Bunch of stuff

Here's a bunch of poems written fairly recently ... villanelles, sestinas and what have you, isolation blues and this and that ...

LEAVINGS

The games we quit unfinished hang bereft

In air unused, of late, to morning calm.

Stripped mattresses which cling to last night’s dreams

Are slow to shed the indents we have left

of hurried sleeps we’d wished we didn’t need.

A shaft of dust dissects the grief-struck room

We have deserted, hoovered soon enough,

Becoming just as quick a place to arrive

And settle in, a home from home to whom

We have bequeathed this palace of tall deeds.

The leavings felt, always, like final hymns

Sung with portentous hush, like spirits lost

To aging, broken bonds of hallowed trust

As each adventure left our worn-out limbs

And all we had was sunburn and cut knees.

I’d wish I’d never left that holiday,

And that one, till the next and greater one.

Each leaving took a part of me; again.

And that last dream? – just this, a brief delay.

No leaving yet. I hate the leaving. Please.

FELLOWS

They learnt, those boys, the rare and cursed power

of solidarity. They sang a song

of bloodshed gone, with locked and loaded arms.

The trumpet’s notes bounced heavy on the ground,

the full moon stamped approval on the pond -

a fellowship those boys would never shake.

They prayed for peace, but sought new hands to shake

and share the grace of this new superpower

they’d found and felt unbound by at the pond.

Their voices filled out concert halls, their song

raised rooves and burrowed deep into new ground

uncovered by the strength in their young arms.

They stored false memories of shouldered arms

that sent out rounds which made great mountains shake.

Each day, they pledged anew to break fresh ground

Still wholly giddy with the growing power

unshackled by a simple moonlight song

they’d sung one night stood round a summer pond.

They sang, and felt the very stones respond –

they sang, they preached, they stretched out sinewed arms

for a reply. They’d learnt their wall of song

could drive a rising coup to bend and shake.

They’d learnt, that heady night, they had the power

to grind dissenting voices to the ground.

They built their forts on freshly hallowed ground

and set at each one’s centre such a pond

as first had echoed their communal power.

A trumpet set the rhythm of their arms

striking the earth. And if they heard it shake

they drowned the noise out with their lasting song.

But though each night still sounded out their song,

their warships, one then one more, ran aground.

No longer could they still the great Earth’s shake,

the angry sun first lowered, then drained their pond.

The muscles weakened in their aging arms,

They raged but could not summon back their power.

We gather for a song around the pond,

place on the ground our instruments and arms.

Our voices shake. It’s gone, our only power.

THERE’S A MAN, DRESSED IN BLACK, AT THE GATE

The man in black’s still standing at the gate.

You warned us he’d be there and he’s still there.

The demon you compelled us to create

was not identified until too late.

So many still can’t walk past the place where

the man in black’s still standing at the gate.

A doctrine of god’s love has turned to hate -

there’s not one with forgiveness left to spare

the demon you compelled us to create.

Oh, you, you’ve had your reckoning, your fate

is, of itself, agreeable and fair.

The man in black’s still standing at the gate,

though, waiting for the ones you’d separate

and celebrate, and order not to share

the demon you compelled us to create.

The narrative you’d nervelessly dictate

will never free the ones you did ensnare.

The man in black’s still standing at the gate -

the demon you compelled us to create.

THE INFORMATION DESK

Blues run the game, we run the blues,

you choose the winners that we choose.

We’re guns they’ve hired, we’re guns that fire,

we’re singer, song, we’re lie and liar.

You won’t believe the rules we bent,

we can’t believe how well it went -

Kenya to Henley, you the many,

we the few who spend the penny.

Push an angle, juke the stats,

shift the blame to Jews or bats

or Chinese markets if you’ll wear it.

Here’s our story if you’ll share it.

We’re the modern dogs of war

plotting what you’re fighting for,

armed with bar charts, dressed to kill,

Chartering flights to Brazzaville.

Take the price and name the gift,

shame to cast and blame to shift.

Twist it, shout it, risk it, flout it,

take the truth and double-doubt it.

Find the target, probe their weak spot;

It’s a Muslim/Catholic/Sikh plot.

It’s the Poles or It’s the Turks,

Just take turns, whatever works.

Any challenge, bug or virus,

Any thug or king can hire us,

Plutocrat or billionaire or

Or oligarch, we just don’t care.

We protect what we admire -

Money, power, brazen liar,

Bloodshed is beneath our station -

We supply the information.

NOW DISTANCE HAS A WAY

They’d never held so tight as in the space

split open by the shrinking then the bang.

 They loved each lost and freshly lonely face

 Their shaking fingers did not dare to trace,

They prayed with pride and sorrow for that gang

They’d never held so tight as in the space

split open by each escalating case.

Of romance and of fellowship they sang

 They loved each lost and freshly lonely face,

wrote paeans to pariahs, granted grace

to every man they’d happily have hanged.

They’d never held so tight as in the space

that shrunk, as each soft soul, confined to base

cried daily tears for bells that never rang.

They loved each lost and newly lonely face

they clasped in distant, desperate embrace.

Each broken heart, each joy, each pain, each pang

They never held so tight as in the space.

They loved each lost and newly lonely face.

HUNGRY THIEVES

The hungry thieves of Hunter Road

Are hiding out at home

Like frightened wolves without a prey,

Without a swamp to roam.

Now death is in the open air

The practised thief breathes scared,

The thief breathes heavy, hard, he shrinks

at every dark night shared.

The motorways lie stunned and plucked

Like running tracks at night.

Just military parties sent

With no clear foe to fight.

The lonely hearts of Kentish men

Go out to men of Kent.

They sigh “I’m sorry, distant friend,

Relent, I beg, relent”.

The soldiers shoot at seagulls stood

In taunting high disdain.

The stranded soldiers cough and cry

And shoot and miss and again.

The hungry and the hopeful buy

What time they can afford.

Each stoic house holds steady till

Disorder is restored.

KINDNESS

I’d thought I would be kind this time, outwith

St Pancras in a winter storm,

Approached, as usual, supplicated there,

Her kind eyes guarded, trained smile warm.

I’d said I would be kind next time I was

Approached this winter, ‘David you

Were kind without a qualm when you were young.

Whenever you think that you outgrew

It or it outgrew you … it didn’t. You

Know kindness doesn’t age or fade’.

And yet, I was not kind this time, again,

I grimaced, shrugged, at once betrayed

My better self, her proffered pride. Perhaps

I am no longer a kind man,

Perhaps I’ve made all the excuses one

Unkind and heartless human can.

THE MISSIONARY

It took me weeks to get those lanterns lit,

Reliant on candles and a helpful moon,

Still callow, still too prideful to admit

I wouldn’t know a pendulum from a pit

I couldn’t tell a werewolf from loon,

It took me weeks to get those lanterns lit.

I’m not sure if I ever learnt to fit

my best endeavours between daybreak and noon,

Still callow, still too prideful to admit

I didn’t have the knowhow, wits or kit

To make a brass neck from a silver spoon …

It took me weeks to get those lanterns lit,

For heaven’s sake, that was the simple bit

For any but a buttoned-up buffoon,

Still callow, still too prideful to admit

He’d landed his young self in some ancient shit.

I tried to change the world, I tried too soon …

It took me weeks to get those lanterns lit,

Still callow, still too prideful to admit.

WHISPERS

The whispers in the walls remained unheard

Until that warmest winter ever known.

“Some creature trapped within, perhaps a bird

By unkind sun from hibernation stirred,

Its plans upset, its steady senses thrown”.

The whispers in the walls remained unheard,

For all those years - the thought had not occurred

that one day he might no longer be alone.

“Some creature trapped within, perhaps a bird

Is begging from the cell where it’s interred

By pride and panic, while, within his own,

The whispers in the walls remained unheard

So long, his sturdy selfhood never erred

Nor longed his kingdom to be overthrown.

Some creature trapped within, perhaps a bird

Is calling quietly, strongly, just one word

“Atone”. He will not. Yet, it comes; “Atone”.

The whispers in the walls remain unheard.

Some creature trapped within … perhaps a bird.

LOVE AND DECAY

Love vies with decay.

Wins today.

But time chose its side

Before love arose.

If time could choose

Again,

who knows

If it would change its mind.

But it can’t, my loves,

It can’t.

Today love wins.

Decay abides.

ONE NIGHT AT A PRIVATE MEMBER’S CLUB

It’s my night to be included, to feel blessed

As I tell the girl with clipboard I’m a guest.

I’ve been signed in, for a favour, by a friend

Of a colleague who had bonhomie to spend.

No one knows me, though some smile and think they do,

I remind them of two players from Man U.

My host tells me that I’ll love this lively crowd,

but the laughter’s just a decibel too loud -

Makes you nervous, all this casual getting seen,

All these grown men trying to act like they’re nineteen,

Oh so carefree yet unfairly blessed and cursed

By a fanbase that had gathered then dispersed.

On the rooftop, in a group hug, there’s the cast

Of a kid’s show better consigned to the past -

One gets lairy, goes too often to the loo,

Takes offense at not being ushered past the queue.

Just past midnight, he’ll be forcibly removed

By the former frontman of Love City Groove …

There are cocktails, there are bottles of Czech beer

Made of plastic. So much glass breaks, so we hear

From the barman – he’s a dancer, so he says,

Not like Nureyev or Travolta, more like Bez.

It’s a fiver for a Budvar, what a joke –

But that’s half the price of one Jim Beam and Coke.

Deals are making, lines are breaking, faces glow

With the price of what they know and who they know.

Struggling actors in discussion on the stairs

With their future benefactors unawares –

It’s the long game, it’s the glam life, it’s the grind,

Taking every chance to hustle they can find.

It’s just cool to have a place where I’ve some peace

says the rock star with the girl who’s not his niece.

He’s been coming since before his friend was born

(that’s before his formal warning for child porn).

It’s a prison, it’s a schism, fatal fame -

In the club, though, it’s so cool, we’re all the same.

THE CUCKOLD

I loved the boy, the matchless one,

With all my broken heart.

I loved that boy, though I admit

Not from the very start.

My name is in the shaded notes

Of every book you’ll read -

The great emasculated ghost

Your lifeblood did not need.

The tale cost me a winter’s worth

Of comfort, work and joy.

I spent my lifetime catching up

With someone else’s boy.

I lived in fear for you, my dear,

Relinquished peace for grace

My prize was the indifferent tilt

Of your anointed face.

Consigned to my own time while those

I loved live on and on.

My own line drifted off unknown,

and my life’s work … long gone.

The lover in the background, I

Was needed for an ass

And all the pangs of jealousy

A good man can amass.

The cuckold in the half-light, was

I taken for a fool?

The greatest story’s good for you,

My friends. To me, it’s cruel.

Song 85: Runaway

I've thought about Kanye West too much.

I know I have. Rather like Steven Gerrard, Joni Mitchell and, bizarrely, Professor David Starkey, he's one of the people who has taken up residence rent-free in my brain for me to have long, involved imaginary rants about, and if anyone makes the mistake of mentioning them in real life, that dull, uncalled-for rant will be made flesh.

The even more stoopid thing is that the starting point for this obsession was indifference. I was, initially, obsessively indifferent to Kanye West. I didn't love him, didn't hate him, just thought he was kind of decent. But, of course, obsessively indifferent can't be a thing for long. And he became so real-life objectionable that perhaps that stopped being a valid position.

What really bothered me was the way he went from being a fairly acclaimed and successful rapper to, in the eyes of music critics, the reincarnation of the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Kraftwerk and Godspeed! You Black Emperor all at once.

Whatever happened to rock'n'roll, I must have thought?

Recently I realised there was one specific incident that must have gnarled at me more than I thought.

Shortly after I laboured for months over a list of 1000 Greatest Songs of All Time, the exercise in futility of which I remain unduly proud, I happened to have some drinks with people who worked in that old new media in America, and it was a perfectly enjoyable and interesting evening, and my list came up (for they were all experts in lists) but, before I had much of a chance to explain what the thinking was behind it (broadly, both an attempt to apply judgement on an accumulation of data from lots and lots of other lists, and, above all, an attempt to listen to lots of great songs and reach a greater understanding of what made a song great), I was being harangued, good-naturedly, on personal choices - which is a perfectly natural instinctive response, and all fine, but the one that bothered me was one of these gentlemen saying "What about 'School Days' by Kanye West? Is that in it?" ... erm, I hadn't heard of this song, do I bluff and pretend I have, this is embarrassing, I thought I'd covered the most acclaimed songs by Kanye West ... erm, no "What, you can't not have 'School Days' by Kanye West, that's just nonsense" and I rather lost the will to defend myself in the face of my ignorance.

Well, maybe you already know but ... there is no song by Kanye West called 'School Days'. I'm still not 100% certain what song he was referring to. There's a (fairly unexceptional) track on 'The College Dropout' called 'School Spirit', maybe it was that, he must have been thinking of something.

I guess the point is, that loud and forceful attitude came to present for me how the American press wrote about Kanye West, the relentless, pseudo-intellectual proclamation of his genius built on flimsy ground, The very essence of Emperor's New Clothes.

And his 2015 botched Glastonbury headline slot confirmed that for me. Sure, I liked 'Yeezus' a lot and a few other tracks from other albums, but the increasing grandiloquence and unpleasantness of his public pronouncements allied to what I thought were pretty mediocre releases post-Yeezus strengthened my position.

I was right about Kanye all along. Those fools, those phony cultists.

Yet his stuff was still right up near the top of end of 2010s lists from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and the rest . The cult lived on. When will they learn?

So I listened to 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy', an album I'd generally found a bit much and not paid a great deal of attention to, one more time, just to confirm my position and put the argument aside.

And, of course, what's happened?

I'm hooked. Finally, wholly. Finally I'm hearing what everyone else was hearing. It's a phenomenal album, a throw-everything-in-and-everything-sticks masterpiece without a dull moment, full of memorable hooks and glorious cameos.

This is annoying for me. It's annoying too that the most acclaimed song from it, probably the most acclaimed Kanye song of all, 'Runaway', is my favourite track on it, a song of power, pathos, sadness and brilliance, everything he and his acolytes claimed it to be.

Lots of people have known this for 10 years ... Those Kanye-cultists who didn't know anything. Ah, well.

Song 84: The Funeral

I think of this song by Band of Horses as one of the last I loved unself-consciously. Hard to know exactly what that means or why that is. There was a period it seemed so easy for bands like this. Stay skinny, grow a patchy beard, big guitar, quiet guitar, Neil Youngish vocal, play early evening in mid-size festivals, sell a few hundred thousands, soundtrack an emotional scene on a glossy but thoughtful TV drama ... keep the ball rolling.

And I and lots of others lapped it up. Then it seemed to get really hard for all of them. I don't know if it was them or us, but Fleet Foxes, Band of Horses, Iron and Wine, Midlake, The National, The Decemberists, The Shins, they stopped hitting the spot quite so much. They changed, music changed.

But I loved this song, and, when I choose to, I still love it. I have various fondnesses for it.

Going to see Band of Horses at Brixton Academy in courtship's early days - a slightly peculiar, but great gig.

Ben Bridwell (the singer) began the show with a possibly ill-advised close harmony with another band member, and a guy shouted, loud as anything, from the audience "get the fuck on with it" as if he was entirely intent on ruining the night for everyone and I wouldn't have held it against Mr Bridwell if we'd packed up and gone home at that point or if he'd played a surly, desultory gig.

But it was a great gig after that, and they ran through those happy/sad Band of Horses numbers which are almost famous like 'No One's Gonna Love You', 'Is There a Ghost', Weed Party', 'Laredo' etc, and then in the encore came their biggest, most well known number 'The Funeral' and yet, as if to cement London's reputation as a dreadful city of dreadful gig goers (which I have not found generally to be the case) two girls behind us started engaging loudly in an utterly banal loud heart to heart, and, to my surprise, I managed neither to dig myself into an angry hole nor snap wildly, but turned round and found the words "look, you can have this conversation later, you'll regret not listening to the encore" which seemed to do the trick.

This was about five months after I'd been listening to the song a great deal as a kind of pep talk soundtrack for the literal-minded, as I was engaged with organising my father's funeral.

The song is, I think, about a romance gone sour rather than an actual funeral but nevertheless I found the lyric "At every occasion, I'll be ready for the funeral, Every occasion, once more, it's called the funeral, Every occasion, know I'm ready for the funeral" was pointing me in the right direction to getting all the arrangements in place.

There were a few issues to iron out, but we got there - it was to be a Catholic requiem mass. I contacted the priest, and probably unwisely took it upon myself to deliver the homily. This priest was a funny one, as we'll get to. It was decided we wanted hymns, and he thought this quite a bad idea and tried to persuade against it, and then when it came to the ceremony, didn't introduce the hymns, so to be honest they weren't sung all that heartily and he probably felt he was proved right.

It was one of those unusually sunny London October days that have become the norm this decade but back in 2010 were still a surprise. I remember getting off my tube train and seeing a man walking along the platform and thinking "I bet I'm related to him" and he was indeed a cousin on my father's.

The day went well and was all rather fun - the contacts book had been gone through and it was quite a treat seeing this parade of London Irishers popping along for one more booze-up.

I had calmed down after the service, where quite the most hilarious (in retrospect, not at the flippin time) thing happened. As I went up to deliver my carefully crafted words, the priest said "Now Paddy's youngest son David will say a few words. Now I think you'll agree with me that David bears a striking resemblance to the footballer Wayne Rooney" ...

Well, I do ... certainly did then ... but there's a time and a place. I later learned members of my family needed to be restrained from lamping him ... anyway, he attempted to make another telling intervention when I briefly faltered near the end of the speech (probably still reeling from the blow he'd dealt me) and tried to "guide" me away from the pulpit. Jesus, this guy. I also knew at that point I'd be ending with a recitation of 'The Parting Glass' which I'd thought quite a genius touch but was informed later was pretty bog-standard sappy cack for an Irishman's funeral.

Anyway, there we go. Throughout this time, I had Band of Horses playing in my head. I'm not sure if they helped or not, but I continue to think fondly of them.

Song 83: Bring da Ruckus

Well, when you think about it, Wu-Tang Clan are the Belle and Sebastian of hip-hop, and 'Bring da Ruckus' is their 'The State I Am In'. In this blog, I will ...

This is one of my favourite songs. Favourite songs in the world. Has been for over 20 years. I won't be able to do justice to it, but there we go.

I first encountered the Wu-Tang Clan on the cover of the NME in 1997 - ashamed to say I hadn't heard of them until then. This was a big interview to publicize their second album 'Wu-Tang Forever'.

The interview was a riot of  late arrivals and quotability - Knowledge is knowing the ledge, Wu-Tang is just ... Wu-Tang etc. The one thing I mainly remember is the only one who seemed more down-to-earth and less self-aggrandising was the ODB, counterintuitively.

Anyhow, I didn't listen to them then, but a couple of years later, I bought their classic debut 'Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)'.

'Bring da Ruckus' is the opening track, and, like millions of others, I was instantly hooked.

I wasn't really into hip-hop growing up. I was aware of it. Other kids at school listened to it, from NWA and De La Soul to Jurassic 5 and A Tribe Called Quest - it would be on Top of the Pops, though usually in a somewhat bowdlerized form. By the time I bought 'Enter the Wu-Tang', I probably already owned a couple of Public Enemy albums, but not that much more than that.

Wu-Tang is, I think, the perfect introduction to what makes hip-hop great, for a suspicious indie kid - the pop culture references, the multiple personalities, the humour, the sense of danger, the not knowing quite whether it's genuinely dangerous or all a big joke, or a bit of both, the eclectic production - it was something that could be enjoyed on many levels.

To be honest, it was 'Bring da Ruckus' I was mainly hooked on to start with. Initially it dwarfed the rest of the album, and it was years before I investigated the rest of the discography properly. I said I was a Wu-Tang Clan fan, and I followed their story, its ups and downs, and listened to a bit of new music here and there, but it's really only recently that I've investigated the back catalogue more thoroughly.

Importantly, as any proper Wu-Tang fan knows, the small number of official Wu-Tang Clan albums are just the tip of the iceberg. There are genuinely brilliant records by solo members which are often not that far from group efforts. Two of those which are highly acclaimed and which I've been listening to a lot lately are 'Liquid Swords' by the GZA and 'Supreme Clientele' by Ghostface Killah.

The GZA, Gary Grice, is the RZA's (and the late ODB's) cousin. The RZA (Robert Diggs) is the Number 1 genius behind Wu-Tang Clan, the producer and the leader. His cinematic production style has been hugely influential, not least on Kanye West (he guests on West's 'My Beautiful ... Fantasy'. Notwithstanding all that, I actually love his rapping (it's him that snarls the refrain on 'Bring da Ruckus' - a fearsome call to arms in one sense, but somehow rendered endearing by his dropped r's).

Wu-Tang's influence is deep and wide and they've a fame which transcends their sales (the first two albums were big sellers, but there hasn't been much in the way of singles success). One such instance is their infamous 'Once Upon a Time in Shaolin' album, of which one copy was made and sold to the highest bidder, who turned out to be the loathsome pharma-bro Martin Shkreli. And, hilariously, the whole saga, somehow, was officially chronicled by someone called Cyrus Bozoghmehr, who I was at school with. Cyrus, a fearsome rugby and football player, used to shamelessly (and dreadfully) burst into song on the District Line. All part of the great lineage of art terrorism, I suppose.

So much did I love 'Bring da Ruckus', i suspect I sometimes forgot its beauty wasn't universally recognised. A feeling of genuine (not just comical) shame overcomes me when I think of a friend's black tie, parents and grandparents included, birthday party in an extremely fancy and picturesque venue being spoiled by me and a couple of friends shouting the refrain from 'Ruckus' at the top of our lungs. Likewise, I remember being in a car with my mother and putting on one of my lovingly-crafted compilation tapes, which was all going swimmingly, in particular when it got to 'Over the Rainbow', only for that to transition into 'Bring da Ruckus'. I mean, it's a great juxtaposition, but still, a bit beyond the pale, really.

Anyway, I still love the song, and, as it happens, the comparison with 'The State I Am In' stands - as the first song on their first album, it exemplifies everything great about the band - you might argue it's never been improved upon, but, in each case, that's a very high bar.

PS I remembered another thing I love about the Wu-Tang Clan; it's that, if you take their real names, it sounds like halfway down the leaderboard of a European Tour golf tournament of the late 80s - Robert Diggs, Gary Grice, Dennis Coles, Russell Jones, Clifford Smith, Jason Hunter, Corey Woods ...

Song 82: Get Some Sleep

This is a song by the New Zealand singer-songwriter Bic Runga

Get Some Sleep

from the 2002 album 'Beautiful Collision' which I think I bought in 2003 but I want to talk about listening to it in 2004.

It's a rather lovely, perfectly wrought album. It doesn't really belong to a genre, it's too caustic to be easy listening though it is easy to listen to, it's not indie, it's just too clean, it's not quite pop or rock.

I listened to it a lot for a while, over the course of a couple of years, then not much for a decade or so, but it's one of the ones I've found myself listening to lately, along with the usual likes of Nick Drake, Kathryn Williams, Stevie Wonder and Carole King.

I think Carole King's 'Tapestry' might be the best point of comparison. It doesn't sound like it as such - it's guitar more than piano led, it's more reserved, and you know, less full of classic melodies which everyone knows.

But it's a wholly realised collection of songs, crisp and clear and grown-up.

'Get Some Sleep' is probably the poppiest track on the record (apart from one which I'll get to in a second). It has this lovely, simple lyric, which again, seems quite fitting in this time of distant connections - "tune into the station, make a dedication, this is going out to everyone".

Runga didn't linger in obscurity. The album was vastly successful in her native New Zealand, and a track from her debut album 'Drive', called 'Sway' was prominent on the soundtrack to 'American Pie'.

'Sway' was tacked on to the end of the UK version of 'Beautiful Collision' and I remember listening to the album and thinking "why does it feel like I've heard that song before?" ... and that way why, though it's one of those melodies which sounds like it's been done a million times before, but you still forgive it for the prettiness of the song. As I recall, 'Sway' does 'American Pie' a massive service. People like me, who wouldn't normally go and see a film like that, were sold on going to see it by reviewers saying despite its grossness, it had a sweetness, and, so it did, but I'm quite sure a lot of that sweetness is given to it by its use of a song like 'Sway' amongst the tuneful pop-punk of the time.

Anyway, 'Beautiful Collision', and 'Get Some Sleep' in particular, I associate with a brief trip to North Wales at Easter 2004, just at that very point when wintery spring was becoming summery spring.

I went with three other men, in a car, stayed deep in the heart of Snowdonia, in a, like, dormitory of a, like, outbound centre relating to the school of my friend Stephen. I think that's what it was. No signal or internet or anything. No sun right there, but in the daytime we'd go out to the castles on the coast - Caernarfon, Criccieth, Beaumaris, Conwy, Harlech, and I remember sun there.

Those castles are special. You may know them. Harlech Castle is one of the wonders of the world, simple as that (I've been a few more times since).

I remember us driving in permanent light rain and I associate Bic Runga with it, though I don't know if it was personal or shared listening, but I think maybe New Zealand and Wales are associated in my head, with wind and rain and beauty and sheep, just glistening.

Neil Finn of Crowded House is a significant sideman on the album, and there's a lovely bit on a track called 'Listening for the Weather' (assume deliberately referential?) where his backing vocals really come to the fore and the're really Kiwi - you can hear him harmonisng "never be afride of chinge" and it's just really nice.

Anyway, at the time, I was very in-between, and I remember that trip was completely free from everything else and that was very nice, free from phones and worry, and we drank beer and I remember one evening drunk cider in this old schoolhouse like teenagers - it was the weekend Brian Lara got 400*, I think I remember that.

But, yeah, I can't really describe how it is that I associate that Bic Runga album with it, its precision, its perfection, its glistening, some kind of renewal and separation from the usual.

I feel lucky this week amidst all the horror and dismay, I feel lucky to be working in the shed at the bottom of my garden, listening to old albums I've always loved, watching squirrels, cats chasing birds, a fox ambling through, seeing the blossom almost coming out and the grass starting to grow. So, perhaps, yes, separation is the right word- this album is a brief separation from the cares of the world.

Song 81: Charmless Man

Ok, it's not that I've got a particular thing about the upbeat, slightly annoying, singles from 'The Great Escape'. [see Song 67]

This post isn't really about the song, or music at all, it's just an excuse to first tell what I think is a funny, or at least representative, story, and then pivot to a more general and humourless diatribe.

So, for the song, actually, I had a few options to pin the tale to, as I don't, in truth, associate it with a piece of music. I could have gone with 'I Just Dropped in to see What Condition My Condition as In' as a tribute to Kenny Rogers, I could have gone with 'Fortunate Son' by Creedence (the Dude's favourite band), which is a great song, I could have gone with 'Don't Stand So Close to Me' by the Police (which I think was the trigger, what with the, you know, news, for me writing about this) but I've plumped for 'Charmless Man', because that's really what it's about.

I mean, look, I'm sure I've been the charmless man myself. Plenty of times.

Still, probably, mostly in my life, I haven't been sociable enough to be that type of charmless man. But there was a window in my life where a) I seemed to want to talk to people and b) people seemed to want to talk to me. So I met a few such men, mostly pretty harmless really, but one stands out.

For the years after I started in my current employment, I really enjoyed talking about it to people, who were generally fascinated by it and would grill me for hours on end. It was nice for me to have something to talk about, to be at ease and confident in a social situation. And occasionally that attracted the odd coked-up advertising guy who really wanted to help me take quizzing to the next level and bored on about it with cliches a little too long, but that was all well and good really.

Only twice, actually, in those early years, did I meet people who, when I told them what I did, were completely indifferent, one because, I don't know, he was just a very dull guy, the other because he was so thoroughly, thrillingly, wrapped up in himself.

It is this chap I will describe now.

It was a friend's birthday at a pub in central London. It was early-ish 2009 - I remember this because it was one of the first times I went out into London after I broke my leg in November 2008 - I recall hobbling a little from the tube to the pub ... this will prove relevant as I imagine whatever discomfort I was feeling at standing up for a long time was exacerbated.

I was enjoying the evening, having pleasant conversations with various people including old friends.

Then I suppose I "lost my place", went to the loo or something, came back, there's the host, my friend, by the bar - introduces me to a couple of people, "Here's my friend ### and this is her boyfriend ****". OK, at this point, I vacillate over whether including the name. I've met several very pleasant people with the name so it's not a dig at the name in the slightest ... but I think it helps for you to visualize, so, you know, his name began with T, ended in Y, had four letters. So ___ or not ___, that is the question, i guess.

So, here's the thing, T had a cold, and not a casual, polite cold, but a heavy, smelly cold. But that wasn't going to stop him from employing his usual conversational strategy, which was to lean in close and tell you important things.

My friend and T's girlfriend distanced themselves quickly - it was just me and him.

Here's another thing. T, who is probably at least 5 years younger than me (I'm 30 at the time) is wearing a green tweed suit. I went to university in St Andrews, this kind of thing is not a shock to me per se, but it was a rare look for the young folk of London in those days.

T had the classic floppy hair of my public-school teens, again an unusual look by that point. We quickly moved on to talking about films, he directed it there. He spoke with tremendous and grand authority. He asked me what my favourite film was. I answered 'The Big Lebowski'. Then came the golden line "Yes, that's the answer I'd expect someone with your level of film appreciation to have". Really. And he meant it kindly.

So he explained to me everything that meant 'The Big Lebowski' was a trite and meaningless film, which was good of him. I asked "Do you work in film?" He said "No, I'm just a bit of an expert on it". We talked about film some more and safe to say his expertise was knocking me backwards ...

...well, something was knocking me backwards. It was a decent-sized upstairs room, probably about 15 metres all the way across - I first encountered him near the entrance, at one end of the bar. As he leaned in and in, failing to practice social distancing and breathing his fumes all over me, I, subconsciously at first, but then, in a way that seemed utterly blatant to me but clearly was too subtle a signal for him, took step after after step backwards, till, I do recall, he had me pinned against the far wall, a full 12 or so metres from where we started.

I recall friends gradually leaving the party and waving and feeling utterly helpless to escape and bid them a proper farewell. T was overpowering.

I was being schooled and assailed. Inevitably, a day or so later, I did get my own cold, and no one has ever known more precisely the source of their germs.

Oh, and there's a punchline, which he held back. I recall he held it back deliberately, he waited and waited to tell me the name of the film that was everything that 'The Big Lebowski' was not ... "no, really, if you want a film which is in a similar genre but just much better in every way, you want ....

... Pineapple Express" ...

and there it was, there was the elixir...

...or rather, thankfully there was the spell broken. Some combination of politeness and intrigue had held me there too long, half-wondering if somewhere within there, T did have something to offer. Only then did I have the clarity and courage to snort and say "Thanks, lovely to meet you, I've got to go".

OK, so that's the funny bit (at least I hope it was a bit funny) ...

... the serious point ... ok, this was 2009 ...

Like I said, I went to a public school, I went to University in St Andrews, I'd met Tories, I knew Tories.

And they could be really nice. But they stood out. They were obvious. And they were usually frowned upon, for better or worse, amongst people I knew. The age I was, it felt like, apart from a certain band of eccentrics, my generation had given up on conservativism. I know, it sounds ludicrous now, and other people's experience might be different, but that's what I felt. Complacent.

Well, something Tories could never be was at all cool, whatever cool is.

How does this link to the guy I've described above? I didn't find out his politics, he wasn't hiding, if he was a Tory he certainly looked like one, and he certainly wasn't cool.

It's just, I think something happened between 2004-ish and 2009-ish, something which has let all this happen. They came back, and they were a certain type.

I lived in London then, so I saw it happening in London, and London's where it started. Maybe it started in 2005 when Justin Greening won Putney, maybe it happened in the run-up to the 2008 mayoral race when loads of Londoners were so sick of Ken Livingstone they voted for Boris Johnson. But it happened. Suddenly people were openly telling me they were voting Tory (maybe they always had, but they hasn't said it before), saying Labour hadn't really done anything in their years in power, blaming Labour for the financial crash. And they weren't all the stereotypical Tories, they were people who'd talk about music and films, people who dressed ok, were at parties with cool, nice people.

The editor of GQ was a guy called Dylan Jones whose writing was always to me, a huge emptiness, in ignorance of the substance and an obsession with the style, and then he started putting his weight behind Cameron and saying how Cameron was a cool guy and it was ok for snappy cool guys to vote for Cameron. What difference did it all this stuff make? Enough ...

It was the detoxification, and it was being done by toxic, toxic people.

I never met my green-tweeded film expert again. I asked my friend about him and he just laughed. My guess is he went into politics. Blue sky thinking. Big ideas. Sell the NHS. Mad how many of those big idea youngish right-wing guys I've met in the last 10 or so years. Working for Dominic Cummings now.

Complacency.

Song 80: Place to Be

Once I was walking around a supermarket, not paying much attention to my inner life, ipod on shuffle and this song, 'Place to Be', from Nick Drake's last studio album, 'Pink Moon' came on.Within a minute or two my breath and my step faltered. A shock of sorrow.

There is so much that is beautiful and desperately sad in Drake's music, but it is this relatively gentle, seemingly innocuous number that now strikes me more deeply than any others.

When Nick, still in his mid-20s (a mid-20s he'd never escape from) when he recorded this, sings

"...I was green, greener than the hill
Where flowers grow and the sun shone still
Now I'm darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be"

you remember this is a boy who may have felt, and been told, as he was growing up, that there was no place in the world he wouldn't be allowed to fit in and feel comfortable - a wealthy and loved English public school boy, a child of empire, with a happy family life, seen as enigmatic and handsome, sociable, sporty, intelligent ... and yet by the time he was 24, all those myriad places, those enormous possibilities had disappeared, and he was begging for just one place to be. And even that last place he ended up, his childhood bedroom, was not a place he allowed himself to be.

I still listen to Nick Drake all the time - there is no other singer whose company I feel so comfortable in. Most of his songs are not miserable at all - far from it, they're wry and magical, full of hope and wonder, but there is something so overwhelming about the clarity and honesty of his despair on some of 'Pink Moon', and in those few songs he recorded after that.

Well, in any case, I'm not going to go on for long about it, it's just listening to this song got me thinking about the saddest songs of all. Not the performatively sad, not the ecstasy of heartbreak, but songs which have the stamp of truth about them, of human loss and empathy.

These are the ones I came up with for starters: it's a bit monochrome genre-wise, I know. 

Danny Callahan - Conor Oberst

Girl in Amber - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Caroline No - The Beach Boys

Fourth of July - Sufjan Stevens

Broken Wave - James Yorkston

Black Eyed Dog - Nick Drake

Floating in the Forth - Frightened Rabbit

Happy Birthday Johnny - St Vincent

Carissa - Sun Kil Moon

I Loved Being My Mother’s Son - Purple Mountains

Casimir Pulaski Day - Sufjan Stevens

Over the Rainbow - Judy Garland

Trellick Tower - Emmy the Great

How - Regina Spektor

Boulder to Birmingham - Emmylou Harris

Losing You - Randy Newman

Does Not Suffice - Joanna Newsom

The Chalet Lines - Belle and Sebastian

It’s a Motherfucker - Eels

No Surprises - Radiohead

There we go. Any suggestions welcome.

I hope everyone right now has got a good place to be and a good place to stay put.

Song 79: Ice Hockey Hair

I've been thinking about why I love the Super Furry Animals so much.

Gruff's doing a radio show at the moment called 'Resist Phoney Encores' and clearly his idea of a phoney encore includes getting the old gang back together, as the other, still super but not quite so super FAs have lost patience with him and reconvened as Das Koolies.

Good on them - the Furries were never a one-man band. However good a Gruff Rhys solo record is, it's never quite the band in its uncontainable pomp. This is the strongest sign yet that there really isn't going to be any new music from the band as a five-piece, which is a bummer.

So, I'm taking on  my favourite Furries song, and one plenty of people consider their greatest, 'Ice Hockey Hair'. ? What makes it a definitive SFA song? Why is it is so magical?

I'm thinking about the drum bit 4 minutes and 7 seconds in - that's where the secret lies. However many 100s of times I've listened to this song, that 5-second section, just when you think the song might be about to come to a close, never fails to make my heart scream with joy. What even is it? It's just an extravagant drum roll which lasts a little bit too long, it's just a rock'n'roll cliche ... and that's when  you realise that it's at these moments the Super Furry Animals are at their best, when they have earnt the right to employ a rock'n'roll cliche, and even then, can't help subverting it slightly.

Gruff Rhys can't help it. 'Resist Phoney Encores' is what he lives by. I remember him saying that the one thing he can't stand in songs is poignancy, and, to be fair, he's been almost entirely true to his word. Only on the wonderful solo album 'Hotel Shampoo' does he write anything close to straightforward love songs without a twist.

Somehow his whole career can be seen as a confrontation with his extraordinary melodic gift and the great "goodness" of his worldview.

People with those talents are few and far between ... Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, a few others ... and, no Gruff didn't have the pop voice for that level of stardom, but while those two geniuses would occasionally subvert but usually make full use of the joy and the cheesiness and let a song just be what it is, from 'Hey Jude' to 'Don't You Worry Bout a Thing', Gruff, never, never let it be ...

Think of 'Northern Lites' - their biggest hit, which doesn't get to the chorus till there've been three verses, and is about a weather system, 'Juxtapozed with You', with its unsettling vocoder and lyrics about house prices, 'For Now and Ever,' in the big, glorious outro, he starts deadpan intoning the words and you can't help laughing.

There's no poignancy. You can never stop and wallow in it.

And yet the Furries often make oddly moving music, even profound ... - who can you compare them to?

The Coen Brothers, maybe ...

or the guy in the skittles advert who makes everything he touches turn into skittles ...

'Ice Hockey Hair', a song the band almost thought was too cheesy to release, about taking advice from a woman with a mullet, it could be nothing, but they can't stop themselves turning it into something joyful and magnificent - it has 3 or 4 great tunes - they try to fuck it up, it has 3 or 4 scuzzy bits but they still sound amazing.

It's not like SFA weren't trying to be successful, they clearly were, it's just they couldn't be conventional. The nearest they came to a conventional sounding record was 'Hey Venus' in 2007, and, you know, it's got some nice tunes, but it's not quite there ...

And, you know, sometimes, compared to other artists, I guess they do sound a bit "shallow" and sometimes the evasion, the wackiness, is frustrating, but that's to be put along side the fact that they were an incredibly hardworking and innovative band - they released a lot of music, and they were ahead of the game on multimedia content, streaming, on everything really.

Gruff's "goodness" is such a big part of his writing too - it's so often political, just obliquely so, so often full of hope and anger and good causes.

I think that's all part of why those that love them love them so much.

Song 78: If You're Not the One

The Bedingfield Supremacy. The Bedingfield Epoch. How to describe those in-between and retrospectively innocent early-2000s, which birthed two such smiling, gleaming pop monsters?

OK, first, I've nothing against either Bedingfield, they're pretty admirable, they both had a burst of extreme success based on pure popskillz - no talent show, no scenes and gimmicks and lurid stuff - it's very wholesome, for want of a better word, and very endearing.

I think the Bedingfield Ascendancy came to an end when the brother and sister performed 'Ain't Nobody' together at the Brits and everyone went "Well, that's a bit weird", but it was fun while it lasted. Natasha Bedingfield was also very successful in America, even after the first single on her second album was 'I Wanna Have Your Babies' and it was not good.

Here's my main Bedingfield memory though. Summer of 2003, and I'm in an Ealing Community Transport minibus on a sunny summer's day travelling the brief stretch between Portchester and Portsmouth, as I'd done so many times before, and we're listening to Ocean FM and it's Daniel Bedingfield's 'If You're Not the One', and the DJ says "If that's not the best love song of the last ten years, then what is?"* It wasn't a phone-in.

But you know, right then, I remember thinking "Fair enough, why not? Good for you. And here we are."

That was my last Portsmouth. 2003. I don't really think of Portsmouth being in the Bedingfield era. My first Portsmouth was 1995, I remember listening to Suggs' 'I'm Only Sleeping' (along with a "Sound of the Seventies" compilation which was surprisingly faultless) and boring everyone to death with my barely-formed half-arsed musical views (as haha I've been haha doing haha ever since).

What's a Portsmouth, you ask, apart from being the only UK city on an island and the most densely populated part of the UK outside of London?

It's a long old story. It's, in its way, a great story. I'm not going to tell most of it.

Portsmouth, or PHSP, or the Playschemes, or the Access Guides, or whatever we'll call it, was a thing some of us did, connected to the school Christian Union (which I wrote about here), where we'd go off and do something for two weeks - usually it was two weeks running playschemes in the North End area of Portsmouth, staying in Portchester Community School, our group made up of St Paul's people, people, originally from Hephaistos School then from a wider sphere after Hephaistos closed down, with disabilities, and various others with various connections, but sometimes we'd spend some of that surveying a city for disabled access, resulting in 'Access' guidebooks. That's really the big and important part of the story - you could read a bit about it here.

But, look, I can't do justice to that. I'm here to talk about Daniel Bedingfield, kind of. There was a lot of music on Portsmouth, there was a lot of travel on those green ECTs. In the early days, you could have an open front door and sit on the steps, maybe, on the way back from a day's playscheme, smoking a cigarette or am i imagining that for the sake of the idyll?

I first did the playscheme when I was 16/17 (it always coincided with my birthday) and kind of struggled with it the first two years and was far from my best and wouldn't have gone a third time but my gap year ended prematurely (another tale) and i don't really think i enjoyed the 3rd time all that much either but then, on the 4th time in 1998, I was a bit more grown-up and got into the swing of it and was more use, and then after that I really loved it.

My friend Alex (not the same Alex as the Dolly Parton Alex) was in charge of the whole thing in 2000 and we did loads of the preparation work together in the week before and then the two weeks was great fun too,  and then I was in charge of the whole thing in 2001, and, again, it was a bit of a riot - I think it was a bit off-script of what the thing ought to have been, but it was fun.

There was a lot of stress and ludicrous arguments on Portsmouth, there were lots of pretentious conversations, there were lots of great people, there were angry and troubled people too at times, there was a lot of music and lots of arguments about music, there was a lot of drinking, of course. I did some of my best drinking there.

After the day's playscheme finished at 4, there'd be an hour or two of getting shit ready for the next day, then we'd traipse to the local pub (Ruddles £1.25 a pint) and there was a "two-pint" rule sometimes obeyed, and then there was dinner with wine in the courtyard on those warm nights and then an evening meeting where someone would say something heartfelt and other folk would chip in and god knows some of the shite that came out of my mouth then,  as  i was mainly very drunk, and then port and coffee and it's one of those things where you ride with the drinking and you never quite have an unworkable hangover.

I know I'm making it sound like everyone's standard youth, but it was something, really something. Friends were solidified, friends were made, good and real friends.

We had a reunion in 2018 (a party for Gordon the founder's 80th too) and I was charged with leading the celebration - I'd done a quiz 10 years before at a similar event and I didn't fancy doing another quiz, so I focused on the music ... the songs we sang and listened to ... all the kid's song and the washing up songs and the late night songs and the minibus songs (I didn't include Bedingfield, i think that memory was too too personal). I was given a list to read out of names of alumni who had died - there were a lot, often people whose lives I'd only passed though and vice versa, but some people who really had a profound effect.

You grow out of some of things you do when you're young, but that's not really because you're growing up, or getting better.

*Incidentally, on Bedingfield, I've rather enjoyed finding out that he doesn't like this song at all, he just wrote it to try and be a bit commercial like Westlife, thought it was sappy cack and didn't want to put it on his debut album.

Song 77: Doo Wop (That Thing)

In the futile and ludicrous list I made in 2014 of the 1001 Greatest Songs of All Time, 'Doo Wop (That Thing)' by Lauryn Hill was respectably ranked at 66. I remember at the time wondering if that was too low.

I am coming round to the view that it is the most all-together perfect song in all of pop music. When I think of other great songs, songs I've at times considered the benchmark, like 'Over the Rainbow', 'Be My Baby', 'God Only Knows', 'Crazy in Love', 'Like a Rolling Stone', I always hit a limit. There's nothing wrong with a limit - when people go outside their limits, that's when disaster happens.

'Be My Baby' is a vocal and production tour de force, it's three minutes of pure rapture, but it's just about being excited about meeting a boy. The limit on 'Like a Rolling Stone' is the verse-chorus structure, the vocal range, the fact that's it's basically just slagging  someone off.

But when I look at 'Doo Wop (That Thing)', I don't see the same limits. It's a song that has everything. For everyone.

How do you explain Lauryn Hill? 'Miseducation' was released in 1998 and the world still waits for a second studio album. How long ago is that? Destiny Child and Beyoncé have had their whole career since then. Lauryn Hill's a grandmother now.

It's not for me to second-guess the life and struggles of Lauryn Hill since, whatever people say about whether she's difficult, a perfectionist, strange, egotistical, whatever other odd tales have emerged. Barring a poorly reviewed live album in 2002, that's a long wait to follow up a debut album.

I bought 'The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill' at the time, which was unusual for me, as I was still pretty straightforwardly into rock music and hadn't particularly loved the Fugees, (though have warmed to them since). I liked it a lot, but whether because I was still holding too hard on to the dwindling returns of Britpop or because my flatmate Alex got into it a bit too much and that was off-putting (I think the latter!), I didn't over-listen to it. In recent years, I've got back into it. Wonderful as it is, nothing else is as immediate as 'Doo Wop (That Thing)'. It's not really a pop album, and none the worse for it. It achieved extraordinary acclaim to go with its sales.

Even so, to me 'Doo Wop (That Thing)' dwarfs it. It is nostalgic and futuristic, it is catchy and memorable, it is beautiful and pure, it is clever and funny, it is cutting and kind, it is lyrical and musical, it is verse and chorus, ebb and flow, male and female, personal and political, it is everything.

I found myself in my mid-30s, living in Sevenoaks of all places, listening to it over and over again, trying to learn the lyrics, saying them to myself (and to irritate others!) - "Lauryn is only human, don't think I haven't been in the same predicament", "Don't be a hard rock when you really are a gem" etc etc Utterly ludicrous, but I was completely enraptured by it.

So maybe it was as simple with Lauryn Hill as the inability to get past perfection. All the success, all the acclaim, and something completely impossible to improve upon.

To go back to Beyoncé, with whom there are pretty good comparisons, in terms of coming from a great pop group to being a great solo artist, the versatility and completeness of the talent, the mass appeal, you could say Lauryn Hill achieved everything in 3 years that's taken Beyoncé 20 years. Still, seems a shame - I think the world would rather have had 20 years of it ...

Song 76: Jolene

I've mixed feelings about 'Jolene', to be honest, as I'll explain. I mean, I love it. It's a great song. I've always loved it.

Jolene

In particular, I loved it in 1999. 'Uncut' magazine still gives you a free CD with each magazine and it's still pretty decent, but, back then, they used to be fantastic, one of the highlights of each month. Not just a fairly random selection of new music, but a proper compilation tape which introduced me to so much fabulous new and old music, as well as just being a great listen all the way through.

One month, there was, along with some great new Americana, a wonderful Richard Thompson song called 'Dry My Tears And Move On', 'Sunday Girl' by Blondie, 'Ready or Not' by the Delfonics, 'The Concept' by Teenage Fanclub, Joy Division, Charlie Parker and Eddie Cochrane, De Niro and Minnelli singing 'Blue Moon' (from the 'New York, New York' soundtrack), the one-two, late on, of 'Sheena is a Punk Rocker' by the Ramones, and 'Jolene' by Dolly Parton.

Pure joy. You learn a lot about how to make compilation tapes from that kind of thing.

In 99/2000, in third year of St Andrew University, I lived with Alexander and John at 7 Baker Lane, a small, dingy flat on an idyllic paved wynd. Despite its griminess, lack of central heating, the fact me and Alexander were in bunk beds, we loved it.

We'd all sit in the front room (basically the house's only room apart from the 2 tiny bedrooms) and listen to music. I'm not sure any of us had discmen or walkmen then. Music was communal. There was a lot of B and S, SFA, lot of Dylan, all sorts, the KLF Chill-Out album, My Bloody Valentine, passing curios like Ooberman, and Alex tended to cotton on to a particular female singer-songwriter and listen to them over and over - I remember there was Lauryn Hill, Macy Gray, Nina Simone, Shelby Lynne, and we listened to Jolene a lot.

One afternoon, we'll have been listening to Jolene loudly, blasting it out. I can't remember exactly what time of year it was, but I've a feeling it was a sunny day, so my guess is around March 2000, as the long cold Scottish winter was coming to its end, so there were more and more reasons to feel joyous, to open your windows to the world and blast out the happiest music imaginable (yes, I know they lyrics to Jolene are not joyful, but, you know ...)

Well, maybe on that same day, or maybe the next, I'd already gone to bed, I think John had too, I can't remember if he was there or still out, it was probably 12.30/1ish, closing time, I think I'd already drifted off to sleep (it was the one year of my life I had pretty dreadful imsonnia, not surprisingly, so sleep was prized).

Alexander was still downstairs. I am hazy on the details of what happened next & what I was aware of. Loud male mocking voices singing "Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene". Some kind of disturbance, a door being kicked. Our door. Voices ... raised. Door shuts. Then Alex telling/showing me [and John] he's been attacked.

He tells us the details, the singing of 'Jolene', the door being kicked, him opening it to stop it being kicked in, to ask them to move on, one of them punches him, another one approaches him to apologise, to shake his hand, punches him some more times.

I feel sick. For various reasons, which I'll get to, but one of the reasons I feel sick is because I know the routine. It's happened to me. The same horrible routine. The previous year.

Alex and I were living with 3 others (in a pretty plush flat) on Argyle Street, the other end of South Street, one of St Andrews' main three thoroughfares. We'd been out, I'd got bored as I tended to, and wandered home at about 10.30. Then, in an unprecedented and not to be repeated move, I thought to myself "maybe I've missed something, maybe the night gets better".

Now bear in mind how ridiculous a move this was in that neither I nor my friends had mobile phones at this point (probably a few folk did, but not Alex, John or me, and I didn't know anyone's number).

I realised as soon I headed out that I didn't know where anyone would be ... I thought I'd try the Student Union, but without much hope. The important fact here is that I was wandering around without purpose.

I am a very firm believer that (I can only speak for men here, I know the risk is usually different and more multi-faceted for women) you are more likely in danger if you are somewhere you shouldn't be and somewhere you don't look like you belong.

[Another time, in 2007, I was in New York (first time I'd been there), agreed to go to a gig in Brooklyn with some friends, they told me to meet at one of their apartment at the bottom of Manhattan, down under one of the bridges. I remember him saying to me "just, it's fine, but it can be a bit dicey so keep your wits about you". But because a) so far i'd found New York completely threatless and b) I'd noticed that Americans often had a pretty idealised and naive view of what London was like, as if there were no inner cities or poor people, unless they were lovable chimney sweeps, I was pretty careless. I walked past where he'd told me his apartment was, realised I'd gone too far, turned around and, a bit nonplussed and clueless, starting faltering back the way. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a guy crossing my path with his hand inside his jacket and a look on his face. As he crossed me, he drew the hand quickly out, said threateningly "Not now, bitch!" and shot his finger at me. Hilarious. I guess, a lucky escape, but I know it was my loss of direction which made me most vulnerable].

Well, back to St Andrews. I'm shambling along, I remember seeing the guys, four of them, they didn't particularly put me on edge, they looked like rugby players, they were big, but I don't suppose they fitted my stereotype, whatever it was, of who would commit random acts of violence in the middle of a busy town.

One stood in front of me. "What are you looking at?" ... oh come one ... a couple of punches ... then the other one, bigger "Sorry, pal, sorry about my mate, let me shake your hand." Takes it. Three precise blows to the cheek. What I remember is he knew what he was doing, was making sure he didn't damage his fist, didn't feel like he wanted to destroy me, I didn't feel in danger, like this was some free-for-all that would never end. After the third punch (five in total, all to my right cheek), I said "Right, that's enough" .... and walked on.

In the coming days, I think I dined out on it rather. A solid shiner. My diffident response, I think, amused people. Easy to sweep under the carpet.

Then, a few days later, in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, I suddenly felt scared, violated, changed. I cried. The feeling passed, but I remember the feeling. That's what violence, however brief and meaningless, will do to people.

Well, these lads (I'm sure it was the same lads) clearly got their kicks out of punching students. Who knows how many they punched, how many they got away with because they never did it badly enough for victims or the police to give enough of a fuck.

So they did it to Alexander a year later. We assumed they'd heard us blasting out 'Jolene' that day or so earlier, that had set off some masculine avenging fire in them, they'd made a note to come back later, half-cut and ready for violence.

How I felt after that was complicated. I felt upset for Alex, and I felt guilty. I'd been upstairs in bed while he'd been getting punched. I'd heard it, hadn't I? I still don't know how it transpired. I think most likely is that when the door was being kicked, I assumed no one would open the door, and by the time he'd opened it, it was too late. But in the aftermath, I wished I was a guy that immediately sprung to action to defend his friend even if he didn't know his friend needed defending, whatever the circumstances.

You don't really know how you're going to respond to threat, nor what the right response. I haven't been around it all that much, but a few times, and on a few occasions, I've kind of frozen, which is the sort of response which makes you feel a bit guilty, but may actually be the best response quite often.

Then there have been a few other times, when angry men have been in my face (in sport, on railway platforms, buses, at parties, streets) where I've felt strangely invincible, and talked back to them fearlessly and facetiously. Most of the precursors to violence are pure ridiculous - ridiculous posturing and cliched words, and on a few occasions, I've felt perfectly at ease pointing out that ridiculousness. It's probably complete luck that hasn't gone badly for me so far, or maybe I was able to gauge that these people were all talk. Who knows?

Above all, though, if there's ever a time where instinct and judgement need to work as one and I need to leap to defend myself or someone I love from a serious threat, I dread freezing then, letting it happen before I've gathered myself. I'm not one for all the male stereotypes, but equally, there's a time to fight, isn't there? Who knows?

Weirdly, when I was young, I used to imagine getting in fights quite a lot, fancied (as a lot of idiots do) that if it came to it I might handle myself fairly well. Thankfully, when, at the age of 28, I had to start taking blood thinners and was told to stop playing contact sports, that flight of imagination disappeared. Getting hit, in any way, is not a great idea for me.

Anyway, so those pricks ruined Jolene for us a bit, to be honest. It's quite Tarantino-esque, isn't it? Mindless violence to a beautiful country music soundtrack ...

Song 75: Go!

I wouldn't say I hate Eurovision. It's not that. I know it gives a lot of people a great deal of pleasure and I understand why.

But somewhere in the mid to late 90s, I lost touch with it and have never really found it again. It got bloated, it got unfair, and it got kind of not silly, not bad enough.

And I myself, of course, became joyless and musically snobbish around the same time. Funny that.

A couple of times in the intervening two decades, rather than look down my nose on it, I've committed to the evening like we did when we were children, and kind of enjoyed it again (albeit with different drinks than as children). Not massively, not with thrill and abandonment, but a bit.

When we were kids, of course, it was everything. It was looked forward to for weeks, it was a long evening in front of TV with the siblings and the cats and the notepads to keep score and the joy and the jokes and it was, what? 2 1/2 hours, maybe 3. Within bounds. Not 4, that's for sure.

Of course, it wasn't just one evening - well not always. The first "Song for Europe" I remember was in 1988, and it was won by 'Go!' by F***** Scott Fitzgerald (not sure that works on any level). A tear-jerking power ballad of the era by a man of the era.

With the preliminary round, the preamble and the actual contest, the song drilled its way into my head and my heart. Those were, of course, the good old days, when a moderate British power ballad didn't totter miserably to 11 points and 28th place, but strode its way to 135 points, only to be denied victory by 1 damn point - by Switzerland, by 'Ne partez pas sans moi' by a little someone you might have heard of called Celine Dion.

Hi Scott, what did you do? I lost by one point to Celine Dion and history changed forever, how about you?

Anyway, the thing is, I probably heard the song about 5 times in total, if that, all in, with the 'Song for Europe', the celebratory reprise, and the big show. It didn't crack the charts or anything. But we (well mainly me) used to sing its chorus in the back of the car for years to come - it had this Don't Worry Babyish persistence and rise and fall - "Go before you break my heart again you know that's what you've come here for, go before you say I love you like you did the day before you walked away from me" ... on and on it went. Probably, in my head, it's been a song that's been in everybody else's head for decades too.

So, I didn't listen to the song after that, just sang it, to be annoying, and then, had in my head. It never left. Never. It played in my head all the time for three decades. Pure background.

Then, suddenly, at the end of last year, I thought, with a flash of genius - The world has moved on. I could listen to that song, it needn't be trapped in some unreachable past. I can release it from my head and be free. It exists, it doesn't have to haunt me any more.

So I did. And had it been transformed by time into a thing of greater or lesser beauty? No, it was exactly as I remembered it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F09DJR9iiHY

It was this.

I'm not sure anything else has lived in my memory so complete and so whole for quite so long - most other songs/films/goals/stories have had some kind of real-world top-up along the way, or faded away, or perhaps reared up once in a decade or so. But somehow, for 30 years, I'd kept Scott's big hair, big lungs, big chorus pristine ever-present and untainted.

I'm sure Eurovision is, in real terms, much better now, I'm sure it was much better in the 70s too, but this is all it is for me.

Song 74: Lithuania

I reckon this will be the most obscure song I write about, the last track on a 2002 EP by a liitle-known American songwriter, it's represented by one video on youtube which has 1.4 thousand views and one comment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVwV3IM3HHk

It's, in its way, a wonderful song though.

I'll tell you a bit about Dan Bern, as much as I know. He's a working American small time songwriter, he's released a bit of this and that, he's written songs especially for films here and there, he's in the classic topical/comical/satirical folk singer mould. He sounds a lot like Bob Dylan, undeniably.

Talking of Dylan, here is the time he penetrated Dylan's consciousness - it's truly hilarious. If you don't read the rest of this piece, click on this link and read this. https://ultimateclassicrock.com/bob-dylan-angry-letter/

Basically (if you've disobeyed me and not clicked), Bern used to write a satirical column for an American magazine, once he wrote something (light-hearted) about Dylan's mother, Dylan found out about it and wrote a gloriously furious letter, which he never sent, and was auctioned two decades later, when Bern found out about it.

Bern has another loverly song called 'New American Language' where he sings "I have a dream of a new American language, one with a little bit more Spanish" which never fails to move me.

But, anyway, Lithuania, was the last track (i think) on an EP wherein Bern courted controversy, called 'The Swastika EP'. Bern (Jewish), wrote an ok little song called 'My Little Swastika' about reclaiming the ancient symbol from Nazis. There's also a song on the EP called 'Talkin' Al Kida Blues' about an American guy called Al Kida who got hate mail. Again, so topical, so solid.

This is what I remember, though. I'll have bought the EP in the days in 2002 when I wasn't up to much - working part time, not in a 5 and dime, not for Mr McGee. I remember it was in the few months when I was still in my mum's house in Ealing but had moved to my long-moved out sister's room (of which I was envious as we were growing up). Being part time and young, there'd be the odd bit of afternoon drinking, and I'd clearly gone into London for a couple of drinks, bought some music, gone home and listened to it.

Because I remember I listened to the Swastika and Al Kida songs still awake and then the EP went on and I was in a half-awake state.

'Lithuania' is a long song. 11 minutes.So I remember that on-and-on-ness as I slipped in and out of paying attention. And I remember that sudden stab into my dopey state that I was hearing something beautiful and moving.

There's some talking, some talking about being American and then it's about his ancestors who were killed in Lithuania, and there's a lot about being Jewish and a litany of Jewish heroes, and then there's some singing and the refrain where he sings "Hey hey the fog has gone" is somehow utterly stunning.

It manages to be a history and a satire and a cry of identity and a love song and an anthem and a travel song and an ode to the poached egg and for a while I couldn't get enough of it (apart from the poached egg).

Anyway, what's it here for?

It's here because even if, like me, you've spent most of your life looking for songs, you want to hear every great song there is, you don't actually know a small fraction of the good songs. I, for whom this song and this genre is right in my zone, could most definitely have never have heard or paid attention to this song. The tiniest fragment of people have heard this song, and yet it moved my little soul beyond measure.

There are/have been 100s, 1000s of Dan Berns out there who really knew/know how to put together a song with words, and some of them got more than a few write ups in the serious music mags and some of them didn't.

Hey hey.

Song 73: You've Got a Friend

I liked 'Tapestry' a lot but 'You've Got a Friend' was not my favourite by any means. Probably I first heard it on TOTP2 in the mid-90s and I just thought it was a bit ... basic.

Nice, solid fare.

The history of it is very pleasing, that it was written in response to the line in James Taylor's 'Fire and Rain' "I''ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend", that both Taylor and King recorded it and both are synonymous with it. Something pretty cool is that 'Tapestry' and 'Blue' were recorded simultaneously in the same studio (Mitchell guested on King's album, with James Taylor connecting the two).

But you know how it is with 'Tapestry'. Gradually it all seeps in to you. It's such an entirely lovely album that even the songs you initially find a bit boring you end up knowing inside out.

And every song will have its time eventually if you give it long enough.

'You've Got A Friend' had its time and I will love it forever. It may be that I have sung it more than any other song. It felt like a lifetime but it was actually only a year or so. A year or so when I learnt a new skill which was the most important and subtle skill I had. A rocking good skill. Rocking.

'You've Got a Friend' became my rocking tune. That and 'Row Row Row Your Boat'. I tried loads of others, nursery rhymes and pop songs, I sang everything from 'Into Your Arms' and 'Blowin' in the Wind' to 'Ten in the Bed' and 'Old MacDonald'. But overwhelmingly, night after night, the ones I would turn to once, twice, however many times, were 'Row Your Boat' and 'You've Got a Friend'.
Whether it was the sound, the pitch, the tempo, it worked for her and it worked for me. Walking up and down the corridor, not allowed to sit down, singing and hoping, hoping it stuck.

Now she goes to sleep without needing to be rocked. It's still not always a walk in the park, it still needs music, but my days of singing 'You've Got a Friend' night after night are gone. Did I get sick of it? No, I did not. Did I get sick of 'Row Row Row Your Boat'. Maybe a little.

Song 72 : Punka

There was a horribly spiteful interview with Lauren Laverne a month or two ago by a journalist called Decca Aitkenhead saying how bland and uninteresting Laverne was, and I thought to myself "Kenickie should get back together and repackage their magnificently spiteful song 'Punka' (P-U-N-K-A) as 'Decca' (D-E-C-C-A), that would be an apposite response about blandness," but of course they didn't.

I happen to think Lauren Laverne on 'Desert Islands Discs' is great - I've listened the show more in the last year than ever before, and several of the interviews have been moving and memorable. But Laverne is definitely, as a default, extremely nice now, and if an interviewer takes that for blandness, so be it. They can't be Kenickie fans.

I've listened to Kenickie's debut album 'At the Club' quite a few times lately. It may be one of the best British albums of the 90s (their second album is also very good, though a bit uneven).

It really deserves reconsideration, though you can tell that Laverne has happily given up on the music for good (and her Kenickie bandmates all seem to have built excellent other careers, according to wikipedia).

I always saw (and still see) Kenickie as counterparts to Ash. Of the bands of the era, these were the two that were my age, that were still doing their A-Levels when they hit the big time, that were a pop-punk three (then later four) piece from "not london" with memorable tunes and great lyrics. Both Tim Wheeler and Laverne's vocals are lightish considering the genre - I never saw Kenickie live but I wonder if they ever got swallowed up a bit in that setting, where they worked really well on record. (both bands also took their name from one of the biggest films of the 70s too)

Kenickie were funnier than Ash, much funnier, but I guess Ash really hit on something with the angels/stars/nostalgia thing. Kenickie's songs were really of the now. 'Punka' is my favourite of their songs, though 'Come Out 2Nite' is also a classic. They really should and could have been massive, if they'd caught the right wave but where Girl from Mars got Ash close to the Top 10, Kenickie never quite got into the Top 20.

Punka should have done it - it's as exhilaratingly dismissive, joyful and knowing now as it was then, a takedown of scenesters and their little concerns. Really, there's a precocity to the quality of their songs that wouldn't be heard again in British music til Arctic Monkeys.

Anyway, that's all. If you've forgotten about Kenickie, give them another listen.

Song 71: Take It With Me

aka Time waits for Tom Waits.

aka Tom Waits for Norman; Norman is in Ireland.

So, eventually, there's Tom Waits.

You think there won't be, but there is, eventually.

There's a Rod Stewart cover when you're young, then there's Short Cuts where you don't really know who he is, but he's perfect, then there's hearing Mule Variations in the summer of 99 at Ed's house and even though it's tough going, you remember Hold On, that there's something to hold on to, in the car home when Bring it All Back beats Beautiful Stranger to Number 1, then there's Blackwell's, where, for that staff of rock star/writer/poets manqués Tom Waits and Tindersticks are like Dylan/Madonna/Michael Jackson and all the old hands are making you compilation tapes with knowing looks and you still don't get it and you're just too young but you think, yes, maybe, when when I'm older, maybe when I'm on a desert island, and Ed Harcourt you like and he doesn't stop talking about Tom Waits but you think that his good stuff is Buckley and it must be his tricky stuff is Tom Waits,  and then you do Somewhere a la Tom Waits at karaoke one time when you've got a cold, and it's pretty fucking good but you make the mistake of trying to repeat the trick when you haven't got a cold, and then, of course, you listen to Martha and Ol'55 and all the obvious ones, and you think, of course, this is great, if he'd only stayed obvious, but all the hard work ones are still hard work, but you're getting there, you know you're getting there, and then you look up a few online lists of the best Tom Waits songs, and amidst the obvious ones you know, there's this one at Number 1 in one of the list, Take It With Me, and you realise, with Ed Harcourt, it wasn't Tom Waits just for the tricky ones, it was for all of it, and that lovely career-starting Ed Harcourt song Whistle of a Distant Train from 2000 is just completely a sucker for this, from Mule Variations, from 99.

Take It With Me

You watch the Coen Brothers film and the thing is Tom Waits isn't a singer slash actor, he's just an actor, and then sometimes he's a singer, of sorts.

And Take It With Me is just a beautiful song. This is his voice without affectation. Even a lot of the pop/rock songs have affectation, but this one, there's no affectation. It's as lovely, straight a song as you'll hear.

There's a Tom Waits covers album in 2019 called Come on up to the House, and it's all by women, and some of the best singers, really the best, and it's beautiful and you realise how many beautiful Tom Waits songs there are, how warm and empathetic they are, and these versions sit perfectly alongside his own versions.

And now I'm all in. All the Tom Waits. All the time.