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  1. 70. Hot Love – T.Rex

    It began, as I’m sure so many great musical journeys have, with Jive Bunny.

    Christmas morning, 1989. Children up and down the land awoke in the traditional frenzy, tore into their stockings and were confronted (for there really is no other appropriate word) by a copy of the Jive Bunny album. Why our parents collectively decided that this was to be the must have Christmas gift of 1989, I cannot say. Perhaps the combination of a harmless looking cartoon rabbit with the opportunity to “educate” one’s progeny on the music of one’s own youth proved simply too compelling to resist. Regardless, the outcome was thousands upon thousands of impressionable kids finding themselves aurally ravaged by some of the worst mixing ever to emerge from human hand.

    Not that we were too bothered at the time. I spent much of that day on headphones, listening to “classics” such as Swing The Mood and That’s What I Like. The records, taken in their sum, were clumsy and ill-advised, but they were also an opportunity to hear music by acts that might not otherwise have reached my ears: Glenn Miller, Little Richard, Dion, The Surfaris, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, and many more. Ok, you were generally only getting about 10 seconds of each song before a clodhopping leap to the next, but still: something of an education.

    In amongst the melee there was one tune that properly grabbed my attention and fired my imagination. The short snippet of Get It On by T.Rex, featured on the unimaginatively entitled Do You Wanna Rock, in between Gary Glitter and The Sweet, was unlike anything I’d ever heard. That filthy guitar riff, the obvious sexuality of the lyric and – most of all – the curled lip of a vocal. I was fascinated: what sort of people could produce music that sounded so exotic and forbidden? So menacing? So nakedly, wantonly desirous? My mind raced, and quickly settled on a probable mental image of the responsible parties: T.Rex, a band dressed in biker jackets, fronted by a mean looking guy with slicked back hair, a toothpick in his mouth and regulation black sunglasses. Dangerous, dangerous dudes.

    About six months later I managed to actually track down a real life photograph of T.Rex, and almost fell off my chair in shock. No leather jackets, no shades. No dangerous dudes. Just the prettiest looking man I’d ever seen, swathed in a great halo of curls, wrapped in feather boas and silk, pouting shamelessly. Whither the razor blade rockabillies of my mind’s eye? And who knew you could dress like this in public?

    From that confounding moment on, I loved Marc Bolan. Loved the records. Loved the look and his seemingly unshakeable confidence. Loved the discovery that this tiny bopping pop elf had apparently ruled the country for a glorious 18 months before I’d been born. By Christmas 1990 I’d moved on from Jive Bunny – in my stocking that year was a compilation entitled Bolan Boogie, which introduced me to one pop gem after another: Raw Ramp, Jeepster, Beltane Walk, Jewel, Ride A White Swan and – last on the cassette tape but first in my heart – Hot Love.

    There was virtually nothing about T.Rex that I didn’t immediately enjoy. I loved how effete some of the music sounded; I’d come in the door expecting machismo, but this was so much better and more interesting. I enjoyed the simplicity of the song structures, which lent them a childlike joy. Bolan’s strange way with words, which chimed with some peculiar inner sensibility I was already in the process of uncovering within myself (“Invaders from the true worlds” – what a fabulous line that is, a story waiting to be told). The way he sang about dragons and wizards and misty mountaintops, but without the need for any surrounding bombast or countervailing physicality.

    In particular, I was fascinated by Bolan’s voice. I’d never heard anyone sing like that, and still never have. The odd phrasings, the way he swings his tone in an instant from purring and contented cat to serpentine menace. The curious and seemingly feminine vibration in his vocals. The sheer bravery that must have been required to sing that way in public, how exposing it must have been. The way he borrowed and stole and made it all his own. In a childhood spent seeking out Artful Dodger figures, he felt perhaps the most artful of them all.

    Bolan was an emissary for an idea with which I was growing increasingly obsessed: that the self is not discovered, but created – that we can be whatever we want, if we only commit. That there is no aspect of you so indelible that it might not be washed away by a passing fancy, or eroded by force of will. What a fabulous get out of jail free card for all our failings. Marc Bolan was the perfect proof of concept: his dabblings with the Mods and Hippies, his willingness to jump from one scene to another without guilt or apparent inner conflict, and his painstaking construction of this magnificent and undeniable force of nature, seemingly capable of bending reality to his will. He was the work of art, and the art was glorious.

    I came to convince myself of a deeper connection at play. I was born in Barnes, a short walk from the spot where Bolan had met his end, and I’d grown up watching the informal annual remembrance ceremony which developed on the Common to mark his passing. As a tiny kid, I’d asked my Mother who all those strange looking people were and what they were doing. Hell, I’d been born almost a year to the day after the car crash that killed him. To my mind, this was all the evidence that could ever be needed: fate had brought me to that Jive Bunny record, and this was my guy.

    All of which is to say: Marc Bolan was the very first Pop star to properly fire my imagination. To do all the things that Pop stars are meant to do: make you believe in the impossible, suggest a life of glamour and collapsed boundaries, build a sense of affinity that makes you believe for a moment that these songs are you and you are these songs. I grew up, of course, and I don’t need some of these things the way I once did, but I still look upon Bolan as a sort of weird North Star, with whom my own life is entwined. Most weeks, I go for at least one long run on Wimbledon Common, and whenever I do, I invariably think of Marc, sleeping in his van somewhere beside those woods, full of heat and light, simmering away and waiting to explode. That galaxy of possibility that can emanate from a single individual with enough wattage. The self, created and at scale.

    There are a thousand happy memories I can trace back to my love of T.Rex. The first time I ever heard The Wizard, a song so utterly preposterous that you can’t believe no one talked him out of it. The frankly unbeatable line “I drive a Rolls Royce/Cos it’s good for my voice”. A hundred happy afternoons spent listening to Electric Warrior. Discovering the completely barmy Zinc Alloy – the track names along would have been worth the purchase, but what an underrated record and what a pleasure to listen to someone take so many risks, stretch so far beyond his usual comfort zone (jesus, this one sounds like the Chi-Lites). Being sat in the back of a mate’s car, a teenager now, listening to Rip Off, and hearing said mate’s Dad splutter from behind the wheel “Did he just say rocking in the nude?!”. Does music get any better than that moment? I think not.

    There was always going to be at least one T.Rex track on this list, because the band remain an abiding musical passion, and they’ve given me so much down the years. I could have picked from any number of songs across any number of albums. But ultimately, it has to be Hot Love, because Hot Love has the distinction of being one of the greatest Pop records ever recorded. The shameless pilfering from Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. The way it surfs in on that golden wave of guitar, handclaps and hummed voices, the utterly perfect lyrics (“I’m her two penny price and I give her hot love” – if ever you could pick a single line that tells you virtually everything you need to know about its author it’s that one), the completely undeniable chorus and the greatest audience singalong section of pretty much any song you’ll ever hear. The completely perfect guitar solo, which evokes a good time taken in retrospect. The ridiculous backing vocals from Flo and Eddie of The Turtles. The song is pure joy, and I will never get tired of it.

    Four or five years ago I attended a party at the local rugby club. They run a big music event every year where acts come down and play in front of a few hundred well lubricated people. Some bloke gets up in the bar with a ukelele and plays Hot Love. The entire room sings along – and I mean the entire room, every man woman and child, drinks aloft, bellowing those “la la la la la la las” to the ceiling and beyond. Builders, students, stay at home Mums, corporate bods and six year olds. All of them.

    I stood there and thought about Marc Bolan, this odd little man in his strange clothes with his funny voice, all perfect beauty and indomitable bravura, singing his songs about dragons and wizards and winning the heart of the British people. This strange country, that can be so uptight and prudish, so insistent on common sense, but which every now and then takes apparent leaves of its senses and clutches to its bosom a wild, dayglo eccentric or two, as if in penance. Marc Bolan, creating himself and burning a path for others to follow. And, really, what could possibly be more beautiful than that?

  2. I was a little old, I thought, at 14, and/or a little too awkward to like T. Rex. A little too young for Tyranosaurus Rex, I have to say I liked the cut of their jib, as portrayed in MM and NME, but never actually got around to listening. I probably heard them first as I saw them first, on Top Of The Pops, the weekly ritual of need and embarrassment, sat watching with my parents on a Thursday night. As Bolan preened and primped through his performance, my Mother piped up, “Who is that”? Too afraid to say I knew, because my reading of the indies had primed me, I would feign ignorance, dreading any future appearance. Conditioned to dislike him, I then duly did, justifying my adult(ha!) appreciation of E.L.P as reason to have a loftier view on what was allowed to be enjoyed. (And as for the nightly Flo and Eddie, dredging the gutter by their collaboration, words failed me, it being a long while before I could admit their earlier employer, Mr Zappa, was more shite than substance, at least by the time they were brought on board, to widen his scatological cast.)
    As the years went by, no, reader, no sudden Damascene conversion, I still finding his muse flaccid and derivative, but I at least got the idea he was peddling. And some of the songs, when done by others, polished up quite well, the Angel Headed Hipster tribute album a decent listen.
    So I come not to mock your taste, more to unearth my distaste and why.

    • No worries – I can totally see how they’d be a marmite band, and if I’d encountered them at a different stage of life then, who knows, they might not have landed with me either.

      I listened to the Angel Headed Hipster album a few times when it came out. My recollection is that it was striking how many of the artists seemed to slip into singing in Bolan’s natural cadence, most notably Nick Cave on Cosmic Dancer. I’m not all that convinced the songs work as covers: most of them are very simple and the magic is really all in the delivery. It’s the way he tells ’em.

      I’ll give the album another listen – it’s been a while.

      • I was 12 when Hot Love came out, the perfect age, just I was starting to find my mind of music. T.Rex were a first love, Bowie, at times a brazen imitator, soon to follow. Black Country Rock proves that he had Bolan’s quirks down to a tee. The hit that made him, Starman, owes so much to Hot Love. “Cosmic jive” and “let all the children boogie” are blatant Bolanisms and the la-la coda is basically Hot Love.

        But, I digress. Bolan was a superstar at a time I first started buying singles. The run from Ride A White Swan to The Groover all with superlative, bespoke B sides, is astonishing. The albums are full of quality, too, but nothing is as complete as Electric Warrior.

        • Fully agree on Electric Warrior being the best album.
          The second best is the aforementioned compilation Bolan Boogie.
          The Slider is third, and then it’s pick your way through as you see fit (although Futuristic Dragon is worthy of some attention)

  3. 1985s compilation Best of The 20th Century Boy was my route to discovery.
    Seems an odd choice for a TV backed compilation from EMI as Marc Bolan had not really been in the public conscious since his passing in 77 – maybe EMI were just looking through their catalogue for something to exploit.
    From there, I discovered that there was no huge market for Marc Bolan / T.Rex albums and the re-issues of Tyrannosaurus Rex and T.Rex Fly albums could be picked up for about £2.50 each.
    The 1972 – 77 albums (on Marc On Wax with no original artwork *) could be got for less than a fiver.
    * the Marc On Wax label bought the rights to the music, but forgot to purchase the artwork. When they went back to fix their error, the price had gone up and they couldn’t afford it.

    • I first cottoned on to Marc with Metal Guru – I heard it as Milliguru, still my preferred title and easily my fave by T. Rex. Bagged the 10 or so big hits for 10p each at Ilford Town Hall over several Saturday mornings. Cheap as chips.

      Around 1985, a Record Collector poll, if I remember, had him higher than the Sainted Dave… if true, rightly so at the time, and still rightly so.

      Got the 20th Century Boy compilation slap bang in the middle of the dire, and was definitely listening to it during Live Aid – what else was there to do? – and the four songs I most dug were by Tyrannosaurus Rex, not T. Rex… subsequently got the Rare Magic 12″ (the only 12″ single I own) for Pewter Suitor, and adore the guy… with no urgent desire to hear, aligned with no great disregard toward, his famous stuff.

      LOVE the fact he was as sober as judge during the 60s, saddened he had to go the coke route… ‘spose there was no choice – again, what else was there to do? – Mod Marc, Psych Marc, Hippy Marc was better than that… Peel got that.

      The Angel Headed Hipster film was brilliant and barely got a sniff on this website where I presumed it would have been hailed as essential.
      It, like Marc, ‘is’ essential.

        • It’s a strange film/record release, because a whole load of people on the first one aren’t on the other one! I really quite liked the two versions of ‘The Slider’… especially the one done on the roof. That was pretty cool.

          I will never entertain anything by Joan Cliche Jett as anything but a Joan Cliche Jett cliche, and obviously it was, and the U2 bit seemed a bit without energy.

          But, you know what, anything that was on screen was soon destined not to be on screen, and the whole thing zipped along.
          Macy Gray came on, doing her thing, and I’m thinking ‘”.. OK, do I need this?” The answer to my question was a resounding … “Yes” when she turned ‘Children of the Revolution’ into some sort of ‘Give Peace A Chance’ / ‘No Woman No Cry’ anthem.
          “Erm… seriously good job Macy… she gets it!”

          When we see at the end the children who have benefitted from ‘The Marc Bolan School of Music and Film’ in Sierra Leone singing the same song… wow… erm, what a legacy.
          I absolutely love East End urchins who’ll ‘”.. look after your car, Mister, while you’re at the football?” That’s Marc Bolan that is.

  4. I’ve been away for most of April to date, and missed the entire last set of these (all caught up now). Lovely writing as ever, Bingo. Keep it up, I can’t wait to see what number Star Trekkin’ by The Firm comes in at.

  5. Not a fan of T Rex at the time. I am the same age as @retropath2. My brother is 3 years younger and loved them. Where I differ though is that in the fullness of time I do have a revisionist view. I heard ride a white swan on the radio a couple of months back and it sounded fantastic. Some of Bolan’s ideas were completely bonkers but occasionally he came out with an absolute gem.

  6. First band I really remember seeing on television. Crackerjack probably. Loved Metal Guru, there were some great singles with mostly terrible lyrics. Never found an album to love unreservedly, Bowie won that and he later showed he could do so much else while Bolan disappeared into obscurity before his tragically early death.

  7. 69. Leave (Get Out) – JoJo

    Do you remember the music press? Those happy go lucky guys and occasional gals who would be sent free records by the barrowload, spill a load of sneering, petulant ink over them and in doing so tell us all what to listen to, what mattered when we did so and how to think about the whole thing? Those jokers.

    I can’t remember where I got started with music journalism. It certainly wasn’t there in the room when I first made contact with music. But somewhere in my early teens it crept in through the window and made itself well and truly at home. Select magazine with its feet up on the furniture, Vox rifling through the kitchen cupboards, Spin leaving the toilet seat up and muddy footprints on the carpet. And, of course, at the centre of it all: the NME, pontificating while leaving its dirty handprints on the wallpaper.

    For years, I drank it all in, absorbed the prose, digested the key concepts. This music good, that music bad. This artist leading to that and did you know that if you enjoy X you really do need to listen to Y, and furthermore if you’ve been listening to Z you need to take a good, hard look at yourself. The “artists” were geniuses, their backstories Arthurian epics, their lyrics sacred poetry. And it wasn’t enough to read the current stuff, I had to go backwards too: Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Nick Kent. Each book I acquired, each article I read another stepping stone in my journey to really understand music, and – most importantly of all – to have good taste.

    Good taste was important, and acquiring it was a battle. Your own record collection was your shield in that battle, your ability to curl a reproachful lip at the record collections of others was your sword, your grasp of rock history and its assorted factual ephemera your quiver of arrows. You needed to know which were the “correct” Velvet Underground albums to enjoy, which genres were strictly verboten, who played bass for Television, and how to listen to Captain Beefheart with a straight face.

    I spent my teenage years saying my catechisms and steadily working my way through the classics. I built a healthy suspicion of catchy songs, or records that were not written by those who were singing them. I listened to Krautrock. I bought Mojo and took my monthly lessons on rock history. I absorbed pure, unrefined Rockism: the belief that there is a clear hierarchy to music, that there is a meaningful critical canon and that music is best understood via the medium of the written word. That songs are to be thought, not felt.

    At the time, the snobbery was appealing. Like most teenagers, I was trying to figure out who I was, and what I meant. I wanted a world that was ordered, and readily understandable. And it felt good to think that my mates who had not served the same apprenticeship were a step behind, perhaps even defective.

    There’s a scene in the immortal White Men Can’t Jump where Wesley Snipes explains to Woody Harrelson that he may very well “listen” to Jimi Hendrix, but he can’t “hear it”. “Y’all can’t hear Jimi…. You’re listening”. The perfect encapsulation of how I’d been trained to view this stuff: you might listen to Bob Dylan, but only I can actually hear it: because I have three (count ‘em) Clinton Heylin books on my shelf, and I know that the best version of Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright is on The Witmark Demos.

    As with most false promises, the appeal eventually wore off. I grew up a little, and the bloom began its steady retreat from the rose. Difficult questions began to circle: were the troglodytes who listened to Oasis but not Suede having more fun that I was? Was I permitted to enjoy En Vogue? And why was I occasionally pretending to enjoy music I didn’t? Slowly but surely, Rockism’s cold, dead fingers were prised from my throat, and I began to listen with a gentler ear. The pressing question of “is this good” began to fade into the background, increasingly replaced by a new directive: “can I take anything from this”. Is it fun? Does it make me feel? Does it make me dance, or jump, or shout? Does it even matter if its garbage if I’m enjoying it? Is anyone even watching at all?

    There were any number of records that helped me make this crossing. Songs that I would never have permitted to disgrace “the collection”, but in respect of which I could not shake a deep and guilty love, and which eventually pushed their way back to the fore. If I Could Turn Back Time. Set You Free. I Want It That Way. So much early Madonna. Spice Up Your Life. A thousand others. Leave (Get Out) by JoJo belongs squarely in this camp, and in some ways represents the archetypal song I could not bring myself to like.

    I was in my early 20s when it released, still grappling with my own internalised Rockism. Let’s examine the components of the song: JoJo Leveque was 13 years old at the time of release (indeed, she’s still the youngest solo female artist to have a US number one). The song was written for her by Soulshock and Kenneth Karlin, who had done work in the past for Whitney Houston. The lyric detailed an incident from JoJo’s own fledgling romantic life: a tragic break up with a boyfriend who had thrown rocks at the geese when they’d gone for a walk together in the park. Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, this was not. And yet…

    Leave is a legitimately brilliant Pop record. The strummed guitar loop, redolent of its moment (see also: Like I Love You), the off-beat cries of “who” and “why” which punctuate the end of lines, JoJo’s towering and melismatic vocal, and that absolute monster of a chorus. It’s a Motown record for an overwrought Primary School romance, sung by a literal child. And it slaps.

    Hearing Leave for the first time was another moment for me. I loved the song immediately upon contact, but I could never have admitted it at the time, and that raised uncomfortable questions. Was I really going to go through the rest of my life engaged in this juvenile self-denial? For what purpose? Did anyone actually give a shit about my record collection? The dam was crumbling, and Leave took yet another enormous chunk out of it. Another huge step towards a life of gratifyingly terrible taste, of listening to whatever I want to because life is short and – jesus – who has time for all this utter nonsense.

    A few months ago, I took down from the shelf my battered copy of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and leafed through it to Lester Bangs’ immortal eulogy to Elvis, written for The Village Voice in 1977. An article I’d read dozens of times, marvelling on each occasion at its seminal coda: “But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse; I will say good-bye to you.” I used to marvel at that writing; what a kiss off, what a glorious statement of cultural superiority. Reading it back in adulthood, it landed quite differently: what I once understood as style and bravado felt closer to intellectual insecurity and adolescent posturing. Really, Lester – who cares? Who cares what you like or don’t? And more specifically: who cares enough that you need to interrupt an obituary to bring your own tastes to the centre of discussion.

    Some time shortly after Leave, I set about dismantling it all. I let go of the idea that Bob Dylan is a literal genius. I surrendered the notion that I actually knew anything about anything, or that it would even matter whether I did so or not. I opened my ears to other genres I’d dismissed, to artists I wouldn’t previously have been seen in the room with. These days, my record collection (such as it is) is somewhere up in the loft. I haven’t clapped eyes on it in a decade, and at some stage it will go to the tip and all those careful decisions I made – all those years of ostensible good taste – will go with it.

    And as those records hit the compactor, it will be Leave that remains. A wonderful record that has brought huge joy to my life. I’ve played it at parties, I’ve sung along to it with mates, it’s been the soundtrack to happy afternoons at home. It’s a total sugar rush of virtually no real artistic merit and blessed with zero authenticity, except that all the merit and authenticity it will ever need is that it makes me happy. It’s shallow and daft and I bloody love it, because quite a lot of the time I’m shallow and daft too.

    And that means I can write a list like this one, where I just honestly ask myself what are the 100 songs I like the most and then give my unfiltered answer, knowing that it really doesn’t matter, and that the only value of the exercise is in whatever fleeting enjoyment I may take from it. And that’s a liberation.

  8. 68. Cookie Jar – Mark Mulcahy

    Every now and then in a life spent listening to music, a voice will come along that speaks to you so directly and immediately that you struggle to believe there was ever a time in your life when you’d not heard it. Often, that voice will be grand, and perhaps soulful. Sometimes, it will be a voice that sounds a little like your own, or the voice you imagine possessing in some other, frequently dreamed of life. Maybe it expresses something of yourself that you’ve otherwise struggled to articulate. But once you’ve heard it the first time, it never leaves you. For me, Mark Mulcahy has, thus far, proved to be that voice.

    I first discovered Mulcahy via Uncut magazine, which gave an enthusiastic review to his 2001 sophomore outing, Smile Sunset. Mulcahy had a storied past as a member of Miracle Legion, an 80s college rock band out of New Haven Connecticut who drew early comparisons to R.E.M before sputtering out in comparative ignominy.

    His second band, Polaris, achieved a sort of infamy in their recurring role as the house band for the early 90s cult classic Nickelodeon kids’ show “The Adventures of Pete & Pete”. The show provided TV exposure for a number of alternative acts of the period, including Luscious Jackson and The Magnetic Fields, but Miracle Legion enjoyed pride of place, and provided the Pete & Pete theme song: Hey Sandy, a gently careening number with the memorable opening couplet: “Hey smilin’ strange/you’re looking happily deranged”.

    By the time of his solo career, Mulcahy had tapered away the college rock sound, moving towards slighter, prettier songs that often felt like demos, or parts of some larger work. A beautiful melody here, a striking lyric there. Lots of meandering and oblique imagery, but with no ambitions to real oomph, and all the better for it. Smile Sunset was an uneven record, but in its best moments (Resolution #1, I Just Shot Myself In The Foot Again) surprisingly touching, and the perfect showcase for the aspect that had grabbed me from the very first listen: Mulcahy’s voice.

    I’d watched Pete & Pete a little as a kid, so perhaps the voice was familiar. Perhaps it reminded me of childhood in some way. But what struck me first was how unusually kind it sounded. A gentle voice, full of vulnerability but clear as a bell. Almost dainty. It sounded the way an interior monologue feels.

    Intriguingly, as I explored further it became increasingly clear that Mulcahy’s entire career had been a kind of stripping back of elements to leave his vocals operating in near isolation. Take Love’s The Only Thing That Shuts Me Up, a mere 90 seconds long and with only the barest of keyboard lines for accompaniment. More a sketch than a song. Or any number of songs on Fathering, his debut album. Take Hey, Self Defeater, one of the warmest and most affirming songs I know, sung virtually acapella, with all the life breathed into it directly by the tenderness in the vocal.

    Something in the voice was warm and familiar. It seemed to balance sorrow and hope like nothing else I’d ever heard, and the cryptic tendency in the lyrics meant that it felt virtually impossible to tell whether any single song was meant to be happy or sad. There was a depth at play that gave the feeling of a man opening a door to his bewildered inner self, and an unusual line of phrasing that rendered each performance distinct: take, for example, the cry of “I thought the case was closed/but now I see some doubt about your innocence” on Tempted; is this accusation? Remorse? Maybe both, and more besides.

    In 2005, Mulcahy released the follow up to Smile Sunset, entitled In Pursuit Of Your Happiness. Another batch of pleasingly offbeat and occasionally half-baked tunes. And in amongst them all was Cookie Jar, a song that immediately won my heart and that I’ve been listening to in quiet happiness and contentment for nearly two decades now. A song that has been track 1 on half the mix tapes or playlists I’ve made in that period, and that has trotted by my side throughout like a loyal puppy, warming the cockles of my life.

    Cookie Jar is my favourite Mulcahy vocal, and my favourite lyric too. It showcases all his boyish tenderness and grace, his disarmingly open heart. It’s gloriously slight and ephemeral, beautifully arranged and when I’m in its grip I feel the world’s a better place.

    Even after all this time, I have absolutely no idea what the song’s about. There’s an odd lyrical through-line where it feels like Mulcahy is trying to work in as many of the contents of his kitchen cupboard as possible (macaroons, cookies, jelly, and marmalade all get a mention), a series of memorable couplets (“A lonely macaroon/inside your biscuit head”) and an off-kilter measure of critique and forgiveness, but not much in the way of clarity. And yet, as I listen to it, it makes a strange sense to me.

    For reasons I might struggle to articulate, when I listen to Cookie Jar I hear a song about faltering friendship; about that moment where you realise your relationship with an old pal is crumbling away, and you’re wondering if they see it too (“I wonder if you know/I wonder if you’re bitter/and all that you consider/might marmalade your mind”). It’s about looking at someone you’ve loved forever, far longer than any romantic relationship, taking account of all of their faults and your own, and letting them go in peace. So sweetly lays the dream, in the cookie jar.

    The song builds to a glorious denouement: an acknowledgement of the impasse (“what about the jam we’re in”), an acceptance of at least partial responsibility (“I kept my cookie jar/too high up on the shelf”) and then the most beautiful and soaring parting wish of peace and happiness (“here’s what I wish for you/here’s what you must do/preserve yourself/preserve yourself/preserve yourself”). Life has reached a cruel juncture; you’ll go this way, and I’ll go that, but I’ll love you forever and I want only good things for you.

    Cookie Jar is this fragile, gorgeous nothing of a song with a handful of biscuit references on one side, and an iron fist waiting on the other. That “preserve yourself” and the odd scatting into which it degenerates gets me every time: what a beautiful sentiment, what a beautiful farewell.

    When Cookie Jar first came out I played it often in the house share in which I was living with a dear old friend of mine. “What a beautiful little song that is” he exclaimed the first time he heard it. And now, 20 years later, it’s the song of our friendship – of a gentle drifting apart. No arguments, no acrimony, just two people who once helped make sense of one another’s lives now clearly borne along on two separate currents. So now when I listen to Cookie Jar I think of him, and that drifting friendship: all the love I feel towards him, all my hope that he finds peace and happiness wherever he’s swept along next, but the knowledge that our chapter is over, and that that’s OK too. So sweetly lays the dream. God, if that isn’t the truth.

    Mark Mulcahy’s wife, Melissa Rich Mulcahy died unexpectedly in September 2008. She was 41 years old and left behind two daughters. Mark slowly withdrew from public life, performing a little less, recording ever more infrequently. The following year a tribute album was released, featuring covers of Mulcahy’s songs and with the clear intent of ensuring he remained solvent. As a cult favourite of the Alternative music world, contributors were not difficult to find: Thom Yorke, Frank Black, The National, Michael Stipe, Mercury Rev and Dinosaur Jr all appeared. Some of the covers were very good indeed, but none of them were sung as well as the originals.

    While Mulcahy has continued to record, and still makes frequently beautiful records, the tribute album is in some ways the perfect capstone to his career: that strange, heady mix of kindness and vulnerability. When I listen to him, it reminds me of the first time I ever read Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. The sense that this is an individual in some spectacular disarray, a modicum of concern, but overwhelmingly a deep and abiding joy to find someone so apparently gentle at heart and able to convey that gentleness through their art. To celebrate that gentleness as it ought rightly to be celebrated.

  9. 67. Atlantis (I Need You) – LTJ Bukem

    I can’t remember where I was when I first heard Drum & Bass. I guess it would have been in the form of Jungle, probably emanating from a passing car, or playing on the radio in a shop. The quintessential sound of young London in the early 90s, the drums of Breaktbeat Hardcore spilling over and fusing with rhythmic elements of Hip Hop and Dancehall and the bass of Dub and House music to create something simultaneously familiar and alien. Inviting and threatening.

    Jungle felt unusual, in that it formed part of the day to day tapestry of urban life long before it crossed over and went mainstream. You heard it everywhere, but it was largely faceless and nameless, traded on cassettes in the playground rather than over the counter at Our Price. Simon Reynolds captured the spirit well, if a little clinically: “Britain’s very own equivalent to US Hip-Hop. You could equally make the case that Jungle is a raved-up, digitised offshoot of Jamaican reggae. Musically, Jungle’s spatialised production, bass quake pressure and battery of extreme sonic effects, make it a sort of postmodern Dub music on steroids.”

    By 1993, the genre was starting to splinter. Raggacore and Jump Up emerged to place greater focus on, respectively the Reggae influence and the bassline. Drum & Bass developed with greater focus on the beats. By 1994, Jungle started to breach the mainstream, featuring in Touch & Fresh adverts and crossing over with actual chart hits (shout out to Original Nuttah and The Burial, still incredible moments for 90s kids). In the teenage mind, whether consciously or otherwise, it was time to move on, and in my case it was time to move on to Drum & Bass, the music which ate my life for most of the next 3 years.

    Looking back, it’s not difficult to see what the appeal was. Drum & Bass boasted a versatility I’m not sure I’ve properly seen in any other branch of EDM; you could dance to it, it sounded fantastic on headphones, it worked for club nights, you could chill to it – hell, you could even think to it. It also boasted a series of headline acts who were more readily identifiable than their Jungle counterparts, and each of whom came with their own distinct style. The icy minimalism of Photek, the dirty basslines of Dillinja, the Jazz leanings of Peshay, the soulfulness of 4 Hero. It made immediate sense to me, and the potential felt limitless.

    The artist to whom I most immediately gravitated was Goldie. He’d produced the first D&B record I ever heard (the immortal Terminator), and his run from 1992 to 1996 was largely peerless, one absolute classic after another, culminating in the magnum opus that was Timeless. Timeless was a big moment in my life: I listened to it endlessly, puzzled over its peculiar airlessness, bought into its classical aspirations. This was “Intelligent” Drum & Bass – it seemed to take inspiration from every popular form of Black music over the preceding 30 years, combine the elements and flatten them out into something that was as taut and reflective as clingfilm under tension. It took the Amen Break and constructed a 100 ft tall monolith around it. It was street music you could intellectualise as much as you wanted to.

    I was old enough by that stage to venture down to club nights, and would spend many a happy hour on sweaty dancefloors blissing out to this new and exciting music. And that’s almost certainly where I heard LTJ Bukem for the first time, and had my mind blown.

    Bukem’s brand of D&B, so memorably immortalised in the Logical Progression compilation series, felt different from the off. It was Jazzier, more ambient than what had gone previously; the areas between beats and bass full of strange and unusual sounds. There was a spaciness, a tripiness I hadn’t heard previously, and it made for an energy I’d never experienced. Listening to Bukem was probably the first time I ever stood in a crowd of people and felt the music properly wash over me, took it in like it was part of me. Those dancefloors felt astral, simultaneously calm and emotional all at once. You went home exhausted and full of peace.

    The original Logical Progression compilation was a huge eye opener when it arrived, capturing all that magic and preserving it forever. But it was the second outing that took things to another level; not so much because the tracks were any stronger, but because it came with a separate mix CD: every tune on the comp, with MC Conrad chatting over the top of them. MC Conrad, with that deep, biblical voice, your tour guide through the heavens. I listened to that mix CD until I practically wore it out – it was my perpetual soundtrack all throughout 1997, to the point where every beat, every bassline, every strangely ambient soundscape, became ingrained on my soul.

    Logical Progression 2 was the apex of my Drum & Bass years, and the high point of the odd feeling of calm this music brings to me when at its best. The sense of a high energy momentarily frozen in motion somewhere up in the stratosphere, full of kinetic potential and yet completely at rest. It also reminds me of a seminal period in my life; the last few months of secondary school. Seven years waiting to escape, the end in sight and the growing feeling that no one could touch me, that I was going to get out scott free, escape that dingy, backwards little town and move on to better things. Logical Progression 2 felt limitless. I felt limitless.

    The song I’ve chosen for this list is Atlantis. Partly because the hardness of the beat forms a neat bridge back to those early Jungle years, partly because I absolutely love the soundbed it runs on. The opening harps, the looped bleepings, the chamber orchestra vibes, and then that glorious sampled vocal: I need you, I want you. Atlantis was gothic – it reminded me of the Wu Tang and it showed me again that this music could go anywhere it wanted.

    My abiding memory of this song is being 18 years old, sat on my bed revising for my A-levels, sun streaming through the windows, Logical Progression 2 on the stereo. Somewhere in the haze of revision, I nodded off and slipped into a brief and incredibly vivid dream, the precise details of which remain with me to this day.

    A large group of us were outside a vast cathedral that seemed to extend up endlessly into the sky, imposing and yet serene. Music began to play and we sprinted inside, pounding through the building’s corridors, in search of something, crashing into walls, desperate to reach our goal. Eventually, we arrived in a vast open space, the cathedral’s nave, and before us on a raised podium stood a hooded man behind two sets of decks. We ran towards him, but the music abruptly stopped, freezing us in our tracks. We looked up again at the hooded figure. There was total silence, and in that silence we could hear the wind, and the sound of tree branches rustling, and it became apparent that there was an almighty crack in the building separating him from us: a chasm running along the floor, up the walls and cross the ceiling, as if the cathedral had been sliced open. And in that silence, in that chasm, it began to rain heavily – a wall of water suddenly separating us from the musician. The sound of rain hitting soil.

    I woke with a start at that point to find Atlantis playing out. My dream had somehow coincided completely with the song on the stereo – the only time in my life anything of that kind has ever happened. The period outside the cathedral had been the song’s opening, the running through the corridors had been in time to its breakbeats, and the period of silence and rain had been aligned with the moment around five and a half minutes in when Atlantis goes completely silent. I had effectively dreamt a music video. It spooked me at the time, and I think about it whenever I listen to Atlantis, all the imagery remains with me. I can feel myself in that cathedral.

    MC Conrad died the same week I’m writing this, a mere 52 years old. With him went a slice of my adolescence, because in that period there is arguably no one whose voice resonated with me harder or longer than that of Conrad. I was lucky enough to hear him perform live a couple of times, and his mastery of the crowd, his instinct for where we should go next, his skill in lifting the entire room, were just incomparable. In as much as any musicians have ever helped bring peace to my soul, it is Conrad and LTJ Bukem to whom I owe that debt, and I know I will continue to treasure their records for as long as I have ears with which to listen.

  10. 66. Coney Island Baby – Lou Reed

    I was maybe 7 or 8 years old when my father’s friends from university came to visit. Lean and full of fidgety menace, they were the first adults I’d encountered who seemingly had no natural interest in children, no desire to give you their attention unless you’d done something to earn it. You could talk to them about the subjects they were interested in, but they clearly had both feet in an adult life that felt distant and foreboding.

    At some stage after their studies, Mum and Dad had straightened out. They’d done the 70s, cleaned up and joined the working week. Their friends, quite clearly, had not: even as a small child, you could feel the transgression coming off them in waves, before you even know how to spell the word. They scared and fascinated me all at once, because they felt like emissaries from an underworld I would never care to visit but from which I was willing to receive the odd postcard.

    Years later, in adolescence, I discovered that Lou Reed had made a career of sending postcards from that same underworld. In fact, he’d willingly have you round and get the whole photo album out.
    Lou was a living, breathing Altamont, a man who embodied the curdling of 60s idealism into 70s nihilism. A genius songwriter in the Tin Pan Alley mould who knew his way around verse/chorus/verse, but preferred to make harsh, discordant music that left you feeling like you needed a long, hot shower.

    I worked my way through the discography in broadly chronological fashion, starting with the Velvets records, then their wonderful bank of live recordings, up through Transformer and Berlin, to Street Hassle, The Blue Mask and beyond. At each turn I found myself surprised and confronted. The dark subject matter, the out of tune guitars, the squalls of noise, the sprechstimme style of talk singing which lead me on to Ian Dury and Talking Heads.

    Heroin, in particular, took me aback, and was for many years my favourite Velvets track (probably Sister Ray these days). The searing, grotesque honesty of the lyrics, the formlessness and drama of the instrumental arrangement. The sheer lack of penitence in Reed’s intoning of the words “Heroin… be the death of me”. The way he strings out the word “Heroin”, like a ghostly voice at the window pane inviting you out to play. The weight of grim foreboding in that word.

    Lou was the outsider’s outsider. He was born with a pebble in his shoe, a sensitivity that made him brutal. Whether that pebble was his sexuality or something even deeper is up for debate, but in virtually every song he ever touched there’s evidence of the scar tissue caused by a lifetime of friction with the normal world, and a deep preference for other outsiders. Whether that meant hissing at hippies, or hanging out with drag acts. Lou walked on the wild side, so you didn’t have to. He was the teenage rebellion that never ended, the receptacle for a hard won wisdom you could never look in the eye. “He who transgresses breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that others are not; and he knows something that others don’t” – Susan Sontag didn’t write those words of Lou Reed, but she may as well have.

    As a teenager, Lou was the great pantheon Rock titan who I found spoke to me most directly, because his work was so personal, and because he was so obviously wounded, just as I was wounded and perhaps we are all wounded. But also in retrospect because I must have heard in him an echo of my parents’ own struggles, and those struggles fascinated me. Certainly, I could not look at him or listen to him without thinking of those visiting friends, that chill wind from the past that blew through our family home and back out onto the streets, taking all those questions with them.

    The problem with teenage rebellion is that no one really stays a teenager, not even the ones that try to. We’re supposed to grow up and get past it. Become regular citizens. Any other direction entails self-caricature, and that was certainly the case for Lou at times. 1975 was one of those times: the commercial failure of Metal Machine Music sent him back home to lick his wounds and ponder whether the path of glorious self destruction to which he was bound was really what he wanted after all. His next record, Coney Island Baby, he later described as an attempt to “get me out of the classic mess I had let happen to me”, both musically and financially.

    Mired in lawsuits and self loathing, the goodwill generated by Transformer just three years earlier already mortgaged and spent, he was forced to make a straightforwardly commercial album. And it turned out to be one of his very best: from the hop and skip of Charley’s Girl (as Poppy a song as Reed ever recorded) to the gloriously sardonic self deprecation of A Gift (“I’m just a gift to the women of the world”, what a line) and on to the title track, which is my favourite thing he ever wrote.

    Going through this whole exercise, it’s become glaringly apparent to me that I have a huge soft spot for straightforward expressions of emotion and vulnerability in unexpected settings. Coney Island Baby fits that particular bill to a tee. Over a Soft Rock setting, accompanied by some of the most nostalgic-sounding guitar lines you will ever hear, Lou spends 6 short minutes going back to where it all began: to Coney Island and to lost innocence. To back before the electro shock therapy, the drugs, the sex and the violence, when all he wanted to do was play football for the coach. Back to the last time he really just wanted to fit in. Astral Weeks through the looking glass.

    Recorded in the Doo Wop style in which Reed wrote his early, pre-fame compositions, the song nonetheless has the unmistakeable chug of Loaded-era Velvets (albeit greatly slowed down) and could be an off-cut from Transformer. And yet it’s utterly unlike anything else Reed had ever recorded to that point; there’s no curled lip, no sneer of reproach. Coney Island Baby is a confession of sorts – the Rock and Roll Animal had started off as a simple kid, just like the rest of us. The great outsider had longed to be on the inside; whether or not there ever really was a “coach”in Lou’s life is by the by. It’s a song about wanting to belong. In a career of provocations, “I always wanted to play football for the coach” might be the most provocative statement of them all.

    Coney Island Baby begs the question of whether there’s an element of this in all outsiders. Whether anyone chooses the road less travelled without first finding the more conventional path barred and guarded. Or whether they simply have their weary moments when they ask if life could not have been a little simpler, its travails less burdensome. I’m sure most of us who have ever failed to fit in once or more in their lives have at some stage been faced with this question; did I choose this way of being, or did it choose me? And then, latterly, which of the two options would be the more discomfiting?

    The lyric of Coney Island Baby is based on a poem written by Reed at college, presumably under the tutorship of Delmore Schwartz. It’s high grade nostalgia from the last person you ever thought would be nostalgic, and it’s quite quite beautiful in both its formulation and performance. Lou’s voice was rarely better deployed than here: the gentle murmur of the verse, the rising valiance of the chorus. All the weariness and submerged hope for unlikely forgiveness. The references to the dark places to which his life had taken him (“When all your two bit friends have gone and ripped you off”, “just remember that the city is a funny place/something like a circus or a sewer”).

    The heartbreaking pathos of “But remember the Princess who lived on the hill/who loved you, even though she knew you was wrong/and right now she just might come shining through/for the, the glory of love”. It’s unclear whether the narrator really believes that he can be redeemed by love, but that “even though she knew you was wrong” gets me every time. That nod to the idea that an ordinary life was never on the cards, because deep down something is wrong inside you. Lou’s caustic eye turned back on himself. It’s the grit in the oyster, that line.

    Coney Island Baby is a song about innocence, written from the perspective of a man whose innocence was spent long ago. It’s full of hope that love conquers all, and just enough suspicion that it probably won’t to prevent it from becoming saccharine. It’s a purgatory for the teenage rebels who never grow up. And it contains the greatest closing dedication of any song ever recorded: “I’d like to send this one out to Lou and Rachel/And all the kids at P.S. one-ninety-two/Man, I’d swear, I’d give the whole thing up for you”. That shout out to Rachel Humphreys and to Lou’s old Primary School is the cherry on the cake – connecting the innocence of childhood to whatever small measure of peace he and Rachel had found in each other, even if only momentarily.

    I love Coney Island Baby because of its weariness, its unexpected sweetness, and because it poses the troubling question: what if I had been some other version of myself? I grappled with that one for years, before finally concluding that there are no other lives but this one, and I’m sure any and all other versions of me are a right bunch of pricks anyway.

    I love the song also because, while I don’t believe in the idea that anyone is ever truly coming to save us, I do believe in the glory of love, and that by fully loving others we become a better version of ourselves. That’s been my experience to date, anyway. There’s no going back, no playing football for the coach. Just the here and now, and the places to which your own path brought you. And, if you’ll just allow yourself to stop and look around, those places are good.

    Dad’s friends turned up again a few times throughout my childhood, wandering in from the cold like characters from Our Friends In The North. They arrived increasingly uninvited, and with decreasing appreciation from my father. They seemed a little sadder with each visit, but I loved them nonetheless. One of them died a few months ago; my parents hadn’t spoken to him in two decades. I don’t know where life took him, or whether he found any happiness. I do know that he loved music, that he was more of a teenager in his 40s than I ever was in my teens, and that somewhere along the line in my relationship with him I moved from fear to sympathy. And that’s really all the recommendation you need for the simple virtues of growing out of all that angst and abrasion. For declaring peace with life. RIP, Mal – I hope you made it to wherever you were meant to go.

  11. In my top 4 Lou albums , great band , great pop but with a hint of menace.
    Just on MMM. I doubt he was mortified by the commercial failure. It was just put out to fuck over his record company when he was short of material. I think CIB was his first on ARISTA.

    • Could very well be wrong, but I think CIB was his last record on RCA. The next one was on Arista.

      I have a soft spot for Metal Machine Music. Growing up on Sonic Youth and Digital Hardcore it never seemed such a reach, and I enjoy Reed’s mythologising around it (albeit I don’t listen to it that often). I believe he recanted the stuff about putting it out to fuck over the label, but I also wouldn’t put anything past him.

      Either way, MMM and CIB has to be one of the oddest one two punches in the history of Rock.

      • Guitarist Mike Rathke , in Sounes book, I think, recounts how Lou had this room fulll of gadgetry and took a guitar in there, strummed it, shut the door. And rhe result sas MMM music.
        I found the book unpacking. I should check.
        And yes to Kicks. Stunner.

    • Wonderful writing about one of my favourite performers!

      Lou wrote great songs, amongst the best in Rock. He could also be catchy as hell when he put his mind to it, deserving more chart hits than he actually achieved.

      My personal choice, from so many, is Sweet Jane, a song that makes the mundane sublime, a trick Lou often managed to pull off.

  13. 65. My Drug Buddy – The Lemonheads

    For many people, there is that one record, probably first encountered at a suitably impressionable age, that fundamentally sets the template for what an album should be. The platonic ideal of albumdom, from a time when the format had meaning beyond serving as a lingering cultural hangover from a bygone age. For me, It’s A Shame About Ray is that record.

    A shade under 30 minutes long, one glorious Power Pop tune after another, song meshing into song, nothing sticking around long enough to outstay its welcome. Every track a gem, some more polished than others, Gorgeous, distracting and effortless, like a good first love should be. I was 13 when I first heard It’s A Shame, and while I knew even then that its loping, easygoing ennui was a product of the moment, I also sensed instinctively that this thing was mine, and that I would be listening to it forever.

    Evan Dando was, at that time, being billed as, alternatively either the Gram Parsons of the 90s or, in the immortal words of Sassy magazine “His Beautiful Blond Sadness.” With his movie star looks and doe eyes, Dando was a Pop star trapped in the body of an Indie slacker, and everything seemed to come easy to him, not least drugs. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s fairly clear that the Gram comparisons were rooted less in the music Dando made, and more in the crackle of expectation that here was another little boy lost who’d be dying young in due course.

    While Dando would stubbornly cling to this earthly realm even in the face of his own reckless proclivities, the lost boy characterisation was apt. Born the eldest child in a picture postcard family, Dando had his world suddenly and resolutely rocked when his father walked out some time around his 11th birthday. Of that departure, he later said: “My parents were like the perfect couple. I felt abandoned. I stayed with my mum and sister, but while they talked about it, I was considered a little boy who wouldn’t understand such things.”

    It seems possible that, likely many children of divorce, he never understood it, not really. Dando’s songs, so often apparently upbeat and carefree, are littered with lyrics which speak to an internal confusion, a dissatisfaction with self, an attempt to come to terms with a world that could be both beautiful and fickle, sometimes all at once. Take Confetti, the second track on It’s A Shame, which directly recounts the breakdown of his parents’ relationship. “He kind shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he could have/he’d rather be alone than pretend”. What could possibly be more early 90s than a shoulder shrugging lyric about one’s own parents’ divorce?

    Every track on the album is steeped with a kind of sun baked, directionless longing. The lyrics are largely character studies of individuals Dando had met during a spell in Sydney (a trip he described as “one big Valium”), but onto each of them is projected the same sense that, while the sun may be shining overhead, the ground beneath your feet is entirely unstable and untrustworthy. The same difficulty in putting a name to a feeling. The same muted vulnerability. Beautiful harmonies dressing up up the same gentle yearning for tragically mislaid better days.

    Evan Dando, emotionally frozen at 11 years old, the same troubling question tumbling round and round in his mind; silenced and numbed and blissed out by drugs. That’s the sound of It’s A Shame About Ray.

    My Drug Buddy is my favourite song on the album, and one of my favourite songs ever, because – in addition to boasting a truly brilliant and ever so on the nose title – it does such a great job of articulating all of the above. The search for a temporary escape from those troubling questions, and the frittering away of time while you wait in hope of healing.

    While I initially received the track as distinctly homoerotic, Dando wrote the song about his friend Nicole, with whom he’d go to score speed on King Street in the Sydney suburb of Newtown. Built around a winding organ that swirls like smoke through the air, and never better backing vocals from Juliana Hatfield, it’s an observational lyric about the joy and camaraderie found in buying and using drugs together (“Is this some the same stuff we got yesterday”, “I love my drug buddy”). But for such a chill and happy sounding tune it retains a darker side, an unexpected kick delivered in the repeated refrain “I’m too much with myself/I wanna be someone else”.

    In a song with no apparent chorus, that refrain is as close as we ever get to a hook. It’s delivered in the same narcotic slur as the rest of the track, but it’s of a different species entirely; the painful truth that is the spark to action, and the barrier to progress. The friendship is toxic, a mutual pact to linger in the bardo.

    In two and a half minutes, Drug Buddy shows you everything; the self destruction and self loathing. The desire to escape one’s own company, and the type of friendships you make when you’re on the run from that particular prison and need another warm body. The way it’s possible to be at your absolute loneliest in company.

    Looking back, it’s no surprise this chimed with me in 1992; it describes most of my friendships at that time. Those melancholy, wasted days. It’s a song that sounds like it’s going round in circles, because that’s precisely where the characters in the lyrics are heading.

    I always read the song as a counterpoint to the cover of Frank Mills which appears later on It’s A Shame. Each song concerns a very distinct type of friendship, but where Buddy is heavy lidded and sedated, Frank is clear eyed and full of heart – the relationship isn’t ancillary and incidental to some greater trauma, it’s the whole point: “Tell him Angela and I don’t want the two dollars back/just him”.

    Evan Dando loved drugs. By the time he recorded the follow up to It’s A Shame (the excellent Come On Feel), he’d moved on to crack, and was spiralling. Running ever faster on the spot to outpace his demons. He became ever less reliable, ever less serious in the minds of his audience. And he did not die. Somewhere along the line, that seemed to grate on people. All that talent squandered, all that self abuse without apparent consequence. Those three minute blasts of melody that came and went without exposing greater depths. He began to stir a passive annoyance in the music press and in listeners. They seemed to miss all the pain so evident in his music.

    Dando’s moment passed him by in a whirl. A decade later he got clean and recorded a very fine solo album (Baby I’m Bored). Last I heard, he’d fallen off the wagon again, but who knows if those are just internet whispers. Wherever he is, and whatever he’s doing, I hope he knows that it was never his fault, and that he’s let himself off the hook.

    My Drug Buddy reminds me of being 13 years old, and uncertain. It reminds me of a time when I really was too much with myself. And it reminds me that even amidst all that angst there were some good times too, and to spare some love for the friends who kept me temporary company while I figured it all out. Little lost souls also fighting their own battles. It reminds me of my pal Scott, who returned home one afternoon wearing a T-shirt bearing the immortal legend “I Love My Drug Buddy” and was almost thrown out of his house as a consequence. That’s how to be 13: good times.

    My Drug Buddy is lazy and listless and true. It’s the song that showed me how not to deal with my problems, even while glamorising those same solutions. It floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee and it’s the heart and soul of one of the first albums to really, truly touch me. I love My Drug Buddy.

    • After your number 66 selection, I listened to some ‘pop’ Lou Reed.

      “Just a perfect day, you made me forget myself
      I thought I was someone else, someone good”

      Both Lou and Evan crave to be someone other than themselves. They cannot bear to be who they are and use drugs to escape their true selves. Evan, of course, covered Perfect Day with Kirsty MacColl in 1994. You can understand why Evan admired Lou so much.

      • It’s interesting that you’ve picked that out.

        I was out in Rome last night with a bunch of work acquaintances who wanted to do karaoke. Couldn’t find a karaoke bar that was open, but managed to locate one with a piano. Was asked by a mate who is a very handy pianist what I wanted to sing, and immediately answered Perfect Day. I was literally singing that song in a bar at 3am this morning.

        I’ve had the “I thought I was someone else, someone good” going round my head all day, and it quite probably factored into what I’ve written above, because My Drug Buddy is, of course, the Perfect Day of the 90s. It’s funny how the subconscious works.

          • The above makes it sound better than it was. Several days in a truly beautiful city, seeing it from taxis between hotels and conference rooms. Bit of a tragedy really, and good incentive to make proper use of the evenings.

            I’m sure you could pull out a decent Perfect Day, Tigger. The chorus can always be bellowed if needs be.

          • Its a good tip for karaoke if you can’t sing. Choose a Lou Reed song!

            I really like the song Coney Island Baby, think album is very patchy though like many until his second purple patch started with New York. Not sure I completely agree with the lengthy, albeit well written, assessment above, I think it may be that he has a crush on the coach and is realising he is gay or bisexual. Hence remaining an outsider, especially in the 50s

          • Regarding singing Perfect Day:
            Nonsense, Tiggs – of course you could! if I can, anyone can!

            Many years ago, the band I was in was asked to play at a wedding
            (local muso – didn’t want the usual wedding-type band!) and his wife-to-be requested Perfect Day. Novel choice – she was a Lou fan, she knew the subtext, but wanted it anyway.
            We worked it up and I got the job of singing it – I wasn’t the main singer, but always got the Lou/Velvets songs, seemed to suit my delivery.

            Get the keyboard melody at the end sorted – and all will be well!

  14. But back to Dando; what is it about a beautiful boy in slo-mo self destruct that is so appealing? And it is, an allowance for those who feel left out to have a poster boy. I invest heavily in all these figures, from Hank to Gram to Dando, from Syd to Jimbo, the one essential being if I liked their music. If I didn’t, none of the pathos of their existence meant a jot. So I didn’t fret for Nick Drake or Kurt Cobain. Oddly, and late to their wakes with no end, I quite like each now.
    Another enormously well constructed read, @bingo-little.

    • It’s a great question. I suspect it probably has something to do with the desire of the audience for youth and authenticity.

      When Richey Edwards carves “4 Real” into his arm, all cheekbones and kohl eyes, the act can be read as reinforcing the authenticity of his art. Oh wow, this guy actually means all the mental things he’s writing/singing about. When Cobain burns out rather than fades away, it shows us that the pain was real, that he wasn’t selling us snake oil. Clever us, for being able to tell the real tortured artist from the feckless dilettante.

      For the beautiful, but tortured boy, self-destruction has the secondary benefit that we will never be forced to watch them get old. We’ll never be confronted by the waning of their good looks, the warping of their features and the reminder that Father Time eventually crushes all beauty. Plus, they’ll never get old and still run around the place singing songs like they’re in their 20s. Or, worse yet, make a Blues record about the ageing process. If Axl Rose had died at 27, would he have left behind a greater legacy? Quite probably, I’m sorry to say.

      Kurt Cobain and Richey Edwards are frozen at, respectively, 27 and 26 years old. They’ll be gorgeous forever, they never got old enough to compromise with the world, and they followed through on their own words. They’re completely perfect and utterly authentic, spared all the complexities of life’s difficult third act.

      I don’t condone it, I just observe it. I’d have loved to see what a 70 year old Gram Parsons or Jim Morrison might have cooked up for us, and I’m still hopeful that Evan Dando might yet release just one more record I’ll really enjoy. It’s better to fade out than to burn away.

      • I’ve not been myself for a day or two, a bit over-emotional and reactive, so apologies in advance.
        But, with the honourable exception of your final paragraph, Bingo, the observations in the rest of your post have reinforced just how out of step with the rest of the paying public I must always have been. These guys needed help and therapy, not a prurient press out for the next shocker – or a listening public demanding their pound of “authenticity”, even when that “authenticity” might mean watching somebody disintegrate before your very eyes.

  15. 64. Ex-Factor – Lauryn Hill

    There are certain words that, as soon as you see or hear them, summon to mind a favourite act.

    Certain words that are so synonymous with a particular artists that they may as well be granted full custody rights. You can’t hear “respect” without thinking of Aretha, for example. You can’t hear “purple” without thinking of Prince, “Mary” without thinking of Springsteen, “gavotte” without thinking of Carly Simon, and if you’re me you certainly can’t hear “yuugh” without thinking of Pusha T.

    If you’re a certain age, you most certainly cannot hear the word “reciprocity” without thinking of Lauryn Hill, and specifically of Ex-Factor.

    Probably the single most demographically inevitable entry on this list, Ex-Factor is the sine qua non breakup record of a generation that came too late for Nothing Compares 2 U, and too early for Wrecking Ball. It’s the perfect melting pot of Soul, R&B and Reggae influences, and it catalogues the latter days of a failing relationship with an excruciating precision. But before we speak more about the end, let’s rewind back to the beginning.

    Hill had first come to prominence as an actress in the Sister Act movies, but she found initial musical success as part of the Tranzlator Crew (later the Fugees). The Tranzlator Crew had formed in New Jersey in the early 90s after Pras Michel sought out Wyclef Jean in his father’s church and asked to be added as the trumpet player to the church band. Wyclef quickly discovered that Pras, a multi-instrumentalist who’d been forbidden from listening to Hip Hop as a kid and who’d grown up with a musical diet restricted to Soft and Hard Rock, couldn’t play the trumpet for toffee. However, Pras did bring with him a friend of his, a local church choir singer named Lauryn Hill.

    From day one, the Tranzlator Crew were an incongruous mix of elements: Hill steeped in R&B and Motown Soul, Wyclef looking to bring a Caribbean flavour to his music and to incorporate Reggae elements, and Pras with his drivetime sensibility. They bounced off one another easily, traded influences and figured out over time how to synthesise their inspirations into a cohesive sound. Their first record, Blunted on Reality, was a fairly nondescript effort: boilerplate boom bap Hip Hop that couldn’t be more 1994 if it tried, albeit ridden over by three MCs of obvious charisma. Compromised and homogenised, it was a commercial failure.

    Their second record, The Score, broke big by packaging up sounds already familiar to a mainstream audience, positioning them as new and exciting and sending Lauryn to the fore. How big did it break? In early 1996 hardly anyone at my school was listening to Hip Hop. By the end of the year, pretty much everyone was, and that was because of The Score. It made Hip Hop acceptable to suburban white kids.

    Killing Me Softly With His Song is still on the books as the biggest selling UK Hip Hop track of all time, and it’s not even a Hip Hop track. People fondly remembered the original version of the song, Hill’s vocal performance was great, and the addition of a stripped down beat and some fairly egregious ad-libs from Wyclef and Pras gave it enough air cover to pass as Hip Hop, but it’s a Soul record at heart, and that made it easier for the public to love.

    Killing Me Softly set the ground for the third single from the album, Ready or Not, the group’s real breakout classic, which fused an uncleared sample of Boadicea by Enya with the pilfered chorus of Ready Or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love) by the Delfonics, and a truly electric verse from Hill. People always remember the eyebrow raising couplet “While you’re imitating Al Capone, I’ll be Nina Simone/and defecating on your microphone”, but the real golden moment in Ready or Not comes about 20 seconds later when Hill flips the chorus into “You can’t run away, from these styles I got/oh baby, cos I got a lot, oh yeah/and anywhere you go, my whole crew gonna know/oh baby, hey baby, you can’t hide from the block, oh no”. That’s the moment when the song becomes greater than the sum of its parts, a Hip Hop sentiment with a Soul delivery.

    The Score sold through the roof, and kicked open the door for other Hip Hop artists to make incursions deeper into the mainstream. Ready or Not was the first UK number 1 in the genre I can ever recall that wasn’t either a form of novelty record or coming off a movie soundtrack. The first proper song. It minted the methodology for crossover hits, and created a path that was swiftly followed by the likes of LL Cool J and Puff Daddy. It remained the dominant paradigm until 1999, when Eminem arrived and the audience finally got the white artist they’d always needed as a full gateway drug into the genre proper.

    At the time, I had mixed feelings about all of this. As a teenage music snob, I didn’t need the mainstream to get onboard with the music I liked. I wanted the mainstream to stay the hell away from my music. Consequently, I eyed the Fugees with considerable suspicion, and experienced a slight relief when the group broke down in 1997, a couple of months after releasing what remains to this day my favourite of their records; the excellent and underheard Rumble In The Jungle. Obviously, being underheard is a big part of what lends it superior status.

    What caused the group to break down? Money and love. Hill and the married Wyclef had entered into an affair that had spectacularly imploded, and the various Fugees were at one another’s throats over royalties, artistic direction and pretty much everything else a band has ever fought over. They peaked and burned out within just a few short months, the Hip Hop Fleetwood Mac, without the staying power.

    Wyclef’s version of events is that Hill tricked him into believing that her first child was his. Hill’s version of events is more nuanced, and can be heard over the first two tracks of her debut solo album, commencing with Lost Ones, a brutal diss track that brutally kicks Clef up and down the road (opening with “It’s funny how money change a situation/miscommunication leads to complication/my emancipation don’t fit your equation/I was on the humble, you on every station”), followed by Ex-Factor, which lends to proceedings a more surgical eye.

    “No matter how I think we grow/you always seem to let me know, it ain’t working/and when I try to walk away you hurt yourself to make me stay/this is crazy”. It’s challenging to think of a lyric in a break up song that gets more directly and painfully to the point and under the skin than this one. Clear-eyed, but full of grief, the song charts that precise moment where you’re close enough to the end to know why it can never work, but not so close that you are quite ready to give it up. It’s an account of two people trapped in a cycle that dooms them both, and a plea to together find the strength to end it (“I know what we’ve got to do/you let go/and I’ll let go too”).

    And buried in there, that killer line: “Tell me who I have to be/to get some reciprocity”. She sings it so beautifully (the fluttering extension on the word “be”) that you almost miss the sentiment, but what a lyric that is. What a desperate, scathing appraisal of a lover’s failings. It’s not even angry, it’s just disappointed. Disappointed and desperate.

    The song is built on a fusion of elements; the Hip Hop sample (the Wu Tang’s Can It Be All So Simple, of course), the Soul piano, the Reggae guitar that comes in on the chorus, the R&B structure. Hell, there’s even a Barbara Streisand record in there somewhere. It’s the culmination of the Fugees’ original mission statement, music that synthesises disparate genres into a cohesive whole, and yet it’s a eulogy to the Fugees and all that promise burned away on the altar of a doomed love.

    Lauryn sings the hell out of Ex-Factor. The arrangement is great, but it doesn’t give much guidance for melody; all of that needs to come from the vocal. That voice, multi-tracked, duelling with itself, a whirl of competing inner-monologues, full of warmth and emotion, technical brilliance and hard-won wisdom. The vocal is real, and that’s what people respond to. When Hill sings “Where were you, when I needed you” (right before the gorgeous guitar solo kicks in), you feel the pain in every word. It’s not even so much a lyric as an outburst.

    The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is now over a quarter of a century old, and remains the only studio album Lauryn Hill has ever released. It’s difficult to blame her for wanting to get the hell away from the music industry, and there’s certainly room in my life for an artist dropping a single, seminal record and then clearing out.

    Ex-Factor remains the great torch song of the late 90s, beloved of the majority who were around to hear it when it first released, and with an active afterlife maintained by regular sampling. I include it here because it’s a song I’ve bonded with so many good friends over, because of how beautifully it sews together its elements in such a manner as to obscure all the joins, because I’m a sucker for that great lineage that extends from Motown to the present day, and because that reciprocity couplet is a proper all-timer.

  16. 63. Attak – Rustie & Danny Brown

    Attak introduces itself with a looped siren. An urgent, blaring warning to all who hear it: the Great Rave Wars have just begun – find cover, dig a hole if you must, stick your head between your knees and for god’s sake avert your eyes from the first blast as it lights up the horizon. Thus begins one of the most exciting and vital Hip Hop tracks I’ve ever heard, and it remains a napalm strike even a decade post-release.

    Attak was born of its own very specific moment in time. That point in the new millennium where Hip Hop had exhausted its fixation with sped up Soul samples, and electronic music/EDM was engaged in a headlong charge into the heart of the mainstream. The Americans had belatedly beheld Daft Punk, and there was no turning back; the bastard grandchild of Disco (and Techno and House and so on) had returned to lay claim to the ancestral home.

    The fit between the two genres was entirely natural from the start; Hip Hop is ever hungry, ever questing for new sounds. EDM endlessly malleable, flowing like water into the empty spaces, weaving and warping to fit the moment. Pairing an EDM production with a Hip Hop vocal wasn’t a remotely new idea (you can go right back to Planet Rock for evidence of that), but it was in this period that the two forms began to properly exchange DNA, and to produce records that moved past novelty and into some sort of cohesive hole. And the best of those records, of course, slapped righteously.

    Attak was the product of an unlikely union between Rustie, a Glaswegian signed to Warp Records, whose Glass Swords had been the toast of a certain corner of the electronica world in 2011 and who had largely made his name in the field of Wonky, an off-kilter but exuberant strain of Dubstep, and Danny Brown, a Detroit-native MC who can lay legitimate claim to being one of the better (and certainly the most idiosyncratic) rappers on the planet. Moving in entirely different circles, the two never met, instead emailing musical ideas back and forth.

    Characteristically for Rustie, the production is full of unusual elements; that opening siren call, the light-as-a-feather cymbal taps and hand claps, hard-hitting 808 rolls and layer upon layer of detuned saw waves. It sounds glitchy and hard – in debt to the synths of classic Trance music, but making space for muffled drums that evoke an elephant bounding its way across a trampoline. Fierce but playful. Taken in isolation, it really doesn’t sound like something that’s begging to be rapped over. In fact, it sounds like attempting to do so would be like riding an unbroken mustang – you’d probably do yourself a serious injury.

    And yet, Danny absolutely kills that vocal – dominates it in a way that makes you feel he could probably drop his flow over a whistling kettle and make it all work. He’s technically brilliant on the mic while retaining the looseness of vulnerability of an ODB. The fire to Rustie’s ice. Helpfully for me, he’s also rapping so quickly on this that you can barely make out what he’s saying, just how he’s saying it. Velocity over lucidity: my absolute sweet spot for modern Hip Hop.

    Many years ago at university I found myself in the death throes of an ill-advised first year studying Film Studies. I’d realised fairly quickly that I was on the wrong course, but the week that really brought it home that I was going to need to change my major arrived in the Summer term, when of the 5 hours of total study time allotted to my class, 4 were spent watching and discussing Basic Instinct for a unit on audience response. All that I can recall of that misspent adventure now is that when they first tested the film a reported 95% of female audience members ventured that they would prefer the movie if Michael Douglas died at the end. Difficult to argue with.

    The other hour that week was spent in a lecture, memorable but probably not conducive to my future employability, that began with a professor striding onstage to the theme tune from Spider-Man and announcing to his audience with some obvious delight that “When I was a child that music always made me want to dance and fight”. Quite the opening gambit, and it’s that remark I always think of when I listen to Attak, because it too always makes me want to dance and fight. The song starts hype and only seems to get more hype the longer it goes on. The urgency of the sirens, the more aggressive tone in the vocal about a minute in, the repeated “I’m a/I’m a maniac” at the midway point: it measurably raises the temperature of my blood every time and makes me want to smash furniture. Pure, unadulterated musical excitement – it really shouldn’t be allowed.

    Attak wasn’t the first track I heard that sought to pair EDM and Hip Hop. It may not even be the best I’ve heard to do so. But it was the first I found to put the two elements together so you couldn’t even see the joins; like they’d always been meant for one another, unimprovable. And it’s one of those tracks that makes your mind boggle at what music can do: its capacity to deliver the unexpected, the sheer, boundless potential of it all.

    Rustie went on to mental health challenges that sadly saw him largely walk away from the industry. A great shame, as he leaves behind him a sense of unfulfilled potential – I’m a big fan of Slasherr, and would have loved to have seen what he’d have done next. Danny Brown went on to become the world’s greatest underground but actually overground rapper, and now makes glitchy, hyperactive records with JPEGMAFIA that sound like Attak on ADHD meds. He continues to demonstrate that there is pretty much no challenge to which his flow will not ultimately rise.

    Attak remains a go-to whenever adrenaline is required. It’s of such a peculiar species of wild, alchemical magic that I never tire of listening to it, wondering each time I do how you even go about starting to make a record like this.

  17. 62. Always On My Mind – Pet Shop Boys

    It’s late 1987, and I’m recently turned 9 years old, sat watching Top Of The Pops. On the screen a besuited man, hands plunged in his pockets, insouciance personified, sings a familiar song of love and regret. Behind him, a second man attends to a bank of keyboards that appears to be emitting the greatest and most futuristic music I have ever heard. The first man gives the air of an unusually self-possessed bank manager who has wandered into the wrong meeting room, the second is utterly impassive and wears a beanie bearing the legend “POSHBOY”. I am smitten. In deep smit. Smitnessing the future, and so on.

    Obviously, I already knew Always On My Mind. The Elvis version. I was still just a tiny kid, but it felt like one of those songs you absorbed through the air – no one played you it for the first time, you just woke up one morning with your lungs full of it. That big old voice, speaking directly to you from the other side of eternity, full of aching sincerity. Always On My Mind was perfect songwriting; it was universal, it was so simple as to be genius, and it felt like it was being sung by Mount Rushmore.

    I didn’t know back then that Elvis was not the original performer. He seemed to own the song so thoroughly that it was genuinely difficult to imagine that he’d not been first to it, and the lyrics seemed so intimately tied to his personal legacy as to make artist and song inextricable. The great man of history expressing regret in his dotage, what could be more profound than that? Elvis was 37 years old when he recorded it, but to me he sounded at least 100. At least Johnny Cash waited until he was 70 to cover Hurt. I listened to that version of Always On My Mind, pondering the road of life ahead and all the wisdom I would be hard-winning as I travelled along it.

    Ironically, the absolute pinnacle of the song almost didn’t exist at all. When Wayne Carson was writing Always On My Mind he deliberately didn’t write a bridge, as he didn’t consider the song needed one. His co-writers eventually talked him round, and we ended up with what is surely one of the great iconic bridges in the history of music; there’s not a great deal out there to beat that first, iconic “Teee-eeell me…” The moment that takes an already pretty great song and boots it up into the stratosphere.

    The Pet Shop Boys first laid hands on Always On My Mind when they were invited to participate in “Love Me Tender”, a TV celebration of Elvis to mark the 10 year anniversary of his premature demise. They weren’t fans of Elvis, and originally wanted to cover Baby Let’s Play House before eventually opting for something from Elvis’ cheeseburger burnout phase, rather than the early Rockabilly years. On paper, the pairing was incongruous: the PSBs were already one of the finest singles acts the UK had ever produced, but the source material here had Country roots, and they were coming from about as un-Country a place as was imaginable.

    As it turns out, it’s the lack of reverence that makes Always On My Mind so special. Most acts, when confronted with one of the all-time great songs, would attempt to show due respect, to operate deep in the long, dark shadow of the original and attempt to add their own footnote or two. This cover does the precise opposite: it treats Always On My Mind as a blank, eminently improvable, canvas, and flips virtually everything about the original in service of creating a song that is – ultimately – better. The emphasis moves from the bridge to the chorus, the vocal is drained of sincerity and self-pity, and the song leads not with a human voice, but with a synth riff.

    Let’s start with that riff then. Instantly recognisable, completely immediate – it makes Satisfaction sound under-caffeinated. Those stabbing, stirring synths are the sound of dancing with your hands in the air on the most epic and consequential night of your life. They’re youth and expectation, they’re acceleration. And they’re not withheld, there’s no deferred gratification; they’re dropped literally 5 seconds in. You’re about to have the time of your life, starting right now. Empires have been raised on weaker foundations.

    But as strong as those synths are, it’s Neil Tennant’s vocal that gives the thing its true MO. Where Elvis is full of passion and a desire to connect on an intrinsic human level, Tennant is aloof, almost absent. The vocals sound as if they’ve been recorded in a tunnel; distant both literally and figuratively. Stephen Thoms Erlewine described the performance as follows: “At first glance, it may have seemed like a send up of the song – but then, in the middle of all this electronic bombast, Neil Tennant’s detached vocals feel as affecting as Willie Nelson’s off-kilter phrasing. And that’s high praise not only to the Pet Shop Boys and Nelson, but to Christopher and Carlson’s song, which now seems to withstand any possible interpretation.”

    There’s something a little sniffy about this reading, and I’m not sure I agree with it. Always On My Mind does not “withstand” the Pet Shop Boys, but rather is elevated by them. The vocal isn’t a sendup, it’s a repositioning: as Tennant himself said, the song is classically “sung from the point of view of a selfish and self-obsessed man, who is possibly incapable of love, and who is now drinking whiskey and feeling sorry for himself. It’s a completely tactless song.” In Tennant’s hands, the vocal is reclaimed – the self-pitying bastardry is drained away and we’re left only with the sentiment, the sincerity of which we’re free to judge for ourselves; does he actually mean any of this stuff? It’s worth bearing in mind that Always On My Mind wasn’t written for a man, it was simply claimed by Elvis. Brenda Lee sings “Boy, I’m sorry I was blind”, Elvis sings “Girl, I’m sorry I was blind”, but Neil Tennant de-genders proceedings entirely with “I’m so sorry I was blind”.

    More than that any of that though, the Pet Shop Boys reposition Always On My Mind as a song for the young. Listen to Elvis, listen to Willie. Older men, freighted with the benefit and curse of experience, bringing their full history to bear. You’re meant to sit and cry and pray you don’t make the same mistakes. The Pet Shop Boys’ version is the precise opposite: welcome to a brilliant party, let’s go out and make some mistakes. That’s reflected in the busy-ness of the production, in the high velocity at which everything moves, and particularly in Tennant’s voice. If Elvis sounds old, he sounds young – a young man, his voice clear and pure, still too callow to yet appreciate the cost of lost love, still too honest to delude himself of his own innocence.

    Looking back, it’s that youth I latched onto when I saw Tennant on TOTP. He’s so fresh faced, his suit doesn’t quite fit and you can see he’s trying to look more comfortable in it than he actually is. The relaxed body language seems rehearsed, as he stands there amidst the maelstrom being cooked up by Lowe. His face is open, kind. He’s relatable and decidedly non-iconic – he keeps looking into the camera and then looking down to the floor. He’s vulnerable. And it’s that youth that makes it all so poignant in retrospect. Many years later, when Neil Tennant sang “Life is much more simple when you’re young” on Se A Vida E (That’s The Way Life Is), it felt like a bookend to Always On My Mind. His own Elvis moment, his own little excuse.

    There are a thousand other things I could point to that I love about this song. I love the fact it was memorably described as “the pinnacle of the sad banger”, I love the way Tennant slows down the second “You were always on my mind”, I love the unintelligible singing over the outro, I love the extra chord just before the chorus, and I love the 9 minute House version, fused with In My House, that appears on Introspective. But most of all, I love the whistle. The strange, rising noise that kicks in just after the repetition of “satisfied” at the point when you think the song can’t possibly get any more exciting, to take it on to new heights still. It sounds like an opera singer climbing, reaching, soaring for a high note, and it’s so strange and beautiful that it genuinely makes me well with emotion whenever I hear it.

    Always On My Mind is very probably the greatest cover version ever recorded. It takes an undeniable, classic song beloved of most and completely turns almost every aspect on its head, emerging with something fresh and undeniable. Perhaps even better. It takes the bastardry of the original and reverses it. When Wayne Carson was originally writing the song he found himself stuck in Memphis on a work excursion that lasted 10 days longer than originally planned. When he called his wife to let her know his stay was being extended she was angry, and he replied “Well, I know I’ve been gone a lot, but I’ve been thinking about you all the time”. That call was the inspiration for the lyric, to the extent that Carson ended the conversation quickly so he could get it down on paper. The Pet Shop Boys had no real affection for Elvis, and seemingly no real affection for the kind of excuse-making from which the song was borne. They present the truth instead, and sometimes the truth sounds cold.

    There’s an endless list of reasons to love this song. It’s an indisputable banger, the synths very probably laid the groundwork for a future love of electronic music, it seems to make (most) people happy, and it always reminds me of Christmas. But really, I love it because when I listen to it I’m transported back to that 9 year old watching the TV and seeing and hearing something that just felt so impossibly exciting, that blended melancholy and euphoria so seamlessly and that seemed to speak to the endless, infinite malleability of music. The endless, infinite possibilities of life ahead.

    • Your best work to-date, Bingo. Absolutely brilliant. I love the track too, especially in the context of the album, where it sits, snuggly, in the middle of one continuous suite. Peak PSB, in my view. I Want A Dog, indeed.

    • “Greatest cover version ever recorded”. Hmmm

      Lovely write-up, but I found it the weakest PSB single up to that point, and it kept Fairytale of New York off no. 1. For me I really think their first one was their best “West End Girls”, but nearly all their 80s and early 90s efforts were triumphant.

      Your opinion of the lyric is interesting. Will think of that next time I hear the song (any version). And Introspective is some days my favourite PSB album.

    • Man alive, Bingo, that’s some beautiful writing. Brought a tear too my eye. Keep ’em coming. A couple of years after its release, I was talking to Neil Tennant in a lift at London Studios (formerly London Weekend Television), and I said how much I loved the version. At that point, Jonathan King, also in the lift, pinched my arse, I threatened him, and it all became rather awkward.

    • As for Tennant’s clear, pure voice. I read somewhere that Pet Shop Boys music is perfect for learning English as a second language. The production is clean and Tennant enunciates the lyrics beautifully.

  19. 61. New York City Serenade – Bruce Springsteen

    I have been wrong. Frequently, and with great conviction, I have been wrong. And in my music-listening life, amidst all the many mistakes I have made, rarely was I more demonstrably incorrect than when it came to Bruce Springsteen.

    I grew up understanding Springsteen to be music for meatheads. Flag-waving, chest-thumping braggadocio. The sonic equivalent of a Rocky movie. Like so many before me, I’d been wrong-footed by Born In The USA and the great 80s commercial peak. I’d misunderstood, skipped over and tuned out. But I’d also been deluded by my own sense of self; my intellectual snobbery and need for music to be worthy and authentic. Having actually listened to precious little of him, The Boss struck me as neither of those things, and so I curled a lip towards him and hunkered down with my Dylan records and my well fed insecurities.

    Somewhere towards the end of university, that all changed on a sixpence when I first heard The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle, and specifically side two of that album. Incident On 57th Street, Rosalita, NYC Serenade. Two mini-operas with a world class party tune sandwiched in the middle for good measure. I can, and will, do everything.

    I sat and listened to those three songs open-mouthed, bathed in that familiar warmth of dawning realisation that my own judgment is not so much questionable as fully up on indictment. That penny drop moment where you suddenly “get” an artist who has previously eluded you, that knowledge that you’re about to have to walk back an awful lot of the foolish opinions you’ve previously hee-hawed around town, and that all those other artists you’ve written off might simply have penny drop moments of their own waiting to happen. Humility.

    The Wild, The Innocent… stunned me, and it opened up the doors to an artist who has gone on to become one of my great favourites, the point where half a dozen of his records could very easily have jostled for space on this list, including some of the very tunes that had originally caused me to so unjustly write him off. It’s NYC Serenade that I’m including here though, because that was the song that took me aback most profoundly upon first listen, the song that confounded my expectations most thoroughly and pleasingly, and the song I go back to most frequently.

    Bruce Springsteen has made a career out of writing brilliant narrative songs; stories of regular lives gone right or wrong, of fleeting glories, prices paid and dreams that may or may not be lies when they don’t come true. NYC Serenade bears some of the hallmarks of those narrative songs, but it’s coming from a different angle: instead of telling you about a person, it’s telling you about a place. It’s Springsteen in thrall to Astral Weeks, another record which builds a strong sense of space and time. It’s Springsteen walking through the neighbourhood and recording what he sees, the rich drama of regular life. Alan Moore once memorably said that if you spoke long enough to a random person at the local bus stop you’d find that they were deeper and more interesting than Superman, that their stories were of greater intrigue and more resonant. NYC Serenade is proof of concept.

    We open with David Sancious strumming the strings of a piano with a guitar pick, before plunging into one of the great piano openings, simultaneously inviting and foreboding. There’s a bit of sturm und drang, some preparatory ivory tinkling and then on to gentler and more contemplative tones. It’s a perfect scene-setter, full of light and shade, and as it plays it calls to mind an empty stage. At around the 100 second mark, Springsteen’s guitar joins us, and he bends a note so beautiful and pure that I hear it in my dreams. The guitar strums with mounting assertion, action is foreshadowed. It’s been nearly two and a half minutes, there’s been no vocal as yet, and this is already one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard.

    The opening of NYC Serenade sets the tone for all that follows. We’re in no rush – we’ll be here for nigh on 10 minutes; still, I believe, Bruce’s longest studio recording – there will be no verse/chorus/verse, and everything is in service of creating a sense of time and place. The sense of a New York neighbourhood waking up for the day. You could play that intro over some of the opening scenes of Spike Lee’s immortal Do The Right Thing and get a perfect fit; for Mookie, Da Mayor and Radio Raheem read Diamond Jackie, Fish Lady and the Vibes Man.

    When Bruce’s voice eventually joins us, it’s to exhale an opening couplet that is characteristically Springsteenian: “Billy, he’s down by the railroad track/sitting low in the backseat of his Cadillac”. The lines are a mirror to the opening of “Incident On 57th Street”: “Spanish Johnny rolled in from the underworld last night/with bruised arms and broken rhythm in a beat up old Buick, but dressed just like dynamite”, but compare the way the two are sung. Incident is full of bravura, a proper statement of intent, classic Rock intonation. Serenade’s opening lines are sung so tenderly, with such restraint, Bruce almost at a whisper. This isn’t a song about glory days, it’s about regular days. The drama of small things.

    Before I heard NYC Serenade I had Bruce down as a bellower. Another error. I love the way he sings this song, the many little flourishes he uses to bring these characters, this place to life. The way he seems to duet with the instruments (the little conga “Ooo” sound after he first sings “Billy”, the saxophone after “take my hand and walk with me down Broadway”), the way he gives character to Fish Lady’s “they ain’t got no money”, the impishness in his “awww, hook up to the night train”, the way he hums along with the outro. His voice does a dozen odd little things as he strives to match the majesty of the instrumentation. He plays all the different parts, tells the story like he really means it. Listen to the way he sings “So long, sometimes…you just gotta… walk on” –as if these are thoughts that are just occurring to him. Or the way he creeps in “All dressed up in satin, walkin down the alley”, barely audible in the middle of all those cries of “He’s singing”.

    The lyrics are similarly fabulous. The free form structure of the song means they don’t immediately leap out at you, because so few of them are given massive emphasis, but there are a number of really memorable couplets: “Diamond Jackie, she’s so intact/as she falls so softly beneath him”, potentially a story all of its own, “mama take my arm and move with me down broadway”, and the glorious description of the Jazz Man: “any deeper blue, and you’ll be playing/in your grave”. On first listen, I seized upon “Walk tall/or baby don’t walk at all” and took it directly to my heart. For many years we had it up on the kitchen wall, and it’s a piece of advice I’ve returned to frequently.

    I was 20, 21 when I first heard NYC Serenade. Staring down the barrel of the end of academia and some sort of entry into the real world. I was also beginning to suspect that I’d had my priorities all wrong, that my fixation on books and words and big ideas that had proved so helpful to my university career and which had kept me so warmly insulated from actual life was a short road to nowhere. I’d originally planned to spend my life an academic, safely tucked away in some dusty study from which all the unpleasant vicissitudes of life could be studied from afar without actual first hand experience.

    A few months before my encounter with The Wild, The Innocent… I’d been walking on campus and seen one of my Philosophy professors stop in the middle of a busy road, pull out a pen and paper and scribble down his thoughts, seemingly oblivious as cars angrily honked their horns and the rain beat down upon him. It was a eureka moment: somewhere inside I recognised that this wasn’t what I wanted – to disconnect further and further from reality. In the words of another great poet, I wanted to see people and I wanted to see lights.

    NYC Serenade fed the flame that had been called to life that day. It reinforced to me that the glory of life isn’t in the big moments, it’s in the little ones. The chance conversation with a stranger, the moment stood by the side of the water with the sun on your face, the change in expression of a face right before the person laughs at a joke you’ve told. The way that true love is often expressed in smaller gestures. Individual moments, strung together like pearls. That’s what this song is about: walking down the road and sensing that everyday beauty playing out all around you, a drama far more ornate and spectacular than could ever be dreamed up by the human imagination. The beauty that comes from people, their stories and their quirks.

    It’s nowhere better summed up than in the song’s apotheosis: listen to your junk man…. he’s singing. The mundane and the magical, all entwined and insuperable. Springsteen giving it everything while the music swells behind him, every ounce of emotion wrung from the mellotron. Shake away street life, shake away city life – look beyond the immediate, peer beyond the stage setting that is your life and locate the true essence. Recognise those small things even as they make your life worthwhile. That was the lesson that helped me find my happiness, and this is the song that encapsulates it.

    My journey to loving Springsteen was a passage from head to heart. And that’s fitting, because heart is what he brings, perhaps as much as any other performer there’s ever been. I initially mistook that directness for simplicity, when it’s really anything but. NYC Serenade blew me away the first time I heard it, and whenever I go back to it I’m reminded of what’s important, of how full of surprises life can be, of how frequently I am wrong, and how exciting the future might be as a consequence, because – really – in amidst my mistakenness just think of all the things I’ve still to learn, and of all the trivial beauty I’ve yet to experience. Listen to your junk man.

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