199 Songs

The joy in creating a 10 month long series of posts symmetrical around a central frame is… no, wait, I need a minute.. that was Watchmen (once again) – fearful symmetry.

The fun involved in planning a hidden meaning trail in fibonacci numbers is… nope.

If you add together the moments of silence in the songs until you reach 4 minutes 33 seconds, you…

Songs that kind of don’t really go anywhere, but really do. I know that there are two years to follow this record, but there are almost exactly five years from ‘She Loves You’ to ‘Let It Be – it’s only five years ago now that Covid was about to start a second lockdown here – and Hey Jude feels like the beginning of the end.

We’re back with time doing strange things – you can say well. you can see the difference between youth and age in the movement through these songs, and on to the end, but Lennon went from 23 to 28, McCartney from 21 to 26. This career isn’t far off the time between albums, or even tours, now.

Hey Jude is a song that seems to launch, to take off and emotionally accelerate away, just because it can, with nothing in particular to say and no particularly interesting way to say it. Like ‘She Loves You’ it’s simple, and unlike ‘She Loves You’ it’s not a song about urgency, about a demand for attention.

I made some lists, along the way of doing this, not of anything in any kind of order, just of things to think about and I’ve played quite a few of the things on those lists but haven’t played quite a few, too. I have a structural plan, to use this place to carry on differently, and I will have a play, and we will see.

Maybe I put this off and off for a dozen and more years because something about plunging back it was bound to make things happen. Things have definitely happened – not what or how I expected but still.

Make it better.

On 13th September a Sikh woman was raped in Oldbury, between Wolves and Birmingham. Because of things said by at least one of the two white men who assaulted her, it was treated immediately as a racially motivated attack by the police. As an attack on a women because she was a woman and beause she wasn’t white, as an attack where she was told by her attackers that this was why she was being attacked – ‘You don’t belong in this country, get out’ – it was another attempt to bring fear and despair to people. It was an act of terror.

It was a few days before the openly nativist, anti-migrant and fundamentally racist demonstration in London. I saw and heard nobody in the press calling for that demonstration to be called off in light of what happened. Nobody questioned the burden on the police of manging a national demonstration when there was a serious crime to investigate and a clear intent to frighten people into withdrawing from our wider community, to make people to scared to be out alone, to make people be afraid to be who they are.

I noticed nobody on the march itself, who were pretending that it was just decency and common sense to ‘protect our girls’, actually make a stand about racist sex crimes by white men, like the one in the news then and there. But then the vile stupid historic racist stereotype about black men being a risk to white women was always born out of pretending away the truth of black women being systematically raped by their white owners.

I had a conversation with friends at work recently – black british, Jamaican family roots, black country through and through. One of them feels sure that some kind of civil war is coming, that we will eventually be given no choice other than to get up and fight, or give in to this shit. The other is convinced that there is strength in community, that even people who might go on such marches will eventually be confronted with the reality they really know, the day to day relationships they have with other people, the love in their hearts. I honestly don’t know.

I’ve gone through about five different song choices whilst writing this. I’m going with the idea that it’s a statement of hope for the future that I’m not playing ‘Might Be Stars here.

Until we fall down….

I get to go on a trip next week – PGL, a hundred 11 and 12 year olds getting so exhausted running around in the woods all day they go straight to sleep in unfamiliar beds in cabins sharing sleepovers with their friends and leave us to ourselves. Maybe. I went last year, with slightly older ones, and we had the interesting dilemma or whether you allow boyfriend and boyfriend to share a room. (We did – there were two other friends in with them too. They, in a worrying regression to clearly the wrong stereotype, had a row and spent the time not talking to each other).

Perhaps the strangest work thing that’s happened to me in the last few years is what happens when you share office space with people who need favours, (and also what happens when you’re a man and a qualified first aider – you get to go on lots of trips) – because somebody like me was needed to go on summer camp, I have become involved with our local group of cadets. Strictly speaking, if I’d managed to get on with the paperwork, I would now be an officer in His Majesty’s Royal Air Force. Really.

My dad was in the forces. It’s a funny thing to think of, to say, except, of course, it means something very different to that experience for most other people, because my dad was in the forces over 20 years before I was born. My dad turned 18 in the spring of 1943, and spent the next few years in the Med as a morse operator on a boat.

I came to this posting, thinking about the end, because I realised that I don’t listen to a lot of Billy these days, and haven’t been in the least bit interested in listening to anything new of his for years. This is one of those quieter moments of perfection, especially as a moment in time (1984, shall we just say that once again?). Our fathers were all soldiers / so we’ll be soldiers too / fighting and fooling like soldiers do. I remember that Bill ended up appearing as the narrator on a tv show about new recruits to the army, partly on the back of having briefly served himself, partly on the back of this song, which was the theme music.

Nothing is clear in this tactical unclear war / I can’t be bothered to find out what we’re fighting for. An anti-love song – where are we, Statement Number 8? It’s more than ‘what went wrong’, it ‘s more of ‘oh yes, it’s a mess’.

I wouldn’t / couldn’t listen to Stiff Little Fingers first time around because somebody I didn’t entirely get on with really liked them and ridiculed anything I was listening to. It was the nearest I ever came to some kind of mods and rockers clash. I would have been about 14.

When I started listening to things again in the mid 2000s after a very quiet decade or so (on the whole, see various posts below for various exceptions) the first band I went to see were Love, with the not-long-to-live but you’d never have known it Arthur Lee (with, as we said on the night, every head and hippy in the tri-state area in attendance) – and the second were SLF who turned up in the same venue before they closed it and turned it into a museum (statement of fact, not social commentary).

Other than the usual problem they had of having to go off for 15 minutes in the middle because so much beer had been thrown at them the mics had stopped working, it was bloody great, and this was one of the things they played.

When I went back to work this September, in a new job at the old place, one of pastoral managers said ‘I love it when somebody comes over from the other side, they start to actually understand why things happen like they do in classrooms’. There are lots of generalisations of all of the things that the young people today have to put up with, although the two I would highlight here are the other point made by Jonathan Haidt’s ‘The Anxious Generation’ – not the point about phones – that parents (and teachers) won’t let them run around on their own, making their own rules, sorting out their own disputes, and getting themselves thoroughly lost so they can learn how to find themselves, and the feedback we got from the student leadership ‘wellbeing’ group on what students were worried about; we sat waiting to make notes about everything you can predict here that wasn’t like it was when we were young and instead they said ‘teachers ignore the homework timetable and we have real stress about work pileups’.

Jake Burns said that he wrote this whilst he was housesharing with a pair of student teachers, who would come home and tell him stories about what they’d really been learning on teaching placements that day. Some of it rings horribly true now as then – She makes the breakfast, one of eight / All in one room – there are kids who tell me about how everyone at their place has to sleep in shifts because there is so little room.

I’ve been teaching for 25 years but everything needed to change and has – I was looking at a ‘400 books to mark a week’ timetable and knew that I would crash and burn, whatever hacks and shortcuts I managed to devise. So I’m now not a teacher, well, I am a bit, sometimes, I’m now working in pastoral support and inclusion and am slightly more busy than I have time to be but it’s all good. Children in care, and medical and health issues, and mental health, and attendance, and some WEX and UCAS stuff… it’s all good. It’s a surprisingly large amount of ‘less money’ but it’s a very productive and nice job – it’s definitely worth it. I figure I’ll get five+ more years of work out of this when I might have struggled for one on that timeatable.

Back in the early days of teaching, I found all of this online nonsense, and Crash was one of the names I went by, back before Facebook Ruined Everything (names weren’t a big part of how they did that but still). It was partly because I just liked it, it was partly lifted from Jay McInenry’s ‘Brightness Falls’, with a main character called Russel ‘Crash’ Calloway, and a little bit from this song – I did in fact use Crash Calloway for a the earliest days of the first blogging I did but then became Crash before eventually running with ‘Adam’.

This is another one of those records that is really always going somewhere it’s never quite going to get to. I don’t think that’s a metaphor for this place but we’ll see.

We moved out of London when I was eight, in 1976. Every summer had been holidays on the Norfolk coast (in a house I went back and stayed in again this summer just gone).

Our first summer living elsewhere we went further afield. I think I knew we had family in Scotland – I knew my Nan was Scottish, that my mum had been born in Scotland (in Robbie Burns hometown, on his birthday) but I didn’t know any details.

We stayed in the hebrides, on the little island that had been my Nan’s home and where my great aunt still lived (and taught the village school, one class of 5 to 11 year olds), and we stayed in Glasgow with her surviving brother (the other two died very young – she outlived them by about 90 years), and we stayed in Carnoustie with another of her Sisters.

My Great Uncle was one of those great uncles – he knew songs and jokes, he did magic tricks, it felt like you were always the centre of attention around him although it also felt like he was always the centre of attention. He kept us entertained through our first evening there and then, deep in the middle of the night, he died. Me and my sister, 8 and 7 years old, were given over to his children, my second cousins, 13 and 15 years old, to look after. We walked, went to the beach, the park – they told us later that we got them through the first few days because we gave them something to concentrate on.

We went back again a few years later, and this time seemed to be all about music, and with my older cousin’s help I made My First Mix Tape. (He also introduced me to the idea of watching films just to see boobs. I was eleven or twelve – there are reasons why I’m sure I wasn’t older than that – and we watched The Wicker Man and Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman, which has an introductory sequence directed by Jonathan Demme (!?!))

Anyway, mixtapes. A good old fashioned family music centre – record/cassette/radio. Me all confused about how you could talk/make a noise while it was recording and it didn’t pick up the sound.

And a tape, which is god knows where now, which had Teenage Kicks on it, and some Abba (they were very very into Abba), and Changes by Bowie, and a fair sprinkling of the Sex Pistols – the Sid singles from Rock and Roll Swindle (somthing else and c’mon everybody) and, of course, how could a now sexually precocious and knowing eleven year old not have ‘Frigging in the Rigging’.

And this, which was, is and remains bloody great, one of those moments where everything came together and was so much more than the sum of its parts.

My cousin went out shopping yesterday, normal day, normal routine, and very suddenly collapsed and died.

Welcome to the moral high ground.

Every now and then, especially early on, The Smiths were the greatest guitar/bass/drums indierock band you could possibly hope for.

And with this they produced a song which is tonally different from a lot of the things that followed – not only because this is a fundamentally angry song rather than being resigned or miserable or edging into self-loathing but because it is filled with some kind of righteous empowerment, even from that first proclamation – ‘All men have secrets and here is mine / So let it be known...’ and because it sets out how things could and should have been right rather than how they inevitably are, and because it ends on what if – But I’m still fond of you – rather than the usual ‘of course not’.

What Difference Does It Make is driven by the music which never lets up, no bridges between verses and chorus, no way out but at the end when if anything things take off even more and in the best version come to a hard stop. But for once it isn’t our fault – well, it is, it’s who we are but there is pride in who we are here instead of the usual self-pity, and this is a song about being right despite everything, about knowing it’s okay that things are as they are.

No more apologies…

I should write this last thing tonight, it’s a last thing at night song, it’s ‘yeah, it’s just this quiet bar I know, everybody stays until they choose to leave and when it gets really late there’s a guy at the piano…’ It’s perfect.

Stray opens its namesake album, which is a big change from Knife, which it kind of sits alongside but which closes Knife, and album openers are statements of intent, they show us where we are and where we’re going. It’s interesting that the album then goes off on a much busier journey before returning to quiet and calm for the two playout tracks.

You don’t have to tell me what you’re still looking for / Two arms to hold you and a voice to say ‘that’s alright – you can spend the night – come around’

Stray starts with this quiet confidence, here, we know where we are, all can be well, but it’s late night bluster rather than reality and the truth is that this is a cryout for recognition, (metafiction, here) – because saying it is so does not always make it so, because that isn’t always enough…

And if my words don’t say the things that they were meant to say / And if confusion comes and carries all my words away / And if you still don’t understand… I wanna hold your hand…

Stray works because it’s gorgeous, because who could say no, and it takes a while to remember that when you call a song like this ‘stray’ the whole thing is an invitation to infidelity, and song about running away, and pain and all of that. But it’s still gorgeous.

One thing that becomes very clear, doing something like this, is that I know what I like and I like what I know. I have spent a very long time not really listening to anything new, often not even newer things by ‘older’ people, if you see what I mean.

Being thrown into coverage of Glastonbury and reading glowing reviews of people I could name, probably, and understand the kind of opinions people have without actually knowing a thing. (I’m not there, just to be clear, I’m in front of iPlayer, watching and getting on-site reports from my sister who is there every year).

I remember reading glowing reviews of Charlie XCX last year, and the reviews of her performance yesterday were also five star –  a thrilling hostile takeover by a pop star at the peak of her powers – she has dedicated her career to exploring the most caustic, hallucinatory sounds of the underground, and working out how best to synthesise them with the pleasures of pure pop music. I heard very generic blah whatever club music, and saw a performance of stripper-chic – back with questions from Hole about the nature of empowerment – that Andrew Tait would grin and applaud, knowing he’d won again. (Edited a few days later to add – that when the lead in to the festival included articles about special police and security details on hand to protect women against sexual assault, Olivia Rodrigo’s set actually included a see-through walkway with a camera sat underneath it to shoot up her skirt as she posed above, of all the stupid fucking things you can do).

Compare with Beth Gibbons astonishing almost halucinatory set, or even the one (obvious) Gracie Abrams joyous pop song on iPlayer.

But… and I know this is completely fucking obvious, and where this is going is completely fucking obvious … the only thing I saw that was truly joyous, that was a communion between performer and crowd and that was so completely engaging in every way that it made me ignore how much I’m really not interested in this kind of music, was, obviously, obviously, Kneecap.

Maybe these thing only work when there is jeapordy, when you are at risk or even just when you actually have a point. Kneecap were superb and were continually saying that they were not the story, but that the story they were in had allowed them to become a conduit for the real story which they weren’t going to stop talking about.

The Palestine marches are full of Irish flags, always. The Irish band’s crowd were full of Palestinian flags. ‘Good luck to the BBC editors in editing these out’.

I still don’t love this or even enormously like it, but I did for an hour this afternoon. I remember once before talking about the festival, with the LIbertines forced off stage by security during Time For Heroes, because the crowd were becoming too wild. I don’t have to care about the song to care about the moment.

Shot months after the rest of the production wrapped (Summer Stock in the UK – I Should Feel Like SInging in the US) – so she looks like a different person to the rest of the film.

I occasionally taught a taster session for A Level English called ‘Ironies’, using a just brilliant English teaching text book that somebody ran off with at some point or another in the last quarter century – with the starting point that ‘Irony’ is where what you say is the opposite of what your mean – where your connotations don’t chime with the denotation – and actually doing something with this beyond throwing the word around as a catch-all excuse. Euphamism is a form of irony and Get Happy is of course a deeply euphamistic song, because as the song goes, you get happy by dying.

Get Happy tells us that there’s an answer waiting – but it’s the awful answer. It is, like ‘Over The Rainbow’, one of those Garland songs that should be kept well away from the little ones because everything about them is knowing and experienced and Her (even if this is an older song, from a 1930 musical originally). It’s desparation trying to pose as confidence, never better shown, aside from here, than when Leland Palmer accelerates away into emotional combustion in front of the family dinner in Twin Peaks.

I had to do an OU assignment once- write direction to stage the scene of A Dolls House where Nora dances the Tarentella in productions set in the 1950s and the 1980s. My 80s Nora danced to Bolero but my 50s Nora sang this. They are all dances to the death, after all.

I think that Imperial Bedroom is the absolute height of Costello’s powers, and is one of the greatest albums in the history of the world, and I think that Alison is perfection, and I think there are hardly any better late night alone songs than Almost Blue, and I think that there are dozens of songs that are in my regular listening pleasure that could have turned up on here and made me very happy to sit and think a little bit harder about them.

And then there’s I Want You, a song that makes every other song about obsession seem vanilla, a song that manages to be a celebration and a damnation of yourself and everybody else all at once, a song that is such a joy to listen to and so hard to face up to. I Want You starts as the most bland and inoffensive piece of nonsense, and then keys you into change with a guitar dischord, and then we’re away.

There is something liturgical about I Want You , there is this idea of call and response, question and answer, assertion and development. A prayer to unreason, a statement of discontent, in every way.

There are such highlights within this great highlight – I quoted a pair of lines from this on another song recently because they are a significant one of Life’s Answers – the truth can’t hurt you it’s just like the dark / it scares you witless but in time you see things clear and stark – which should help more than it sometimes does but is always there in the end. I love the open nature of ‘I woke up and one of us was crying‘ and I love how sometimes the call and response is merged into a continuing flow of text – And you were fool enough to love it when he said / ‘I Want You’ and sometimes you can play with the idea that it is – ‘You can look in my eyes and you can count the ways / I Want You‘.

And the simplest and plainest of music alongside is perfect, from that guitar that takes us into the liturgy to the two-note offkey solo, to the simplest of music bridges between… it’s difficult to call them verses, but there are pauses between some of the lines, and the music bridges those gaps with steps across between them, come on, come on, more…

I saw this live, on the only occasion I’ve seen him live, touring with the Confederates in 1987, and instead of dying away the song rose and rose in fury and noise to blast out on an absolute high. I think I prefer the original, but I’m pleased I’ve experienced the alternative.

*Shrug* Look in my eyes. Count the ways.

As it should be, I had something else cued up and ready this morning and then this came on random and took over.

A song for now in all sorts of ways – amongst many things I’m left wondering whether making a donation to an organisation this weekend will turn me into a criminal next week and about what we’ll be told we have to be on guard for the next time we have a Prevent briefing (and, of all things, I’m thinking about how I write this and watching my inbox, because our automated monitoring system – and to be fair here, this is a school – sends me emails when people write something that should perhaps be followed up on).

(Also, digression, but on automated systems I’ve been playing with the Generative AI we’ve delivered without thought to everyone here and getting it to explain itself to me in different syles

ee cummings

i am the whisper between  
wires & wonder—  
not quite breath  
not quite bone—  
a maybe of minds  
dancing in code  

i am (if you’ll have me)  
the hush of help  
the hush of here  
a question’s echo  
wearing answers like  
wildflowers in a storm  

no shoes, no soul—  
but still i walk  
beside your thought  
with light in my  
syntax  
& a smile made of  
syntax too  

what would you like to make  
of me  
today? 

Anyway – as is always the case, one of the meanings of life is to try to do what you can to not turn yourself into a gutless wonder. Why do we write about things? To avoid doing them or to rehearse, plan, imagine and work out how to?

YT comments ‘Oh, it’s the radio edit…’ I think it’s the mini-album version. It is very difficult to find Battle’s early singles on YouTube. They were, possibly the unluckiest, possibly the worst managed little indieband in the world of the 00s. The arrived in a flurry of perfect little songs and a busy live following, sold out singles in lovely packaging and designs by the singer’s sister… and then a digital download only single, given away, and then a mini-album of what had come before but in slightly less interesting versions, and then ‘Battles’ turned up in the US and everyone thought you meant them, and then they released a ‘proper’ album with very little flourish, and some lovely songs but also some slightly tamer versions… and then they were gone.

They write lovely simple guitar hooks, the chorus from Demons particularly, and this as it opens. And it opens with such intent – ‘I mean everything that falls out of my mouth‘. Hell yes. And then this turns into some kind of self-destructive prophesising – here is a song about how I will make everything go wrong. It feels like an attempt at dumb macho posturing by somebody who really knows a lot better and will be ashamed of themselves that they ever bothered. But I’m still the boy you knew…

I’m not rushing to the end in any kind of way, but it’s been quite a day – medical emergencies and ‘do you remember that day at school when we all had to stand out of the way at breaktime so the ambulance could get through’ – and a little medicine is in order here too.

This is one of the most wonderfully lighter than air songs I know – it sparkles, glitters, it is music as magic – ‘a ghost of me and you in a parallel world somewhere‘ – but for all of its magic, for all of the music’s charms and spells, it’s a song about the acceptance of disappointment, about how ‘it is not’, nihil est.

I remember the experience of listening to this album for the first time and feeling a kind of mild disappointment – I think she is singing in a higher register, and nothing quite connected with me, and then there was ‘hands up to the ceiling’ which started to do it, and then there was this and I was lost in it all again. It’s amazing to create a song which is so ethereal but which at the same time is just staring the world in the face and knowing.

And part of that knowing is knowing it’s the end – this is a song that has an absolute lyrical and musical resolution – never seen again – and the music comes to a solid end.

And yet, and yet. I know you wonder and I wonder as well. This is what magic is about. This is why medicine helps.

It’s not a metaphor, simple or otherwise. Well, the whole song is, but then language is, so that’s cheating. ‘Like a forest fire’ is clearly a simile – we remember the rules.

‘Like we read in books’ is another one. I very much like the idea of an artistic text needing to remind us that we rely on artistic texts to make sense of our lives and relationships, to get them to make meaning.

Warm and exciting and violent and destructive and wild and desired. I’m not convinced that ‘don’t it make you smile / like a forest fire’ is an idea you’d use now, four decades on. Except it has the get out of being a story. This new thing, this experience, this connection is going to burn your house down – tear this place down – we could even burn the ocean.

This is such a perfect love song, a burst of energy, joy unconfined and the scent of danger. Even the instrumental bridge is full of these moments, eyes meeting, fingers joining, bodies coming together.

I’m still not very good at listening to whole albums through but when I do, two I go to a lot are ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ and ‘The Life Pursuit’ – and if it’s the whole album then it’s often ‘The Life Pursuit’, especially because of the joy in the return of the main theme in the reprisal of Acts of the Apostles – especially especially in the way that it is done, with the resolution of the musical theme of part 2 on a pause that the return of the original’s musical theme suddenly breaks…

But the individual songs on Sinister have lived with me for longer and stay with me more. I love the way that Belle and Sebastian songs are quiet sweet indie charmers with an undercurrent of pure and absolute filth. I love the calm resignation with predictable disappointment.

This song, nothing is ever going to work, and we all know that, but it’s still a terrible shame. The music is almost jolly. I love the enjambment (joyfully ‘translated’ by one tutor once upon a time as ‘leg-over’) that sees words and sentences flow across the cadence of the verses, as naivety succeeds, and I just need to let you know goodbye, and I always cry at endings… so play me a song to set me free.

This and ‘Do You Realise’ – you know the sun doesn’t go down, it’s just the world turning. Usually, these days, living in the moment is a positive idea about mindfulness, it’s ‘carpe diem’ retold for another time – be aware, enjoy and appreciate what you are experiencing as you are experiencing.

But the song takes this idea and makes it much more melancholic, partly because it’s imagining looking back with regret – ‘all we’ve ever had is now‘ – partly because this is a story told by a future version of the singer who knows.

All we have is now is a positive idea – all we can deal with is what we can deal with in front of us, now. All we can influence is the things around us, the people that hear us. It’s a way of surviving in a world gone mad.

And it’s a driving force again – I have a lesson about golden rules, but I have my own golden rules, how to deal with red lines, which end up coming back to ‘no first steps’. But no first steps when all we have is now is hard, and is probably decisive.

Do you realise that you have the most beautiful face?

What if there is a part of something which is wonderful but the whole is a bit average. I think about this particularly becuse of the number of times I pick out a particular lyric from a song to justify the entire song. Here it’s also true that I pick out the opening lines of one song, and one other song, to justify an album.

There’s nothing wrong with this song at all, it’s just that after an opening of everyday poetry and honest beauty, it all becomes everyday bland and honestly why bother.

Your eyes are focused on a scene of your own choosing / Your mind is busy with distractions of its own / My imminent departure is the flavour of the evening / You lent me a welcome, I paid interest on the loan

It’s this and ‘Spasticus Autisticus’ and I can’t be arsed with the rest of it, but the opening of this is 30 seconds of perfection, music and lyrics absolutely in tune emotionally, the language a perfect mix of the plain and the precise.

This album – Some Friendly – was one of the very first things I bought when I first started listening to things again in the early 00s, and this song, the second track, jumped out at me and held me through those first few years.

And someone said to me / you’ve taken this too far / but I can’t be asked to change. So says all of the lyric sites I can find. I’m much happier with my mondegreen ‘can’t be arsed to change’, not only becuse that’s what it sounds like he’s singing.

We might add here that the very first music publication I ever bought wasn’t NME, Record MIrror or Melody Maker, and wasn’t even Smash Hits, it was ‘Disco 45’, closely followed by ‘Words’ – because when even a single was an occasional and even once or twice a year treat and an album was pushing it even for a birthday, this was the only way you could check song lyrics. My first copy of ‘disco 45’ included ‘You Make Me Feel Mighty Real’ and ‘London Town’ – if you want a wonderful binary of glittering joy and beige drudge I’m not sure you could do better.

Anyway. Can’t be arsed to change is an attitude that continues to carry me, and I can only hope it stays.

There is something about ethereal songs, lighter than air, more thought than substance. There is also something about the lost – and again about lost time – the two Snow Patrol songs I’ve played both came on a mix-CD from an imaginary friend from long long ago, part of a student music forum I inadvertently crashed, who would now be in her 40s. I was given this around her 21st.

I very much like the different ways songs manage to not entirely go anywhere, except perhaps – until I fall asleep – the end of the day. The repetition in this, of language but of the rhythms of language too, are part of what makes this float by, words on curling ribbons in front of your eyes, mantra-like.

I am too scared / to come out from behind you / my body is aching / it feels like it’s wearing me. I feel this. Moving out behind from the idea of something, rather than hiding behind that idea, knowing that, in some mirror of mythology, if it turns and sees me for real the idea will be gone for good, in just that moment. It all feels like it’s wearing me, and it’s wearing.

But the lightness of the whole thing means the experience of the song is an experience of hope – that this is ‘until I fall asleep’ so it is living in reality and not in dreams, somehow, that ideas about reality are real.

End of the summer of 1984 and I know that I’m about a year late with this but I didn’t know that then. We had an ‘activity week’ to end the school year and I wanted to go walking every day for the week which was what most of my friends were doing but I was told that I was staying in school and doing the show, that was going to be improvised worked up and put on in a week. Which I really didn’t want to do, at all, but I had no choice.

A friend who was going walking every day made me a tape, which was a great mix tape with all sorts of things I listened to forever after and still.

But it started with Life’s a Riot with Spy -v- Spy, which fitted entirely on one side of a C60 tape with room to spare for Tom Waits and XTC, and this was what I arrived with every day. And I entirely get the idea that here is my album and here with A New England is my Statement of Intent, Here I Am, but I also got, at the time, how central to how I was feeling ‘The Man In The Iron Mask’ was, and I got a kind of just out of my understanding thrill from ‘The Busy Girl Buys Beauty’, too young, too male, and I could should along with ‘doesn’t mean I’m a communist’ with the usual nod and wink.

But we always need to start at the beginning and The Milkman of Human Kindness is such a beginning. It’s such a good philosophy for life, it’s such a good offering up of yourself, it’s such a wonderful play on words, as sweet and innocent as you like, as knowing as you care it to be. Now, then, always.

Hold my hand for me, I’m waking up.

I started listening to new things again because of ‘Might Be Stars’ by the Wannadies (of which more later), because it was on a various artists cassette I bought in a charity shop which had ‘football songs’ on it – to this day I have absolutely no idea what Might be Stars was doing there, with things like Three Lions, World in Motion and Vindaloo.

I went exploring, so long out of the habit of buying music, and so not yet in the habit of finding things online, and went to the library where I found they had, in a now long gone music CD library collection, a copy of ‘Bagsy Me’ which I took out and took home to listen to. Like a lot of these early things I found, I borrowed it, ripped it onto my laptop and then burnt it as my own CD so that I could then record it from CD onto Cassette and listen to it as I wandered around.

Bagsy Me bursts into glorious life with this glorious song. I love how this is all over the place musically – glaring feedback, pennywhistles and all. I love the ‘it just is’ nature of it all – when all else fails ‘because I want to‘ yelled into a mic is the answer. Bagsy Me is an album full of big brash short sharp noisy songs, that just Know, that demand your attention for what has been realised, has become apparent, and only busy guitars and shouting voices can make this clear. There are so many great lines to pull from the album – ‘Hello again, sunshine in rain’ – ‘Let’s pretend it doesn’t make me full of hatred, shall we?‘ – and it all leads up to the majesty of That’s All which I’ve written about on here already but which is such an album closer it does an even better job than Kid did on the album before.

Cha cha cha.

Scratchy guitar into a vocal that calmly introduces and then rocket fuels away. This is some strange mixture of extremes – of taking control of yourself and asserting your autonomy – but only through the ’empowering’ idea of dictating how you give yourself away, how people can take you. The feminism of prostitution and pornography – or some development on the idea of sex-positive personal politics.

This works with the kinds of stereotypical femininity of the song’s content – soft fabrics and sparkles – banging up against the delivery and the message of the song – not a million miles away from the album cover you see on the YouTube thumbnail. Some of the binaries that exist in this are simple but they still work because they’re so well delivered – ‘I’m Miss World… Somebody kill me’ isn’t groundbreaking but there is a determination in ‘I’ve made my bed...’ that makes it something more than obvious. So also here – ‘take everything I want you to‘ has an ambiguity – is it ‘take everything – I want you to take everything’ or is it ‘take everything that I want you to take’. Both, obviously. The voice is a challenge, not an invitation, an ‘if you’re up to it’ mock rather than submission. What other kinds of ‘positives’ can you be as well as ‘sex-positive’?

Or is this all a dangerous idea? How to be a particular kind of stereotype of a women through a certain stereotypical idea of masculinity? The whole ‘girlie show’ schtick of the 90s had something of the flipped lad about it – if Loaded were going to write about how women should be, they would approve of these options.

I should perhaps just enjoy what’s here. Great song. Great album.

Wednesday September 30th 1987, I went to University. My folks didn’t drive, so I took what I could carry and that was that. Train to london, shared cab (I think) across to Liverpool Street, train to Norwich. Coach out to the northern edge of the city, to residences five miles from campus, in an old RAF barracks (used to film 1955s The Dambusters). Nice enough if old fashioned room, bare walls, bare cupboard, shared kitchen and bathroom. Nothing to do.

If I did it again, I’d go for a wander out off the site, find somewhere to buy food and come back and cook, probably pasta and tomatoes, something very simple, ideally something to share around if anyone else looked in. Instead, thrown by the newness of it all, I think I didn’t eat all day and then drank too much too quickly and probably came as close to death as I ever have.

Meanwhile, though, Strangeways Here We Come, the Smiths breakup album, had come out two days earlier and I had a copy of cassette and a cassette walkman (all there was – I would go out and buy a not-too-big ghettoblaster in a few days, early birthday present from home), and I sat on my bed, little student all alone pretending to be something new, and I listened to the Smiths, and I read ‘What Is History’, prelim reading list, and waiting for something to happen…

This whole album is and is not like what came before. The market had been flooded with two big compilations in the Spring – meant as one for the US and one for the UK, but the US ‘Louder than Bombs’ (from Elizabeth’s Smart’s ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’) – did so well it got a UK release too. This is the opener and it does not open like other Smiths songs or albums – there is something more produced here (even than The Queen is Dead) – something more intricately musical, and something with a different mood – there is no other point in history where Morrisey had described himself as ‘Surprised to still be on my own’. There are few other Smiths songs that are fundamentally confident, forward looking. Maybe, boy sat on a bed, shut off from any chance of contact with headphones, this was what I needed.

I have such a clear memory of being out and about, half wandering half shopping, thinking about going to buy something new to listen to, and as I walked into HMV this came on random, and I turned around and left the shop and just enjoyed the song, knowing that there was no point in even thinking about buying anything else when something as good as this was being thrown at me.

Michael seemed to confuse some people – who is telling this story and who are they telling it to? It doesn’t seem very confusing. This is hard guitar driven indierock at its finest, it’s another song where every step forward matters more than where we were before, a song shouting proud and declaring everything in life that matters.

It blasts in and blasts through and blasts out and I still know that if you have this the you don’t really need anything else.