Freaky Trigger’s
Top 100 Songs
of All Time

A list 10 years in the writing

freakytrigger.co.uk

A Note on Methodology

Tom, 3rd January 2005

You may be familiar with how these lists are compiled. You may not be. The theory is that people’s truest aesthetic preferences come out under the influence of some substance or other (generally alcohol). The theory is also that the essence of list making is competition as well as consensus – individuals trying to win the majority over to their view of the world. The theory is thirdly that list-making should certainly not be confined to those people who actually know about the stuff being listed.

Hence the method: you get a bunch of people in the pub. Each in turn proposes something for inclusion in the list. One other person needs to second their nomination, and then everyone gets a chance to veto. If enough people (enough = half to two-thirds) veto it, it’s out. Otherwise, it’s in. With the Top 100 songs a special rule applied, viz. if lots of people started to sing along with it, it went in whether vetoed or not. You keep up this process until you have 100 songs.

(There is also a rationale for having the last named item be No.1 rather than the first. But I forget what it is. It’s more fun that way, anyhow.)

Anyway, the Top 100 Songs of all Time – we’ll be counting these down over the next few months on NYLPM. Are they really the Top 100 Songs of all Time? Well, you might not think so – particularly after you see what No.100 is. But wait until the end of the list and we’ll ask the magic eight-ball that question again.

100. Sultans Of Ping FC ◊ Where’s Me Jumper

Tom, 4th January 2005

An OLD MAN and a WISE MAN are sitting on a bench.

WISE MAN: Tell me, Old Man, if you had one piece of advice to give young students, what would it be?
OLD MAN: I would tell them to be neither too proud or too ashamed of their music taste. The music you hear when you are young will expand to fill the space you provide for it, regardless of how good or bad it is. Perhaps you will be lucky, and you will find that the music you hear at 18 remains excellent. Perhaps you will be unlucky, and your bloom of youth will be wasted on awful novelty indie records that if you screw up your ears sound a tiny bit like a Wedding Present B-Side. But do not congratulate or blame yourself – it is not your choice.
WISE MAN: Hmmm.

OLD MAN: You disagree?
WISE MAN: I would say that the music you use to accompany good times becomes good through them. Don’t be so quick to discount or belittle pleasure. The time you spend alone, weighing and measuring music with the benefit of hindsight, is surely worth less than the time you spent belting its nonsensical lyrics out on walks back from the pub.
OLD MAN: Preposterous! Next you’ll be telling me not to be ashamed of remembering all those lyrics word for word.
WISE MAN: What lyrics?
OLD MAN: (takes deep breath) “My! Brother! Knows Karl Mark! Met him eating mushrooms in the People’s Park! He said what do you think about my manifesto? I like your manifesto, put it to the testo…”

(exit pursued by an angry dog)

99. Madonna ◊ Papa Don’t Preach

Tom, 5th January 2005

Pete says

On the day this list was made I was kindly given Madonna’s The Immaculate Collection, which means that I finally own a copy of “Papa Don’t Preach”. It also means that nearly eighteen years since this song was released, I finally know all the words. The line “You’ll give us your blessing right now”, had always escaped me, and I often paraphrased it into something to do with laughing. The importance of this, past a column filler in the Guardian magazine, is in the degree you need to know a song to love it. Certainly I have heard “Papa Don’t Preach” hundreds of times on the radio. Equally I approve of the songs underlying pro-choice philosophy (it is clearly Madonna’s choice that she is keeping her baby, and other options are certainly also available). But basically it is a great sing-a-long song. And as such I have sung along lustily to it.

Knowing the words has never really bothered me. Possibly because the words themselves do not seem to dwell on their importance (the pairing “I’m in trouble deep/ I’ve been losing sleep” is a perfect piece of dodgy phrasing to provide the rhyme). Kelly Osbourne’s version is totally superfluous, memorable only for the inconsistent spectre of Ozzy Osbourne preaching. Perhaps this castigation of hypocrisy lies at the heart of Madge’s version too, but frankly the song does not need another layer to justify its brilliance.

Alan adds

The older I get the more trite this song seems and the better In To The Groove sounds. Only a fluke of (late) puberty and intellectual snobbery makes this still my favourite Madonna song.

You see, what stands out about this track at first is not the clever AA rhyme scheme, but the bit in the video where it seems possible that her tits will pop out. Pop legend says several out-takes prove the possibility, but that’s surely a legend probably borne of the wishful-thinking adolescents with those smash-hits posters of her on their wall. Or possibly in the 80s no tit-tape was strong enough to hold back those puppies.

I had this on my taped top-40 countdowns throughout the summer of 86 (the one between 6th form years, so you know), and being more high-minded (i.e. too embarrassed to have aforementioned posters) I would say it was the lengthy (synth) string intro that hooked me into this song. I liked synth strings. They were the mark of serious music. And Poppadom Preach (© Simon Mayo) seemed like Madonna’s first attempt at serious. The “mature” nature of the story; the music that was still danceable without being the out-and-out pop of In To The Groove, or the silliness of Holiday (both much higher in the FT list I trust). And I’m sure I told this to myself and to others, while I listened on the walkman and imagined those pups on the loose.

On lyrics, I still sing “Maybe we’ll be alright, from 9 to 5″ instead of “It’s a sacrifice”. Also, I wanted Kelly O to pronounce “papa” more foppishly as “pah-par” instead of the cutesy-kiddie “popper”. That way I might have cared.

98. Deee-Lite ◊ Groove Is In The Heart

Tom, 6th January 2005

A song that makes me feel slightly old, as it has become a standard in my listening lifetime. And a real, top-ranking standard, too, up there with “Celebration” and “Dancing Queen”, except unlike “Dancing Queen” it’s fast enough to actually, yes, dance to. It’s one of the absolute dancefloor bankers – it may not be original but unless you’re playing to class A snobs you can get a reaction with Deee-Lite.

Which can lead to other problems. I’ve heard this record a lot, and rarely because I put it on. I am perpetually a bit bored of “Groove Is In The Heart” – unless it’s playing, at which point I always like it. But I take it for granted – I’m a little bit pleased it turned up at No.98 rather than No.9 or 8. Or 1, which it easily could have.

What makes it so good? For one thing it never stands still – if I started counting the different hooks on this track we’d be here all month. There’s a low-attention-span Transatlantic pop thread which bounces back from one group of tres hip disco magpies to another: S’Express in London then over to Deee-Lite then back to Saint Etienne. Now I love Saint Etienne to bits but they never did anything like this. What’s Deee-Lite’s secret weapon? Hip-hop. It may only have a half-minute of rapping on it (and that won’t win any prizes) but “Groove Is In The Heart” is surely one of the classic Daisy Age tracks, steeped in effortless positivity.

97. The Beat ◊ Save It For Later

Tom, 13th January 2005

So, do lyrics matter? Well, what we have here suggests not – a charming parade of colloquialisms adding up to… what, exactly? What’s “Save It To Later” about? No, don’t tell me. I can feel the answer, just like you can. That mood, that itchy, frustrated, aching, still so so hopeful mood that doesn’t have a name of its own – so let’s call it the “Save It For Later” mood. The mood that you get when you triangulate “sometimes I don’t try I just nah nah nah nah nah nah know” and the heartbreak strings and the supportive sax.

And the lyrics? What are they doing here? Why do I instinctively think “yeah, good lyrics” when they don’t seem to go anywhere, when the record is so plainly driven by its hooks? It’s because I like those colloquialisms, and I think they are doing something useful – the conversational style (“You’ll hit the deck”, “Must be a sucker for it”, “what can you do?” and the snapped “you lot” on which the whole song pivots) establishes the singer as someone ordinary, someone you can identify with in the face of that mood, the one he can’t verbalise and you can’t either. The words give “Save It For Later” a center that you can step into, and their lack of specifics makes the song very adaptable once you’re in it, and that I guess is why it made the list.

96. Belle And Sebastian ◊ Sleep The Clock Around

Tom, 17th January 2005

Dave Boyle says:

I wasn’t one of the participants in drawing up this list, so if you don’t like this song’s presence in it, i) don’t blame me and ii) tough. I’m very glad it’s here, as it’s my favourite Belle and Sebastian song. The first time I heard it in 1998 I was utterly enraptured. It’s the the way the music builds up. There’s an ethereal quality to the opening, and every verse adds some more noise. The dreaminess remains all the way through, with new sounds and more being added to three-quarters in, where it distills to a beat, then rises quickly, building to the moment when the bagpipes kick in.

Back in 98, for a reason I don’t know why, I got goosebumps all over when that happened. It was instantaneous and direct. I played it again and again, and was in tears at the end of it. I wasn’t surprised, as I love the sound. Maybe it was Mr Spock’s funeral in Star Trek II; maybe it was Mull of Kintyre. It didn’t remind me of anything, or of a time, or even a place – I’d not been to Scotland apart from briefly as a kid to Aviemore, and even more briefly to an NUS Scotland Conference.

A year later, I was in the pool room of the Strathclyde Student’s Association and saw it was on a juke box. This was amazing – B&S were barely known at the University I was at, so to see it on a juke box was fantastic.

Despite this, I’d never actually seen it performed live. I got my wish at Glastonbury 2004, where they closed their set with it. I was a bit drunk and in wellies but didn’t care, because I was finally seeing Belle and Sebastian. I was jumping around like an idiot (thanks to Carsmile who found my thumb ring in the mud after it flew off in a particularly exuberant bit of clapping) and despite there being no bagpipes I was in tears again. A few weeks later, I saw them again at Somerset House, and they finished with the song again. Cue more idiotic leaping and jumping, and if not tears, then certainly misty eyes (I only dropped my phone this time). And no bagpipes. Now it’s just the song. I’ve just listened to it again and I didn’t get any goosebumps, or misty eyed.

I couldn’t tell you what the song is about really to this day. I think it might be about a waster (you’re not likely to be much use to anyone if you spend the whole day in bed) and there might be some deeper in-joke meaning that only 23 people who used to be on Sinister get. I don’t know, and don’t care either. There are other Belle and Sebastian songs that I like that mean things to me because of other people or other events or times in my life. But Sleep the Clock Around is my song alone. I have no memories fixed in my mind about it, and the way I react to it has changed. But most of all, whatever I think is totally personal – it reminds me of nothing more or less than of my liking the song.

95. Gladys Knight ◊ License To Kill

Tom, 18th January 2005

Vic Fluro says:

There are stalker songs and there are stalker songs, but when Licence to Kill sweeps into its heavy, pounding intro – like the incidental music for some massive earth-destroying threat – you know you’ve found the daddy of them all. Gladys Knight doesn’t sound breathy and sensual so much as acutely menacing as she sings “Hey baby, thought you were the one tried to run…AWAY?” I can’t help but picture Bond locked in some hillbilly’s basement, desperately scrabbling with the lock as Gladys Knight comes closer and closer with bulging eyes and a bloodstained carving knife.

Actually, that’s not quite true – even at this stage, the orchestration suggests some massive purring machine of a song, holding back the full weight of its awesome power. Bond would be scrabbling at some electronic hyper-lock, and Knight would have a ray-gun or possibly a white cat. The surroundings would be opulent. “Please don’t BET” snarls Gladys “that you’ll ever ESCAPE ME – ONCE I GOT MY SIGHTS ON YOU!!” Knight isn’t the bond girl here, or even Bond himself, but a deranged, power-crazed villain in her own right, hiding inside a massive arrangement of synth trumpet and drums instead of a volcano base. And then the true horror is revealed, along with a backing chorus seemingly composed of snake-women:

Got a LICENCE TO KILL (To KILL!!) and you know I’m going straight for your heart! (Got a LICENCE TO KIIIIILL!!)
Got a LICENCE TO KILL (To KILL!!) ANYONE who tries to TEAR US APART!! (Got a LICENCE TO KIIIIIILL!!)
Licence to… KILL!! (cue incredible sweeping synth trumpet bonanza presumably meant to suggest deployment of nuclear missiles)

Well eh wot I mean to sa wot? I surely can’t have heard that correctly. The shock lasts right the way through another vaguely creepy verse, complete with breathy snake-gals in back, in which Glad sings that she thinks James can depend on her to make things right before threatening to aim a gun at him again as in verse one. This is not a stable woman. Another chorus and then suddenly we’re into whole new uncharted levels of lunacy, as Knight hypothesises a likely scenario complete with LOUD MUSICAL STABS like the stabbings of A KNIFE:

Say that somebody tries to make a move on you – (stab stab stab stab stab stab!)

In the blink of an eye – I’LL BE THERE TOO! (stab stab stab stab STAB STAB!!!)

And they better know why I’m gonna MAKE ’EM PAY (STAB STAB STAB STAB STAB STAB!!!)

TILL THEIR DYING DAY!!

TILL THEIR DYING DAY!!

TILL THEIR DYING DAAAAAA-AAAAAAAYYYYY!! AAAAEEEEAAARRRGGGHHH!!!

Yes, you read that correctly. If someone tries to talk to you for even a moment, Gladys Knight will appear like the creature out of The Ring and then hound them until they die. And to make the point she then howls out like a creature from the depths of hell. The music does its best to match her point for point, growing ever more melodramatic, stagey, showy, flouncing through the riffs like a predatory Adam West. Finally, having swept up into some kind of grotesque epiphany, Gladys leaves us with the following:

Oooowwoooooooo… LICENCE to… KILL….. mmmmm… KILL… KILL… KILL… KILLLLLL (whispered again and again until the music fades out into, one can only assume, shocked silence)

Needless to say, this is one of the greatest pieces of music ever devised.

94. Al Green ◊ How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?

Tom, 20th January 2005

Martin Skidmore, who nominated this song, has written exhaustively and excellently on it for us here [also reproduced below]. I don’t have anything to add except a heartfelt cry of “CHOOOON!”.

Martin Skidmore, 1959–2011 Our very dear friend Martin died, aged 52, surrounded by friends, on 27th July 2011, at University College London Hospital, of complications of cancer. Memorial website. He also wrote entry 68.

Everything They Say About Soul Is Wrong

Martin, 13th November 2004

Emotion vs Technique in Soul Music and its Criticism

Does soul music have soul, and does it matter?

Hear or read most people praising soul music, and they’ll be hyping certain qualities, while some others won’t get a mention. ‘Soul’ is an awkward word anyway: not just a genre, but a quality, something to aspire to, an inherent good, a damning criticism when you say something lacks it – more so if the target of the complaint is black! There’s circularity to some praise: soul records are good because they have soul; and we’ll define soul music as records with soulfulness…

But we know what is meant, really, even if it’s not that simple to pin it down or measure it. We aren’t just dealing with arrangements and modes, we are talking about heartfelt emotions, raw passion, a sincerity of feeling, expressed from the heart in natural ways. I am very doubtful, though, that this has anything to do with soul music and what makes it so wonderful. Vintage soul is my favourite kind of music, especially the Southern stuff in the ’60s and early ’70s – Stax and Hi and all that – but I am deeply suspicious of the way its fans talk about it. This has seeped into the wider discourse too – the emotional angle is by no means restricted to the devotees, experts and critics. You only have to be aware of the existence of live shows to know that we aren’t hearing the real emotions of the performers – no one has three minutes of hardbreak, then three of anger at betrayal, then three of having a party, then three of being deeply in love…

I can’t help thinking about the way football commentators talk about African players – it used to be black players in general in my younger days, but now it seems to have been cut back that far. Lots of natural skill, but do they have the discipline, can they overcome their naivety – about an inch from suggesting that these blackies ain’t too bright, this – can they understand how to play as a team? It doesn’t take a vast amount of insight to spot the racism in all of this. You might not get too many people talking openly like Ron Noades nowadays, with grotesque generalisations dismissing the strength and intelligence of black players, but the ideas are still there, and they smack you in the face every time you watch an African team play. If the players are Europeans, the commentators will frequently admire the technique and tactics and cleverness; if they are African, it’s all defensive naivety and innate exuberance, and you keep half-expecting the commentators to start talking about natural rhythm. I keep feeling as if the pundits are watching a different game from me, one in which the shambolic Germans I can see are replaced by the disciplined, technically superb team being talked about, and the hard-working, technically excellent, well-organised African side have been swapped for this bunch of naive – but naturally talented! – athletes.

Now think of soul music. I think much of its criticism (formal and informal) does very similar things: the talk is of passion and raw emotion, an innate access to feeling, and not of intelligence and musical technique. I think there are plenty of examples to show how hopelessly distant these ideas are from what is actually happening on the tracks. I’ve picked Al Green’s cover of the Bee Gees’ ‘How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?’ because it’s one of my favourite records, but I also think it may be the best example from the accepted soul canon of a record that has nothing whatsoever to do with this common discourse.

How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?

Firstly, it’s a cover version: plainly not the sincere and heartfelt expression of Al Green’s pain and anguish, but someone else’s song. And not another raw soul singer’s song, not even a black artiste at all, but one by the Bee Gees, just about as white a band as you could name, a boy-band pop group of brothers from Australia. Obviously the critical framework that’s accreted to soul in the three decades since was virtually non-existent then, so I don’t suppose Green and co. agonised for one second over whether it was right or acceptable or credible to cover a Bee Gees song. It’s a fairly simple little song, very nice melody, it’s about a broken heart, plenty of scope to do things with it – that’ll do. I used to be in a painfully serious Yahoo southern soul group, and I particularly remember their reactions to a new published interview with Sam Moore of Sam & Dave. He expressed a liking for various people, by no means all soul types or ‘credible’ artists. Elton John was the name that agitated them most – they were trying to make excuses, looking for a hidden agenda, wondering if there was talk of Elton writing a song for him or working with him. They couldn’t believe that a soul giant could really like Elton’s music, which is surely the obvious and completely plausible explanation. That’s one of the reasons why a cover of a Bee Gees song appealed to me as an example here.

Listen to the way it’s all put together: this isn’t any kind of raw outpouring of anything, this is a measured, restrained, carefully constructed record with some of the most subtle, intelligent playing and production you’ll find anywhere, in any form of music. And the reason Al Green is the perfect singer to address these points is in its clearest form here: yes, he had a great voice, but this isn’t the natural outpouring of romantic pain; it’s not even method acting, where he deliberately feels it and so expresses it; this is the work of a powerful musical intelligence, who has carefully thought about every moment of the song, every word, every sound, and has calculated how to make it work with maximum effect. The feeling comes across, irresistibly and heartbreakingly, but we are doing everyone involved (and musical criticism in general!) a disservice if we stop with that thought. I’m not necessarily claiming the intelligence is all Al Green’s – there is no way of knowing how much it is his thinking and how much it is the producer’s. Some of both, I expect, but I don’t think speculation on this is terribly interesting.

Willie Mitchell produced all the great records on the Hi label. He’d been in music since the ’50s, mostly as a horn player. He understood passion and excitement, but he also had a deep understanding of musicianship, and of a variety of production approaches. I think he was more in tune with the lusher style that rock ‘n’ roll had forced into the background than with the rawness of the great Memphis soul that had dominated, via Stax in particular, for the several years before Hi’s early ’70s glory days. No one made lovelier use in soul music of strings – well, maybe Norman Whitfield, but that’s another argument.

Mitchell not only knew what a good singer sounded like, and had therefore lured Al Green to Memphis (and signed up O.V. Wright, Ann Peebles, Otis Clay and many other terrific vocalists), but he’d built up great contacts in the local music scene. Peter Guralnik refers to his having brought up the Hodges brothers almost like a parent, and the three of them provide guitar, bass and organ here. Even more importantly, I believe he had worked in the ’50s with a drummer named Al Jackson, and also his son Al Junior, whose regular gig was with the house band at Stax, Booker T & the MGs.

Al Jackson is one of my musical heroes, on more records that I adore than anyone else, and I think he is vastly important here. Hi most regularly used Howard Grimes as a drummer. He was a disciple of Jackson, and Guralnik’s Sweet Soul Music describes him as his ‘rhythmic twin’, but there is an audible difference: maybe not much at all in the beats they generate, but in their touch (I think Jackson’s grip was softer, but that’s a layman’s view). Howard Grimes was a great drummer, but Al Jackson has a delicacy, a subtlety, even a beauty that not only Grimes couldn’t match, but that no one else ever could. You don’t often find drumming lovely, but this is, especially the flawless use of the cymbals. That restraint and control and gentle, almost laid-back touch is vital to this song.

Leroy Hodges was an exceptional bassist, and brother Teenie a great guitarist, but they are mostly backgrounded here. Teenie could draw you into a tune as well as anyone (listen to the peerlessly constructed intro to Al Green’s Love And Happiness), but they aren’t at the front on this one – Teenie plays extremely lightly and simply. Nor is their other brother, Charles, at the front, but his unique use of the organ is maybe at its finest on this. He doesn’t play like everyone else, he rarely plays anything like a tune at all: his organ makes a background sound, much like a colour tone, a wash. One note holds, and switches seamlessly to another with no moment between, no space. When he occasionally does something different, even as simple as a quick run, the contrast is spectacular and thrilling – there’s a moment just over five minutes in where he suddenly plays one unexpected note, to stunning effect.

But there is much more on this record. I’ve always liked bravura moments in pop production (it’s why I love Shadow Morton so – no one threw more in than he did), and Willie Mitchell came up with a few dazzling uses of strings – the pizzicato violin raindrops in Ann Peebles’ ‘I Can’t Stand The Rain’ are the most famous example, but ‘How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?’ has my favourite such single moment, the extraordinary shimmer of violins representing the breeze just referenced in the lyric, something that always sends a chill down my spine.

Having said all this, we have to note that the singing is at the centre of most pop music, and (its terrific instrumentals notwithstanding) this is arguably more true of soul music than any other form. I wouldn’t wish to neglect my favourite singer, and also the singer is at the centre of what I’m claiming is the big misguided way in which I hear people talk about soul.

I want you to listen to the thought that has gone into every instant of Al Green’s performance, every shift of tone and volume and pace, every intonation, every wordless sound. Dave Marsh has described Al as pop’s greatest solipsist, and that is one way of looking at it – but I think it makes Green’s intensity and the seriousness of his examination of how the particular lyric must feel, and how to express that, into something that sounds like a character flaw. And also, again, I think he doesn’t go far enough: this is full of carefully calculated technical devices. We can call it trickery if you like – I have zero interest in trying to claim that it is genuine, authentic feeling, that Al Green felt anything at all that he expresses here. It makes solipsism a false term: I don’t believe that all he is doing is expressing how he feels, if he is doing that at all; he is finding ways to express what this lyric and song feels like, he is putting those emotions into the song, irrespective of how he might have personally felt at the time it was recorded.

This isn’t an outpouring, it’s a very restrained and subtle performance, especially the very gentle start – it’s a sad and thoughtful mood, dominated by Al’s lovely and light falsetto tones, though he builds to the lower, hoarser tones in places. He almost speaks the first line, quickly and in a near whisper, setting a thoughtful tone from the start. He stays mostly behind the music and even the backing vocals for some while, his voice drifting alongside and behind the tune, carefully synchronising here and there and then going its own way again, a man thinking his way through an impossible problem. The way he breaks up the last word in “How can you mend this broken maa-aa-an?” is perfectly judged, a gentle little example of form and meaning meshing, then the first strain in his voice appears in the next line, “How can a loser ever win?” The hesitancy before the last word in “misty memories of days gone by” is another masterfully modulated touch. By the end he’s bringing it all to bear, the changes of tone, the hesitancies and ad libs, the sweet high voice, the gruffer tones, nearly crying in places, even a strangled scream at 5.26. It’s finally a determined song that looks to a positive future, and he injects real strength and straightforward force into his final “I want to live” as it fades.

other genres

I should note that I am not claiming this gap, between the way experienced and expert musicians put a record together as against how its fans and critics talk about it, as unique to soul music – the raw feelings being valorised are constructed in a slightly different balance in rock, for instance (and no one has ever failed to notice all the technical skills on show there), but the distance and unreality is often much the same. Records are made by professionals in a studio, not by people with powerful feelings instantly picking up their instruments and making some spontaneous sounds from the heart. I just think the gap between the way people talk about music and the way it’s actually made is greater in soul music than any other, and I think the musical skill and intelligence on show in its many great recordings are therefore persistently undervalued, or even not noted at all.

93. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers ◊ Why Do Fools Fall In Love?

Tom, 25th January 2005

Cis says:

I loved doo-wop when I was little. The black-and-white photographs on record covers, smiling boys in ill-fitting suits, close harmonies and bubblegum and soda floats and school hall dances and all those things that only existed in made-for-tv movies set in the fifties. My dad taught me to jive, in the living room, trying not to make the record skip, a few rudimentary moves that I never quite got right.

‘Why do fools fall in love’ does a pretty good impression of being doo-wop, but it’s not really – it can’t be, because after the bouncing bass lead-in and the open-vowel blast of backing vocal, Frankie Lymon bursts in and takes everything over. You can almost imagine the recording: one mike, maybe two, and the rest of the group have been shunted right to the back of the room so their harmonies only drift forward when Lymon’s treble yell tires itself out.

I don’t remember how to jive, but my body thinks it does: some songs, there’s this twitching, this demand.

And then Jimmy Wright’s sax blurts up from somewhere, and it’s a contest between boy and reed for who can be the rawest, the loudest, the most absurdly fun, the most catchy, and this song was never about falling in love, always about making people move. The swing beat shuffles, the double-bass jumps and loops – whyy does my he-aart skip a cra-a-zy-y beat, sings Lymon, and it sure don’t sound like a question.

Birds sing, rain falls, fools fall in love. So what? We should be dancing.

92. Girls Aloud ◊ Love Machine

Tom, 26th January 2005

There is one good thing, and one good thing only, about indie zine The Fly. It is free, and handily available for homeward bound tube reading from Victoria HMV.

This month is the first of a new year, and a new year means New Music which only The Fly can ‘turn you on’ to. So the magazine asked some of the movers and shakers on the scene to give their tips for the sound of ’05.

Well their replies were various, yes various, but they all had one thing in common. They all sounded the same. You mean they all sounded similar? No, they -

- ah, hold on, wrong entry.

One of the Fly’s interviewees had something interesting to say, though. “I think rockabilly will be back this year,” said the programme director of XFM. Or maybe it was the publicist for the Kaiser Chiefs. Or the guitarist for Kasabian.

“I think rockabilly will be back this year, but with some electronic sounds, so it’s not just a retro thing.”

And I thought, hold on, that sounds familiar…

91. Ike And Tina Turner ◊ River Deep, Mountain High

Tom, 31st January 2005

At the time, notoriously one of the biggest records ever made. But if there’s one thing the recording industry has worked at since 1966, it’s making its product sound larger. “River Deep” still makes the effort but next to the casual compression on every radio it’s a losing struggle.

But cathedrals aren’t the biggest buildings around these days, either, and it doesn’t make their intricacy and ambition less impressive. There’s detail and passion in the bluster of “River Deep”, even if those things weren’t top of Phil Spector’s mind (or Ike’s or Tina’s) at the time. The scale makes a kind of sense of the song too, the transition from dolls and puppies to the all-or-nothing crash of the chorus drawing some of the sentimental sting. Even so there’s something a little creepy, a little hysterical about the record – as close to tantrum as it is adoration.

Side note: my notebook doesn’t actually say “Ike And Tina Turner”. It says, naturally, “Pike And Tuna Turner”. This was the punchline to the joke in a quiz we did. The rest of the joke is lost. In fact the rest of the joke has to be lost, since, given the answer “Pike And Tuna Turner”, it is very very hard to construct a question which keeps the element of surprise. “Who recorded River Deep, Mountain High… in a river?” Which soul singers… are actually… fish?”

90. The Only Ones ◊ Another Girl Another Planet

Pete Baran, 2nd February 2005

I cannot remember how, or why I had tickets to see The One, Peter Perrett’s mid-nineties bands playing on the fact that The Only Ones were no longer the only ones. Maybe they were supporting some no-mark Brit-pop new wave band who were trying to claim some post-punk lineage. Whatever. They were terrible and I vacillated between ignoring them and taking the piss. What a lovely audience I must have been. It was almost certainly the beginning of my disillusionment with live music, and if I don’t blame The One completely for falling out of love with live music, they had a hand in it.

They did however show the power of “the one good song”. After six or seven of these slidgy guitar based crawls, Perrett shouted something along the lines of “we know what you’re really here for” (the answer surely being the headline act). And The One ripped into “Another Girl Another Planet”. I stopped moaning, I stopped ignoring. I might even have jumped about a bit.

Sci-fi love songs are nearly always greee-eeat. Perhaps it is because they often have funny electronic noises in them, making them novelty hits sonically (I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper?). Lyrically the astronaut love story will be stuffed with references to ray-guns and zipping through space (cf the theme to Fireball XL-5). So even if The Only Ones missed out on the bleeps, and were about as direct as you can get lyrically, they were still writing a sci-fi song.

Another girl – one of pops perennial obsessions. Another planet – this is stupid sci-fi new wave fun. Set your pop phasers to stunning.

89.5. Skeletal Family ◊ Promised Land

Mike, 4th February 2005

The first of more than forty goth records in the top 100, this track was unanimously agreed upon by everyone at Freaky Trigger in some pub around Christmas. Two even sported tattoos of the band.

Skeletal Family were from Keighley in the West Yorkshire delta. They were never a Champions League goth band and most of their other records were tuneless arse. I know this because I have them.

As was the custom, the Skeletals were often asked if they were a goth band “No,” they said, “we write the kind of doomy music and silly bollocks lyrics that pleases us and if any socially inept bangle-arm freaks buy it, it’s a bonus.”

It was around the time of Promised Land that I came out. I asked my parents to switch off the TV, “Look, I’ve got something to tell you.” They shuffled together and smiled, their fingers entwined, “Mum, dad, I think I’m a goth.”

They were fine about it and had suspicions anyway. Their friends’ kids didn’t paint their nails black or listen to Gene Loves Jezebel.

Promised Land is a cracking song. It even dented the danker regions of the charts and the world was theirs for the taking. Well, not the world but a prestigious support slot on the Sex Gang Children tour. It all ended in tears and runny mascara as various band members listened to their own records and left the band in embarrassment. The crimped-up singer went on to form Ghost Dance who, she insisted, were not a goth band.

89. Reel 2 Reel feat. The Mad Stuntman ◊ I Like To Move It

Tom, 7th February 2005

This had a previous life as “Jazz It Up” by the Erick Morillo Project, a funky disco-house number which no doubt kept many a party rollin’ with its tasteful floorfilling vibe. In barges the Mad Stuntman and credibility flies out of the window to be replaced by multi-million sales and the love of all mankind. “I spent forever tracking down the original” sniffed someone on a DJ board I googled, well ha! cos apparently it was on the B-Side.

I am sure that “Jazz It Up” is a fine record, the drums on this refit are satisfyingly crunchy after all and the groove is propulsive. But let’s face it, this song would not be on this list were it not for Stuntman, M. What you will learn about this force of nature by the end of the song:

i) he is a stuntman
ii) he is mad (these two facts gleaned from the sleeve but nothing he does on wax suggests otherwise)
iii) he is physically fit
iv) he likes to move it move it. To reinforce this last the follow-up is called “Go On Move” and isn’t quite as great.

It is a record that everybody wants to hear, especially if they’ve had a drink or two. They may not think they want to hear it but they do. The perfect marriage of a high-class groove and a low-brow energy.

88. Subway Sect ◊ Ambition

Tom, 9th February 2005

Sarah says

What’s the matter, Vic? “I don’t write any words you get in rock songs…I like those words – that seem out of place in a rock song.” It’s a funny thing that Vic’s been most famous for the most trad “rock” song he’s ever written, but punk has always been a funny old mare to me. The aural assaults of the Sexy Pistols left me cold, but Vic came out with Ambition that LAMBASTED the hoary old punk machine with a WIT and SUBTLETY like no-one else. I won a guitar from him you know, and he delivered it to my HOUSE! You can tell he’s a postman, there was something in the QUALITY. Do you think that Peter Cook was ever a Northern Soul boy? I can’t say the thought ever crossed my mind, until I saw Vic play a tiny football bar in Sunny Brentford last year, and then it all became startlingly obvious – Pete wasn’t, but Vic is. Ambivalence stalks us, but Vic galvanises us. I love him. He loves me. He is my husband. No really. HE IS!

Er will that do. Sorry. SORRY. Who nominated it anyway?!

87. Roxy Music ◊ Virginia Plain

Tom, 1st March 2005

Here’s a parlour game: take a famous debut single and imagine what you’d think of it if that act had released nothing else, ever. Roxy Music’s arch travelogue is no longer the fizzy overture to their career of strangeness, charm and smarm. Instead it fits neatly into the weird British novelty-pop boom of the early 70s. At its No.4 pop hit zenith it shares a chart with Lyndsey De Paul’s sultry “Sugar Me” and Lieutenant Pigeon’s demented “Mouldy Old Dough”, both of which match it for oddness, and perhaps for other things. As a standalone “Virginia Plain” mixes hammering gummy goodness with an absurdist jet-set fantasy, a commentary before the fact on a decade of wide-eyed ‘summer hits’.

86. Janet Kay ◊ Silly Games

Pete Baran, 3rd March 2005

What Humans Hear:
Ah, that’s a nice and gentle little bit of reggae. Oh and what a sweet voice. A bit high but – oh – she’s not happy. What a wistful way with words she has. Who is this? I quite like it. Steel drums, I remember them from Blue Peter. What a great song about how crap men are, really. Shows that she is determined, unbeatable and not going mess about -

Fuck me that’s high.

Fuck me, that’s even higher.

Silly Games is one of those remarkable songs which is wonderful on three levels. Firstly it really is a genuinely sweet piece of music. The almost lazy skank behind Janet sucks you in, as does her voice. Sure its all a bit high but that is nice. Put it on the jukebox in any pub and nobody (except maybe the pub dog) will complain. But listen to the words and it is clear that the second level is as a leading contender in the genre of “for fuck sake ask me out” songs. Perhaps it is not feminist enough to do the right thing and go and ask him out herself, but Janet has no more time for stupid flirting. And she makes it very clear that she has no time by being so very, very high.

Silly Games is also a novelty single. The astronomical pitch Janet reaches cannot help but make it so. Again, take that pub jukebox (the place I hear Silly Games the most, and mainly because I put it on). No-one is going to complain about Silly Games coming on the jukebox, but they sure as hell are going to notice it. A number of things that can “build” in songs: volume, tempo, number of distinguishable instruments. Pitch clearly can, and classical music often does chase up the octaves for effect, but in pop it is rarely used. The key change is a simple example of how dramatic a shift in pitch can be, but only Janet Kay, Jimmy Somerville and perhaps ELO have ever struck me as using pitch for emphasis. And you do not get more emphatic that Janet Kay. Cartoon wine glasses burst whenever I hear it.

What Dogs Hear:
All the secrets of the universe being shouted at them by the doggie version of Lemmy from Motorhead.

85. Teddybears STHLM ft Mad Cobra ◊ Cobrastyle

Tom, 7th March 2005

If I was a real music journalist I would look forward most to the part of the job where you make up new genres! I think I would make up a genre which would include this record, and Junior Senior, and Bigtrack Rockismo (or whatever they’re called), and let’s throw in the Go! Team as well. This genre would be called Bubble Beat – what a rubbish name eh? It’s kind of a tiny bit like Big Beat but with a really brazen pop sensibility and flagrant disregard for the real cultural context of anything it uses. And with no ridiculous ‘po-mo’ ‘manifestos’ either, just a love of stupid fun. “Cobrastyle” for instance marries dancehall to rockabilly with only the most glancing regard for either and ends up as a fabulous pop record and surprisingly not at all insulting. A while ago I called this song the audio equivalent of sequinned Motorhead T-Shirts and I see no reason to back away from that. Incidentally do not buy a Teddybears album, if you want to hear something else by them then “Different Sound” is quite good, though it actually is Big Beat.

84. Pulp ◊ Babies

byebyepride, 16th March 2005

The genius of “Babies” is that the harder you try to make sense of the story the less sense the song seems to make: and the more you think about the song the less the story matters. This is a confession of what ‘happened years ago’ which is also a seduction; an attempt to rewrite (Freud might say ‘cathect’) pre-lapsarian companionship as the prehistory of today’s desire. But the urgency of the chorus – ‘I want to take you home’ RIGHT NOW – suggests that teenaged fumblings are not the prelude to but the truth of mature sexuality, hastily hidden under the mattress when adulthood knocks on the bedroom door. Making babies is the coverstory: “Babies” doesn’t just make the family the centre of precocious sexual experiment, but makes home, kids, boyfriend-girlfriend, everything else, an excuse for it.

Story: curiosity becomes desire (‘I wanted to see as well as hear’); fellowship ‘we listened’) is abandoned for solitary vice (scopophilia); the act of entering the wardrobe (shades of CS Lewis?) becomes both enclosure and a seemingly paradoxical kind of exposure. Shut in by our desires, we’ve also effectively cornered ourselves: ‘I fell asleep inside, I never heard her come’, I was hiding, but there was nowhere to hide… And then repetition: she caught me inside; you caught me inside her, and although this time I heard you stop outside the door, I still couldn’t do anything else!

Song: a hymn to the aimlessness of undisciplined teenage desire, not yet running along socially sanctioned lines, in which one body can be substituted for another, one sister for another, one sex for another. Desire which expands to fill the time (after school) and space (bedrooms detached from the houses which enclose them, which literally do not belong: sex before marriage as sex before mortgage!) available. Which is why this story can never add up: what’s unsettling isn’t just the substitution of one sister for another, but of me for the boy from the garage up the road; ‘I had to get it on’, driven not only by my displaced lust, i.e. lust itself, but by hers.

Excuses multiply guilt rather than rescind it, and “Babies” produces the fact of substitution – that for sex one body is as good as another – which love’s particularity seeks to tame and subdue. I want to take you home. Now. We can make up for all that lost time. So I was watching your sister; and I was listening while you went with Neve. So we never. Although we wanted to really. It was you all along. But we never. Until now. Now? If the chorus is supposed to make amends for or cancel out the past, it’s not just unconvincing, but a radical failure. The indeterminate ‘you’ to which it is addressed is never just you, never only you, never really you at all: it’s you or your sister, you and your sister, you and/or whoever else were to be sitting across the table from me now.

…And of course, YOU: and you, and you, and you? This is popular music and like the sound of one couple in the block shagging, as Jarvis recounts in Sheffield Sex City, one of the tracks that partnered “Babies” on the original Gift release, pretty soon it’ll have everybody fucking.

83. Orange Juice ◊ Rip It Up

Tom, 4th July 2005

Edwyn Collins and company fake the funk. What’s so appealing about Orange Juice (and Dexy’s, and ABC) is the “let’s pretend” element – they know they’re not a ‘proper’ disco outfit, but they want to play the disco music anyway…or not any way, their way. And they know it’s ridiculous, but here’s the important thing: they want us to believe it anyway, they don’t want us to ever feel ridiculous for liking it.

(That’s where The Darkness, who aren’t a hundred miles away from ABC when you think about it, falter slightly. Though I don’t believe they mean to. A game of let’s pretend is spoiled by other people standing around saying, you’re pretending: this is one curse of modern pop.)

Amongst the gaucheness and good humour, and so many wonderful lines, there is one outrageous and special moment in “Rip It Up”. It goes like this – “And my favourite song’s entitled ‘Boredom’”, so far so sweet, so clever, so Orange Juice, and then naturally the guitarist plays the two-note solo from “Boredom”, and THEN the solo suddenly turns into an aching, yearning sliver of cocktail sax, punk grub into new pop butterfly if you like.

82. Jimmy Cliff ◊ Many Rivers To Cross

Pete Baran, 17th August 2005

A conversation I had about Many Rivers To Cross today.

Me: Have you got a copy of Many Rivers To Cross by Jimmy Cliff.
Her: Yes. It’s great.
Me: You couldn’t play it down the phone to me.
Her: Sure. I’ll just try and find it.
Me: Is it quite sparse, arrangement-wise? All I can think of then I think of the song is the Aswad version which is pretty syrupy.
Her: Did Aswad do a version?
Me: I think they did. Didn’t everyone soft reggae do a version?
Her: UB40 did a rubbish version. I know that because I am from the Midlands and UB40′s career is etched in my brain as some sort of racial memory.
Me: Oh Christ, it was the UB40 version. Sorry Aswad. You know Aswad were pretty hardcore when they started, like Steel Pulse.
Her: What? Sorry, still looking. I thought it would be in this pile. Hold on, what’s this? A operatic version of The Handmaid’s Tale directed by Phyllida Law. Isn’t that Emma Thompson’s mum?
Me: Yes. Put that on while you keep looking.

Scary opera of The Handmaid’s Tale goes on. The clacking of hundreds of out of order, badly indexed and containing the wrong disc anyway CD’s continues.

Me: Doesn’t matter if you can’t find it.
Her: No, no I’ve got it here somewhere. Maybe in the reggae section.
Me: Why didn’t you start there?
Her: I don’t really think of Jimmy Cliff as reggae.
Me: Okay. Er-
Her: (Defensive) I thought it would be in the singer-songwriter section. Or the dead bloke section.
Me: How many sections have you got?
Her: It’s not my record collection, it’s my husbands. Sorry. Maybe I leant it to someone. I was listening to it last week.
Me: It doesn’t matter, I just said I’d write about it on Freaky Trigger because it has been getting in the way of finishing the Top 100 Singles.
Her: What number is it?
Me: 82.
Her: What was number one.
Me: I can’t tell you.
Her: Spoilsport.
Me: If I told you then you would tell other people, negating the exciting point of a chart countdown. Anyway, you heard it last week, how does it go? Is the arrangement sparse? I think it would have a sparse arrangement. Does it sound like seventies reggae?
Her: It sounds like Many Rivers To Cross. You know?
Me: All I remember is the UB40 version.
Her: Well in your case then, it sounds better than Many Rivers To Cross.

Conclusion: Many Rivers To Cross is great because it sounds better than rubbish versions of itself that I can’t get out of my head.

81. The JAMMS ◊ It’s Grim Up North

Tom, 1st September 2005

N. says

This record is ten minutes long (exactly). On it, Bill Drummond reads out the names of (approximately) 70 towns in Northern England over a berserk techno backing, containing bursts of train sounds and robotic squeaks. He explains that they are all in the North. For the final three minutes, this competes with a synthetic orchestra playing ‘Jerusalem’, and the track finishes with the cries of some crows.

It’s not a fucking joke. It’s the best British single of the 1990s. In my head I have a 26-year-old American man scoffing at this assessment. This man annoys me more than you can imagine.

80: Public Enemy ◊ Fight The Power

Tom, 5th September 2005

Steve M says:

Clearly I picked this because I was worried there wouldn’t be enough rockist rap in the list. I still think this is their best and most succinct single, although I know the general consensus would point to any of the three before it. The street sound of Summer ’89, this reference run deep into the ground by its gratuitous use in Do The Right Thing. The track is presented in that movie as some ultimate, towering concoction of black punk, following two years of consolidation and growth by the most exciting band in the world at that point.

It feels a little busier, more infectious and, perhaps crucially, more Pop than their other anthems, with the production unit and MCs on peak form. Containing arguably Chuck D’s most famous lyric (Oh, NOT an Elvis fan you say?), he wins sympathy from me as even today I know friends equally indifferent to the stature of John Wayne. Other great lines are strewn throughout. Another highlight lies in Chuck bitterly stressing that Bobby McFerrin’s message of ‘don’t worry be happy’ amounted to nothing more than denial, for D’s target audience at least, and simply wouldn’t do. How they got away with this level of fun-hating lyrically whilst attached to some of the funkiest party music of the time is the real skill of the act.

I often miss the rawness and maximal approach that came with so much hip-hop at this time as things have moved on since then in more ways than one. This represents well though the point where their message managed to capture maybe their largest universal audience yet, before being drowned out forever by the far greater demand for bitch/gun/money-obsessed gangsta fantasies (N.W.A. etc.) as opposed to dour b-boy political aspirations, regardless of how def the jam. It’s also the last track on their last truly great album and a fitting ‘exit theme’ as a result.

79. Kim Wilde ◊ Cambodia

Tom, 6th September 2005

Mark S says:

Writing a chart-song with this title in 1981 – Year Zero was 1978, as punky types (=me) liked boringly to remind everyone – sets some kind of dunderhead record, you’d think, for chutzpah, hubris and just not getting it. But of course “just not getting it” is what the song turns out to be about – avoidance of knowledge, self-deluded cocoonment, the SCREAMING WOUNDED ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM – and pretty blonde Kim, with her cool expressionless nu-pop voice, was the ideal no-baggage vehicle. Born to the purple of the manufactured-hit family trade, she tells the story as if with minimal involvement: did it happen to HER? A “friend” Is she just the reporter/newscaster/bored raconteur at a party she’s not enjoying? The template is “Cool For Cats”, pumping bop-bip synth octaves, the ghost of Squeeze’s little cartoon cocknoid suburban tragicomedy shtick frozen down into desperate-housewives nembutal coping haze, Kim’s freon-based glide a forerunner of the Cocteaus/Lush/Goldfrapp bliss-hook, except (as regards storyline) with extra vivid if unexplained justification (the rather excellently terrible vintage pic sleeve – done cartoon-strip fashion by Rod Vass – hints that her husband pilots a Vietnam-style green insecticopter): “She didn’t wonder then/She didn’t think it strange/But then he got a call/He had to leave that night/He couldn’t say too much/But it would be alright” — What’s his mission? DON’T ASK DON’T TELL: “He used to cry some nights/as though he lived a dream.” Every question the tale demands, the music – Kim’s distracted and disinterested delivery tone, the sprightly know-nothing new wavey hummed chorus – leaves wide open, so open you can’t help sketching in every last semi-plausible scenario for yrself. “He used to fly weekends/It was the easy life…” The plasticised percussion includes a nice little whip swish, and he was “Thailand-based” — what kind of dreamsex Emmanuelle-style colonial utopia was this “easy life” exactly? And then at the end, the echo-drenched “White Horses” style reverie switches the feel back to kid-lit romanticism, the nostalgising of being allowed not to be in the (adult) know.

The unspoken possibilities overwhelm the often trite words, the gumball-trinket form, setting and melody, and THIS EXPRESSIVE INADEQUACY what the song is about: the realisation that triteness is all many of us will have to hand when horror strikes.

Curious revealing sidenote: the lyrics as available on the net all end song as follows: “But there is only one thing left/I know for sure/She won’t see his face again” —well, there is one thing left *i* know for sure, and that is that kim actually sings “she WILL see his face again”: proof maybe that what the all-knowing affect-free carefully euphemising narrator means is (as witness the entire web’s affirmation): HE IS DEAD AND SHE DAREN’T FACE HOW OR WHY…

78. Culture Beat ◊ Mr Vain

Pete Baran, 8th September 2005

There is an argument, one I hope to elucidate in the following, that Culture Beat are exactly that. The rhythm of our Western Culture in 1993: the thud of the backing of this song is merely the underpinning of the songs accurate and razorsharp critique of that culture. That it sold 4.5 million copies worldwide and hit the top of the charts in twelve countries also manages to show how self-reflexive said culture is, even to the extent of taking a scabrous political song and treating it as mere dance music.

Lyrical analysis is never the best way to discuss a song, but perhaps with Mr Vain it is the lyrics which are most disregarded. Certainly it is a wonderful song to dance to, but it also demands a singalong. Yet do we ever really consider the meaning of the words? Take the best known parts:
I know what I want and I want it now
I want you cause I’m Mr. Vain
If you do not recognise this as the 90′s mantra then we lived through a different decade. It is all about the narcissistic “me” generation of the period. And why do they want so much, citing vanity as a cause for profligate consumerism may seem contradictory: but is it? The reason we need to acquire so much (and in this case sexual conquests are seen as much as acquisitions as anything else) is that cultural vanity requires us to experience and judge everything. We turn the music into an extension of our own creativity. We are the artist. And we are not exactly modest about this.

Ironically this process of unpacking the song and turning it into our own product, “a nice safe cheesy dance record” seemingly neuters the power of the tune. Mr Vain is remembered as just that, a slightly embarrassing floor filler from the early nineties, where German producers grafted in a singer in spike heels and ruled the pop charts. But Mr Vain is a Trojan horse: it still fills the floor today and the words sometimes get through. When a lagered up lad at that wedding disco mouths “I’m Mr Vain”, the response is certainly in the affirmative. That Mr Vain is the soundtrack of 1993 there can be no argument to. But I would also propose it is the soul of 1993 too. And when we are also invited to note the equivalence of Mr Vain to Mr Wrong, we can see instantly what Culture Beat’s line on 1993 was.

77. Depeche Mode ◊ Just Can’t Get Enough

Tom, 17th October 2005

Depeche Mode are a curious lot in that they’ve made a lot of entertaining singles in which you can plainly see the seeds of their future complete awfulness: for much of the band’s lifespan (OK, the 80s) there’s quite a fruitful tension between poptastic tunesmithery and hard dancefloor action and lyrical/vocal seriousness which stops the records being more embarassing than charming and which sometimes makes them sneakily effective. And then the first and second elements went AWOL and suddenly the band was as terrible as you always thought they could be.

But also there’s their curious early period, the Vince Clark years, which have nothing of the gloom or metaphysics or BDSM and which amp up the pop bounce at the exclusion of all else. I didn’t nominate this song and I think the OMD tribute “New Life” is quietly a lot better, but “Just Can’t Get Enough” is probably the most ruthlessly Bucks Fizz catchy record Depeche Mode ever made and hence is one of their most memorable. It comes off as a more virginal, dry run Erasure but it’s still pleasantly ticklish that the same band nominally made this and the grisly “Barrel Of A Gun”.

76. Shystie ◊ Woman’s World

Tom, 24th October 2005

Alex Macpherson writes:

She was meant to be the female Dizzee, the girl who would feminise grime enough for the charts and the broadsheets alike while still holding down the scene’s realness. Instead she released an album which was acclaimed by precisely no one except me and bought by even less, and the super-scary teenage MC Lady Fury did a diss track so harsh that Shystie hasn’t been heard of since in any capacity whatsoever. Shystie could be just as harsh, too, and she was at her best when she indulged her inner Lil Kim rather than aiming for the Ms Dynamite socially conscious model. On ‘Woman’s World’, she aims her rapid-fire flow squarely at MEN – not some men, or scrub men, but ALL MEN – and pumps them full of verbal bullets. Shystie is imagining a world, possibly a utopia, in which gender roles are reversed; she starts off joking about naked studs on Page Three and ends up fantasising about keeping men “in kennels like dogs”. After climaxing with some particularly outré what-the-fuck-did-she-just-say musings on body hair she delivers the sucker punch with relish: “Yeah we crossed the line / But men do that shit all the time!” Come back Shystie!

75. Art Garfunkel ◊ Bright Eyes

Pete Baran, 25th October 2005

There are two songs in the world which are guaranteed to make me cry: Ordinary World by Duran Duran, and Bright Eyes. One is about what it is like not being a pop star any more, something I should find difficult to empathise with. And the other is about rabbits. I am not a rabbit, so why does Bright Eyes effect me so much?

Theories are called for:

1: The Watership Down factor: Bright Eyes is, if not the theme to Watership Down, THE song from it. A brutally sad tale of rabbits, I did not see Watership Down until I was much older: it is after all a pretty disturbing film. My main memories were then of the odd excerpt on Top Of The Pops. The animated rabbits did look sad, but I am rarely touched by poor drawn animals.

2: Mortality: This could be the rub, I think my Grandad died about the same time as Bright Eyes reached number one. The line “how can the light that burns so brightly, suddenly burn so pale” is more than emphatic about illness and death. Let’s be fair, this is no jolly song: the first verse does mention a river of death after all.

3: Singability: This is not a “round the barrel organ” classic, but the chorus in particular invites a singalong. And whilst it can sound odd bellowed out by burly drunken fellows, it never loses its edge of wistfulness. And it suits the acoustics of a bathroom perfectly.

4: Art Garfunkel: The tall one out of Tom & Jerry? A certain Mr Hopkins of this parish will rave (rightly) about his Jimmy Webb numbers, but the beauty of Art’s voice is how unaffected it is. It is quiet here, holding the moment, and never really letting on that it is a song about rabbits. Perhaps that is the key, he manages to inhabit the idea of a frightened creature, with his ridiculous barnet and borderline falsetto. Bright Eyes might be an easy song to sing, but no-one sings it quite like Art Garfunkel.

It is a combination of these issues which I love about Bright Eyes. It has the instant power to transport. It turns up briefly in the Wallace & Gromit rabbit themed movie, and instantly conjured a smile. Not because it was necessarily funny, but the rabbits and the song (and what a song) will never leave me.

*If I am on my own, feeling a bit down and adequately hydrated. I don’t burst into tears all the time.

74. Urban Cookie Collective ◊ The Key: The Secret

Tom, 26th October 2005

Kat of General Khaki writes:

Verses? Let’s face it, they’re rubbish, aren’t they? The artist blabbers on because they are not concise enough to get the gist across with their chorus. BORING. The advent of The Lovely Acid House Thing meant that dance music no longer had to be geeky (ahem Kraftwerk) depressing (coff coff Blue Monday) or critically acclaimed (COFF bloody everyone else who could pick up a synthesizer without dropping it or going Where Are The Strings On This Cuboidal Guitar?). Dance music was now FUN! And what is more fun than jumping up and down and chanting a few catchy words to a nice simple happy tune with yer mates? You didn’t even have to be gay. It was great.

‘The Key, The Secret’ is a cracking example of the 1992/1993 Golden Europop era. What’s that? U.C.C. are English? Blimey. With verses consisting of “Ah ah ah ah ah ah/A ha a ha/Ah ah ah ah/I’ve got the key” (courtesy of Lyricz.net) and a soaring chorus it scores highly in the Singalonga category and indeed also in the Thumping 4/4 Beat stakes. It is almost impossible to listen to this song without doing the turny-head nose-pointing dance. Yep, it’s a corking little bit of Euro-bop that somehow sprung from the pancreas of Manchester.

73. Smiley Culture ◊ Police Officer

Tom, 30th November 2005

It has been 20 years since this simple song was released and about a dozen since I fell for it, playing it on a dare in an 80s disco. I have listened to it well over a hundred times, and I’m not tired of it, which isn’t something you can say for many records where the pleasure is in the punchlines.

Certainly more feted ‘story records’ don’t come close. Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts” is by one of my favourite acts, on a really good album: it’s awful. The Shangri-Las’ death ballads are sublime but I don’t listen to them as much as Smiley, and I don’t smile at them as much either. What is it about this song?

Not the story, really, especially as the ‘twist’ is dumb: Culture’s already told the coppers his name a few lines ago. No, it’s the telling that stays fresh. That slight increase in tempo at the end when he knows he’s going to get away with it, and his natural cockiness reasserts itself, “me draw out me Parker”. The venal cop, all oily magnanimity, “a favour for a FAYvour”. The bubbling pride, while the situation’s still in the balance, “number one was its number”. And the brilliant interrogation, switching on a half-beat between eager police and weary, hassled, contemptuous Smiley, “What you got in the boot then son? Me cyassete recorder.” Right then the police are everybully, and Smiley is you.

72. The Wee Papa Girl Rappers ◊ Wee Rule

Pete Baran, 1st December 2005

Is it lame to like a song because it has Wee in the title. Of course not. Luckily, that is not the real reason why Wee Rule, well, rules. Though my description of why Wee Rules rules is partially about the idea of “ruling” in a UK slang kind of way. UK rap was still in its very nascent form, and this – along with Smiley Culture – defined (for better and worse) what we were going to get from the UK rap scene for ten years. Often it was quick snatched verses over a pop track. Or a slow, somnambulant Jazzy B stab at something credible. What We Rule does, in a minor sense, is bring it back to the playground.

You would not hear Run DMC saying that they rule. Or that they were skill. The Wee Papa Girl Rappers were clearly British, albeit leaning on dancehall roots. They were not an Althea And Donna for the late eighties though, this was clearly rap. And it managed to slip French swearing on to Top Of The Pops (and even point out it was doing it). It was a pop tune though, and probably led to more school projects where you write a rap about crossing the road. The Wee Papa Girl Rappers (one letter away from being the Twee PGR) told us they were rap, and were just a cheeky pair of South London girls (who have passed their French exams).

All this and the “Bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp” in the chorus: one of those killer stings that roots a tune in your brain for the rest of your life. The Lawrence girls may not have done much more, but were clearly paving the way for Mel & Kim and TLC (though both groups would probably have been able to traverse an unpaved road).

Alright, it does have Wee in the title too. That is a bit funny.

71. Jay-Z ◊ The Takeover

Tom, 2nd December 2005

Joe M says:

The Jay-Z attack on Nas in ‘Takeover’ is a masterpiece because he acknowledges that Illmatic was a great album, and even that another unspecified Nas album was insert equivocal hand-wavering gesture here okay. Then he adds “That’s a one hot album every ten year average”. This is pretty much the accepted wisdom on Nas: that he made one of the best debuts in hip hop history and never achieved that level of quality again. Saying this, rather than saying “You are shit in every way” as some rappers are prone to do on diss records, made at least a large part of Jay’s attack on Nas very hard to refute.

Andrew F says:

(The Takeover is) a near-perfect diss record, through disrespect into dismissal. Where most rappers come up with a good insult or two and off to the studio, this is pleasingly thorough, covering the target’s past, sexuality, street cred, business sense and basic rapping ability (“Yeah I sampled your voice, you were using it wrong”). It’s magnanimous in victory – Jay-Z has no problem saying that Nas has released two great albums, as long as he has made more and greater. And still, better to be the target of all this than the multitude brushed aside in the last line.

70. Aqua ◊ Lollipop (Candyman)

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør, 10th August 2006

There’s a device in film soundtrack music which may well go back to 19th-century opera — or actually operetta, something just round the corner of memory is whispering (bizet, it whispers, bizet) — where banal-sounding tunes are deliberately chosen or composed to amplify sinister effect, because they signify a split between the awful events on-stage and the silly happy cheesy music playing on all unawares. A euro-bubblegum hit which repeats the phrase “Candyman” is clearly already well aware of dissonant layers of meaning, Candyman being the psychotic hooked-handed monster in a series of horror movies where you call his name five times and he comes and etc etc — but what’s so strong here is less this basically minor bit of referential cleverness than the stripped compactness of the song, which is the soundtrack to its own implied narrative in an unusually cinematic way for pop. Two voice: a perky pre-teen-sounding minipops cutie acting out the ‘lollipop’ half (lollipop as hymned by shirley temple, or Jamaican one-hit-wonder millie smalls); and — absolutely as per classic pop duet humour — a deep comedy-p4ed0 voice as “candyman”. The two parts of the song lock into one another like pitiless sex-pumping rinkidink clockwork — a machine ticktocking away to ghastly purpose. The Lollipop seductrix’s declaration is framed in the classic, sickly-twee trope of the lover being MADE OF SWEETS (“if you show me to the sugar tree/will you give me a sodapop for free”), the metaphor extended to an embrace of sugar addiction as delighted sex slavery (“oh my love, your word is my command”) . The Candyman-predator’s response is faux-weak innuendo (‘bite me, i’m yours, if you’re hungry please understand, THIS IS THE END of the sweet sugar candyman”), and a plea of companionship as they run away together to “bountyland”. What I’d really like to do is follow through musicologically, and explain-explore why the tune — which is harmonically very simple, and melodically rigorously repetitive — is at once so funny and so scary. But for now, let’s just say that the exact mapping of gleefully banal sex-candy imagery onto the soundtrack device outlined above — where cheesiness concentrates and crystallises a sense of impersonal evil — and such is Aqua’s artful precision at every level you can’t tell (no one will ever tell) where mischievous pop game ends and GRISLY SEX-HORROR STORY begins.

69. Anthrax and Public Enemy ◊ Bring The Noise

CarsmileSteve, 29th August 2006

YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH BOOOOOOOIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!

As soon as Flav appears after 6 seconds of, even for Anthrax, ridiculously fast heavy drumming, you knew something was up. This track takes the idea that Aerosmith and Run DMC (quite literally, in the case of the video, of course) had broken down the walls between Rock and Rap five years earlier and shows them up for the chancers they were. In barely three minutes of actual songy bit (excluding the pissing about at the end) Anthrax and PE Changed Metal Forever. OK, so admittedly this eventually led to Fred Durst, but it wasn’t their fault, there’s more ENERGY and EXCITEMENT in this one song than pretty much everything we would come to call nu-metal.

68. The Shirelles ◊ Will You Love Me Tomorrow

Martin Skidmore, 2nd September 2006

I think this song, by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, might be the best song ever written. It’s a beautiful melody, given superb life by producer Luther Dixon’s luscious string arrangement (over a cod-Latin beat which I like less, but Leiber & Stoller had made it fashionable) and the precise singing, but it’s the extraordinarily poised lyric that makes it so exceptional.

In 1960, you couldn’t talk about fucking on record, however politely, and get mainstream play and sales. There had been plenty of black hits, on the ‘race chart’, with overtly raunchy subject matter (‘Sixty Minute Man’, by Billy Ward & the Dominoes, was a giant hit in 1961, #1 for 16 weeks; before that there are plenty of unmistakably sexual jump blues numbers, most notably by Wynonie Harris), but the white chart was different. This song says not a single word about sex, and one could interpret peerless lines like “Tonight the light of love is in your eyes / But will you love me tomorrow” as being concern about whether love can last, if you were so inclined. That was enough to get it play, but we all know what was really going on: I love you, but if I give in to you and have sex, will you still give a damn about me afterwards? It’s clear that they are going to make love – the “and I won’t ask again” line can only mean that – and I’m sure its audience knew what it was all about. It’s that delicate balance, a high wire strolled across with confidence and total grace, that is so special here.

Lead singer Shirley Owens (later replaced while she got married by a young Dionne Warwick) doesn’t have such a lot to offer as a singer or storyteller – the Shirelles gave us the first giant girl group hit, but she totally lacked the power of Darlene Love or Ronnie Spector, or the acting genius of the Shangri-Las – but her simple and straightforward, even somewhat flattened, reading is probably necessary here. A more overtly soulful or emotive vocal would have disturbed the equilibrium between the readings, and rendered this either insipid or unplayable on mainstream radio, and that might also have made the lyric seem hopelessly coy. This may be why most of the countless cover versions of this (a surprisingly large number of them by men) don’t come off, and I don’t suppose many people are trying these days, where the lyric would seem merely quaint.

67. The Velvelettes ◊ Needle In A Haystack

Tom, 9th September 2006

Nobody volunteered to write about this record, so it falls to yr humble pop editor. Which is a bit of a shame, because it turns out I don’t like it much.

The track is a fairly straightforward hybrid of two sounds I love – Motown pop-soul and 60s Girl Groups, handclaps and beats and shang-a-langs all present and correct. But for me the two sounds seem to cancel each other out rather than mesh: the girliness softens the Motown drive, and the soulfulness clashes with the girl group’s teeny melodrama. I like the lyric, I like the tune, but the whole thing feels bloodless somehow.

(My suspicion is that it feels bloodless to me cos this is the sort of sound certain indie clubs – mentioning no names – have adopted as their own version of ‘perfect pop’, so when I listen to this it’s not the lovely Velvelettes I see.)

(Naturally this snippy review is also a GOAD to anyone who wants to write in praise of this record: do it yrself and we’ll put that one up!)

66. Dexy’s Midnight Runners ◊ Come On Eileen

Pete Baran, 12th September 2006

Freaky Trigger has been quiet over the last few days. This can pretty much be put down to the marriage of our main technical support and indispensable chief Admin bloke Alan Trewartha and his stunning bride Emma Hamilton. This means that the site will probably fall over within days of them being on honeymoon, but more importantly meant that most of the Freaky Trigger writers have spent the last few days worrying about speeches (and/or heckles) and being overcome by bouze and bonhomie. We even ignored the second attack of Banksy in a week.

What has any of this got to do with Come On Eileen? Well, at the wedding on Sunday I was witness to a number of rituals whose birth are now shrouded in mystery and significance obscured. Brides side / groom side? Bridesmaids? The cutting of the cake? The wedding breakfast? All the blokes do speeches, all the ladies don’t. What I am trying to say is that traditions are often self perpetuating, and stem from something which may have had a point somewhere back in time, but no longer have any direct significance.

I don’t know at whose wedding Come On Eileen was played first. One assumes, since it was a pretty big number one, it would have been pretty much around the time it was released. Nevertheless, and me and my fellow occasional wedding DJ’s hold this as a truism, YOU ARE NOT MARRIED UNTIL SOMEONE PLAYS COME ON EILEEN. This has the happy knock on effect in my opinion of relegating other entertainment options such as Cedilah to just a proportion of the evening. Perhaps the success of Come On Eileen as an all family stomp along is the fiddles and how it invokes a Cedilah without any of those tedious step-learnings. It builds to a crescendo, the bride whirls round in her dress and people of all ages gurn with delight. Perhaps Come On Eileen became an albatross around the necks of Dexy’s, a world striding, dungaree wearing colossus of a party tune. But no other band can honestly say they have become part of the tradition of the British marriage ceremony.

And congratulations yet again to Emma and Alan!

65. Tears for Fears ◊ Pale Shelter

Pete Baran, 22nd November 2006

OK. This list was derived almost two years ago now, and in our slow, thoughtful trawl through it, throws up odd anomalies such as this. Why Tears For Fears in 2004? Do we dare blame Donnie Darko?

Of course we bloody blame Donnie Darko. Without the the artful slow-mo and whacked out plotting, the prog-pomp-synth edifices of Tears For Fears first album would never have been rehabilitated. And I find it hard to say altogether good things about Pale Shelter (or its full title on its first single release: Pale Shelter (You Don’t Give Me Love). I can tell you a tale about how I first heard it though. It was upon joining Borehamwood Main Library. As a library junkie from a young age I had finally read dry the small mobile trailer that visited our local shops, and so a step up to the big library followed. But the big library did not just have books. It had a massive rail timetable**, and a CD section. It was 20p to take a CD out for a week, and my Dad had just bought a CD player. And hence a trawl through bands I had vaguely heard of to see if they were any good. And a soft spot for Everybody Wants To Rule The World and its evil genius subtext meant I stumbled across The Hurting.

Even at the age of fourteen I could smell self-importance a mile off. But also at the age of fourteen I was a sucker for it, and lyrics like “You don’t give me love…” Hello angst. It is, of course, this insufferable teenage angst that Richard Kelly found in Tears For Fears which made it perfect for Donnie Darko, as shorthand for Jake Gyllenhaal’s mental state. But while Pale Shelter, like everything else on The Hurting, is slow, portentous and awe-inspiringly earnest, it is nothing compared to Head Over Heels and Mad World.

So why pick Pale Shelter. Difficult to say, you’d have to ask the nominee. But in spiriting it up in my head, there is one thing that is true of the Hurting as an album. They all blend into one in my head. I can start the (non-Jules) Mad World in my bonce and find that post-chorus it turns into Head Over Heels and finally morphs into Pale Shelter. So maybe that is its legacy. We were all young once, but we don’t have to listen to all of the records.

Still, at least it wasn’t WOMAN IN CHAINS.

*Picture = DO YOU SEE!

**This was an item of wonder to me. All the UK’s rail timetables in one book. Only five years later did I discover how unreliable a book could be.

64. Christina Aguilera ◊ Dirrrty

Pete Baran, 8th March 2007

I didn’t like Dirrrrrrrty when I first heard it. Indeed I probably heard it about twenty times before I finally got it. And that is when I saw it. I remember exactly where this was. In a hotel room in Brussels, Belgium.

How many moments of your life do you remember vividly? I remember watching EuroMTV with Tom as we were running late for breakfast in our nice swank hotel (the Metropole). We were there for Tim’s thirty-third and a third birthday and celebrated this in our usual fashion by drinking SHED LOADS. But it was Sunday morning and after a baby shed load the day before, we were warming up to an out of town B&Qload later that day. This required a formidable breakfast, but it also required getting up in time for it. Running late as we were, laughing at EuroMTV had made half-sore heads less grumpy. And just before my finger pushed the button to release the little German gremlins in the TV, Redman happened to cry out “If You Ain’t Here to Parrrrty”.

“I don’t much like this,” I said to Tom.
“Its good,” he said back.

I watched. With growing incredulity at this grubby dwarfen lady being lead into some sort of mud wrestling boxing match, along with syncopated rhythm and then THAT chorus. What I had previously pigeonholed as some lame attempt to grasp credibility by a sugapop singer, was instantly discarded. I already knew that Dirrrty was silly. I had just assumed that this was the force of my massive critical brain which had made this assumption. Rather than everyone, including supercamp Redman, throwing themselves wholeheartedly into this piece of mocking flummery. Perhaps previously i had really believed the song to be earnest. Perhaps I really thought it was a call to arms to get Dirty. Whilst I am no neat freak, i don’t want to get dirty for nothing, and am aware of how much certain things (say mud) can stain.

It was so silly, so funny* that my later reaction to the song seems justified. “I wanna get, mucky, wanna get a little bit: grubby, wanna get filthy” are the words which go though my head, and the words that got us to the end of the song, running late for breakfast. “What held you up” Tim asked. We were getting Dirrrty, I luckily did not reply.

*And okay, despite the ridiculous hair, make-up, and silly dancing it was appropriately hot.

63. Take That ◊ Back For Good

Pete Baran, 11th April 2007

The recent Take That revival has brought them up as a topic of conversation in my flat. My American flatmate saying to me that she was surprised the Take That had been quite so big over in the UK. I replied that Take That were like Wham!, N’Sync and The Jackson Five all rolled into one: and they were. But without Back For Good, there would be no big revival now, no number one albums. Back For Good is both the high-point of Take That’s career, and the millstone around their neck. It was the song that cemented critical respectability, it was the song that stopped them being just a boy band.

Which is a problem because at the heart of it, Take That were already not just a boy band. They were THE boy band. Back For Good turned them into a “proper” band (albeit one which didn’t play their instruments which in 1994 was pretty important). There had always been the “Gary Barlow = good songwriter” strap-line before, but Back For Good is a sentimental classic, and one which he was never able to recapture solo. Back For Good, not unlike Careless Whisper for George Michael, suddenly grew the audience for Gary’s songwriting. He didn’t follow through and Robbie Williams stole his thunder**. A ballistic missile aimed right at the heart of Radio Two, it was for the mums, for the girls and for the boys who didn’t mind gruffly saying “aye, they’re shite but I quite like Back For Good”.

For all of Take That’s five man boygroup set-up, they had always been quite ropey at inserting harmonies and intertwining vocal lines into their songs. Back for good not only showcases Barlow’s hesitant falsetto, but allows even the dullards of the band to throw in the odd line. Initially plodding, the music builds in a way which couches the song in a comfort zone which the words require. Not since the double whammy of Beat Surrender and The Bitterest Pill had a band so effectively written the song for their own closing titles. And while they went off to have failing solo careers, looking enviously at end-of-pier variety Robbie (whom the song could have been written about – no hard feelings), they knew that even vs Angels, Back For Good is the better song.

Patience, the comeback single, was very much an answer record to Back For Good. Its not as good, but it reminds you how good Back For Good is. But also it says that they were always coming back, but you had to wait. Without Back For Good we wouldn’t have Take That now, we wouldn’t have hip new Radio 2 (and therefore no Radio 6), the Spice Girls would have floundered and the Sugababes definitely would not have existed. None of which make it a good song. One listen is all you need for that.

*Pictured "Fake That", a Take That tribute act which appears to be made up of four Robbie’s. Which make no sense.

**On the George Michael career-o-meter, Robbie is about a year away from coming out!

62. Glen Campbell ◊ Wichita Lineman

Pete Baran, 12th April 2007

I have a firm belief that this is the first song I ever heard.

Really.

As the wee-est of wee nippers, I would happily burble along, or toddle precariously around the living room as my mother did no end of never-ending housework. To do these acts she was accompanied by noise, and where Jeremy Kyle or Trisha have sufficed for a later generation, my mother had a tape player as part of our Sony Hi-Fi (my Dad was ever the early adopter, thwarted by how much money he was allowed to spend*). I was not allowed to touch it of course, and my mother was restricted pretty much to the basic operation of turning on the radio (tuned to Capital and Roger Scott) or playing a tape. And my mother only had two tapes.

Abba’s Greatest Hits Volume 1 and Glen Campbell’s 20 Golden Greats.

So its possible that the first track I consciously heard was Ring Ring, but for some reason the Campbell stuck with me longer. And the two tracks which really stand out from kiddie memory are Rhinestone Cowboy and Wichita Lineman. Mid-tempo country crooners with something alien and peculiarly American about them. Since then Rhinestone Cowboy has dulled in my appreciation a touch (too self-reflexive perhaps, though its great a Karaoke: I WANNA BE WHERE THE LIGHTS ARE SHINING ON ME!!!!) But Wichita Lineman has never faded, to the extent that I bought my own scratched copy of 20 Golden Greats and rediscovered Campbell JUST BEFORE THAT CAPITOL BEST OF CAME OUT AND PROVED ME RIGHT.

I always thought Campbell was naff before then: partially because he did not seem to exist in the UK “history of official pop music” (ie Beatles, Stones, Marrow, Bones). Also my Mum liking him didn’t help**. But fundamentally it was that soft focus cover that really put me off. Glen looks kind of eighty and a bit like a man who might pick me up from school instead of my Mummy and offer me a bag of Black Jacks (which I didn’t like). The tape version maintained the record in the shape of a heart motif, and just put it on a white tape backing. So my early days were soundtracked to Glen from the lows of his stinky version of Amazing Grace to the highs of Lineman, and Where’s The Playground Suzy (which often got changed to Where’s The Playground Peter, and indicated we were off to the swings). I had no choice, and perhaps this indoctrination is why I still like it now. But if that were the case I would like his version of All I Have To Do Is Dream – which is happily not on other Campbell comps I own. And clearly others like Lineman.

Perhaps its continued appeal was the true mystery behind the job in the song. What is a Lineman? Why does he ride the main roads? It sounded awfully rugged and glamorous to me (in the way Rhinestone Cowboy stopped being so when I realised he wasn’t a REAL cowboy. I know what a lineman is now, my flatmate Dad was one. Doesn’t stop me hanging from the ceiling and singing it a capella whenever I get the opportunity.

*The Sony Record/Tape/Radio Hi-Fi was a thing of beauty, belt driven and with lovely shiny knobs to control volume and tuning. It had heft and craftsmanship and very little plastic about it, chrome being the order of the day. It was the second from top range, the very top being in burnished black metal – which in the catalogue looked appealing like technology never has since. Perhaps this early brush with Sony 70′s design is why I find Apple design a bit underwhelming. I want my gleaming chrome.

**It later transpired that the only reason she bought 20 Golden Great was for Dreams Of The Everyday Housewife, a song which even I find kinda despicable.

61. Carl Douglas ◊ Kung Fu Fighting

Pete Baran, 19th April 2007

There is a rule in the FT Top 100 which means that Tom won’t write about a number one: clearly he is going to write about all of them in Popular. And he is not a million miles away from reaching Carl Douglas’s Kung Fu Fighting: and what’s more I will preemptively guess that it will get a pretty high score. Why wouldn’t it, its a novelty record which is actually a really great record at the same time. Tying into a fad, it appeals to five year-olds, and yet has stuck as a cultural touchstone for well over thirty years (indeed one of the few reasons it might not get a 10 from Tom is that he possibly prefers the Bus Stop version from the nineties). What more is there to say though except to note a generosity of spirit and absence of overt racism* in which was not necessarily apparent in the day (see the Hammer House two kung fu films to see what I mean: The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires in particular).

But what I have been doing recently is to go and see a bunch of kung fu films at the NFT, in the second half of their Heroic Grace season. My knowledge of this genre is all very recent, working back from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and a bunch of Jackie Chan films. And whilst a lot of these have clearly got their roots in the Shaw Brothers picture of the seventies, these films are very different beasts. Carl Douglas’s hit may well have peaked during the height of Bruce Lee’s (Enter The Dragon is 1973) but the flood of historical Shaolin epics from the Shaw Brothers gave Lee some background. Douglas’s song seems contemporary, The Big Boss mentioned is probably most reminiscent of Lee’s 1971 movie which is a triad film, but they all have a similar history.

[Open YouTube Video]
The Shaw Brothers historical, wuxia, films are in most cases concerned with the ethics and practice of martial arts. Legendary Weapons Of China, which I saw last night, is partially structured as a catalog of the eighteen weapons used in Chinese martial arts. The trailer above shows nearly all those weapons being used. These films mainly exist primarily for their extensive and impressive action sequences – sometimes considerably longer than (necessary) Carl’s poppy song suggests. Legendary Weapons however does have something Carl’s song demands: it is also a little bit frightening: the opening sequence has a martial arts student under mind control pulling out his own eyes and another castrating himself. None of which happily happens in Carl’s Funky Chinatown.

Dirty Ho, which I saw at the weekend, has a suggestive name which may seem more at home in gangsta rap: or indeed The Wu-Tang Clan. (The 36th Chamber Of Shaolin ring any bells?) Dirty Ho is actually the name of a thief in the film, an action comedy, which excels in its first half at using all sorts of props for its fights. Indeed both Dirty Ho and The Legendary Weapons Of China have tremendous extended comic sequences utilising what Jackie Chan later excelled at: a martial artists extensive body control also stretches to slapstick. The Dirty Ho clip below shows the prince fighting the thief Dirty Ho, by using a female musician to apparently do all the fighting for him.
[Open YouTube Video]
It is the anything goes aspects of these sequences (the baddie using Biting Kung Fu in Dirty Ho is hilarious) where the pop sensibilities of Carl Douglas resides. Kung Fu Fighting is a funk, proto-disco, kitchen sink kind of song: just see how easily it took Daz Sampsons rapping. As for the films, well they are a bit of an acquired taste (annoyingly I am acquiring it at the end of the season), but it is telling how the Wu-Tang Clan took all the seriousness of the films** – whilst Carl embodies the much more individualistic comic sequences. It seems fitting that this record came off an album called Kung Fu Fighting and Other Great Love Songs.

*The exception could be the lyric: “Funky Chinamen” – which is rendered impotent by being from “Funky Chinatown”. Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown was not so funky, but also from 1974.

**Not always in a bad way. The intro of the Genius/GZA album Liquid Swords which samples Shogun Assassin is remarkably straight-faced and yet a fabulous intro. Though of course Shogun’s are Japanese, and thus have no place in a discussion of Kung Fu.

60. Diana Ross ◊ Upside Down

Tom, 11th May 2007

Kat Stevens writes:

It’s 1997, and the Brit Awards organisers are trying to recover from the previous year’s Jacko/Jarvis debacle. The Spice Girls steal the show and the Manics’ rendition of A Design For Life ensures sales of Everything Must Go increase by 200%. And then we have Motown legend, Miss Piggy sound-a-like and all-round bonkers diva Diana Ross teaming up with… Jay Kay from Jamiroquai? Jay Kay from Jamiroquai? It’s a terrible duet, both performers sounding breathless and disinterested. Diana stares at Jay’s feet, Jay’s head is encased by a monstrous fluffy ushanka. The seventeen-year-old classic has been chewed up and shat out by the horrific advance of late nineties coffee-table funk. Bernie Edwards must have been turning in his barely-cold grave. Luckily we need never think of this travesty again, and can instead wallow in the deliriously euphoric Nile Rodgers guitar groove and knotty bassline of the original. Not a stupid hat in sight.

59. C+C Music Factory ◊ Things That Make You Go Hmmm

Pete Baran, 24th May 2007

aka Things to make you go hmmmmm about “Things The Make You Go Hmmm”.

This is a more than adequate early nineties pop dance track, perhaps a little more suited to the radio than the dance-floor, with a cheap but memorable video and a killer hook in the chorus which justifies its longevity in any case. However my reason for loving this record is wholly due to the anachronistic circumstances under which it was used as part of my schooling. I was in the Upper Sixth (Year 13 EMO BOY!) doing Chaucer, and we were having a lesson regarding some of the archaic spellings and words (and swears) which rock up. The classic being “cuckold”, which is a terrific word which has drifted out of usage without actually dying. Its not a word I use often in speech, and this Chaucer class was the first time I had encountered it – though the theme of being cuckolded was quite familiar to me. When Steven Lees and Caroline Hogan split up apparently it had been due to her dalliance with Martin Brown, and thus an instant analogy was identified by the the class. Though she did not then go and prance around with horns on.

Anyway, the analogy turned out to be a touch unfortunate. Not just because Caroline was in the class and got embarrassed about her love life being used analogously to explain some archaic language in front of a dusty old English teacher. Well more embarrassment was to come, not just for her but the rest of us when Mr Donaldson decided to use a teaching aid. Considering we had already worked out what Cuckold meant, we probably did not need another example, and certainly not one that used one of the schools even archaic tape players. When it got clonked on the table we were expecting at best some medieval music, for a bit of role-play scene setting. Maybe hearing a bit of Chaucer being read by Martin Jarvis would be tolerable. I think none of us expected to hear a snippet of Bruno Brooks voice announcing that number seven was C+C Music Factory, and then the intro to “Things That Make You Go Hmmm”.

Maybe it would have been alright if it was just the intro. But the whole song was played to the class of eight, with Mr Donaldson’s fifty year old frizzy teacher hair bobbing along. As if he was enjoying it. You know that awkwardness that settles when you are listening to music with someone else. Well imagine that with your teacher. This had been a block to me enjoying it for some time.

Song finished, and Mr Donaldson asks us what the relevance was to the conversation we were having. Ever the wag, I suggested that perhaps it was the song to which Caroline had copped off with Martin to. Note, I would never have suggested this if Steven had been in the room. Indeed I would imagine the insertion of his fist into my mouth would have stopped me. Anyway I was wrong (it was I Wanna Be Adored by The Stone Roses). Donaldson used the “anyone, anyone” ruse, and then rolled down the blackboard, where he had put the lyrics of the second verse of Hmm: like so.

“Here’s how it started
Just an example of how another brother can trample
Ruin your life, sleep with your wife
Watch your behind
There was a friend of mine named Jay
Would come over late at night and say hey
I watched the fight. I thought is was alright.
‘Cause me and Jay were really really tight
So damned close we had the same blood type.
Months went by and my wife got big
We were havin’ a child and I got another gig
So I let Jay move into the crib and chill
He had his own room and helped pay the bills
The time had come (for the baby down to the scene)
It looked like Jay and I couldn’t believe
Before my eyes in the delivery room.”

So to recap. Our teacher had transcribed the lyrics and taped a song off of the top 40 countdown to explain precisely to us what the word Cuckold meant, and how the themes implicit in Chaucer were still universal. A good discussion followed, partially due to this innovative teaching aid, and partially in fear that he might play 2 Unlimited to explain to us how the human imagination has no limits. Our embarrassment certainly knew no bounds that day.

I have since come to terms with the bouncy, resigned jollity of this song. And thanks to Mr Donaldson, C+C Music Factory, and about one hundred and fifty other lessons, I passed my A-Level English exam.

Hmmmm.

58. Shangri Las ◊ Leader Of The Pack

Tom, 25th June 2007

Mysteries Of Pop #38715 – Who are the chorus on Leader of the Pack?

The backing vocalists on monumental deathpop masterpiece “Leader Of The Pack” are a gaggle of interested parties who first appear in the spoken-word section that opens the song – “Let’s ask her”. They ask two questions – “Is that Jimmy’s ring you’re wearing” and “Is he picking you up after school today?”. So we know they can’t come from the singer’s school, where everyone stops and stares, because they don’t yet know that Jimmy is dead. In fact you have to feel for the poor heroine of the song, not only is her lover dead but these people are asking frankly intrusive questions. Her initially evasive “uh-uh”, after all, suggests that she doesn’t really want to talk about this stuff when the song starts.

Still she takes it in good grace, recounts how she and Jimmy met, the chorus indicate that they understand – they are curious but not voyeuristic, they don’t want to probe these intimate moments too deeply. Then things really get odd – their next two interjections are attempts at clarification, but only of what the singer’s parents are reported as saying. And indeed they’re directly addressing the parents – “what ya mean when ya say that you better go find somebody new”; it’s the parents who have been saying this, not our heroine. Who, incidentally, makes no attempt to answer the chorus’ questions.

So what’s going on here? Here’s a theory – the chorus are people who are known to, and on speaking terms with, the parents, as well as knowing and being concerned for the heroine, but not at school with her. In other words, they’re the parents’ friends, not the singer’s. They are a little older, gossippy but not so tuned into the events of young life to know yet that Jimmy is dead. They are very keen to push back on the parents’ prejudices as they are certainly a lot more liberal – and we know this because of their frank, indeed enthusiastic, endorsement of pre-marital sex: “Gee, it must be great riding with him”. Case closed!

57. Elvis Costello & The Attractions ◊ Oliver’s Army

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør, 20th July 2007

I semi-remember just two lines from the NME’s (Charlie Shaar Murray’s?) review of “Armed Forces” (secret unused title “Emotional Fascism”). One was that one of the other songs resembled ELP “jamming in the bottom of an oil drum”! The other — more germane to this post, as well as being true — is that “with the boys from the Mersey, the Thames and the Tyne” is a brilliantly compressed evocation of a nation’s sense of itself (if “a nation” = England obv), the disparate togetherness of an army abroad. The other thing I recall from the time is this: watching EC&tAs play this on top of the pops, and someone sitting near me — who was iirc an organ scholar — saying in sudden surprise (as he watched Steve Nieve play the triple-stabbed piano chords of the bridge passage into the second verse), “Oh! He can actually play!”

Craft — the mastered techniques of ordinary pop, word AND music, from a sprawling and unusually broad clutch of decades — is Costello’s thing: his focused strength and his limitation. And at this moment (early 79) — when punk was revalorising the 3-minute single, and “getting into the charts” was considered (by everyone except the bleedn Clash) a radical act, a reignition of a latent power — the compacting into one another of a song built round an Abba riff and a lyric exploring the states of a soldier’s mind, — this was an announcement of thrilling potential. LOOK WHAT WE’RE OPENING UP! Where we’re going is just so RICH, pop but deep, pretty but dark, direct but clever, we can sing about ANYTHING NOW etc etc.

I don’t want to take away from that feeling — it’s my own youth and idealism and excitement, and I’m not going to repudiate it — but I do want to look at how it became a problem, how openness went closed. Costello today is imprisoned by his gifts, and I think all of why is on show already here, in this his biggest hit.

OK what I like about the words are, yes, the compression, the perspective shifts — I don’t know exactly when this device became part of rock and/or pop expressivity, but of course the Pistols had just pushed it to a kind of dizzying limit, every line of every Pistols song a different idea in a different mind — and the resultant ambiguity of cryptic image-collage and POV in OA achieves sympathy as well as critical distance. Only push a bit further in, and I think the crit begins to blur: the Mersey/Thames/Tyne couplet, in full, is as follows: “We could be in Palestine/Overrun by the Chinese Line/With the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne.” Actually google and lyric-sites have “Chinese Lion”, but that doesn’t make much sense either, in terms of geopolitical precision, or cliches about world affairs we know and love [any better ideas or explanations, put em in comments]. I’m not sure that’s such a weakness in this song — it’s just a line that’s never quite parsed — but the punning, rhyming crossword-puzzle density would turn into a shtick, a habit, a way of staying away from the centre of some of (a lot of?) his later material.

The song was written after Costello — real name Declan McManus — visited Belfast, and experienced for himself what it was like to be in a militarised zone, the British Army — descendent of the professionalised forces, loyal to Parliament, fashioned in the English Civil War by Oliver Cromwell (a blood-soaked figure justly loathed in Ireland, whose rep in England is on the whole far more complicatedly positive, precisely bcz the political revolution he set in motion, the ending of the divine right of kings, the establishment despite er hiccups of modern democracy, also established Britain as the hub of an Empire) — wielding guns which pointed, as he suddenly saw it, at himself and those like him: “All it takes is one itchy trigger/One more widow,/one less white n!gger…”

Verses one and three are about the romance of the military — wanting to join up (“My mind goes sleepwalking/While I’m puttin’ the world to rights”), and the sheer vivid energy of possibility, of escape into exotic glamour, of swift-sketched peoples and cultures shimmering and clashing: Kipling said that Empire was great for the British because it encouraged them to escape from their ingrained fubsy parochialism, to encounter the teeming variety and imagination of all humanity. Verse two, the reality from an outsider perspective, recalls the then-famous takedown joke of a Army Ad Campaign of the era: “Join the Army, Travel the World, Meet Exciting, Interesting People — AND KILL THEM!”

And verse four — well, I don’t really get verse four. It mentions Churchill and Johannesburg, and closes the song down in a somewhat formless hint at more knowledge than it delivers: it may be an attempted portrait of how the would-be squaddies are kidding themselves, about how it works when they join up: out of luck, out of work, join up, hey presto you’re side-by-side with the Historical Greats of empire, a tourist in other cultures' energies. I don’t know. What I do know is the perfectly balanced fusion of polar opposite pulls in the chorus: “I would rather be anywhere else than here today” — this is Costello the working-class Irishman, seeing himself as a restless native and thus potential target on Murder Mile, hating it and wanting out; and the unwanted teenager in the Recruitment Office, dreaming of warrior nobility in the world’s dazzling troublespots, and wanting out. I wonder if verse four is there as a wised-up counter to the extraordinary — and I think daring — chorus link: to reassure the punkier, more insecure punters — viz me then — that we’re not being led into WRONG THOUGHT by this linkage, that we DO KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS, and so on and all…

This is getting a bit long, but bear with me two and a bit more paragraphs. The second embedded flaw — which at the time seemed such an enticing portal — is Costello’s commitment to “clever pop”. The problem being — tho this wasn’t clear at the time, indeed I think he was bending the stick in the correct direction — that his rehabilitation of despised craft technique, whether from Cole Porter or Stax or Nashville or Abba, was underneath it, a kind of a revised stands-the-test-of-time announcement, that here were a bunch of ways of approaching the song which deserved to enter the pantheon of deeper intelligence; that complacent rock culture could be opened up. And yes, along with this opening up, we get to rescue pop from being shunted over into the “mere brash ephemeral stupidity” column, where pre-punk rock had shunted it. All of which seems like a great idea — except (over the long haul) it undermines that other thing chart pop provides which considered art is much less good at, that idiot flash of energy and insight (the two inseparably yoked) that you get from a line or a hook or a bodymove: Johnny Rotten’s scornful laugh, Mel and Kim’s hair, Adam Ant’s [select and insert from list too long to include]…

[Threes near-subliminal examples of such flashes in this song: the odd way he pronounces "Arabs"; the way the chorus goes "Oliver's Army is...."/Oliver's army are..." -- another perfect economical statement of an army as both a group and a unity, as disparate unity; and of course Steve Nieve's triple-stab piano]

Oliver’s Army — maybe Armed Forces as a whole, it’s a long time since I listened — is an impacted sketch of ambivalence, of the lure of bad things, ugly emotions and desires, and “I would rather be anywhere else than here today” is the posterchild motto of this, memorably and chart-toppingly both-ways-looking as we reach for escape from the mundane into, well, something maybe much worse (worse for others, if not for us). This was his highpoint — the ebullient, slightly overpumped and convivial fullness of sound, singalong anthemic pubrock punctuated with these startling flashes of otherwhere, seizing the attention of coach-potato poets and organ scholars– and gradually Costello went with his best skills, and why shouldn’t he, except it was a step away from something also. Heroic workrate, enviable facility in wide range to styles, persistent fascination with complex states of mind and nasty states of life assembled themselves into a large, detailed lego-palace labyrinth of work which exactly muffles exactly this kind of WTF this-here-now surprise inreach, into ourselves (artist-audience) when wide open and maybe unalert, ourselves when undefensive and undefended.

56. Marvin Gaye ◊ I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Pete Baran, 23rd July 2007

A British sitting room, 1988. A father and his son are both watching a rental television, a Ferguson one, which was not supplied with a remote control. The child is sitting on the rug, whilst his father has dominion over the room in a very comfy chair.

The strains of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” come through on the televisions single tinny speaker, boxed in by veneer. The son seems resigned in his role as nominal remote control, but puberty has made him less reliable than the standard infra-red version

Father: Turn it over.
Son: I like this.
Father: It’s a travesty. Using a great song like this for advertising.
Son: I like them.

The son gestures towards the on-screen image of claymation raisins.
[Open YouTube Video]

Father: Turn it over.
Son: It’s like a cartoon.
Father: It’s an advert. They are just trying to get you to buy raisins.
Son: Why?
Father: Because its what they sell.
Son: No, I mean why are they using “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” to sell raisins?
Father: What?
Son: It would make sense if they were selling grapes.
Father: Raisins are grapes.
Son: What?
Father: Raisins. They are dried grapes. Hence the sun dried bit in the name Sun Dried California Raisins. Oh god forbid I have just memorised the bloody advert.
Son: So grapes are raisins?
Father: Raisins are grapes. And now the advert is over so its all moot. What’s on now?
Son: Airwolf.
Father: Turn that rubbish over.
Son: No I like to see the old fat man in the jump suit.
Father: Ernest Borgnine. He’s like a sun-dried version of – er – the bloke who played Max in Hart To Hart.
Son: What are you on about Dad?

Airwolf comes on. Ernest Borgnine looks unhappy in the grey jumpsuit: probably remembering his Oscar winning days.

And whilst “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” is a clear soul classic by Marvin Gaye (as Tom and the gang discusses here in Popular), it will always remain to me the way I discovered that raisins were merely dried grapes. Latterly I joined my fathers dislike of animated anthropomorphic fruits trying to sell themselves for me to eat. So that’s the Munch Bunch right out. And that celery who wanted to be smeared in Salad Cream. Though I have always had a soft spot for the Green Giants “ho ho ho”.

55. David Bowie ◊ Suffragette City

CarsmileSteve, 21st August 2007

Wham bam, thank you mam, well quite. Having just looked up the lyrics (having sung them phonetically all these years), is this like bowie trying to be bolan or summat? The other thing is I seem to spend most of the time thinking about other songs whilst trying to think about SC. If it’s not surfin’ usm it’s rock & roll suicide (now i no longer listen to alBUMs this very rarely happens with new tracks, but i have played ZS&TSFM once or twice over the years). maybe it’s the way the wham bam thank you mam bit (the most memorable bit of the song) drags you to the end before you’ve sung the beginning to yrself, thus leading you into the next track on the alBUM, or it being the sample makes you think of the other song (see also cloudbusting vs the u-u-utah saints).

Actually the WBTYM bit even sounds like a sample in the original track, I guess it’s a drop-in, but it doesn’t seem to completely work (or were they obscuring the last consonant on purpose (man rather than mam?))

Anyways, what is dame david going on about here? I’m thinking that much like macca’s use of it in JET, there is little beyond word sound in using suffragette to stand in for “lady” unless, of course, the song is actually about a pankhurst daughter or summat. I’m rather shocked to discover that this was never a UK single, given its ubiquity in terms of a certain type of rock/indie disco, but I suppose early 70s = only a couple of singles off an alBUM at most, rather than the standard 5 or 6 these days.

Importantly, I still think it’s a great track, almost as good as Jean Genie in terms of Bowie/Ronson Glam Stomp.

54. Will Young ◊ Leave Right Now

Pete Baran, 29th August 2007

BALLSY! That’s no the first word that springs to mind when I think of Will Young. And perhaps BALLSY is the wrong word to append to “Leave Right Now”, a sappy song of monumental wetness. But let me tell you why I have recently realised that “Leave Right Now” is one of the BALLSIEST songs of the noughties. And before you say it, none of the reasons is that the songs is itself BALLS. No, I think “Leave Right Now” is terrific. Its just that’s not the reason why its BALLSY.

Will Young came to pop stardom late, and via a route usually relegated to lousy thrashalong indie bands. NO, I don’t mean Pop Idol, you wouldn’t have got the singer of Midway Still getting past four seconds with Simon Cowell. I mean he was finishing a Philosophy degree at university. This should not, and does not, qualify you in anyway to be a teenage heart-throb singer. Being gay is not usually a detriment, but you’re not really supposed to tell anyone until a small proportion of the countries teenage girls have embarrassed themselves over you. But Will announced his not secret anyway sexuality, got through and was the surprise winner of the first series of Pop Idol (beating the pre-pubescent Gareth Gates with the speech impediment which miraculously disappeared afterwards). Whilst Will was the first winner of Pop Idol, the UK music scene has never been overly supportive of talent contest winners having big careers. Particularly if they make a definite effort to move away from their obvious audience (viewers of Pop Idol).

None of which prepares us for the BALLSINESS of “Leave Right Now”. Sure Will showed a remarkable amount of control, making decisions that weaker PR and managers would have vetoed. As one imagines they would have vetoed the initial release of “Leave Right Now”. What artist in his right mind, having been accused of being a flash in the pan, coming out of that most fickle of backgrounds (Reality TV) and with a definite shift in musical style would release a song whose chorus goes:
“I think I’d better leave right now”

The critics were waiting with their knives, and frankly most of them would not have been able to resist a clarion call like this. And this is a song which creeps in the room to start off with, trying not to offend, trying not to make too much of a fuss about itself. The video for it is perfectly literal, it is the song of a man who is ignored and alone in a crowd. That crowd could and perhaps should have been pop music. But as Will’s voice cracks and then smoothly takes control you realise just how BALLSY this guy is. He took on the power of word-play, but he also took on the big ballad. Its a Careless Whisper for the noughties, one of those lyrics which touches the nerves of everyone who has ever felt slightly left out. Will gambled, and was given a career. Like I say BALLSY.

Of course there is an argument that says that Gareth Gates was even more BALLSY to do “Spirit In The Sky” for Comic Relief with The Kumars. But they’d be wrong. This is where the BALLS joke applies.

53. Wham! ◊ Wham Rap

CarsmileSteve, 13th September 2007

They rly don’t make ’em like this any more. Boy bands singing about unemployment? Mentions of governmental departments in choruses? Comedy rapping? OK, there’s still comedy rapping.

My “best of wham!”, which features the 12″ mix of wham rap (all 6:46 of it!), credits the song to michael and ridgeley, I’d kind of always assumed it was written for them, otherwise why is the george michael “character” so very far from the different corner/careless whisper big girls blouse GM we grew to love (and which was clearly much more commercially successful)? In terms of early 80s english rap singles, it’s probably the best though (not that there was a lot of competition). It does kind of capture the Chic groove that eg rappers delight has, and is arguably no more lyrically naive, why shouldn’t hertfordshire boys do rap? I think it works because they’re singing about what they know, what three million people knew at the time (although I doubt whether dole money stretched to buying singles, which might explain why this was their lowest charting proper single). Interesting that the lyrics on the 12″ version include the wonderful line “i choose to cruise”, but this is excised from the single version, Tom Watkins’ idea not to raise suspicions perhaps?

52. Joe Jackson ◊ It’s Different For Girls

Alan, 14th September 2007

Look over there! Where? There in wikipedia where it tells you that Joe Jackson has been putting out records (but not cigarettes) constantly since the late 70s. Not just those two songs once. Yes JJ is one of those unfortunate artists that you know more of their songs than you realise. “Stepping Out” that was him too — a song I know very well, but didn’t even know the title or that it was by him until 20 minutes ago. (Go find it on youtube.) But that was later, smoother 80s JJ — you don’t get more dinner-party-smooth than playing piano for Suzanne Vega, and Stepping Out is even on one of the GTA soundtracks – so perhaps the right phrase is “Mondeo Pop”. If it is I have to insist there are no pejorative connotations. Good, that’s settled.

Anyway. Earlier in 79/80, It’s Different for Girls, and Is She Really Going Out With Him?. These merge into one another in my head. Partly because, well , they do sound the same (they do!), but also because they are in a particularly malleable bit of my memory (someone find me a JJ megamix plz!). The late 70s was the environment that formed my own pre-teen musical tastes, and they were part of the furniture. Everyone knew these songs. Well in the UK – IDfG didn’t chart or wasn’t released in the US despite being his (still) highest charting single in the UK. Shame.

These two songs have a similar tone too — a ‘reportage’ sense of conversation. Something that seems prototypical of my favourite sort of indie — mid 80s shambolic uk guitar indie. “Relationship” conversations overheard/reported or from a dissociated 1st person is key to the songs of David Gedge for one. There is a strong “IT’S NOT FAIR” sulky injustice in common too.

Though ISRGOWH? is clearly a ‘what a bitch!’ conversation between Joe and his gang of mates (in which you are included), IDfG is more ambiguous and more generous to the ladies. It’s not certain how the narrator relates to the people in the song — he could be repeating what he overheard at a bus shelter, or he could be, more conventionally, the bloke in the story. But then that story is none too clear either:

“Don’t you know that it’s different for girls!? [sez lady presumably] You’re all the same”

Women, eh? Bless them. It’s as if they were, i don’t know, from another planet or something — as if Men were from Ceti Alpha Six, and Women were from Ceti Alpha Five. And guess what? THIS is Ceti Alpha Five! Because a close look at the verses can seem to imply a reversal of stereotypes — that it’s the girl here who is just out for no-strings ‘fooling around’. Or, looked at another way, perhaps she’s saying she just wants to be friends. WHO CAN BLOODY TELL WITH WOMEN?†

And perhaps that’s also the point. Negotiations are fraught when you don’t speak the same language. (Just like that episode of Star Trek where Picard… why do i keep coming back to star trek??) And because the title is one of those unreasonable trump-card lines to which there is no comeback, it’s a win-win — the boys get to sulk (yay, so indie) and the girls get to feel good (yay, so empowered).

†Unclear as it is, the story here has little in common with the film of the same name — Tony ‘TV drama’ Marchant’s transgender rom-com. You ’eard. Being generous you could draw a gender role-reversal parallel. I don’t want to know about Jo Brand’s book of the same name. But the wide appropriation of the phrase in titles and headlines does make me wonder if JJ was the first to the presses of popular culture with it.

51. Whigfield ◊ Think Of You

Pete Baran, 28th September 2007

What do I think of when I think of “Think Of You”?

Sadly, the answer is “Saturday Night”. You can’t talk about Whigfield without talking about “Saturday Night”, and the problem with that is that in the end “Saturday Night” is probably all you end up talking about. If hard pushed to name another Whigfield song, the smart people may remember “Think of You”, but would be easily sidetracked into saying “Turn Back Time” by Aqua. Indeed Aqua seemed to be Whigfield fronting the B-52′s* such are their equivalent lasting appeals and places in pop. So why Whigfield and Think of You?

The “holiday” song was not a new phenomenon by the time summer 1994 came around. Y Viva Espana was twenty years before. But “Saturday Night” was a holiday pop song which came from Ibiza, the ubiquitous pop club banger which everyone knew on their way home. By the time it was finally released in the UK it had a ready made audience. It also had the extreme good fortune to knock Wet Wet Wet’s “Love is All Around” off of the top of the charts engendering Whigfield with an indie cred that could not be derived from the song itself. But my primary memories of “Saturday Night” is associating it with Ibiza. I had just left University, and the island of clubs was a post-exam destination for lots of people I knew (and didn’t much like ). All though the summer the all new down with the kids Radio One, I mean One FM, had been banging on about Ibiza, Peter Tonging from the Island during its club heavy weekends. So when I finally heard the fruits of this hardkore summer of action I was a bit surprised. This sweet little pop confection that came WITH A DANCE! That was what Ibiza ’94 was all about. Oh the schadenfreude!

All of which is STILL not about “Think Of You”, but does go some way to explaining why I consider “Think Of You” as Whigfield’s only proper song. “Saturday Night” to me is a cultural milestone. It killed off Wet Wet Wet (probably forced Pellow to smack). It tore down the party I was not having by not being in Ibiza, but being so naff. And even its seminal video was cheap, nasty and was fundamentally about a girl who looked liked she would be more comfortable in Lederhosen doing her hair**. Saturday Night, from its bouncing frog sound to its fake echo at the end is an artefact, not a song, and Whigfield herself is just a small part of it.

[Open YouTube Video]

So “Think Of You”, the follow up, was, to me, her first real song. And it is a good song. Its less gimmicky, less flashy and potentially less catchy than “Saturday Night”. It doesn’t have a dance after all. BUT if this had been “Saturday Night” I doubt I would have dismissed the Ibiza sound quite so much. It starts with almost the definition of Balearic House, with a simple piano motif which repeats throughout the song. The production is as clear and bold as a SAW Kylie song from the late eighties, and the catchy lyrics (down to a little bit of Scando Scat near the end). Indeed the Kylie comparison is a good one, as this is the period when Kylie was off being SEXKYLIE, and INDIEKYLIE wasn’t far off. Far be it for me to be as simplistic as saying that there was a Kylie-sized void (which would be pretty small), but there may be some truth to it. Beating Wet Wet Wet was Whiggy’s Neighbours, and if “Saturday Night” was her “Loco-motion” that makes “Think Of You” Whigfield’s “I Should Be So Lucky”. So perhaps the dwindling of Whigfield’s career is down to a lack of a Jason Donovan, or indeed any definable personality beyond the usual pop platitudes. Or maybe none of her other songs were as good as “Think of You”

You’re still thinking of “Saturday Night” aren’t you? Listen to “Think Of You” below…

*A description that simultaneously is unkind to not just Whigfield and the B-52′s, but Aqua as well!

**I know Whiggy was Danish, but she looks and acts remarkably German to me. In the Think of You video, in her power suit she reminds me more of Andrea Merkel more than anyone else. LOOK!

[Open YouTube Video]

50. Gwen Stefani ◊ What You Waiting For

Tom, 9th November 2007

Tick tock tick tock – generally with any top 100 list there are some very recent records that slip into the rundown thanks to the immediate enthusiasm of the participants and stick out a bit amidst the established classics. Here at Freaky Trigger we believe – Malcolm Gladwell stylee – that momentary enthusiasm is generally a truer guide to worth than long rumination and so we have daringly waited for three years before writing up Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?” because we KNEW we were right about it. When the list was made this was a bubble of joy shooting up the half-full glass of pop THAT IS THE CHARTS – now however it stands revealed as the foundation stone of a reinvigorated strand of mental clockwork robot pop by ladies. Without the self-knowledge, tricksiness, frightening dancefloor compulsion and Jacques Lu Cont remixes of “What You Waiting For” we would surely not have had Fergie, “Hung Up”, Britney singing about flashing the paparazzi and that other Gwen track about the goatherd. The only sorrow is that Britain’s pop stars have been too reserved to take up the baton: TashBed is mad but in a slightly different fashion and the new lot seem happy to sing about toothbrushes.

49. The Spice Girls ◊ Who Do You Think You Are

Pete Baran, 13th November 2007

Well our slack timing has done us a favour here. Because all things Spice are knocking around again, and we aren’t completely succumbing to nostalgia to justify its position. Has history been kind to the Spice Girls, and to Who Do You Think You Are in particular? Well, I can’t speak for history, but recent journalistic summaries of the Spice Girls first coming have been pretty damning on WDYTYA. A song notable for being the last release off of Spice, and a double A-side with the not all that good Mama, but many reviewers seem to think it was bland and by rote.

Well, yes, in comparison to Wannabe, Who Do You Think You Are does seem a little more like a standard girl group number. Unless you consider it in its historical setting. Nothing the Spice Girls, nothing anyone else has done, has ever really sounded like Wannabe* – as a girl gang stomp of naked ambition and sisterhood it stands alone. Whereas girl bands since have borrowed the sleek chassis of Who Do You Think You Are, with its watered down attitude and its aerobic chorus ever since. All the “just good” Girls Aloud stompers are the children of Who Do You Think You Are, and as a piece of lego songwriting the three distinct parts of the song can be reassembled into countless Atomic Kitten, Sugababes and Pussycat Dolls tracks ad infinitum. Indeed take out the stomping chorus, and it becomes an almost vulnerable stab at pathos.

Of course it was a double A side with Mama, and the Comic Relief single – usually enough it its own right to push it down the dumper. So as defacto fourth/fifth single off of Spice we were itching for the new. All this paring showed us was the competence of the album. I actually think Who Do You Think You Are is better than that, but it is interesting to see why others might think it isn’t.

The pop girl group (as response to Boy band) did not exist before the Spice Girls, so they are aloud to make the generic track, because they sort of invented it. Perhaps hindsight doesn’t treat the song well for people who despise what the Spice Girls wrought. But to me it still sounds like what it was sold as, the sound of the future (a future which they let others provide – cheers Xenomania). But bear in mind they came out of the traps with a bizarre sounding shouty concoction, a hyper-sexualised mid-tempo love song and a swoonsome Christmas number one ballad. Mama and Who Do You Think You Are could be seen as a bit staid in comparison. But actually as the last single it brings the Girls full circle back to Wannabe. While it is less openly aggressive than Wannabe it is still more accusatory that 95% of the rest of the pop charts at the time. Who Do You Think WE Are – the Spice Girls were asking at the end of nine mental months: the tabloids had already decided, christened and set their personalities in aspic. But the song (with its stupidly cheap video which still trounced the horror of the Mama video) is actually asking us, the audience who we wanted them to be. We, sadly, sided with the tabloids, happy with the cartoon spices until we got bored. But as the end of phase one of the Spice Girls it is the perfect ending to a vital moment of pop history.

Wannabe got them noticed. Who Do You Think You Are confirmed to me that they were more than just some kind of superstar.

*OK, C’est La Vie by B*Witched has something of Wannabe‘s WTF sass. But it also has a Riverdance breakdown which puts it beyond the pale.

48. Glen Campbell ◊ Rhinestone Cowboy

Pete Baran, 2nd December 2007

I have a firm belief that this is the second song I ever heard.

Read all about my childhood association with Glen here. Instead here I want to talk about how a song can subtly infiltrate different thoughts and memories and thus distort your view of the world. There are three aspects of my life view which have been distorted by Rhinestone Cowboy.

a) What a Rhinestone is
b) The weather in New York
c) The plot of the film Midnight Cowboy

So super-tiny Pete bouncing around at home hears Rhinestone Cowboy. I know what a cowboy is, Bonanza is still on television and Alias Smith And Jones was on too late to watch. But lyric comprehension is not a high point. I know there is stuff about trains, which probably ties in with train robbery – but the mention of snow and rain is what most arrests this youthful country fan. Having recently experienced, and asked endless questions, about a hail storm which had occurred there must have been some slight linguistic confusion in my bonce. Henceforth, and until put right some years later at school, ice falling from the sky was known to me as rhinestones. Even when corrected, I did not correct my view of the rhinestones not being meteorological in origin.

Which brings me on to the weather. There is a lot of weather in Rhinestone Cowboy. One of Larry Weiss’s nice runs of words introduces the nice guys who get washed away like the snow and the rain: the rain which later reappears to really not mind. And having been introduced the concept of Broadway via some television musicals, couple with the subway tokens, I have always assumed that Rhinestone Cowboy takes place in New York. And thus New York, via Glen’s song, is a windier, wetter town than Manchester in my memory. (That said the regular news reports of New York under snow in January has reinforced this).

So finally to Midnight Cowboy. Its unlikely that the three year old me had much awareness of Midnight Cowboy. This was before video’s after all, and Midnight Cowboy is famous for being the only adult rated winner of an Oscar*. Possibly my first awareness would be in the early eighties – maybe via a listen to “Everybody’s Talkin’” (I had a friend who was a big Nilsson fan). So there was a connection between this gentle Nilsson song, the film and thusly Midnight Cowboy becomes Rhinestone Cowboy. Midnight Cowboy: a story of a grizzled showbizzy country singer hustling his way up and down Broadway. I was possibly too young to pick up any double meaning of hustle in the song and in Midnight Cowboy. Even now I think Rhinestone Cowboy is the theme (and occasionally name of) Midnight Cowboy.

Thinking about all this has given me a fourth connection, one of a pop music family tree. If Rhinestone Cowboy is the grandaddy of country meets city singalongs, then one of its progeny is Big & Rich’s “Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy”. And as both songs straddle Broadway I just singalong, standing on a table, adding to my musical landscape of New York. And thanks to Glen my New York is wet and snowy, bombing frozen hailstones like rhinestones from the sky with Jon Voight hustling his way up and down Broadway. And that is as good a New York as anyone elses.

*Its a trademark you know. I’ll probably get sued just for saying the word. Note, no-one is ever called Oscar these days.

47. Doop ◊ Doop

CarsmileSteve, 7th February 2008

It’s March 1994 and i’m helping to set up at our “end of rag week” ball. As usual there are twice as many people as are actually needed due to being able to get in for nowt if you do a bit of humping and shifting. Both the ents and rag gangs (separate, yet overlapping) were pretty much, to a person, INDIE, one might even go as far as to say PROPER INDIE (with maybe like three dance kids). And yet, and yet, about every five minutes, one of us without fail would start humming or whistling or quietly singing to ourselves “doo-de-ah doo-de-ah doodoodoo” without even realising until someone went “GAH, THAT BLUDY SONG AGAIN!!!” and then five minutes later it would be them whistling it. Honestly, it went on all day. The sound engineer, who was a truly miserable bastard having spent ten years on the road with hawkwind (and had the track marks to prove it), was beside himself, because we just couldn’t stop doing it. I’m sure that Doop was not one of the songs discussed on How Pop Songs Work the other month, but it clearly was very very effective somehow…

[Open YouTube Video]

Blimey, for a three minute song, it goes on a bit, eh?

46. Franz Ferdinand ◊ Take Me Out

Pete Baran, 12th February 2008

TEN RANDOM THINGS ABOUT FRANZ FERDINAND AND TAKE ME OUT.

1: The intro sounds like the end of another song. Indeed I didn’t know there was an intro until someone (Carsmile?) played the song at Poptimism. So whilst I do think a degree of the success of the song is the delay of the killer riff, it isn’t the most important aspect of the song.

2: Franz Ferdinand’s robust new wave jerkiness in my mind contrasts with the Russian avant-garde imagery of their cover art-work in a way I find hard to peg. Whilst both the band sound, and the artwork is distinctive in its respective marketplaces, I find an odd disjunction in their relative strikingness. But hey that’s art school bands for you.

3: “But hey, that’s art school bands for you” is a lazy, but nevertheless thoroughly appropriate put down for them which would explain why they will never reach Arctic Monkey levels of success. If they aren’t happy with that they can always commiserate with Damon Albarn (who I daresay they met when they interviewed the Gorillaz.

4: Its one of those songs whose lyrics border on the banal, and yet bellowed in a club become almost the Tabula Rasa of the indie night out. Probably not since “go home and cry and I want to die” has a single lyric been embraced purely because it describes the ugly lives of its listeners more that “I know I won’t be leaving here/ with you”

5: Franz Ferdinand is a character in the Dutch cartoon Alfred J.Kwak. He plays the king, and is a lion. There is also a crow called Dolph who looks like Hitler. It is not a subtle cartoon.

6: Franz Ferdinand epitomise the speedy rise of the Brit indie band, from small gigs in their stripy tops, to top five single, to Brit awards, to old statesmen of the industry writing food columns for the broadsheets. They also have employed almost all the tricks to parley their relatively limited sound into mainstream acceptance – namely a strong visual branding and willingness to play with the music press (Franz Ferdinand go bowling).

7: Franz Ferdinand (the band) come higher on a Google for Franz Ferdinand than Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

8: It is one of the only indie video’s I really remember from the last ten years. And as videos go, it happily sets out the look, sound and – and perhaps this word is more apt than other bands – manifesto of the band. Whilst perhaps avoid the Russian avant-garde of their main artwork, it is still a video all about art, rather than a video about what the song is about. Its a performance video via a craft shop and manages to plant the ideas of art, craft, and being not quite the finished product in the viewers mind. Which is a touch ironic as it is unlikely FF is going to make as iconic a record as Take Me Out again.
[Open YouTube Video]

9: The video also commits the cardinal sin of displaying the words to much of the song as it goes on, which they get away with by the skin of their teeth. I should hate it, but I don’t, because its a terrific song and video.

10: Its an odd tempo-ed song for dancing to. The intro rattles along with its snare, but is all build and no bass drum, so tough to dance to. However at about 105 BPM the main body of the song feels irresistibly danceable, but all you can really get away with is a matey bounce. This is lucky because the matey bounce is one of the three acceptable indie disco dances, but is the least attractive, yet again underlying the message of the song. Whilst you sing “I know I won’t be leaving here/with you” your body is making sure of it.

45. The Undertones ◊ Teenage Kicks

Pete Baran, 13th May 2008

Of all the records this admittedly sluggish Top 100 could have stalled on for its longest period, it is odd that it was Teenage Kicks. After all everyone loves Teenage Kicks, right? Tom was toying with writing about it as an adjunct to this Pitchfork article about Peel, but the time came and went (and you can’t begrudge him, he is going great guns on Popular). A few other volunteered, to then realise that they couldn’t quite put into words what they really wanted to say about TK. And so I will attempt it, after being prompted by the reference made by Tom in this Abba – Dancing Queen article. He (rightly in my opinion) sees Teenage Kicks and Dancing Queen as being cut from the same cloth, a glorious celebration of teenaged energy and abandon. Is that why Teenage Kicks is so good though?

Well yes. That’s why it is good. Great even. But SO GOOD? That reason is John Peel. Bear in mind that as the eclectic, all over the place, music loving DJ persona that really crystallised in the 80′s, he would constantly be asked a number of questions about his musical taste. And it is odd that we all know his favourite single and favourite album and that NEVER CHANGED in almost twenty years. Trout Mask Replica, and Teenage Kicks. Which perhaps in 1982 as a pairing would have shown considerable pop/rock breadth, but by 2002 could be from the same album (indeed I am sure you can get a Peel sanctioned comp with Kicks and some Beefheart on it).

None of that is to say that Teenage Kicks isn’t any good. Part of me wanted to write a devils advocate piece, to at least crisp up the comments segment (non-Popular threads often get Popular envy). No, its a terrific little firecracker of a record which has survived being endlessly quoted. But I am pretty sure that even my first listen to it came with the Peel baggage (now I may not have listened to Peel then, but I would have been young enough to consider ANY DJ thinking a track is the best ever as enough of a seal of approval*). But I was aware of power pop, and punk and coming in way after the fact was there still enough in Teenage Kicks to really make it special? I don’t, and can’t know – and as the bargain basement of the Record And Tape Exchange fills up with more Green Day best-ofs, is there anything that will make Teenage Kicks stand out?

If Tom is trying to think about about the context of a single in its time in Popular, I suggest it might be interesting to do the opposite here. Take Teenage Kicks out of its context (which may help it from a Feargal Sharkey perspective). Try to divorce it from Peel, take it away from its period of post-punk greatness. Would it fit on an Ash Greatest Hits album without surprising you? There are other Undertones songs which are much funnier and more distinctive (My Perfect Cousin for one). Teenage Kicks may be generic teenage energy crystallised perfectly, but perhaps its perfection would have made it fade, if it wasn’t for Peel. Watch and see if you agree?

[Open YouTube Video]

*I am pretty sure my love of Nellie The Elephant is due to an inappropriate Ed Stewpot Stewart interview in Look-In.

44. The Selecter ◊ On My Radio

Alan, 11th June 2008

The edition of Top of the Pops on the 8th November 1979 featured The Specials (A Message To You, Rudy), Madness (One Step Beyond), and The Selecter (On My Radio). UK pop buyers officially loved the “2 Tone” label. The distinctive checkered-strip logo was an instantly recognisable label of your pop allegiance — a simple design that was easy to pick out in tippex(r) on an army-surplus school-bag, or in the blocky graphics of home computers at the time (shift-S shift-S shift-S…). I was too young to care (or know) about labels, but I knew the music, and I knew there were special moves at the school disco.

The success of 2 Tone was rapid — their first release, by founding band The Specials, had only been in the summer gone of 79 when the band ‘The Selecter’ didn’t yet exist. They were the label’s first manufactured band, put together from Coventry’s ska scene and given the name of that first release’s (ambiguously attributed) instrumental B-side.

It’s a template pop-ska song, all insistent speed-reggae hooks that get you up and dancing. Elbows and heels. Fun fun fun. Not the overly conscious genre of ska associated with this wave. But it’s not ‘nutty’ Madness either which luckily means it endures beyond adolescence, and (well done them) gets into FT’s legendary top 100 tracks of all time. So listen again. This is the ska version of Tina Charles’ “I Love To Love” — their respective babies just love to dance, and that’s just not enough for a relationship, now is it gents? And you don’t want to be dumped by (Selecter vocalist) Pauline — she’s been in The Bill and everything.

Listen to a recorded live performance on Last FM
Articles on 2 Tone

43. Stina Nordenstam ◊ Little Star

Alan, 26th June 2008

If you haven’t heard this song just go and listen to it. (You may recognise it — it was used in the sproutface DiCaprio Romeo and Juliet). That’s all I should say.

However, to make the your perhaps-momentous discovery more possible, you may need preparing.

If you have not heard Stina’s voice it’s because you’ve never seen an Ariston washing machine advert, and it’s her voice that could be the deal breaker. There are songs you cannot persuade people they will like, and often it’s because of the vocal. If a voice is like nails on a blackboard to you, you won’t get past that. Similarly if it’s like being repeatedly limply patted on the shoulder by a wet teddybear, you’re going to get fed up quite quickly. Still, I made an effort to like Neil Young and Morrissey, so you could have a go with winsome Stina, eh? She’s Swedish — you love Swedish pop right?

In a way this is the song to get past her twee etiolated voice. Like the little star, her voice might feel initially weak, but it’s got a hidden and precise power, and it’s set among such glory — contrasting simple and luxurious instrumentation, a rising-bird-song clarinet melody and a tasteful amount of latin chanting. Well, it is a eulogy — and there should be generous room for tasteful at a funeral. The lyrics supposedly recall a friend who killed themselves (those crazy Swedes), which explains the extreme bitter-sweet feeling it conveys.

The song is from an album of equally moody jazz-blues soaked and sullen songs that manage to avoid being passive-aggressively ‘sensitive’. Her other albums have varied in tone a lot — she’s done dreampop guitar-noise, collaborated with Mew and Vangelis (the washing machine ad!), and had Brett Suede guesting on one of her own tracks. So if this piques your interest and you want more, you’ll find she’s got quite a range. Just not as a vocalist.

Man I love her voice.

42. ABBA ◊ The Winner Takes It All

Pete Baran, 1st July 2008

Oh it's all Abba all the time round here these days, what with Popular knee deep in the 1970s. Well Winner Takes It All is 1980′s Abba, and a significantly more jaded, wistful Abba it is too. So rather than talk to much about the track itself (I’d leave that to Tom cos I’m afraid of the spoiler bunny), let’s use this opportunity to talk a bit about the other big Abba sensation this month. The release of Mamma Mia! the film.

The stage version of Mamma Mia! has been fantastically successful, and deservedly so. It did not take a genius to work out that Benny & Bjorn’s music would work well in a musical theatre setting (well, they did make Chess twenty years ago so they themselves noticed). It was however pretty smart to match the tracks to a plot which allows the songs to occasionally touch on the plot whilst being apt for the setting – namely a wedding. We expect to hear Abba at a wedding, so the scenario of a wedding on an idyllic Greek island also works as a perfect setting to hear Abba songs. TV Writer Catherine Johnson manages to intertwine an interesting and even suspenseful plot around this – whilst being as fluffy as you would want it to be. Compared to the monsters it spawned (particularly anything with Ben Elton’s involvement), it is a remarkable achievement.

And so to the film. A friend of mine went on a press junket yesterday for it and was surprised when most of the questions for the panel – consisting of Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan and Benny and Bjorn – were aimed at the Abba duo. Who gets to interview Abba these days? And this is the Abba who don’t like people sampling their records, and are quite protective of their rights. Sure Mamma Mia! will make them a lot of money, but they already have a lot of money. Do they really need to see Meryl Streep singing The Winner Takes It All? Because she belts it out in the movie.

Actually for your info, here’s the soundtrack listing (with an implicit hint that Stellan Skarsgard is not a great singer):

1. Honey Honey – Seyfried, Amanda & Ashley Lilley/Rachel McDowall
2. Money Money Money – Streep, Meryl & Julie Walters/Christine Baranski
3. Mamma Mia – Streep, Meryl
4. Dancing Queen – Streep, Meryl & Julie Walters/Christine Baranski
5. Our Last Summer – Firth, Colin & Pierce Brosnan/Stellan Skarsgard/Amanda Seyfried/Meryl Streep
6. Lay All Your Love On Me – Cooper, Dominic & Amanda Seyfried
7. Super Trouper – Streep, Meryl & Julie Walters/Christine Baranski
8. Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight) – Seyfried, Amanda & Ashley Lilley/Rachel McDowall
9. Name Of The Game – Seyfried, Amanda
10. Voulez Vous – Full Cast
11. SOS – Brosnan, Pierce & Meryl Streep
12. Does Your Mother Know – Baranski, Christine & Philip Michael
13. Slipping Through My Fingers – Streep, Meryl & Amanda Seyfried
14. Winner Takes It All – Streep, Meryl
15. When All Is Said And Done – Brosnan, Pierce & Meryl Streep
16. Take A Chance On Me – Walters, Julie & Stellan Skarsgard/Colin Firth/Philip Michael/Christine Baranski
17. I Have A Dream – Seyfried, Amanda
18. Thank You For The Music (hidden track) – Full Cast

How is this as a list of Abba greats? A few surprises maybe. Thankfully they have not considered a way of slipping Fernando in there (actually if I remember rightly Chiquitita may have been excised from the stage version). Interesting to see if they deal with the Glasgow issue in Super Trouper.

Will it do what they call boffo box office? There seems to be an undercurrent of interest in it, and everyone I know who has seen the film has liked it. But then I was sceptical about the stage version, but was won over. The interesting thing is the very faithful backing tracks coupled with the more interesting deliveries (here is a link to Pierce Brosnan singing S.O.S. which isn’t great). But hey I’m a sap, I like musicals. And with that I will leave you with the 42 best track of all time, but sung by Meryl Streep. Sorry Agnetha and Frida.

[Open YouTube Video]

41. t.a.T.u. ◊ Not Gonna Get Us

Pete Baran, 10th July 2008

There is a strange double headed hydra lurking at the centre of pop marketing. The first head is the music. The music is the product, and the music is what people are buying. If the music is good enough, surely there is no need for extraneous marketing. However the second head rears up here, and will happily point out the huge number of other singles being released all of which have some claim to being good. Since once you are inside the belly of the beast (in this case a hydra) it becomes more difficult to spot those sure fire winners. Especially if those future hits require a couple of plays. So how do you get a couple of plays? Sensationalist marketing. Such as:

LIPSTICK LESBIAN RUSSIAN TEEN POP SENSATIONS TATU FOLLOW UP SINGLE SMASH

SHOCKING VIDEO FOR SAPPHIC SENSATIONS WHO WOULD NOT BE LEGAL IN THE UK

TREVOR HORN PRODUCES NOT QUITE AS GOOD FOLLOW UP SINGLE TO ALL THE THINGS SHE SAID

Yes, one of these headlines is not like the other. Because there is little room for truth in marketing, and as t.a.T.u.’s second big world hit is still a pretty good single. Not Gonna Get Us relies strongly on the girls strangled cat vocals, which are still startling. It reminds you of All the Things She Said, without completely replicating it – and in its own way continues the loose story of the previous track. It is Lena and Yulia’s forbidden love against the world, and the world is not going to get them. Not that their plan of “hiding in plain sight making a lot of noise” makes an awful lot of sense. But it works as a robust dancefloor filler, happy to fit in a pop, goth or emo club (where we might find our confused teens punching the air shouting “They Don’t Understand Us”.)

I suppose my question is – bearing in mind that this list was made in 2004 – does Not Gonna Get Us stand up as a great single now? If we remove it from its trucking video, from the lesbian chic and the tabloid hoo-hah about nothing. Lesbianism has always been a strange hetero male fetish, and clearly one played up to the hilt at this point of global domination. Can the song also be separated from revelations of non-lesbianism, childbirth and that piss-poor petulant Eurovision song contest entry? Truth is it can’t be divorced from either, and much like the less impressive follow up records of many a big thing, when revisited later its difficult to recreate the excitement, the feeling of NOW that allows a track like this to go to number one.

Of course, the comments box will now be filled with people saying how much they prefer Not Gonna Get Us. GO BACK TO YOUR "MY MORNING JACKET" ALBUMS!

[Open YouTube Video]

40. Led Zeppelin ◊ Immigrant Song

Tom, 14th July 2008

When Jeff Wayne was hunting for a musical way to express the horror and chaos of a Martian invasion, it was to Led Zeppelin he turned. The synthesiser riff on “Horsell Common And The Heat Ray”, so evocative of war-blasted Wokingham and Chobham, is nothing more than the wordless chorus howl of “Immigrant Song”, slowed down a bit. To the Angles huddled in their sheepfolds on the North Sea coast, the attacking Norsemen must have seemed as terrifyingly other as the Martians, sharing their blind death-lust and effortless tech superiority. So of course from the comfort of our armchairs centuries later it’s the Northlanders we empathise with, not their prey: surely being a Viking must have been as primal and thrilling as Led Zeppelin’s most undeniably POP moment?

(Similarly, in Wayne if not Wells the Martians are BY SOME DISTANCE the amoral pop heroes of WoTW – let’s face it, OOLAA gets the blood pumping more than D.Essex)

To be a “barbarian”, an invader, is to face two historical fates: oblivion or assimilation. The long-term economics of constant rapine don’t add up – sooner or later you end up dead, or in a bigger sheepfold of your own, listlessly watching the horizon you once shadowed. That’s the pessimistic view, anyway, one I subscribed to when I used to handwave Led Zep away into irrelevance because they were Rock and Old. The Vikings short-circuited that gloomy prospect by simply making their afterlife a hall of heroes where eternal pillage was an option. In its forever addictive aggression, the Zep song that turned me round on them makes the same point.

39. Awesome Toys ◊ Do The Fury Boogie

Pete Baran, 29th August 2008

From the files of futurologist Al Ewing:

Originally released in March of 2014, ‘Do The Fury Boogie’ was the standout track on the Awesome Toys’ ‘difficult’ second album, How Dare You Say You Love Me When You’ve Taken The Only Parachute,which divided the fans on the issue of whether or not it was rubbish and, indeed, whether there weren’t more important things the band could have been doing, like being with their loved ones. It’s a mysterious song – Geberhart sings from the point of view of an albatross whom lonely mariners have taught to dance by the expedient of tying heavy mechanical parts to the tips of its wings, an odd little conceit that somehow works when Geberhart relays it in his croaking, ruptured monotone. It’s what Yellow Submarine might have sounded like had it been performed by a snail. The high point comes as the weights melt from the sheer hateful intensity of the titular boogie, but the albatross does not fly – instead:

Rather than take to the air
I vomit in despair
into your hair
so there

It’s that moment of tragedy that defines the song and to a large extent the band – it’s hard to listen to that kind of pure heartbreak without shedding a tear, although most people were in a crying mood back then, for obvious reasons. Which makes it all the more strange that – when the news broke that we were actually in for a near miss – ‘Fury Boogie’ suddenly became a euphoric dancefloor smash, retooled by The Neptunes for the summer as a high-gloss bosh-mambo freakout, with Ken Geberhart’s original haunted tones, like the lowing of a dead cow, replaced by Kylie in what would be her last performance. There were lots of songs that summed up the Spring of Fear and the Summer of Joy, but this was the only song that did both. It’s a snapshot of history and history in its own right – for that alone it deserves to be in anybody’s top tracks of all time.

38. Kenickie ◊ Punka

Pete Baran, 28th October 2008

Avid readers of Freaky Trigger will be aware that our intermittent at best feature, running down the “Top 100 Songs of all time as voted for in a pub in 2004″. And hopefully haven’t been holding their breath, because they’d be a Long Time Dead by now. Not a hint. So why have we been waiting for so long for this particular entry. Why number 38?

Well let me show you behind the curtain. No, the list was not broken by Awesome Toys lesser known and not actually real (yet) Do The Fury Boogie. Instead the officially decided Number 38 sat there waiting to be written about. The usual writers looked at it and passed, not being particular fans. But that’s OK, we have an extended gang of people who would happily write about it, who must have voted for it. So we waited for them to write it. And it did not happen. Which can mean only one thing.

Punka – by Kenickie is not the thirty eighth best single of all time. Not even in the rarified atmosphere of upstairs in the Jeremy Bentham after a pub crawl. We have been proven wrong by history because its impossible to write an article saying how good Punka is. So instead, we have a deal for you dear reader.

38 is up for grabs. You have until 12 noon tomorrow to put your own suggestion in the comments thread below, and then we will do a poll to decide what the 38th best single of all time is. Think of it as a dry run for the US election. And whatever wins I will happily write how great it is.

ONE WARNING however. If the chosen song turned out to be in the top thirty, it will get moved down and a whole new election will take place. Barely a warning but keep it in mind. In the meantime remember, Punka – proven rubbish by science…

Editor's note… This happened not through lack of love for Kenickie. We later managed to get them voted 3rd best Britpop band after Pulp and Blur.

38. As Chosen By You The Readers: Baltimora ◊ Tarzan Boy

Pete Baran, 12th November 2008

Pop culture songs are tricky. Just look at that current Scouting For Girls song about James Bond. I am not cynical enough to say that Scouting For Girls have picked a release date just because Quantum Of Solace just came out. But some commentators might. Just as some people may note a match up between the release of Baltimora’s Tarzan Boy a few months after Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan mopefest was released. But this would again be a case of coincidence – as the jolly Eurodisco of Tarzan Boy resembles in no way the dull Christopher Lambert starrer. To me Baltimora’s song was a much better match to the playful Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan season shown during the 1985 summer holidays. Us indoorsy kids not playing out in that balmy summer were not big time record buyers – so our Cheeta love alone could not be why punters in their droves snapped up this pop culture special – without it being a novelty single.

One of the things I always appreciated about Baltimora’s lyrics in Tarzan Boy is how little it really refers to Edgar Rice Burrough’s most lucrative creation. Tarzan Boy is not about Tarzan after all, rather Baltimora uses Tarzan as a simile for his own make-believe jungle life. And by jungle life they just mean some mild arson and monkey business. The rest of it is a slow burn hi-energy chant-a-long, a slightly overgrown Club Tropicana. Yes there is merit in the “Night to night – gimme the other” repetition in the chorus, but the real secret to the song is the – and I quote from a random lyrics site:

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

I count that as forty four oh’s which – whilst a good night in on the divan – is not as many as I count the song offering in its Tarzan break. Not that Baltimora do an even vaguely convincing Tarzan yelp. Instead it is some sort of anodyne yodel, Conway Twitty lite. Not that smuggling what is essentially a yodelling song into the top five in 1985 is not without its merits. Its just a bit sneaky. Like the bad guys in Tarzan.

It was that summer I discovered Maureen O’Sullivan in Tarzan And His Mate. Even after they changed her costume to a one piece she was the first black and white woman I ever loved. And that was without the original pre-code nude swimming scene. Oh oh oh indeed.

[Open YouTube Video]

There would have been no way I could have linked to a nude video if I had written about Punka.

37. T-Rex ◊ Metal Guru

Pete Baran, 18th November 2008

Marc Bolan was never one of the great dead pop stars when I was a kid. T-Rex were not on my pop radar, seemingly out of fashion from the late seventies until a Bolan track was used to sell jeans in the late eighties. I really don’t remember hearing them much at all, not in the gobsmacking way I did when, post said jeans commercial, I looked them up in the Guinness Book of Hit Singles. Number ones, big hits, tragic popstar death. Why did I not know these tracks?

So once 20th Century Boy had burned its way into my brain, I made an effort to hear more. The albums were really hard to get hold of, which I put down to their ridiculous title (My People Were Fair And Had Sky In Their Hair But Now They’re Content To Wear Stars On Their Brows for example). And it surprised me that even off of the back of said jeans commercial no T-Rex Greatest Hits was released. Was there some conspiracy to stop me examining the back catalogue of this hugely successful band? I started blaming David Bowie who seemed to be a contemporary who also liked a bit of sparkly make-up and had survived. I wondered if Bowie had indulged in some form of rewriting history, where he was the kind androgynous pop chameleon and Marc Bolan was just a frizz haired chancer who was lousy at driving.

And then I heard Metal Guru. And I realised I knew it all along. There was not a conspiracy after all. Indeed Metal Guru was sung to me in my crib by the radio. I just did not know that was what it was called. It was a nonsense song whose name waved to me between Midilly Rue, Billy De Do, Jimmy The Who? I think I finally settled on Middle La Rue – perhaps the name of the second eldest of Danny La Rue’s two brothers (who I imagined to look like Liberace). In many ways I was right, Marc Bolan was to some degree the spiritual heir to some of Danny’s schtick – the maleness of his androgyny was akin to Danny’s very male drag act.

Anyway this is revealing about the light entertainment stars I remember from a young age: Danny La Rue rather than Pepe Le Pew is telling. But latterly reading the song title, having heard 20th Century Boys fizzing opening riff, I expected more of the same but harder. Actual Metal if you will. Instead it was that song my mum used you replace most of the lyrics with Diddly-do.

And yet were her lyrics any less meaningful. Was my Danny La Rue folderol any less pertinent? You know a song, and you rediscover it. And what I discovered second time around told me next to nothing. Didn’t stop the tune being ace.

(OK, I know Metal Guru is not on My People Were Fair but the album cover is so ropey it was worth an airing.)

36. KLF ◊ Justified And Ancient

Alan, 15th January 2009

Delightful nonsense — that’s the standard way to write off this song, and at FT we find nothing wrong with that. Indeed some would say there is no higher accolade. However as any illuminati or discordianista will tell you, the best place to hide the TRUTH is in PLAIN SIGHT (and on national television if you can) where people will assume it is nonsense. Ahhhhh!

“Bring home a dime, Make mine a 99″

No. It IS total nonsense. Awesome. It’s also the KLF’s last new single proper — although with the KLF, this is a blurry-line to define as the song is material recycled from not just other artists but also previous KLF productions. After this they did re-release a version of 3AM eternal with Extreme Noise Terror, performed with ENT at the Brits, and that was (sort of) that. (Full and proper details in William Shaw’s Select article from July 1992.)

Here’s THAT ToTP performance (via ToTP2 sadly):

[Open YouTube Video]

Tammy bless her. But It was all about the ice-cream van, first seen with my personal favourite It’s Grim Up North (only no 81 in out top 100), and the dancing ice-cream cones with mickey-mouse gloves (for it is THEY). Isn’t it? Read nothing more into it.

35. Martha & The Muffins ◊ Echo Beach

Pete Baran, 17th January 2009

Some songs stand outside of time. Often they are one hit wonders, divorced from a bands career and existing with no backstory outside the song itself. So to me Echo Beach has always existed, as one of a clutch of holiday records which sound as great now as when they were released.

Except, except, Echo Beach is also so much of its time. It supplanted Y Viva Espana and perhaps Barbados as the ultimate package holiday record. And to me that is what Echo Beach is all about. I don’t believe that the beach in question is the ultimate secluded destination, it is just that magical beach of that magical holiday. I went on my first foreign holiday, first package holiday – to Malta – in 1980 (far away in time indeed). The package holiday boom had started in the seventies and was now a staple of British life. So that 1980′s trip to Malta coincided with the release of Echo Beach. And for all its saxophone and spiky punk-lite delivery from Martha, it is a song about conformity – it fit on Radio 2 even then. It was about something we can all understand, those little bits of heaven in our mundane lives.

The key couplet, one of the best rhymes in pop, starts the chorus:

From nine till five I have to spend my time at work
My job is very boring, I’m an office clerk

And there but for the grace of our heart go all of us, clerk or not. It is a song of quiet desperation, for all its summery trappings. Because its not really a song about being on holiday, its a song about longing for the holiday, holding on to the memories as the only thing that can get us through the working week. It is a song of surrender dressed in a Hawaiian Shirt. And of course in the UK in 1980, there is even more bitterness and longing. To go on holiday you have to have a job in the first place; unemployment was soaring as this crept up the charts.

Which is perhaps why its fitting that the beach on the UK sleeve shown above is Chesil Beach. Ian McEwan’s recent novel is arguably the sexual subtext to Echo Beach in novel form. Is Martha longing for Echo Beach for the lovely sunset? She does watch the sun go down twice, dirty crossword style. The On Chesil Beach comparison is hard on McEwan’s novella, Martha and her Muffins version is much easier to dance to.

(Echo Beach was voted the 35rd best Canadian single of all time by a show on CBC. Can you, daerest reader, think of 34 better?
HINT: The Safety Dance came in at number 36).

34. Shanice ◊ I Love Your Smile

cis, 19th January 2009

It’s fourteen degrees centigrade in my room, much colder out, and at this point in January summer feels like a friend you’ve lost touch with and will never see again, but sometimes semi-recognise in the faces of strangers in the street; and in this song.

I don’t remember a time when this song didn’t exist. I don’t remember any one time I’ve heard it on the radio. In my head it’s jumbled up with in-line-skating, loudly-patterned leggings, pineapple and cheese cubes on sticks, an oversaturated yellow mess of nostalgia beyond emotion. The song tells much the same story as Janet Jackson’s ‘Whoops Now’ four years later: school’s boring, her boss is lame, the only thing that gets her through is — is the chorus, the way it rolls with blithe certainty into the hook, whistling and tootling doo doo doos, as sure as summer. Vague discontent gives way to wordless contentment.

You can’t hear this song and not feel the sun come out, somewhere inside — or even outside. I’ve been listening to this song over and over, writing this, and as I type I’ve just noticed the sun peek out from behind the clouds to shine its smile in through my window. Summer’s going to come back, inevitable as a laid-back drum loop, as heartwarming as a saxophone solo. So: smile!

33. Echo and the Bunnymen ◊ The Cutter

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør, 8th March 2009

The wrong kind of rock and the wrong kind of snow….

“They do not like all that about ending and failing,” said Merry. “I should not sing any more at present. Wait till we do get to the edge, and then we’ll turn and give them a rousing chorus!”

It starts with the heart of the song; the bit not by the Bunnymen, the element allegedly foisted on them in remix, when the record company sent the first drafts back: the drone-clot of Carnatic non-rock violin, as played by Tamil sessionman Lakshminarayanan (more usually just L) Shankar. Respected composer and ethnomusicologist in his own right, Shankar had played on such (half-forgotten) outer-edge countercultural landmarks as Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, Amon Düül’s Wolf City, and — with Yorkshire prog-fusion guitarist John McLaughlin, the acoustic Indo-jazz virtuoso collective Shakti. Frank Zappa produced his first solo LP: he belongs, in short, to a world set aside; an era of swirlingly expansive transformational utopia shelved, and (in less than a decade) lost from view.

It was the early 80s, the age (as some of us excitedly imagined) of the Death of Rock: and what I liked about the Bunnymen (when I liked them, which was far from always) was that the rock they made seemed to come from right inside this territory of loss of belief; this sense of a catastrophic cultural ending. In the 60s and 70s, there had existed within rock culture — somewhat off to the side of its mainstream, true, but there and known and broadly tolerated as true to some notion of rock’s larger social purpose — a pan-cultural project, a proposed radical centre setting the standard rock quartet (vgbd) and electric production and dimensions of packaging and distribution and discussion as the state of the encounter with and acknowledgment of a global and pan-cultural colloquy of music tongues… as prog had brought blues and classical habits into naive exploratory contact, so it would widen (it was imagined and hoped) to embrace musics from Africa, South America, Asia, wherever… It would be the map of the entire field of play as well as a player on it, as daring as it would be stable (in content, shape, presence, social motion)… George Harrison’s pal Ravi Shankar (no relation as far as I know) was the early posterchild for this meeting of sensibilities; “Within You Without You”, its musicians uncredited, is the posterchild for what would come to be purged.

Punk of course had defined itself by saying no to a whole lot of things prog was said to stand for — I’m not going to list the benefits and faults of this long-ago sibling war; we’ve all been there too often. What I am going to insist on is that postpunk, announcing itself repeatedly as an intellectual expansion, often quietly kowtowed in the cull. Tainted hippydippy piffle was out, and this — for a long time — included anything remotely associated with the Indian subcontinent. To the extent that you likely don’t experience now The Cutter’s violin sample (which isn’t a sample, of course) in terms even of an absence of awareness of any of the above: the lost detail has to be brought in back for the shock of this juxtaposition to flare. This sense of appalled incomprehension, even panic, is (I think) part of the song’s meaning and effectiveness, if not necessarily its self-aware intention. Focus back on EatB: their own sound, mac’s own words; what you’d get if L Shankar hadn’t been semi-invitedly guesting.

The sound is big, a sense of a space dabbed in via high-reverb ambient fragments, and streaking across it the long-form lope-and-glide that U2 were already successfully refining away off into their own patent arena-manipulative pseudo-religious yearning-and-redemptive-smugness (I *really* don’t like U2). Guitars scythe across the Bunnymen soundscape (and scything turns to ambience and back, and to rhythm and back); this zone isn’t one to be comfy in, a quasi machine-driven high-volume near-monotony of semi-hysterical unease.

As oblique non-disgressive sidepoint, here’s the Mac lyric I’ve always liked best, from the seemingly U2ishly named song ‘Pride’, on Crocodiles: “Mother says/Sister says/Would you mind if we laugh at you?/Do you mind if we sing with you//Daddy says/Brother says/Make us proud of you/Do something we can’t do/Do it…” It’s a song about stepping up and being good — in a rock band or anywhere else — and I love the compressed sense of ghastly daring, the snidey family fondness and doubt…

The Cutter — in sound and structure, in tone and energy — is also a song of dread, and doubt; a figure for the fear of how wide the failure of the 70s project would travel, for the revelation that nothing — in this particular vgbd tongue — was anything but doomed. If EatB are in anyway presenting themselves, and the way they play, as a needed route out of something, out of a failure or a failing or a blockage (the impasse of expressive fright), this is not a happy let alone a convinced self-presentation. As rock, the sound is the sound punk wrought, stripped of pretty much anything black or blue — of anything of the conventions of prog-metal bluesiness, that uncalculated shared argot at the heart of the fusion project, the platform an earlier rock had improvised to enable global inclusion — of Africa, India, Latin America — in this collective generational anti-elite resistance to the Man, the System, the War-Machine, the War. Stripped of anything that had come to be seen as, despised as, feared as unselfcritical delusion, of any sound of this mark of every kind of collusive failure…

So, “Porcupine”: a deliberately mysteriously titled project. Mac (or someone) loves a wholly unmoored metaphor, and this LP is a chilly, hurtling flood of them, a torrent of frozen blocks of words and ideas and sounds… as the cover-image declares, the foursome stood gingerly at the lip of the frozen Gullfoss Waterfall near Reykjavik, loomed over by TWO major sub-species of the gothickal sublime, which (rather awesomely) cancel each other out emotionally: a CATARACT, as in ever-rushing, ever-tumbling body of water, made of ICE, petrifying monument to pent-up power stopped forever in mid-flow blah blah blah…

Turn to the internet for Bunnyman lyric interpretation and largely you get yr own private cataract of semi-anachronistic speculation about cutting as self-harm (which of course works as a meaning, but entirely narrows and privatises the sense of doom). A cutter’s also a fast sailing ship (once used in the slavetrade, now largely found in the world of yachting). It’s a type of pig — bigger than a porker, smaller than a baconer. It’s a blade, a guillotine, the technology that editors or producers or directors use on celluloid or audiotape or text; it’s the means by which L Shankar’s swell and throb and turn is introduced into Bunnymen noise. As a lyric-writer, Mac is a helplessly addicted cutter-and-paster (a later song on Porcupine notoriously cut in his little sister’s A-level englit notes about John Webster’s revengers’ tragedy The White Devil…)

We needn’t choose: the song yells “spare us” because the cutter — whatever else it actually “is” — is the threat of cultural cull that’s the founding crime of punk… the fear here, and the force, is the EatB terror, having stood up as part of the gale unleashed, of falling and failing (as we now knew rock could; as we had begun to think it couldn’t not). The boldness of the song is that — with a bit of a market-eyed push from someone not in the group? — it presents in the face of this bolt of music outside the “movement”; presents as a foe or a rival or a compadre, this isn’t clear or meant to be. EatB don’t know; this isn’t a situation they’re analysing politically, just like ‘Pride’, it’s an emotion and an energy they’re capturing, a response to extreme uncertainty and unclarity, to distrust of the very possibility of successful art, or successful them.

32. Amii Stewart ◊ Knock On Wood

Pete Baran, 10th March 2009

Knock On Wood is one of those party staples which ended up representing a whole scene. You can understand why. Not just because it is a consummate disco record, with its infectious opening like a tube train whooshing into a station. The tempo is forgiving enough for lousy dancers, open enough for good dancers to strut their stuff. Its got sound effects. Amii’s extravagant act also adds something to the track, especially when coupled with the clarity of her voice through the effects. But the fact it is a cover version makes it special. It shows what disco could offer a song, what it could do to beef it up and make it truly disco.

Watch it:

[Open YouTube Video]

Like some slinky avatar of Aries The Ram, Amii, aided by a quantel paintbox and a playfully aggressive delivery sells the song. Its one of the most direct tracks I know about getting on the dancefloor, and getting up to speed. It takes glitter band percussion to the next level, stapling its relentless shuffle to the synthesized tune and beat. It takes Eddie Floyd’s R&B stomper and adds a shuffle to it, keeping the raunch but removing the strut. The song has always been about the horn crescendo under the title, and Amii’s version turns that into a cyborg honk of electronic clarity. Amii’s is almost like an answer record to Eddie’s, his is how he pulls a girl, all funky strut and brassy. Hers is cooly efficient, less aggressive but with an edge of raunch with her thunder and lightning on show. And whilst both tracks are great, there is only one I would play at a wedding.

31. Prince ◊ I Would Die 4 U

Elisha Sessions, 20th March 2009

Michael Jackson came in for some stick at the 1996 Brit Awards for dressing up like Jesus and surrounding himself with children, but he never pulled the groundbreakingly presumptuous move of speaking in the first person as Mr Christ himself. Somehow, though, Prince never sparked the embarrassment that MJ did, nor the outrage that Madonna cleverly cooked up for 1989′s “Like a Prayer”.

This might be on account of “I Would Die 4 U” working so well as a straight-up love song. (In the countless times I’ve danced to it, striking bravado poses during the wonderfully staccato chorus, I never thought much about theology.) Prince manages the trick of making a conversation between deity and humanity sound an awful lot like a declaration of love from one lonely individual to another. He’ll never beat you, he’ll never lie (and presumably will never give you up, or let you down). He, and this song, will be there for you whenever you need them, without judgement or condition.

He’s quick to protest that he’s not your lover, he’s not your friend. He is something that you’ll never comprehend.

Oh come off it, Prince – we know what that third category is. It’s “pop star”.

30. White Town ◊ Your Woman

Pete Baran, 25th March 2009

I think this is the last track I made go to number one.

Sorry, I’ll clarify that before hubris catches up with me. Your Woman, by White Town (or officially the Abort, Retry, Fail?_ EP) is the last single I bought which, in the week I bought it, went to number one. There aren’t many of these in my record collection at all, my single buying habits going from a slight ripple in the early eighties of pop, then album buying (singles were a waste of money) and then buying indie, and then dance singles to DJ with. Both genres rarely got to number one, I have Blur’s Country House and the odd KLF number one. But the charts were desperately important to me in the nineties, where every extra place you could bump Common People up by made the week so much better. We would probably have imploded if Pulp had actually gone to number one.

So to White Town. At this point I wasn’t really DJ-ing and my single buying was as moribund as the single scene at the time (I got my Spice Girls on vinyl). Every now and then I would come across something weird that could only be bought on single and I would grab it. Which is exactly how you would describe “Your Woman”, a sweet Pet Shop Boys offcut with M vocals and a subdued trumpet sample. A bubbly, effervescent piece of experimentation that even its own author seemed surprised with. It was, when you look at the history of the charts, one of those occasional aberrations when a great one hit wonder wriggles out of the pop depths and suddenly everyone recognises its genius – perhaps via its strangeness. It was bedroom pop at its best.

When it went to number one I was genuinely surprised. And part of me thought “I did that”. And equally made me wonder about all the other people who made it go to number one. This is the communal power of the charts, it makes you consider the musical tastes of others and see where in that pop song Venn diagram we all intersect. I am sure very few of the other buyers liked it because they saw it as the pop song sung buy someone on the other end of that phone in Clouds Across The Moon (something I remember trying to drunkenly articulate in ’97). It may well be the major chart legacy of the Mark Radcliffe Radio One Breakfast Show*, they championed it and perhaps it showed the power of whatever show is in that slot. But Jyoti Mishra’s bedroom funk still is a terrific single. And it even has a film named after it**.

This is also quite a good time for this track to come up, with our ten year celebrations going on. Because Jyoti Mishra was the first person Tom ever interviewed for Freaky Trigger. And as far as I remember, he may also be the last! Read the interview here though.

*The less said about The Shirehorses the better.

**Which I can’t believe I haven’t written about at greater length. I mention it here in the Role Models chat where I posit its lack of success on not including the White Town track.

29. PJ & Duncan AKA ◊ Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble

katstevens, 27th March 2009

“No jokes, no messin’, we’ll teach you a lesson, a state of confusion to keep you all guessin’!”

Wholesome family entertainers Ant (PJ) and Dec (Duncan) have come a long way since that terrible (but thankfully fictional) Tyneside paintballing accident in 1992, where Debbie and Amanda ganged up on the boys as revenge for two-timing them but PJ had taken his protective goggles off for a split second and got paint in his retinas. Whoops! “Geoff! He cannae see man! Spuggy’s done a sick! Nyooaaoorhhhhhhhhh!“. The duo/twosome have left behind the memories of PJ not being able to keep it in his pants and Duncan joining that tai-chi cult where if you recruited someone else you got a blue t-shirt (for 10 people you got a green one and 50 got you a red one!), and are ready to make their mark on an expectant world.

“Give us the aspiration we can cause a sensation!”

As the follow-up to televisual tie-ins ‘Tonight I’m Free’ (which originated as part of a Byker Grove Battle Of The Bands storyline and got to number 62) and ‘Why Me?’ (which fared slightly better), ‘Rhumble’ was Ant & Dec’s transition from child actors to child MEGASTARS. Watching the video, you can see that the lads are on the cusp of a new adventure – proclaiming their readiness to take on the world by moving to London with no adult supervision (save for the disembodied approval of pre-chorus boxing announcer Michael Buffer, whom I like to imagine is channeling Lou, the foster matriarch). The only thing the lads are frightened of is being TOO GOOD.

[Open YouTube Video]

“Everybody rumble!”

But Ant & Dec’s appeal doesn’t stop at their burgeoning confidence and oversized-trousers. There’s something captivating about their fresh-faced Pied Piper gang mentality. If you’re a UK resident of a certain age, the mere mention of the word “Psyche!” floods your brain with the boisterous exuberance of the Grovers, jumping up for joy in front of their blue screen credits. The rave sirens and maximal production make sure this message comes across loud and clear: there’ll be none of this wussy Grange Hill sappiness round their way. JUST SAY YES! I know which gang I’d rather be in – the cool kids who you never actually saw going to school, EVER*. Ant and Dec know this and suddenly we’re all following them down the street doing dance steps complicated enough to require us to stare at our feet the entire time. I wonder what colour t-shirt selling a half a million records gets you?

*Though heaven forbid they’d ever get caught doing anything ILLEGAL: “Partners in crime, we’ll never do time/A sentence for us has to end in a rhyme!“

28. The Jam ◊ Going Underground

Pete Baran, 1st May 2009

Mildred: What’re you rebelling against, Johnny? / Johnny: Whaddya got?

Going Underground is the aural equivalent of this quote from The Wild One. I’m not saying that Paul Weller is Marlon Brando, but Going Underground is cliched and as empty as a rabble rousing tune as Brando’s rebel was.

Teenagers are the lifeblood of pop music. They were the primary consumer, the ones with the disposable income, disposable time but most importantly the absolute disposable energy to be passionate about pop music. And it is when people start to learn instruments, form bands, write rubbish songs about endless love that they have not felt because that is what other pop songs are about. Because the truth is teenagers don’t usually make that good pop stars, feckless, directionless, a little too close to their audience*. And this is no bad thing, get your juvenilia out of the way first because you don’t want your early albums to be cluttered with songs about how you hate to tidy your bedroom.

Going Underground is luckily not a song about Paul Weller never putting away his Ernie Ball wrappers, but it could be. What is so startling about it is the inchoate rage that simmers under the surface of the song, but when you scratch away at that surface you realise that it is just the last stabs of teenage angst. Weller has a bunch of half formed things that anger him about the Modern World (cf This Is The Modern World), many of which don’t add up to a coherent political manifesto (it isn’t directly kidney machines that pay for rockets and guns). But who is Weller most angry with. YOU! The public, getting what the public wants, and The Jam want out of that society thank you very much.

Of course the public did get what the public wanted which was a rabble rousing stomp along from Weller. Go straight to number one and do not pass go without being assimilated thank you very much. Leaving a record curiously neutered by its own passion. Because not only is Going Underground a stab at articulating teenage political rage, its also a stab at an empathic narrative about said rage. Which does not work because Weller is no good at getting into character and the driving nature of the song is too good (also fitting too many words in and singing them in the same way doesn’t help**). The voice is that of a teenager mocking his parents and suggesting that when he gets the vote things will be different. And yet the ambiguity of the opening very (Some people might say my life was in a rut / Me I’m quite happy with what I’ve got) is actually a more accurate representation of teenage apathy than anger.

So there is no surprise that
a) Teenagers bought it in their droves
b) Kids younger than teenagers bought it in their droves (me being one of them)
c) It did not scare the establishment one jot.

*There are numerous counter-examples to this stupid statement, but teen pop stars are usually imbedded in the music business like some sort of teen marketing exocet rather than a “voice of the youth”. HELLO MILEY CYRUS!

**Latterly known as “The Curse Of The Manics”

27. Chaka Khan ◊ I Feel For You

Pete Baran, 6th May 2009

Chaka, Chaka Khan, Chaka Khan, Chaka Khan
I love the cover of this single. Much experimentation with what was left of my childhood crayons convinced me it was a lot harder than it looked.
Chaka Khan let me rock you, let me rock you Chaka Khan
I knew about rap in the early nineties, I just hadn’t really heard much of it.
Let me rock you that’s all I want to do
I had heard The Message, I think it was on an early compilation tape I had, but it hadn’t really stuck in my brain.
Chaka Khan let me rock you, let me rock you Chaka Khan
I had liked White Lines, but for its incessant bassline more than its rapping. And to be fair much of the rapping in White Lines is half sung, and whilst impressive it is slow, allowing the “talking” insult to be thrown at it.
Let me rock you cos I feel for you.
I Feel For You is not really a rap song. Even though Melle Mel’s rap comes back twice, I only think of it as an intro. But it is a terrific post disco dance track, slathered with electro, flirting with allsorts – even a bit of Stevie Wonder’s harmonica before its ubiquity robbed it of any significance.

Chaka Khan let me tell you what I wanna do

And this is Chaka Khan’s record. I didn’t know anything about Chaka Khan before this groove was released, but despite its rap intro and its production, she still stomps all over it.
Do you feel for me, the way I feel for you?
But in the end it is the rap that I always think of when I think of this record. The first piece of rap that I memorised, sang and would repeat over and over.
Chaka Khan let me tell you what I wanna do
I can’t say it made me scurry to discover more rap, though I did look up Melle Mel in the ways that you could back then. IE wait for someone to play something on the radio.
I wanna love you, wanna hug you, wanna squeeze you too
But it did make me understand what people saw in rap. It was clever, it was heartfelt, it was tricky (before Its Tricky) and if you could do it, well it was the best tongue-twister in the world.
Let me take you in my arms let me fill you with my charms, Chaka
I tried to see if I could still do it, I put my crackly copy of the single on (OK it was my sisters but I nicked all her singles when she got rid of them). She used to be Chaka, I was Melle.
‘Cause you know that I’m the one to keep you warm, Chaka
And the first six or so lines I could do perfectly and then it slipped away. It isn’t really that hard, not compared to later more difficult raps that I semi-mastered (too much Eminem karaoke will do that to you).
I’ll make you more than just a physical dream
But then this is one of the best intros of all time. Which makes some of its descendants look even weaker – YES I AM LOOKING AT YOU JAY-Z ON UMBRELLA.
I wanna rock you, Chaka Baby, cause you make me wanna scream

26. The Human League ◊ Open Your Heart

Pete Baran, 9th July 2009

We are all the Human League. WE WISH! If there was a band that, given a few early synths that we would want to be, it would be the League. How hard can it be, a few simple melodies and semi-portentous lyrics sung over the top? How hard is that. And then we all got a Casiotone keyboard (with additional calculator functionality) and we realised how hard it was. Take Open Your Heart.

The Human League made a choice to play Open Your Heart in an oddly high key, which then necessitated Oakey to sing it all shakily either too high or then an octave lower (Jo and Sue on backup). It is, as you would imagine, terrific. Phil Oakey’s voice is a donkey dressed as a horse. It brays, it strains and it puts itself through remarkable contortions to hold a tune sometimes – but it does it all with its head held high. And then, when you step back and ask exactly why he has had to make such efforts the blame always comes back to him, its his song. But sometimes a donkey is right for the job.

Dare era Human League is magnificent stuff, the true cyborg man machine conflict made whole. It is The Terminator in musical form (and yes, lets cast the girls as Linda Hamilton). On the one side we have synthesizers which can play devastatingly unearthly sounds, keep perfect time and in their staccato way blow away all boring old twangy instruments. But they lack a certain spontaneity, their monophonic restrictions relegating them to toytown tunesmiths. On the other hand we have the men behind them. Geeks, boffins, oddly becoiffured builders mates, girls spotted in a nightclub. Neither side has sent the best team into to battle, but the moment they decided to stop fighting and team up – well that was moider

So Open Your Heart (bip bip). Well it uses about twenty pop tricks. It starts in the middle, it uses LOUD quiet LOUD to its advantage, and goes overboard with its sweeping sub-operatics. But this one will always be Oakey vs the machines. This is the first League single I really remember, and I certainly remember how much it seemed that Phil meant it. I had it on a compilation (Chart Hits 81 maybe?) and it started the A-side, I think. Back then its oddly theatrical robotics got fast-forwarded to get to, oh I don’t know, some tat like Je Suis Un Rock Star. But man cannot live by the fast forward button and soon I got to love its strange synth melody break, playing – what was that instrument? I never knew what it was supposed to be, though the sound soon turned up on the weeny Casiotone as Fantasy I believe. And that Casiotone that everyone had allowed us all to be the Human League, as long as we sang a bit off, and had some way of turning the little bugger up. AND EVEN THEN WE COULD NEVER BE THE HUMAN LEAGUE. Because we were only Human.

Though that’s a different song.

25. Madonna ◊ Into The Groove

Pete Baran, 2nd October 2009

What he said. [Tom's Popular entry for this which is reproduced below.]

Popular #554

Tom, 2nd October 2009

Madonna enters this story already a superstar – eight-figure sales of her last album, this her third top-three hit of the year in Britain. “Into The Groove” is no kind of introduction, more a victory parade, and it’s become one of her calling-card singles. Perhaps because it’s a manifesto of sorts: not lyrically, but in the way that everything great about Madonna and her pop – movement, power, willpower, sex, hunger, vulnerability – is in here somewhere.

Actually, most of it’s in one place – the series of repeated “now I know you’re mine”s that serve as the bridge into the final chorus. At first she sings the line at the lower end of her range, with the husky strength that’s made her ballads so compelling, beckoning her dancer-lover closer. And then suddenly she can’t keep it in any more, and “now I know you’re mine!” rings out in her other voice, the sparky, raw, New York clubland hustler voice you get on “Burning Up”, “Holiday”, “Angel”. It’s pure triumph: the moment when a girl singing “you’re mine” to a guy in pop finally, irreversibly flips from domestication to predation.

But most of “Into The Groove” isn’t like that: unlike several of her previous singles which really were all about her and her teasing and shocking and winning the crowd, this is highly functional. A little bit freestyle, a little bit pop, it’s a good, modish dance record. You could imagine this as being by one of the post-disco club scene’s many two- or three-single acts, a Carol Jiani or a Stacey Q but with thinner vocals. Well, you could if Madonna’s presence wasn’t so unmistakable: anonymity’s the only flirtation she could never have pulled off.

Madonna is one of pop’s foundational figures – perhaps the last of them: one of the people without whom modern music just doesn’t decode properly. She’s the closest thing to an Elvis in my lifetime – someone who emerged out of populist, under-appreciated musics and whose sheer charisma changed the culture – how pop singers (and their fans) dressed, danced, behaved, thought about themselves. That doesn’t mean all her records are good – though a remarkable number are, this included. “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free”: this is the dancing queen all grown up, and determined to hold the spotlight on her own terms.

Popular score: 9

24. Rachel Stevens ◊ Some Girls

Pete Baran, 8th October 2009

When the Sugababes shed Keisha a few weeks ago, I was a bit worried for the catty one. Not cos she can’t look after herself, and not because she’ll be poor. But rather because the old idea that you have a successful career in a boy / girl / pop band and then have a successful solo career seems to have been proven to be pretty ropey. It struck me that Keisha, sticking with some form of the Sugababes as Mutya went all out for her solo career seemed to be pretty clever. Because what makes a solo career work is very different to the group dynamic. Good luck Keisha, but look closely at the parable of Rachel Stevens first.

Rachel was the pretty one from S Club 7. Well, according to the lads mags anyway, who had anointed her as such, and being the lad mags favourite she also became the favourite for a solo career. Bear in mind that this happened a few years ago when it looked like Girls Aloud were going to split up, Sarah Harding was the one tipped to have the solo career, again because she charted higher in the FHM Top 100. But of course Girls Aloud were clever and stayed together because they learned the lesson of Rachel Stevens.

The lesson of Rachel Stevens is simple. It doesn’t really matter how good your pop singles are, how many column inches you get and how high you are in the FHM wank charts. A solo artist hasn’t got a band persona to hide behind, and in Rachel’s case that meant that to maintain A-list, or even S-list, status she had to do the work of seven people. Sweet Dreams My LA EX, and in particular Some Girls she did everything right. A good, and cool producer in Richard X. A solidly nagging pop hook (wanna wanna, other other) and even a stab of making the song sound a bit like the Tardis. A schaffel beat, spot on in 2004 made the whole thing feel that the detached singing style of Stevens was done on purpose. But look at the video below and you see the problem. What about this song has Rachel’s personality in it. The hordes of women coming out of the sewers overwhelm her. The song was co-opted by Sport Relief, for no obvious reason, but that becomes bigger than anything Rachel can stamp on it. The most telling point is that through most of the video Rachel is dancing, with six other backing dancers. You can take the girl out of the 7, but she will still grasp for it.

[Open YouTube Video]

Basically Some Girls is a terrific record. But nearly everything that makes it terrific is nothing to do with Rachel herself. And as soon as that became clear, the media got bored with her goody goody, ex-S-club ways. Whilst she recorded a few more OK singles, the media started sniffing around girls who could talk and have personalities. Seven does not become one easily. And that is the lesson of Rachel Stevens.

Actually there are two lessons of Rachel Stevens. The other one is that whatever you do, don’t call your first album “Funky Dory”.

23. Kate Bush ◊ Wuthering Heights

Pete Baran, 24th November 2009

There are 15 cover versions of Wuthering Heights on Spotify. They are all here in this playlist. Since Tom has covered everything I could say about the original here, I thought I’d look at these versions instead to see if there is a secret about the song that will be revealed. So in order of Spotify popularity:

The Puppini Sisters: They spread their Beverley Sisters for the noughties magic over Kate’s tragic, and in the process sing it as if they do not understand any of the words. Indeed they pronounce Cathy as Caffeine. Not trusting the original to be nuts enough they also add wacky milk bottle instrumentation, a musical saw and a thorough disdain for anyone who liked the original.

Angra: I think its a non-native English speaking male singer trying it in a gentle falsetto. It is! Brazilian power metal, which only really comes on in a few drum fills and some underplayed choral guitars. Possibly a little bit too respectful, for a metal version the original has more oomph. Not bad though.

Hayley Westenra: I am guessing a country singer, again played straight but with an interesting set of lilting flutes in the background. Actually the backing is so tame we are tiptoeing into potentially Irish ballading/easy listening. Oh, she is a NZ classical music singer who later joined a Celtic band and is apparently quite big. Competent but bland.

Pat Benatar: Now this one I was aware of but have never heard. The mid-eighties production understands to trust the voice, and goes for gentle but monolithic chords in the chorus. Again she treats it significant kid gloves (there’s even a faux harpsichord in the mix). The way the song builds means there is always a potential surprise around the corner, but this rocks a little bit more – with an odd breakdown squeal. But it still doesn’t get anyway near the rush of the original.

White Flag: I expected Black Flag (and you will be pleased to hear the 3 Colours Red version is not on Spotify), but instead this is more pop punk, almost psych on the vocals. Its a jolly strumalong version with a few nice little guitar licks that you would want from a pub band. Oh, they are from the US – and it turns out that this is the only band on this list where a member has kipped on my couch! Go Ken Stringfellow. Actually much more fun than I expected.

The Sweptaways: Hooray, the lady Flying Pickets – a female acapella choral version. Worth it for their treatment of the “My only monster” line, and a choral stab at Kate’s accent. Lots of fun as a novelty, but actually the first one to really “get” the otherworldliness aspects of the song. Recommended – if only once.

Studio 99: Its a lady club singer version! Warbling half cocked stab for some sort of Top Of The Pops albums, which doesn’t disappoint to disappoint. Excellent stereo effect on the drums, complete lack of feeling from the vocalist. You don’t need top understand what Wuthering Heights is about to get it, but you do need to at least know what the individual words mean.

Dannilu: It starts with a minute and a half of penny whistle, Lloyd-Webber moody synths and an ominous tolling bell. And then becomes, er, a straight instrumentation with another non-native English male falsetto mangling some of the lines. I am guessing Italian because they are trying to sound Italian. And Dannilu is….another super talento Brazilian: there is a video. Beware.

Janine Kitzen Straight version, probably another classical singer as she is over pronouncing the words, relishing the high bits and the backing is cheap synths. Mind you it throws in the kitchen sink and violins and in later stages someone appears to have left a drum machine on playing a completely different track in the corner of the room which enlivens it. Turns out to be German, good accent then.

Zoom Karaoke: A soft but faithful karaoke version with no guide versions. A good way of checking how simple the original is, and how it builds. Guitar solo at the end sounds like it was recorded in a different country. Nice ending, no fade.

Madeline Le Roy: With a name like that she must be French. OMG, its some sort of electronic goth version sung by a woman eating some hot chestnuts. Wonderfully menacing throbbing backing, with excellent out of tune backing vocals (probably by Le Roy). Its not a radical reinterpretation but its much more interesting than most of these. It is the goth version that Bella would approve of (Edward would rightly find it too sappy). See it performed in all its goth glory here. Filmed the same time as Dracul Follow Me!

Top Of The Poppers: See Studio 99 but with slightly higher production values, and a singer who is happy to just do a straight impersonation. It is a tough impersonation to do though , and this one falls into cockney vowels sometimes.

The Klone Orchestra: OK I can now spot a straight cover in two seconds. Very casio preset piano, but the singers voice does the best impersonation yet but frankly, I have the original on Spotify why would I listen to this except for the small strangling sounds in the chorus.

Susan Egan: This is an actress right? Yes, well recognised Pete, she did Belle in Beauty and The Beast on Broadway first and she goes all out for theatrical here. A really interesting version full of obvious overdubs, and relying on a string section instead of the piano. A completely different stab at the unstrung heroine vocals, its not actually that good, but top marks for trying something radically different.

Ameritz: The Spotify Karaoke name to trust. Actually pretty shonky vocal free version which almost turns into Hey Jude until someone turns on the Casio autofill button. Doesn’t even bother with the guitar solo! ROPEY.

And not strictly a different version there is a soft glitchcore remix of the Sweptaways version which if it had just boshed it up might have been good but takes a sweet novelty and makes it even more annoying.

So my conclusions? Well the absence of 3 Colours Red’s indie dash through the song means this is incomplete. Indeed lack of a proper bosh version also surprised me. But the main conclusion is that the song is way to scary for anyone to mess with too much. A few have noticed the goth potential, but instead it seems to be the token pop track for classical singers. None of them take it as seriously as Kate, NOT EVEN THE GOTH, and thus fail to make an impact. None of the versions really add much to the original, though I am glad I now have Dannilu in my life!

22. Joy Division ◊ Love Will Tear Us Apart, and 21. Scooter ◊ Ramp! (The Logical Song)

Alan, 1st December 2009

There’s a song on the radio, a catchy ear-worm of a song, and it’s been on the radio a lot now that you mention it. It drags you in, “now listen to my words” it commands. How might you react?

Reaction A “No colours anymore, I want them to turn black”

Ian Curtis, so the story goes, heard the song “Love Will Keep Us Together” sung by Captain and Tenille and was revolted. Somehow this Neil Sedaka-penned song (highest UK chart position: 32), an unrelentingly jaunty paean to the enduring and constructive power of love, grated with the adulterous misanthrope. So when the boys in the band came up with one of their really great hooky (HA HA) melodies, out came the notebooks with his very own misery memoir. Result:

Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart (Highest UK chart position: 13)

OK, so misanthrope is overstating it – he was a joy to drink with. It was only the constant skim reading of the ‘off-beat’ yet actually fashionable literature of pain and suffering, Ballard Hesse Gogol, and his own emotional insecurity that led him to vandalism – to take a watercolour chocolate-box confection and piss all over it. BLACK IT’S ALL BLACK. SO COLD, ALWAYS SO FUTILE!

[Open YouTube Video]

Curtis, we know, was not to allow himself to mature as a writer, to progress beyond imitating the authors he worshipped and alluding to books, like Atrocity Exhibition, that he would never get around to reading. Not that any of this makes LWTUA less enjoyable on its own terms. Musically it’s paralysingly lovely, much like its antecedent though along a different axis of appreciation. Lyrically it’s a list song for Goths, “We Didn’t Start The Fire… But We Could Easily Have Done So And Maybe You Should Consider That When Your Loved Ones Are Sleeping”. But it is a more direct and honest sounding lyric — a step above a lot of his work that comes off like the internal narration of Batman, all brooding hurt, ‘the city is full of filth’ and fist-shaking at the injustice of the world.

Reaction B “Take a sad song and make it better”

Here’s another song now jumping from hook to hook, and then a soaring strangled vocal: “Please tell me who I am. Who I am!? Who I aaaaam?! WHO I AAAAAM!!!!???!11″. Yer basic existential angst right there. If only they were 18 or 19, we’d understand, but in time-honoured “And that was just the teachers” fashion, The Logical Song (highest UK chart position: 5) was written and performed by a 30-year-old man. (Incidentally in the same year as LWTUA. Was the terrific run of number 1s that year putting people off?) Scooter with their sample robbery, hook burglary aesthetic couldn’t resist the bait on these hooks but the ho-hum alienation of the lyric would have to go. Result:

Scooter – Ramp! (The Logical Song) (Highest UK chart position: 2)

They accentuated the positive “When i was young…beautiful magical” first half of the verse both by helium-voice ‘chipmunking’ of the vocal to kick things off distinctively and by literally eliminating the negative second half of amateur-emo in favour of bellowed motivational sound-bites. “GOOD MORNING!… are you ready…Peace, Love and Unity” and so on like Sportacus’s novelty alarm-clock stuck on ‘pumped’.

Many people dislike the enforced jollity of an aerobics instructor — the constant Up rubs the wrong way against their hard-earned Down. “A-and it’s all chemically enhanced and fake, right?” Such people are miserable, or idiots, or both. The joy here is as enforced as Joy Division’s misery, and is as genuinely felt. Scooter really do want you to have a good time all the time. It’s just the constant Joker’s grin that makes the sceptic presume idiocy. But The Joker’s grin hides an unhinged and eclectic intelligence bent on thievery on a grand scale.

Compared to Scooter, the Brinks-Mat job was a second-rater. Their appetite for mainstream and arcane music casts them as the stock villain who robs the world’s most famous museums of their priceless works of arts for the love of it. The Thieving Magpie with ADHD, they blur the distinction between cover, sample and homage, taking from folks songs and rock operas about dragons and lifting riffs and lyrics from films (the 60s Miss Marple films), rap (Talib Kweli), indie (Blur) and techno (Kraftwerk, RMB). Most head-spinning of all, they have based TWO of their songs on one track by UK 80s indie band Stump:

[Open YouTube Video]

Seriously. Stump. Dude. Most often of all they swipe work from established master thieves The K, The L, The F and the -ology — a none-more appropriate appropriation used in this track. Scooter are the stick-up boys, the Omar Littles of pop, taking from the dope-hook pushers and working by their own paradoxical code of honour. In Ramp! they took a sad song and made it Harder Better Faster Stronger.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better…

– TS Eliot

20. Chic ◊ Good Times

Elisha Sessions, 1st December 2009

What exactly are good times, according to Chic? The lyrics refer to jitterbugging being involved, but it’s hard to believe many people on the dancefloor actually jitterbug to it (past tense of jitterbug: jatterbug?). The jitterbug isn’t a hard dance but its hand-round-the-waist 50s style of partnered-up bopping is light years away from what disco invented: full-fledged, individualistic yet en masse booty shaking, preferably until way past a reasonable hour. This is the new state of mind that Chic is talking about. Don’t be a drag, participate. And then:

Clams on the half shell, and roller skates. Roller skates!

Possibly the greatest image ever conjured in song.

You can’t beatmatch “Good Times” because it’s played by a band rather than locked into a computerized timeline. This is infuriating for DJs but serves as a kind of protective bubble when played in a nightclub – the song basically gets played from beginning to end without too much funny business in between. If you’re attentive and know the song well, however, you can mix an acapella rap over the long instrumental breakdown (warning: most raps will be too slow!). It’s complicated though, due to the aforementioned BPM wibbling; far easier to just get a friend to rap over it instead.

Hmm I get the feeling someone’s done that already.

p.s. I have always loved the juxtaposition of Chic dressed up in heavy winter coats with the words “Warm Summer Night” emblazoned below them.. Hot, baby.

19. Michael Jackson ◊ Billie Jean

Pete Baran, 14th January 2010

There really isn’t much to add about Billie Jean that wasn’t mentioned in Tom’s excellent piece for Popular, or indeed in this Freaky Trigger & The Lollards Of Pop episode where we heard Jackson’s slightly ramshackle unformed demos of the song. So I will give you the one thing that always made me wary of Billie Jean, bar it being on an album that my family had already dismissed for being “silly”. The name. Who is called “Billie Jean”?

So in lieu of saying anything about Billie Jean, here are some other prominent Billie Jeans, or Billies Jeans.

Billie Jean King: Probably the most famous Billie Jean, and almost certainly the most important female tennis player of all time. But was Michael Jackson a big tennis fan? It would certainly make sense when Mike says she is not his girl though, by 1983 she had come out. Certainly if Mike chose the name to honour her, he would have been way ahead of the US: she did finally receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama last year. But apparently Quincy Jones (who never liked Billie Jean anyway) wanted to change the name of the song because he though people would think it would be about Billie Jean King.

The Battle Of The Sexes is what I mainly know Billie Jean King from, the 1973 match up between on top of her game Billie Jean King and ex-male champ Bobby Riggs. In winning it Billie Jean struck a serious blow for feminism DESPITE it being a game, and Bobby Riggs being 26 years older than her. Indeed I had not realised the age thing until recently, and it does put a bit of a spin on it. Feminism has since been repealed since Jimmy Connors beat Martina Navratilova in 1992.

The Legend Of Billie Jean
Mike clearly isn’t talking about the heroine of this, the second nail in the career coffin of Helen “Supergirl” Slater, as this film came out in 1985. In it some kids get bullied for talking like Jack Nicholson (Christian Slater – no relation), being pretty (Helen Slater) and talking like Bart Simpson before Bart Simpson was invented (Yeardley Smith). I vaguely remember seeing it on video back in 1987, and it is a wonderful piece of its times, plenty of neon cut down wetsuits, denim, power ballads and EMPOWERMENT BY CUTTING YOUR HAIR. Indeed as the clips below show, EMPOWERMENT IS 90% hair cutting. (The other 10% seems to be watching Jean Seberg be burnt at the stake in Saint Joan, which is meant to be a meaningful scene though its hard to note anything like emotion in Slater’s (no relations) face, as she is probably more interested in Seberg’s ginchy bob and making the obvious link between EMPOWERMENT and HAIRDO’S).

As befits a 1980′s teen movie all the characters have ridiculous names (except for Billie Jean, which is merely an unusual name to tie into a song which has nothing to do with, and is not in, the film). Christian Slater (no relation) is called Binx, Yeardley Smith is called Putter and there is even a character called Hubie. If I remember rightly Billie Jean’s rampage of disorderly behaviour all comes about because a mechanic doesn’t fix her brother's bike properly, which means she is basically playing the Texas version of Watchdog with Lynn Faulds Wood. With better hair (but then LFW never made Hairdo of the Year, did she?) The teen rebellion is also inspired by Billie Jean watch The driving power rock soundtrack featured Pat Benatar’s Invincible (which also has Helen ‘Did Anyone Say Outrageous Fortune’ Slater all over the video), which Pat always often introduces as being from “the worst film ever”. Truly Legendary.

Billie Jean in Eastenders

Apparently on Eastenders in November they played Billie Jean in the Queen Vic, when Billy and Jean were having a conversation. THAT’s why its the 48th best TV drama of all time!

18. The AlkoholiKs ◊ Only When I’m Drunk

Pete Baran, 25th March 2010

A review by Alix…

I liked this song in 2003 or sometime in the past when this list was compiled and I was mostly drunk. I do not look back on this period in my life with much fondness or pride (or clarity), and can only apologise to my friends and society in general for suggesting this track as part of the Top 100 Songs (I’m not even sure I did suggest this, almost certainly, I was drunk). This song, although catchy, features mostly puerile humour about drinking, which nowadays we know is neither big nor clever. The track also features least one instance of burping, which, in my opinion, is vulgar and has no place in popular music. I have yet to establish for certain what it is that the Alkaholiks do only when they’re drunk, but the lyrical evidence points towards calling their daddy a punk, something about a gun, vomiting and fucking an ugly b1tch, though not necessarily simultaneously. In their defence they do advocate against drink driving, and the bassline isn’t too bad.

But if Alix hasn’t put you off here it is:

[Open YouTube Video]

Or even worse the CRAZY TOWN COVER:

[Open YouTube Video]

And what a cover that Crazy Town album has!

17. The Ronettes ◊ Be My Baby

Pete Baran, 13th April 2010

Be My Baby always existed. Clearly to me it always existed, it is ten years older than me. But there is something about Be My Baby which feels like it always existed, its has the primal chord, the ur-drumbeat, that wall of sound and in the heart of it Ronnie Spector’s hics, tics and wonderfully strident voice. You get the feeling they could have shut down pop music then and there and called it a good job well done, and a plenty of people would have said fair enough.

(By the way I love that London Records reissue sleeve: way to go to miss the point).

This perceived perfection is the problem with Be My Baby. Not that it is too good. But in marrying Spector’s production to this wonderful mid-tempo stompathon it unwittingly gave us the template for “proper pop”. You know, the pop that never really existed, the pop that people are always talking about when they are sniffy about S Club 7. Brian Wilson loved Be My Baby so much he wrote Don’t Worry Baby as some sort of drug whacked out response (there is nothing in Be My Baby that suggests Ronnie or indeed the Ronettes, were particularly worried, though with Phil Spector in the background perhaps they should have). So perhaps we can imagine a world where Be My Baby never existed, and how different it would be?

Well Mean Streets and Dirty Dancing would be down a key song each. Don’t Worry Baby would be off any Wilson / Beach Boy touring repetoire. And The Rubettes and the Raveonettes probably wouldn’t exist – thus Luke Haines would have had to riff on something else to make a creepy commentary on the state of pop. But part of me wonders if this hole in the musical canon would be skirted around forever, as the ultimate idea of a wonderful record that we cannot quite attain. In avoiding such a great record because it makes ours or other efforts look lame in comparison are we not just throwing Be My Baby out with the bathwater?

We do not need to imagine the world without Be My Baby. Instead use it as the base of some sort of half-arsed ontological argument being rehashed for the pop era; doesn’t the existence of a record like Be My Baby imply the possibility or existence of even better records? This very list suggests the existence of sixteen better ones (though there are plenty of caveats to be taken with that statement). The Ronettes and Phil Spector didn’t just get lightning in a bottle with Be My Baby, they kept trying and often got close. Others ploughing a similar furrow equally get close. And others go all over the place to chase the ideal. I hope we don’t attain it. Because the truth is, as great as it is, Be My Baby has never given me goosebumps. Because it always existed. Perhaps we need flaws, we need the near misses, to prove we are fallible. Be My Baby is not a template to get there, but other routes are constantly available. But while we wait, watch Ronnie and the girls come as close as you should come to perfection. But :

[Open YouTube Video]

16. East 17 ◊ House Of Love

Tom, 30th April 2010

I’ll tell you what pop’s missing at the moment and that’s rivalries. Not feuds, we have plenty of feuds, there’s a feud a day on Twitter I think. Feuds are great but the emphasis is on the stars themselves and what they think or feel. Rivalries are different. They’re about the fans, about what stars mean on a social level.

The great necessary thing about rivalries is that if you’re an outsider they should baffle you a bit. Take That and East 17 – seriously? What’s the difference? They’re both boy bands right, both manufactured, you shouldn’t be listening to either of them, you should be listening to oh, I don’t know, Consolidated or something. And isn’t the rivalry all a hype thing anyway? I had those conversations a few times in 1993.

But hype is the brassiere of pop rivalries, it lifts and separates but there’s got to be something there in the first place, some real division the marketing can draw to your attention. East 17 were rough lads, not cheeky, Londoners, ravers maybe – they were singing “House Of Love” at a time when the words HOUSE and LOVE were code for DRUGS and DRUGS. Well, maybe. Would you get Gary Barlow with his songcraft making anything so rambunctious and mucky and unchoreographed as “HoL”?* Would you get Tony Mortimer and his crew of chancers making anything as sleek and crushable as “Pure”?

There were real differences, but proper rivalries don’t just rest on real differences. They rest on the unspoken tribal things the groups bring to the surface, which were waiting there ready for bands to incarnate them for a few months. Those deeper things are why people feel however briefly that the rivalries matter, because unlike silly stuff like Coldplay v Crazy Frog they dredge up the hidden splits WITHIN a group you might be inclined to think of as a mass. After a bit the baffled voices receded and everyone KNEW what East 17 vs Take That ‘meant’. We have hardly anything like that now and it’s a shame.

*or indeed singing “So many bombs in the world it’s like a LIVING MINE”

15. The Futureheads ◊ The Hounds Of Love

Pete Baran, 20th May 2010

There are a number of songs on this list that, in the cold light of day (or indeed the cold light of 2000 days later) it has been hard to find someone who will champion enough to write about it. One even got booted off of the list for that reason. A similar situation has arisen with The Futureheads version of The Hounds Of Love. To a sober mind it is hard to work out why this robust but one joke gag on one of Kate Bush’s best tracks should have made any list of the Top 100 Songs of All Time. Especially with Kate’s own Wuthering Heights wuthering considerably lower down.

To explain it, and to excuse saying much more about it than calling it “a robust but one joke gag on one of Kate Bush’s best tracks” it probably would make sense to explain again how this list was made. Since in the next couple of months we will finally make it to number one after this six year journey, let us go back to a room above the Jeremy Bentham pub on the 29th December 2004 and see how that group even suggested The Hounds Of Love by The Futureheads.

First remember that everyone had been drinking for at least four hours. Remember it was Christmas, post party season where any dancing aspect of Christmas paries would have been slim pickings indeed. In this era of landfill indie anything which stood out or had at least some claim to musical greatness (which The Hounds Of Love certainly does, less so in this version) would be a fig leaf from pop heaven. Consider how funny Geordie accents are. Take all this into consideration before thinking that at this point in time the list making will have been going on for just over an hour. About 150 tracks would have been suggested, some given quite fulsome consideration, others thrown out on their ear. A song required a proposer, a seconder but four vetoes around the room would have kicked it out. Early on songs got in on a good vibes nod. But when you start getting to the top twenty, things slow down considerably. You may get five songs in a row vetoed because they are not top twenty material. And all the time people are getting more drunk, some are also getting bored.

Enter our previous number. House Of Love, by East 17. Remember that this party took up the entirety of the pub floor, was noisy and some people did not hear House Of Love, they heard Hounds Of Love. Humorous banter ensues to clarify which if the songs is voted in. East 17 makes it on a whisker. Smart arse coming up next then says Hounds Of Love, BY THE FUTUREHEADS. Laughter ensues, voting goes through on a nod because it seems like a good idea at the time.

And if anything sums up Hounds Of Love by the Futureheads its: Seems Like A Good Idea At The Time.

Mind you their remix of Fit But You Know It is terrific.

14. Shirley Bassey ◊ Goldfinger

Pete Baran, 25th October 2010

Goldfinger by Ash is a bit of a dirge, and almost certainly one of those songs named because somewhere along the line it sounded to someone somewhere a bit like Goldfinger by Shirley Bassey. Its unclear from their performance, and the song where in the gestation period of the song it was, but they were still in school at the time they wrote it. Safe to say the song contains no luscious horns, no pussycat Bassey growl and no references to King Midas, or the oddly low temperature of anybody’s fingers.

Ash have never been asked to write or perform a Bond theme.

But if you ever are asked to write and/or perform a Bond theme, I suggest your first point of reference should be Goldfinger. Which is a remarkably odd song. Interpolating Monty Norman’s (John Barry’s) James Bond theme into a swooping horn heavy full on diva piece which refers to the titular baddy and how cold his fingers are, Goldfinger is the archetypal Bond song. For starts it has the secret ingredient all PROPER Bond songs are, ie the name of the film is the name of the song no matter how tricky it is to make that name into a song. (Which is why, Quantum Of Solace really should have gone with this). I’M LOOKING AT YOU ALL TIME HIGH.

[Open YouTube Video]

There is something strange about pieces of art which end up representing a greater body of work. Goldfinger is thought of as the defining Bond film, the one where the levels of action, humour, gadgets, girls and goofiness seemed properly calibrated. Creepy gimicky bad-guy sidekick, tick. One-liners ahoy, tick, Pussy Galore, tick. And a theme tune with a brassy diva, brassy lyrics and just plain brassy Bassey. But Goldfinger is probably not the actual best Bond film, and Goldfinger as a track may not be the best Bond theme as a record. But it is THE BOND THEME. And Bassey is THE BOND DIVA. If you are making a Bond parody, it is the Goldfinger well you visit. I’M LOOKING AT YOU GOLDMEMBER.

So I don’t know what Ash were thinking frankly. It makes them look more than a bit silly.

13. Busted ◊ Air Hostess

Hazel, 3rd January 2011

We’re big fans of Busted here at Freaky Trigger; speculative futurism, analysis of authority in the education system, asking people to dance at the disco and Thunderbirds are all highly relevant to our interests and I’m confident that if Charlie hadn’t thrown a strop to go and attempt to gain that elusive approval from Biffy Clyro that seems to be the prize on the X Factor these days then I’m confident their third album would’ve contained a song about the long egg continuum.

Air Hostess is a puzzling piece of their discography -lots of Busted’s songs namechecked being in a band but this was the first one to talk about being famous. More than foxy uniforms, this is a song about being the kind of international popstar who takes planes, who goes through crowded airports surrounded by paparazzi flashbulbs and gets away with throwing peanuts down the aisle. Which sounds like highly antisocial behaviour on an aeroplane and so is almost certainly pretty rock and roll.

Air Hostess also follows the common theme from the band of “unattainable women” but where most of the other objects of affection have ended in a fantasy romantic situation, the air hostess “can’t because [she's] working, the paparazzi’s lurking, [she] doesn’t know [they're] in a band, it’s not that people know [them], one photo’s worth a hundred grand.” This sounds like quite an inflated idea of Busted’s pap stock but I’m no financial analyst and so I’ll concentrate instead on the dynamic here- Air Hostess was the first single off Busted’s second album, coming from a successful tour they were confident, no question as to whether the lady will fall for them, no more dreaming of Miss Mackenzie: we’re in business class now, even if they have messed their pants as they flew over France*

The difference between being turned down at the disco and only being held back from joining the mile high club by paparazzi is pretty substantial- this was Busted’s announcement of their arrival, with a relatively expensive video and the opener for the cockily-titled A Present For Everyone album campaign. This is the sort of ballsy move that used to be reserved for rockstars and top rappers, not snotty pop bands but it was the sort of obnoxious move that sat well with the increasing punk-style pop criticism that had been building in what I feel an urge to stuff my own fist in my mouth to stop myself calling “the blogosphere.”

Yes, Popjustice was a big fan of Steps but it was the bolshiness of groups like Busted and Girls Aloud that came to characterise the pop resurrection and supremacy of the 00s; suddenly, a series of popstars appeared who appeared to (ok, possibly not James) “get it.” Air Hostess isn’t Busted’s best song but it was a massive herald of an era of amazing pop songs which were largely amazing because they didn’t care if they were stupid. Essentially, the exact antithesis of everything that Matt Cardle stands for and simultaneously, completely the opposite of what someone like Jessie J is trying to do – Busted upset people by being a pop group without apologising for it (well, until Charlie decided he would) to which the upset was just a sideline, rather than being the point of the thing.

It seems ridiculous now to imagine the amount of rock press column-inches that were devoted to saying how rubbish and stupid a band who sang a song about wanting to have sex with an attractive woman on an aeroplane were and retrospectively, it’s hard to believe there’s anything controversial about the band at all but I can guarantee there’ll be several comments going ‘Busted were shit you don’t have ears they didnt evun play they’re instruments worst list ever how dare you put this on the internet’ within a week here. And that’s a pretty mighty legacy for a defunct, two-album boyband if I ever heard one.

I can only find versions of the video ripped off (at this point, in its twilight years) Saturday morning kids’ TV so it misses out all the rude bits. And that’s no fun. So I’m afraid you’ll have to have the audio version-

[Open YouTube Video]

*This line has always been troubling; I assume they mean to imply premature ejaculation but it sounds like a deeply unalluring scatological travel nightmare.

12. MC Hammer ◊ U Can’t Touch This

Pete Baran, 13th January 2011

It is serendipitous (in the non Cusack / Beckinsale way) that U Can’t Touch This has turned up in the dying throes of Narnia week. Because MC Hammer’s most well known hit has a surprisingly large number of parallels with the Narnia sequence. Whilst people have seen religious metaphors all over CS Lewis’s fantasy kidlit, well the same is true of this 1990 reworking of Rick James’s Super Freak. Indeed you could say the relationship between the Bible, made of the Old and New Testament is similar to the addition of Hammer’s rap to James’s iconic riff to make You Can’t Touch This. Consider the Old Testament sex and temptation in Super Freak, to the New Testament pacifism and turning the other cheek of Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em. Indeed the Gospel According To Hammer is all about not hurting anyone, but just good baggy panted fun.

That’s not to say that You Can’t Touch This is all New Testament. Indeed as Hammer’s first single of this new phase of his career it was fitting that he is particularly focusing on the start of the Bible for his allegory. Namely the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. It is more plain than Aslan’s Shaggy mane that what MC Hammer is suggesting we can’t touch is the apple on the tree of knowledge, and Hammer is playing the role of a more benevolent God than that which offers up the tempting warning. Rather than saying don’t touch the apple, Hammer is saying U Can’t Touch The Apple. But there is a fatal error in God/Hammer’s statement, when he follows up with a touch more detail: “Why you standing there man, u can’t touch this”. The man, Adam, can’t touch it. But the woman, Eve, sees this as an invitation. And so, suddenly, jarringly even, the song pauses, violently, for the fall of man.

Or as MC Hammer puts it so succinctly: Stop: Hammertime.

This explains why, though man of people have searched for it, the Garden Of Eden has never been found. Hammertime is exactly what it sounds like, God and all of his angels taking apart Eden with their hammers and sundry power tools. It make us consider God as one who may use a hammer, the creator as a builder, or more precisely a carpenter. LIKE HIS SON. The Hammer is a multi-levelled metaphor in a way Aslan’s Lion can never be.

What is a Hammer after all if not a sawn off, imperfect cross? The imperfect reminding us of the imperfection of man.

Much like The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, U Can’t Touch This posits a cosy world (from “London to the Bay”) which nevertheless is a bit crazy. The only escape is to a magical world, via a wardrobe, or via the very transformative power of rap music. Hammer does throw in a ragbag of biblical references across the song, though the most striking is his two line recapitulation of the Lazarus myth:
“Go with the flow in a spin if you can’t move to this
Then you probably are dead
So wave your hands in the air”
Commanding the dead to rise, and not only rise but dance infectiously to the beat, in a situation where Hammer is in the role of Lord Of The Dance. Hammer is not saying he is God in this song, or Jesus, that is for others to say, but he happily plays the role. This of course explains his most iconic clothing. Loose, like the robes of a Bishop, or even the Pope, the baggy trouser Hammer uses in the video suggest the all encompassing stride of the Godhead. Omnipotence – all powerful. Omnipresence – all present. Omnitrousered.

CS Lewis has nothing on this kind of religious subtext. If the world was destroyed tomorrow, one could happily reconstruct nearly all of what is great of the Christian faith from one copy of U Can’t Touch This. Left with the Chronicles of Narnia you’d end up being scared of Turkish Delight and worshipping a tedious Lion. There is a reason why the MC is there in MC Hammer’s. Its short for Man Of Christ (according to Wikipedia).

Who knows why Hammer did not keep up this kind of reverence in subsequent songs however. 2 Legit 2 Quit is a bit like St John on Patmos, apocalyptically poor. And Pray is ironically about snorting cocaine off of a prostitutes arse-cheeks.

11. Mr Oizo ◊ Flat Beat

katstevens, 21st January 2011

Any 13-year-old from 1995 will tell you that the following are vital if you are to be in any way cool:

- attitude of complete indifference to all events
- inside-out knowledge of everything that happened on telly last night, especially Friends
- Rimmel Black Cherry lipstick
- copy of Sugar magazine (RIP :`()
- some trendy jeans

Wearing the WRONG SORT of jeans would mark you as an outcast forever. Pepe Jeans? No. Lee Jeans? HELL NO. Levi’s was the only option, and Levi’s 501s at that, even though they looked terrible on most girls. I suppose having ’501s’ at the end of ‘Levi’s’ makes one more comfortable about Levi’s inconsistent use of possessive apostrophe. I wore Reebok tracksuit bottoms for most of the decade not because my coolness levels were already so stratospherically high I didn’t need them (which of course they were) but because Mum, anticipating a Hulk-style growth spurt at any second, was understandably reluctant to fork out for expensive jeans which I would shortly render as useless as Bruce Banner’s. However my adolescent body refused to ‘spurt’ in any way (easy now), choosing instead to remain steady in its progress and jeansless in its covering. By the time I’d reached my final height I had to buy my own clothes, and anything costing more than a tenner was unthinkable when there were CDs queuing up to be bought. To this day I have never owned a pair of expensive, unflattering Levi jeans. THANKS MUM.

The thing is, by the time Flat Eric turned up in 1999, the cool kids weren’t wearing jeans either. A couple of years beforehand, Steps discovered that wearing an apron over the top of your trews was a good way of concealing that said trews were in fact from Tesco, and All Saints realised that if you were going to cover up the label of your jeans you might as well wear combats instead. Even Levi’s seemed to stop bothering with major advertising campaigns for a while – perhaps because of the disappointment of ‘Underwater Love’ by Smoke City only getting to #4 after the excellent chart-topping work done by Shaggy, Jas Mann et al.

Obviously something drastic needed to be done. Levi’s decided to base their ‘Sta-Pressed’ advertising campaign on a cult puppet belonging to French DJ/film-maker Mr Oizo. Flat Eric was neither flat, nor called Eric, and I don’t know of a single person who bought a pair of ‘Sta-Pressed’ jeans. This last ditch effort may have regained a brief glint of chart supremacy, but the last ten years have not been kind to Levi’s. Apparently they are now millions of pounds in the red, as 501s aren’t skinny or elasticated enough for the kids of today who can’t even be arsed to read Sugar magazine. If they did, they would discover in the final issue under the ‘Hot or Not?’ section the new rules of cool: ‘must listen to French techno at all times, preferably accompanied by amusing Muppet video on Youtube’. Flat Beat kills both birds with one stone!

10. West Side Story OBC ◊ America

Kerry, 27th January 2011

Poor Rosalia, the only Puerto Rican in West Side Story who seems to actually like Puerto Rico. In contrast to Maria, who prances around the bridal shop pretending to be Miss America (despite the competition being open only to members “of good health and of the white race” at the time), and Anita, whose witty and leggy defence of their adopted home is the basis of the catchiest song in the show and indeed FREAKY TRIGGER’S #10 BEST SINGLE OF ALL TIME, Rosalia is OK with Puerto Rico. In the play script she is described as “quietly dressed and not too bright”, which might explain why she doesn’t really have a problem with the Sharks’ homeland (although it does not explain why the costumers for the 2009 revival gave her such stupid hair). But Puerto Rico, according to Rosalia, is kind of okay. You know, it’s pretty. There are some nice tropical breezes and pineapples there. Maybe sometime she’d like to go back and visit.

NOT SO FAST, IMMIGRANT! You’ve made your choice and you can never go back!

[pic: also, in America, girls don't wear ponytails on top of their heads. Join us in the first world, chiquita!]

Rosalia is pretty much erased in the film version to make way for a fiery musical skirmish (I know, another one!) between RITA MORENO and GEORGE CHAKIRIS and some other dancers of various non-white ethnicities. But she lives on in the stage version and ORIGINAL BROADWAY CAST recording ft CHITA RIVERA LA-LA-LA-LA-LA.

It’s a rare song that is not quite as racist as it first sounds, as this one is with all the exaggerated Spanish accents and slightly awkward English. The film version, which everyone knows better (sexy dance-off! boys vs girls! it’s just like the end of High School Musical 2 only with more than one Latina!) is sharper about the social commentary; the original is basically a group of teenage girls pressuring another teenage girl into conforming, and by “conform” they mean “assimilate into majority white culture”.

Which is something the creators were familiar with. Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music) and Arthur Laurents (script) were all middle-class Jewish guys whose parents or grandparents had moved to the US from eastern Europe and Made Good. All their families created the kind of success for themselves that allowed their sons to loll around on the Upper West Side fucking around in music school and making a “living” off arty stage musical concepts that are, it must be said, pretty wanky.*

So when it comes to immigrants to the US, West Side Story is firmly on Team Stop Complaining, You’re Lucky To Even Be Here. Because if Stephen Sondheim’s white immigrant grandparents could make it in this country fifty years ago, so can you! To its credit, the film (1961) corrects this with the Puerto Rican characters complaining in unison, “Your mother’s a Pole, your father’s a Swede/But you were born here, that’s all that you need”. But that level of self-awareness hasn’t made it into the earlier (1957) stage version from whence this version of the song comes.

Laurents, Sondheim and the characters all seem to have forgotten that in the mid-1950s, when the story is set, Puerto Rico was in the middle of a tremendous violent military revolution against the US government. The only hint of this conflict in “West Side Story” is the Sharks’ warlike visages (although the violent arm of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement was mostly led by women, which is pretty great) and Anita’s throwaway line, “Always the bullets flying…” during the intro verse. The revolution involved the US National Guard bombing several major Puerto Rican towns and, in 1954, Puerto Rican nationalists storming the US House of Representatives with handguns and wounding five congressmen. You’d think that would come up sometime. But the way Laurents and Sondheim write them, except for one, these Puerto Rican women don’t care about Puerto Rico, don’t want to be Puerto Rican, don’t even want to think about Puerto Rico unless it’s an extended sarcastic putdown that turns into a feisty, flirty dance number with a nice catchy tune.

But it’s a fair cop really if you think about it! I mean, who needs independence when you can have a Cadillac and a washing machine?

*Thank you Mirisch Studios for cutting the tediously surreal “Nightmare Ballet” sequence and playing up the jolly songs like “Gee, Officer Krupke”.**
**Although that said, it is always worth mentioning that “Gee, Officer Krupke” is in COMPLETELY THE WRONG PLACE in the film, since the whole POINT is that these kids are singing “We ain’t no delinquents, we’re misunderstood/Deep down inside us, there is good” AFTER THEY HAVE JUST KILLED TWO PEOPLE IN A GANG FIGHT AND ARE TRYING TO PROCESS THAT IN THE ONLY WAY THEY KNOW HOW BECAUSE THEY ARE KIDS. HONESTLY. Worst misstep in a film adaptation of a musical since __________ (fill in your own in comments).

9. Althea & Donna ◊ Uptown Top Ranking

Pete Baran, 6th March 2011

What to say about this reggae supersmash not already said by Tom, and the army of comment crew enthusiast over on Popular. Every angle of this amazing one hit wonder has been touched up, a worthy ten out of ten and a record that still sounds fresh as light as the day it was birthed upon the charts. The twin guns of confidence and sass bounce this along as such a terrific little pop gem that it really is very very hard to find anything to say except its really, really good.

So instead why not look at the conspiracy theories which swirl around the song. From the sabotage of the BBC Top Of The Pops orchestra to the misspelling of Althea on a record sleeve, its a song with a fair share of odd stories attached to it.

Here is that Top Of The Pops performance. Backing is terrible, ripping the guts out of the rhythm and almost turning it into elevator music. Althea and Donna are out of sync, and fluff the words occasionally, look hugely out of their depth and you can see why the song plummeted after this. Everything wonderful about the record has been destroyed here, and you can start to smell the one hit wonderdom that befell them, I would have cried all night if my genius slab of pop had its largest audience in this version.

[Open YouTube Video]

And so to the single cover here as well. Its a tatty piece of seventies artwork where at least A&D look better than they did on ver Pops. But Althia? Wither this spelling? Have we been misspelling her name all along? Has the Guinness Book Of Hit Singles let us down? The real story is this cover, attached to Tom’s Popular piece, is the US single cover, released by Warners trying to sell it on its UK hit status. Or rather its “TOP TEN IN ENGLAND” status, where ENGLAND is represented by a Union Jack. That being the ENGLISH flag and all. Looking on google images for other covers throws up a few potentials but I have a sense that Lightning Records probably just released it in a dust sleeve – perhaps one that advertised hairdryers.

I could go on further and talk about Pop Will Eat Itself sampling it on X, Y and Zee, but as much as I liked it at the time, none of this is doing anything but detract from the lightning (cheers) in a bottle that Uptown Top Ranking was. Sometimes pop comes out of nowhere, and sometimes it goes back. It leaves us the records and that is what counts.

8. Dexy’s Midnight Runners ◊ There, There, My Dear

Pete Baran, 12th September 2011

It feels a bit wrong, me being the one to write about Dexy’s. I have friends who are much much bigger fans, I have already written about the other Dexy’s track on this list – Come On Eileen. And for a very long time, until I picked up a cheap reissue CD of Searching For The Young Soul Rebels in 2002, Come On Eileen was one of the three things I knew about Dexy’s. The other two being Jocky Wilson Said and the Theme From Brush Strokes. Which for any band would be enough for at least a page in any half decent history of pop.

You see Robin, I’m just searching for the young soul rebels, and I cant find them anywhere. Where have you hidden them?

I also knew, obliquely, about There, There, My Dear, from one of Danny Baker’s shows in the mid-nineties where, in a typical off the cuff riff, he discussed Kevin Rowland’s spoken word piece in the middle of the track. There was a suggestion that rather than leave the title of the album a manifesto baiting enigma, he kind of blows it by suggesting that the Robin the song is aimed at has hidden the Young Soul Rebels somewhere. Perhaps under the sideboard, or swept under the rug. So when I saw heard it properly for the first time I recognised this odd moment, though truth be told at the end of the album it makes a hell of a lot more sense.

There, There, My Dear caps off Searching For The Young Soul Rebel as a blasting statement of intent. Its not the only track on the album to come in all barrels blazing with the horns up front and centre. Its also not the only track where Rowland’s blustering pyrotechnic delivery threatens to break the song on a number of occasions. I don’t know the Robin this epistolary song is aimed at, but my bet is that the name was picked for the sibilant R which ddddddddddddddddddRowland ddddddddddddddddRolls like he is Mam’zelle at St Claire’s*. Whoever Robin is, he is the early eighties version of a hipster, a music journalist too interested in cool than to open his ears to what Dexy’s were doing.

This seems a little unfair, horn sections may well have not been in favour when Dexy’s emerged, but I am always wary of bands who write songs, if not whole albums, taking their critics to task. Surely the music is meant to solve that problem on your behalf, and bands who are too obsessed with what the music press often end up either bitter or chasing their own tail. But such is the specific genius and madness of what I know of Kevin Rowland. Attacking pretension whilst being fantastically pretentious, looking for a new music by aping a type of soul which had drifted out. All of which is made palatable by this overwhelming force of personality and energetic drive that runs through There, There, My Dear. This is a record, and an album, that sounds live, that promises a sort of live experience, and delivers.

Of course what Kevin knows in this imaginary letter, is that there is one place he hasn’t looked for the young soul rebels. Its the one place he already knew he would find them, or at least one. In the mirror. Which is clear here, in a later live slowed down version, where what I imagined Rowland did at every gig, which was riff at length in the spoken word segment. Let’s do it like Lyon…

[Open YouTube Video]

*Enid Blyton girls Boarding School, slightly less famous than Mallory Towers. What? I had an elder sister.

7. The Orb ◊ Little Fluffy Clouds

Pete Baran, 2nd January 2012

“What were the skies like when you were young?”

I think everyone hears a record in their youth which suddenly reveals a whole new world of possibilities. It could be a three minute punk song, where simplicity and lyrical fervour suddenly make the business of writing your own songs seem possible. Maybe hearing the Aphex Twin opened a world of atonal computer music, bedroom techno that saw no instruments at all. Or think of the kid coming home from yet another tedious trumpet lesson hearing the joyous release of Two Tone and looking in a whole new way at his instrument.

For me it was the Theme To S-Express. I knew drum machines existed, I knew sampling was going on. But hearing the cut and paste of S-Express suddenly suggested that my tape recorder was not just a way of listening to music, it was also a way of making music. I crudely stitched together my own extended version, interpolating bits of Pump Up The Volume, and latterly made a frankly tedious twenty two minute version of Beat Dis which barely held its own beat for twenty seconds. The beat frankly was the annoying bit, if I could get that to match up it sounded fine, but I couldn’t add my own samples over that beat, it would cut out when I tried to add a speech from Ripping Yarns.

But I had seen the future of pop and was insanely excited about this new sound. Then as soon as it happened, this sampladelic revolution got subsumed into Acid House, dance music and the wit and joy of finding vocal samples seemed to vanish into single hooks. The Jigsaw of S-Express had its moment in the sun then vanished. The KLF were doing some things like it off of my radar, but even when they got big, they were inventing their own lunacy.

And then, five years later, when I wasn’t looking for it I heard Little Fluffy Clouds. A song which has a laconic bubbling up beat under the longest strongest intro sample I had heard in ages. And that is before we get on to the frankly astounding Rickie Lee Jones sample.

“They went on for ever and they when I we lived in Arizona and the skies always had little fluffy clouds and .. they were long and clear and there were lots of stars, at night. And when it rained it would all turn, it, they were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire and the clouds would catch the colours everywhere, that’s, its neat because I used to look at them all the time when I was little. You don’t see that.”

The secret of a good sample is for it to be compelling, fit the song and withstand constant repetition. This one does more than that, for all of its stoner simplicity, its seeming near idiocy, the American pastoral nature contrasts nicely with the previous very English sample. The beat isn’t anything special, the tune is pretty unremarkable, but the playful cut and pasting of the sample yet again shows endless possibilities if you find some interesting content. Compared to much of its parent album (the fantastic Adventure Beyond The Ultraworld) Little Fluffy Clouds is positively stuffed with content. But even by itself it seems laconic, laid back – the very essence of ambient house. I loved it and still do.

And the song is about its own method, Layering different sounds…

Rickie Lee Jones, her of the sample, didn’t love it. Annoyed that the track made her sound, well, stupid and or stoned she sued. And since she makes up the lions share of the song, Bog Life settled out of court. I do feel a little sorry that Rickie Lee Jones’s extensive musical career may have a highpoint represented by sounding a bit. On the other hand, perhaps she should be proud that The Orb found this obscure sample and made it into this track. After all, not many of us could give such a good response to the question.

“What were the skies like when you were young?”
“Mainly grey.”

Every now and then another jigsaw ambient track pops up to impress me. Nothing will ever blow the doors down like The Theme To S-Express, or perfect the form such as Little Fluffy Clouds. And I still believe I could make that brilliant bit of bricolage. And then to get myself in the mood, I listen to the Orb again. Which stops me, I could never beat it. The Theme From S-Express opened that door, Little Fluffy Clouds perhaps closed it. The problem with near perfect art is that it sometimes stops any form of imitation.

“You might still see it in the desert.”

6. Eartha Kitt ◊ Just an Old Fashioned Girl

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør, 20th January 2012

Some time in the mid-70s, I went on a school trip to the Ludlow Festival, to see (I think) Cymbeline: six kids crammed in the back of a teacher’s little van, five in their late teens actually studying it for A-level, and me, experimenting and showing off. So naturally they were all having fun amiably teasing me, and hit on POP as a topic to trip me up. As a gamble — early version of a dodge I make to this day — I declared my Young Person’s admiration for my dad’s favourite singer: Eartha Kitt. Which paid off — they’d none of them never heard of her, and with no comfy take, to needle or muddle me with, preferred to chuckle a bit at my weird obscure tastes and went back to earnest Sabbath-chat.

Funny thing is, I grew up and through a life writing about and categorising music, exploring and improving histories, and still Eartha feels more like a handy prevarication move than a name to conjure with: someone people kind of know about, for sure, and maybe like (maybe a LOT), but without a set place, or role, or handy symbolic meaning. Actually she was RCA’s biggest artist before Elvis arrived and the World Changed™ — but even in all the battle, begun in the 80s really, to rediscover undismissive unconfused perspective on pre-Elvis time, nothing apparently re-centred Eartha where she belongs in it.

Not sure how de-confusing it is, but there’s a very intriguing interview with Kitt in Vol.One of RE/Search’s “Incredibly Strange Music”, where she casually demolishes pretty much EVERYONE’s received cartography of values and politics and pop. Certainly she stomped all over LBJ’s notions of the politics of pop: in 1968, Lady Bird Johnson had invited her (along with 50 other women working in various communities across the nation) to the White House, to discuss what black kids want, and what could be done about it. And Kitt told her: in terms she apparently never expected to hear, from a mouth and a compass-point she was (one imagines) quite unaccustomed to processing. So yes, Kitt at that time belonged — as the White House promo department had judged — to a passing age of Las Vegas-y mainstream entertainment, still hugely popular but very much NOT the standard-bearers of the rising young rock-focused political wave. So what was causing riots in urban neighbourhoods, Kitt was asked: Vietnam, of course. Reward: being made presidential persona non grata, and banishment from the US light-entertainment universe for many years.

Her fame had started outside America, and she didn’t need its unoffended custom to thrive: in fact she’d spent the years after the war on the left bank in Paris, in the kinds of dives that James Baldwin and Jean Gabin and Sartre and de Beauvoir could doubtless be found. And well, even setting aside this handily existentialist self-education, the pop-cultural mainstream that rock was busy scorning was surely at least as just as fascinatingly uneasy and complicated in its wit and seemingly shallow opulence as any of the noisier pop that followed, muffling it.

Thursday’s Child is the 1957 LP that “Just an Old-Fashioned Girl” comes from, and it’s the LP my dad had at home (and I have now). It’s a concept album — as so many 50s LPs were — but there’s a sophisticated wit, a subtlety of the unspoken to the concept that’s an unfathomable distance from anything we seemingly habitually associate with this term today. The title phrase comes from the old nursery rhyme: Monday’s child fair of face, Tuesday’s full of grace, and so on. Thursday’s has “far to go” — and the LP is presented as a succession of places Eartha’s been and what she’s seen, dance troupes and night-clubs in New York, Hollywood and Vegas, but also Paris, Istanbul, south and central America. And it’s genuinely an “album” — that’s to say a selection and cross-section of unexpected styles of song, a succession of snapshots and atmosphere — that take us from the delicate, intelligent, definitely somewhat threatening vixen on the cover (shades of Roxy Music) back into the past that made her. Exotic imagined glimpses of the bohemian life and loves of a dancer or singer — of the kind of interzone that gets called “transgressive”, at least by writers determined to drive all joy and energy from the world — further conjoined with an an extract from EK’s first autobiography, also called Thursday’s Child, printed on the reverse of the sleeve (and blurrily reproduced below). As you can read, it’s an intensely evocative passage about Kitt’s mother (a displaced sharecropper, part black, part Cherokee), leading through two barefoot children through the South Carolina night, trying to find somewhere they can all sleep safely. EK was fathered by rape, by the white son of the owner of the farm she was born on — and more or less completely disowned by future stepfathers. As a child she was often dismissed as the ‘Yella Gal’ and — as she wrote and often noted — spurned on all sides; and so she ran away to all the world, to punish all such tiny-minded local bigotry, by becoming an inescapable global success.

Part of the thread of this possibility you can trace via Kitt’s conductor-producer for Thursday’s Child: a New Yorker called Henri René, French mother, German father, musical director for the international wing of RCA Victor from the late 30s, leading his own orchestra from the 40s, he’s best known today — better known than she is in some places — as a pioneer of the “bachelor pad” mode of wittily arranged, lushly recorded music (in “living stereo”), a sequence of LPs released across the 50s, their titles alone a muddled key to the story: Paris Loves Lovers; Passion in Paint; Music for Bachelors (cover feat.Jayne Mansfield in a negligee); Music for the Weaker Sex; Compulsion to Swing; Riot in Rhythm; Listen to Henri Rene (Dynamic Dimensions; Portfolio for Easy Listening; In Love Again; Melodic Magic; White Heat (ha!); and Swinging 59….

The wit is a deeply musically informed wit — the strength and allure of the LP is its breadth, as much as anything — and the “lushness” a very deft use indeed of new-found studio possibility, so that orchestration has a precision and 3D stereo presence in and around the singer. Kitt switches between personas and deliveries and the arrangements do likewise, cinematic jumpcuts that juxtapose, undercut, gather and playfully debate, ironise — “ironise” in an important way, that’s so common in 40s and 50s film, that doesn’t necessarily have a jargon term, at least when it’s deployed in non-film music, where the “soundtrack” amplifies the emotion of a scene or an action or a section in a story by being its exact opposite.

(The classic example comes from Hitchcock: the circus music rising to a loud climax during a nasty murder at fairground’s edge: the sound obscures and distracts from the material nastiness of the story, and — one step back — foregrounds the unconcerned happy world as it carries on having fun only yards away, which of course means that as viewers — two steps back, as it were — we’re complicit in these two clashing worlds, and thrown doubly hard against the pathos of the victim by sharing the last sounds she hears, and recognising her solitude…)

The layered, lush, learned irony here is an invocation — as much as anything else — of the ugly side of a woman’s success in this kind of world: and this is the use of irony I want to stress here — the conscious, amused, wise adult alertness to the fact that every one of us is embedded in conflicting worlds and roles and perspective, torn between loyalties and obligations we agree, for the sake of moment-by-moment social enrichment, to share and acknowledge. This is where the intensity and horror of Hitchcock’s irony arrives, because it demonstrates how often we fail to negotiate a settlement between clashing worlds; but this is also where the release and dark joy of Eartha Kitt’s irony operates, which insists that sometimes we can, and it’s thrillingly and heartening when this happens — just look at her!

Let’s get back to to ‘Old Fashioned-Girl’, a song that meets the contradictions of past and present head on, and playfully explores the way role-play suffuses our response to both. Or we can dig sideways a bit more — noting for oblique confirmation that René’s White Heat, made for Imperial after he left RCA, includes a version of the Woody Woodpecker themetune: and actually this (of all things) brings us back . Because the best comparison I can make for the image stream in “Fashioned” is decadence-era Tex Avery: as he eased himself away from the nihilistic anarcho-libidinal energy of his earlier cartoon shorts, the director made a group of animations that seem somehow to predict (and tease) the Bachelor Pad set, even though they’re not more than streams of quickfire visual puns, each at once cutely witty and instantly forgotten, an affectionate giggle at modern market culture as pure silly cornucopia: The House of Tomorrow; the Car of Tomorrow; the Farm of Tomorrow; and TV of Tomorrow

“I want an old fashioned car, a cerise Cadillac/
Long enough to put a bowling alley in the back”

“I like the old fashioned flowers, violets are for me/
Have them made in diamonds by the man at Tiffany”

“Our little home will be quaint as an old parasol/
And instead of carpet I’ll have money wall to wall“

The arrangement’s terrific: a dense harpsichord clatter bouncing behind her, as speed-read gesture at the “olden days” (and at more recent craft-enclave opulence: Wanda Landowska playing Bach on harpsichord had been released as an album of 78s in a pioneering subscription issue before the war, the cognoscenti paying upfront for a quality document that would never have received mainstream release). She sings the words bell-clear, enunciating like a guide to elegant ways to speak, as the words spool out, relentlessly, into an impishly self-mocking cartoon of material-girl cupidity, Avery-style images as sung sight-gags (“I’m just a pilgrim at heart, oh so pure and genteel/Watch me in Las Vegas while I’m at the spinning wheel“). The fold-over irony of the role she plays not so much straight as a wide-eyed and coolly understated innocence, holding your gaze, challenging you to call her on it all. As emphasis on the elegance there’s even just trace of a mimicked accent when she sings “Old” — and it reminds you how hard it is to guess or hear her own real accent anyway; her default mode isn’t not quite as wildly mutable as Nicki Minaj, say, but nevertheless they’re soul-sisters.

Eartha was hot and she was witty and quick, and her voice darts across backdrops of cartooned identity; a knowing actress flickering between roles, momentarily sketching them, chuckling about them, chuckling at you so fascinated by the growling codeshifts, as we’d call it today. “Old Fashioned Girl” is a portrait of a type — impishly material-girl in the way it mocks cliches of piety — but it’s self-mocking too, mocking the type, mocking the performer sketching the type, mocking the audience the performer has in the palm of her paw, mocking the need for the relationship we’re all in, in contrast to… what?

Mocking cliches of piety — maybe this is why Kitt seem to sit so resolutely outside the legacy of “soul” as a singer, and only somewhat overlaps with jazz (I have a rather nice 1991 LP with a stupid title, Eartha Kitt: Thinking Jazz), no more part of its canons than (say) Louis Prima. Anyway, as we can see — to return to particulars from airy and confusing generalities — Kitt’s sensibility was never about the fetish for some idealised cultural home-space blessedly free from roleplay or powerplay or the erotics of hierarchy. Nor (of course) should anyone’s idea of soul or jazz have been, but somehow the UK factions in the post-punk critical generation worked together to effect exactly this: perhaps the single greatest failure of this era was our collective inability to open up a language and an ethos that encompassed the new music in front of us, the post-Elvis tradition, and a grown-up non-symbolic understanding of soul, of jazz-as-ethos… and of everything Eartha seems to carry about her, on this LP above all.

RE/Search were attempting with this particular collection and its 1994 follow-up to re-purpose several lost strands of music, from electronica to what became known as loungecore, and venturing in the process a little clumsily through the usual stages of a re-evaluation: between a forgotten and a rediscovered pleasure lies an awkward stretch of ambiguously evolving attitude, easily tagged (and dismissed) as “ironic” or “guilty”. I don’t think it’s an accident that Kitt fell into this area for them: as a collective RE/Search had travelled from old-skool west coast punk-rock ’tood (the zine was then called Search and Destroy) via Ballardian Industrial Culture (which was fascinated with celebrity and mediation and muzak and such figures as Martin Denny) to its not-very-clear slightly self-congratulatory 90s identity, which embraced tattoos, scarification, circus freaks, and the “Angry Women” project (which Kitt fairly easily belonged in, truth to tell). The “irony” this kind of project risks having imposed on it is a feeble ghost of the mode that Hitchcock or Kitt are so confidently deft within and so unsettling deploying: you see the generous motive behind a title like “Incredibly Strange Music” (to recast something seemingly over-familiar and uninteresting as utterly weird), and yet it’s fairly tricky not also to be feeling that much of this music is really only “Incredibly Strange” if you start from an “Incredibly Self-regarding and Parochial” viewpoint. Which perhaps RE/Search felt its readers mainly did?

(Actually there’s a lot to be written about 90s attempts to resolve the 80s impasse — but I’ve already written quite a lot, and don’t intend to pursue that issue here.) (Phew! and indeed Hurrah! cry the long-suffering FT readers…)

To follow every hint and glint of this music, we have to be drenched in a world that’s gone: I can laboriously patch in some of the relevant backstory, but the labour drags down away at the intended effect. We’ve forgotten too much, if we ever even knew it. Examine the label credit — to chase up the provenance of the songs, which were at some point very deliberately selected and agreed on, even before René’s arrangements were written, and work on the sense of conceptual unity begun — and you’re instantly embrangled in a tangle of typos, long-dispersed modish approval, forgotten events and musicals and names: George Shearing (‘Lullaby of Birdland’) and Marvin Fisher (‘Just an Old-Fashioned Girl’) were well enough known in some circles, as perhaps are Mack David (co-composer of ‘If I Can’t Take It With Me When I Go’) and Murray Grand (co-composer of ‘Thursday’s Child’) — but Jean-Piere (sic) Moulin? Who was Mesi Julian? ‘Oggere’ seems to be by the Afro-Cuban composer Gilberto Valdés (the label credits just say “Valdez”), and the “Tabares” of the ‘No Importa Si Menti’ composer-credit may be Baz Tabranes, but who was “Tore”, the sole fragmentary indication of the identity of the composer-author of ‘Fascinating Man’? And has no one else ever sung this song? Really? (Don’t say Falco — only the title’s the same… )

(None of the above is actual real proper historical research, mind you: I didn’t even hunt through my own books, just set off on a few lightning google-trips across the internet — I wanted to out the post up before the actual end of time — so any clues others turn up or already know are very welcome. Orson Welles called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” and cast her as Helen of Troy in his staging of Dr Faustus: she also crossed over into semi-highbrow Broadway appearances, such as a musical based on archie and mehitabel, called Shinebone Alley, one of the first with an all-integrated cast, which I want to know more about. I’ve gone nowhere near her role as the third Catwoman, as nuttily perfect as Sun Ra’s Batman project, or the free shows she gave to East Londoners, one of which I saw in the very early 80s… )

Which all brings us back, the long route, to the ‘prevarication move’, and how it was I had something I could baffle the older kids with in 1975-ish, even knowing none of this. Something happened in the late 50s and early 60s, a cultural ruin of sorts, and whether you blame Elvis or “rock” or Vietnam or perhaps even the Vegas swing culture that was one victim of the ruin, that’s allowed songs like to be artefacts that hide more than they reveal, and escape more they connect; for performances like this to be mysteries more than they’re windows. Gather together nothing more than the languages Kitt sings in on this LP — Spanish, French, German, some kind of apache street pidgin in ‘Mademoiselle Kitt’, whatever Cuban patois is featured in the sinister and magnificent ‘Oggere’ — and the scattered dance styles that René unifies into his own orchestral voice, and you’d faced, in the end, with the masked pain, which is also very much the mastered pain, of a performer who never had a home to go back to her; whose family are the multicultural band of outsiders of the Josephine Baker orphanage; a smart, highly political girl-pirate, a feminist Vegas showgirl, who made the stage her best trusted place.

All revolutions go down in history, yet history does not fill up, as another old-fashioned left banker once wrote.

5. Belle And Sebastian ◊ The Boy With The Arab Strap

Barry Sheavils, 9th January 2013

STEPS WAS ROBBED

.

4. Madonna ◊ ”Like A Prayer

Pete Baran, 25th January 2014

Tom wrote about this on Popular here: so here is a project ending couple of thoughts.

“Life is a mystery”. But Madonna doesn’t mean a mystery like the kind Sherlock solves three times a year, or even the kind they solve using CSI in Las Vegas, New York or Miami (with or without sunglasses). What Madonna means here is that “Life is a mystery” sounds, in itself, mysterious. Smart. Sexy. A bit deep. Like a good lyric.

Compare that opening to the main couplet in the chorus: “When you call my name, it’s like a little prayer”. Now this sounds self-aggrandizing, perhaps a little big headed, a typical silly lyric – but of course is factually correct. If you call her name: “Madonna”, it is indeed like a little prayer, it is a little prayer to the Virgin. All of which lies at the heart of this terrific song. It earns its religiosity, by being factually religious and reassuringly secular at the same time.

This is a world Italian American Madge knows well, she knows the buttons she can push in the video (it’s a Black Jesus on the cross – not her after all, a female Jesus would be a step too far in 1989 in a way that was totally fine in the 00′s). And the whole thing is bundled up like one big simile – I wonder if these days she would have bothered with the “Like A” – when it came to the prayer. But it is the “Like A” that also allows the secular world in. We may not pray like her, we may not pray at all, but we understand the purity of the sensation she is referring to. And it is an oblique callback to “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free”, the prayer comparison comes from the romantic pairing, but the music makes it more than clear with its ersatz gospel flourishes and raw dancefloor power that the real thing that is like a prayer here is dancing to a ridiculous song. The Beatles might have been bigger than Jesus, the Stone Roses may have declared themselves the resurrection a few years later, but Madonna understands the communion between feet and dancefloor here like few before or after. Which is a bit of a mystery.

3. Shaggy ◊ Boombastic

katstevens, 11th July 2014

Its usage in the pinnacle of BBC light entertainment [ Open YouTube Video ] aside – what a record this is! The drum intro is played on the side of a rusty water tank. The noisy brass squawks like Pingu angrily trying to shoo geese off his lawn. The piano is straight out of a Chas’n’Dave pub knees-up, and the end of each chorus line is punctuated by Cher Lloyd’s grandma (subs check this) going ‘Ugh!’ All Shaggy himself needs to do is drawl along for the ride: sleazy, cheesy – easy peasy!

The Levi’s advert that propelled this to #1 has stuck in the memory for many: our hero takes on Pingu’s claymation form, effortlessly pulling motorbike stunts to save the damsel in distress from a burning building. The animated city itself has a similar feel to the spoof-robot-noir of Dick Spanner, as does our greaser’s chiseled chin.

Even the visual jokes are there: the roast pigeons coming back to roost on the telegraph line are exactly as subtle than the giant illuminated “SAVE ELECTRICITY” sign in Spanner’s metropolis. The advert is only a minute long, but still manages to cram in a number of other gags that would have been edited out of Police Squad for being too obvious – a firehose full of holes, a firefighter toasting a sausage on the flames, an oblivious nose-picking kid as one of the bystanders (which includes someone wearing a Santa outfit for some reason?) and of course, finishing on a toilet joke.

The official video unfortunately contains none of these elements. Hence this can only be the third best song of all time! I wonder what could be at top spot?

[Open YouTube Video]

2. The Trammps ◊ Disco Inferno

Tom, 23rd December 2014

A disco track is second on this list because – Rock Hall of Fame shenanigans notwithstanding – disco is almost universally beloved. If you’re a wedding DJ in a tricky spot, the late 70s will not let you down. Perhaps that was truer in 2004, when we compiled the list, than 2014, but even so a Whig History of Pop – one in which the aim is to create a sense of progress to the present day – might as well start with disco. This stuff is foundational. The intuition of disco’s discontents – like the Comiskey Park crowd who took the Trammps’ chorus on “Disco Inferno” as an order – was that disco was a break point, the end of something they had loved and the beginning of something they would not. This intuition was not entirely wrong.

If “Get Lucky” is an indication, the more intricate, light-touch end of disco is more fashionable now than the uproarious, full-fat version that “Disco Inferno” represents. “Disco Inferno” is tacky, it smells of cheap drink deals and sticky floors. But it got that way because it’s barely deniable. The delighted, destructive frenzy of the song – the punch of the horns, Jimmy Ellis’ devilish growl – is violently inclusive: if we’re going to burn, we will all burn together. Disco may be the dawn of pop these days, but there is always deeper magic, other layers to excavate; unrest – in this case – both theatrical and real. The panicky bass and string parts on “Disco Inferno” call up The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown; the chant is lifted directly from 60s DJ Magnificent Montague, via the Watts riots.

But this is what pop does – assembles coincidences, ideas and images, spins them into a moment, leaves writers to catch up and piece it all into a story. And stories tend to hide the more down to earth angles. Jimmy Ellis was 38, a working class, southern black guy, a former meatpacker with a big voice who’d spent the 60s as a jobbing vocalist before getting the Trammps together in his early 30s. Did he love disco? No, he was an R&B singer. Were the glitzy red suits – and the uniform dungarees before them – his idea of style? Who knows. They worked. The stories of the disco groups – soul and R&B men who saw a shot and took it – remind me of other 70s realists, a continent away from the Trammps. The glam rockers: old school, working class, rock and rollers and one-shot psych bands who dressed up to become Slade, the Sweet, Alvin Stardust. Pop history flatters itself and its fans by emphasising the self-actualisers, the people who, through music, become what they always were inside. But there is a more pragmatic element – never better seen than in the 70s – and we romance it away at our peril: let the wham of “Disco Inferno” serve as today’s reminder.

1. Pet Shop Boys ◊ Always On My Mind/In My House

Tom, 29th December 2014

The intro: 00’00 – 00’39

In December 1987 the Pet Shop Boys released “Always On My Mind”, a cover of the song made famous by Elvis Presley and Willie Nelson. It became the Christmas Number One that year. Almost a year later, they released Introspective, their third album, whose fifth track is a nine-minute version of “Always On My Mind”, including an acid house inspired breakdown that features Neil Tennant rapping. Introspective marks, in Tennant’s words, the end of the band’s “imperial phase”, where virtually anything they tried came off and was commercially successful. It charted at number two, behind U2’s Rattle And Hum.

Sixteen years later, at the end of a Freaky Trigger pub crawl, someone said that “Always On My Mind/In My House” was the best record of all time, and around a dozen of us agreed, or at least did not disagree, and that installed it at number one on our list, a list, we promised, that we would write up for the website over the course of 2005. And so we all went home the merrier for it.

And ten years after that, here we are.

The song: 00’39-02’53

When I wrote about “Always On My Mind” for Popular – giving it a 10 – I suggested the flash and bombast of the Pet Shop Boys’ synth arrangement preserved the song’s humility. I think I was mistaken about that. Neil Tennant isn’t gloating about his neglect of his lover, but he isn’t humble or regretful either. His reading of “Always On My Mind” preserves the admission at the expense of contrition: he is laying out the facts as he sees them, but even at this late stage he will not commit himself. Fortunately, the song has already done it for him: the crashing, swaggering synth riff that defines the Pet Shop Boys’ cover leaves you in no doubt which way Tennant is jumping.

But on this extended version, the riff is discarded, and Tennant’s wonderfully considered vocal holds the spotlight by itself. This time, he’s more thoughtful, more equivocal. And he has been across the whole album. Introspective is called that because that’s what the songs are like – “the Smiths you can dance to”, a winking Pet Shop Boy said to Record Mirror – but what the record is often about is autonomy: the will and fantasy and loneliness of living your life however you choose. As the opening song puts it, “I could leave you, say goodbye. I could love you if I try, and I could, and left to my own devices I probably would” – the desire here is for the fact of the choice, not its making. And on Introspective’s extended version of “Left To My Own Devices”, Tennant is faced with that choice, and smiles, and simply rejects the decision itself, stepping out of the song’s binary into a final-verse dreamscape where all his imagined possibilities mix into each other.

It’s intoxicating – an old rock dream of total individual freedom seductively re-stated as a promise of pop music. A promise – or so I heard it at 15, very ready for such things – that pop contains doors. Doors which, if you bolt through them at the right time, on the right day, could simply upend the way you see the world, by rejecting false choices and connecting impossible things: “Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat” – why ever not? Great pop music is forever being confronted by sentences that start “Great pop music is…” and try and throw a rope around it. “Left To My Own Devices” tells me that pop (or love, or people) are defined instead by how they shrug off or wriggle out of definitions.

That was one song, and at the other end of the album, “Always On My Mind/In My House” picks up the same threads, more darkly. Without the riff to bring Tennant’s decision home, he can lose himself in equivocation again: “Maybe I didn’t love you quite as much as I could,” he’s singing, but his unruffled tone is saying… and maybe that doesn’t matter. But the difference between “Devices” and “Always” is that in the former I hardly notice the “you” it’s sung to, I’m as giddy as the song is about its celebration of possibilities. “Always On My Mind/In My House”, though, is haunted by its wounded “you”, who is paying the price for the singer’s indulgent indecision. We can be, to ourselves, as undefined as we like: sometimes other people need us to be fixed.

Tennant makes the opposing case. It’s not enough. The song collapses around him.

The rap: 02’53 – 03’49

The way we worked out the greatest songs of all time was simple. We sat round a table, drinking. Someone named a song. If someone seconded it, it was put to a veto. If enough vetoed, it was off the list. Otherwise, it was on. Once we had a hundred songs, the list was over, and the final named record was number one. It seemed as honest a method of making a list as the usual ways, one as likely to reward happy memories or well-timed jokes as acknowledged classics.

One of the things that is favoured when you make a list that way, in the pub, are moments that can be easily imitated, in the pub. Neil Tennant’s rap on “Always On My Mind/In My House” is such a moment. In the plan of the record and its emotional journey that I’m outlining, it has a place – a list of excuses for inattention that the production, speeding and slowing, turning Tennant’s speech into a calliope ride, seems to mock. In the Pet Shop Boys’ career it has a precedent too – it’s an extension of “The Sound Of The Atom Splitting”, their theatrically disturbing surrealist B-Side.

None of that matters next to the pleasure of putting on a funny deep voice and going “You were AWLWAYS” like a slowed-down record. It’s silly, as befits the greatest song of all time.

The breakdown: 03’49 – 05’22

It’s the end of 1988, the dying days of it, that odd slice after Christmas and before New Years. I’m in my room, listening to a cassette of Introspective that I copied off a friend. The album is a few minutes too long for half a C90, so the final track, “It’s Alright”, cuts off. I don’t mind that as much as I should, because in 1988 I don’t understand “It’s Alright”. A cover of a house music track by Sterling Void, the man with the greatest name of all time, it sounds corny and repetitive to me.

But for thousands of people Sterling Void, and musicians like him, are one of those doors that open up in pop and rewrite the shape of their world. A few miles outside my bedroom is the M25 London Orbital motorway, opened two years earlier. On it, British pop music is changing nightly. The looped road means that convoys of cars can move around it at speed, looking for illegal warehouse parties, getting instructions at service stations or on new mobile phones that keep them an hour or two ahead of the police. The house and techno music played at them (and in clubs, and in fields) has begun its irreversible transformation of British pop.

The Pet Shop Boys – born out of a shared love of clubbing, remixes, import 12”s – looked well placed to take advantage of this new world. Instead, they never really meshed with it. The roots of their work were in Hi-NRG, synthpop, Freestyle, italo – the melange of post-disco dance musics where smart, direct lyrics and strong pop songwriting could thrive. The blissful structural explorations of house and techno – its repetition, its long breakdowns, the different ways it used vocals – drew on other parts of clubbing history and culture. Like pub rockers when punk came along, the Pet Shop Boys almost fitted in, but that almost could suddenly seem glaring.

I assumed, perhaps, that Introspective was the Pet Shop Boys making house music. It’s not: it’s the Pet Shop Boys responding to house music, trying to fit some of its ideas to their template. The breakdown of “Always On My Mind / In My House” is the best example of this. An acid bassline underneath a mournful orchestral melody, leading into an angry thicket of programmed drums, and then the whole thing repeats. It’s unsteady, more a travelogue than a groove, and it sounds little like any contemporary club music. The template is still the extended pop 12” mixes of the mid 80s – by remixers like Francis Kevorkian or Jellybean Benitez. Even so it feels like a house-inspired version of those, because of the dark bassline, the pitched-up squeaks of “You were always!”, and because while it sounds eventful now, back then this middle stretch of the song seemed forbidding, alien even, in its minimalism.

All this is knowledge applied in hindsight. It’s 1988. The new world is propagating imperfectly, and has not reached my bedroom. The magazines I read are other schoolboys’ copies of Q and Record Collector, which have no interest in orbital raves. They lead me to Morrissey and REM at best, U2 and Pink Floyd at worst. I start the Second Summer Of Love exploring classic rock, sometimes with enthusiasm, increasingly with duty. Then I discover the Smiths – a door to bolt through, a name to call myself. I like indie music. By the end of the year I’m an evangelist, drunk on new rules and prejudices. But my friend has the new Pet Shop Boys album, and offers to tape it for me. We used to listen to Actually together, but that was long ago, all the way back in 1987, when I was 14 not 15, and I still liked pop, not indie. I’ve made my choice.

The drop: 5’22 – 5’30

I’m wrong.

The triumph: 5’30-6’46

The riff – and with that sudden shunt of synthesiser at 5’22 the whole of “Always On My Mind / In My House” is revealed as an extended exercise in delaying it – doesn’t just define this Pet Shop Boys cover version. It defines their entire, storied, “Imperial phase”. I once spent a whole Pitchfork column trying to throw a rope around the term “Imperial phase”: I suspect it wriggled free. But the point of them, it seems to me, isn’t just that the stuff you always do well becomes absurdly popular, it’s that the stuff you stretch for, and risk, comes off too. So while a relatively mediocre Pet Shop Boys single like “Heart” reaching Number One is the sign of an Imperial Phase, so too is the band invading the rock canon, at Christmas, with an Elvis cover and a video of clips from a surrealist film they’ve made, and it seeming like perfect, swashbuckling sense. And this also is a promise of pop music: it can make any decision you take seem the right one.

“Always On My Mind/In My House” is not part of the phase, by Neil Tennant’s own definition. “Domino Dancing”, the melancholy lead single from Introspective, was the Pet Shop Boys stretching once again – two uptight Brits making Latin synthpop – and it failed: it staggered into the Top 10. The game was up. So this uproarious minute of music, the riff rampaging through the song, synthesisers squealing and drum machines crashing around it, is a victory lap and farewell to the brief moment of British pop when the Pet Shop Boys were in charge of it. They will go their separate ways now, the Pet Shop Boys becoming a band that can release songs like “Left To My Own Devices”, “Being Boring”, “Can You Forgive Her?”, and “Se A Vida E”, an occasional, clever counterpoint to the rest of whatever pop is doing. But in this minute, this bubble of pop, they will always reign. Wasn’t it fun?

The Resolution: 6’46 – 8’11

Meanwhile there’s a song to finish – one last go-around for “Always On My Mind”, this time closer to its hit single version, with the riff appended, once again making Tennant’s choice obvious. The seductive refusal of decision in “Left To My Own Devices” finds its balance, the tune finds its breakdown, and the album can proceed to its happy ending. As can this list.

It’s 1988. The thing about pop music, when you’re 15, is that its doors open all the bloody time. Years later, month-long obsessions or beliefs seem like eras. Was there a time when I disapproved of pop music, on the say-so of Morrissey or Roger Waters or some spanner on the front of the NME? There was, but it didn’t last. I’d like to say the moment I heard “Always On My Mind/In My House” killed it, but things are rarely so neat. Still, it was a moment – I rewound it again and again, playing the whole album or just that track or just that minute or two. After it, I could not honestly stake a position where I disliked pop music. Within it, I could trace the outlines of other doors, into house and disco, and a world where the glorious return of the riff wasn’t a great pop trick, but a first principle of making and building music.

The Coda: 8’11 – 9’04

It’s the most liminal time of the year. The days between Christmas and New Year are, if left unfilled, an unsatisfying appendix, like the minute or so of unadorned beats you find sometimes at the end of dance tracks, a residual tail for the mixer to match the next record to. Christmas is the year’s natural climax, New Year its natural beginning. The space in between is an equivocal season, something left hanging like an unresolved decision, or an unfinished list.

So we – a very specific we, the list-makers – fill it up, coming together every December 29th to go to pubs, catch up, talk nonsense, and occasionally in former years make lists of things to write about. Why lists? Because we were sad old nerds, obviously. But also, we liked – or at least, I liked, and I’m the one stuck writing this – the conceit that this unfixed time of year, and the magic of the pub, was a good time to make arbitrary decisions, like naming the greatest records, and accept the challenge of one day writing as if those decisions were right.

And now the list is finished. Something else can be the greatest record of all time. Not everyone who started reading the list is still reading, not everyone who made the list is still with us. I’m going to post this, put on my coat, go to the hospital, and then eventually go to the pub, because it’s December 29th and that’s what I do. Perhaps I’ll see you there.

“The impulse behind this “10″ is probably the same as the impulse of the “10″ for “Atomic” – whether it’s a cover version or not, important or not, this does what I need a pop record to do, perfectly and reliably. When you start saying “it needs something extra to be a 10″, what you’re doing is saying that joy on its own can’t be enough. I object to this idea. That objection can get misinterpreted as a hedonistic philosophy – that joy is always enough, pleasure above everything in criticism – but it’s not: of course pop can act in ways beyond simply ‘being pop’, how boring if it couldn’t! But I wouldn’t be much of a pop fan if I didn’t think that sometimes simply being pop IS enough to get the highest praise I can give.”

“I think it’s going to be alright.”

Acknowledgements

This information was automatically retrieved on December 31st 2014 from http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ using dotEPUB.com (v. 0.8.14 / b1.1 IL). Our thanks to them.

Subsequent editing and styling by the FT staff.

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FREAKY TRIGGER’S TOP 100 SONGS OF ALL TIME eBook © Freaky Trigger 2015. All rights reserved under some convention or another. By downloading this eBook you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook excluding this paragraph, which you should stop reading right now. Every part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, so long as you have the express written permission of the Queen. Except micro-fiche – she'll wave that through no questions asked.

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eBook v1 – 16th January 2015