What do you see in a rock band?

I watched (on TV) The 1975 headlining Glastonbury on Friday night. I thought they did a pretty good job, but also it gave me the slightly melancholy thought - is this the last British guitar band that will headline Glastonbury for the first time?

The 1975 are a big, notorious band and they've been around a while. They've had five UK Number 1 albums, an actual Number 1 album in the USA, 25 songs with 100 million+ Spotify streams [my new personality is middle aged man obsessed with streaming numbers), yet still, they were only just big enough for that stage.

You wouldn't say that any of their songs are really and truly embedded in the national consciousness. They haven't had any proper big big hit singles. No guitar bands have, for years.

What are the biggest (both real and potential) current British bands (which haven't already headlined) ... Wolf Alice, Wet Leg, The Last Dinner Party, maybe? Fontaines DC if you're counting Irish ... Idles? Blossoms? Don't think any of those are close, really (Wet Leg most likely to prove me wrong) - Headlining Latitude, maybe, but not Glastonbury ...

Someone older who hasn't done it yet ... Keane? Franz Ferdinand? Elbow? Wouldn't have thought so. Those bands are getting smaller, not bigger. Suede? They might actually be able to pull it off, but very unlikely to be chosen.

Someone not yet known? Possible. Things change and come round again, but it really has been a long time since any bands really blew up, like Oasis, like Coldplay, like the Arctic Monkeys, and there's no reason, based on how music and society is now, for that to change.

Through their career and on Friday night, a lot of people have found Matty Healy and The 1975 irritating. I can see why, indeed that has included me, but I've come to quite admire his schtick and quite like their music. Quite in the English, not American, sense. All quite quite. They've got, for me, one all-timer of a song (Love It If We Made It), which they didn't quite nail on Friday night, and quite a lot of pretty catchy, derivative, good tunes, with quite funny, occasionally slightly scabrous lyrics. He is well served in being bearable in his knowing dissolute rock star performance by being in a group of friends, rather than a solo artist. He is like a more bearable Robbie Williams, more bearable perhaps because he leans harder into being irritating and doesn't demand the love in return to quite the same extent.

Anyway, watching them on Friday night made me think quite a lot about big rock shows, how to carry it off and how not to carry it off. I'd give The 1975 a 7/10, and maybe their new album (from which they, quite safely, played nothing) will contain a couple more all-timers which will lift them to an 8/10 if they headline Glastonbury again.

I'd maybe be more effusive about them had I not watched The Maccabees on Sunday night, a band of a similar (slightly earlier) vintage who never got quite so big, split up and have now reformed. The Maccabees headlined a smaller stage, the Park Stage, and it was, from my sofa, a 10/10.

I rather love the Maccabees, as I've said before, and this triumphant gig only emphasized, for me, that they're the one that, so far, got away, a band that, with different timings and a fair wind, might have been properly huge - not Coldplay-huge maybe, but bigger than Elbow-huge. This wasn't a truly big gig, though, just the Park Stage - a far easier win. Their big gig comes at All Points East in August, when they headline their own show. Would love it if they made it.

Amongst many things I liked about the Maccabees is how close (and democratically) they stood. Their three main members stand level with each other across the front (bassist to the side). They are much more of a guitar band than The 1975. Usually three, sometimes four, guitars coming right at you. Lots of all singing together, a barrage of harmonious noise.

Right, I must say, at this point, my intention was to analyse, in detail, from my experience, the different things that make a headline set work or not work, but it strikes me that would be a) unsatisfactory and b) lead nowhere.

Let me simply say the best big shows I've been to have been Blur, and the worst have been The Strokes (both bands I've seen three times). The most mundane and going through the motions was Oasis. The most brilliant because I caught them right at their peak (though one wouldn't have known they were peaking) were Franz Ferdinand and Ash.

Anyway, going back to my original point, my elegy for the big British guitar band, I decided to put together a playlist.

Now, I started making compilation tapes in the mid-90s, and making countless compilation tapes and latterly playlists taught me to always do your best to be eclectic. I might, at times, only listen to one type of music, but you wouldn't entirely know it from the tapes I made.

But this list will be given over, in the most part, the one dimension - the white guys with guitars.

It will be the (a) tale of British guitar bands from 2000 to 2025 - always bands, never solo artists. It will not be cool, but I think it will be an enjoyable listen. All the songs will be songs I enjoy and, when it comes to British indie rock, my taste tends to the straightforward and anthemic. But I won't include Kasabian. Or Scouting for Girls. We start at, or near, the beginning.

• Yellow - Coldplay Well, British "indie" "rock" music of the 2000s unquestionably starts here, with this undeniable song, which Coldplay never really sounded like again. Still my favourite Coldplay song, maybe their only one I like unambiguously, and still their most popular.
• The Cedar Room - Doves I loved Doves a lot at the start of this century, felt this was the direction guitar music would go in, but it never really happened.
• American Trilogy - The Delgados. Not surprising that there are so many Scottish acts in the first couple of years, that being, very much, where I was at.
• Actually it's Darkness - Idlewild
• I Need Direction - Teenage Fanclub. A large part of music in the 2000s, for me, was albums by older bands that were still good - also true that nearly all the 90s bands I've chosen here were, though around at the time of Britpop, not usually called Britpop.
• Winterlight - Clearlake. Man, the epic, cinematic indie of the early 2000s, that's really something ...
• Always: Your Way - My Vitriol
• To You - I am Kloot From the short-lived "new acoustic movement"
• Flowers in the Window - Travis. Co-written, apparently, by a little fella in a great little blues band, Mr Paul McCartney. And you can hear it. Travis were the biggest British guitar band at the start of the century, which is strange ...
• Don't Just Do Something - Spiritualized. Not Ladies and Gentlemen ..., but I've always found this languorous epic from the mainly disappointing follow-up incredibly moving and also extremely good advice. Only recently realised that he almost certainly substituted "cigarettes" in for "heroin" in the lyrics, at the last moment.
• Julie Christie - Spearmint. I listened to this none-more-indie album again recently. Scottish Pop, this, The Flaming Lips, Stealing Beauty. Absolutely lush and full of pop culture references.
• Time for Heroes - The Libertines. Though The Libertines are my age contemporaries, I also felt they were a generational, musically, below my first love (Blur, SFA etc) so, thankfully, was always a bit removed. They're not good, really, but there were good songs on that first album.
• Envy - Ash. Actually, the start of Ash's down slope, because this was a standalone single but not a massive hit, and obviously Shining Light and Burn Baby Burn are the sensible choices, but I always rather loved Envy.
• Slow Life - SFA 
• Darts of Pleasure - Franz Ferdinand. When I saw Franz Ferdinand for the first time, headlining Benicassim (I saw them a couple of years later headlining Latitude), what struck me was gleeful choreography and the menacing joie de vivre of the non-Kapranos members. They just had so much personality, and I think it got too Kapranos-focused, really, and something was lost.
• Lose Yr Frown - Electric Soft Parade
• Friday Night - The Darkness
• The Final Arrears - Mull Historical Society
• Time is Running Out - Muse. Don't really like Muse, but felt I should include the bands that have headlined Glastonbury (which they've done a baffling three times) ... couldn't face including Oasis, Kasabian or The Who, though (yes, The Who have headlined Glastonbury and released new music this century ...)
• Run - Snow Patrol
• Forned a Band - Art Brut. A break from the morose and overblown.
• Four to the Floor - Starsailor. Were supposed to be massive, but their hammy balladeering was maybe a step too far, but with this song they happened to do a song people could dance to, so it had a bit of a life of its own.
• To You Alone - The Beta Band. Lovely standalone single from that weirdly magical band.
• Somewhere Only We Know -  Keane
• I'm a Cuckoo - Belle and Sebastian. If ever this band was going to get properly big ...
• Long Time Coming - Delays
• Vice - Razorlight. Actual decent first album.
• Our Mutual Friend - The Divine Comedy
• Heliopolis by Night - Aberfeldy
• Dakota - Stereophonics
• All Night Disco Party - Brakes. As I've said before, I saw Brakes about five times at small festivals in the late 2000s, and they were the most fun little festival band I ever saw.
• In the Morning - The Coral
• Wires - Athlete. Finished a few seconds ahead of the lead singer at the Ashford Parkrun a few weeks ago. Huh, some "athlete", McGaughey quipped ...
• Banquet - Bloc Party
• Godhopping - Dogs Die in Hot Cars. Hmm, do we think we should maybe have called ourselves something else, members of little remembered but highly catchy Fife indie band Dogs Die in Hot Cars sometimes say to each other ...
• I Predict a Riot - Kaiser Chiefs. In the 2000s, millions of people going mental to this and Mr Brightside. Mental. That's just how it was.
• Ashes - Embrace. Embrace at Barrowlands was the first gig I ever understood the power of live music - big guitars, singalongs, throwing beer, the heady fun of it. So I don't care, still got a soft spot for the most-maligned of the much-maligned ...
• The Coast is Always Changing - Maximo Park Maximo Park and the Futureheads are absolute peak "new rock revolution" era, weird little bands having proper hits. Saw them both on successive days at Benicassim and, let me say. those were good times.
• Hounds of Love - Futureheads
• Forever Lost - Magic Numbers 
• Sewn - The Feeling At the time, the press tried to make that The Feeling were doing something unusual, that their influences were different from other bands ... i mean, that's pretty hard to make out.
• Trains to Brazil - Guillemots
• Burning Benches - Morning Runner. 
• My Brittle Heart - Lucky Soul. Aah, this was a nice album.
• Suzie - Boy Kill Boy. A catchy song.
• Reckoner - Radiohead. Pure landfill indie this. Just another bunch of chancers cashing in on on the fad.
• She's Got You High - Mumm-Ra. The ultimate.
• Giddy Stratospheres - Long Blondes. "A woman?" said Bond archly. Yes, I have noticed that up to this point it has all been men, and that is truly shocking, yes, and does explain a lot about why people were sick of the boys in the band. The tables do gradually turn after this. Anyway, Long Blondes - great.
• People Help the People - Cherry Ghost. Name comes from Wilco. Doesn't sound like Wilco, but a nice song.
• Ice Cream - New Young Pony Club. Hardly qualifies, as not really guitar music. but this band was supercool for a very short while.
• Robot Man - The Aliens. "A funny wee man with a funny wee beard"
• Now Til 69 - The Shortwave Set
• Starlings - Elbow. Quite a good Elbow song as they go.
• Precious Plans - Field Music. I remember, on iTunes, seeing that I'd listened to this album all the way through over 10 times, but, although I enjoyed it, could hardly remember any of it. Just a band I tried to like a lot, but, in the end, only liked a bit.
• I'm a Realist - Cribs
• Waving Flags - Sea Power. Makes me quite emotional, this song. "Well, welcome in from across the Vistula, you've come so very far, all waving flags". Just what a terrible country we became after this.
• Head Rolls Off - Frightened Rabbit. Apple's just sent me a 100-song playlist of my most listened to tracks of the 10 years of Apple Music, and, notwithstanding the Let it Gos and Hakuna Matatas I couldn't control, there are actually very few songs from this list on it. It's mainly the Americana. But this is there. Tiny changes.
• Paris - Friendly Fires. That British version of indie-dance from around 2010, a lot of it I can't be doing with (Alt-J, just never for me) but this song I do love.
• Two Doors Down - Mystery Jets
• NW5 - Madness. Aah, you know, Madness.
• Don't Upset the Rhythm - The Noisettes
• The Sweetest Thing - Camera Obscura
• Place for Us - The Mummers. This is, although a little sickly, a quite lovely song, maybe a bit of a steal from Us by Regina Spektor.
• Mountains - Biffy Clyro. Bichardy ric, they might have been called.
• Dog Days are Over - Florence and the Machine
• A Matter of Time - The Leisure Society
• How You Like Me Now - The Heavy
• Daddy's Gone - Glasvegas. Dunno about including this one, really. Got talked up a lot, Glasvegas, but not great, really.
• Something Good Can Work - Two Door Cinema Club
• Willows of Carbeth - Trembling Bells
• Little Lion Man - Mumford and Sons. So, notwithstanding the personal sympathy I have for the pleasant and right-on lead singer that his decision to put his name to the band now means everyone thinks he's a horrible racist, whereas in fact he diplomatically kicked the horrible racist out of the band and spends his days drumming for Joni Mitchell and doing right-on things, this band headlined Glastonbury and I certainly don't dislike their music enough not to include it.
• Spanish Sahara - Foals. In, I think, 2011, I was at Latitude and I'd just come from some fairly middle-of-the-road headliner and stood on the edge of the second-stage tent, absolutely packed with kids and going nuts to Foals, specifically this song. And I'd have sworn that was the future, and Foals would be huge. But, no, they weren't.
• Zorbing - Stornoway. Aaaaaah.
• Tonight's the Kind of Night - Noah and the Whale. Writes for musicals, now, this guy.
• Wet Suit - The Vaccines. You may have noticed the list is very top-heavy, chronologically. This is not halfway through, and we've only got about 25 songs left. Again. I guess that is very much the point.
• Snap Out of It - Arctic Monkeys
• Under the Westway - Blur. Blur released three very good albums this century and I could have had something from any of them, but, you know, Albarn losing it while singing this non-album single at Wembley in 2023 was really my most unforgettable Blur moment. Coxon's face doing the Lineker "someone have a word with him". And, going back to the start, seeing that it means a lot to the band can be a big part of what makes a headline show memorable.
• The Mother We Share - Chvrches 
• What You Wanted - Spector Kind of, the last cry of a certain scene.
• Duet -  Everything Everything
• Show Me the Wonder - Manic Street Preachers. The Manics have released 10 albums this century. 10! Workrate. Nearly all of them went Top 2 as well.
• Pompeii - Bastille. You know, it's funny, I've been talking about the death in popularity of the indie band, but if you look at the upper reaches most streamed songs in the world ever, it is full of polite, sensitive Brits with guitars - Sheeran, Coldplay, Tom Odell, Passenger, Keane, and Bastille, who are, strictly, an indie band, and released this insanely successful song.
• Default - Django Django
• Something Like Happiness - The Maccabees. Aah, the Maccabees. My pet theory is that the Maccabees split up first time because they had this song which they thought would be sung back to them by 100,000 people, which would cross over every potential barrier ... and ... nothing. I bloody love Something Like Happiness. 
• Don't Delete the Kisses - Wolf Alice 
• Love It If We Made It - The I975. I guess we won't.
• Danny Nedelko - Idles
• Here's the Thing - Sports Team
• Heatwaves - Glass Animals. This is a British indie band, right, and this song has three and a half billion stream on Spotify! That's, i guess, 300,000 times more than Something Like Happiness by the Maccabees. What the hex.
• The Place Where He Inserted the Blade - Black Country New Road. Very nice.
• Friday - Let's Eat Grandma
• Chaise Longue - Wet Leg. Not even this was an actual chart hit single.
• She Still Leads Me On - Suede
• Sweet Sound of Heaven - The Rolling Stones. British guitar band, headlined Glastonbury this century. They qualify.
• Back to the Radio - Porridge Radio
• The World's Biggest Paving Slab - English Teacher
• We Make Hits - Yard Act. Ha, they don't actually. 
• Nothing Matters - The Last Dinner Party
• All Now - The Staves
• Alone - The Cure British guitar band, headlined Glastonbury this century. They definitely qualify.

So there we go, that's 100. I could have gone deeper on the landfill, some of which is memorable and catchy - no Wombats, Pigeon Detectives, The View, The Fratellis, The Others, Hard-Fi, no The Automatic, no Dirty Pretty Things,, no Hoosiers, no Courteeners or Reverend and the Makers ... there was a lot, wasn't there, and they all had bona fide hits.

I will say that it does seem to me sad that there isn't a path for hopeless boys to get together and practise and learn to play together and harmonise, write songs, to make something beautiful and make a success of it. This is the night Oasis are playing together for the first time in 16 years, and Oasis maybe embodied and sullied that image, but they don't have to be Oasis, they can be The Coral, The Jam, The Manic Street Preachers, Arctic Monkeys or The Beatles. That would be good.

10 Films

The New York Times is doing a big survey of the Best Films of the 21st century. They've made their own critics' list and they're asking people to submit their own 10. I couldn't resist, though I did find it a bit tricky.

I went for, in no particular order

Aftersun

School of Rock

I've Loved You So Long

Inside Llewyn Davis

Killers of the Flower Moon

The Fellowship of the Ring

Adventureland

The White Ribbon

Brick

Adventureland

Most of those could have been any number of others. I tried to go with ones that had stuck with me, had haunted me in some way, or, in some cases, that had brought me joy and I would happily rewatch.

Films, unlike albums, are things I mainly don't rewatch. I guess that's true of most people who aren't pros or ultra-film buffs. So, for the layperson, coming up with a list like this is as much about the film's afterlife as the actual experience of watching it.

For example, taking Scorsese's last two - The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon. I was very enthusiastic about seeing both, enjoyed both, and enthused about both in the immediate aftermath. Years afterwards, though, I feel like The Irishman was merely decent, with plenty of flaws, it hasn't really lingered with me, whereas I look on KOTFM as a great film which is living inside me, thematically and visually, which tells a story that needed telling which hadn't been told before. That's the afterlife of those two films for me.

Sideways is a film I, at the time, was deeply moved by and felt would be a lifelong favourite, but I think its general critical afterlife is a bit so-so, and I've been somewhat influenced by that. So it hasn't made the Top 10.

School of Rock is, I think, in its way, the most straight-up wholesome good fun film with a masterpiece comic performance. and nothing can replicate the cusp-of-adulthood-but-still-in-touch-with-being-a-child thrill that the first Lord of the Rings film gave me in 2001.

Looking at the NYT Critics' List, I've seen nearly all of them, it's not exactly Sight and Sound's esoteric global extravaganza, it's pretty American Oscar-baity but, you know, good films, mainly. Gone Girl is probably my least favourite in the list.

I think my Number 1, at the moment, is Aftersun. It was just an absolute kick in the chest in its own new language and I still feel it.

An alternative Top 10 i could have given would be ...

Brokeback Mountain

Rust and Bone

Pride

Memento

United 93

Oldboy

Mulholland Drive

Palm Springs

The Quiet Girl

Portrait of a Woman of Fire

Those all definitely packed a little punch.

Another thing I noted from the full NYT list is Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper must be thinking "what about the critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated films we were in? What did we do wrong?"

Temba Bavuma

Temba Bavuma is the current captain of the South Africa test cricket team. If the wider world is interested, there are, I think, profound lessons to be learnt from, and currency to be made from, his story.

South Africa have just won the final of the World Test Championship. This was the third running of the WTC in its two-year cycle, a tournament introduced fairly recently to formalise the competitive structure of test cricket which, though not without significant flaws, is already well-established, prestigious and sought after.

This is the first major ICC trophy South Africa have ever won. They have, over the 33 years since their return after apartheid, developed the reputation as cricket's greatest chokers, losing countless crunch games when victory was in their hands. They have had many fine players, and arguably better teams than this one, but this is their first big win (this aversion to success is in direct contrast to the rugby union team, which has a remarkable four World Cup wins from only eight tournaments entered).

South African cricket, post-apartheid, is a complicated story, with plenty of good and bad to it.

As well as scholarships and schemes for young black cricketers, it was decided early on that their should be a formalised "quota system". I think the exact nature of it has varied, but certainly, for the last few years, that has meant, across a cricket season, there need to be six non-white players in the team, two of whom should be Black African.

Separate to Black African players, in this categorisation, are "Cape coloured", one of the most diverse intermixed ethnic groups in the world. Ashwell Prince was, briefly, the first non-white South African captain, but Temba Bavuma is considered the first black African captain.

He was also the first black specialist batter in the team when he made his test debut in 2014. That is pretty striking as it had been more than 20 years. There had been excellent non-white batters like Herschelle Gibbs, Ashwell Prince and the great Hashim Amla, there had been one great black bowler, Makhaya Ntini, some other decent all-rounders but in all that time, there had not been one black batter who had made it to the team, let alone thrived.

So there was a lot of pressure on the diminutive Bavuma from the start. I remember the first time I encountered him, watching England's 2015-16 tour of South Africa. He failed in the first test. In the second, famously, early on in his innings, Ben Stokes, fresh from a career-high double hundred with the bat, sledged him with the brutal "You are absolute shit. What are you doing here?" 

Now, people have said worse on a cricket pitch, and no ill intention implied on Stokes' part, but such a sledge carries double the weight because of SA's quota system, because of what a cause of tension and dissent it has been, quite often from white players who do not feel they are being treated "fairly". Many of them, most famously Kevin Pietersen, have plied their cricket elsewhere. South Africa became quite the cricket factory for other nations, particularly England (to be fair to many of the players involved, England is a much better place to be a professional cricketer financially than South Africa, so if you have a British parent and are not certain you'll make it to the South Africa team, it's a natural move....)

Anyway, Bavuma made a century in that innings, and I immediately became a fan. His next few years in test cricket were ok, not great. He made a fair few 50s and showed he could exist at test level but didn't push on with more 100s. This was, in general, a bad time in tests for South Africa. with the great team of Smith, Kallis, Amila, de Villiers, Steyn, Boucher, Philander, Morkel coming to an end, and very few new players of quality coming through. Their best player, Quinton de Kock, refused to take a knee when it was demanded, and would retire from tests for white ball riches. The country prioritised white ball cricket in general.

Bavuma held his place in the team but was not doing enough to put the muttering about quotas to bed, even though no one else was doing any better. He replaced de Kock as captain of South Africa's white ball side in 2021 and became captain of the test team in 2022. He was South Africa's first black captain.

The upturn in fortunes, both for the player and the team, was instant and remarkable. Bavuma has averaged 50+ with the bat since then, looked like a proper world-class batter, and he has not yet lost a test as captain. In this suddenly good-again South Africa team, there are several very good players, the best of them being fast bowler Kagiso Rabida. Indeed, with Bavuma, Rabada, fellow fast bowler Lungi Ngidi and spinner Keshav Masharaf (SA's best spinner since apartheid), the core of the side is non-white.

In a world where the idea of diversity, equality and inclusion is being rolled back, supposedly in the name of fairness, it is worth looking at what happened as the culmination of a long-running albeit controversial system of positive discrimination, where a little bit of quota helped a young black player keep his place in the team, what actually happened, for him and for the team, when he was given the lead, how South Africa finally has a team that properly represents their nation and has also achieved something the teams of the past could not achieve.

Fairness, eh ...

Meet Me in the Bathroom

This week I watched 'Meet Me in the Bathroom', a 2022 documentary based on Lizzy Goodman's acclaimed book of the same name about the early 2000s New York indie scene. I'll hopefully get round to reading the book some time, which will presumably have significantly more depth to it than what was quite a slight and frustrating, though entertaining, documentary.

The bands it focused on were The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture and (a little), TV on the Radio. It was quite hard to tell if there were any new interviews conducted for it, but you heard from most of the main members of those bands, with very little mention of anyone else, and not that much real attempt to describe the extent of the scene and how everyone and everything joined together. Fine - there are limits to a 2-hour documentary.

Wisely, there were was significant focus on Karen O and James Murphy, who both, at times, said some things that threatened to be pretty interesting. Karen O is one of the great rock stars of this century, and (though I think a lot of overt arseholes play the card of "I'm actually really shy") a genuinely shy person who created an on-stage persona which was a complete different animal. You can tell that the shyness and introversion remained, off stage, such that the unsettling collateral of being an unhinged, captivating, onstage presence was very hard to deal with - the relentlessness, the physicality, the expectation, the substances, the voyeurism, the creepy men ... she had a lot of interesting things to say about how male rock stars had a template to follow, while she had no template. 

I'm not sure that's entirely true, but true enough - she wasn't the first female rock star, but there hadn't been many like her. I've often thought there's a certain similarity to Debbie Harry. The thing from DH's autobiography, though, is that, unless she's completely lying to her readers and herself, her formidable lifelong toughness is genuine. She endured a lot of unpleasant, as well as thrilling, personal circumstances, and her reaction to it always seems to have been phlegmatic and stoic. She even acknowledges the limits of that approach, for the purposes of storytelling, several times ... "I expect you want to know about how that affected me and my reflections at the time, but the truth is I just got on with it ..." that comes up quite often. While Karen O was clearly always reflecting and struggling (though seems to have reached a reconciliation after not too long...)

As for Mr Murphy, the underlying fact is that he would go on to write what is my probably my favourite song and one of the greatest songs of all time, 'All My Friends'. To me, everything about him hangs in the shadow of that. The documentary does not mention 'All My Friends' (the chronology is a bit vague but it's mainly dealing in roughly 1999-2003), but it's somehow relevant to the things he does say.

A failed indie musician-turned-sound engineer, he describes himself bluntly as, in his own view, just not able to function socially, not able to make friends. He is into rock music, not dance music, he is a perfectionist and tyrant in the studio, who needs it to be exactly how it is. Not taking drugs or drinking, he finds himself out of place at clubs. That changes in a revelatory fashion.

In producing The Rapture with Tim Goldsworthy (with whom he set up DFA Records), both the band and his production partner suggest after so much pigheadedness and determination to get his own way, he should really just make his own fuckin record.

So he does, which is Losing My Edge. Fascinatingly, Goldsworthy (with whom he's since fallen out) said at the time he hated it because "dance music has a long history of beautiful lyrics" (Does it?!!!!) and Murphy's lyrics were dumb (Are they???)" ... funny old world.

Anyway, Murphy formed LCD Soundsystem within a handful of days when he was offered a tour on the back of Losing My Edge, and in an endearing moment, he says he finally found his friends. So, that's, for me, the fascinating bit ... All My Friends, which appears to be the ultimate song of nostalgia for lost youth, was written, in fact, by a guy who finally found his friends in his mid-30s, and he got to perform it with all his friends to adoring audiences to this day.

Another notable thing about Murphy, of course, though it shouldn't be, is that he got famous and became an unlikely icon of cool when he was a big, cumbersome bloke in his mid-30s. Breaking the mould. So tying that back in with the main stars of the scene, The Strokes, one considers the tyranny of skinny in indie rock'n'roll. (always i give the caveat when i talk about The Strokes, cos they seem to bring out the carping envious meanness in me ... i like The Strokes a lot). 

The Strokes were the apotheosis of five skinny rich well-dressed handsome guys forming a band ... now, it was possible for some people to be part of that club, but it wasn't possible for many. It sounds completely ridiculous but there's nevertheless a truth that some bands came along where I was conscious that I looked too much like a rugby player to be properly into them ... Pulp were another one.

That's me overthinking myself, sure, but 95% of indie rock frontpeople and lead guitarists have been skinny with good hair since the dawn of time. The drummer and bassist can occasionally get way with a bit more heft and normality, but only sometimes.

So, notwithstanding writing my favourite song, I think James Murphy is quite a trailblazer in his own way, though he still did look like an aging, out-of-shape hipster, rather than an aging out-of-shape small town accountant, and until that indie rock icon comes along, I won't be satisfied.

...

Ok, one more thought about The Strokes. Clips of their early shows in small venues just look amazing. Thrilling. And, of course, I've seen them three times at big outdoor shows and found them a bit crap each time. So maybe that's been one of the biggest problem with rock music in the 21st century - that the trailblazing crossover cultural icon band were never meant for a mass audience, that they got too big for the small they ought to be.

The 50 best singles of the 1990s

Haven't I done this before? And very recently? Yes, but not exactly this. I'm weirdly drawn back to different versions of the same thing. I guess it's watching repeats of Top of the Pops and reading other people's opinions that make me want to refine it.

This will be a list of 50 hit singles in order. My one little rule is that everything has to have reached the UK Top 20 (a rule I will slightly break once). I will try to base it on my memories of the time, what felt like a significant single that got people around me talking, or really got me thinking, whether it got to Number 1 or Number 16.

A few significant singles I won't be including - Wonderwall (or anything by Oasis), Angels, Wannabe, Back for Good, Everything I Do. All just feel like they'd be a waste of a place, and the ones of them I do like, I don't like enough.

Getting it down to 50 is tricky, because there are a lot of singles from that time which bring back fond memories, & there are a lot of moments or trends that you feel need representing. It was the last time, I think, that the pop charts were part of the national conversation, and it is also, I think, the time with the most even spread of diverse genres at the highest reach of the charts.

So, there's about 80 other songs I could easily have included, but I've basically stuck with the first list I made.

50. Oh Carolina - Shaggy There were, in the early 90s, a lot of hits within the genre of pop-reggae/ragga - Shabba Ranks, Inner Circle, Snow, Shaka Demus and Pliers etc When I think of 1993, that's the main type of music I think about. Shaggy's first big hit is my favourite - a charming piece of work. I don't have many positive memories of 1993, but this song, ubiquitous at the time, brings a smile to my face. I have included this above Here Comes the Hotstepper, which shows what an agonising process this has been.

49. That's the Way Love Goes - Janet Jackson Watching old Tops of the Pops of the decade, there really are a lot of Janet Jackson hits, and, honestly, I think quite a lot of them are not that good - they're surprisingly twee and cheesy. I've never been completely convinced that she deserves her iconic, innovative status. But this was always a great single - much better, I think, than everything else she released in the 90s.

48. Sit Down - James At university in the late 90s, what normal men were listening to more than anything, I found, was that persistent strain of British mainstream indie that wasn't Britpop - Stone Roses (above all), The Charlatans, James, The Beautiful South. James have released almost 20 albums, and amazingly, their first Number 1 studio album came in 2024. Sit Down is much maligned, but I definitely think it's ok to like it, and I like it. It is the uncool dancefloor for people who can't dance, and that's just fine.

47. House of Love - East 17 Rather than Take That, I choose this little slice of joy by the other boyband. Though really, East 17 had more in common, at the start, with The Prodigy than Take That. Tony Mortimer could write a banging rave-pop tune. There are three or four others, which got higher in the charts, but this is the first and purest.

46. Stay - Shakespears Sister For some reason, I felt I had to choose between this and Goodnight Girl by Wet Wet Wet, and because I've talked about my weird affection for Goodnight Girl several times before, and because Stay is, by any reckoning, a more interesting, memorable chart-topper, it had to be this.

45. Nancy Boy - Placebo Brian Molko was one of the music press's primary villains of the late 90s. There were several articles wherein he clearly did not get on well with the interviewer and the headline was some pretentious pull quote, designed to make him look like an idiot. I certainly went along with it, and it was only a lot later I realised a lot of the Placebo singles were great fun. I was away when Nancy Boy came out, and only saw it on TOTP a few months ago. Not quite Bowie-doing-Starman incendiary, but must have been pretty thrilling at the time.

44. Ain't No (Ain't No Use) - Sub Sub There were so many female-vocal/male-producer dance tracks that hit the upper reaches of the charts throughout the 90s, a lot of which I hated, but even at the time, Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use) was a cut above. This narrowly beats out Set You Free by N-Trance.

43. Hyperballad - Bjork This was the single after Bjork had a weird Christmas smash with It's Oh So Quiet. Although it encourages littering in beauty spots, it's a marvellous song. Venus as a Boy is probably the other Bjork choice, but this is my favourite.

42. A Life Less Ordinary - Ash I saw this one again on TOTP recently, and remembered how much I loved it. Of course, Girl from Mars and Oh Yeah were the 90s Ash singles that really broke through, but I wilfully choose this, as I think it captures a very specific post-Britpop moment, where all the good bands might still have got bigger and better (but generally didn't) and shows Ash with their perfect combination of harmonious tunefulness, messy noise and high romanticism.

41. I Try - Macy Gray Another song which had a direct alternative I could have chosen as a piece of surprisingly moving, idiosyncratically voiced retro-soul, Give Me a Little More Time by Gabrielle, but I really liked the slow trajectory this song took to ubiquity.

40. Jump Around - House of Pain I had forgotten that House of Pain also did a song called Shamrocks and Shenanigans. What a thing. Both ludicrous and undeniable, Jump Around represents every American funky white-boy hit single (Under the Bridge. Butterfly, Drinkin' in LA) which just burrowed its way into everyone's head for months and years. But this is a song I have seen lots of different crowds of people go nuts to, and that puts it above and beyond.

39. Outside - George Michael Strange as it might sound, I'm not sure most people (including me) realised/remembered that George Michael was brilliant until this song. He was a huge star, but I think generally seen as the epitome of mainstream, even a bit boring. This response to his public arrest was not just a genuinely fine song, it was also very funny, very bold and groundbreaking.

38. Ebenezer Goode - The Shamen I don't know, I just remember how nuts it was that this was Number 1 for 4 weeks, how disconcerting the Gerry Sadowitz video was. It also represents the remarkably substantial early-90s genre of "UK rave single that had some pun which, if a 4-year-old heard it, they might not realise was about taking drugs, but everyone else would, haha, aren't we naughty". Nothing else as flagrant, catchy or popular as Ebenezer Goode in that genre.

37. Ray of Light - Madonna Needless to say, Madonna, being Madonna, had a lot of hit singles in the 90s, and Vogue was probably the biggest, Take a Bow is probably my favourite, but this is, I think, the most 90s Madonna hit.

36. Two Princes - The Spin Doctors It is quite gratifying to look up on Spotify an old track you used to like but don't hear much anymore, and see that it's got 600 million streams on Spotify, and think, ah yes, true catchiness is timeless (though just as often, streaming numbers are baffling and a song i think of as a big hit has pitiful numbers). Anyway, one of the all-time relentlessly catchy songs.

35. Waking Up - Elastica It's a bit tricky to know what to include from Britpop. Maybe Elastica are a band people want to have been better/bigger than they actually were. Maybe it's more honest to include Slight Return, Wake Up Boo, Inbetweener or Road Rage, but I think Waking Up is indeed a pretty cool song, and we want the kids to think the 90s were cool, after all.

34. Stars - Simply Red Talking of cool ... but again, just one of those songs which, as you get older, you just accept is very good - the song that sold the biggest album of the early 90s.

33. Unfinished Sympathy - Massive Attack One of three classic Massive Attack singles, which maybe I don't adore and venerate as much as everyone else does, but this one I do like a lot.

32. Sabotage - The Beastie Boys Sometimes I do think not enough rock bands realise that you can't really go wrong with a big, blatant, dramatic guitar-and-drums intro, and it took a hip-hop band to show them. But, equally, I suppose, Sabotage is one of those songs so simply great that once it had been done, it couldn't really be redone. Interesting, since it was the year of Definitely Maybe, Parklife, Dog Man Star, The Holy Bible, His'n'Hers, Dummy, that this is the only track I've chosen from 1994.

31. The Drugs Don't Work - The Verve Maybe I regret including this one rather than, say, Alright by Supergrass, who are a band people don't find embarrassing now unlike The Verve, but I still think this is, taken in isolation, an unusually sad, pretty song, to be a Number 1.

30. Can I Kick It? - A Tribe Called Quest There was a lot of really nice, jazzy, early 90s hip-hop, De La Soul or PM Dawn or Dream Warriors, even Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, but I think the most enduring single is Can I Kick It? Felt like it had a broader place in the culture almost as soon as it arrived. 

29. Torn - Natalie Imbruglia If you don't count Stefan Dennis' immortal Don't It Make You Feel Good, the best Neighbourspop single (let's say Kylie's later stuff is something different ...)

28. No Diggity - Blackstreet A ship called No Diiigity. I think this was one of the first songs that made me notice that "production" (whatever that is) exists, that several people had worked hard on this to make it a perfect-sounding record.

27. Three Lions - Baddiel, Skinner & the Lightning Seeds. Not much to say about this. The absolute worst singers, maybe apart from Noel Gallagher, to have a massive, enduring hit single. But Three Lions is probably, in the UK, the best known song that came out in the 90s, and people still aren't completely sick of it.

26. You Get What You Give - The New Radicals This timeless smash by the less reprehensible double-g bald Gregg. One of the least new, least radical, most triumphant songs of the decade.

25. You Oughta Know - Alanis Morissette You Oughta Know didn't actually make the Top 20, it only got to 22, but I'm not about to include Ironic, am I? I didn't think much of the rest of that album, but this is still great, a genuinely rocking outlier. And whenever I write it down, I am reminded that Morissette is a surprisingly difficult surname to spell.

24. Animal Nitrate - Suede This was the first time I heard Suede, the first song, I think, where I heard British indie rock and knew that what was I was listening to. This music was exciting at the time, and it's still pretty exciting. There are Suede songs I slightly prefer, but I think this is their greatest single, albeit it's really no better than Ebenezer Goode when it comes to "ooh, aren't we a card" titles ...

23. My Name Is - Eminem I think few people have been more delighted than me by the now-slightly-hackneyed fact that Chas and Dave play on this. This song was funny at the time, but it's still pretty remarkable that one of the two most relentlessly successful artists of the last quarter century is just a rude little guy who just keeps doing his rude little thing.

22. There She Goes - The La's The apostrophe in the name of the La's always bothers me, but I suppose The Las might be worse. This is another one where you look up the streaming numbers and go "oh yeah, people still like that nice song".

21. Bills, Bills, Bills - Destiny's Child Beyonce has been having hits for a long, long time, and I'm not sure anything is better than this, from 26 years ago. I guess this is the most 21st-century song on the list.

20. The Man Don't Give a Fuck - Super Furry Animals I'd personally go for Ice Hockey Hair but this is SFA's most noteworthy single, which really got people talking for a while, and is a wild joyride. It is a great and simple protest song. I couldn't really include B and S or The Beta Band, the other great late 90s EP bands, as they never had any kind of hit singles really, but this, though it didn't reach the highest echelons, was a single that made an impact.

19. Song 2 - Blur The two-minute second track on an album, the second single which reached Number 2. Very nice indeed. Blur had how many classic singles ... six maybe? But this is the biggest by far, globally. Albarn's career is full of triumphant changes of direction, recoveries from setbacks to show he's capable of way more. This simple universal thing is a perfect example.

18. Don't Let Go (Love) - En Vogue Not to be confused with that other similarly-themed En Vogue hit, Hold On. There's something of an epic scale to this song, a sense some grand, glorious drama is being enacted. Over the years, it's become one of my favourite singles. En Vogue's combined voices make one of the best noises.

17. Firestarter - The Prodigy Weird to think about this, now. I didn't really like it, it wasn't quite my thing, but I'd say it was this dominating the charts, even more than anything to do with Blur or Oasis, that made you feel that this was a moment, that alternative music was now a big thing. It holds up pretty well, I think.

16. Common People - Pulp Oh god, whenever Common People comes up I turn into the most boring man in the world. Maybe I was literally just a threatened do-gooding teenager going "well, actually, if I called my dad he most definitely could not stop it all, so there" and I built a whole theory about the song's imperfections on that. Common People does feel more apposite than ever in some ways, but I still feel I've betrayed everything I believe in by putting Pulp above Blur here. But there we go ...

15. Born Slippy.NUXX - Underworld It's really quite a beautiful thing, Born Slippy, a proper piece of desperate on-the-edge poetry which somehow became an anthem. One of those great 90s Number 2s (I think about 12 songs on this list stalled at Number 2 ...)

14. No Surprises - Radiohead I've put this a little higher than I thought I would. Radiohead, though not really thought of as a singles band, had four or five great, very successful singles. This one also had a great video. A staggeringly popular band, really, considering what they sound like.

13. No Scrubs - TLC No surprises, no scrubs, no dogs, no Irish. Released in the same year as Bills, Bills, Bills, and let's be honest, basically the same song, about trifling, good-for-nothing type of busters, but even more enduringly great and memorable.

12. Your Woman - White Town When you dig into it, this song is even better than you think it is - just everything about it is completely subversive and original. It is interesting that between 96 and 98 there were three pretty iconic indie one-hit wonder Number 1s by British Asians (one of them, which we'll get to, is not strictly a one-hit wonder, but they're certainly known to the wider public for only one song).

11. Mmmbop - Hanson No comment. Just is.

10. Never Ever - All Saints Again, since I've been watching the TOTPs from late 97, it's just remarkable how great All Saints are compared to how rubbish the Spice Girls are. I know that's unfair, because the Spice Girls were for young girls, and that's the most important audience, but still, in terms of singing, choreography, cool, music, clothes, it is just such a leap.

9. Nothing Compares 2 U - Sinead O'Connor The earliest one here, I think. The 2 and the U are so incongruous and a reminder that it's a Prince song

8. Groove is in the Heart - Deee-lite Another one from 1990 and famously a Number 2 by a handful of sales. Continues to be excellent and as fun as you'd want any song to be. Pleasingly, the top of Deee-Lite's Wikipedia page says "For the multinational auditor, see Deloitte".

7. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana And this is, fact fans, the most streamed song of the 1990s, just ahead of Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls. The power of a riff and a scream can change lives.

6. Brimful of Asha - Cornershop I remember watching this on TOTP, in the TV room in my hall at university, and they played the original (also magnificent) slower version, and it really brought a few little bits of racism out in a few people, which was odd. The album version is a real epic.

5. Doll Parts - Hole When Pitchfork had their Best Albums of the 90s a couple of years, and Live Through This was ranked 8 ahead of Nevermind at 10, I thought "oh yeah, right" but, here we are, I've done the same thing. Courtney Love doing Doll Parts is the Top of the Pops performance that stands above everything else I saw on the show.

4. Would I Lie to You - Charles and Eddie If anyone has any resentment to this song's high position, let me reiterate that jealous minds, jealous minds, never satisfy.

3. A Design for Life - Manic Street Preachers God, I love these guys. But it was some moment this. Having been not that big really at the start of the 90s, such that, really, most people had probably not heard anything by them, the Manics had unwelcome fame in 1995 and 1996 and this was the first thing most people heard of them. Something so unignorable. 1st of 6 Top 2 hits, which is a lot for a band which always made such unfashionable music.

2. Yes - McAlmont & Butler Well, indeed, it did sound like a brand of cigarettes or an Edinburgh legal firm, but, still, they did this, the most 40-something online British guy's idea of the best song ever going. But I hold back from putting it at 1 because of ...

1. Doo Wop (That Thing) - Lauryn Hill The greatest song ever, so obviously Number 1.

Well, that's finished, and it's very mainstream, but good, I think. I will probably try to make a more interesting playlist of other 90s hits next, just pull together everything that I vaguely remember enjoying or have come to enjoy late which was, at least, Top 40 or so ...

And/or

I finished watching Andor last week and then went straight on, as many have done, to rewatching Rogue One.

Amongst the universally glowing official reviews, there's been a significant thread of media/TV/artsy middle-aged British Bluesky which has ostentatiously shrugged and said "what's going on/it's a bit boring/it's all procedure/Star Wars for grown-ups is pointless, the whole fun of Star Wars is that it's for kids".

The point is worth considering, especially as it echoes one made by this blog's regular reader. Is Andor a bit overhyped? Is its adult tone a considered shield against an absence of the kind of thrills which are and have always been the lifeblood of Star Wars?

Well, obviously, it's a big no from me. I did pay heed, while watching the first half of the second series, to the notion that maybe I was buying too heavily into it, that there were longeurs which may not pay off. But they did pay off..

The first thing I'd say about Andor is that, to me, this is the story. The main story. Andor, Rogue One, Star Wars. How the rebel alliance was formed, what kind of people they were, how tyranny operates, how people operate against tyranny, how they got the plans for the Deathstar, how the Deathstar got blown up. This direct line. A perfect story.

Of course, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi may also be "the story", but the line from Cassian Andor being recruited to the first Deathstar blowing up is a straight line, and all of it is "important".

That is not true of most of the other spin-offs, even when they try to connect to the main story. They're just dipping in, even Obi-wan Kenobi, a fun show that didn't really add any depth or understanding. 

So, to the counter the notion that Star Wars is best when it's for kids, well, they've tried that. Almost everything else since The Phantom Menace has been, very much, for kids, and it's been patchy at best. I could enjoy something like The Mandalorian for a while, but after a while, people who grew up with the original films but now prefer ... different ... types of films, will ask for good people who do bad things, bad people who are human, things going unspoken, some things that aren't completely explained, resonance with the real world, levity, pathos, that kind of stuff. That's what Andor went for, and what it achieved.

Needless to say, it tied up with Rogue One pretty well. You'd hope so, since the whole series had that to aim at. Rogue One I liked very much at the time, and still do, though it is an uneven film, where the compromises between being more grown-up and traditionally Star Warsy are pretty evident. Some of it is just ok, but is elevated by the "I'm afraid everyone dies" ending, which really is, for me, one of the best and most moving bits in all of Star Wars.

Anyway, there we go, Andor was excellent, particularly the third quarter of the second series. I don't really know if Star Wars has much more to give me, after that. but you never know. 

The Commitments

I watched half an hour of The Commitments recently. It is certainly one of that handful of films that I've happily rewatched or dipped into, and will never tire of.

I watched the film near the start of the 90s, read the book near the start of the 2000s, and watched the musical near the start of the 2010s. The film is best.

First, the book, though. Roddy Doyle's debut novel, written in 1987. It would be the first of a trilogy. I bought the trilogy in, I think, early 2002, when I was working at Blackwell's. It was on 3 for 2 "Irish Literature" deal and I got my 30% staff discount so, by my reckoning, The Commitments cost me about a pound. The other books I bought as part of that deal were Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan and Tony Cascarino's autobiography Full Time (the big reveal of Cascarino's fine book being, ironically, that the grandmother he, and everyone else, thought qualified him for Ireland was not actually Irish, so he gained 88 international caps on a false premise).

This was part of a period of general engagement with my "Irishness". I remember reading an article about The Commitments which tied it together with Van Morrison and Dexys and the idea of Celtic Soul, and I think I was disappointed a little, when I read the book, that Doyle doesn't actually go very deep on that, nor on the idea of the Irish as "the blacks of Europe" (in-famously, in the book but not, wisely, the film, he uses a stronger, less acceptable term).

It's a short, sweet, funny novel, but didn't really give me that much that the film (co-written by Doyle) hadn't already.

As for the stage show, that was very enjoyable too, but smoothed out plenty of the edges, of course. I remember that the focus was more on the lead singer Deco than the manager Jimmy, particularly because the guy playing Deco had a spectacularly good voice.

Which brings me to a thing that has long interested/perplexed me about the film. The lead character is the band's manager Jimmy Rabbitte. played by Robert Arkins. Arkins really carries the film, is on screen most of the time, has most of the memorable lines, does most of the acting that the film requires.

He'd never acted before. In fact, he was a singer who was lined up to play Deco, before the director Alan Parker heard Andrew Strong's spectacular voice, and cast him as Deco. So Arkins switched to Jimmy, who doesn't sing in the film, though he does over the opening and closing credits.

What perplexes me somewhat is that Arkins has never really acted again. I mean, he wasn't perfect -  watching it back, you can see there's plenty of happy amateurism from many of the young musicians - but he was good, charming, pulled off some memorable lines.

Many of the cast members of the film have gone on to great careers, but not the lead. I've always wondered why.

Anyway, what else about the Commitments? It did more than almost anything I can think of to defang swearing. It paved the way for a billion terrible versions of Mustang Sally. It has one of the two great "pretending to be interviewed while sitting in the bath" scenes of the late 80s/early 90s, along with Emilio Estevez in Young Guns, and what greater legacy is there than that?