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Bingo Little’s 100 Favourite Songs Of All Time

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As promised/threatened at the tail end of last year, I have decided to follow in the footsteps of the estimable Kid Dynamite by cataloguing my 100 favourite songs of all time (and also by pilfering wholesale his format). I figure if I start now and get a couple done each week then we should hopefully be through it all by 2025, leaving me with a lasting record of all my nonsense, and anyone else who manages to follow along with a plethora of unanswerable questions and varying degrees of musical PTSD.

As a chronic maker of lists, this top 100 has sat on my phone for a while now, but I thought it might be interesting to lay it all out with some thoughts on each tune and maybe a little bit of accompanying autobiog as to why and when each of these 100 love affairs began. I’m afraid I’m not going to follow Kid’s very sensible approach of one pick per artist, but otherwise the – ahem – song remains the same.

If nothing else, it will provide the authorities with valuable psychological profiling material when my many crimes eventually and inevitably come to light. And if further enticement were needed, I can sensationally confirm that – despite my self-proclaimed status as a man wedded to the here and now – a bewilderingly large proportion of the list was not in fact recorded during the last 20 years. Shock, and indeed horror.

So, without further ado…..

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Comments

  1. 100. A Song For You – Gram Parsons

    I first heard Gram Parsons as a teenager, some time in the mid-90s. I had seen the covers of Grievous Angel and The Gilded Palace of Sin amidst my father’s largely dormant vinyl collection, and something drew me to the former, even at what was probably the authentic low point of the demand of British youth for Parsons’ “Cosmic American Music”. In an era of Blur and Oasis, this was not so much the road less travelled as haunted scrubland.

    What followed was, to all intents and purposes, love at first listen. Virtually every track on Grievous Angel is a thing of minor beauty, from the maudlin Sunday afternoon blues of Brass Buttons to the runaway mine train laments of Ooh Las Vegas; it’s essentially one classic after another, and it was my first introduction to Country music as something other than the butt of the joke. It also left me hugely susceptible to the joys of Americana and Uncut magazine when that wave rolled in a few short years later.

    When I listen to this music it makes me think of my Dad. Dad, whose music this really was, whose own none-more-private melancholy was the subject of much fascinated study and conjecture in my teenage years. Dad, who actually met Gram in person during the brief window of time in which the latter was a member of the Byrds (has to have been 1968), and Dad who – like Gram – had lost a father to suicide. I suppose somewhere deep down, I must have believed that the keys to at least some of my father’s mysteries lay in this music, and that thought can only have added to its currency.

    Later, I learned more about Parsons the human being. His weird, quixotic skip through the 60s and 70s, his dalliances with the Byrds and the Stones. His refusal to play shows in apartheid South Africa and the ridiculous hubbub around his death, which managed to combine the dime store inevitability of a junkie’s fate with the epic heroism of deep myth. The fact that he died on my birthday, a detail never lost on me.

    The truth is that there are a number of Gram Parsons songs that could have made this list; Love Hurts, Hickory Wind, $1,000 Wedding, She, etc. Ultimately though, only this one has, because it’s the one that has brought me the most joy down the years, and the one which provides the finest example of the magic woven by the combination of Gram’s voice with that of Emmylou Harris. Gram was 26 years old when he recorded A Song For You – the oldest he would ever grow – but he was already in possession of a voice that sounded beyond its years, a voice that suggested some serious living had occurred. The juxtaposition of those vocals with that of Emmylou, plucked from relative obscurity but already in possession of a voice of such ludicrous and seemingly guileless beauty as to offer perfect contrast, is the bedrock of the magic happening here.

    So, there’s great beauty, but there’s also so much sadness. There are very few lyrics more poignant than “Some of my friends don’t know who they belong to/And some can’t get a single thing to work inside”. I puzzled over that one for years as a teen, and then in adulthood came to learn what it meant; that awful sense of watching people you love try and fail to find their place in the world as youth evaporates, doors close and frictions with the wider world grow instead of ease. But there’s also the glorious resignation of “So take me down to your dancefloor/And I won’t mind the people when they stare”. It’s a weary song, its participants heading to the dancefloor with their doomed love and doomed lives, to lose themselves in music for a short while, and forget their sorrows. And that closing line, repeated for effect: “And tomorrow we may still be there”. It’s just too perfect.

    The song is also in possession of one of the most glorious instrumental breaks in all of guitar-based music; the point just after the halfway mark where the fiddle comes in and leads the listener on a waltz around the room, figuratively mirroring the action of the two leads. It’s giddy and joyful and possessed of just the right amount of morbidity.

    A Song For You is the song I reach for on those thankfully rare moments I catch myself in a downswing. It’s the one that reminds me that even in sadness there’s so much beauty in the world, and that the solution to a darkening big picture is often to lose yourself in the moment as best you can. To take yourself down to that self-same dancefloor, so to speak. It makes me think of how hard life can sometimes be, and it makes me think of my Dad, in all his glorious inscrutability.

  3. What a way to get 2024 started!

    Kid Dynamite’s 100 songs, with its irresistible cocktail of insightful descriptions of the songs and pages from his autobiography, has been one of the most enjoyable threads we’ve had for yonks.
    The news that you will be following in his footsteps has brightened my day enormously. Please take your time! I hope the thread lasts all year.

    No “fades in slowly” for Mr Little. You kick off with a wonderfully enticing, mysterious song by one of the great legends of popular music. And one that is packed with personal significance. Your dad met Gram Parsons! Like any good storyteller, you really know how to grab your audience’s attention. Now we’re all sitting here, waiting with hushed breathe for number 99!!

    After reading your text, I dashed off to listen to the song a couple of times.

    What musicianship! It’s Buddy Emmons on steel and Byron Berline on fiddle.

    https://www.allmusic.com/album/gp-mw0000470760#credits

    I googled. That Buddy Emmons was a maestro!

    In Japan 1982.

    • I’m afraid that – as will frequently be the case with this list – we’re about to skip directly from the sublime to the ridiculous, so it may be worth unhushing that breath.

      I can’t promise to have interesting things to say about all these entries. A fair few are just going to need to be more along the lines of “this one just really makes me tap my foot”. I’ll do my best to keep it vaguely interesting though.

  4. Right I am going to do this too. It’s Listomania!

    Decent first choice. How do you distinguish between what is placed at no. 100 and no. 99 though? 😉

  6. A great choice and lovely writing.

    The phrase “my Dad, in all his glorious inscrutability” reminds me of my own Dad. I often wondered what lay behind his quiet moments. Although it’s too late to find out now, I don’t think that I would have ever asked. I reckon that we are all entitled to keep some things to ourselves if we wish to.

    • If time has taught me anything, it’s to try to accept the people we love for who they are, rather than who we want or need them to be.

      My Dad is, thankfully, still with us. He had his first real health scare before Christmas, but so far it looks like he’ll make it through (touch wood).

      I gave up many years ago on the idea that one day we’d have the Big Chat where he reveals what on earth has been going on in his head all this time. It’s enough that he just stays with us a little longer; he can continue to be as gloriously inscrutable as he likes if he just stays with us a little longer.

  10. Excellent writing about a very good song.
    Not sure I agree with @dai -,in a way you don’t need to number them other than ensuring you stay within the hundred. It is somewhat like deciding a favourite child – they should all be loved and that is all that matters.
    I am hoping that this is in addition to the proposed top 30 favourite songs by @RayX where we can all join in but will certainly be looking forward to your next instalments if they are as well written as this.

  12. 99. Kung Fu – Ash

    Inevitably, many of the songs we end up loving the best are those which transport us back to specific golden moments in our lives. Kung Fu by Ash is one such song.

    Ash were an important band to my mates and I, in that they were the first act we ever came across who could have been us. They were about a year older, but they looked like us, they dressed like us and their lyrics revealed that they shared many of our obsessions.

    From early on, they were adopted as something of a house band for our social gatherings, and we celebrated their meteoric rise as if it was a personal triumph, not least when they included multiple Star Wars references seemingly for our personal benefit (including a cover of the Cantina Band song as a B-side remains a move of rare genius, rivalled only by having an actual band member with a name perilously close to Star Wars royalty).

    By the end of 1994, we’d all bought their debut mini-album, Trailer and thrilled to its fuzzy pop-punk stylings. These songs were super accessible and relatable; where you looked at Oasis and Blur and saw pop stars in waiting, Tim, Mark and Rick all felt like they would one day turn up drinking in the park with you. They were just normal kids doing normal kid things.

    In particular, we had coalesced in our mutual appreciation for Trailer’s lead off single, Jack Names the Planets, which remains a bop to this day and which commences with the memorable and still unexplained pronouncement “the centre of the universe is Planet Nieuw-Vennep”.

    What I’m saying is: we were 16 years old and we all agreed: Ash were a really good thing. And more importantly than that: they were OUR thing.

    I’m not sure we expected them to really go anywhere, this tiny cult band of ours. Maybe a legit album or two, and then burn away. Instead of which, in 1995 they properly and unexpectedly broke through, and it was Kung Fu which commenced that process, storming the beachfront so that the heavy artillery of Girl From Mars could be assembled and deployed later in the Summer.

    Kung Fu was, in the words of Tim Wheeler, written in about five minutes on boxing day 1994 while waiting in Belfast airport, and then recorded in two and a half minutes the following day, using equipment borrowed from The Verve. It always tickles me to think of the Verve of 1994, presumably on a break from essaying 12 minute long sonic bliss-outs, lending their kit to a bunch of kids to bang out their half thought through Ramones pastiche, the two poles of guitar music briefly converging somewhere in a studio in Wales.

    I will remember forever the day we first laid hands on the single, not least because it announced itself with one of the greatest and most fortuitous front covers of any music release ever made.

    In January 1995, Eric Cantona had infamously gone over the railings at Selhurt Park and booted Matthew Simmons in what he would later describe as the best moment of his entire career. Listening at home on the radio I was stunned and jubilant. The mid-90s were a time utterly pregnant with possibility; the country was clearly changing, a new vision of Britain was emerging and apparently it now included mercurial French football geniuses laying waste to foul-mouthed spectators. Plus, it might mean Utd missing out on the title. What a time to be alive.

    Barely 8 weeks later, in March 1995, an image of Cantona in mid-assault was deployed on the cover of Kung Fu. You can keep your Sgt Peppers and your London Callings; nothing will ever beat that cover, either for pure style or for effortless grasping of the zeitgeist. I legitimately laughed out loud when I saw it – the combination of song title and visual was perfection; we couldn’t get it home fast enough.

    Once we did get it home further delights awaited. Kung Fu is, ultimately, a nothing song; 2 minutes and 17 seconds of storming guitars, cheap pop culture references, handclaps and “oh oh oh oh oh”s. It’s the kind of thing teenagers churn out to make other teenagers over-excited: it has virtually no artistic merit, no class, no lasting significance and no musical credibility whatsoever. It sounds like the Buzzcocks with lyrics by Adam and Joe. Obviously, we absolutely fucking loved it. Our love only intensified when we discovered that the band had faxed Eric Cantona asking for his permission to include his image on the single, only to receive the immortal response: “I spit on your record”.

    What I remember most about Kung Fu is being sat in my mate Al’s front room listening to it for the first time. Propulsive and brash, it seemed to fill the place utterly, bouncing from wall to wall and sending sheet electricity through the air. It was so stupid as to be irresistible, so direct as to be undeniable.

    But I also remember how it made me feel. I was never a very good teenager; I never got the rebellion thing down and I was too busy with introspection to really join the party. But for 2 minutes and 17 seconds in March of 1994 I felt as teenage as I ever would. Here was our band, playing our music and here I was with my mates listening to this thing of ours that suddenly felt like the centre of the entire universe. Like this thing that had been made for us but would soon enough be heard by everybody. For a brief moment, it lifted a weight and I felt legitimately and properly young in a way that was often not the case in those years. I had also discovered a great truth: even before I became a party person, I always loved party bands. Probably always will.

    What followed is pretty well documented. Ash went big and released a string of very successful singles, adding a punky edge to the sometimes trad stylings of Britpop. As most bands do, they remained frozen in amber at their particular point of impact, which is to say they remain 16 years old even as their modest physical beauty warps and fades.

    The rest of us grew up, stopped being teenagers. I’m still close friends with Al and a number of others who were in that room that day. Over the Summer we got our families together in the States and visited (inevitably) the Star Wars section at Disneyland. There’s a photo of us at the end of that day sat on my desk right now; arms around one another, beaming as fireworks explode overhead. 40 years of friendship in one image, and somewhere, beneath the wrinkles and retreating hairlines, the faces of those same teenagers who loved Ash, and for whom Kung Fu will always remain an irresistible call to arms.

    • For me music is mostly enjoyed in isolation because I appreciate the tune, the sound. My favourite songs are generally not significant due to associations with a time and place, or people. Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed dancing in clubs or at parties and some songs remind me of a moment in time. But favourites are kind of what I think are the best (for me) as examples of excellence, something brilliant. There are different approaches to these things, which is interesting I think.

      • I’m with you. On Desert Island Discs the castaways often say that they chose songs which remind them of people and places, which makes perfect sense for the format but doesn’t resonate with me at all.

      • Interesting. Like you say, I think we probably all experience music in slightly different ways.

        Looking down the list to come, quite a few of the songs I’ve never knowingly listened to with another human being, and my love of them is largely down to the merits of the work itself, and what it does for me.

        But there are others (and let’s face it, Kung Fu is not here on the strength of its artistic virtues) that remind me of a person, place or time, or in respect of which my love is built on shared experience, and those are all the better for it.

        For me, at least, music has always been a swiss army knife – it performs a lot of different functions, and there have been lots of times when the penny’s only really dropped on a song once I discovered the proper utility for it.

        I suspect what’s going to emerge as this thread progresses is that a lot of the time I’ve been using music to better navigate, chronicle or understand life. Which is probably slightly foolhardy, but there you go.

    • Funnily enough, there was a hit single about Kung Fu when I was sixteen. Neither I nor my mates particularly liked it, never mind fucking loved it. It was Carl Douglas and Kung Fu Fighting.

    • So good a song, I moved to Downpatrick!

      Not quite true but I did move to outside Downpatrick, Ash’s home town and where there’s a Girl From Mars mural on Church Street.

      There’s a purity to Kung Fu that Ash would very rarely repeat. And so this is (almost) all the Ash that I’ll ever need. Almost true as the opening screech of a Tie Fighter on Lose Control and Girl From Mars are both great but Kung Fu is their best song.

      The pity about Ash is that they had to grow up. Obviously, they couldn’t still be singing about Star Wars and kung fu movies in their forties but, like milk, I was surprised just how quickly the taste went off. 1977 is the classic example of a one-and-done band. One album is all they needed to do…in fact, they could have just recorded Lose Control, Girl From Mars and Kung Fu and they’d still have a recorded legacy much better than most bands.

      This, then, is the flip side to the Wu Tang’s meditative martial arts. This is Jackie Chan, Monkey and Jim Kelly in Enter The Dragon. And it’s absolutely glorious.

      https://twitter.com/thisisfriz/status/1507829085703229455/photo/1

      • I agree with you on all fronts, not least regarding the purity of Kung Fu. Whatever the true essence of this band was, they distilled it utterly in this song.

        Slightly oddly, I never actually bought 1977. I picked up all of the singles, but by the time the album was released I felt – exactly as you state above – that it couldn’t possibly prove additive to what was already in my possession. And I’ve never really gone back since.

        Looking back, my favourites remain Kung Fu, Angel Interceptor (I really like the handclaps) and (from Trailer) Petrol, the latter of which is a much overlooked classic of the period.

        Oh, and that mural is absolutely bloody magnificent. I’d never seen it – thank you so much!

    • Great to see this thread, looking forward to some excellent writing and some proper bangers!

      I’ve got a soft spot for Ash. I couldn’t honestly say that I’m playing them all the time, but when I do hear something of theirs I’ll invariably enjoy it. This is a later period song that got irrevocably stuck in my head when I saw them at a festival a few years back, which proves that their knack for a chorus hasn’t disappeared over the years.

      Funnily enough, in the light of your comment about how they seemed like regular lads who might join you down the park, I was quite good friends with the drummer’s brother for a few years. We were doing the same job in different locations, and got together a few times a year after meetings to mostly talk about Star Wars and have a (several) pints. He’s a nice fella. Never met his brother though.

      • Ooh – had a listen and that’s great. May inspire me to explore the catalogue a little more.

        Love that the drummer’s brother shared the Star Wars fandom. That was always such a big part of Ash’s appeal; we didn’t really need our musicians to be banging on about drugs and debauchery (we had Suede for that). We were often quite happy for them to simply posit a theory on whether Han shot first and name a b-side after their favourite Nintendo game.

  14. 98. Oi – More Fire Crew

    I love London. It’s where I was born, it’s where I’ve been for the vast majority of my life, and it’s where I hope to live for the rest of it. I’ve lived here young and old, rich and poor, and I’ve enjoyed pretty much every minute of it. It’s a brilliant city with an incredibly vibrant culture, a rich musical history and a long track record of throwing out jaw dropping sounds at regular intervals.

    For much of my life there’s been something new to listen to more often than not; from Bashment to Drum & Bass to UK Garage to Dubstep to Drill and Afroswing. You’ll hear something in a bar, or a club, or emanating from a passing car, it’ll catch your ear, and the next thing you know it’s everywhere, and it’s all you’re listening to. The energy flash that occurs when new music bubbles up and pops is all part of the joy.

    I have loved Oi since I first heard it, almost certainly downloaded off Napster, in late 2001. I’d spent a fair bit of the preceding couple of years listening to UK Garage, but that sound was now starting to twist and mutate in new directions.

    In particular, a mate had turned me on to Wiley, who was beavering away with what he then called “Eski-beat”, a frosty, heavily digitised take on Two Step which reversed that music’s natural warmth and swing in favour of the brooding tones of dancehall and synthesized sounds that might have been lifted straight from a ringtone or an 8-bit video game. This was the music that was on its way to morphing into Grime, and it sounded like nothing I’d heard before; instrumental tracks liked Eskimo and Ice-Rink that felt simultaneously foreboding and futuristic. Where Garage had given us sounds to dance to, this was something else entirely; cold, dark and awkward. It was also distinctly young, as evidenced by all those ringtone sounds and a longstanding debate over whether the first ever Grime track was in fact the incidental music to a boss fight in the long-forgotten Super Nintendo game “Wolverine: Adamantium Rage”. Show me another genre that can put up an origin story like that.

    In terms of the period of its emergence, Grime had a number of things going for it. At a moment in time when planes were going into towers and economic bubbles appeared to be bursting, Grime sounded like the party was over and an almighty ruck was about to kick off. It also bastardised a number of popular musical styles, allowing it to cross over amongst the various urban tribes; its rhythms had a clear dancehall influence, it contained plenty of elements of electronic music, and it invited MCing which allowed it to spread in the same word-of-mouth and mixtape-based style as Hip Hop. From the outset, it was a perfect storm, in need of little more than the right messengers.

    More Fire Crew came out of North London, and managed a grand total of three singles in their entire career, the first of which was this absolute masterpiece, the first Grime track to properly cross over and achieve wider chart success.

    Let’s start with the production. It has all the classic early Grime hallmarks; the skittering drums of UK Garage, the dark horns of Dancehall, the brooding undertones of Jungle, that sped-up Hip Hop MC style, and just the slightest detectable element of Punk’s attitude. It’s a veritable cocktail of London’s urban music history, served up by three local kids aged 16-17. It’s nagging, insistent, aggressive and gets in and out in a little over three and a half minutes, absolutely nailing that trademark choppy, off-centre sound.

    The vocals are even better, the now-familiar but then still novel nasal delivery, the sheer speed of the chat, and most of all the super memorable lyrics. The song is absolutely littered with them, from the spoken word intro (“One’s got Avirex, man thinks he’s rough”) to the fabulous calling cards of each of Lethal Bizzle, Neeko and Ozzie B. As grand entrances go it’s pretty tough to beat “Uh-oh, who’s that boy Lethal B/the one who rides bikes and he don’t give a D”, although later verses have a fair crack at it (respectively “another badman inside the party” and “the one with the thugged out mentality”). Oi didn’t sound like anything else up to that point; it was distinctly British, very young and so immediately and brilliantly quotable that it just caught fire.

    Grime went on to do what genres inevitably do. It built and built, went fully commercial (see: Wearing My Rolex, the scene’s godfather fully cashing in), waned in the face of a natural successor (Dubstep), and then enjoyed a latter resurgence which saw some of its strongest material produced and which ultimately morphed into Drill. More Fire broke up and later reformed. Lethal B became the breakout star, releasing Pow! a couple of years later and having his career stalled because the song was so regularly starting fights in clubs. Dizzee Rascal emerged (and his I Luv U, a near-contemporary of Oi, was also in danger of making this list – what an absolute headfuck that song was when it first released) and morphed in fairly short order from the face of ASBO Britain to national treasure status and back out again to pariah.

    When I listen to Oi, I still hear “the sound of young London”. But I also hear something that sits squarely in an unbroken line that stretches from London Posse to Silver Bullet, on to Sway, Skepta, Giggs, Krept & Konan, Stormzy, J Hus, Tion Wayne and a thousand others. It’s a song that reminds me that no matter how old I get, somewhere out there in a bedroom on the other side of town someone will be cooking up something that will probably blow my mind in about 18 months’ from now. The time it takes to reach me only grows with age, and there’s little I can do about that, but I can at least have the courtesy to maintain receptive ears for when the next such moment arrives.

    I have listened to Oi on a regular basis for over 20 years now. It’s a truly timeless record that could be released today and would still sound great. It still gets played in clubs, it retains all the energy of youth, the video is still joyously lo-fi and I still have mates who quote its immortal “I ain’t seen no machine, get me?”. When I hear this music I am grateful to come from London; grateful for its energies, grateful for its exceptional musical history and grateful that I (hopefully) get another few decades to see where it all goes next.

  15. 97. The Future – Prince

    In the long and inglorious history of my personal interactions with popular culture, a special place must always be reserved for Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie.

    Batman was an absolute milestone in my cultural life, a billion dollar gothic meat cleaver separating what came before from all that followed. It was the first time that something I had believed to be an utterly private obsession (yes, Batman – that well kept secret) exploded seemingly overnight into mass culture, and it confirmed to me absolutely, aged all of 10, that the future would be bright, and would look very much like the inside of my head.

    But of course, Batman wasn’t just a movie. It brought with it a once-in-a-decade marketing and merchandising bonanza that saw the bat-symbol emblazoned across all manner of products, splayed across t-shirts and shaved into hairstyles. Alongside that marketing bonanza, it also brought with it a soundtrack.

    Young as I was, I had some vague awareness of Prince prior to the Batman movie. I had heard a snippet of Kiss on the radio, seen the back end of the video for 1999 on Saturday morning TV .

    I knew enough to recognise that this was music beyond my meagre years, that Prince was exotic and maybe (to my mind) a little dangerous, and that his music sounded startlingly unlike anything else I’d heard to that point. When he released the Batdance single in June of 1989 I was perfectly positioned; I had enough information to enjoy Prince’s unlikely association with Batman, but not enough to give the actual music any sort of proper critical consideration.

    As a consequence, I was quite simply blown away; the dialogue samples, the slightly clumsy blending of what were clearly half a dozen different song ideas, the absolutely glorious opening minute – I had never heard anything so brilliantly hyperactive. It felt like it was bursting at the seams with uncontrolled energy and potential, absolutely rife with new thoughts and visions. Which, coincidentally, is also pretty much how it felt to me being 10 years old.

    Batdance gripped me utterly and built my anticipation for the movie to near-hysterical levels. It also lead to an unseemly incident at a friend’s birthday party in which, ensconced in the local branch of Pizza Express for dinner, I used the money I’d been given to pay for my food to play the track on the restaurant’s jukebox no less than eight times in succession, to the enormous consternation of our fellow diners. My evil was only thwarted when the restaurant’s manager emerged to unceremoniously pull the plug.

    The Batman soundtrack album itself, I found no less compelling. I know it’s widely regarded as something of a regrettable mis-step for Prince, but I simply do not care. This was my first proper engagement with the purple one’s music, and – consequently – it remains to mind the absolute ur-text of Prince’s imperial period. Plus, the songs are virtually all bangers. Vicky Waiting? Lemon Crush? Electric Chair? Partyman? Bangers. The record is the movie’s perfect match; it’s simultaneously dark and gothic while also being preposterously and endearingly goofy. The Michael Keaton of Prince records.

    When Prince had first been approached to soundtrack Batman the idea was that it would be a joint effort with Michael Jackson (and god only knows what that might have sounded like). After Jackson quickly extracted himself from the project Prince took sole creative control and set about repurposing a bunch of songs he’d been working up with the intention of releasing an album of House tunes (again: god know what that might have sounded like). As a boyhood fan of the comic books, Prince got it. He understood the character and where Burton was planning to take him. He also had access to the movie’s dailies, and was able to craft the soundtrack in parallel to the movie, lifting dialogue that caught his ear.

    As a consequence, Prince’s Batman tracked Burton’s Batman to perfection. Accordingly, two of its songs eventually made their way directly into the movie, and the album won an immediate and enduring place in my heart.

    The Future is my favourite song on Batman, by an absolute mile. It’s also, slightly oddly, the first song I think of when I think of Prince, demonstrating once and for all that the first cut really is the deepest.

    So then – what’s so good about it?

    Fittingly for the song that kicks off the record, The Future is blessed with a tremendous opening. Subway sounds give way to a when-you-wish-upon-a-star keyboard line, the quintessential Batman movie sample (the gasped “What are you?!”) is unceremoniously deployed, and then we’re straight into electronic drums and that grade A rubbernecking funk riff, with accompanying wobbly synth noises. It’s absolutely 0-60, it’s gloriously evocative and it builds a great platform for Prince’s vocal.

    In a lot of ways, this track is a direct antecedent of Sign Of The Times. It has the same looped song structure, a similarly grimey sound-bed and there are lyrical similarities; Prince in full on preacher mode, and a number of lines that could easily have graced either song (not least “Pretty pony standing on the avenue/flashing a loaded pistol, too dumb to be true”). Indeed, the first time I actually heard Sign Of The Times, my immediate reaction was that I was essentially listening to a fractionally less awesome version of The Future.

    The lyrics contain some truly great Prince one-liners. “I’ve seen the future and it will be, I’ve seen the future and it works”, “Hollywood conjures images of the past”, “New world needs spirituality”. It’s a regular sermon, full of urgency and resignation, offering damnation and redemption at the listener’s election.

    It also had the benefit, when listened to by a child in 1989, of sounding very much like it had been beamed direct from the future; I had certainly never heard a song like this in my parents’ record collection. “I’ve seen the future, and boy it’s rough”. I cannot tell you how much time I spent pondering what it all meant – what had Prince seen, what was he warning us about? Most of all, what does “I’ve seen the future and it will be” actually mean; is he reassuring us that there will actually be a future, or is there a deliberate word omitted from the end of the line, inviting you to fill in the blank?

    I love The Future because it’s a happy childhood memory, but I also love it because it just goes so damn hard; from the cry of “wait a minute” triggering 10 seconds of awesome chicken scratch guitar and a little throwaway keyboard solo, to the way it crashes directly into the next track on the album (Electric Chair), which comes with such a different vibe and an absolutely preposterous opening couplet (“I saw your friend first, that’s who I danced with/all the time I was watching you”). It’s got so much style, such a distinct vibe and it does all the things I like about Prince so brilliantly; it fundamentally has more ideas than it knows what to do with. It’s also brilliantly unfashionable, which only adds to the appeal.

    When I listen to The Future, inevitably I think about the past. The excitement of hearing this record for the first time, but also the excitement that came from one thing leading to another; my love of Batman leading directly to my love of Prince.

    How many times down the years would a movie introduce me to a great song, or a song reference a novel I needed to read, or a comic book point reference a great movie I hadn’t seen? When you’re a kid you start out reading and listening and watching and you know nothing. You climb that great tree and every branch is a fresh new discovery leading to further branches still. When I heard The Future for the first time I had all that in front of me, and I kind of knew it on some level and it completely electrified me to the absolute tips of my toes. As you get older, those new branches become slightly harder to discern, and perhaps a little narrower, but they’re still there and they can still be climbed. I hope to keep climbing forever.

    A few months after Batdance was released my parents took me to see the Batman movie. I sat between them and watched as my most fevered imaginings played out onscreen, and I felt that – yes – this was a world I could live in after all. That there was magic out there that could be bottled, and people who shared my sensibilities and my already firm conviction that I would not, in fact, be growing up under any circumstances.

    Years later I would receive a phone call inviting me to go and work for the studio who made that incredible movie. Obviously, it was a job I had to take, compelled by a heady mixture of loyalty to my childhood self and a sense that sometimes the universe will steer you to where you were always meant to be. That the promises I made to myself in that movie theatre would form the map that might lead me to the proper destination. That the great tree of life is much the same as the tree of movies and music and books; one branch leading to another, one adventure to the next, the past giving way to the present and onwards, upwards to the heavens. And that, having diligently followed that map and climbed those branches, I can confirm: I’ve seen the future, and it works.

    • Amen brother!

      I remember hearing this on Jeff Young’s Friday night show and being instantly convinced that getting Prince to do a Batman soundtrack was a genius move, after initial skepticism. This track has a grandeur about it which is equal both to the Batman myth and the gigantic scale of Prince’s 80s greatness.

      I don’t think the rest of the album or the film matched up to that but it almost didn’t matter. Burton plus Prince plus Elfman plus Batman was a great moment.

    • Will give it another listen, but I am amongst those who thought the album was the first sign that not everything he touched turned to gold.

      However I have the “limited” CD in a circular film case. There’s my pension right there!

      And lovely story!

    • I love the whole album, though agree The Future is the most stunning track. Scandalous is one of Prince’s best horny toad romantic ballads. There were loads of great outtakes: 200 Balloons, Feel U Up, I Love U In Me and Dance With The Devil. However, I don’t think Batdance has aged well.

      Let’s not forget Clare Fischer’s strings. She should be on the stringy thread.

      Bring on the box set, please.

      • Listened to now, Batdance is all over the road, but the opening remains superb. The first thirty seconds is positively begging to be repurposed somewhere – the rotating three note riff that kicks in after about 10 seconds is still my favourite moment on any Prince tune.

        You’re right about the outtakes, and I absolutely love Scandalous – the vocals are a riot. “Touch it and exploooo-oooooo-ooooode”.

  17. 96. Fool To Cry – The Rolling Stones

    I would not normally consider myself a Stones guy.

    They were never my band growing up, they didn’t get a tremendous amount of play in my house and I’ve always found something slightly grating about the band’s persona, particularly that of Keith Richards.

    I eventually came round to their musical virtues via a borrowed copy of Exile, but even to this day I tend to find that a little of their stuff goes a long way; give me Shine A Light, Beast of Burden, Wild Horses, Moonlight Mile, Rip This Joint, Under My Thumb and Let’s Spend The Night Together and we’re basically all good for the Winter, thank you very much.

    Nevertheless, there is one of their songs that holds a really special place in my heart. A song I’ve listened to hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times and that never fails to soothe my soul. And that song is, of course, Fool To Cry.

    I first heard Fool To Cry on the soundtrack of Ted Demme’s 1996 opus Beautiful Girls. The movie is well worth watching; it’s the film Zach Braff essentially ripped off for Garden State, built around an unlikely (and even then clearly “problematic”) connection between Timothy Hutton’s 20-something musician returning to his hometown, and his 13 (!) year old neighbour, played by an effervescent Natalie Portman.

    The pair are ably supported by a stellar cast, including Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Michael Rapaport, Mira Sorvino, Martha Plimpton, Rosie O’Donnell, Lauren Holly and Noah Emmerich. It’s well worth a watch, despite its alarming central plot, and features a number of memorable performances, not least from Portman, who clearly already had the whole movie star thing figured out even at that tender age.

    The movie also has the benefit of a gorgeous soundtrack, including great tracks from The Spinners, Kiss, Chris Isaak, The Diamonds and the Afghan Whigs, the latter of whom actually make a brief appearance and play a couple of numbers. Worth watching for the music alone.

    It was Beautiful Girls that introduced me to Otis Reddings That’s How Strong My Love Is (a song that very nearly made it onto this list), and it’s also the movie that introduced me to Fool To Cry.

    Over the years, I’ve come to understand how the Rolling Stones work best for me. It’s as the greatest Bar Band that ever existed; the act who would work most perfectly on the best night ever in your favourite bar. It makes so much more sense to me than massive stadia, helicopters, and all the other biggest band in the world nonsense.

    To wit: when I first realised that Fool To Cry was theirs I was surprised – it seemed too obviously a soul tune. But the Bar Band paradigm helped me digest the revelation: this is the song they play as the place shuts down. The regular patrons have long since gone home, the lights are dimmed, the floor is filthy and the only people left to hear them play are the hardened drunks and the guy slowly sweeping up. Everyone would be crying a little if they hadn’t long since lost the capacity to do so, no one really wants to go home (if they even have one) and the band have nowhere to sleep.

    Fool To Cry has a sound all its own. Those woozy, backstreet keyboard lines along which it’s built, the sonic equivalent of a cigarette burning right down to its embers. The squelchy wah wah guitar lines which crawl up the foundations like vines, and the gorgeous noodling of Wayne Perkins that fills the spaces in-between. The superbly understated drumming. The song is super-textural and distinct – nothing else I know really sounds like it, and what it sounds like is – let’s be very specific here – 3am.

    Most of all, I love Fool To Cry for the vocal. Jagger brings so much character, such unique phrasing to this thing – that slightly unexpected falsetto, the conversational tone of it all, the way he leans into the song’s soul affectations so unashamedly. All the weird noises he makes, and bizarre intonations: “I’m a certified fool babe, ah-yah”, “Even my FRIENDS say to me sometimes… ahmackalackadonunderstan”. I’m a huge fan of his “You know what she said, she said” and his “AH GOT A WOHM-AN”.

    There’s barely a line in the whole thing where he isn’t doing something completely mental and uncalled for, something utterly melodramatic, and yet it hangs together perfectly as the ultimate barfly’s lament. “Daddy you’re a fool to cry, and it makes me wonder why”. So good, I could listen to it forever and always find something new.

    I suspect that unique vocal is the reason this otherwise brilliant song has drawn very few covers – no one fancies the challenge of going up against all that, and it’s obviously well understood that no one is singing it better.

    In fact, I can only think of one act brave enough to take it on: Teagan and Sara, about a decade ago, asked to cover the tune by Lena Dunham for the TV show Girls. This is what Teagan (or maybe Sara, who can really tell) had to say about the experience: “Oh my god, this is a nightmare. How are we going to do this? It’s like he’s talking, he’s meandering. I was like, what the fuck?”. What the fuck indeed.

    Fool To Cry is the song I habitually play when I’m returning home from a late night out. Streets deserted, walking down the middle of the road towards my house, bathed in streetlights and solitude. It’s the song that makes sense of the world in the wee small hours, and as a person who has always absolutely loved the wee small hours and the heady mix of possibility and introspection, little white lies and hard unvarnished truths they invariably evoke, what could possibly be better than that?

    • I remember this on TOTP. It was a moment that had an impact. Something so charismatic about them and a bit strange, the androgeny of Mick, the white guys doing black music. What the fuck is this? But then in the seventies it was kind of de rigueur. Great song. The rest of Black and Blue doesn’t impress me so much but I love this. They could do this kind of soul stuff very well, also on covers. Many styles but always Stonesian.

    • The song that Keith once fell asleep to on stage.

      Fool to Cry is not really for me. On the same album there is also Memory Motel, in a similar vein but for me a far superior song.

      • Funnily enough, I was going to mention Memory Motel. It’s the only other one on that album that I enjoy, it has some stylistic similarities, but for my money there’s just too much of it.

  18. Ha!! More superscribing, and, after two that mean less, another big one. Actually, I remember the time it came out, the single that followed, am I right, Angie, and, aged 17, it struck me the band had gone from soppy to soppier. How dare they, but, as I trudged up from the Pells to Simon Treacle’s house and his 18th party, I suddenly got it. Realising that there was no way on earth I would ever “get off” with any of the 6th form girls that night, or probably with any woman ever. Daddy, did I bawl. I still went to the party, drank to much and was sick on the way home. It remains a good song.

    • It’s Only Rock n Roll came in between.

      Great stuff, Bingo, and lovely to hear you rate Winter as highly as I do. 😉 Fool To Cry is a great, great song, the only decent one on the album. By this point, Jagger had perfected his vowel mangling vocal style. It worked best when he was totally committed. This song sounds autobiographical, as though he wrote it having arrived home to his family after a long tour.

      • Writing this made me realise that, unlike most of the big monumental bands, I actually have very little sense of the chronology of the Stones. I had to look up when this was recorded and I couldn’t tell you the first thing about how it fits into their overall evolution. I think I might actually prefer it that way.

        I also had to look up the fact they have a song called Winter! For my money, the best Winter is by Tori Amos – another one that very nearly made this list.

        • It’s refreshing. You came to this song twenty years after it was recorded and love it more than I do (I doubt it would have made my top 100!). Now, your perspective has given me a new appreciation, it stands a better chance.

        • ” I think I might actually prefer it that way” I do not believe I enjoy the Beatles more now than I did when I was eight and didn’t really appreciate that Sgt Pepper and A Hard Day’s Night were from distinctly different eras.

          “1963,-7,-9,-6 all the same isn’t it? It’s all just….er… a long time ago!”

  19. I didn’t like this much at the time…but I came to love it. A great assessment, Bingo…

    Funnily enough, my “rolling home at a deserted 3am” song would be Far Away Eyes…

    • Mine would be Losing My Touch. Mick’s faux accent on Fool To Cry annoys me (like Elton’s does). At least on Faraway Eyes it’s not done seriously.

  20. 95. I’m Me – Lil Wayne

    Lil Wayne is at least partly responsible for a number of trends which many would consider regrettable in modern Hip Hop. The popularisation of Auto-Tune, inaudible mumble rapping, the preponderance of daft jokes and double-entendres, the shift from rapping about selling drugs to taking them and, perhaps most vividly, ill-advised facial tattoos and looking like you fell asleep at a party in a marker pen factory.

    However, while all of these are serious charges, he’s also responsible, both directly and indirectly, from some of my favourite Hip Hop tracks of the last 20 years, and for inspiring a generation of MCs to switch up their flows, embrace their own idiosyncrasies, and at least try to make us laugh.

    In many ways the heir to ODB (albeit with far greater skill on the mic), Wayne began his career age 14 but didn’t fully blow up until circa 2005-6, by which time he already had more albums and mix tapes under his belt than many acts release in decades long careers.

    He had a look and sound like no one else at that time: the now ubiquitous tattoos, the dreadlocks, all the weird vocal tics – the high pitched giggles and croaks, and an absolutely devastating selection of memorable couplets, many of them built around ridiculous, shake-your-head-but-laugh-anyway gags. He refused to stay in one cadence or tone, jumping suddenly between thoughts and styles, utterly hyperactive and about as far removed from the standard East Coast Boom Bap I’d cut my teeth on as anything I could imagine.

    Wayne was a huge crossover artist, playing the electric guitar onstage, referencing Hard Rock and Metal bands as influences and guesting at the Country Music Awards when such things were unheard of. He felt like he might do anything, go anywhere, just as all great pop stars should.

    For whatever reason, I have always been a huge fan of musicians who make it all work through sheer force of personality. I have a suspicion that it’s down to a childhood obsession with Marc Bolan, but I enjoy nothing more than watching someone take material that appears relatively simple, or otherwise unsophisticated, and selling it so hard that it becomes absolute dynamite. For me, Lil Wayne falls very much within this tradition, and I enjoy his work in much the same way I enjoy (say, for example) Jeepster, or Metal Guru.

    Wayne was and remains one of the genre’s great stylists; you can argue that these are all gimmicks and tricks, but the first time you saw them it was devastating. You can argue that the music is basic and deeply vulgar, and it is: in fact, that’s very much the point. He’s trying to gross you out and make you laugh. He’ll play the clown if he has to.

    Lil Wayne has sold 120m records all in (roughly the same as Bruce Springsteen). He’s a major influence on any number of this generation’s artists (not least Young Thug and Lil Uzi Vert), and – in addition to provoking the best verses Eminem ever recorded (No Love) – he’s also responsible for what is widely known as “the track that saved Hip Hop” (A Milli) and the seminal, and hotly anticipated, album from which it came (Tha Carter III). And it’s with Tha Carter III that we (finally) come to I’m Me.

    I’m Me (originally titled 1000 Degreez) was originally slated to be the opener on Tha Carter III. Regrettably, it leaked months ahead of release and was therefore dropped from the album and put out separately alongside a number of other leaked tracks. This is a great shame as, for reasons we’ll come on to, it would have been one of the all time great album openers, but it also meant that I first heard the track at an auspicious moment – waiting patiently for a much hyped album.

    Production was handled by Dj nasty & LVM, and the tune is built around sampled elements from “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” by Moby. This gave the track an immediate sense of familiarity, but what made it truly memorable, and what makes it one of my favourite songs, is the golden combination of the lyrics, which have always made me laugh with their sheer audacity, and their absolutely unhinged delivery. Simply put: this is one of my absolute favourite vocals of all time.

    The first thirty seconds of I’m Me are basically a killer compilation of numerous prior ad-libs and boasts from members of Wayne’s Cash Money Crew, all of them either memorably crass or daft, from the Birdman bird call to “Cash Money reckless for dreams come true” to “it’s Cash Money Records man, a lawless gang.” At around 30 seconds, we get the beat drop and then we’re off and running with what is essentially a Hip Hop power ballad; one man taking the spotlight and owning it completely with his memorable, laid-back flow and a series of ultra quotable couplets.

    The first verse that follows is utterly iconic. I can still remember being stopped in my tracks the first time I heard it, and I’m going to lay out the whole thing here.

    “Un-fucking-believable! Lil Wayne’s the president
    Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em, even if they celibate
    I know the game is crazy, it’s more crazy than it’s ever been
    I’m married to that crazy bitch; call me Kevin Federline
    It’s obvious that he’ll be Cash Money ’til the death of him
    The ground shall break when they bury him—bury him?
    I know one day they got to bury him
    Better lock my casket tight, baby, so I don’t let the devil in”

    One of the greatest opening lines of any song I know; we’re straight into a fantasy of Wayne in the White House, with Kennedy appetites to match. It’s then followed up with the truly iconic lines three and four; “I’m married to that crazy bitch, call me Kevin Federline”. Oof. Absolutely 0-60 and unforgettable. The guy is just all over the road dropping stand up comedy gags, and the song has barely started.

    But the point that really grabbed me is what comes next, because Wayne follows what is ultimately a crude and lamentable jab at Britney Spears with that weird riff on Kevin Federline staying rich for life and then one day dying: “the ground shall break when they bury him”.

    We are about seven lines in and he’s jumped from political fantasy to swipes at pop stars to contemplating the death of a Z list celebrity, and it’s the repeated “bury him” where the good stuff lies. Wayne delivers it in a totally different tone of voice, almost a disbelieving question rather than a statement, as if he can’t wrap his head round the fact that Kevin Federline will one day die, that he himself will one day die. I had never heard this in a Hip Hop track before: that tonal leap from crass misogyny to a strange vulnerability, that sudden and unexpected shift in the MC’s voice, his entire demeanour, the snap from bravado to unexpected weakness. Light and shade. And all the time he’s talking about Kevin freaking Federline.

    It’s a magic moment, and it sits right at the heart of why I love I’m Me – that ability of music you think you already know well to suddenly confront and surprise you.

    The track is full of other memorable lines, from the almost cartoonish playground super-narcissism of the chorus (“Baby I’m Me, I’m Me, So Who you, You’re not me”) to “I’m rappin’ when you sleep/I was rappin’ when you were in jammies” to “Mel Gibson flow, Lethal Weapon/Book em Danny” to “I’m a monster I tell you/monster Wayne” and finally to the lyric’s horrendously scatological closer: “The only time I will depend is when I’m 70 years old/
    That’s when I can’t hold my shit within, so I shit on myself/
    ‘Cause I’m so sick and tired of shittin’ on everybody else”.

    These are gags, ultimately. Stupid, head shaking jokes. And yet all of them are delivered with such incredible style; the throaty chuckles, the slurring, the hiccups, the switched up pacing (listen again to the way he accelerates that “better lock the casket tight baby so I don’t let the devil in”), the absolute commitment to it all that makes this material somehow work against all odds. The changes of emphasis on the chorus, the twisting of pronunciations, the “ha”s and “ugh”s that sound like James Brown on cough syrup. That wild, wild flow.

    I’m Me is so unashamedly all-in that it virtually serves as self-parody, a compendium of all the worst aspects of this music, all the boasting and lack of refinement, all the money worship and finger pointing – it’s like he’s summoned up Hip Hop’s Id and laid it out before you. And I love it. I’m not proud of that fact, but a fact it remains. In a world full of “I don’t give a fuck” songs, it’s the ultimate I Don’t Give A Fuck song. It’s brash and dopey and it makes me laugh, albeit a little guiltily, every single time I listen to it without fail. And I hadn’t known Hip Hop could do that.

    • I’ve never really thought about it before but it’s difficult to take Hip Hop seriously. I mean: I said-a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip hip hop-a you don’t stop the rock it to the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat. Gangsta was even more silly. De La Soul were gentle with their humour. Even Public Enemy had their moments of being ridiculous. As for Kanye, he often makes me laugh.

      I’m now looking at the whole genre in a different light. It’s lot of fun, isn’t it.

      • There’s a deep reservoir of silliness running through Hip Hop that people often overlook. Ya Mama by the Pharcyde, How To Rob by 50 Cent, OPP, the Humpty Dance, etc. The genre can be goofy as hell, and even some of its most serious tracks contain gag lines. It’s definitely a lot of fun once you scratch the surface.

  21. 94. M.P.B – Womack & Womack

    When putting together a list like this, it’s almost impossible to avoid thinking about one’s own relationship with music. Where did it begin, through how many seasons has it passed? What makes you love one thing and disdain another? Which songs have shifted from one state to the other down the years, and which might make the same journey in future? How do you listen, and where did you learn to do so?

    As I look back, I reflect that, while my Dad was the one with the enviably hip record collection and encyclopaedic knowledge, it’s through my Mum that I really learned to feel the things I do about music. Perhaps because so many songs I heard her play growing up have stayed with me down the years, but also because – even as a lip curling adolescent – I always secretly admired her passion for the stuff she loved; her willingness to lend an ear to new things that might be outside her usual forte, and the sheer joy she seemed to take from discovering new things she liked.

    While Dad was classically English, and always seemed to experience his records (and indeed everything else) on a strictly internal basis, with Mum it was just the opposite – even to this day, you always know exactly what she’s thinking and feeling, because she’ll invariably tell you. Only she won’t really need to, because you’ll feel it in the air long before she speaks. It was Dad who could give you the lowdown on every Byrds b-side ever released, but it was Mum who in her student days had heard Exodus for the first time and refused to allow the record (newly purchased by a friend) to leave the house at the end of the night. Ice and fire, thought and feeling. The push and pull of their marriage, and the sometimes bewildering psychological terrain of my childhood.

    Conscience was released by Womack & Womack in 1988, and was immediately and forever one of Mum’s records. It was clean, and soulful and joyous and it filled our house for months on end at a moment when, at 9 years old, I was attuned to the mood of that house down to an almost sub-atomic level. For me, the album is the sound of a happy home, a happy family. Safety and security. Teardrops, the obvious big single from the record, is the recurring soundtrack to our gatherings to this day. Reminds me baby of them.

    Womack & Womack, latterly “The House of Zekkariyas” occupy an odd place in our cultural memory. Outside Teardrops, and perhaps Love Wars, they’re largely forgotten and overlooked. And yet – as I would later discover to my surprise in adulthood – they sit directly adjacent to any number of the greatest Soul acts ever to grab a microphone.

    Cecil Womack is, of course, the brother of the legendary Bobby Womack, hence the iconic surname. But I had no idea until well into my 20s that Linda Womack is the daughter of Sam Cooke. Or that Cooke’s widow had married Bobby Womack within 3 months of the death of the former. Or that Bobby Womack had latterly entered into an affair with Linda that lead to the widow Cooke shooting him. Or that, following the shooting, mother and daughter would allegedly never speak again. Perhaps not the beacon of happy familyhood my youthful idealism had projected from the album cover.

    Celebration was Womack & Womack’s fourth album, and something of a commercial peak. It’s full of lovely, feelgood songs (not least Celebrate The World, a slightly self-conscious retreat of the still outstanding Teardrops), it features a live band (the gloriously monikered Mountain Man Band), minimal 80s synth and well judged production from Chris Blackwell of Island records fame. It’s not really classic Soul, or an 80s record, but somewhere between the two.

    There are a number of songs on the album that I could have picked here – ultimately, they’re all surfing the same Proustian rush – but I’ve gone for M.P.B because it contains so many elements I enjoy; the extremely 80s title (Missing Person’s Bureau), the fabulous bassline, the sweet harmonies, the slightly odd lead-in (“The lions lurking everywhere/and nobody see them/hit it”), and the glorious incongruity of a song about a missing person that sounds like the easiest of Sunday mornings. The song has a bounce and lightness of step that, for whatever reason, always twins it in my mind with Donald Fagen’s wonderful I.G.Y (another track frequently heard in my childhood kitchen, another mysterious three letter acronym). I’m also a fan of the Frankie Knuckles remix which emerged in 2018, and which gives serious beach bar vibes.

    Looking back, this song and album weren’t just the soundtrack to my own little paradise of innocence, they were also quite probably my first real introduction to Soul music, sparking a love that has persisted for the rest of my life. About a year later I heard Tracks Of My Tears for the first time and was just blown away by the quality of the vocal and the sheer economy of the song-writing. The script-flipping revelation that this music could express devastation and loss even more profoundly than joy. In many ways, M.P.B laid the necessary groundwork for me to have my mind blown that day, and many days thereafter, by music that has twisted, turned and flipped down the decades, shifting and morphing into glorious new forms.

    When I listen to M.P.B now, I think of a weekend afternoon in our little terraced house in South West London. The hustle and bustle of family life, windows open, sunshine flooding in, surrounded by friends and neighbours and all the warmth and love and ruckus of family life. And I think of my Mum, and all the times I’ve watched a song move her – seen it written across her face – and how it never really seemed to matter whether the song was particularly complex or substantial or good, just that it let the light in. I listen to M.P.B and, even after all these years, it still lets the light in for me.

      • This one was 88, so reassuringly fractionally more proximate to yesterday than 83 (that would have been Love Wars – also great).

        I’m extremely envious you saw them live. I can only imagine how good those vibes must have been.

          • Looking this up, it appears that the follow up to Conscience (1990’s Radio M.U.S.C Man) contains Love Calling, an unfinished song by Sam Cooke himself.

            For whatever reason, even though I’ve spent years listening to Love Wars and Conscience I’ve never got round to this record. May need to give it a spin – the unfinished work of a favourite departed artist is never going to disappoint, is it? Nailed on winner.

        • My memory doesn’t seem to be functioning properly today.

          I’ve been thinking about how my relationship with certain songs/pieces of music has developed over time. It evolves. Today, it was Vivaldi. The Four Seasons was the first classical LP I bought fifty years ago. I love the 2012 Richter recomposition and the 2022 ‘New’ version. I’m glad it’s changed almost as much as I have.

  22. 93. Untitled (How Does It Feel) – D’Angelo

    In January 2000 D’Angelo released Voodoo, unquestionably the first truly great album of the new millennia, and – to my mind – a quantum leap from its predecessor, the still perfectly lovely Brown Sugar. The record marked something of a transformation for D’Angelo, on pretty much all fronts, and it’s that transformative aspect that drew my attention and captivated me, and which still drives a great deal of my love for Untitled.

    D’Angelo began his career as a member of the Hip Hop act IGU before blossoming into a highly capable but somewhat insular solo R&B performer. Typically, he would perform static behind a piano, letting his preposterously wonderful voice do much of the work, his obvious introversion a bulwark between artist and audience. Brown Sugar, his first album, was an insular record, a true stoner’s album all about the joys of weed.

    It took half a decade for the follow up to arrive. In that time, D’Angelo became a pivotal member of the Soulquarians: a rotating collective of experimental black artists who fed into one another’s thinking, helped out with each other’s recordings, worshipped old music and were committed to making future music. Other members included such luminaries as Erykah Badu, J Dilla, Questlove, Q Tip, Mos Def and Common – your basic full house of talent. The Soulquarians picked up where the Native Tongues had left off: consciousness, afro-centrism and a shared love of Marvin Gaye, George Clinton and Jimi Hendrix.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the above, Voodoo was recorded entirely in Hendrix’s old stomping ground, New York’s Electric Lady Studios, and mainly on whatever old equipment the collective could lay their hands on. It was an analogue beast at the start of the digital age.

    Much of the content was the product of endless hours of jamming. Half a decade’s worth, in fact. But also informed by D’Angelo’s absolute meticulousness (he’s a sonic obsessive who currently runs at an aggregate rate of around an album a decade) to keep things from getting too saggy. The Roots acted as the house band for the recording, which is to say that this is what happens when you trap a bunch of shit hot musicians in a room with any number of musical geniuses for years on end and ask them to play around with classic sounds. Consequently, the record channels any number of legendary black artists, from Prince to Funkadelic, and is possessed of that crazy loose, low swing you only ever get when unbelievably talented musos are asked to play sloppy by design. It takes serious chops to sound this easy.

    The record is heavily informed by Dilla Time, the signatures innovated by Hip Hop producer J Dilla around the turn of the century. It’s a style characterised by the deployment of multiple rhythmic feels simultaneously, some straight, some swung, some on the grid, some ahead of or behind. The overall effect is both hyped and woozy, creating a range of dissonances that inform the whole. It’s a sound you’d have heard previously in Jazz, but never to this extent, never quite so consciously by design, and never with so much calculation; Questlove recalled years later that his instruction was to drum “like he’d drank some moonshine behind a chuckwagon”. I have no idea what a chuckwagon is, and neither do you, but the phrase is sufficiently evocative that I feel I get it. It’s the sound that allowed Voodoo to swing in a way that few records before or since have.

    Coupled with all the sonic innovation, something blossomed in D’Angelo himself in the five years between Brown Sugar and Voodoo. Having first emerged as a slightly tentative performer, he suddenly and unexpectedly stepped out from behind the piano, prowled the lip of the stage and addressed the audience head on, placing himself self-consciously in the tradition of James Brown and Prince, the latter of whom’s fingerprints are all over Voodoo. He also transformed himself physically – having left us as a slightly chubby and genially agreeable stoner he re-emerged toned and gleaming, looking like he’d just stepped down from the Mount Olympus of black music. Shortly after the record dropped he was referred to by the critic Robert Christgou as “R&B Jesus”, and it was a moniker that fit that incarnation like a glove, although it would ultimately come at a cost.

    The album is almost uniformly glorious. It scratched my itch for a great contemporary Soul singer to call our own (and underneath all the trappings, this to me is still very much Soul music), it sounded dirty and salacious and it came adorned with some of the most gorgeous and beautifully layered vocals I’d ever heard. It referenced so much of the music I loved from the 60s and 70s, while also laying out a clear blueprint for the future. Indeed, what first drew me to Frank Ocean is that I heard in him a very clear echo of D’Angelo, another Hip Hop kid turned experimental R&B genius with half an eye on Prince.

    So, then – why Untitled? Why the album closer? Why not, say, Devil’s Pie, blessed as it is with that unbelievably filthy groove and what is one of my all time favourite lyrical couplets in any song, ever: “Ain’t no justice/Just us” (I mean – really – how great is that)? Well, the glib answer is that I always enjoy a track that declares itself “untitled” and then immediately provides you with a title in parentheses.

    But the more fulsome answer is that Untitled is the most unbridled expression of the album’s genius, possessed of some of my favourite vocal lines and is the ultimate archetype of everything that made me fall in love with D’Angelo.

    The song is a slow burn, nearly seven minutes long and announcing itself with that slow, lolloping rhythm that sets the tone for what follows. It’s gentle, but tough, and full of empty space. In fact, that space is a major feature of the work; years later, when I heard Frank’s Self Control for the first time it felt to me as if he’d taken Untitled to the next logical extreme. More space, more room to breathe, more canvas for the voice to paint all those glorious pictures.

    Untitled has the lot, from the sweetness of the multi-tracked vocals, one glorious falsetto duetting with another, over and over, off into the next life, to the rising swirl in its final third to the way it summarily crashes to an abrupt halt, bringing both song and album to a close. Vocalus interruptus. I sometimes like to imagine being able to sing like that. To even faintly approach singing like that. Just skipping off from the melody, all rhythm and feeling, out in the wilds. To my ear, the performance has some of the same properties as Try A Little Tenderness; that sense that the singer is trying to convey something urgent and that words are probably not going to get us to where we need to be (and lord knows, the lyrics here are nothing to write home about). The harmonies when he sings “won’t you come closer” – my god.

    It’s impossible to discuss Untitled without also referring to its accompanying video. D’Angelo, naked and glistening, a black David, the camera crawling across him. A rare example of the male gaze turned directly on to another man. It provoked absolute mayhem, and immediately got in the way of the music. At the moment of his absolute sonic peak, D’Angelo’s live shows descended into a sort of carnal Beatlemania: women were reportedly ejected from his gigs in their hundreds, they would repeatedly attempt to rush the stage and cries of “take it off” were audible before he could even sing a note. The vibe was described as “Circus Maximus”. This was not what the artist had signed up for (although if he’d thought a little longer he might have realised it would be inevitable).

    What interested me about this period of D’Angelo was the sense that he was liberating himself. Becoming the apex version, both physically and artistically. And that part of that process saw him connecting to his own femininity. Watch the video: there’s a vulnerability in his eyes, an endearing awkwardness underneath it all. He looks superhuman, but he’s clearly not comfortable – he’s exposed, and that’s endearing.

    It was also unusual by genre standards at the time that the album contained a cover of a Roberta Flack song (Feel Like Makin Love), and that the liner notes, by the poet Saul Williams, openly exclaimed “If we are to exist as men in this new world many of us must learn to embrace and nurture that which is feminine with all our hearts”. It’s there on Untitled too: just listen to the way he sings “You already got me right where you want me babe”. Just as in the video, he makes himself the object, the receptacle of desire. None of this was particularly normal for fin de siècle R&B. All of it was interesting to me, both then and now. The “that which is feminine” is still a part of us after all – why not embrace it?

    As a person who has often internalised, I have always been fascinated by art that offers a breakthrough. That suggests we might be able to take everything inside us and get it all out there if only we’re brave enough. That sensation of walls coming down, of release. Voodoo is the ultimate musical release; the whole album is like one long musical orgasm, and Untitled is its climax.

    Ultimately, most of us spend our lives trying to get out of our own way. To navigate the walls we’ve put up for ourselves and that no longer serve us. I’ve certainly spent a lot of my adult life figuring out how to remove the barriers I hastily erected to protect myself in adolescence. Figuring out how to emerge, once and for all, from that chrysalis. Voodoo represents one of the most perfect musical moments where an artist did just that – dug deep, dropped a masterpiece, laid it all out there for everyone to hear. Whenever I listen to Untitled now, what I hear is potential and walls toppling. It makes me reverent for the past and excited for the future.

    What did D’Angelo do next? He ran like hell. Put his shirt (and the weight) back on, didn’t release another note of music for over a decade – albeit it was well worth it once he eventually did – took to drink and generally behaved like a man truly spooked by his own success. I guess you can’t win ‘em all. It was little short of glorious while it lasted though.

    • Bonus content!

      Just in case anyone is looking for some absolutely brilliant new music that barely anyone has heard, a friend of mine recently turned me on to “Live From Ursual Avenue” by Jordan Hawkins and Naive, a collection of truly excellent covers that currently has under 50,000 listens on Spotify.

      Included in the mix is a version of Untitled that is straight fire. Jordan Hawkins can sing like a motherfucker – one to watch. The versions of Ex-Factor and I Wanna Be Your Lover are also gold. Strong recommend.

    • It’s a remarkable performance without a doubt.

      I find Brown Sugar too Gaye and this too Prince (he did the naked thing on Lovesexy and the feminine thing on songs like If I Was Your Girlfriend). Black Messiah is something else entirely. Maybe some Sly and Miles but very different. It came out nine years ago in December, too late to be in my top ten of the year. No Deal would still be number one if I voted again today but Black Messiah would be number two. A follow up can’t be far away.

      Try A Little Tenderness makes my top fifty. Otis, bless him, tries to make his girl’s life cheerier but, by the time he’s done some huggin’ and squeezin’, he gets carried away and becomes incoherent with lust. We can all relate to that, can’t we, boys and girls?

      • He was definitely consciously channeling Prince at this stage, and you can hear it consistently in the vocal.

        But I prefer Voodoo to any of Prince’s albums, when push comes to shove. For my money, it leans much further into Soul, and it’s more directly relatable in its consideration of human relationships.

        Prince was a genius, but he could never truly execute a Soul record because he was so devoted to being utterly alien. When you listen to his lyrics you don’t think “ah yes, I’ve had that experience too”, because they always contain the same subtext; I am Prince, and you – regrettably from your perspective – are not. That’s not a criticism, because I love Prince, it’s an observation as to why he couldn’t have produced Voodoo, and likewise why D’Angelo could never have produced (say) Purple Rain. “I’m not a woman/I’m not a man/I am something you will never understand”. Or, to put it another way: there’s naked and then there’s naked.

        There’s also a critical difference in that Prince was only ever himself. Right from the start. You never really got the sense that he was putting it on, or inventing himself, or even breaking sweat because it all came to him so naturally. Per the above, that’s not true of Voodoo. It was a titanic effort for D’Angelo to become this version of himself, and consequently he still remains connected and earthbound. That duality, for me at least, is the appeal.

        I agree on Black Messiah, it’s an utterly brilliant record. No idea when we’ll hear from him next though, I certainly wouldn’t recommend counting the days.

  23. Can you please stop writing so well and so long ? I’ve started on my Top 100 – here’s a sample:
    100. Lucky Old Sun by Ray Charles: first record I ever bought, it’s really good.
    99. Down By The River by Neil Young. My first proper girlfriend’s favourite song, it’s really good.
    Further work needed, methinks ….

  24. 92. I’m So Sad, So Very, Very Sad – Crash & The Boys

    Sometimes in life (albeit only very occasionally) less is more. There is a time and a place for your 11 minute, state of the nation, definitive expression of one’s central thesis, a correct moment in which to tack on a four minute long, everyone-in-the-band-gets-a-turn wig out on to the back-end of a tune that had otherwise shown all the mistakeable signs of being ready to breast the tape and retire for refreshments. And then there are the moments when it is only proper to head in the other direction entirely and worship at the tiny altar of brevity.

    There follows a brief (naturally) precis of short songs I have known and loved:

    Pin by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2 minutes on the nose) – The entire early sound of the band, and Karen O’s stage persona, embodied in just 120 seconds. Bit woolly though, could have been shortened.
    White Riot by The Clash (1 minute 58 seconds) – A superb calling card, marred only by the tremendously wasteful 20 seconds of noodling that precede the song really getting going.
    Tame by Pixies (1 minute 56 seconds) – Push comes to shove my favourite Pixies track and the screaming, whispering embodiment of the quiet/loud juxtaposition that fuels so many bands I have loved. Second minute arguably a little supererogatory.
    Time: The Donut of The Heart by J Dilla (1 minute 38 seconds) – More ideas here than in many full albums. Could maybe lose the porno heavy breathing, but otherwise perfect.
    Broken Face by serial offenders Pixies (1 minute 30 seconds) – At a mere 90 seconds, moving into the right territory, but there’s an argument to be made that it never improves upon the initial “I got a broken face, uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, ooooh-ooooh”.
    United States of Whatever by Liam Lynch (1 minute 26 seconds) – Whatever.
    Vaseline by Elastica (1 minute 21 seconds) – All the Elastica you ever really need. Their whole thing laid out in 81 seconds.
    Bend Down The Branches by Tom Waits (1 minute and 6 seconds) – Underappreciated, quite lovely and always feels longer than it is. Most songs should be this length.
    Straight Edge by Minor Threat (45 seconds) – One of the greatest songs of all time. An undeniable riff, a great vocal, a political message, a way of life. More than many bands manage in an entire career, all delivered in a meagre 45 seconds.

    The initial incarnation of Crash & The Boys understood very well that, while once an audience might have had time to sit around and listen for days on end, bereft of anything better to do, today’s gig-goers exist amidst the hurly-burly of the always-on, neon-lit, non-stop, 24/7 and over-frequently-hyphenated 21st century. They have no time for airs and graces, and instead demand their pleasures here and now, paid up front and in full. They were, undoubtedly, students of all of the above songs, and consequently they understood that the world is changed in seconds, not minutes.

    Accordingly, the band first introduced themselves to us with the excellent first single We Hate You Please Die, a superb, sub-one minute bass-lead thrash that only blotted its copybook by lazily insisting on repeating both its own intro and chorus. Perhaps recognising the folly of this grotesque extravagance, they followed up with what is the greatest short song of all time, I Am So Sad, So Very, Very Sad.

    Initially conceived as the band’s answer to Napalm Death’s until then peerless You Suffer (4 seconds long, for those manning the stop watches), IASSVVS clocks in at a punchy 12 seconds, including both its own spoken-word introduction and outro. It was first debuted to the public at a seminal 2004 battle of the bands staged at The Rockit in Toronto, provoking almost instantly a surge of violence which very nearly destroyed the venue, triggered a lengthy series of vendettas and altered permanently the lives of many involved. Infamously, Crash & The Boys returned to the stage amidst the damage and closed the show with the immortal Final Song Kills Audience, the sheer force of which caused blackouts and seizures amongst those still in attendance.

    So, what’s so great about IASSVVS? Well, it captures in short order a fundamental human truth: sometimes each of us is sad. So very, very sad. But it does so in such a direct and honest fashion, and with such enormous economy. There’s no subterfuge, nothing is dressed up with pretty words or smoothed out into something that might be more palatable to the listener. In many ways, it is the essence of all rock music condensed into a very short timeframe, a kind of white hot singularity around which all other music ultimately orbits.

    When I listen to this song, I am reminded that some of the best music ever made has kept it simple; in this case a very short drum intro, two howled words and a couple of slams on the guitar. Now, I don’t know if Beethoven is still alive, but if he is and he hears this I reckon he’ll be feeling pretty foolish when he looks back at how sloppy and wasteful some of his stuff was in comparison.

    Crash & The Boys never enjoyed the success they deserved. After killing most of their audience at a show in late 2004 they struggled to secure a replacement fanbase and drifted from one musical reinvention to another, dabbling variously in Christian Rock, Krautrock, Witch House, Catstep, Nintendocore and, ultimately, Crunkcore. Their momentum stalled, they never quite recaptured the sheer on-stage ferocity of that night at the Rockit, and they drifted, still very very sad, to the margins.

    I Am So Sad, So Very, Very Sad has been amusing and entertaining me for over a decade. It reminds me not to take things too seriously, that there’s something a bit silly about depressive music and that bands would often be better if they had a singer who looked like he hadn’t slept in years, an 8 year old drummer and a tendency to flip off their audience. It’s also the song that my eldest and I always perform together at karaoke, and it would probably have earned a place on the list for that fact alone.

    And yes, that girl is a boy too.

  25. 91. Darling Be Home Soon – The Lovin’ Spoonful

    Like many children of the 80s, I’m sure, I first discovered the 60s in the glove compartment of the family car.

    Until the age of 11, I’d spent limited time in cars. Living in South West London, with a mother who – at that stage – did not drive, and a father who was generally off at work, public transport was the order of the day. Maybe a trip on the back of a bike. More often simply walking. The radius of our lives was comparatively small, comprised of neighbouring roads, nearby parks and trips further afield for football matches and chess tournaments, with the occasional epic drive to Yorkshire or Cornwall to keep us on our toes.

    At around the time I turned 12, we moved out to the countryside, at which point the cadence of life changed markedly. Our schools were further away. Our friends were further away. London was further aware. Our need to escape the house was more pressing as teenhood loomed. Consequently, we began to spend more time in cars, being ferried from one destination to another by our tireless parents. And it was on those journeys that I noticed a hitherto unrealised feature of the family car: it contained cassette tapes, most of them Mum’s.

    My parents were essentially both tail end hippies. They’d relished and benefited from the opportunities for greater freedom brought about by the 60s, but they’d properly come of age in the 70s, and consequently lacked many of the illusions of their forebears. They had also both grown up great distances from whatever the cultural epicentres of that decade had been: Dad oop North and Mum mainly in Lima. This meant that Mum, in particular, was gloriously liberated from any real critical sensibility; her 60s music tastes were eclectic, slightly schizophrenic and generally towards the pop end of proceedings. Perhaps most importantly, neither of them seemed particularly bothered about the Beatles or the Stones, both of whom were largely absent from my childhood.

    As a consequence, the first 60s cultural contact I made was watching the Pink Panther and the Monkees on TV, and the first 60s music I heard was through Mum. Van Morrison and Motown in the house, the Doors pilfered from her teenage record collection when visiting grandparents, and – in the car – the Small Faces and the Lovin’ Spoonful. In later life I would discover other joys for myself (chiefly, the Velvet Underground, Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix), but these acts formed the bedrock of my relationship with that benighted decade, and remain the bedrock to this day.

    I was fascinated by The Lovin’ Spoonful from the start. That utterly god awful band name, swiped from a Mississippi John Hurt song (Coffee Blues), the way their music seemed to veer so manically from one style to another (should She’s Still A Mystery and Coconut Grove really live side by side in the same library?), and all the background stuff about their career going down in flames because of all the narcing.

    They were possessed of virtually every quality that turns me off certain areas of 60s music (the rinky-dinkiness, the lack of self awareness, the total absence of any kind of edge), and yet they sounded good to my ears, having penned not only some of the greatest straight pop songs ever written (Summer In The City, Do You Believe In Magic), but also running a weird little sideline in minor pop gems (You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice, (Til I) Run With You, Daydream).

    It boggled my mind that in amongst all her Doors and Led Zep albums, this was what Mum had listened to as a teenager. Even with my rudimentary maths, I could see that Six O’Clock had released in the same year as When The Music’s Over. How could anyone possibly have sat and listened to – listened to and enjoyed – both? And yet… I kind of got it. The Spoonful were a completely unrepentant sugar rush, totally uncool, totally of their moment and with minimal artistic merit. And that’s what allowed them to write songs as glibly wonderful as Rain On The Roof, with its pretty lyrics, its “hello sunshine” descending chords and its sudden and unexpected outburst of country guitar. While I could hear a modern artist in the Doors or Van, it was impossible to imagine anyone voluntarily making this music outside the 60s.

    So I sat on those car rides and listened to Lovin’ Spoonful records and enjoyed their charm. And then I was knocked sideways by Darling Be Home Soon, which is – to my mind at least – a legitimately brilliant song.

    Written on spec for Francis Ford Coppola, who requested something mid-tempo and sounding like Monday, Monday by the Mamas & The Papas for his movie You’re A Big Boy Now, the song is possessed of a level of sophistication I don’t think this group ever managed again. The instrumentation, the lyric, the structure – it flips all your expectations of the band by eschewing that 60s sunbeam for a much more classic sound that could have emerged from Tin Pan Alley, Motown or the Great American songbook.

    It has inspired a slew of cover versions, from Slade to the Tedeschi Trucks Band to Bruce Hornsby and on to 90s rock-bellowers Reef, and none of them get close to the original (although Joe Cocker’s rendition is the best of them).

    The lyric is simple and direct on its face: the author awaits the return of their love. But it’s also deeply weird in that it plays with the audience’s expectations; instead of a woman waiting for her lover to come home the song is written from the perspective of a man in the same position. The male role is positioned as passive, nurturing and craving intimacy. It even plays with typically female gendered imagery: “I feel myself in bloom”. That flip on your expectations is what drives the song and makes it unique. It’s certainly what made it interesting to me when I first heard it.

    On first release, Darling Be Home Soon was received as an anti-war song. The audience assumed that its author, John Sebastian, was writing from the perspective of a woman hoping for her husband to return from war. But that wasn’t the intention: Sebastian had thought about the pull of tour, leading him away from his lover, and then, in his own words, asked himself: “What would it be like if the roles were reversed, if the guy was the one waiting for his girlfriend to return from the road”.

    To my mind, Darling Be Home Soon finds a (relatively) contemporary counterpart and counterpoint in the immortal Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs (another near miss for this list), which tackles the same predicament from a more traditional perspective, but with a distinctly male sensibility in Karen O’s vocal.

    What makes Darling Be Home… truly beautiful is the way it celebrates the mundane in such a direct fashion.

    “Come
    And talk of all the things we did today
    Here
    And laugh about our funny little ways
    While we have a few minutes to breathe”

    No bluster, no grand romantic gesture. Just two people with busy lives, missing one another and hoping for a quiet moment somewhere along the way. Companionship, conversation and mutual encouragement: the model for everything a long term relationship should be. There’s an enormous intimacy here, and a great sense of economy – the whole thing is in and out in three and a half minutes and even then there’s time for the weird, hippy third verse about “beating your crazy head against the sky”.

    There’s a gentleness to Darling Be Home Soon that I responded to as a kid, and that has always stayed with me. I liked the idea of really missing someone, not in a nakedly lustful or possessive way, but because you just sort of like being around them and they’re your person. I liked the goofy rhyme scheme (“dawdle” and “toddled”, really?), which gives the song an unguarded feel, and I love the emphasis in the vocal when he sings “I feel myself in bloom”. The purity with which he holds that “bloom”.

    The song also has a lovely build, starting with a gently strummed guitar, adding in drums and strings and then horns. It’s a lyric that celebrates the mundane, but its sound reaches for grandeur, and that dichotomy is what gives it wings. And there’s a weird sensibility here too in the slightly sinister sounding background tone that plays across the entire second chorus.

    Joe Cocker elected to strip the song back and allow the lyric to step further into the foreground, but I always prefer the original; the moment the horns finally arrive is such a glorious point of release, and what greater release than being informed, with wide eyed sincerity “it’s OK to shoot the moon”. Well, thank goodness for that.

    Even the final line is doing something fun, music and vocal both slowing down on to a halt on that last “for the great release of having you to talk to”, an exhalation at the sound of keys in the front door.

    The emotion in that line, poignant as it may be, also has a slightly more earthbound source. After the first recording of the song was completed and the musicians had gone home, it was discovered that an engineer had mistakenly erased John Sebastian’s vocal track, forcing him to return to re-record it. Per Sebastian: “What you hear on the record is me, a half hour after learning that my original vocal track had been erased. You can even hear my voice quiver a little at the end. That was me thinking about the vocal we lost and wanting to kill someone.”

    Darling Be Home Soon is one of my favourite songs because I love the goofiness of The Lovin’ Spoonful, with their ever so twee missing “g”, because of how thrilling it makes basic human intimacy sound, and because it so beautifully lays out what really, ultimately matters in a relationship, and how joyful it is when you have someone in your life with whom you cannot wait to share the trivial minutiae of your day. It is the love song that most accurately captures a certain depth of love.

    Plus, I will never cease to be entertained by the knowledge that they grassed up their dealers and no one would ever forgive them. What a great and novel way to blow it.

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