night in Fabric on the worst drugs imaginable, but which is built around a playground chant that could comfortably fit into a Daphne & Celeste track. Or I’ve Seen Footage, which sounds like Salt & Pepa have been forced to record a soundtrack for Snow Crash solely using a Gameboy, It’s Pop music, but Pop music fed through a pixel grinder, and with a crazy appetite for antagonism.

    The Money Store is a violent, confrontational record, a vulgar display of power. It overloads you with stimulus, never lets you settle in, and the vocals are a jabbed finger right in the face. Perennially skinny and topless, with his bald head and big beard, MC Ride seemed to deliberately channel that singular mania native to the homeless population of LA. He’s a walking nightmare, an unexpected confrontation in the car park, jabbering and barking, largely indecipherable. You listen to this music and it’s the latter day internet; there’s too much of it, it’s coming too quickly, from too many angles, with too much irony. The chatter is deafening and now you regret ever logging on to 4Chan at all.

    The Money Store blew me away back in 2012. Properly blew me away. It somehow manages to be both ravey and industrial, impenetrable and catchy. In it, I can hear Daft Punk and Nine Inch Nails and all points in between. Exmilitary, the mixtape which preceded TMS, contained samples of Link Wray, Jane’s Addiction, Bad Brains, Black Flag and Charles Manson. The Money Store goes one better by sampling the grunts of the Williams sisters playing tennis.

    L.A Reid, the mogul who signed the band to Epic Records, compared them to Whitney Houston, in that they were an act that resonated at gut level. They responded by graffitiing his bathroom during the signing session and leaking the entirety of their second album online for free.

    Not only had I never heard music like this back in 2012, but it seemed to crystallise a long term suspicion I’d held regarding Hip Hop; that the sonic potential of the form is virtually limitless, that there’s nothing it can’t absorb and assimilate, and that not only are the lyrics often inessential, sometimes it’s outright better if you can barely understand them at all. The record seemed to open not just one door, but many.

    Others were quick to step through those doors. It’s impossible to listen to Kanye’s Yeezus, released the year after The Money Store, without sensing the abrasiveness of Death Grips. They’re an acknowledged influence on David Bowie’s Blackstar. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 100 Gecs cited them as a key inspiration. Tyler The Creator referred to the band as “my meth”, memorably claimed to have built a trampoline in 17 minutes while listening to them and admonished his followers not to drive while under the influence of this music. Bjork has been a frequent collaborator, and there’s at least a trace of The Money Store in virtually every major experimental Hip Hop record of the last 10 years.

    There is no album I can think of with which I’ve had a greater eureka moment than this one. Pure shock and awe; it profoundly changed the way I thought about this genre, and left me excited for what might come next. It did what all great music does – opened up new pathways for me to explore, introduced me to sounds I never even knew I could love. It’s also, and let’s not kid ourselves here, a big load of trashy old noise that repels 90% of people who will ever listen to it.

    While I generally prefer to take The Money Store as a whole, I’m going for The Fever because it epitomises everything I love about the record. From the opening, which sounds like a distress call from a doomed spacecraft, to the frequent and violent beat switches, to the sci fi stomp of the chorus, to Ride’s vocal. You can barely understand a goddam thing he’s saying here; the words “deviated septum” leap out, there’s clearly a “know what I’m saying” (frankly, no), a sudden shout of “fuck you” and a chorus I initially misheard as “I did da favour”, so badly does he slur it. It’s one of the most unhinged and in your face vocal performances I can think of, and I absolutely love it.

    The Fever is the first record I reach for whenever l want to hear something completely feral. It’s wired to the eyeballs with dark energy, completely excessive and totally redolent of those years where we seemed to inadvertently flip onto a darker timeline. I love it, because it reminds me that in the midst of chaos you can very often still find beauty and maybe even some truth, and that the world is full of surprises, some of them even good. For all our prognostications of light and shadow, the only two things you can truly say with any real certainty about the future are that it won’t be what we expect, and that it’ll arrive faster than scheduled. All the rest is noise.

  6. 57. Day In Verona – Tom Baxter

    There have been moments writing this list when I’ve had to stop and consider the actual gap between liking something and championing it artistically. It’s notable that in attempting to explain my choices I’ve frequently found myself arguing that a song is somehow important, or innovative, or clever – as if it’s somehow landed here on objective merit.

    Sometimes, though, there are songs that you would struggle to champion from an artistic perspective, but that resonate with you for other reasons nonetheless. Sometimes, there are songs that arrive at the precise optimal moment, from the optimal direction, and that make you feel something that outweighs any proper consideration of their actual merits. And sometimes, just sometimes, those are among your favourites of all.

    Day In Verona is a largely forgotten track by a largely forgotten artist. Tom Baxter was part of the fin de siècle wave of acoustic troubadours who took as a starting point Jeff Buckley’s good taste and pronounced sensitivity, sanded down his histrionic tendencies and appetite for the outré and arrived at a style that could comfortably soundtrack both your relationship breakdown and a pleasant evening in the local wine bar. Think Damien Rice, David Grey and Ray LaMontagne.

    Viewed through the lens of the critic’s eyepiece, Day In Verona is not a great song. Released in early 2004, it meanders along prettily on a gentle piano line, playing unrepentantly on the listener’s sentimentality via some fairly clunking lyrical couplets (“So here I sit, and I reminisce/Of that afternoon when our lips first kissed”). It’s insubstantial and a little trite, and yet it’s the song that calls to mind one of the single happiest days of my entire life. The day I fell in love with my wife.

    We’d met at work a few months earlier. My first day as a trainee lawyer, shiny and polished in my new suit and shoes, pretending to be interested in everything and everyone when the door opened and in walked the single most legitimately interesting person I would ever meet. I didn’t speak to her that day – I had no cause to – but as the weeks ticked by we began to find ourselves on the same nights out, began to chat to one another and began to feel that familiar tidal pull. That sixth sense that enables you to tell exactly where the other person is in the room, even without looking. Silently, unknowingly, an event horizon had been crossed. Somewhere along the way, we decided to take the day off and spend it together. Characteristically, she booked it as holiday, while I phoned in sick.

    Mark Twain famously said that there are two important days in a person’s life: the day they’re born and the day they find out why. That day off, spent together was, without question or hesitation, the day I found out why.

    We didn’t do anything particularly memorable. Lunch in town, a walk around the National Portrait Gallery, some drinks and then back up to my neck of the woods for dinner. But we talked. Properly alone for the first time, we had that conversation you have with someone when you’re clearing the decks to fall for them. Maybe you know you’re doing it, perhaps it only becomes apparent in retrospect, but the conversation invariably occurs. Flirtation is so often rooted in mystery and withholding, but love, or at least its prelude, is the opposite: you open the ledger to another human being and show them who you are. You drop your guard, and they drop theirs.

    In my case, that took some doing. I had concluded some time before that relationships were not my thing; too complicated, too messy. I was good at being single. I enjoyed being single. I was recently returned from several months travelling alone and I’d loved every minute of it; being away from everyone I loved, not having to worry about any of them. Meeting new people, going where the wind took me. I’d discovered I was suited to it all, and I was looking ahead to a life filled with more of the same.

    I don’t remember everything we did that day, but I will always – for the rest of my life – remember how it felt. That sense of the rest of the universe receding at pace, of looking at the person I was with and wondering how anyone could possibly be so magnificent. Waiting for another side of her to show itself, another side that never came, that’s still never materialised even 20 years on. Of making her laugh and realising that – really – that’s all I wanted to do with the rest of my life. That if I could just do that every day, I’d be truly happy. I knew I was in love with her before the sun set.

    In the early days of our dating, I made her mixtapes, because of course I did – what could possibly be more on brand. And the very first track on the very first CD I burned and passed to her? Day In Verona, because its first verse described so perfectly what we’d experienced together already.

    “We lost ourselves that afternoon
    You Juliet, and me Romeo
    In the shade from the sun
    Where that old apple tree hung
    Irresponsibly young, we let go
    We talked about our families
    Shared dreams, and insecurities
    Then from under our shells
    In a passionate swell
    Both our barriers fell
    And we let go
    Into the black of the evening
    Under the spread of the stars
    I was falling for you
    Like the sun did the moon
    I remember that day in Verona”

    To this day, I cannot listen to this song without feeling impossibly and inconveniently moved by it. It sends me right back to that day, to those hours spent together defining the very start of the rhythms that would become our shared life. To the odd moment that passed across both of us that evening, that moment that felt like the future brushing your sleeve – like we saw, just for a fraction of a second, everything we had ahead of us.

    A few weeks later, I introduced her to my parents, warning them in advance “this is the girl I’m going to marry”. Two years later, we were married, and Day In Verona was our first dance. An awkward, embarrassed first dance because how on earth do you dance to this, and because my wife hates to be the centre of attention. And it’s funny, because even though it probably should have been, this has never really been “our song” (that’s to come later), because it’s slow and sentimental, and our life together has been fast and joyous.

    Here I am, sat writing this, nearly 20 years later, acutely aware that virtually every good thing in my life has flowed directly from that day. That for all the times I’ve overthought it all and made life more complicated than it needed to be, on this occasion the hand of fate reached down and tapped me on the forehead with the lucky stick, shining a light on the correct path ahead that even an idiot like myself could not miss. I was going to say here that my plan to be alone would not have worked, that I wouldn’t have been happy. But that’s not really accurate; it’s probably fairer to say that, while I would have been happy, I would have missed out on true joy. Because this has been true joy.

    Day In Verona is not a great song. It’s a hallmark sentiment, with a fortune teller’s insight and a mannered delivery. But it’s a song that warms me every time I listen to it, because it so perfectly captures the sensation of that first day, and in doing so reminds me of my own enormous good fortune. That to have had even one such day in my life, one day in which the world spins a little different on its axis, one day in which your own good fortune seems so marked that you can practically taste it in the food and drink, marks me out as a lucky man indeed. And it reminds me of my wife and I when we were really still just kids, sat in the sunshine, chatting and finding each other, figuring it all out. Irresponsibly young, we let go.

  7. 56. Come Down To Us – Burial

    What does Burial mean to you?

    Moody, anomic sound collages, punctuated by distorted voices wailing like lost souls? Reverb and subliminal sound effects? Rain beating down on the night bus window as you wend your way home through a city of flickering hostility? Watching a stray dog bite a homeless man through the windows of Burger King? Loneliness?

    Burial’s music has typically been defined by absence. Absence of warmth, absence of light, and absence of the artist himself. Famously, he liked to test his early tunes by driving around South London late at night, checking that they had the necessary quality of “distance”. Perhaps as a consequence, his records typically sound like a lost soul navigating an unfriendly city (let’s be honest: London). He doesn’t give many interviews and hardly anyone knows what he looks like. Absence.

    This isn’t music to set the heart soaring, it’s music that allows its audience to share in a sense of dislocation. Music that owes as much to M.R James as to classic Rave. An elegy to warehouse parties and pirate radio, as well as an attempt to capture and pin down the haunted soul of modern urban life. In this music you hear echoes of the past, of something that’s maybe been lost, and those echoes add to that all important distance. The communality of coming up. The loneliness of coming down.

    Burial’s music takes the history of British dance music, all those late nights been and gone, and asks whether a dream’s a lie if it don’t come true, of if it’s something worse. As he recalled in interview around the time of Untrue’s release: “It sounds stupid, but it’s like they were trying to unite the whole UK, but they failed. So when I listen back to them I get kind of sad.” Perhaps the dream was simply untrue.

    Burial opened doors for electronic producers. The unquantized percussions, the eerie and yet beautiful soundscapes, the sense of space in his music in general. The way he mangled the human voice almost beyond recognition. He wasn’t the first to do these things (he certainly owes a debt to Todd Edwards), but he was the first to synthesise them into a cohesive whole, and to popularise the idea that this music could be used to evoke a wide range of emotions beyond the usual poles of chill and euphoria. And, in addition to becoming a Dubstep pioneer, that made him the patron saint of the lonely.

    I wasn’t lonely by the time the first Burial records emerged, but – like most people – I had been, and I remembered how it felt. In fact, I’ll never forget how it felt; that desperate fear that you’re adrift on an ocean of dissimilar souls, that your distress calls are destined to go unanswered forever. The sense that there was something out of kilter between yourself and the world, and the suspicion that it was probably your fault.

    I was lucky enough to find my people – they seemed to be waiting for me en masse in adulthood; in retrospect it seems ridiculous that they would ever not have been. But what does retrospect know, the scar remains. I can never resist running to the aid of anyone around me in whom I detect that same sense of isolation, even when it’s not really my business to do so.

    There are about a dozen Burial tracks I could have chosen here, because almost everything he’s ever made is great. Like his Rock equivalent, Joy Division, he released a spectacular debut album, a super accomplished second that developed and perfected the sound, and then left it there (a few EPs aside).

    In my head though, there’s a third album, and that third album is 2013’s Rival Dealer EP, from which Come Down To Us is taken. Three tracks, sharing a single concept, and I find it very hard to separate them, so cohesive are they in their themes and sounds. Rival Dealer is my favourite Burial release because he takes all that absence, all that loneliness, all that apparent nihilism, and flips it completely on its head. Because he gives back.

    The Rival Dealer EP is explicitly and by clear intent an anti-bullying project, designed to comfort the afflicted. “I put my heart into the new EP, I hope someone likes it. I wanted the tunes to be anti-bullying tunes that could maybe help someone to believe in themselves, to not be afraid, and to not give up, and to know that someone out there cares and is looking out for them. So it’s like an angel’s spell to protect them against the unkind people, the dark times, and the self-doubts.”

    While still retaining virtually all the usual features of Burial’s sound, it’s a warmer, more emotive record that hails from an entirely different place. A place where the party isn’t yet over, and moreover everyone is invited to it. Rival Dealer puts aside Burial’s normal themes, and opens his music up to the world. It trades distance for proximity.

    Looking back on it now, the EP contains the seeds of whatever I found to plug into in the music of Fred Again. Listen to Hiders: the ambient space, the uplifting keyboard riff, the field recordings and direct address vocals. The drop. It’s the root of it all, the idea that if this music could do not just euphoria but loneliness and dislocation, then it could also do catharsis. Fred simply took the next step of making that catharsis a communal event, thereby closing the circle to the dawn of Rave culture. The first time I saw Fred live he sampled Burial’s Archangel, dropping it casually into the mix, formalising the connection. Out of the darkness, into the light.

    Come Down To Us is the final track on Rival Dealers. It opens with a sampled “excuse me, I’m lost”, the voice of a woman so wracked with uncertainty that she doesn’t even sound entirely sure she’s lost at all. Over the next 13 minutes, the song provides warmth and comfort to anyone who finds themselves lost or seeking, via a series of apparently incongruous sources. Featured on the track are samples from at least two video games (Fable and EVE Online), dialogue from the films The Tree of Life and Flatliners, an interview with NASA scientist Melissa Dawson, and a speech by Lana Wachowski at the 2012 Human Rights Campaign.

    Perhaps most intriguingly, the main hook in the first section of Come Down To Us was created by pitch-shifting sections of Michael Jackson’s vocals from You Are Not Alone. The voice is so heavily treated that it’s possible to listen to it a hundred times without even realising the source. One of the most readily identifiable singers on the planet, anonymised and made human.

    The contrast between Jackson and Burial is an intriguing one. You Are Not Alone is a big Pop ballad. It centres the artist as the source of comfort (“I am here with you”) – perhaps inevitably for Jackson, a sort of Christ figure around whom everything is revolving. Come Down To Us is the precise opposite: Burial is nowhere seen but everywhere felt. There’s no ego at all, and the listener is the centre of the action. The song is a warm hug from a disembodied spirit.

    Come Down To Us retains Burial’s well-established melancholic low-pitched strings/pads, distorted sounds and otherworldly effects, but the soundbed is markedly different to everything he’d done previously. There is a lot of twinkle in this song, some moments that feel almost choral. There are not one, but two hooks. It feels like he’s taken the soundtrack to an 80s movie and Burialised it. It’s an unexpected left turn.

    When push comes to shove, Come Down… is my favourite Burial song. There are better, more accomplished, songs he’s produced, but this is the one for me. I love that he took all that darkness, all that edginess, and then converted it into light. That he had the instinct to reach out and actually try to help people who might feel alone. I’m blown away that he did so while expanding his signature style into such an interesting and fruitful new direction, that he took that gamble.

    Ultimately, I love this song because I am an absolute sucker for unexpected pathos, for those moments of human connection where no connection could have been expected. Music can do so much for us, but above all it can make us feel less alone. Come Down To Us is a record that has very clearly been made by someone who has felt a deep and abiding loneliness, to help others who may be feeling something similar. It’s a beautiful, uplifting piece of music that makes you feel anything is possible. It has heart, and it reminds us to be kind.

    In my unhappier days, when I was young and lost, I would sometimes try to tell myself the things I needed to hear. Little pep talks and self affirmations. It’s a habit that stuck, although nowadays it only happens when I go for a long run; when I find the necessary time and space to have a word with myself, charged by the endorphin surge. Come Down To Us – with its “you are not alone”, its “don’t be afraid”, its “let yourself go” – always calls to mind those internal conversations. Only Burial didn’t just deliver his pep talk to himself – he delivered it to the entire world, to anyone who needed to hear it… and that is a glorious thing.

    • And I thought it was about aliens. 😘

      Burial is an amazing artist. He is almost a genre to himself, in a league of his own. His two LPs are amongst the finest of this century. He has regularly released new music ever since 2007’s Untrue, including some incredibly long EPs (up to 30 minutes).Two of those added together equals more than one LP, as he did with Street Halo/Kindred. Tunes 2011-19 is a compilation full of jaw-dropping music.

      My favourite? I want to say Ashtray Wasp, one of his most uplifting, closest to the ying to his yang, Four Tet, but tomorrow, I’m sure I’ll feel differently.

      • His post-Untrue stuff is less influential, but over time I’ve found I enjoy it even more. Particularly the longer tracks.

        For my money he’s hit a particularly strong patch in the last 5 years. Chemz/Dolphinz, Antidawn, Nova/Moth, The Shock Power Of Love EP, even this year’s Boy Sent From Above – all excellent. That Kindred EP is brilliant too.

    • I love his work, but my favourite sounds (to me) like an outlier from his ‘standard’ sound template: Dolphinz, from one of his EP’s, a rather uplifting 10-minute rave-influenced number that never fails to lift my spirits.

  8. 55. Living In The World Today – GZA

    “When I was little, my father was famous He was the greatest samurai in the empire, and he was the Shogun’s decapitator…”

    So begins Liquid Swords, the fourth Wu Tang solo album and GZA’s sophomore effort. An unforgettable, sit you up straight in your seat sample to key off one of the greatest Hip Hop records of all time, and arguably the beginning of the end for the imperial phase of the finest Hip Hop group ever to sling a mic. As the old aphorism goes, if a man is tired of hearing of the work of the Shogun’s decapitator, he is tired of life.

    Between Enter The 36 Chambers (3 November 1993) and Liquid Swords (7 November 1995), the Wu Tang released a grand total of 6 all time classic albums in a shade over two years, all of them masterminded and produced by the RZA in an artistic hot streak to rival even Bob Dylan’s 18 months of madness in the mid-60s.Liquid Swords was the last in the run, and arguably the group’s artistic peak; while it can’t match the debut for sheer strength of tunes, it’s more cohesive, more of a single piece. More of an album, as opposed to a greatest hits set.

    Liquid Swords is defined by two key features: the determination of the RZA to construct a record that flowed as a whole in terms of themes and style, and the absolute fixation of Genius on the quality of the rhymes. Genius was 29 years old when Liquid Sword released; older than the rest of the clan, and viewed as both the group’s best lyricist and something of an elder statesman. He’d also been burned once already, his debut record (Words From The Genius) having ignominiously flopped in 1991, and that taste of defeat instilled in him a hunger to produce the best work possible, in recognition of the fact that he’d surely never get another shot like this.

    While the other Wu Tang records are filled with samples from martial arts movies, RZA took a different approach here, selecting one particular film from which to draw all the album’s skits. As Genius would later recall: “I think Rza made it a concept album. I don’t think it was until he scored it with all the other stuff. I think it was already almost there, but when he tied the theme an’ the skits an’ all that? It was even at the last minute. We were masterin’ the album, and he sent one o’ the assistants out, an’ he said ‘Go get me the Shogun Assassin‘. Last minute! He went an’ got that movie, an’ that’s where all those skits came out”.

    What was the concept? Very simple: GZA’s lyrics would take you on a tour of State Island (the “slums of Shaolin”), while Shogun Assassin (as movie that GZA had never actually seen before the sessions began) would overlay a secondary set of imagery, recasting scenes through the lens of feudal Japan. The same comparison alluded to on all the early Wu records, made more concrete and explicit: these movies weren’t just a fantasy land RZA daydreamed about, they formed a direct allegory for the world in which he was living.

    The result is some of the most memorable introductions to songs ever recorded to tape: there’s not a single Hip Hop fan of a certain age who can hear the words “Oh mad one, I see your trap” without adding “submit with honour to a duel with my son”, and the intro to 4th Chamber has been making me snigger for nearly 30 years – just how long will that samurai be stood waiting for the baby to choose between the sword (life) and the ball (death)? At what point does he give up and start gingerly rolling the ball towards the kid with his foot?

    Living In The World Today doesn’t have its own Shogun Assassin sample to kick things off, but it has a memorable opening nonetheless: GZA and Method Man giving a little pre-hype (“Lyrical sorcerers right here, rising to the cream of the crop son”) over a looped sample from Ann Sexton’s I’m His Wife (You’re Just A Friend) before that immortal “Yo, check it” that christens the track proper.

    Once underway, the song is an absolute feast for lexophiles; GZA takes a free association approach to wordplay that serves up one memorable line after another. The song is braggadocios throughout, but the lyrics are seemingly built just as much on how fun they are to say out loud as how deeply they wound an adversary. Try “criminal subliminal minded” or “draftin’ tracements, replacements in basements” on for size. The meaning just about hangs together, but this is a guy enjoying figuring out which words go together, what feels right tripping off the tongue. It’s a show of lyrical strength that places feel over meaning.

    The result is a flow that’s dense in conception but loose in delivery; from the glorious alliteration of “now who could ever say they heard of this/my motherfucking style is mad murderous” to Meth and GZA trading bars at the top of the second verse: “Now what you know about MCing/Yo, I know a lot/Well can you demonstrate sumthin for me/Hm, I’d rather not” to the acronym-play of “We only increase if everything is peace/Father you see King the police”.

    Liquid Swords is an album that loves words, and deploys them thoughtfully. I’ve said before that I generally prefer my Hip Hop illegible, but this is an exception: I’m hooked on what GZA does here, the explosion of ideas struggling for containment within each and every bar. The 11 similes and 13 metaphors he drops in the title track alone, the glorious use of slang – and what slang.

    If you living in the world today, you’ll be hearing the slang that the Wu Tang say. GZA stole the chorus from a group of kids he knew out in the Bronx, the RZA underpinned it with the horns from In The Hole by The Bar-Kays. It’s a playground chant, but it beautifully expresses one of the chore elements of the peak Wu experience; you had to really work hard to understand half of what they were on about. They had their own ever-evolving lexicon of mixed etymology, some of it ripped from the streets, some of it cooked up in the bedroom. “Steez”, “Brolic”, “Jake”, “rico” – a whole universe of terminology required to decipher the lyrics. Take Liquid Swords’ Cold World, to give but one example: proper understanding of the story being told requires an understanding of the following, among others: what a “tec” is (a gun), “callisthetic” (a concept in numerology), what “links” are (necklaces), “52 handblocks” (a form of self defence), and “357s and 44s” (bullet sizes). There was no glossary – you had to figure it out contextually or through word of mouth. I’ve taken English exams I worked less hard on than Wu Tang tracks.

    Living In The World Today is the stand-out on my favourite Wu album, amidst some stiff competition. It showcases everything that was best about the group: the sonic invention (continuing even here: Living In The World today is an unusual Wu track in that it’s possessed of a West Coast swing), the camaraderie, the showcasing of external passions (martial arts movies, chess), and the sheer joy of words and their myriad uses. Half the verses on Liquid Swords are about MCing style, about the styles and techniques that go into building lyrics, about the inability of peers to challenge GZA’s own technique. It’s the absolute peak of a certain school of MCing that would fade and die with the 90s.

    Liquid Swords is also the album that formally broke the Wu commercially. While everyone claims to have copped 36 Chambers on day one, the group were still a relatively niche concern as late as 1995, and a lot of the glow came later. Liquid Swords was the first Wu release on Geffen, a label that had no idea how to promote a Hip Hop record, and who therefore (not unreasonably) elected to promote the record as if it were by an independent Rock act – the world they knew. At the same time, MTV closed down “Yo! MTV Raps” a few weeks before the album’s launch date, meaning that the singles from Liquid Swords shared air time with No Doubt and Alanis Morrissette, instead of being ghettoised with other Rap music. The result was that the album, and by extension the group, reached a demographic that none of the band’s previous records had quite been able to hit.

    Living In The World Today is a song that really grabbed me as a teenager. I loved the euphoniousness of the wordplay, the weirdness of the sing-song chorus (what kind of a chorus contains the admonition “but only raise your hands if you’re sure”?), the Dick Tracy vibes of the horns and GZA’s singular flow. I listened to it endlessly over headphones as I mooched about the place, and – like all the Wu Tang releases of the time – it seemed to offer entrance to a whole other world. I was inspired by the way that they’d taken their daily reality and blown it up into something so much more grand and epic, because that’s the imperative that drives so much of teenage life, to figure out that springboard beyond the mundane. To make a statement to the world as glorious and pure as “my motherfucking style is mad murderous”. Plus – and really I could have dispensed with all of the foregoing and left it at this – Living In The World Today absolutely slaps. Did then, does now.

  9. 54. Busby Berkeley Dreams – The Magnetic Fields

    There are any number of problems attendant to compiling a list of, and then thinking at length about, your hundred favourite songs.

    The most obvious is buyer’s remorse: the sense that you’ll probably look back and fervently regret not placing, say, New York City Serenade higher. But there’s also that nagging, tingling feeling that you’ve entirely forgotten a favourite and – perhaps most glaringly of all – the creeping emergence during the exercise of certain clear musical peccadillos.

    I’ve harboured a few such peccadillos down the years – certain styles for which I am, quite self evidently, a sucker. High NRG but slightly knowing Pop songs, anything that fuses Post Rock and Death Metal, indecipherable Drill. I have loved them all without discernment.

    And the production of this list has identified one more to join the club: concept songs.
    Short, self contained tracks that take a single lyrical conceit and then build a pleasing but unfussy tune around them. They’re usually very pretty, adroitly executed, and fairly disposable. The kind of song that will prick up an ear but that is usually no one’s favourite.

    There have already been a couple of these on the list so far. Cookie Jar and Darling Be Home Soon certainly fit the bill. Had the exercise been extended for another 50 or so entries there would unquestionably have been space found for more: 1980s Horror Film by Wallows, The Night We Met by Lord Huron, Hey Self Defeater by Mark Mulcahy amongst the candidates.

    Busby Berkeley Dreams is one more such concept song, and can boast the unusual quality of hailing from an album containing pretty much nothing but tunes of a similar ilk.

    69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields is a weird, weird record. Its appeal was obvious and immediate: a lunatic has written 69 separate love songs, in varying musical styles, and arranged them over a triple album in service of that glaring titular single entendre. Who wouldn’t want to listen to that? Who wouldn’t be curious? Who wouldn’t savour the sheer economy of acquiring that many songs in a single transaction?

    I can remember getting it home, sticking it on and being nonplussed. There was, quite simply, too much content. Too many songs. I was a simple man, and it was still (just about) the 90s: I was used to consuming my music 11-13 tracks at a time, with some degree of pre-exercised quality control, and streaming’s era of over-abundance was not yet upon us. I bounced off 69 Love Songs and filed it away.

    But then a curious thing happened. Every couple of years I’d go back to the album, and every couple of years I’d discover another gem in amongst the chaos. One lovely little song after another, hidden in plain sight. All My Little Words, The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side, Yeah! Oh Yeah!, The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure. Each performed in a different style, yet still recognisably from the same source.

    Stephin Merritt has said that 69 Love Songs is not an album about love, it is an album about love songs. It took me a couple of decades to really digest what he meant by that, and I think it’s the reason I didn’t get the album at first. These are not romantic songs, not really. They’re about the tropes and tics of various types of love songs, about throwing a spotlight on those tropes and tics, and sometimes inverting them. I went in expecting to find heart, but the album is cold and cerebral. Far too self aware for sentiment. It’s an album of means, rather than ends.

    Busby Berkeley Dreams is head and shoulders my favourite of the 69 love songs. The stately piano introduction, the lush arrangement, the flicker of grief in Merritt’s laconic baritone vocal, the way the solo (which I’m assuming is recorder and xylophone) sidles in late in the game, seemingly from another room entirely. It’s beautifully crafted and perfectly executed.

    The song is, quite obviously, a Sondheim pastiche, and that genus places it at the absolute centre of what 69 Love Songs is all about: indeed, Merritt had originally conceived the entire project as a 100 track long, Sondheim-indebted theatrical revue for four drag queens before someone talked him down from that particular ledge. Busby Berkeley Dreams would have fit that original brief perfectly, with its low hum of barely conceived hysteria.

    The track’s central conceit is that it’s a profession of undying love from an ex partner who has clearly misplaced the plot: “no you can’t have a divorce…. I haven’t seen you in ages, but it’s not as bleak as it seems, we still dance on whirling stages in my Busby Berkeley dreams”. It sounds so pretty and graceful, yet conceals a danger.

    When I listen to Busby Berkeley Dreams I always think back to many years ago, to when a friend of my wife received a valentine’s card from her boyfriend. The boyfriend, clearly besotted, had attempted to eloquently express his love and devotion, but had done so via the truly eyebrow raising closing statement: “I’ll make sure you never get away”. I will never forget the utterly horrified reaction of the card’s recipient – needless to say, the relationship proved short lived from that point on; holed below the water line by one side’s appalling lack of linguistic facility.

    Busby Berkeley Dreams plays a couple of tricks on the listener, offers up a couple of dummies. First, that it sounds so much like a straight up love song in the chorus, but the verses denote faculties in profound disarray (“darling you may do your worst/although you’ll have to kill me first”). But then secondly in that solo near the end. It’s a sad, wistful sounding little solo, and it repositions the lyric; we’re not being invited to laugh at the narrator, or even to fear them. We’re being asked to pity them, another victim of love and the fantasy world mis-sold by love songs. It’s a sad tune – sadly beautiful.

    As someone who frequently finds himself unduly moved by music, and who needs little encouragement to extrapolate romance where little or no romance is present, Busby Berkeley Dreams is a warning. Do you think it’s dangerous to have Busby Berkeley dreams? Life isn’t poetry and it isn’t a ballad either – don’t let yourself be carried away by a pretty tune and a clever lyric.

    And yet, it’s also a song that sweeps you off your feet and waltzes you round the room, a song that dares you to believe that love isn’t truly dead until both sides have surrendered. That no matter how bad the situation, it’s not as bleak as it seems if the inner life still resists. That the outrageous beauty of whatever’s going on inside you can and will trump reality.

    Busby Berkeley Dreams wins my heart because it’s so full of tricks, because it’s so cleverly executed and duplicitous. Because it contains both the grandeur of high romance, and the desperate smallness of love gone sour. Because it strikes a note of sympathy for anyone who has ever let their heart dethrone their head, and lost the run of themselves into the bargain.

    • That album is wonderful from beginning to end. The whole of it is cleverly executed, duplicitous and full of tricks. There is something for everyone. In order to convince others of its greatness, you have to find the song that fits them best. I’ve managed to convince three people to buy it, and that’s three more than any other album I’ve been smitten by.

      • Cripes, it is zillion years since I listened to, and invested in, this album. Perhaps, like many, my point of entry was Peter Gabriel’s cover of The Book Of Love, which, rather than being very boring, struck me as one of the most magisterial statements around the uniquity of, person to person, love. I feel no desire to see if I still like, roughly, one third of the songs, reviled by a further third and open to uncertainty as to the others. I’m just glad it was made.

        • Glad it was made is a fitting epitaph to this album. Even at the moments where I didn’t really get it, I was still glad it existed. Objectively, an act of absolute lunacy though.

  10. 53. Wetsuit – The Vaccines

    “Remember what it was to be me. That is always the point”.

    Joan Didion reportedly kept the above words on a note beside her mirror. It was the bedrock of her personal philosophy, and the reason she wrote. Arguably, the reason anyone has ever written. Not a bad mission statement.

    You can argue that there is no core “me” to remember, that our identities are transitory and that the self is created, rather than discovered. But that’s to miss the point, because there’s a feeling you have when you’re young – a connectedness to the world and to life – that can slip away as you get older, as duty and work and the routine conspire to distract. A feeling of lightness on one’s feet, of operating at an energy level higher than that of one’s immediate surroundings. A feeling that’s worth putting in your heart, remembering and returning to whenever the opportunity presents itself.

    When I was a kid, I made myself a solemn promise that I would never forget that feeling. That some small part of me would remain forever youthful, even as the rest of me aged out. I pledged myself to a Peter Pan complex, to never becoming so adult that I would cease to remember, cease to connect. To never become insensate to the intrinsic magic of the universe, the great chemical rush of simply being here.

    Now, obviously, life has other ideas. Life is full of work, and chores, and adult considerations, and picking out home furnishings and wondering if they’ll finally get your tax code right this year. And there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s all as it should be. But every now and then an opportunity arises to realign with that original source; maybe it’s late at night in some bar with people you’ve just met, or making up a stupid game at home with your family. Maybe it’s making the entire table laugh, or singing, or dancing, or running as fast as you can, or simply howling at the moon. Maybe it’s meeting a person who lights you up, or looking at the people you love and beholding clearly the absolute glory of them. When those moments arrive, you have to drop all of it – all of the detritus of adulthood – and follow the white rabbit.

    When I think of all of the above, of the great liberation of those small moments, Wetsuit is always the song that springs to mind. It’s the track we play in the car every year as we arrive on the traditional family excursion to Cornwall – stuck on the stereo as the sea hoves into view, a week or so of running, surfing, board games, food and arguments ahead of us. Chaos and laughter with my entire extended family. And it’s a track that seems precision tooled for precisely such moments.

    Wetsuit is a song that feels like it was written to sum up the feeling of the first day of a holiday. Put a wetsuit on. Put a t-shirt on. Slow it down. Grow your hair out long. All that water imagery. When I listen to it, I’m transported to Polzeath bay, floating on my board, late afternoon. Sat waiting in between sets, watching the coloured sails of the toppers and lasers meandering their way to and from Rock beach. Glancing across and seeing the spray off the top of a wave, droplets slowing down as they hit the air, catching the light of the fading sun and dancing across their arc. Arms tired and fingertips wrinkled, nowhere to be but here and now.

    But it’s only accidentally a holiday song, because Wetsuit is really about ageing. About being caught somewhere between young and older, and catching sight of the latter while still having at least one foot firmly in the former. About fighting a rising tide and not letting go of where you started. About the fear that you’ll one day fail to remember what it was to be you. It’s a song that reminds us, amidst the hurley burley of life, to stop and look around once in a while, to take a moment to reconnect to the essence. Those moments are more common on holidays, but they can happen any day, any time if you just look for them.

    I’m getting older now. It’s probably why I’m writing all of this down, to capture something of my own intrinsic spirit while I’m still in close contact with it. I don’t see the passage of time so much in myself, either because I’ve thus far been tapped only lightly with that particular stick or because you don’t notice erosion so much when you’re its host.

    I do see it in others though. In friends I’ve not seen in a while, in the kids who live in the streets around us. In my parents and their pals. And that used to horrify me, because it’s objectively horrifying that we’re given this incredible gift that we know will eventually be taken back from us. But there’s also something comforting about it too, because life wouldn’t be quite so beautiful if it wasn’t so transitory. If it wasn’t on loan.

    Time gets harder to outrun, but maybe that’s OK, because it was never meant to be outrun. I’ve taken a lot of lessons from surfing, the vast majority of which fall squarely into the inglorious category of bumper sticker wisdom, but one of the most important of them all was that life isn’t there to be wrestled into submission, it’s something you just try your best to flow across the top of. Imagine that your path is preordained, and all that’s left for you to do is to decide how you’ll choose to walk it. So grow old, but do it your own way.

    So I listen to Wetsuit, and I think of the past and future. Of that promise to self I made as a kid, and how it resonates all the way up to the present and beyond. Of running across Cornish beaches with my brothers as kids and then later adults, with nothing much changed between us. Of my parents out in the sea, old and young at once. Of my kids beating the ceiling of the car and yelling along at the tops of their lungs: PUT A WETSUIT ON, CMON CMON. Of that spray dancing on the lip of the wave. I think of shedding baggage, of reducing it all down to the essence of who I was, am and always will be. Of a thousand tiny moments of true self, like pearls on a string, connecting one end of my life to the other.

    I listen to this song, and I think of all of that, and – inevitably – I remember what it was to be me. And that is glorious.

    • Great work again.

      I’ve been reflecting on my past and future today. My best friend when I was aged 17-23 had his funeral today. We had a whale of a time, literally light on our feet. We loved dancing. His younger sister delivered the eulogy and talked about him dancing to EWF, Chic and Little Feat, bands I love to dance to go this day (she forgot Talking Heads). Men who danced back then we’re popular.with the ladies. We were irresponsible, loved to score points with sarcasm or general taking the piss and drank far, far too much.

      In the end, I had to break away. I had too responsible a job that took up too many of my waking hours. Before the European working time directive, a working week of well over a hundred hours was the norm. It took me ten more years to properly be in control of the alcohol.

      I hadn’t been in touch for decades. He died of alcohol related lived disease. I attended the funeral with my mum, who was fond of him. Few others were there. They were barely recognisable to me because they had aged so much. Internally, I was a youth again, going to see Blade Runner on the big screen and being moved by Roy Batty’s closing soliloquy.

      I was shown photographs of me at that age. Time’s a whore as Bowie said. Hold your mad hands.

    • These musings tie in a little bit with something I’ve noticed in my own life. I suspect I have maybe ten years on you, and I too went through that period of having to learn to behave like an adult and do serious adult business. I thought I was a proper grown up with responsibilities and obligations. But in the last decade I’ve come to care much less about them. It’s not that I don’t do those things anymore, at least not while there’s still a mortgage to pay off, but I’m nowhere near as bothered by them now, and they trip lightly off my shoulders. The desires and plans I had for career ambitions in my twenties and thirties don’t burn anywhere near as bright, and I’m not fussed about having a bigger and better house or a new car. In terms of things like political views or preferred ways of spending leisure time, I’m much closer to how I was at nineteen than at twenty nine. So far, so mid-life crisis, but I prefer to think of it as a return to my core self, the KD that was always there but temporarily hidden under a (frankly unconvincing) patina of maturity.

      I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

      • A few years ago I was sent on a “future leaders” type training course at work. Psychological profiling, sit downs with CEOs, all that sort of jazz. As part of the course we had extensive sessions with this guy whose philosophy was that you need to be “on purpose” at work in order to succeed. I.e. what you do for work needs to be your purpose.

        I remember saying to him over dinner that, much as I enjoy my work, I couldn’t begin to imagine it being my purpose. My purpose is people: my wife, my kids, my family and friends. Trying to look after them and sharing joy together. If work was my purpose, they wouldn’t need to pay me to keep showing up. He didn’t care for that assessment, but it’s the truth.

        Work is something you do to make a bit of money, pass the time and maybe learn a thing or two. It should adorn your life, not be your life, and it should never, under any circumstances become your identity, because that way lies madness.

        I’ve always felt that the goal of adulthood is to emerge with that bit of my childhood self intact. To get to the end and still be recognisably me. I think that’s probably where you’re heading too; I don’t want to be one of these guys (and it’s very often guys) who retires and doesn’t know he is anymore. And as I go further along it becomes apparent that nothing I’ve ever done at work, no money I’ve ever earned, can lay a glove on the most average day in my house, with the people I love, just doing everyday shit. Joy is in the little things, and joy is my purpose. There’s absolutely nothing I can buy that comes close.

        You keep doing you mate, it all sounds grand to me.

  11. 52. Wild For Da Night – Rampage

    There has always been something quite magical about a late night. Whether it’s in company, when the conversation invariably seems to range wider and deeper than during regular business hours, or where flying solo, the liminal period after midnight is possessed of a special quality, a different texture, a sense that a more precious coin is being spent. I’ve had many of my greatest adventures in those hours, many of the times where I’ve felt most completely and comprehensively myself, often as I’ve set off in good company to coax the night into revealing whatever mischief it may be harbouring.

    As much as I’ve enjoyed those excursions, there’s also something to be said for a late night of doing not much at all. Those evenings at home where you stay up unplanned because the book has become too good to put down, or because an intriguing movie has just started, or just because you want a little extra time and space to sit and think. With the right body clock, you can do a good deal of quality thinking after midnight, and the sense of having won back a little ground from a hectic world is usually delicious. The bill will, of course, invariably fall due the following morning, but that’s a tomorrow problem.

    I’ve made some amazing discoveries in those wee small hours. I finished reading Heart of Darkness for the first time very late at night, and sat on the end of my bed, quite unsure what the appropriate next steps might be – when you’ve concluded a long, hard stare into the abyss going to bed feels a little jejune. I stumbled into the opening minutes of Terrence Malick’s immortal Badlands, and froze, completely transfixed for the next 90 minutes, commencing a love affair that persists to this day. And, perhaps most gloriously of all, I chanced, late one evening in the 90s, upon the video for Rampage’s Wild For Da Night. I don’t remember which channel it was on (let’s be honest though, it’s Hip Hop, it’ll have been C4), or what the program showing it was called. But I do remember how it felt.

    Wild For Da Night is a party tune. A hype track. It’s built around a looped sample of Zulema’s American Fruit, African Roots, a bleak and stately piano line, but everything else about it is dayglo and moving fast. From the goofball spoken word intros (the Slick Rick inspired “It’s I sire, Richard of Flatbush” and then a riff on The Warriors) it accelerates almost immediately: 1 time, 2 time, 3 time, 4 time and then the unmistakeable Busta Rhymes delivering one of the all time great calls to the dancefloor:

    “All my real live n****s throw your hands up
    All my real live bitches throw your hands up
    All my hustler muthafuckas throw your hands up
    All my bigger ass n****s throw your hands up”

    Busta was a known quantity by this point. I’d grown up with him via Tribe Called Quest and that immortal, unforgettable verse on Scenario. His solo career was already up and running, and it was increasingly impossible to dissociate him from Hype Williams’ fisheye lens. Busta was a box of tricks, a guarantee of a good time. But this still made me laugh out loud – the sheer contrast between the urgency of the track’s opening and the line “All my bigger ass n*****s throw your hands up”. Even the little “ah” he gives after he says it. Busta was James Brown meets Dr Seuss meets the Cheshire Cat. He was big, big energy and this was his moment.

    Let’s go back to that piano. If you’ve never heard American Fruit, African Roots then I strongly suggest taking the necessary five minutes to listen to it; a lugubrious, mournful retreading of the historic African American experience, it’s beautifully performed and incredibly moving. It also gives absolutely no sense that any element of it is ripe to be repurposed as a party banger. Therein lies the genius – Wild For Da Night trades on that contrast, the desolation of the piano loop offset against Busta’s vocals, which are all e-numbers and bouncy castles. All my muthafuckas in the place to be, if you feel right throw your hands up because we wild for da night. The way he tees up the line “wild for da night” with all that energy and then delivers it deadpan. Tension and release, tension and release, sadness and joy.

    The song’s message is devastatingly simple: let’s go fucking mental. Rampage’s verses are nothing to write home about – he’d been signed because he was Busta’s cousin and his career didn’t ultimately go anywhere special – but it really doesn’t matter, because the chorus is solid gold. Throw your hands in the air if you wanna fight, feel right, cuz you know we’re getting Wild For Da Night. I was sat on my own at about two in the morning listening to that and it made me want to smash furniture. It didn’t hurt either that the video is a thing of genius: all the big puffa jackets, the fingers in the camera, the stairwell party, the way they all freeze on the chorus and Busta pulling his carton character come to life schtick.

    UItimately, my love for Wild For Da Night doesn’t run a great deal deeper than the above, and nor does it need to. There will always be a place in my heart for songs that look the audience up and down and then ask the immortal question: what if we all just go batshit, here and now, and worry about the mess later? And that goes double when it’s Busta asking the question – there was a spell right around this time when he was Hip Hop’s authentic good time. He had the mic credentials and the legacy, but he was making incredible party records and playing brilliant live shows.

    A few months after discovering Wild For Da Night in the wee small hours I got the chance to experience one of those brilliant live shows. Notting Hill Carnival, 1997. Where my first contact with the track had been resolutely solo and left me with nowhere to put all the energy I’d just received, this was the precise opposite. A couple of thousand people going nuts in West London, screaming the lyrics, bouncing along as Busta lead proceedings in his gigantic red combats. In the space of about 10 minutes, he played Scenario, Wild For Da Night and Woo Ha and the effect was utterly electric. One of the best live shows I’ve ever seen, because – ultimately – if you play brilliant music telling people purely and directly to have a really good time, they’ll invariably follow that suggestion.

    I still love a late night, but it’s a long time since I’ve spent one watching linear TV in the hope of uncovering something brilliant. I’m probably missing out – I certainly miss that “it’s Sunday night and I have a load of work to do tomorrow but fuck it, True Romance just started and there’s no way I’m switching it off” feeling. I guess there are easier, less time consuming ways to discover brilliant new music now, and that’s a good thing. But very little will ever compare to stumbling across this track out of nowhere way past bedtime, and then a comparatively short time later standing in that crowd – that sea of colliding bodies, driven into a frenzy by music – and howling along to that chorus. Just as very little will ever compare to following that late night magic all the way down the line.

  13. 51. Glory Box – Portishead, 50. Hell Is Round The Corner – Tricky

    The year is 1995, it’s the afterparty for the Mercury Prize, and a dispute has broken out between two prominent musicians of the day.

    On the one side is Geoff Barrow, currently of Portishead, formerly Massive Attack’s tea boy, and riding high as one of the masterminds behind Dummy, an album that has fully colonised the nation’s polite dinner parties and clothes shops. On the other is Tricky, a former associate member of Massive Attack, who has risen to mainstream prominence off the back of his debut record. Both albums were nominated for the evening’s award, with Portishead taking home the gong. But that’s not what Barrow and Tricky are arguing about. They’re arguing about a short sample from an Isaac Hayes record released a quarter of a century earlier.

    The sample is lifted from Ike’s Rap II off the album Black Moses. It’s only a few seconds long, but it’s highly distinctive; strings gliding smoothly over a skipping bassline. Arguably, it owes a conceptual debt to 1969’s Daydream by The Wallace Collection, but it’s so beautifully executed and singular sounding as to make any accusation of magpieism redundant. Talent borrows, genius steals, after all. Which is convenient for Tricky and Barrow, because both of them have recently borrowed/stolen a near identical sample of Ike’s Rap II to underpin their own music. And that music is now wildly successful. So they’re arguing about whose demo came first, whose good idea all of this was originally.

    To this day, I find it impossible to think of Glory Box without thinking of Hell Is Round The Corner, and vice versa. The two songs are both built on that Ike’s Rap sample. They both notionally hail from the same nascent Bristolian “scene” (the appallingly named Trip Hop). They both address notions of femininity and they share a languid, loping pace. Consequently, they’re regularly filed alongside one another, even though – once you look beyond those surface details – they’re fundamentally the fruits of two different trees.

    Let’s take Glory Box first, because Glory Box came first – or at least it had the earlier release date. Glory Box is, of course, one of those Songs That We Can No Longer Hear. Like Everybody Hurts, or Somewhere Over The Rainbow, it’s tainted by utter ubiquity: you don’t have to ever listen to it because you’ve heard it everywhere and it’s there in your atoms, part of you. Consequently you can never experience it without bringing baggage – all the signifiers that cloud the experience once you’ve absorbed a song fully and spat out the bones. But let’s pick over those bones regardless.

    The song is blessed with one of the all time great fade ins, rolling into town like a deep mist coming off the ocean. It’s immediately sultry and beguiling, immediately feminine in character. The song’s title leads on this front: a “glory box” is an Australian term for an item of furniture wherein women would store clothes and other items in preparation for marriage. In preparation for becoming, what must have seemed at the time, a woman in full. And it contains, buried within, a hint of menace, of supressed rage.

    Beth Gibbons has said in interview that Glory Box is a song about men giving women a reason to love them. It’s about demanding more: don’t reduce me, live up to your end of our bargain. If every song on Portishead’s Dummy is a potential Bond theme in an alternative universe, Glory Box is written from the perspective of the discarded Bond girl: “I’m so tired of playing, playing with this bow and arrow”. Weary and furious, it’s a plea for equality (“move over and give us some room”- the line Beth Gibbons would later identify as the core of the song), and for men to consider the feminine experience (“just take a little look from our side when you can/sew a little tenderness, no matter if you cry”). The song’s video sees everyone but the band in drag.

    There’s an iciness to Glory Box, right from the off. The production is so clear it’s almost crystalline, and so clever that you can’t discern what’s a sample and what’s being played by the band themselves. Like the rest of Dummy it’s blessed with a tremendous sense of remove, the property which lead to its widespread (and near fatal) adoption as high end background music. In 1994, it sounded simultaneously drawn from the past and beamed from the future. A citizen of nowhere and no time, cold and lonely. And sitting atop that loneliness, that exquisite desolation, is Beth Gibbons.

    Lots of people have made fabulous, slow motion electronic records with artfully chosen samples and clever guitar work. Lots of those albums have been blessed with the same vital property of remove. And yet, Beth Gibbons is what takes Dummy and elevates it to the truly extraordinary, because her vocal is so oppositional: it works with the music, but also against it. Where the production is thick and luscious, her voice is thin and tremulous; there’s a fragility here, but always the sense that it’s masking great power. She brings the humanity, she brings the warmth, and her performance on Glory Box is extraordinary.

    Very clearly, Gibbons is channelling Eartha Kitt here, that sense of hyper-exaggerated femininity. There’s a purr to her voice: just listen to that opening “I’ve been a temptress too long”. But what’s striking is the way the vocal repeatedly flips throughout the song. For the chorus, the purr has been put away and we get the everywoman voice – the games are over, it’s time for sincerity “Give me a reason to love you/Give me a reason to be a woman”. It’s soaring, anthemic stuff, underpinned by Adrian Utley’s preposterously dramatic, fuzzed out guitar. And then on to the bridge: the extra edge she adds to “Take a little look from our side when you can”, the hint of menace. The way her voice practically evaporates entirely at the end of the line “sew a little tenderness.” There’s a hell of a lot going on in that vocal, a cauldron of emotions, hopes and wishes. It’s a five minute Ibsen play delivered by a lone actress. And at its core is the same question that underpins Lauryn Hill’s Ex-Factor, the same question that has been underpinning songs and poems and novels since women have first held a pen: tell me who I have to be to get some reciprocity.

    For all the bells and whistles of the production, Glory Box is reassuringly familiar, classic songwriting. It has a great chorus, a great bridge. A superb guitar solo. It’s a torch song, in the long tradition of torch songs; a song about love gone bad. It’s unusual in that it fully centres the woman, rather than revolving around the man or the absence thereof, but it’s a form of writing that would be instantly recognisable to and understood by (say) Aretha Franklin. It’s not the best song on Dummy (for that you’re probably looking at Pedestal or Sour Times), but it’s the most resonant, because there’s a traditionalism behind it. And that observation is as good a place as any to switch our attention to Hell Is Round The Corner.

    If Glory Box chronicles the war between the sexes and invites men to take a look over the fence from time to time, Hell Is Round The Corner proposes dissolving the fence entirely and communalising the garden. It’s a busy record: very warm, full of difficult humanity. It’s about men and women, but it’s concerned with sameness and osmosis, rather than otherness and barriers. It takes the Isaac Hayes sample, promotes the bass over the strings and builds around it a storm of wailing voices and record crackle. Forget Trip Hop, it’s a Soul tune to Glory Box’s Jazz. Hell Is Round The Corner is like a human mouth: throughout, you can audibly hear the vocalists exhaling, hear the spit leaving their lips. Where Glory Box is crystalline, this song is thoroughly moist.

    Hell Is Round The Corner, like the rest of Maxinquaye, is Tricky attempting to grapple with the death of his mother, who had died, either by suicide or due to epilepsy, when he was four years old. The album is named in tribute to Maxine Quaye, but it’s also Tricky trying to understand Maxine Quaye, and in some sense to see the world through her eyes. Tricky wrote his early lyrics directly from the female perspective, channelling his departed mother, seeking commune with his life’s great departed anchor presence. “My first ever lyric on a song was “your eyes resemble mine, you’ll see as no other can”. I didn’t have any kids then.. so what am I talking about? Who am I talking about? My mother… used to write poetry, but in here time she couldn’t have done anything with that, there wasn’t any opportunity. It’s almost like she killed herself to give me the opportunity, my lyrics. I can never understand why I write as female. I think I’ve got my Mum’s talent, I’m her vehicle. So I need a woman to sing that”. The woman in question was Martina Topley Bird, a Bristolian teenager who Tricky had discovered sitting on a wall near his house, singing to herself.

    Unlike the slow build of Glory Box, Hell Is Round The Corner goes 0 to 60. There’s a heartbeat, an ascending tone, a brief wail from Topley Bird, unidentifiable as either pleasure or pain, and then straight in to Tricky’s slurred, feline, spoken word vocal.

    It’s a vocal like no other, really; clearly lifting from the Rap tradition, but with a lexicon entirely outside Hip Hop and possessed of a passivity of role unthinkable in that genre. The song’s chorus – “Reduce me/Seduce me/Dress me up in Stussy” – is one of the most extraordinary lyrical moments of the 90s: it’s a Frank Ocean line 20 years ahead of its time. As a teenager, the sight of Tricky in full make up and devil horns singing those words was completely electric, completely transgressive. It seemed to take every aspect of masculinity and flip it squarely on its head. Reduce me? Seduce me? Dress me up? Here and now, in the middle of Britpop?

    Hell Is Round The Corner is full of similarly arresting couplets, words that feel brilliant to align out loud, that fairly drip from the tongue. “I stand firm for our soil/lick a rock on foil”. “I seem to need a reference to get residence/a reference to your preference to say”. “My brain thinks bomb-like/so I listen he’s a calm type”. “We’re hungry, beware of our appetite/distant drums bring the news of a kill tonight”. They’re opaque but evocative, they play the poet’s game of showing you nothing but telling you everything. Just try saying out loud: “Mr Quaye lies in the crevice/and watches from the precipice/imperial passage” – absolute dynamite.

    The song is full of glorious little details, little touches you don’t notice the first few plays. The way Tricky quietly states the line “and as I grow” before he actually sings it, like he’s forgotten what he’s about to say and needs to remind himself. The way the vocals blend seamlessly back and forth between male and female performer, the duet performed as a dance, bodies entwined. The distorted moans which punctuate the latter half and play on the fade out, created by slowing down a vibrato vocal sample. Topley Bird’s cry behind the line “my brain thinks bomb-like”. The way the whole song seems to stutter on the repeated line “until then, you have to live with yourself”.

    Hell Is Round The Corner is a deeply sensuous song, perhaps one of the most sensuous ever recorded by a male artist, and that’s reflected in its apparent formlessness. There’s far less concrete structure here: lyrics are sometimes repeated, but there’s no real chorus, there are no solos. Just a melange of sounds and textures, of swirling imagery and voices. Like Glory Box, it isn’t the best song off its host album (see: Brand New You’re Retro) but it’s the most iconic, and it remains Tricky’s calling card.

    Glory Box and Hell Is Round The Corner are, ultimately, the final glorious flowering of the seeds laid by Massive Attack’s Blue Lines. They both flow from common sources, and yet yield disparate results. Where the former is a song to make you think, the latter is a song to make you feel. Where Glory Box is the pain of romantic love, Hell Is Round The Corner is the lament of the lost child. Where Ike’s Rap II is a clearly masculine song (“treat me good mama/I’m so tired of being treated so bad”) and Glory Box is feminine, Hell Is Round The Corner is poised somewhere and nowhere between the two, a neither and both effort.

    Although both songs are glorious, Hell Is Round The Corner is the one that remains most profoundly part of the bloodstream. It released at a moment when I was grappling with the expectations and limitations of masculinity, and looking for other roads less travelled. When I was coming to understand that I don’t actually have a masculine side and a feminine side, I just have me, and if it’s part of me then it must be good. That I could unapologetically encompass all my different aspects, even where they seemed to conflict. I never looked at Tricky and thought “I could be that”, any more than I watched David McAlmont perform Yes on Jools Holland and thought that I could ever be so spectacularly exotic-seeming and self-actualised. But the path Tricky forged helped to open up the space I needed to stop and think, and granted me a little more latitude to be my own, slightly less striking, brand of different. Which is precisely what artists are meant to do for us.

    Glory Box and Hell Is Round The Corner pose questions with which the world is still grappling. Would men and women live together more comfortably if we recognise the distinctions between the two classes, or seek to erase them? Do we find peace via division or absorption? Issues over which people still have incredibly strong views, issues which sometimes go right to the heart of our identities. To me, the two songs will always be indivisible, because together they speak to that ongoing struggle, and speak to it in such style.

    Ultimately, the argument between Tricky and Barrows over which demo came first is pointless. There’s no copying of homework here, no pinching of a good idea. The original sample is great, but the two songs spin it off into such radically different universes, with such radically disparate perspectives, that what we’re seeing isn’t a lack of originality, but the precise opposite.

    A few years ago my Father suggested to me that men will never really be able to write women (or presumably vice versa). I found that suggestion impossible then, and I find it impossible now; the notion that the inner life of (say) Anna Karenina lacks realism, or that there is some deficiency in Daniel Deronda or Tess Durbeyfield. The whole glory of art is that it enables us to stand in the shoes of another, to see the world as they do, just for a moment. To experience the other. That an artist can put themselves in those shoes and take you with them into the bargain. These two songs, born twinned at the hip, helped to sell me as a teenager on that concept; that the very best music might take me somewhere I otherwise would never otherwise have gone. Whether via a glance over the fence or by hopping it entirely. Imperial passage.

    • Bravo! I love both albums and both these tracks (and Black Moses). I still listen to them regularly. Glory Box is definitely in my top 100 alongside a different Maxinquaye track. Tricky is a superb artist, always against the grain. Portishead struggled to match Dummy but Beth Gibbons is a marvel, as her latest album proves.

      • Ooh – which Maxinquaye track? Overcome?

        Slightly insanely, they released six singles from Maxinquaye and they’re the opening six tracks. Not sure I’ve seen that anywhere else.

        I actually really like a lot of the stuff Tricky went on to do. PMT is super underrated (love Makes Me Wanna Die and Christian Sands), and he still pops up now and then with something good. That said, this might be my favourite post-Maxinquaye track;

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