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  1. 80. Even After All – Finley Quaye

    The year is 1997. I’m down in London, staying with old friends.

    We’ve all just had our A-level results the day before, and we’re heading out to Notting Hill Carnival. We’re heading there to celebrate/commiserate, to eat some good food, and to hear some great music. We’re heading there to hear Finley Quaye.

    This was one of those days that aren’t like the others. A day where the air feels a little clearer, the sun a little brighter and the future so proximate, so tangible that you might just be able to leap up and take a big old bite out of it.

    For me, it’s the culmination of a long seven years in a school I’d profoundly disliked. Seven years of ignorance, grimly unearned machismo, and othering (and that was just the teachers).

    It had felt like a prison sentence, but there I was: out on release, and having achieved my goal of waving the old place off with my desired exam results and a big old middle finger. I’d been strong enough to make it through, and I was still naïve enough to think that life on the outside would be simple. The exam results were the final stamp on my exit card – mission accomplished, a weight lifted, on to bigger and better things.

    It was a hot Summer in 97, or at least it felt that way to me and my mates. We listened to music, went on long pub crawls along the river, sat around in parks and chatted endlessly. More than anything, we looked ahead. And it wasn’t just us; Labour was newly in power and for the first time in living memory it felt as if the whole country was looking forward. We had a young Prime Minister, there was optimism in the air and absolutely nothing (nothing, dammit) could possibly go wrong.

    Even After All was the song we listened to that day, more than all the others. We had a fabulous time: Ethiopian food, incredible music and – critically – no stabbings. We saw Busta Rhymes, Boyz II Men, Jay Z and Lil Kim, among others. But it was Finley who defined it – out in the park, in the bright sunshine, playing his balmy Soul/Reggae/Funk hybrid.

    We were all fans already; the album had been out a couple of weeks and was on heavy rotation, and we’d discovered he was related to that other great mid-90s favourite Tricky. Indeed we’d piled down to his show armed with the iconic cry: “I yam Treeky’s oncle, woah-oh-oh”.

    Finley’s voice was singular sounding to us. It seemed to float effortlessly between genres, super new but also somehow redolent of Nina Simone in the phrasing. He made music sound effortless, and we loved him for that because that’s what we were all determined that life would be for us: effortless. Just listen to Even After All. There’s barely anything there; he conjures all the magic in a vocal that is virtually spoken word. He was perfect, and his music floated like a Summer breeze.

    Even After All wasn’t our first introduction to Quaye. That meeting occurred before we’d even heard him sing a note: Guy Called Gerald, Finley’s Rainbow, heard off at some Drum & Bass night lost to time. Earlier in 1997 he’d released Sunday Shining, sampling from and riffing on Bob Marley’s Sun Is Shining – our first introduction to those vocals. I’ve always been a sucker for a sweet, clear vocal – still am – and Finley’s were sweeter than most.

    But it was Even After All that sealed the love. Those reverbing notes that call to mind For What It’s Worth. The languid bassline. Minimal drums. The strange phrasing in the lyrics: “You know I looo-ooove you so/You know I loooo-oooove you so, and so”. It’s a Reggae lyric with a Soul lilt. That glorious breakdown: “Them eyes are gorgeous girl/no demise/uprise/them eyes are gorgeous/I must advance”. Tender, charming and swoonsome. It sounded like nothing else.

    And it hit home to me, deeply, because I instinctively read in those lyrics a self-affirmation that chimed so perfectly in that moment. “You know I love you so”. Me talking to me, as I often had to in those days. The little pep talks; don’t let this place grind you down, stay low, keep moving and come out the other side. Love yourself. Love yourself.

    I was still a teenager, and to me school had felt like a war; a war for my sense of myself. And here I was at the end of it all, sat in a sunbeam with my mates, singing along: “Even after all/You just survive, soldier, and your soul is beautiful/and your soul is good”. I can’t tell you what those words meant to me, in that moment. My soul soared in a manner that’s only ever possible when the events of real life conspire to mingle with good music in exactly the right time and place.

    We trooped home buzzing. Probably played some Nintendo, listened to some records. Life moved on, but it didn’t take all of me with it. A little piece stayed back at Carnival, like Rupert Brooke’s soldier in that proverbial foreign field. Trapped in a sunbeam, frozen in a happy moment. Complete.

    Soon enough, I discovered that the future couldn’t possibly be as bright as it had felt that day. That I, like everyone else, had limits. That you can leave prison but still carry it with you. That these things take time and that life cannot always be an easy business. And that’s fine – that’s as it should be.

    Finley Quaye never managed to top Even After All, or that first album. He receded from view, got himself in trouble. Struggled. But on that one day in late August 1997 he was perfect. We were all perfect, in that way you can only ever be aged 18 and full of hope.

    Even After All became a permanent go-to; partly to spark again and again the memory of that glorious afternoon, and partly to remind myself forever: your soul is beautiful, your soul is good.

    • Fkin love this tune. 1997 was a delicious summer and that was a great album. It’s a mess and kind of shouldn’t work but does. I was young and free, looking out at a garden with bunny rabbits at the bottom of it, smoking fags… didn’t require another album from Finley, it was just of that moment.

      The other albums I played a lot that summer were Gaucho and the Howlin Wolf compo The Genuine Article. It all made sense at the time.

  2. Given he is, actually, a link between Caleb Quaye and Tricky, that sort of sums up his blended sensibilities to me. Lovely song and album. What happened to him, or is it a sort of file under Terence Trent D’Arby?

  4. 79. Luv 4 The World/Turnin Me On – Plantlife/Nina Sky (Diplo Mix)

    The Fabriclive compilation series, which ran to 100 editions stretching from 2001 to 2018, was an absolute goldmine for new music discovery. The format – popular DJs tasked with assembling and mixing some of their favourite tracks – was by no means a new one, but the range of different music types was broad and it felt like everyone really brought their A game, to the point where you could generally be assured of finding at least one new gem on each offering.

    My favourite of all those albums was number 24, curated by Diplo, back in 2005. Diplo meant something to me in 2005 – he wasn’t yet a pop star producer, hadn’t formed Major Lazer, and was still in the foothills of his career. But he’d already put out the Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape with M.I.A, which I’d loved, and – even more importantly – he’d already released Favela On Blast.

    Favela On Blast was a mixtape documenting the extraordinary “Funk Carioca” scene that had emerged in Brazil at the turn of the Millennium, mixing the US electronic funk sound of the early 80s with more traditional elements of Brazilian music to create some seriously intense party sounds. Diplo had discovered Funk Carioca while travelling through Brazil and brought it to the US and Europe. It was the foundation stone of his career. More importantly, it was one of the first times in living memory I’d heard authentic South American music smuggled into our own popular culture.

    Growing up, I was intensely conscious of my own Latin American roots. It was difficult not to be; they were front and centre in my family and in how we presented to the outside world. My mother is deeply proud of where she’s from, where we’re from, and has never held back from letting others know about it.

    That wasn’t always so simple in childhood. Not on the playground or the classroom, and particularly not when the country I was born in went to war with the country from which my ancestors hail. I learned very quickly when to be proud and when to keep my head down. I also learned that, to the English, South America is a distant continent that only really exists on the fringes of their consciousness or in the context of football. It was a badge I wore that marked me out as different, and when you’re young, different can be a struggle, particularly when your surroundings are notably homogenous.

    South America was part of me from the day I was born. Mum saw to that. But it was that classic second generation immigrant experience: this thing that anchors you, but that you’re experiencing at a remove. The suspicion that what you’re clinging on to is a parent’s hazy memory of the place from decades earlier. A home full of mate cups and paintings of gauchos, and the suspicion that the South America to which we were really connected was probably a ghost by now. A cultural marooning. The badge I wore, the badge I was forced to defend, was an emblem I couldn’t really understand.

    I’d visited the continent plenty growing up, long holidays to see relatives and travel around with them. But those were really just holidays – you never see a place properly in just a couple of weeks. In 2004 I’d gone over alone, as an adult, and spent some time exploring the continent on my own terms, eventually settling for a few months in Buenos Aires, the city from which my family hailed and where they’d lived until my grandparents decided to move on.

    It had been a formative trip; I’d learned a lot about myself, lifted some burdens and come to understand my heritage a little better. I’d also experienced a sense of belonging somewhere for the first time in years, partly due to the hospitality of the locals, who I found unbelievably welcoming and who assured me that, wherever I may have had the misfortune to be born, I was a Porteno (not true, but a lovely thing to say nonetheless).

    Favela On Blast was released a few weeks after I got back to London. In it, I heard some of the same sounds I’d enjoyed in Brazil. But I also went to parties, saw it being played, saw people enjoying this music, and I felt proud. It wasn’t a pride that had any foundation in reality – none of this was my doing, and my family aren’t even Brazilian – it just felt nice to see something South American being picked up and admired. And for the first time in a long time, I felt at peace with that part of myself: I had a connection with the motherland that was real and solid, and that I would carry for the rest of my life. I had my own South America, not just my Mother’s.

    Diplo’s Fabric mix arrived a few months later, and it was fantastic, moving beyond the Baille Funk sound of Favela to draw in all sorts of unexpected influences. Cat Power, Le Tigre, Outkast, Aphex Twin, The Cure. It remains to this day one of my absolute favourite mix tapes, a great example of how many different types of music can be thrown into the same gumbo and made to work together. And it was kicked off by a track I came to love above all the others: Luv 4 The World/Turnin Me On.

    Luv 4 The World is effectively a mash up of two songs: Luv 4 The World (Why They Gotta Hate) by Plantlife, an underground LA Funk band, and Turnin Me On by Nina Sky, an R&B track by a pair of albino Puerto Rican twins. Slammed together, it’s a fusion of Funk, Salsa and Electro, with a rap by Pitbull (of all people) thrown in for good measure. It’s much more Westernised than Favela On Blast, much less heavy and much more of a Pop song.

    It’s also perfect party music. The way it swings, those handclaps and “yeah”s, and particularly the last 40 seconds when it all goes heavy electro and links us right back to Diplo’s Brazilian music odyssey.

    This song reminds me of the period in my life when I was back in London, fresh from my adventures overseas, full of certainty and ambition. It reminds me of being out every night, of a million parties and of meeting my wife and moving in together. It’s a song that formed the gateway between my past and my future. It’s one of the first tracks I reach for at a social gathering, and it makes me happy every damn time I hear it.

    It’s not an overly substantial song (again: it features Pitbull), but it means a lot to me, because somewhere along the way it got wrapped up with my identity and my sense of self. It soundtracks a period wherein I came to understand myself a little better – where I was from, where I was heading and what it all meant – and that makes it comfort food of the best kind.

      • As ever, a man of great taste MC E.

        I still think Diplo is comfortably the best Fabric set, it’s the most consistent anyway. But these ones are also very good: James Lavelle, Grooverider, Jacques Lu Cont, Scratch Perverts, Herbaliser, DJ Format, Spank Rock, DJ Craze, Freq Nasty, A-Trak, LTJ Bukem, Toddla T, Four Tet, Erol Alkan, Skream.

        Here’s another absolute banger from the DJ Craze set: the Switch remix of True Skool by Coldcut & Roots Manuva. Was within a whisker of making this list in its own right.

  5. 78. Disco 2000 – Pulp

    Disco 2000 was written about Jarvis Cocker’s childhood friend, Deborah Bone, for whom the song’s titular Deborah is named. Cocker performed the song at Bone’s 50th birthday party in 2014. She died a year later of bone marrow cancer. She had run out of future, as all of us eventually will.

    I was 8 or 9 years old when I first began to think about time. To struggle with the idea that we’re all trapped in this great river, moving slowly and inexorably downstream, with no ability whatsoever to fight the current. That we’re all just drifting, and that we seem to accept it, or at least ignore it. I would lie in my bed at night and think about all the seconds of my life, arranged end to end – the good moments and the bad – and I would think about the last second of all: the moment where I would eventually go from being here to being…. elsewhere. I would notice the way my brain recoiled when I tried to make it think about that second, as if I were beating against an invisible wall.

    A few years later, as an unhappy teenager, I was working my way through the works of Kurt Vonnegut Jr when I came to his 1959 sci-fi novel, The Sirens of Titan. The Sirens of Titan is about a billionaire named Winston Niles Rumfoord, who while travelling through space falls into a temporal anomaly, and is transformed into a living probability wave, existing in all times and places at once, stretching along a spiral from the Earth’s Sun to Betelgeuse. Later in the book I was introduced to Vonnegut’s greatest creations, the Tralfamadorians, an alien species that experience time in a non-linear fashion, effectively living every moment of their lives simultaneously.

    I know now, with the benefit of further reading and thought, that these experiments with time were a form of therapy for Vonnegut, and that he was exploring the mechanics that would eventually allow him to build Slaughterhouse 5, one of the greatest meditations on trauma ever essayed by human hand.

    But the mechanics also worked for me. They allowed me to return to those childhood thoughts, that image of my life arranged along a single great line along which I could skip, drawing strength from both past and future. They allowed me to think about that final second as just another second, no more or less consequential than all the others. And that was a source of great comfort for me. I could learn from the Tralfamadorians, maybe think a little like them, and it would make my present a little more bearable as I waited patiently for it to recede into my past.

    A couple of years further down the river, Britpop happened. It was brash and shiny and self-certain and all sorts of other things that I struggled to feel. But it also smuggled along with it a number of rogue elements, as all musical movements are wont to do. Pulp were one such rogue element.

    Pulp were already a thing before Britpop began. They’d been a band for as long as I’d been on the planet, they’d released good records and most people who took an interest in music knew who Jarvis Cocker was. His ‘n’ Hers had given them a bunch of radio play, and they were co-opted as Britpop by association, largely on the basis that if Suede could (just about) be held to be part of the club, then so could they.

    When Common People happened, Pulp went from associate membership to a lead role. It is, of course, a brilliant Pop record, but it also pulled off the unlikely trick of managing to talk to the British public about class in a meaningful and honest way without being angry and unsettling or provoking a backlash. It was a rare moment in which the art school kids addressed “real” people in open, accessible and clear-eyed terms. Common People articulated a truth which remains a truth to this day, and it did so while sounding like a really good time. In many ways, it was the absolute zenith of Britpop, because at the time it felt like it signalled a future Britain in which we could finally openly discuss class, break its stranglehold on our lives and let talent speak for itself. Plus, you could dance to it.

    Pulp became stars, and Jarvis Cocker joined the great pantheon of British archetypes: that happy firmament of people who are allowed to be a little odd, and celebrated for it. By the time Different Class was released, we all knew precisely who he was – the King of the Outsiders, ready to lead us all in to the party through an open bathroom window. He was to the 90s what Morrissey was to the 80s, only where Morrissey was remote and exclusive, Jarvis was hyper-accessible and inclusive. Warm instead of cold. And none of the suspect politics (so far, there’s still time).

    Nonetheless, it wasn’t Common People that won my heart, or Mis-Shapes, the song on which Jarvis seemed to explicitly accept his new status, or even Underwear, which is probably pound-for-pound the single best song on Different Class. Instead, it was Disco 2000, because Disco 2000 is all about time.

    Full disclosure, I don’t particularly love the way Disco 2000 actually sounds. I don’t like the super clean production, the jagged guitar riff or the whole common room disco vibe. I don’t much care for Laura Brannigan’s Gloria, from which it seems to lift is distinctive central chord sequence. In fact, if you take the vocal off the song I’m not sure I’d ever want to listen to it. But that vocal is magical, and – more than almost any other example I can think of – it lifts the song from mediocrity to greatness, because it carries with it a legitimately brilliant lyric.

    Disco 2000 is, of course, a narrative song essaying the narrator’s attempts to facilitate a meeting with his erstwhile and unrequited childhood love. It plays time from both ends; the verse is retrospective, set in adulthood but looking back on the pains of adolescence, while the bulk of the chorus occurs in the past, the same adolescents looking ahead to a reunion in the year 2000, full of fascination at what the future might hold. This unusual structure allows the song to leverage a tragic juxtaposition of hope for what might be ahead with knowledge of what it actually holds; that the narrator will “end up living down here on my own”, hoping against hope that the lovely Deborah will also find herself so diminished as to actually consider him as a potential romantic partner.

    The song nails how you feel when you’re young – laughing at the preposterous notion that you’ll ever be old (“won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown”), and the wistfulness of looking back at missed opportunity and unfulfilled dreams. It shows us a story from both ends, and skips merrily back and forth along the temporal line. It sounds like a party, when it’s really a lament, and it’s blessed with a chorus of such absolute genius that you it’s difficult to believe no one got to it before: “Let’s all meet up in the year 2000”.

    While Gloria is the song to which Disco 2000 is always compared, to me the song’s real cousin is Martha by Tom Waits, another lyric built around a narrator contacting his long lost love to broker a meeting. But where Martha is warm and full of hope (“Those were the days of Roses/poetry and prose and Martha all I had was you and all you had was me”), Disco 2000 is secretly quite dark and bitter. Where Martha is a phone call between former lovers, Disco 2000 reads more like the internal monologue of the narrator; preparation for a phone call he will never make, and words he might never say aloud. Where Martha’s past is “poetry and prose”, Disco 2000’s is “damp and lonely”. The sweetness and romance is somehow absent, replaced by a string of glaring red flags (“you were the first girl at school to get breasts”), and a sense that what’s on offer here isn’t love, but capture.

    Jarvis’s vocal is perfectly played, allowing the song to be read from multiple angles. From the comedy mystique of “Oh Deborah do you recall”, to the bottom notes of contempt in “cos you were so popular” and on to the song’s peroration, that magnificent and heartbreaking “What are you doing Sunday baby/would you like to come and meet me maybe/you could even bring your baby/ooh-ooh-ooh”. For my money, there are very few lyrics more tragic and revealing than that “you could even bring your baby”. He brings the song to life, he makes it work, he makes it universal.

    When I first heard Disco 2000 I was 16 years old. The year 2000 was half a decade away, and the idea that it would come and go, that planned reunions and lives would fall by the wayside, that we’d all get older in just the same ways our parents had, was still comical to me. And then time moved on; the river flowed further and suddenly the year 2000 is nearly a quarter of a century ago, and Disco 2000 is a part of all our pasts. Deborah’s baby would conceivably be a teenager or older by now, Deborah herself is lost to cancer. And yet, she’s not lost at all, because somewhere out there in the universe, she’s still young and with everything ahead of her, and because she’ll exist forever in Cocker’s lyric.

    Disco 2000 made me feel the way I did as a little kid in bed, trying to stare at the sun. It provoked the same glitch in my brain that thinking about that final second used to. It was warmly nostalgic, but brutal and unflinching. It connected me back to childhood and onward to my future as yet unwritten. It made me feel I could have both at once.

    To this day, I still sometimes try to think of my own life arranged along that timeline, a string of pearls suspended against eternity. I try to remember how it felt to be young – not what I did, but how it felt – that great Joan Didion edict to self: “Remember what it was to be me”. I try to imagine what it will be to be old. I try to force my way to the banks of the river for a brief moment, to notice its flow, to steal a glance both down and upstream, and to wonder at it all. And in a sense, that’s what this entire list is – using music as a vehicle to look the river up and down, from that very first second to the very last.

    Disco 2000 is young and old, hopeful and fearful. It’s a song about growth and erosion, the way that the passing years can make you giddy, and the sad fact that not everyone gets a happy ending. It’s a madeleine de Proust that, when consumed, fractures you across the timeline. It’s comforting and discomfiting all at once, and that’s a trick that takes some doing.

    • Great write-up of course. And probably the best example of Pulp co-opting bits of semi-remembered radio hits (in this case Gloria by ?Pat Benatar?) See also the previous year’s She’s A Lady which is basically I Will Survive spliced into The Final Countdown. Britpop became associated with lumpen trad-rock but Pulp knew their pop and it showed.

      However – Pulp ” co-opted as Britpop by association” ?- hardly. They were one of the bands in the original Britpop issue of Select magazine in May 1993 – the others being Suede, St Etienne, The Auteurs and, er, Denim.

      • I think it really depends on whether you mean Maconie’s initial designation in 1993, or what Britpop had become by 1995 in its final form.

        The former always felt to me like a standard attempt by the music press to manufacture a scene around a handful of disparate bands (per your list above). Suede certainly weren’t comfortable with the designation, and the records they were making at this time didn’t sound like Britpop (albeit the opposite is true of 1996’s Coming Up).

        The Britpop of 1995 was an actual sound and aesthetic. It was a deliberate and self-conscious “scene”, and Pulp were certainly part of it – in fact, they were one of its three main pillars – but they were an unlikely fellow traveller when you step back and look at it. Just as unlikely as Suede, in fact, it’s just that Pulp seemed to rise to meet the moment, whereas Suede shrank from it.

        • Well, that’s one way of describing how Bernard Butler tried to turn the band into Popol Vuh while Brett clobbered himself with psychedelics.

          Probably having read too many interviews, I did at the time see Suede and Pulp as two sides of the same coin – the reverence for pop – as experienced through Smash Hits and Top of the Pops rather than John Peel and the NME, the social realism, the approachable yet bizarre singer, the charismatic mad-scientist guitarist (Bernard Butler/Russell Senior), I could – but mercifully won’t – go on.

          The first track on His’n’Hers is musically a kind of satire on Suede. As you say, nothing to do with the rumty-tumty elbows-out Britpop sound.

          • Lol at rumty-tumty elbows-out Britpop sound.

            Looking back, it feels like maybe Blur were the chief architects of the whole thing, when you think about the look and feel. I could be wrong, but I don’t remember an album before Parklife that really *sounded* like Britpop, or had that specific sensibility. The music hall thing, the sportswear, the anti-American posturing. The faux-laddishness.

            Oasis bolted on their own stuff with Definitely Maybe a few months later; trad-Rock leanings, the trade mark arrogant interviews, the non-faux laddishness. But even they swallowed a little bit of Blur – would they have recorded Digsy’s Diner without Parklife?

            In between the two, Loaded launched, and probably had a similar impact to either of the above bands.

            To me, it never felt like Pulp really belonged in that mix, but they went where the energy was, and Jarvis was ready to start writing big, glossy state of the nation Pop tunes at just the right moment.

        • Interesting. I struggle of two acts as dissimilar but regarded as being in the same movement as Oasis & Blur, (Slade v T.Rex, maybe) yet both are clearly Britpop.

          Britpop equals British guitar bands (must be a band) popular in the charts in the mid nineties.

          • Nirvana and Pearl Jam?

            They got lumped together because of the plaid shirts and the lyrics of Jeremy/Alive (both of which address childhood trauma, which was very much Cobain’s stock in trade), but otherwise if these two bands had released their records 10 years apart you’d never have filed them together.

            I kind of get it with Blur & Oasis. They started out a good distance apart, but it felt like they fell into one another’s orbit and absorbed aspects of one another. That’s probably because both acts had a keen eye on the demands of the market. They wanted to be huge, and they went where that thought process demanded.

            • But Blur wanted to move on a soon as possible. The Great Esvape was never intended to be Parklife Part 2, and 1997s Blur moved on again (taking some influence from US indie bands like Pavement – further breaking the Britpop link)

              They (sort of) started it, and they (sort of) ended it

        • In my opinion Pulp got lumped into Britpop, purely by the timing of their long-awaited success.
          In any case Britpop was just journalism and the music biz making a “scene” out of what happened to be going on. There wasn’t really any connection until the inkies made one.
          Naturally, the bands and their managements/labels went along with it for the sake of the attention it garnered.

            • I used to be interested but nothing I want to hear now. Quite a lot of the US guitar thrash remains in these records despite the distancing from that source. A lot of referencing sixties influences like The Kinks and Beatles but you don’t hear that so much in the music. Some dodgy Weller type mod haircuts. Supergrass were my favourite I think.

  6. 77. I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now) – Otis Redding

    When I was 10 years old I managed to contract severe tonsillitis.

    For six weeks that felt like six years I was off school, housebound and – with both parents at work – largely left to my own devices. Each morning I would haul my duvet downstairs, park myself on the sofa and try to figure out how to fill the time until school got out and I could watch from the window as my friends, unsullied by similar feculence, scurried home with smiles on their faces and joy in their tonsils.

    Within the first couple of weeks of my convalescence I had more or less exhausted the entertainment potential of my nascent comic collection, my ZX Spectrum and the various books in my collection still unfinished. Faced with a yawning chasm of boredom, my attention turned to the family VHS collection which, at that time, consisted of a grand total of three tapes: a copy of the History of Manchester United FC gifted to my father, and two movies lent to us and never returned by family friends who enjoyed membership of BAFTA and all the free movies that unthinkable honour entailed. Those two movies were the still glorious to this day 1984 Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner vehicle Romancing The Stone, and – more pertinently for this entry – The Blues Brothers.

    In the weeks the ensued, starved of better options, I watched each of these tapes dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of times. I would watch them in sequence, I would watch one, wind it back and start again. I would watch them multiple times in the same day. I had literally nothing else to do until kids’ TV started in the afternoon. Soon enough, I developed strong feelings about the Munich air disaster, a fascination with Jimmy Greenhoff, and a near obsession with Michael Douglas’ decision to attend a village party deep in the Amazon rainforest in what appeared to be an all-white tuxedo.

    But the VHS that drew most of my attention, indeed my absolute fascination, was The Blues Brothers. Unlike the other two, it has stayed with me throughout my life, and I continued to watch it even after the illness had passed and beyond, deep into adulthood. A couple of years ago I sat down with my kids to watch it for the first time and was able to cough over all the swearing because I still knew the script word for word. The Blues Brothers remains one of my all time favourite movies, it was a seminal moment in my childhood, and it introduced me at an impressionable age to some utterly fabulous musicians and their music.

    When James Brown first appeared onscreen I was glued to the sofa. When Aretha opened her mouth and began to sing, my jaw dropped. When Cab Calloway transformed his whole look to perform Minnie The Moocher (a song I still regularly give an airing to at karaoke), I was enraptured. When Ray Charles took a shot at that thieving kid (later to play Argyle, John McClane’s chauffeur for the day in Die Hard) I was delighted. And when I first heard John Lee Hooker sing Boom Boom I was – quite simply – blown away. I was 10 years old, and this was 1988: I had absolutely no idea who any of these people were on the way in, and I was quickly obsessed with them all.

    About a year after I returned to health and left the long VHS days behind me, I heard Otis Redding singing I’ve Been Loving You Too Long – probably over the radio – and I felt something inside me shift again. I had never heard a vocal like that: so immediate, so vulnerable and real. That distinctive rasp, all the righteous weight behind it. The songs in The Blues Brothers had all felt like performances of one sort or another. This didn’t feel like a performance at all, it was like you’d simply walked in on a man in his lowest moment. It felt unfiltered – just listening to it seemed like some sort of intrusion, and it connected with my humble pre-pubescent soul on an irreducible level. This was the guy who had written Respect for Aretha? Jesus.

    I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (to bother including the brackets every time) is, of course, a lament for the death of a relationship. You can read it a few ways, but to me it’s that little bit at the end of a romance where you kind of know it can’t last, but equally no one is quite pulling the ripcord just yet. The period of suspended animation where you can’t stay or go, and you have too much time to think. It’s asking yourself the question: how am I going to live without this person, who has become everything to me? Lyrically, it probably owes a minor debt to Sinatra’s I’ve Got You Under My Skin, but – if you’ll excuse me saying so – Sinatra couldn’t lay a glove on the vocals here. As a kid, I listened and wondered that anyone could feel anything so deeply. Wished that I too would one day feel things so deeply. As an adult I say: kiddo, there was really no rush. Yeesh.

    There’s a great story behind the song’s creation, of course. Otis and Jerry Butler run into one another by pure chance at the airport in Atlanta and discover they’re both booked to play the same gig. They share a cab. The conversation continues on back to a hotel room, where they share songs. Butler plays Redding his early, unfinished version of I’ve Been Loving You Too Long – he’s got a draft of the first verse, but nothing more than that. He’s been tinkering with it for years, making no real progress. Something immediately clicks with Otis, and he asks if he can work on it. Two weeks later, Butler is in Detroit and someone asks him if he’s heard the new Otis Redding single. He listens, open mouthed, at the final product then calls to congratulate Otis. Later, Butler would say the following:

    “Nobody else on the face of this earth would have gotten that song because it was intended for him. I was just the conduit. I never would have approached it the way he approached it. He sang ‘I’ve been’ and then he just paused and let you think about it: I’ve been what? Okay, ‘lovin’ you.’ And then he stopped again. Then ‘too long.’ And he made ‘long’ a ten-syllable word! When he sang ‘You’ve grown tired,’ that was every wail and cry and moan that any man has ever sung. Like when Ray Charles says ‘Georgia.’ It was a statement. It was a paragraph. It was just beautiful.”

    Looking back on it, the structure of the song feels surprisingly modern. It’s built on that circling piano figure, creating the loop around which everything circles. The horns take the pace up and down, dropping in and out and leaving the space for Otis’s vocal to do the real heavy lifting. And what a vocal it is: from that first great peak (the “I’m tii-iiiiired”) to the glorious final minute in which all structure is abandoned and he just emotes us to a close, it’s an absolute masterclass in control. The way the first line lands, then a sharp drum shot comes from out of nowhere and the horns play that ascending progression that sounds like a voice rising in anguish. It takes its time, and there is no real chorus. Every hesitation is poignant, every wail full of pain and dignity. It’s one of those songs that you just cannot imagine it would even be possible to sing better. In fact, you’d be daft to even try (looking at you here: Ike & Tina, The Stones, Aretha, Etta James et al).

    The definitive version of the song is, to most, the live 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival incarnation. It’s only four minutes long (a full minute longer than the original recorded version), and in that time Otis takes the crowd from smiles and cheers (“This is the love crowd, right”) to the most almighty pitch of pain and loss; each one of those “please”s a dagger to the heart. He starts off screwing around with the band, but he’s so very quickly in some other space entirely, lost in the music. He hits those big notes and sings his ass off. He was 26 years old and his tragic death was less than six months away, and almost three years to the day after Sam Cooke had left the planet. Each would see their most well-known track released posthumously. God knows what might have been in some gentler timeline.

    My journey into Soul music only progressed from here. Six months later, I heard Tracks Of My Tears on the radio and my mind boggled that someone could have written such a simple but effective pop song and sung it so beautifully. I sought out more music that connected at that basic, unabashed human level (believe it or not, it’s a quality I found in spades in Nirvana as a teenager), more great voices. More heartbreak and elation.

    I burrowed my way through Stax, Motown and all that great 60s music. And I discovered that the path hadn’t ended there, that it had continued on into the 70s and beyond, twisting and turning, taking new forms. When Frank Ocean released Blond in 2016 I listened to all that empty space, all those pregnant hesitations, and it was Otis Redding I heard – the Otis of Try A Little Tenderness and I’ve Been Loving You Too Long. The Otis of Jerry Butler’s description above. I fully expect to hear Otis again in some brilliant music as yet unreleased, because the idea he represents is eternal: that you can sing a song so damn well that it connects you, squarely and directly, to the emotional experience of millions of others.

    I’ve Been Loving You Too Long was one of the first songs I ever heard that felt like more than just a song. It felt bigger than that, like it put its finger squarely on something painful and universal. Something grown up and beyond me. It fascinated me, and I revelled in its open spaces, its low valleys and high mountains. Even to this day, just the way he sings “My love is growing stronger/As you become a habit to me”. The raw emotion he packs into those lines. My god.

    • Superb write up, again. It must have been devastating for you and your parents, being ill for so long at the age of ten. I hope there are no lasting effects.

      Otis Blue is full of wonderful songs, magnificently performed, the definitive Soul album in my view. His two greatest influences are Little Richard and Sam Cooke and he is a perfect blend of flaming brandy and soothing cream. I have a feeling another one of its songs will feature higher up your list.

      He was business savvy too. He really took care of business, earning over a cool million dollars in 1967.

      Oh. And he wrote Respect for himself. Aretha took it and rewrote it for her and her sisters.

      • Cheers, Tigger. It wasn’t that bad and there was no lasting damage done, it just felt like it lasted forever to me as a kid. I missed my mates and I missed school. Plus, I missed some important fixtures for the school football team: the league was gone by the time I recovered, but we did win the cup that year.

        I know Otis wrote and recorded Respect (and that Steve Cropper, of Blues Brothers fame, produced it). But as a kid I’d met Artetha first, and she seemed to own the song so completely that I assumed it had always been for her.

        Still, proof possible it is (just about) possible to out-sing Otis Redding on one of his own songs. Just not I’ve Been Loving You Too Long…

        Btw – “flaming brandy and soothing cream” is a spot on description.

  7. 76. You Only Live Once – The Strokes

    Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote that “some men are born posthumously”, by which he presumably meant “no one is listening to me now, but they will do once I’m gone”. But it’s an aphorism that might aptly be applied to The Strokes, a band whose moment had passed before their first album had even released.

    I first heard The Strokes in late 2000. I had graduated university a few months earlier and returned home to start law school. Post-graduate life already felt daunting: for the first time, the great shadow of true adulthood loomed, as friends took on jobs, career paths were staked out and the burning question of what might be seemed to gain urgency daily. It was a period of discombobulation, and I responded by retreating to my age old natural habitat: the bedroom.

    I attended lectures, I kept late hours, read a lot, mopped up the great movies I’d not yet seen and discovered Internet piracy. A friend had mentioned Napster at our graduation ball, and I’d made a subsequent beeline for it. Within weeks, I had amassed a vast library of MP3s, comprising hitherto unthinkable gems: live recordings of favourite songs, demo versions, and god knows how many tracks by new and unsigned bands. For the first time, my listening was unbound from what was available in HMV and the constraints of my budget: I could have whatever I wanted, and consequently I gorged myself.

    In amongst that great feast, I made an attempt to discover new things. If I came across a band with an intriguing name, I would download the track and give it a listen. And that’s precisely how my first interaction with The Strokes occurred: a search for who knows what song beginning with “M” throwing up a track called The Modern Age, a moment of intrigue, a couple of clicks to download and off we go.

    The love affair was more or less immediate. That insistent opening riff, the fuzzy crackle of the vocal. The way it sounded simultaneously lo-fi and super polished, pre-fab and vintage. I needed more of this in my life, and there were three or four more tracks already on offer – early demo versions of Someday, Take It Or Leave It and – best of all – Last Nite. The Strokes hit my sweet spot straight away. Much as I love a bit of deep and meaningful, I’ve always been a sucker for a party band, and The Strokes had party written all over them from day one. Washed ashore amidst a great, thundering tide of nu-metal, they stood out like a sore thumb.

    A few weeks after that initial download, several of the songs were released by Rough Trade as their debut EP. A couple of months after that, they made their UK debut, playing bottom of the bill on an NME tour featuring Rocket From The Crypt and And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. In between the two events, the NME published the famous black and white photo of the band caught at play by Leslie Lyons in the Lower East Side’s Mercury Lounge. They promptly went supernova.

    Looking back, it’s difficult to avoid that conclusion that The Strokes were the end of something. The songs traded so heavily and self-consciously on a knowledge of Rock & Roll heritage, and specifically New York City Rock & Roll) heritage. The look was so strong – it seemed to synthesize everything that had gone before and perfect it. But they also arrived at an odd inflexion point in history. They were the sound of a backward-looking world, a world before the towers fell. The debut album didn’t release until October 2001, but thanks to the Internet the songs were in wide circulation months before 9/11, and they soundtracked the final weeks and months of the end of history.

    Something about those songs even to this day feels stranded on the other side of a temporal line; the great before and after of my generation, a band who looked and sounded like a cartoon version of all your old favourites, who made music from an era before you had to worry about exploding buildings, but whose music reached you via your computer, rather than the record store. A band who soundtracked the end of days. A band who were born posthumously, symbols of an age that was already receding quickly into the past before you even managed to pay a penny for their music. They felt like a last hurrah for Rock & Roll, and that’s probably what they proved to be.

    But they were a great band too. Fuck the naysayers. The white hot hype made them hard for people to love, and the sense that it came so easy for them made them tough to root for, but they produced a glorious racket in those early months: virtually every song a banger. And they kicked down the door for so many acts to follow. Not just acts that sounded like The Cars and dressed like the front of Marquee Moon, but the gothic suaveness of Interpol, the art punk experimentalism of TV On The Radio and, perhaps best of all, whatever the hell The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were. They took a moribund music scene and made it exciting overnight, and they gave New York a cultural pulse in the months while the dust, both figurative and literal, continued to settle.

    The Strokes are a band it’s impossible to discuss without reference to how they looked. Just go back to those early band shots, to that photo in The Mercury Lounge. Pick your favourite band: the Strokes looked better. Better clothes, and certainly better haircuts. They were the Indie Rock ideal made flesh: five doe-eyed boys in need of a mother’s love who probably weren’t eating enough and who had legitimate charity shop style. They were the most boyish-looking band I’d ever seen, and I loved them for that.

    More than any other band I can think of, they made being in a great band look like so much fun, and they made it look deceptively simple. Much of that was a confection: they fought like brothers and worked their arses off for success, but they lived by the simple motto laid out in that very first single: “work hard and say it’s easy”. The Strokes were germinated in Swiss boarding schools and plush Manhattan apartments, but they paid their way in dive bars. The Strokes had the look of a group of people who know that they’re the epicentre of the world no matter where they are and what they’re doing. The Strokes inspired other kids to form bands. Sure enough, venues across the Western world quickly filled up with garagey-sounding acts with croaky, uniquely sardonic vocalists singing about girls and drugs.

    I loved The Strokes because I thought of them as my own. By pure dumb luck, I’d beaten the music press to them – heard them first, tucked away in my bedroom, and known immediately that they’d be huge before I’d even clapped eyes on them. It didn’t matter to me that Last Nite cribs the intro from American Girl, because Last Nite is self-evidently a better song. It didn’t matter that much of their stuff sounded like Loaded played at double-speed. It didn’t matter that they leant on their image. They were too much fun to care about any of it. They were a beacon of joy in a suddenly uncertain world.

    My favourite Strokes track is You Only Live Once. It didn’t arrive in that first flush of success and excitement – it came years later, in 2005, by which time both the world and my life were in a very different place, and so were the band. They’d had some ups and downs. The hype had cooled, and the world had moved on. But You Only Live Once is still their best tune, because it captures so much of what was great about the band, and in particular because of the vocal.

    Julian Casablancas is, to my mind, an underrated front man. In addition to writing all the songs, he gave the band their USP – that fuzzed up, wandering vocal style with all the weird little affectations. The tendency to ad lib and lean on his own natural finesse. Just listen to the start of New York City Cops: “Ow. I meant ah. No, I didn’t mean that at all”. Or the sudden falsetto intrusion of “trying” on Someday. The little adornments.

    He had the big brown eyes, the slightly doleful good looks and the perfect balance of sad kid at the party and malevolent intent. In Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom, the fabulous oral history of the scene from which The Strokes emerged, there’s a wonderful aside where a member of a rival band recalls talking to his girlfriend at a bar and slowly realising that she wasn’t actually listening to anything he was saying because she was looking across the room at Casablancas, who was in the process of seducing her with his eyes alone.

    You Only Live Once gives full range to Casablancas’ vocal idiosyncrasies. The “oh-oh”s, the “oh don’t, don’t, don’t get up”, the general insouciance. I’m not sure any of his lyrics ever really meant anything, but he had the knack of making them fit perfectly. That cry of “sit me down/shut me up”. That opening lyric: “some people think they’re always right/others are quiet and uptight”. The video also gives us one of his strongest looks, which is really saying something: the pristine outfit, the white leather jacket with the chess board on the back.

    The song had originated as a gentle, brooding keyboard ballad, entitled “I’ll Try Anything Once”. It’s worth a listen, because it shines a spotlight on a quality of Casablancas’ songwriting that seemed to get lost in the melee of the audience response: a kind of quiet yearning. It’s there in any number of the band’s songs: from Someday’s “I ain’t wasting no more time” to the refrain of “I just want to know you’re alright/I’ve got to know you’re alright” on the greatly under-rated Under Control. Or even the “I can’t see the sunshine” of You Only Live Once. Yearning isn’t what people think of when they think of The Strokes, but it’s constantly there in the background, and it’s emanating from Casablancas.

    The Strokes make me happy because they’re a truly great party band who looked like someone fed the words “handsome, skinny indie rock kids” through an AI image generator. They make me maudlin, because I hear in them a world that was already passing us all by even as they first emerged. I love that they attract opprobrium because they’re a little too stylish and it all came to them a little too easily (heaven forbid). I love You Only Live Once, because it showcases so neatly all their best assets; the chiming riff, the quietly excellent drumming, the magnetism of the vocal and – in the video – their ability to continue playing and looking utterly beautiful even as their surroundings went to pieces.

  8. 75. Juice (Know The Ledge) – Eric B & Rakim

    My mother arrived in this country in the early 70s, just a year after the laws changed to allow inward migration from South America. She either brought with her or developed in consequence of her arrival two primary characteristics: a blazing intolerance for any perceived injustice and a willingness to raise her voice in argument even (and indeed particularly) when badly outnumbered. Which is a polite way of saying: she doesn’t take any shit and she could start an argument in an empty room.

    I will never know whether Mum’s preference for the role of outsider inured her against the difficulties of arriving into 70s Britain, or whether, as is so often the way, the preference was constructed out of necessity as a mechanism of self-defence. What I do know is that I never once in my childhood saw her play down her roots, attempt to fit in or blend into the background. She was seemingly certain of who she was, she was proud of where she came from and she could be triggered into a lecture on the evils of colonialism by even the most minor of provocations.

    Growing up, Mum was clear with us all: we were half Latin American, and we should be proud of it. She was also very explicit that there were plenty of people who would kick her, and us, out of the country entirely if they ever came within arm’s reach of power, and that where we encountered such people we should take the fight to them. As an extension of that same logic, she frequently implied a kinship to other immigrant families, particularly those originating from the Southern Hemisphere.

    This education came with its pleasures and challenges. In the right company, we felt as a family exotic and outside the usual rules. In the wrong company, we felt perpetually behind enemy lines. There would be plenty of days when it would feel like we were just like all the other kids and she was making it all up, and then – punctuating those extended periods of calm – those rarer but infinitely more memorable days when you’d stand listening to someone racially abuse your mother in a parking lot, and clench your tiny fist in preparation for the violence you sensed was lurking not far behind those harsh words. It was an odd upbringing, swinging in and out of camouflage and adapting accordingly.

    Years later, it became clear to me that we’d grown up with an unusual quantity of what might be termed “Black” culture in the house, and I assume that this was at least partly Mum’s way of claiming kinship with a then-unfashionable group who were right at the pointy edge of dealing with our own issues. Certainly, she was clear with us all that wherever they went, we would eventually follow: never mistake that once the country has been rid of the Black community, we’ll be next. We’re all fighting the same war, they’re just further up the front.

    Whether those thoughts were accurate or not, I cannot say. Hindsight makes it impossible. But there was at least one happy byproduct of being drafted into the endless war on racism, regardless of where it might be lurking: on our weekly trips to the video rental store, we were gently steered towards “Black” cinema. In the 80s, that meant every movie in which Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg or Larry Fishburne appeared, and the early works of Spike Lee, no matter how age-inappropriate. And then came the 90s, and Boyz N The Hood and the spiritual successors that followed it through the door: Menace II Society, Clockers, New Jack City and – most of all – 1992’s Tupac-starring Juice.

    Juice had a massive impact in our home. We rented it multiple times, watched it over and over. It offered a first glimpse of Tupac in his final form, it articulated a “me against the world” nihilism that chimed perfectly with the notion that your surroundings are arranged against you, and it was blessed with a soundtrack that absolutely banged, not least the formidable title track: Juice (Know The Ledge).

    Written specifically to spec for the movie, Juice was one of the final singles released by Eric B & Rakim. Falling right at the end of (and perhaps even outside) their true imperial phase, and arriving just before The Chronic and 36 Chambers changed the game completely, it served as something of a punctuation mark, but it was also the single best “life on the streets” Hip Hop track released to that stage.

    Juice stood out for a number of reasons. It had a classic New York sound: based around a looped sample from Rise, Sally Rise by Nat Adderley that called to mind a rushing subway train, it threaded in what were then de rigeur jazz elements, as well as additional samples from Pleasure, Billy Cobham and Ramsey Lewis’ cover of Back In The USSR. But it was fast. Very fast for Hip Hop up to that point. And that speed lent it an intoxicating, adrenalized character – the sound of bad decisions boiling in the blood.

    The track’s speed also made it perfect foil for electronic music’s burgeoning tendency to pilfer from other genres. Within a year of release, Juice could be heard sampled on Metalheads’ Kemistry (a reworked version of which was later to appear on Goldie’s Timeless album, a mainstay of my teenage years). Within 18 months it was the centrepiece of The Chemical Brothers’ seminal Live At The Heavenly Social mix CD. Juice worked as Hip Hop in isolation, but it also worked beautifully alongside other, non-Hip Hop, elements. It was the first time I heard this music branch out and connect in new directions, and therefore arguably the first glimpse of its vast true potential.

    Riding over that accelerated beat was Rakim. Still revered as one of the greatest MCs ever to take up the mic, and no stranger to rapping fast, here he took it to the next level, spinning a cautionary tale of street life full of glorious wordplay (just try repeating out loud: “I grew up on the sidewalk/Where I learned street talk/And then taught to hawk New York”) and memorable bons mots (“Come say Hi to the bad guy/don’t say goodbye I don’t plan to die”, and the frankly unbeatable “I’m at war a lot/like Anwar Sadat”). Years later, Juice was revealed as the song that caused a young Curtis Jackson (nee 50 Cent) to set his sights on life as a rapper: “They were painting a picture of where I lived and all the moves you needed to make in order to live on the streets there. It was the law of the jungle out there.”

    The final element that caused the track to stand out was its ending; the narrator felled on the playground amidst a hail of bullets, bleeding out and coming to the realisation that he hadn’t sufficiently “known the ledge” after all. It reframes all the preceding braggadocio, and marks Juice out as a sterner, more contemplative track than many of its peers, and certainly most of those that followed in the same vein.

    Rakim, for his part, loved Juice. It had come to him in a whirlwind of creativity after attending a screening of the movie: “They let me go up in a little room and see the movie. It was funny: I was living in Manhattan, downtown on 19th street. So when I got to the crib, me and wifey, she knew I was zoning in the cab. When I got to the crib, I had my studio in a little room. I went straight up into the room and found the sample. The bass line. I took the bass line and put the regular drum sample underneath that shit. Half an hour later I had the lights off because I was in there zoning. Wifey came in; I was like, ‘Turn the lights off and close the door back.’ About an hour later, I came out of there with three verses, man. It was crazy.” In addition to arranging the track and contributing those epic, wisdom-soaked vocals, he also played live drums on it.

    Juice is a tune that has been living in my head since 1992. It’s still regularly sampled and covered by other artists, it’s still both a seminal early 90s track and oddly timeless. Hearing it, or even just a snippet from it, is like greeting an old friend. And it reminds me of a time when my musical worlds were starting to collide; where an artist from one genre could crop up in another, and that juxtaposition was still new, unexpected and fresh.

    But it also reminds me of being sat with my brothers, watching Juice the movie for the umpteenth time, each of us silently calculating our own stratagem for dealing with what felt a sometimes hostile world. That delicate balancing act between fitting in and standing out, without ever losing sight of yourself in the process. Of trying to work out who “your people” were, and suspecting that the answer might be everyone and no one all at the same time. Juice was the soundtrack to struggle – struggles large and small.

    • Despite being familiar with Nat Adderley’s sixties hit (presumably inspired by Mustang Sally?), I didn’t twig the sample for ages because it’s just a few seconds of bass, looped repeatedly. I think Q-Tip was the best at mixing other genres into Hip Hop around that time. Will the Tribe feature higher up in your list, I wonder?

      Your mum sounds amazing!

      • Cheers, Tigger. She is certainly amazing, and she’s still out there scrapping with anyone who wants an argument. No idea where she gets the energy.

        Re: Tribe, they’re a favourite act and would have a number of songs just outside this list, but regrettably nothing on it, a Q-Tip feature aside.

  9. 74. Break On Through (To The Other Side) – The Doors

    What are the contenders for the greatest debut single in the history of popular music? Maybellene? Anarchy In The UK? Hit Me Baby One More Time? Blitzkrieg Bop? Losing My Edge? Hey Joe? Protect Ya Neck?

    Songs that completely define the artist, that offer up on first contact all of their strengths and obscure all of their weaknesses. Songs that kick the door down and rearrange the living room.

    For me, the answer is, was and always will be Break On Through (To The Other Side). Clocking in at just 145 seconds, not one of them wasted, it’s a perfect Pop song, sung and performed as if there’s no tomorrow.

    I was 13 years old when I first encountered The Doors, which is of course the perfect age to meet this particular band. The Oliver Stone biopic was on the horizon, we were visiting my grandparents, and I fished the first two albums out of the pile of discarded vinyl in my mother’s childhood bedroom. It was a period when the music of mum and dad’s youth still held an odd fascination; you hit your teenage years and the growing suspicion that your parents are not, as previously understood, the geographic centre of the universe, but rather two people who just happened to decide to have a baby, takes on an urgency that demands attention. Who are these people? Were they too once young? And what on earth did that preposterous state of affairs look like?

    For Mum, it apparently looked like The Doors and Led Zep. I quickly bounced off the latter, but the former were a lightning strike on the soul. Their music made immediate sense to me, in the way it’s presumably been making immediate sense to 13 year olds for six decades now.

    The earnestness, the sixth form poetry. The short and perfect Pop tunes, mashed in with sprawling ten minute long nonsense-fests to lend a bit of gravitas. They were simultaneously utterly daft, and completely serious. As a teenager, the latter aspect felt the main draw – because what could possibly be more serious than being a teenager – whereas with the benefit of hindsight I can admit that it was the Pop songs I was drawn to. The Pop songs and the voice.

    First contact was inauspicious. With no idea how record players worked I stuck the first album on at the wrong speed and sat there for fully 15 minutes thinking Christ, this band’s reputation is well deserved: they sound like they’re all drugged up to the eyeballs.

    By halfway through The Crystal Ship I realised something was awry, corrected the error, sat down to listen anew and was immediately bowled over by Jim Morrison’s vocal. The richness, depth and urgency of it, the prevailing sense of need contained within it, but more than any of that, its surprising modernness. To my ears, he could have been singing from the 90s – there was no affectation, no mannered veneer to separate him from the listener. He seemed to attack every song, full bore. He meant it, man.

    Ever since that day, I have had a huge soft spot for The Doors. Yes, they’re a very silly band indeed. Yes, many of the lyrics are awful. And yet, they remain a perfect Pop group with a distinctive sound and a completely magnetic frontman who brought utter conviction to so much of what they did, even where conviction was ill-advised.

    There are a number of Doors tracks that could easily have made this list. Touch Me, Wishful Sinful, Five To One and – perhaps the nearest miss – Tell All The People (another perfect album opener). But ultimately it had to be Break On Through – it’s the obvious choice, but it’s obvious for a reason: because it’s completely brilliant.

    Let’s step through those two and a half minutes. The opening bossa nova drums, redolent of One Two Brown Eyes by Them. The weird, muffled “doof” drumbeat that kicks in at the 7 second mark, and which recurs throughout the track: like a punch being delivered through a pillow. The absolute brilliance of the opening couplet: “You know the day destroys the night, night divides the days/Try to run, try to hide, break on through to the other side”. It takes just 20 seconds to hit the chorus, no messing about. The wigged out keyboard solo at 45 seconds in.

    The whole damn song is on fast forward, in a hyper-adrenalised rush to get to god knows where. By the time Morrison starts bellowing the “everybody loves my baby” bridge we are a grand total of 75 seconds into the band’s musical career. 75 seconds with more ideas than some bands have in a whole lifetime. We close out with one of THE great endings to any record, ever: a messy climax, keyboards all over the road, drums pounded as if they owed John Densmore money, “Break on through/break on through/break on through/break on through – uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh” and then – if you listen very carefully, after everything else drops away – a lingering echo of that final “uh”.

    This is ultimately a song that’s all about the vocal: the sheer directness of the first “try to run, try to hide”, the little growl he puts on “hide”. The bizarre way he phrases “but can you still recall”. The noise he makes on the end of that final “she gets high” – listed as a “yeah” in the lyrics, but sounding to these ears more of a “baaaeeeoooo”. That absolutely electric “Break on through – oh – oh yeeeaaarrrgh”. The whole thing is raw charisma from start to finish, a singer throwing everything he has against the music.

    Break On Through is a provocation and an invitation. The band recorded it on the second day they ever spent in a studio, and yet it serves as the absolute definitive article of a Doors record: vocal front and centre, winding keyboard, all restraint and decorum cast to the winds, and the question, seemingly so urgent when you’re a teenager grappling with a million rules: “Ah yes, but what if I were to simply break them all?”. It captures the Dionysian frenzy the group were aiming for, first time out the gates – if they’d retired after that second day and never given a single interview you’d be looking at the perfect band.

    I love The Doors because I fundamentally understand them as a good time band, playing silly music with huge sincerity. They exist in direct opposition to the Rockist tendency to believe that all popular music needs to be weighed, graded and catalogued according to some set of cosmic imperial measurements. Their best music has minimal artistic value, it just sounds fucking fantastic and must have been dynamite when delivered in sweaty rooms by a very handsome man in leather trousers. Where Rockism demands that music appeal to the intellect, The Doors were instead richly sensuous, an aspect often lost on the insensate.

    The Doors were style over substance, and I am here for that. In fact, the very first time I clapped eyes on The Strokes it was The Doors I thought of first. They’re also to this day the quintessential LA band – that hit of sunshine mixed with a healthy side order of dread. The knowledge that the temperature drops fast at night and something is crawling with malicious intent out there in the desert. Intense beauty with an ugly underbelly.

    I love Break On Through because it’s perfect, and because it’s the sound of a release occurring. Because I would listen to it at 13 years old, still bound by all the many barriers that age entails, and wonder what it must be like to be as free and uninhibited as Jim Morrison sounded. To be so completely and publicly oneself, even just for a moment. To sing like you may never have the chance to sing again. To feel that much urgency in your blood, that strong a call to action. Break On Through taught me, and continues to teach me, the value of absolute conviction.

      • Agreed. Superb piece, as usual. However I do think that LA Woman is a mature, grown up album that has stood the test of time. A proper Rockist album.

        If I had to choose a single it would be Hello, I Love You, a bite-sized summation of everything appealing about their first two albums. Even with an ear only half-cocked to the radio, it grips the listener almost immediately with John Densmore’s opening military trill. It tells its boy-meets-girl story neatly in less than two and a quarter minutes. Its catchiness, filched from The Kinks, lingers long after it’s over. However, its structure is strange and unsettling. The instruments sound upside down, falling through a worm-hole at the halfway point. Robby Krieger plays guitar but it sounds nothing like one. Jim Morrison’s passion is disturbingly histrionic in the second act. Even in 1968, it was highly unusual to declare undying love at first sight. A song that seems quite straightforward turns out to be complex and intriguing. For me, it is classic Doors.

        • Hello, I Love You is a great pick, and I agree about the unsettling arrangement and the worm-hole (what a gloriously goofy moment that is).

          Love Street is the other one I should have mentioned. And Love Me Two Times. And Love Her Madly.

          Basically, any Doors track with “love” in the title is ace, while the opposite is true of “ frog”. All of which is as it should be.

  10. 73. Fat Lip – Sum 41

    Released in April 2021, Fat Lip is the authentic sound of an over-stimulated infant class storming the playground at the very tail end of the end of history.

    The song marked the absolute zenith of a decade long experiment with genre. After countless attempts to fuse one style with another, to collapse the barriers between different musical categories and foster strange new forms, Fat Lip was the moment when the impossible was finally achieved: a team of mad haired scientists figured out how to combine Rap-Rock and Pop-Punk with a soupçon of Boyband style, and in doing so brought forth the rapture. A Manhattan Project for the new millennium.

    Fat Lip is one of the stupidest and most unserious songs you will ever meet. And yet, it’s also genius of the most profound sort in the simplicity of its message, the mad alchemy of its structure and internal dynamics. It exists in a singular genre of one, a monument to its own moment.

    Opening with an almost regal sounding guitar line, the song plunges abruptly into what can only accurately be described as a skate ramp riff – side to side, up and down, full on multi-guitar assault – and an opening line that sets the tone perfectly; “Storm into the party like my name was El Niño”.

    The song is clean cut, but scuzzy, frattish but knowing. It pairs verses which self consciously channel the Beastie Boys with a chorus straight from the great Pop Punk mainline: “I don’t wanna waste my time/become another casualty of society”. It’s so on the nose it’s almost laughable; and yet it’s perfect here, because this is the authentic sound of being 12 years old and over-caffeinated.

    Deryck Whibley, the song’s author, one of music’s great misspelled Dereks and a future Mr Avril Lavigne, sweated blood over Fat Lip. It took him a full year to write, proving conclusively that the more effort you put into these things, the more brilliance emerges at the other end. In Deryck’s case, the art was in correctly assembling a Frankenstein’s monster of disparate song parts into something that would transcend its components. “I had been writing these different sections of ‘Fat Lip’ not knowing that they were all going to eventually be one song, I had the riff for something that I thought was actually going to be a ballad because I was playing it really slow. Then I had this chorus that I’d written six months later that I just thought was something else that was a fun punk rock song. Then I’d been working on this little riff that I was trying to do some rap stuff over. I realised that they all could actually work together. If I sped up that riff and maybe slow this thing down, and all of a sudden change the key of that, they all work together.”

    Whatever he did, it worked, Fat Lip is clearly not a particularly moving or transcendent piece of music, but it is one of the most fun songs I have ever heard. It was fun when I first heard it back in 2001, and it remains fun today. In fact, there isn’t a single second of it that I find anything less than mildly entertaining, and taken as a whole I consider it to be a very good time indeed.

    I love the way the main riff comes back in after the chorus. I love the faux Beasties, my turn next, shout-rapping (“Be/cause/You/Don’t”). I love the butter-wouldn’t-melt bridge and the way it crashes into the hyper-adrenalinised finale. I love the litany of pre-teen complaints scattered across the lyric (“I’m sick of being told to wait my turn”, “I’m sick of being told to act my age”). I love the “I’m sorry, did I just hear you correctly” factor of the unforgettable line “the dentist said my mom should have had an abortion (bortion, bortion, bortion)”. I love that the drummer now works in real estate. Real estate!

    The video is absolute gold too, capturing to perfection the spirit of its age, a Jackass-hued montage of teens goofing off and Sum 41 themselves only semi-ironically giving it loads. The excellent punky egalitarianism of a band who look like their audience and an audience who look like their band. In its unabridged version the video features an end sequence in which wigs are donned and an additional performance of Pain For Pleasure, a wise-assed Hair Metal pastiche, is essayed. This is 2001 all over: pop culture reduced to a sandpit in which different styles are borrowed, toyed with and disposed of. A world in which nothing is serious or impermeable. An epoch of disbelief.

    Fat Lip is the perfect version of itself. It’s sonic e-numbers, for people who want to feel suddenly and inexplicably over-excited. It’s a primary colours only firework display for the ears. It’s also one of my favourite songs to perform at karaoke, because you don’t so much sing it as watch it take off and then breathlessly pursue it.

    Sometimes I look at my son and his mates, at their physicality, their odd tactility and their strange, unpredictable movements. The way they crash into one another, and into the furniture. And I remember what it was to be 9 or 10 years old myself: to harbour inside me that great, twitching electricity that could never find proper outlet, that need to move, jump and writhe – movement without a clear sense of purpose or even conscious direction. Just moving to be. And I reflect that Fat Lip is the sound of that electricity – witless, guileless and full to bursting of glorious, irrepressible, completely gormless life.

  11. 72. Dooms Night – Azzido Da Bass (Timo Maas Remix)

    I was 7 or 8 years old when I first discovered how powerful and surprising music could be. Sat on the floor in my Primary School assembly, legs crossed, as the new, progressive Headmistress, of whom I already thoroughly approved, lead us through a rendition of Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes. We’d sung a lot more Pop music since she arrived, fewer hymns, but this was something else: the power of a room full of small children singing those gentle, maudlin words was completely palpable. It hung in the air above us all: the spectre of loss and grief, unknowable and in shadow conflict with our innocence. The kid next to me burst into tears and I remember looking at him and wondering in absolute awe that a song had done this. Words and music, nothing more.

    In the intervening years, there have been many more moments where music has stopped me in my tracks, done something I didn’t know it was capable of. Sometimes, that’s the invocation of a certain mood or the prompting of a certain sense of self. Other times, it’s more connected to the form of the music itself, the strange new shapes it weaves. My mother playing me Percy’s Song on the guitar, conjuring beauty from thin air and making it look effortless. The first time I ever stood in the middle of a proper dancefloor and felt the euphoria in the air wash right over me – all that untapped energy. Almost falling out of my seat in shock in my early 20s when the guitars kicked back in on Like Herod by Mogwai. Hearing Nautilus by Anna Meredith for the first time. Feeling simultaneously confronted and comforted by A New Error/Chanel/Sabrina, trying to hold it together in a crowd.

    There have been hundreds of moments where a new piece of music has stopped me in my tracks and allowed me to experience something entirely novel. To access aspects of myself previously verboten, to share a new connection with others, or just to wonder that, even after all these years, I’m still hearing things that seem to me to push at a frontier that only recedes more swiftly the faster you chase along behind it. But very few of those moments have been as unexpected or as exhilarating as the first time I ever heard Dooms Night.

    But first, let’s rewind. Back to 1999 when a Levis advert featuring a small yellow puppet rocketed an unknown electro track to number 1 across the globe. That track was Flat Beat by Mr Oizo, a novelty single, written to spec in less than two hours for the advert to give the puppet something to dance to. It was genius in its simplicity and directness: a single bassline, rendered via a Korg MS-20 and with just enough squelchy distortion to make it feel dirty. It was raw enough to get played in clubs, simple enough to work as a Pop record and – for a spell – horrendously ubiquitous enough that everyone got sick of it and you rarely hear it in public these days.

    Flat Beat was an unlikely club hit was the late 90s, not least because it didn’t emerge from any particular genre, and its author had zero pedigree in, or understanding of, any particular style of music. “I only knew the big names like Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Aphex Twin,” Mr Oizo later confirmed. “I wasn’t connected to any scene, the track wasn’t a reaction to anything, it was just an attempt to make ‘dance music’.” That outsiderdom, that otherness, left Flat Beat free to be adopted by multiple different communities: it was a poster child for no one scene, so all scenes fell behind it and began to co-opt its bass heavy approach. In the couple of years that followed, Flat Beat touched Hip Hop, Ska, Techno, House, and Trance – you heard its influence everywhere.

    But it was Garage where Flat Beat really caught fire: its grinding melodic bassline chiming perfectly with the demands of the crowd, and its stripped down nature attractive to DJs. DJ Deekline’s “I Don’t Smoke” and DJ Zinc’s immortal “138 Trek” were both released within months of the track, hyping the younger generation and agitating the older crowd who preferred that Garage lean harder into its soulful roots. It was a schism that would eventually pave the way to Dubstep; an argument about basslines that would see pioneers take their leave and strike out for new ground. It also saw a greater latitude develop in what was and was not permissible on the dancefloor.

    All of which brings us to Dooms Night. It’s early 2000 and I’m in a Garage club somewhere in London, off with my mates in the middle of a crowded dancefloor. A beat kicks in – it’s minimalist and spare, unfamiliar, but clearly in the Flat Beat tradition with added snares. The crowd seems to lift, so I know that whatever it is it must be good. About 30 seconds in though, something surprising happens: the music drops away completely, replaced by what sounds like the rotor blades of a helicopter slowly descending onto the roof of the building. It doesn’t sound like music at all, and it goes on for long enough that I start looking around, wondering if this is some sort of fire alarm or test of a security system. Maybe something has gone wrong here. Finally, after what feels like an age, the beat drops – and what a drop it is; a rapid chopping noise and then the rotor blades are still there, but they’re now joined by one of the filthiest sounding basslines I’ve ever heard. Flat Beat on steroids. The whole place goes fucking mental.

    When the song eventually ends I lean in to a total stranger who’d been dancing next to me and ask “what the fuck was that?”. He looks me dead in the eyes and delivers the immortal reply: “Dooms Night”. Perfect. Just perfect. Tom Cruise in The Color Of Money perfect.

    Dooms Night was first recorded by German Techno producer Azzido Da Bass in late 1999. The original track contains all the necessary component parts; the helicoptering is present and correct, but it’s much quicker and briefer, much less abrasive. The squelching bassline is present, but it’s less foregrounded, and it isn’t introduced with that absolute monster of a drop. The track was quickly picked up and remixed: the Timo Maas iteration is my preference, but there are also great versions by Switch, Crookers and (particularly) Stanton Warriors).

    In as much as Dooms Night took inspiration from Flat Beat, others quickly took inspiration from Dooms Night. The helicopter sound was used in a lot of Jump Up Drum N Bass tracks in the years that followed, and crossed into House, Trance and eventually back into Techno. It was a tune that traversed borders easily: like Flat Beat, it wasn’t recognisably “of” any particular genre or scene, and that lack of identity gave it an open passport to travel. As Timo Maas himself described his work: “It’s just a funk record and that works in every kind of club. It’s cool, it’s dirty and the breakdown’s really weird. People in clubs like that.” Unlike Flat Beat, it had a long tail – you still hear it to this day.

    What Dooms Night reminded me of on first contact, the prism through which I immediately understood it, was Daft Punk. A dance record with a sensibility all of its own that was so sparse and singular that it felt like an open textbook: here’s how this music works, here’s how the dynamics of it function, and I understand it all so well that I can turn it inside out and back to front and still make it live, jump and breathe right in front of your eyes. A magic trick where you’re shown behind the curtain, and yet the wonderment still lands every time.

    If I live to be a hundred I will never forget how it felt hearing the remix on that dancefloor. The shock and awe of it. I had no idea that you could stand in a club, surrounded by hundreds of other people, listening to a sound like that – like somewhere in the building machinery was malfunctioning in a manner that might well be terminal – and that it could all come back together and work so beautifully.

    It filled me to the brim once more with a profound sense of joy and excitement at the power of music and its infinite ability to reconstitute itself in new and exciting ways, whether taking the form of a hundred primary school kids singing along to a very sad song about a rabbit or a room full of adults going batshit to a bassline so filthy you should need an ID check to access it. It made me want to keep listening forever, confident in the knowledge that there are further such moments still to be had. And more importantly: it made me want to dance.

  12. 71. Sicko Mode – Travis Scott

    I started listening to Hip Hop when I was 9 or 10 years old. Three Feet High And Rising (figuratively and literally). It was the first music that immediately clicked with me and which I couldn’t otherwise have heard at home in the normal course of business. It made perfect sense to me: a beat and a voice, music boiled down to its essence.

    Over the intervening years, I’ve watched Hip Hop grow and morph, contorting into strange new shapes I could never have imagined, refusing to sit still. There have been lulls and down periods here and there (in fact, we’re probably in one right now), but generally it’s been a hyperactive form, always questing, always looking for new influences, always looking to head off some place new. It’s proved uniquely capable of absorbing ideas and sounds from other genres, which has generally helped it to stay fresh and one step ahead. And in the process it’s become completely ubiquitous.

    In a 20 year spell I watched the sun rise and set on the Daisy Age, Dr Dre mining old funk records to make the West Coast swing, the RZA bring his horrorcore out of State Islands and into suburban bedrooms, Tupac & Biggie trading diss tracks into an early grave, the rise of the Dirty South, the explosion in Backpack Rap, the absorption of EDM elements, the boom in Auto-Tune and vocal experimentation, the blog era and the emergence of Soundcloud Rappers. At each stage there were new sounds to enjoy that felt nothing like what had come before, and a sense that over each horizon was another horizon that might be sweeter still.

    Hip Hop’s last great boom period of intense experimentation, to my mind, arrived in the 2010s, and only petered out fairly recently. Year on year, we were treated to incredible records, one after another: Oldies by Odd Future, Dreams & Nightmares by Meek Mill, Bad & Boujee by Migos, Money Trees by Kendrick, Mask Off by Future, XO Tour Llif3 by Uzi, Fuck Your Stuff by POS (what a record), Hot N by Bobby Shmurda, Yonkers by Tyler. Pick Up The Phone, Numbers On The Boards, Shutdown, and about a thousand more.

    Sicko Mode was part of that wave. It’s become one of those songs that’s achieved such a level of cultural saturation that it’s really difficult to properly listen to these days – it’s been everywhere, you’ve heard it a million times and it’s part of the furniture. Consequently, it’s difficult to remember how fresh and bracing it sounded when it first touched down in 2018, but hey – let’s at least try.

    The career of Travis Scott has thus far been defined largely by two aspects: his total inability to enforce proper safety measures at his live shows and his magpie eye for piecing together disparate elements to create a specific and unusual vibe in his music. Sicko Mode was the perfect showcase for the latter; multiple producers, multiple beat switches and a sound that didn’t really feel like anything else at the time. It’s a song that plays out over three acts, each with its own distinct themes and soundbed.

    We open with Drake in spoken word mode over a chilly, carnival-themed repeated synth line, preparing the ground for Scott’s arrival. That synth alone is strong enough that it could have formed the basis for a great track all on its own, but here it’s used and discarded in under a minute, nothing more than a calling card. We get the immortal couplet: “Goin on you with the pick n roll/Young La Flame he in sicko mode” and then we’re off to the races: the record’s beat proper is dropped and it’s an absolute monster. I can still remember the shock of hearing it for the first time, a pretty good Hip Hop record suddenly and unexpectedly lurching into absolute greatness with a bass sound for the ages.

    The track never sits still from there. The superbly deployed Biggie sample (“Gimme The Loot”), the immediately iconic turns of phrase (“Checks over stripes”, “Don’t play us for weak”), the reference to 2 Live Crew, Drake rapping the specifics of his in-flight Xanax regimen, the shout out to Stacey Dash, and the sneaky suspicion that the whole lyric is full of subliminal Kanye disses. The detonating, scuzzed out klaxons right before the second beat switch, and the whole vibe flipping to something gentler and more starlit.

    Sicko Mode is that rarest of beasts: an artist figuring out how to sew together two or more notionally separate tracks and make it all hang together as one. Paranoid Android. Nights. Take Me Out. House Of Balloons. Bohemian Rhapsody. Songs that shouldn’t work, but that somehow do in consequence of a singular internal alchemy that cannot be measured or fully explained.

    Sicko Mode is also one of the greatest karaoke tracks of all time. The week it released my gang attempted to perform it for the first time. Moments before the first beat switch the door swung open and one of the venue’s staff came sprinting in, shouted “this is my jam”, grabbed a mic and joined us in performing the whole thing. A sweaty, over-excited mob bellowing every word, bouncing off the walls with a bloke in a waiter’s outfit going mental in the middle of it all. We’ve done Sicko Mode at every session since, sometimes more than once. No other song gets that treatment. But few other songs are such an immediate and devastating hype bomb.

    Obviously, Sicko Mode blew up, it didn’t need our help. It’s one of the most streamed records of all time, it’s been played everywhere and it’s been out long enough that its shock and awe has long since abated. There’s a great Skrillex remix that blends in what I’m pretty sure is a lengthy sample of Inner City Life by Goldie (another near miss for this list), but otherwise the song has surrendered up all its secrets and faded into well-deserved ubiquity.

    So, why do I still love it? Because it reminds me of late nights out with my pals, of a whole room full of people getting super excited by the same song, month after month. Because it’s a great example of a genre you know and love serving you up something that feels really different to everything you’ve heard before. Because it’s so full of little details: sounds and background motifs you only notice on the hundredth play. And most of all because, no matter how many times I might have heard it by now, it still absolutely and undeniably slaps.

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