If you're feeling sinister

I have had something of a turn-of-the-century summer, something of a classic-indie-EPs-of-the-late-90s summer. I have seen many musicians in their 50s,  in various states of preservation, playing songs from the late 90s and early 2000s, and why, goddammit, wouldn't I, when there are so few simple pleasures left? I've seen SFA (twice), Beta Band, Badly Drawn Boy, Rilo Kiley, St Etienne, Belle and Sebastian. The Maccabees, in their 40s, were a rare dip into yoof culture.

I could write something about any of them, about time moving forward and standing still, about stardom and the lack of it, about the certain lengthy moment most of them represent, that era when you could make marvellous, imaginative and tuneful, unkempt and magical, fairly but not very successful guitar music for a good long time and no one expected any more or less.

I could write about how many Top 10 hits they actually had between them, all these excellent and, in their way, iconic acts (somewhere between 1 and 3, and none, exactly, proper Top 10 hits).

But I've ended up thinking the most about 'If You're Feeling Sinister', the album released 30 years ago, and played in full by Belle and Sebastian at Dreamland, Margate, last Friday night.

'If You're Feeling Sinister' was at 25 on US publication Pitchfork's most recent list of the top albums of the 1990s. It crossed the Atlantic and it lasted. Hearing it at an ecstatic Dreamland on the summer Friday night before my 48th birthday was marvellous. But also, it was weird, when you think about what 'If You're Feeling Sinister' actually is. What it felt like at the time.

Well, actually, no, I can't really say what it felt like to anyone but me. Which was like a dream. Which is not what most things feel like to me. 

I'm not the hippest on this. I didn't buy 'If You're Feeling Sinister' on the day it came out. In fact, I've a feeling I didn't buy it all. I think it was copied for me in around 2000, by which time I already knew it inside out.

By chance, or why not, fate, I'd heard the B&S BBC session in the summer of 96. I hadn't sought it out, I rarely listened to Radio 1, certainly not late at night. My tastes were basic Britpop, Beatles, Dylan, Blondie, Bowie still - nothing wrong with that. I just happened to have the radio on that night. I remember Stuart's singing was so ropey, the playing was ropey. But it was The State I Am In, and by the end it was magical. It may also have been Like Dylan in the Movies. He sounded like a little boy, or girl - I pictured what he, or she, looked like, and I was completely wrong (I'll get to that). Stuart M was, I could somewhat tell then, and it turned out, more like me, or a certain aspect of me, than all the Britpoppers.

But, still, though I now had the name Belle and Sebastian in my head, that was all I had for a while, and I don't think I tried to change that. 

But gradually it changed. Those first three years that I listened to Tigermilk, If You're Feeling Sinister (by far the most), the EPs, and Boy with the Arab Strap, it wasn't me that put them on the stereo. I guess it was nearly always my friend/flatmate John. So, they just kind of drifted into my consciousness, quietly, persistently. I think I did actually buy the reissued Tigermilk at a certain point, so I have a more precise relationship with that, but 'Sinister', it still has this weird insidious place inside me. 

And, of course, at that point, it really is true that we hardly knew anything about Belle and Sebastian. I didn't know what Stuart M looked like, didn't know the history, none of it. They started to creep out of the woodwork around the turn of the century. The NME barely mentioned them, and when they did, it was often with loathing. One journalist in particular, the renowned Steven Wells, who could be very entertaining when you agreed with him, loathed everything about them - but I remember one very funny piece he wrote where he described his shock that Stuart was not at all as you'd think, that he was a really nice late-20s guy who was excellent at football (rather than, I guess, a vampiric shrinking manchild) and that was making it harder to hate them, but he was sticking to his guns.

Belle and Sebastian looked great on Friday night - all of them, really, are aging elegantly. Stuart Murdoch was always older than he looked, and he certainly does not look 58 now. He looks about 31. He still looks, maybe a couple of months post-fighting peak, like a featherweight boxer, or a gymnast, or a scrum-half, or a 1500m runner. He chats a lot on stage, maybe a tiny bit too much. 

The band are absolute pros, entirely suited to Friday night in a seaside town, in front of the rollercoaster. But still, 'If You're Feeling Sinister' remains an album written by a chronically ill, unsuccessful, church-tending, bus-riding small young man with a wavering, quiet voice. Its big singalong that got everyone dancing is called Get Me Away from Here, I'm Dying.

Still, the reason it's a canonical transcontinental classic and people around the world go out and get merry to it 30 years later is because the songs are brilliant, of course. As Stevie Jackson said, he simply could not believe what he was hearing when he first heard Murdoch's songs. He says it was like hearing Paul Simon or Bob Dylan. 

People have different favourites - even back then, sitting in our shared living room on Baker Lane, for me it was the central section of Dylan in the Movies, Fox in the Snow, Get Me Away, If You're Feeling Sinister which drew me in the deepest. But there are, as they say, no skips. On Friday, I was reminded how great The Boy Done Wrong Again is, and, just generally, how great all the little flair moments are, those little extras in the arrangements.

There's a case for Tigermilk being just as good. I don't think there's really a case for any other B&S album being quite as good, though I might just say I'm a Cuckoo is my favourite pop song of theirs, certainly when played live. Such wish fulfilment.

And though they've been "this" Belle and Sebastian for over 20 years, the live, all-singing, all-dancing, poptastic B&S, and though there's always some gap between recorded and live music, one does still sometimes stop to consider quite what a journey the songs of If You're Feeling Sinister have been on.

Rein Me In

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3triLkS0nq4&list=RD3triLkS0nq4&start_radio=1

What to make of this song, that has now been UK Number 1 for, all told, a record-breaking 19 weeks? I have seen some talk that its vast success is baffling, and exemplifies how little crossover there is between chart success and universal recognition these days, but I'm not sure that's true.

Firstly, I like the song. It's easier, obviously, to understand why something is popular if you yourself like it. When Drake's One Dance was Number 1 for 15 weeks a decade ago, there was no part of me that could understand that, even though I knew Drake was, at that point, the most popular artist in the world, known for his gift for a hook. But it sounded like drab shit to me, so my bafflement remained.

But, even if I didn't like it, the massive UK success of Rein Me In makes, to me, a very specific, and heartwarming, sense - a happy accident of timing and the culmination of certain trends in recent chart music.

At least, something of an accident, in that the collaboration was mooted before Dean's second album went massive - far more massive than anyone could have anticipated. At the time, Sam Fender was the bigger star, with three hit albums behind him. 

I'm not a huge Sam Fender fan - he happened to play early in the afternoon when Bob Dylan and Neil Young played Hyde Park in 2019, and I was impressed but not exactly enamoured. His sound is big, his voice is exceptionally strong. In the past, he'd have been positioned as the frontman of an indie band - not one I'd have loved - but bands don't have hits these days. Even before Olivia Dean's contribution, Rein Me In was one of his better songs. He seems pretty nice, and that certainly is part of his appeal.

They both come from somewhat "indie" or "authentic" backgrounds - indie soul and indie rock, while both are now pop stars. Dean is a very adaptable singer, I think - I don't imagine there's many markets, age-groups, that will feel too embarrassed about liking her. They're both pretty easily charming, lowkey, endearingly English - one South Shields, one South London - the viral success of Rein Me In seems to have been solidified by big gigs in Fender's team's football stadium, St James' Park, and Dean's, the London Stadium. That's where it seems like a bit of a masterplan. Two readybaked fanbases, some sense of a united, groundroots England. The England that gets behind the football, that sings the same song.

I've heard the song around a lot - of course, not as much as one used to hear Wannabe or Wonderwall, but enough, in different contexts, without seeking it out at all. And it just makes sense that this nice song by two nice, different but similar English artists, this nostalgic duet of a love song, has become quietly massive. Most of the big pop songs these days are nice to listen to - more in the tradition of classic AOR than youth-orientated dance music. I suspect that's the long tail of the Taylor Swift effect. Punks and contrarians would call these songs bland as hell, but I'm not a punk, and I much prefer them to the litany of awful cack that was topping the charts in the 2000s and 2010s.

So, anyway, there it is, Number 1 forever and a nice little song. What's not to like.

When Harry Kane played golf with Donald Trump

Harry Kane has been my favourite footballer of the last few years, and I have defended him against most unfair, and occasionally fair, criticism.

He played golf with Donald Trump.

Harry Kane scored six goals in this World Cup, but none since the world found out he played golf with Donald Trump.

I'm disappointed England were agonisingly defeated in the semi-final of the World Cup, but a tiny bit relieved. For over a year, the slightly sickening thought had occurred to me that he year that football finally came home our splendid team would have to share the winning stage with Donald Trump, and look happy and say nice things about him.

Well, that happened and we didn't even get the large pay-off of winning the World Cup.

What was the precise sequence of events which meant Harry Kane played golf with Donald Trump? Who sought out who? It doesn't really matter. We know Donald Trump has spent his life getting his claws into famous people. There's many an American sports star who counts Trump as a "friend". I was similarly grossed out when Rory McIlroy, a smart thoughtful Northern Irish sporting superstar I've always liked, spoke out postively about not just Trump but Elon Musk. But Trump is so intrinsic to golf, so unavoidable, and, well, golfers are golfers, there's not a left-wing bone in their whole body, and they're individuals who play for themselves.

Harry Kane is the captain of the England men's football team, and he played golf with Donald Trump around 18 months ago, made a sufficiently good impression that Trump called him a really nice guy, and when somewhat sheepishly, but not very sheepishly, reminded of it last week, said it was surreal, a great honour, and complimented Trump's golf game. 

I know what sportspeople are like. I know that it conforms with the sportsperson's mindset to trend to the right, or to be entirely indifferent to politics. I have always liked Harry Kane, not just because he has been a tenaciously excellent striker, far exceeding any reasonable expectation of him, for my club Tottenham Hotspur and for England, but because he really seems like a nice man, who treats people with respect, is universally liked by people that play with him, doesn't show off, and is smarter than he seems. I still think that about him. But he's the captain of the England football team and he played golf with Donald Trump.

Actually, in this increasingly awful world and country of open racism, prejudice, violence, repression, lies, corruption, and division, the England football team does, or can, mean something. Gareth Southgate understood that and his team represented that. The England men's football team represents (as does the women's team,  in similar but different ways), more than most things, an England to believe in. A team made up of young men born in England whose parents and grandparents were not born in England. Of smart, likeable men who have had to fight for everything they're achieving since they were small children. Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, Jude Bellingham, Declan Rice, Harry Kane.

Sport is not left-wing, but, of all sports, football, indeed western European football, football may be the most left-wing. Many of the greatest western European football managers - Ferguson, Shankly, Guardiola, Clough, Klopp, Cruyff, Dalglish - have been outspoken left-wingers.

I do not like the fact that, in that context, the England captain Harry Kane just went and played golf with Donald Trump, who is, my sources suggest, a murderous racist gangster rapist, one of the worst human beings that has ever existed, and Harry Kane said it was surreal and an honour.

He doesn't have to be glued to Bluesky and have read Das Kapital, but he should, having been England captain for almost a decade, having worn a rainbow armband and knelt before games, always said the right things when required to, understand the context of not finding a way not to play golf with Donald Trump.

This isn't the most disappointed I've been in an England football leader.

This was,

https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12743654/roy-hodgson-i-couldnt-pick-rio-ferdinand-and-john-terry-at-euro-2012-due-to-furore-surrounding-racism-case

when the loveable, erudite manager Roy Hodgson, faced with the choice of taking to Euro 2012 either the world-class defender Rio Ferdinand, whose brother Anton had been racially abused by John Terry, or the world-class defender John Terry, who had racially abused Rio Ferdinand's brother Anton, chose John Terry. 

I'd been wondering to myself recently why I hardly watched hardly any of Euro 2012, and it was that. I'd simply had enough of England at that point. It wasn't an England I cared for. Once Terry was gone, I tentatively returned, and Southgate brought the sense that actually the England football team could be a force for good to the fore in a way it had never been before.

So, at the World Cup where John Terry, who, surprise surprise, has recently come out in support of far-right party Restore Britain, is England's official representative in the FIFA box, shown on TV pretty much every game to an unheard-by-the-powers-that-be right-on Bluesky response of "Fuck off John Terry!", we find out that England's likeable, good egg captain Harry Kane played golf with straightforward evil gangster tyrant Donald Trump, and we want England to win the World Cup a little bit less, and, for all the good he's done, we feel it's time Harry Kane wasn't England captain anymore.

Although we don't know their politics and we don't know that they wouldn't play golf with Donald Trump, we feel it's time the England captain was Jude Bellingham, or Declan Rice, or, why not, Bukayo Saka or Marcus Rashford. [I'd say Marc Guehi, who has clear leadership potential, but he's already had a bit of a https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/clyj2e3dg14o hmmmm moment ...]

So thank you Harry Kane, for all the magnificent goals, may you win the Ballon d'Or you almost but don't quite deserve, may you win the Champions League you won't quite be able to seize, but I'm afraid I can't help but feel that England didn't win the World Cup because you played golf with Donald Trump, because, for all your qualities, maybe if you'd been sharp and brave enough not to play golf with Donald Trump, you'd have been able to seize all those little moments you didn't quite seize in your magnificent career, sadly forever defined by the fact that you didn't win the World Cup or the Euros, and you played golf with Donald Trump.

All the Number 1s of the 2020s, so far, ranked - REDONE

I made this list over a year ago, but I'm going to do it again, as there have been some great Number 1s since then. I'll leave in most of my original comments, and add a few more. New songs in bold.

The pop charts are not that lively these days in that lots of the same songs hang around for ages, but I think it is an era with a high end of pretty great singles, and great in a very accessible, universal way.

Nevertheless, we must begin with ...

96. LadBaby - Food Aid. I'd not actually listened to these before, just reasonably assumed how bad they'd be, but I actually listened to some of this today, and it's way worse than could possibly have been imagined. Just unbelievably bad to listen to. Makes me hate this country even more than i already do.

95. LadBaby featuring Ed Sheeran and Elton John - Sausage Rolls for Everyone. This is much better. Only kidding.

94. LadBaby  - Don't Stop Me Eatin'. This is much better. Only kidding.

93. Michael Ball, Captain Tom Moore and the NHS Voices of Care Choir - You'll Never Walk Alone. Hahahahahaha. Probably my favourite band, Michael Ball, Captain Tom Moore and the NHS Voices of Care Choir.

92. David Guetta and Bebe Rexha - I'm Good (Blue). Aah look no, i couldn't stand this first time around, i don't want to revisit it.

91. Lewis Capaldi - Wish You the Best. They do grate after a while, the Capaldi songs, I'm afraid.

90. Ed Sheeran and Elton John - Merry Christmas. Ching-ching. I mean, all Christmas songs are ching-ching, but this really takes it to the next level.

89. Tion Wayne and Russ Millions - Body. I like the name Russ Millions, and I actually quite like the sound of this, but I found it wearing.

88. Jack Harlow - Lovin on Me

87. Saint Jhn - Roses

86. Gayle - ABCDEFU. As we will continue to find out, they're very sweary, the young ladies of popular music.

85. Lewis Capaldi - Survive

84. Lewis Capaldi - Forget Me

83. Ed Sheeran - Shivers

82. Mariah Carey - All I Want for Christmas Is You. I'm pretty certain that the main reason I still don't like this is that, when I was 15, I was shocked by the opportunism of it having been recorded in summer. Imagine. Hootenanny! But, there we go. The world may love it, but I still do not.

81. Alex Warren - Ordinary. One of these modern blokes.

80. Sabrina Carpenter - Taste

79. Ed Sheeran - Bad Habits

78 Internet Money featuring Gunna, Don Toliver and Nav - Lemonade

77. Lewis Capaldi -Before You Go

76. Adele - Easy on Me. Have hardly listened to Adele for more than ten years, but a few seconds of listening to this extremely Adele-like song, and I still find the vowels and the consonants annoying, I'm afraid.

75. Drake - Toosie Slide

74. 24kGoldn featuring Iann Dior - Mood

73. The Fate of Ophelia - Taylor Swift Too many annoying lyrics in this one.

72. Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding - Miracle

71. Elton John and Dua Lipa - Cold Heart (Pnau remix). Kind of works ok.

70. XMAS - Kylie Minogue

69. Taylor Swift featuring Post Malone - Fortnight

68. Little Mix - Sweet Melody

67. Jawsh 685 and Jason Derulo - Savage Love (Laxed – Siren Beat)

66. Ariana Grande - Positions

65. DaBaby featuring Roddy Ricch - Rockstar. Definitely not the worst song called Rockstar.

64. Eminem featuring Juice Wrld - Godzilla. Eminem's ability to still have massive singles is actually pretty impressive, and this is a perfectly good single.

63. MK ft Chrystal - Dior. The singer actually has a really nice voice, but there are far too many songs about brands these days.

62. Justin Bieber - Daisies

61. BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge Allstars - Times Like These. Don't mind this all that much, surprisingly. The song suits the treatment quite well, most of the singers don't over-emote, and, yeah, unlike that creepy Hollywood Imagine, it seemed quite a sweet gesture in those zoomy gloomy days.

60. Hozier - Too Sweet. Hozier's enormous success it definitely one of those modern things I don't understand much. But fair enough.

59. Beyoncé - Texas Hold 'Em. Didn't like the album at all. This single is actually fine. but not good like Beyonce can be good.

58. Eminem - Houdini

57. Miley Cyrus - Flowers

56. Ellie Goulding - River. Again, didn't mind this. I remember it got to Number 1 purely on the back of being on a playlist, which is rank. And I'm not really a fan of Ellie Goulding, but River is an all-time song, and not the kind of thing one really hears in the pop charts, and she sings it really carefully and appropriately, if those don't seem like extremely weird adverbs to use.

55. Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion - WAP. Yikes, well crumbs, well really ...

54. Lewis Capaldi - Pointless. When he sings "airs and graces", it's hard not to warm to him. Hymn to Richard Osman, this.

53. Joel Corry and MNEK - Head & Heart

52. Ariana Grande - Hate that I Made You Love Me

51. Carolina Gaitán, Mauro Castillo, Adassa, Rhenzy Feliz, Diane Guerrero and Stephanie Beatriz - We Don't Talk About Bruno. And this was actually, fact fans, the first Disney film Number 1.

50. Noah Kahan - Stick Season. Now, this being, of pretty much all of the 73 years of UK Number 1s, the one song on the surface that  looks closest to the kind of music I have generally liked the most - beardy, sensitive, somewhat rural American men with guitars doing gentle, harmonious, tunes -, is a source of bafflement to me. If this song had turned up halfway through  a Fleet Foxes or Iron and Wine or Ray LaMontagne or Midlake or Band of Horses album, I don't think I'd have picked it out as a hit. I don't even hate it. It just sounds like a song. But it's a worldwide smash. Kids love it. Everyone loves it. Sometimes I don't get pop music.

49. Dave and Central Cee - Sprinter. Stylish, but not loveable.

48. Ed Sheeran - Eyes Closed

47. Charli XCX featuring Billie Eilish - Guess

46. Lola Young - Messy. It's good, it's just, there's a lot of swearing, and a lot of the same milieu about. It's a welcome milieu, but there are a lot of these about.

45. Sabrina Carpenter - Please Please Please

44. Taylor Swift - Anti-Hero

43. Sabrina Carpenter - Manchild

42. Wham! - Last Christmas

41. Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande - Rain on Me

40. Taylor Swift - Is It Over Now?

39. Benson Boone - Beautiful Things. I imagine this has inspired more awful karaoke versions than almost anything else in history. I'd give it a crack myself on a bad night.

38. The Beatles - Now and Then. I thought this was rather good, all things considered. But I much prefer Days We Left Behind.

37. Gracie Abrams - That's So True.

36. Eliza Rose and Interplanetary Criminal  - B.O.T.A. (Baddest of Them All)

35. Chase & Status and Stormzy  - Backbone

34. Olivia Rodrigo   Drivers License

33. Doja Cat - Paint the Town Red. Kid came home singing this. Radio edit. Mainly.

32. Kenya Grace - Strangers

31. Olivia Rodrigo - Vampire. Kid came home singing this. Radio edit. Mainly.

30. Gigi Perez  - Sailor Song

29. Dave and Tems - Raindance

28. Lil Nas X  - Montero (Call Me by Your Name)

27. Sam Smith and Kim Petras - Unholy. This is a song with some pizzazz, I must say.

26. Harry Styles - Aperture

25. Nathan Evans, 220 Kid and Billen Ted - Wellerman. This is nice to listen to. There we go.

24. Olivia Rodrigo - Good 4 U

23. Dave - Starlight. 

22. Stormzy featuring Ed Sheeran and Burna Boy - Own It

21. Sabrina Carpenter - Espresso. 

20. Djo - End of Beginning

19. Dua Lipa - Dance the Night

18. Taylor Swift - I Knew It, I Knew You. Very nice.

17. Sam Fender and Olivia Dean - Rein Me In Genuinely fascinated by how vastly successful this song is, looking like it's going to break all records for weeks at Number 1 in the UK. It is a properly a nice song, and has clearly tapped every nerve and every market that can reasonably be tapped.

16. LF System - Afraid to Feel

15. Olivia Dean - Man I Need

14. Billie Eilish - No Time to Die. I think, if I'm not mistaken, this was the first time Billie Eilish displayed her capacity for grandeur.

13. Huntrix/Ejae/Audrey Nuna/Rei Ami & KPop Demon Hunters Cast - Golden

12. Taylor Swift - Opalite

11. Kendrick Lamar - Not Like Us. Honestly, i have tried to hate this, found it deeply unedifying, but it is just the work of a master.

10. Raye featuring 070 Shake - Escapism

9. Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill. One of the greatest songs ever, and gives hope to all other great songs that they'll randomly, cos of a TV show, get to Number 1 40 years later.

8. Olivia Rodrigo - Drop Dead. I really like the music on this Olivia Rodrigo album. Lovely crisp indie-pop. Much prefer it to the last one.

7. Chappell Roan - Pink Pony Club. Of course, if Good Luck, Babe had, instead of stalling after several weeks at Number 2, snuck to Number 1 for just one week, it would be right at the top, but Pink Pony Club is also, unquestionably, very enjoyable to listen to.

6. The Weeknd - Blinding Lights. Also good. The most streamed song ever. The first song to 5 billion streams on spotify. I imagine, most times it has been streamed, people have thought, "yup, this is a good song".

5. Harry Styles - American Girls

4. Chappell Roan - The Subway

3. Harry Styles - As It Was. Yes, of course. But also, you know on Watermelon Sugar, when he's going "I just want to taste it, I just want to taste it", is that lifted from SFA's Smokin'? (i know that song took that from somewhere else but it's all pretty obscure ... has anyone else asked these key questions?).Anyway, As it Was. Good. I had Blinding Lights above it, but I definitely prefer As It Was. Sadder, dreamier.

2. Billie Eilish - What Was I Made For? A few years ago when mockney doofus and musical maestro Dan Abnormal got into trouble for saying he didn't really rate Taylor Swift's songs (and, more questionably, she didn't write them all by herself), but he loved Billie Eilish, at the time I thought "well, he probably hasn't listened much to either of them, he's probably just jetlagged and irritated" ... but now I think, having myself listened to them both an awful lot more,  he had listened to them both and he knew exactly what he was talking about. It's not a slight on Taylor Swift, whose songs are often excellent, but they really and truly just don't have ... whatever Billie Eilish has ... let's call it depth. Depth is the simplest, best word, isn't it. Writing and performing a hack song for the Barbie song, Billie Eilish and her brother managed to make something with some real depth.

1. Raye - Where is My Husband Just one of the best singles of all time, I think. The album, sadly, less so, but what a hit.

Push Barman to Open Old Wounds

I had cause recently to want to hear the Belle and Sebastian song 'Take Your Carriage Clock and Shove It', and that led me to relisten to the whole of the 2005 compilation 'Push Barman to Open Old Wounds', which collects their early EPs and singles.

When it came out, I did buy it, but I don't remember listening to it, in and of itself, that much, or paying it much heed, because I had all the songs and knew them perfectly well already. It was just a piece of B and S ephemera.

But, you know, holy shit, what a record! I do still listen to B & S, both in terms of going back to old stuff and hoping for the best with the new, but I'm certainly more distant from those songs than I was, and more able to see it all in context.

So, to think that this collection is "the 25 songs from a band's first six years of recording which they didn't include on the four albums they released in that time, including one album, maybe two, which was an all-time classic (the only crossover being different versions of The State I Am In)", rather than the career-spanning greatest hits that it sounds like, is quite a testament to Stuart Murdoch's relentlessly high quality writing at that time.

Taken as a whole, listened to on random, this collection is so enjoyable - there's maybe one or two throwaway tracks at most - everything else stands up in its own right, from Dog on Wheels to Winter Wooskie, The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner to String Bean Jean. Every track that comes up, I'm listeing and going "oh yes, this one, I love this one".

It's maybe a little churlish to say this is as good as it got, that they never quite hit this peak again. Their biggest "hits" were to come (they had 11 Top 40 hits, not bad for a little band) and there were great songs and good albums to come, and they have tried to recreate this magic again with EPs and compilations, standard and surprise releases, but they were never so consistently emotive, evocative and unselfconscious again.

Supposing, and there's every likelihood this is the case, that a slightly later generation of fans really only know B and S from their albums (e.g. in the US I know there is a lot of focus on If You're Feeling Sinister as their singular masterpiece), imagine listening to this for the first time. What a joy that would be ...

Anyway, just for fun, though I know I've done it before, here's a 12-song B and S compilation, trying to be fair to every era:

I'm a Cuckoo

Nobody's Empire

The Loneliness of the Middle Distance Runner

Get Me Away from Here I'm Dying

Working Boy in New York City

I Didn't See it Coming

String Bean Jean

Lazy Line Painter Jane

If She Wants Me

My Wandering Days Are Over

The Stars of Track and Field

The State I Am In

Zebulon

You know, with Rufus, although I think Want One is his only classic album, and the debut self-titled album is the only other one which is close to wholly satisfactory, he always manages to come up with some lovely songs here and there.

Zebulon, from 2010's 'All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu', has gone past old favourites like Dinner at Eight and Foolish Love as my favourite Wainwright song. It's something of a dirge, and I've felt since Want Two that he's done too many dirges and not enough grand and glorious pop songs, but Zebulon is such a captivating dirge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IoVpMOw8-I&list=RD5IoVpMOw8-I&start_radio=1

Firstly, Zebulon is a cool name. I've never met a Zebulon, though in Kenya, I coached Zablon Mshambala, and he was a proper little footballer - one of the best I've seen. So, often, when I hear this song, I wonder what Zablon, 14 or so in 1997, might be doing now. 

Secondly, I recently read an interview with Melissa auf der Mar as she released a memoir this year, and she mentioned that she, who was at school with Rufus, also had a crush on this Zebulon who is the subject of this song. The legendary Zebulon.

I like the effortless sadness of the song - walking around his old home town, thinking about a boy he had a crush on at school, just skating on the ice of his song, as his mother's in the hospital (soon to pass away). Idle thoughts, heavy feelings.

Anyway, I thought I'd have more to say, but all I really want to say is that this is a lovely song.

And here's a little 12-song Rufus Best of: all killer.

• Unfollow the Rules
• Going to a Town
• Poses
• Danny Boy
• Zebulon
• 14th Street
• In My Arms
• One Man Guy
• Oh What a World
• Foolish Love
• 11.11
• Dinner at Eight

Better the Devil You Know

We watched the Kylie documentary a couple of weeks ago, and I thought about the song Better the Devil You Know, and how strange memory is, lurching backwards and forwards through decades, drawing every strand of several lives together.

I'd say, unlikely as it sounds, I'd never really listened to the song Better the Devil You Know properly until the last couple of weeks. I didn't hear it when it came out in 1990 but remember seeing its title, and, not knowing the expression, thinking "how the hell is that the name of a pop song?"  (of course, the same title was used in quite an unwieldy fashion a couple of years later on Sonia's Eurovision second placer - I suppose, since for most of the 90s, that was the only one of the two I knew, that barely adequate tune of a Better the Devil You Know was better the Better the Devil You Know I knew.)

Strangely, the first I gave any significant thought to Kylie's Better the Devil You Know was several years later, without actually hearing it. I bought Nick Cave's The Secret Life of the Love Song lecture on CD in around 1999. I'd already bought The Boatman's Call by then, but I do think it was The Secret Life of the Love Song that made me a Cave acolyte (speluncaphile?). Solo renditions of People Ain't No Good and the as-yet-unreleased Love Letter, all his trademark humour, learning, biblical allusions, the first time I'd heard the words duende and saudade, and, perhaps most notably, his breakdown of the harrowing lyrics to Better the Devil You Know, his description of the song as a message ""to God that cries out into the yawning void, in anguish and self-loathing, for deliverance".

At the time, being merely a narrow-minded indie kid, I mistook Cave's words as as an ironic take on a cheap song (which I still hadn't listened to!), rather than a slightly grandiloquent take on an excellent song.

Not that I thought, even at the time, that Kylie was not capable of good songs or good singing. I definitely liked Confide in Me and Put Yourself in My Place. Of course, Where the Wild Roses Grow. I was stung by the negative reaction to the James Dean Bradfield-written Some Kind of Bliss. I'd seen her perform Rescue Me in 1994 on Don't Forget Your Toothbrush and, for the first time, thought "she's really a pretty good singer" (although I also distinctly remember thinking that this was a singer who was no longer young and no longer a frontline star .... good one Dave). I also remember, a few years earlier in Our Price Ealing, almost buying the debut album Kylie with my £10  Christmas voucher, but chickening out at the last minute because I thought it was uncool, and buying an album of Andrew Lloyd Webber instrumentals instead ...

How readily we kill our darlings. I was a true original old-school Neighbours kid. I'd owned not just Especially for You but also Angry Anderson's Suddenly (still a banger!). But I did, like a hurt child, turn against Kylie when Spinning Around came out, in 2000, with a big campaign of "I'm a pop girl at heart, I shouldn't have done all that indie rubbish". Well, fine, have it your way, popKylie, did the Manics write Little Baby Nothing especially for you in vain?

Even then, had I listened to Better the Devil You Know? I did hear it as some point, at some point in the 2000s before this last month, but I'm not sure I could have hummed it or sung much more than the title.

Look, I wouldn't say Kylie has been of massive interest to me one way or another throughout most of this century - beyond that brief chagrin at the anti-indie turn of Spinning Around, I've certainly never felt any negativity to her,  but broadly, over the last couple of decades, felt only a distant respect for the admirable pleasantness and normality she has clearly maintained, for the knack of still finding a pop hit when most of her peers have only got nostalgia left. Still, we decided to watch the recent documentary together, hearing it was well made and interesting.

The main non-Kylie figures in it are Danni Minogue, Cave, an extremely poignant and raw Jason Donovan, an extremely full-of-shit Pete Waterman, and, in footage, Michael Hutchence.

We reach Better the Devil You Know in the first episode, and it is described as a career turning point, a sign of Kylie wanting to have more control of her music, while still being written and produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. There is some connection made between the song and her then-new-partner, the roving international heartthrob and bounder Michael Hutchence, I think both by Kylie and Waterman - that, for all his faults, at that time, Hutchence was "the devil she knew" - I have since read that Mike Stock, the song's main writer, has denied knowing the slightest thing about Kylie's romantic life at the time. But still, of Pete Waterman said it, it must be true ...

In any case, I really listened to the song. I listened to it on the TV, and then I listened to it that evening and the next day. I heard, for the first time, that it truly was a good song - the melody of the verse, the melody of the chorus, the relationship between the two, the stretch of the vocal performance, the sound -  still SAW but just with more oomph, the sense of unexpected depth, and, indeed, the lyrics, this "message to God that cries out into the yawning void, in anguish and self-loathing, for deliverance", which may or may not be about Michael Hutchence.

What do I know or care about Michael Hutchence, this -  clearly - impossibly alluring man who died in his mid-30s at a time of having becoming one of the most notorious cads in the world? 

I remember the day his death was announced, in November 1997. There were, I recall, parallels drawn with the death of Diana a couple of months previously - two people around the same age, the horrifying post-rationalised inevitability of the sudden ending. I remember that it was quite commonly dismissed/joked about as a case of autoerotic asphyxiation - I think until recently I'd thought there was considerable likelihood that was the case. But no, it seems the simple truth is it was a horrible, desperate suicide.

I really remember that day well, and associate Hutchence with it. At university in St Andrews, I travelled in a car down from Pollock Halls in Edinburgh, listening to regular bulletins about Hutchence on the radio, to a place called Ilam Hall in the Peak District - it was for a reunion/celebration of the organisation I'd taken my gap year with, in the first half of that same year. It's notable to me for a handful of reasons. At that time, I was very good friends with three of the people I travelled down with - via that previous year, and seeing them in Edinburgh often. I was friends with a lot of people from my gap year, but most of them I never saw at all after that reunion, and even the ones I was particularly close to at the time, I haven't seen now for a long long time. So that disconnection feels a bit strange.

But also, there's a connection that feels strange. This place, Ilam Hall - chosen, typically for that fkn organisation, rather boneheadedly, because it was in the middle of England, while actually not at all easy for anyone to get to - was, coincidentally, somewhere I'd been twice before.

A teacher took us on walking holidays in successive summers - 1988 and 1989 (prime Kylie time!) - where we stayed at Ilam, a fine Victorian manor with huge grounds which was, incongruously, a YHA hostel. 

There's an innocence and joy in my recollection of the first trip which there isn't in my recollection of the second, much more ill-tempered, trip, and there are complex thoughts about the teacher who took us, who I found out committed suicide when charged, a few years ago, with accusastions related to grooming and abuse. Every thing I remember gets examined and reexamined. And, weirdly, that's all there when I think about Michael Hutchence.

I can't say I like, or have ever liked, the music of INXS. Some of their most well known songs, like Never Tear Us Apart, are almost there, but not quite there, for me, a bit like, say Purple Rain and other songs by Prince. In 1996, I liked Britpop but, even then, when Noel Gallagher, presented with an award by Hutchence at the Brits, said "Has-beens shouldn't be presenting awards to gonna-bes", I knew what revolting behaviour by a fundamentally unpleasant human being looked like. That's near the top of the vast Gallagher hall of shittiness.

There's something else about Hutchence that is ... well, I'm going to change the metaphor I was going to use here, as it's too literally true. I've recently read about Stuart Sutcliffe, Tammi Terrell and Michael Hutchence, and in all three cases, they received violent blows to the head while being assaulted which, possibly, in different ways, significantly later, led to their deaths - Hutchence was assaulted by a paparazzo in 1993 and apparently that was when depression and mood swings first took hold of him. 

There's so much tragedy in these people's worlds - the Hutchence/Yates/Geldof world, the world of Cave, who sang Into My Arms at Hutchence's funeral, and Rainy Night in Soho at MacGowan's funeral. If Better the Devil You Know was written with Hutchence in mind, it contends with the only U2 song I unambiguously love, Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of, for being the best song about him.

And so here it is, me listening to a dance-pop song from 1990 and really hearing it properly for the first time in 2026 - making me thinking about 1988 and 1997, about Nick Cave, Bob Geldof and the Manic Street Preachers, about old friends and old haunts. 

As with so many things, turns out the tall man was right - this really is a love song with a secret life of its own.