To celebrate my 60th birthday, I asked my social media friends to nominate a favourite song from 2021 – 60 to commemorate the fact I am 60.
Today. Wait. Today, I am breaking my own rules once more. This recommendation is my own: yesterday, my dear friend Crayola Lectern passed along a beautifully-packaged slab of clear 8″ vinyl to me, with a gorgeous painting of a many-coloured parrot on its front cover. Now, I can only play 8″ on my straight-to-MP3 record player, sounded out through mono speakers, so… (Wait. I have some stereo speakers now. Whatever.) So, I did the sensible thing. And read the (physical, hand-typed) press release for The Helicopter Of The Holy Ghost‘s brand-new (released May 20) 8″ single, Slow Down c/w Not The End Of. Found the link to the website with the lashings of charm and information.
And I quote:
The Helicopter of The Holy Ghost are Billy Reeves, Crayola Lectern, Mark Morriss and, on guitar, Mark Peters. To to buy our eight inch single please join our socials: insta /thehothg – fb / thehothg – twitter /helicopterholy where, on May 21st the store URL will appear at 9am. as the record is very limited. It will also be released on May 21st on all streaming platforms and iTunes.
Billy Reeves formed theaudience for a bet, fortunately meeting the fabulous Sophie Ellis-Bextor two days later at The Garage, Islington. (He won the bet seven months later). The band reached the dizzy heights of 12 in the LP charts. In 2000 he signed to Sony with the group ‘Yours’ but this project was violently curtailed by joy-riders that hit his Morris Minor at 99 mph (on the way home from promoting the first ever gig by the popular heavy metal band, The Darkness). A long coma, many operations and a housebound year ensued. In 2017 his brother gave him two mini-discs that had been saved from the wreckage, including demos of songs he had forgotten – due to crash-related amnesia. These songs were recently moulded into an album, ‘Afters’ by Reeves, Mark Morriss, (solo artist and singer with the chart-topping guitar-janglers The Bluetones), Mark Peters (of Engineers – Rough Trade included his solo LP ‘Innerland’ in their best albums list of 2018), and Crayola Lectern (from Crayola Lectern/Zofff/la Momo/Departure Lounge and Damo Suzuki’s band up the Con Club in Lewes).
What are these songs about? No-one knows. They are, however, very pretty.
I need to insert myself back into this dialogue here and point out two things: first, I was the person on the other end of that bet (the losing side). Second, earlier that day I was shown the exact spot (in “boring” Goring) where the video to the original version of ‘Slow Down’ was filmed. (Coincidence? I think not.) I already love this song – as indicated when I first wrote the following several years ago while living in Brisbane.
I know and I love this song so well, though – ever since I saw him perform it on a grand piano in the Quakers Meeting Hall in Brighton a few years back. Or perhaps it was in his and Sadie’s flat in Worthing. (I say a few years. It has to be over six, because that’s how long I’ve been living here in Brisbane. This video was released 18 months ago. So long ago, I’ve seen Chris perform with Crayola Lectern on a beach in Worthing since then. On pebbles, and with random revellers snared in and entranced by the hypnotic loveliness of the Lectern keyboards.) I know what the song is about, loosely: he’s told me. So I’m not going to tell you. Interpretation, remember? Always leave it up to the listener. It’s haunting, mournful, beautiful. It’s like something drawn from that wonderful 1974 album Rock Bottom, but I don’t mean that to sound like it’s copyist. It ain’t. It’s so fucking good, it should be closing out the end credits of three dozen TV serials about surrealist loneliness and isolation and long-distance worry. Such a graceful way of making the silence linger. Such a beautiful sonorous trumpet. Such a lovely dance. Such wonderful double-layering of the vocal line. Makes me miss my dear friend’s companionship and caring so much.
(My eyes are closed right now, enjoying the music. I cannot see the keyboard for my two-fingered type. I just love being able to lose myself; in the process like this.)
So now there is a new version of the song out, vocals from the singer with my former Britpop sweethearts The Bluetones, car crashes and bets and love included, new video with some fetching stop-motion line animation, and a beautiful painting of a parrot. Damn, I feel spoiled today. And now I wonder what the song is about, bearing in mind all this back story and added connotations. (Have I mentioned that trumpet… oh my God. Trumpet to die for. Not literally. Please, not literally.) This is as gorgeous as your arse is flatulent. No. This. This is as gorgeous as Sophie Dahl waltzing through fields of ballet dancing men, as melancholy as spending your entire life never listening to Robert Wyatt, as evocative and poignant as a child kicking a stone alone on the way home, as refreshing as Spring Rain. As gorgeous as the arse of Donald Trump is flatulent. Oh god. No. This. This is succour and beauty and redemption and pain and laughter. This is…
Slow down lad. Please, slow down.
Treat yourself. Go to their website, and order yourself a slice of… oh god. I don’t know. Poignancy. Poetry. Love.
To celebrate my 60th birthday, I asked my social media friends to nominate a favourite song from 2021 – 60 to commemorate the fact I am 60.
Today, it’s the turn of dear friend Chris Anderson to make a suggestion – ‘Song‘ by LC Pumpkin. As Mr Pumpkin himself indicates on his homemade webpage, “It’d be nice to have a box here where you could write your comments but I don’t know how to set something like that up“. Amen, brother. Amen to that.
He goes on to explain: Hello. Here’s another of my home recorded tunes with my psych banjo & MPC sampler set-up. The foil curtain is there to add a touch of low budget showbiz to the video, and to try and disguise the fact I’m just playing in a corner of our flat with the odd neighbour and passer-by peering through the window at me every now and then. If you’re interested, you can find out more and get some free music at https://www.lcpumpkin.co.uk/.
You heard the man! Go have a look!
Here is what I wrote about him earlier (puts Blue Peter hat on) (apologies to American friends and so forth who will not understand what the fuck I am going on about here): L C Pumpkin plays: described on the flyer as an eccentric one-man music machine, he simultaneously sings, blows harmonica and bashes instruments too strange for even Tom Waits to curate, taps out a melody on his xylophone-keyboard-organ contraption with the microphone he uses for singing down, throws in the occasional jarring squelch and bleep, and is quite honestly the pub given aural dimension. He smiles, we smile. He smiles more, we smile more. Psychedelic is not a word that is often correctly used, and I am not convinced I am about to use it correctly here so please blank out the last 30 seconds reading time. This is what L C Pumpkin is most like, but in a decidedly non-linear fashion:
I know full well that NO ONE is going to click onto this blog entry – if it ain’t Bruce Springsteen or Joy Division, it ain’t worth a damn – so I thought I would take the opportunity to reprint a thoroughly under-researched article I wrote a few months ago for a French print fanzine.
Oh, wait. First, the music. I do not deny I do not know even the first thing about Asea Sool, even who recommended the band to me. I just know what I love, and I fucking love this. “British rock’n’roll, US delta blues, French chansons and Georgian folk,” they reckon – and that sounds about right. This music has got this otherness that is so hard to fake (very nice scream, too) – sure, I can hear elements of British and American rock and pop music in this duo’s other songs, but to me that is the least interesting aspect of their sometimes unhinged, often contrary sound. And that is why this next song is my favourite. That, and its untrammeled infectious energy…
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Five songs sung in French that I like, by Everett True
I do not claim these songs to be the greatest.
I do not claim these songs to be representative of my favourite songs sung in French (surely, I would bring in more music from the 1950s and 1960s for that?).
I do not claim these songs to be representative of my taste, in general.
I do not think these songs fill a void.
These songs are simply representative of a desire to turn around some written copy for a friend and knowing that I could never properly research a request like “name my favourite five songs sung in French” (the field is too vast, and my knowledge too limited) I figured it might be better to play to the galleries once more and name a handful of songs that are no so well-known. Except, perhaps they are in this context? Who knows.
THE LIST
Michel Polnareff – Love Me Please Love Me
There is so much that exists within the canon of pop music that I cannot even begin to dream of. There is so much to dream of.
Elli et Jacno – Main Dans La Main I’m sure it says reams about my age and the year this particular video and song were made, but I find both the song and the way the woman dances oddly alluring. And when I say alluring I mean sexy. Clearly, this is how sex – back when I was a 19-year-old virgin – was defined for me: a tight shiny skirt and a disinterested woman dancing in a way that may or may not be construed as provocative, but she doesn’t care either way, and haircuts that belonged to Moonlighting or somewhere. Noah Taylor shades on the dude. And a clear Serge Gainsbourg influence (not that I would have known that at the time). I guess that’s what happens when you spend your late teens reading superhero comic books. Sigh. As the comment beneath the video on YouTube states, “Every fine woman should also have a rectangular sheet of paper to dance on”.
Alizée – J’en Ai Marre (Tubes D’un Jour)
When the French do pop music, the French really do pop music. Ravishing, in a way the Pet Shop Boys often were. I was infatuated with this song in a way not seen since the heady days of ‘Bonnie And Clyde’ (which is not sung in French, hence disqualified). P.S. the first comment underneath the YouTube video made me giggle uncontrollably for 20 seconds.
Short aside here, but did Nina Simone ever sing anything in French? I know she did. I’d have Karaocake in this list except she sings in English. And I’d have Ruth in here except this list has been limited to a ridiculously short number. Can we include Pascal Comelade’s ukulele-and-balloon instrumental version of ‘I Can’t Control Myself’? Not sung in French but not sung in English either. At the very least, please can we mention his early band, the Young Marble Giants-influenced Fall Of Saigon?
Please?
The Wendy Darlings – Elucubrations
The Wendy Darlings understand – probably not by design, certainly not by committee – what once made Ramones, Comet Gain, Heavenly, Lesley Gore, Shonen Knife, Prolapse, Ramones, Pastels, Skeeter Davis, Buy Off The Bar, Pounding Serfs, Camera Obscura, Concretes, School, Loves, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Huggy Bear, Lulu, Pee Chees, Orange Juice, Ramones, Michel Polnareff, Kenickie, Undertones, Les Calamities, Television Personalities… so great. That petulant glee. That grandstanding twenty-something (thirty-something, forty-something…) refusal to face up to the facts and get on with life, the bounce behind the casually thrown away yeah yeah yeah’s, the laconic grace behind hitting the drums stand-up, the irresistible slide into bratty nostalgia, that schoolyard stomp and schoolyard blam, the ringing jangling guitars, the Phil Spector drums, the boy-girl boy call siren, the laughter, the ennui that exists behind every kid-less Sunday, the late rising, the turbulence, the joy of discovery and rediscovery and discovery, eyes still wide open even though the world keeps telling you to close them, close them tight shut, the voice of adulthood vainly trying to admonish but totally ignored, Brighton beach in the early hours of the morning, racing around Olympia throwing snowballs at fire hydrants, the falling apart and laughing…
Sugar & Tiger – Henri /Noël Christmas
I’m a sucker for a certain type of continental power pop. Full throttle. A little bit Chin Chin, a little bit Die Toten Hosen, a little bit Elli et Jacno. Rama lama. Solid. A beating heart. Songs start, continue, end. Listener left with MASSIVE GRIN on his face. Typing CAPITAL LETTERS.
The purest encapsulation of everything I LOVE about pop music RIGHT HERE. God, I want to see all these artists and performers play live SO MUCH.
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Here is some Asea Sool again. I was going to throw in a compendium of comments left on my ‘Ed Sheeran Is Shit’ YouTube video but then realised no one would see them.
And here. Have a little bonus Crayola Lectern as well.
This post has something for everyone, except Bruce Springsteen fans. It’s a right fucking shame no one is going to click on it.
I know it’s three weeks into January. Shit’s been going down. I know 2018 was not the greatest of years for me. I wanted to document it nonetheless.
These are in no particular order, and I know I have missed loads but I was not writing for large periods of last year. Here it is anyway, and I kinda like it.
Oh, not all of these came out in 2018 either.
1. Suburban Death Twitch – A Layer of Fat and Mold
One dear friend saw Brighton’s Suburban Death Twitch perform recently and found himself dismayed and more than a little angry that such casual, soulful brilliance should go unrecognised. He has little recourse to publicity like many of us, so he used what he could. He bought a copy of their new EP for me, knowing that I could not fail to love this beautiful, soulful music (like a general scouring in the area that involves ABBA’s break-up albums, the mould at the back of your fridge, half the towns of Hastings and St Leonard’s, the three-point acerbic harmonies of The Roches, the wayward belligerent swagger of Band Of Holy Joy, #metoo, friends that still cannot grasp why half their world seems to give up soon as they have a steady revenue and a person, any person, to fill the void, and so forth).
There’s comforting cello and trumpet, or something. There are harmonies to kiss for. There is intelligence and awareness, so much of it painful. (How can this be nostalgia when it hurts so bad?)
2. Nadia Rose – Skwod My friend comments, “like who would give a shit what i have to say about that”. I write back, and say that’s the point. That’s the whole point. I ain’t qualified and she ain’t qualified but… wait a fucking second WHO THE FUCK IS QUALIFIED? someone who gets paid fuck that shit… Anyways, if you know you’re not qualified it liberates you to write what the fuck you want again. See also, the fact I know NO ONE gives a shit what I have to say about anything any more.
That’s to the good. That’s liberation.
Like I don’t understand freestyle? Like I can’t dig and groove to rhythms and shake my head Like I can’t appreciate attitude. Like I can’t do this.
3. Corporationpop – Ted Hughes Observational, despairing, witty. Suburban beat poetry for the disenchanted, disinherited, atonally dispirited generation. Authentic in a world where the word has lost all meaning. Altruistic – she gives of herself and sprinkles magic. Of course she reminds me of my new suburban Southern sweethearts.
4. Tracyanne & Danny – Alabama
I love Jonathan Richman. I love Go Violets. I love Nadia Rose. You think you understand, but you really don’t. There is nothing else. Nothing. Not when I slip into this somnambulist dream world and for a few precious moments can tear myself away from the grey mundane and chase stars in my head. During times like this – and with no reflection on my kids who I would right now step in front of a lorry for – music is more important than eating, breathing… my reason for existing and loving and failing. This is why I am still able to fall and laugh and fall again, even through the grey, unbearably lonely, single existence. This is the stuff that haunts my dreams and whirls round my head on meaningless train journeys and endless car rides. Nina Simone, Dexys, Beyoncé… FILL IN YOUR OWN NAME
5. Cardi B – Be Careful
This is the shit I like.
My reading of her is different to yours. I’ve never been into champagne unless to wash ladies’ feet. I like her music in small bites, like my older lovers. I ain’t cool or stuck in a dead-end job or pretty ass or transgender or female or American or blessed with financial clout or holiday somewhere. Wish I was. Wish I did. I ain’t macho or don’t aspire to be macho either. I don’t get off on aspiring to be part of her brand, I don’t want to exchange sweet nothings with her bodyguards, I don’t get my kicks from her bragging or use of profanity or delicious sense of timing. I like all of them sure, but they ain’t the main reasons I keep returning to Invasion Of Privacy. There is a feeling of fragility at the heart of the toughness and poetry, a gaiety and playful way round the beats, a sense of fragility that fuels the name calling and spooked sounds. Here a glimpse of a heart best treated carefully, there a glimpse of a heart shattered, everywhere a fragility. A rub-a-dub-dub.
6. Janelle Monáe – Make Me Feel Adult, but not dull given-up Haywards Heath half-cut hair salon adult. Sexy MF adult, alert and alive and appreciative of all of life’s possibilities and twists and graveyard turns. ‘Pynk’ is a salacious drool, a knowing tease that straddles the line between fantasy and reality with a wicked knowing wink. ‘Make Me Feel’ takes it all to a next level that even Radio One DJs can understand and that is some fucking trick I can tell you, take it to a level that even Nick Grimshaw does not feel uncomfortable discussing. Sex. This video haunts my dreams in a way only Amanda Palmer has managed. At least, I wish this video would haunt my dreams in a way only Amanda Palmer has managed.
7. Crayola Lectern – Rescue Mission
This is beautiful, beautiful music. Sinister, compelling and so welcoming. The four names I have typed out are Roy Wood, Neil Innes, Robert Wyatt and The Addams Family but if you want the truth of it – and why the hell wouldn’t you want the truth of it? – none of the four names means as much to me, have ever meant as much to me, as the music from Mr Crayola Lectern, even with its woozy space-age proggy leanings. Especially with its woozy space-age proggy leanings. I finished up Neil Gaiman’s spellbinding spell-encrusted The Graveyard Book two days ago, and this music feels like my head playing catch-up. My dreams are no longer filled with wonder and mostly the realm of bleakness does not allow me the luxury, the necessity of music but if it did… this would be my succor, this would be my balm, this could be my beautiful Gothic dreaming.
8. Suggested Friends – I Don’t Want To Be A Horcrux For Your Soul
It’s all mid-American mid-1990s twin guitar interplay swagger (yes, Blake Babies I am looking your way) except it is what London and Leeds and it is 2018 and I really should stop eating these packs of Asda Mint Imperials like they’re rice cos I think my teeth are gonna fall out before the hallucinations and sugar rush kick in.
9. Totally Mild – Today Tonight
Please accept this. Beauty is found in the most mundane of places. Your smile, your eyes. This is like Nick Cave fully realised, his songs performed the way he always intended them to be. This (incidentally) is absolutely nothing like Nick Cave. However futile these words may be. The important thing here is document and eyewitness.
10. Jorja Smith – Blue Lights
This cut through the inane banter on Nick Grimshaw’s Breakfast Show this morning like a ice-blue blade through rancid butter. Desolate, chilling. Bleakness filtered through forgotten council estates and crumbling tower blocks. Sirens wailing. Neosoul. Nostalgia for an age when it was perceived there was not so much of a need to be nostalgic. Painting a portrait of paranoia and alternate realities.
11. The 1975 – Give Yourself A Try
Every time, Daniel goes “You like this song don’t you dad?” as I’m negotiating another two cars parked on a blind corner, cyclists holding up a line of 30 cars treating the country roads like their own personal gymnasium, horns blaring in fading frustration, another couple of hundred quid added to the bodywork bill. And I’m like, “NOT NOW DANIEL” and then realise how I am too late and stutter an apology for my grumpiness, my lack of good humour. He’s right, I do like this fucking song. A lot. Killer guitars, Killer riff. And now I’ve listened to it eight straight times on YouTube I like it even more – smart lyrics. Smart, smart lyrics. And in the context of Nick Grimshaw’s Breakfast Show it’s a near-miracle. Moonlight in the palm of your hand.
12. Goat Girl – Cracker Drool
The NME has it about Goat Girl that, “The four piece’s debut album is a grubby, clattering thing that takes its lead from 1980s LA punk trailblazers like X and The Gun Club” [delete rest of sentence for a) not being entertaining and b) not adding anything to the dialogue around the music that cannot be summed up in the one word ‘scrappy’ even though that one word is misleading]. I do not mean to devalue my colleague’s writing by spiking the sentence even though I wanna throw in the screamer “she drawls like Courtney Love when Courtney stops pretending to be Stevie Nicks for one moment”, cos mostly what she has to say is relevant. I do however want to bang the heads of the rest of my colleagues together for spouting cliché after cliché about “girl gangs” and “Brixton” and for overlooking the Courtney Barnett influence on ‘Country Sleaze’. Thing is though, by bringing in the NME quote, as staple as it is (not an insult: you need staples in your music reviewing, otherwise how can you music review?), you have a sense of where the music of Goat Girl is coming from, even a little cultural and attitudinal context – context that would be greatly increased if a) I could be bothered to put links in to their forebears and b) you could be bothered to click on them but a) I can’t and b) I know you won’t, so we will leave it there for a moment, shall we?
* Uh, you do need to be aware that X and The Gun Club were not punk in the way most people understand the word.
13. Jimmy and The Worn Out Shoes – Bramble Path
I love Jimmy and the worn out shoes.
I love near everything about them*, the way Jimmy dances, the way Jimmy’s moustache hangs there droopy and gentle, the soft shoe shuffle, the unassuming but so smart lyrics and deadpan way round a harmony, the presence of other musicians, the lack of presence of other musicians, the chugging rhythms and self-deprecating putdowns, the idea he communicates simply by being there that we should not give up however stupid and unfriendly the odds against us are, the slender soft shoe shuffle, his height, the laconic melodies, the box drums and skiffle beat, the fact he shoves dodgy recordings of songs about Viv Albertine out on YouTube and you can’t understand a single word even though you know that if you could understand even a single word your life would be enriched in so many different small ways, the way he’s from Brighton but a Brighton you were always attracted to not a Brighton you wish you could turn your back upon, the way he used to be in a band that released possibly the greatest Christmas single ever, the empty beer glass, the way half his songs could be doubling for Clive Pig or O-Levels B-sides from 1985 or 1981 perhaps, the stupid soft shoes shuffle, his fondness for chips, the way he understands nostalgia should mean more than marketing, the whistling, the wrong shoes the wrong shoes the wrong shoes the wrong shoes…
14. Eminem – The Ringer
Shortly as I was coming up the final approach to Haywards Heath, a new track started up. Didn’t pay too much attention, then I started getting into the nasty-ass lyrics and obstructionist worldview, the steady flow of invective, the aggressive double-speed rap and… damn, I was just loving the flow. I sat there in the car outside my house, engine running, lights on, neighbours beginning to peer out their windows, while the track built inexorably to its cussed climax. I wanted to know who it was (although it was clearly Eminem). I wanted to know what it was. The volume kept building. The invective kept flowing. Damn, it shook my late Thursday evening up.
15. Wolf Alice – Don’t Delete The Kisses
Wolf Alice remind me of two favourites from the early 2000s – Meanwhile, Back In Communist Russia and Life Without Buildings. With some Northern Gothic leanings and bog-standard indie guitars thrown in, obv.
16. Amyl and the Sniffers – Westgate
Wow. OK.
Clash magazine has it that Melbourne band Amyl and the Sniffers are “a bunch of deviant children enjoying illicit behaviour and the odd pineapple juice”. Beat My Bones says, “Their songs are as fast as the Ramones with the obnoxious smuttiness that the Sex Pistols had”. It is not in my nature to quote other writers when it comes to hyperbole but OK. Wow.
Watching Amyl and the Sniffers at The Windmill in Brixton yesterday evening is what I imagine it must have been like going to CBGBs in ’75. Not that there’s anything four decades old about Amyl and the Sniffers. Not even vaguely.
17. The Legend! – Live at the Haunt
I owned that stage, for what it’s worth. I had a backing tape of desolate beautiful disturbing violin music supplied to me by Maria because she could not make the show, and that fed into the isolation and sense of bereavement too. As did my divorce, and the fact I could not find a single friend to accompany me to the show.
18. Yoko Ono – Teddy Bear
Now, you tell me. Was I wrong to put my faith in Yoko all these years?
19. Let’s Eat Grandma – It’s Not Just Me
Within seconds of listening to the luscious ‘Hot Pink’, I’m reminded of Gothic Americana popsters, the sisters CocoRosie, with a much more immersive understanding of EDM. I am not trying to pull Let’s Eat Grandma down by making this observation (also, this is superficial, based around a certain Helium trill in the intertwined voices and love for esoteric slightly jarring sound) – just pointing out the danger of calling something like “nothing else in pop right now” (thank you Pitchfork) when a statement like that is more revealing of the writer’s own lack of immersion than the music itself. Indeed, the description Pitchfork applied to Let’s Eat Grandma’s debut album could so easily be applied to Cocorosie’s early work, “If anything, I, Gemini’s everything-at-once psychedelia spoke directly to the feeling of being a young teenager—a kaleidoscope of unknowns, as terrifying as it is cool.”
That’s not to say it’s not a great line. It is. It’s a great line, especially the phrase “a kaleidoscope of unknowns”
20. Flight Of The Conchords – Father & Son
So, Isaac. Hello.
“Hello.”
What is it that you like about this song?
“It’s quite funny.”
How so?
“I don’t know.”
Is it something about the self-deprecating way the two singers tackle the subject material and their downbeat wry manner, or is it the delicious delight of the (vaguely taboo) subject material itself, the way the duo sometimes throw in an unexpected sting at the end of a line, the understated pathos that is none the less sweet or moving despite the fact the song is satirical (like all the greatest comedy it holds truth), the underplayed but heartwarming musicality, the way the song builds up into mini-crescendos and dies away again, passion momentarily spent, the smart interplay between the two disjointed narratives, the smart way “Trevor” rhymes with “live together”, the wry nastiness of some of the more ostensibly throwaway lines, the way the song becomes funnier and funnier with familiarity and repeated listens, the unmusicality of the voices as the song draws closer and closer to its climax, the gentle chugalong of the rhythm and melody, bodies swaying gently in the spotlight, the…
22. Kristin Hersh – Lax
This new album – her 10th studio album, it says here – is so full. So fucking full I cannot begin to muster the energy required to equal it with words (thereby failing RULE NUMBER ONE OF MUSIC JOURNALISM: always be more entertaining than the music you write about). Everything claimed for her former 4AD soulmates The Breeders, obv – but without the cosy familiarity that helps so often when confronted with casual genius, the intimate stranger. Brooding. Broody. Squalling. Squalled. Mysterious like Lyra Belacqua. I am just pleased that I am not the only one unable to measure up here.
23. Noah Cyrus, MØ – We Are… Brexit is fucked.
The government’s fucked.
We’re all fucked.
24. Ariana Grande – God Is A Woman
I come at pop not from a teenage girl perspective (that would be absurd) or even a middle-aged white dude perspective (although undeniably this must influence me). In 2018, Ariana is first and foremost a diva, and one that has been greatly affected by tragedy and heartache. (Think Judy Garland, for the archetype.) I come at her music from a gay perspective. I wrote an article for The Stranger about this once – I can’t find the original, but I reference it here.
25. Big Joanie – Fall Asleep
Nice nice nice, but decide I fractionally prefer the production on the old songs more. Prefer them (a little) more when the guitar sound reminds me of The Petticoats. I do like the way the YouTube algorithms take me immediately on to Hole (first time), Solange (second time), Beyoncé (third time) and Skinny Girl Diet (fourth time) following this song.
26. Little Mix – Strip
What if you have long thought that Nicki Minaj is way more entertaining and imaginative and creates (I dunno) way more adventurous noise pollution than anything the more feted rock and avant-rock and doom metal and whatever genres have thrown up in decades?
What if you started believing in stars like Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn again?
27. Rosalia – Di mi nombre
She’s from Catalonia in Spain, she’s 25, she has a grace and style that I find bewitching, she spends a lot of time in hotel rooms doubtless, dreaming. The music sounds steeped in tradition. Interesting it should feel like that (to me). Signals and noise. I first encountered flamenco singing on a visit to Athens, Greece in the 1980s – the heat was oppressive and the noise and fumes even more so. I was tasked with uncovering the English-speaking Greek rock music scene when all I wanted to do was listen to flamenco at open-air concerts and watch the flames flicker, the dancers shift. I know little of the tradition it encapsulates and am content to be watching on the sidelines still, the dancers shifting shape and form around me, ribbons fluttering. The music here is not overstated.
28. Clean Bandit – Baby (feat. Marina & Luis Fonsi)
I feel like I’ve slipped over the edge of the vortex. It’s dark here, and full of unfamiliar smells. (Is this what cultural appropriation smells like? The smell of pine disinfectant?) Clean Bandit belong in the same category as Dua Lipa as Calvin Harris and Jess Glynne, the anonymous pop stars who have risen without trace. Found yourself stuck in a loop listening to the same 90-minute segment of Radio One over again, unable to differentiate between any of the music being played (or banter, or jokes, or “human interest” pieces, or competitions)? Blame these artists: pop Polycell designed to clog up any living, breathing arteries: there to muffle the not-silence and blare of headlights streaking towards you down darkened West Sussex country roads; the smile is not on the face of the tiger. The rise of sad pop. Not melancholy, just sad.
29. Christine and the Queens – 5 dollars
I do not know why I am starting off by talking about passion, about desire here. This is not how I hear this song. To me, this song is a beacon, a full-beam headlight steering me away from the ever-looming rocks – or maybe it’s towards, I cannot tell – a ray of hope, of understanding, that even as the grey and tumble of detritus threaten to overwhelm me, remind there are still Voices out there that can aid, inspire. Her music has feline elasticity, supine grace. Oh no… wait. I mean the opposite of that.
30. Mitski – Nobody
Nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nodoby nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nobody nodoby nobody nobody nobody moves me like Mitski does right now. 100,000 of those 2.8m listens are from me.
How NOT to write about music 