Part Nine

This entry still needs a title

November 19, 2009

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Nursery rhymes are not, by and large, supposed to make sense on a first listen. Many of them are drenched in satire and social commentary – ‘Humpty Dumpty’, for example, is either about a civil war cannon or King Richard III, or neither, depending on who you ask. The innocent-sounding ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ described the symptoms of the Black Death (even though this may not have been intentional), and ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ almost certainly refers to Richard of York’s unfortunate defeat at the Battle of Wakefield. Popular song has always been a particularly potent means of dealing with social commentary, and there’s no reason why children’s songs should be any exception. As a child I always wondered why the parents mentioned in ‘Daddy’s Taking Us To The Zoo Tomorrow’ didn’t just pick a day when they could all go together, until I read that it was in fact a wry dig at the custody battles and contests of one-upmanship that frequently result from broken marriages where children are involved – something that tends to go over the head of your average seven-year-old.

Nonetheless, some nursery rhymes are simply weird. ‘Round and Round the Garden’ is a prime example. My children love being tickled, and weep with laughter when we reach the punchline, particularly if you draw it out a bit, but I don’t think that any of us have ever really stopped to consider that the simile is hideously inappropriate. I’ve never seen a teddy bear of any sort ambulating round a garden, at least outside of certain areas of Canada (and even then only courtesy of Library Pictures). If we’re talking about a stuffed animal, they tend to be inanimate, and thus the only way of getting them to move in a circular direction of their own accord would be to peg them on a rotating washing line before spinning it. If we’re talking about a real bear, then perhaps the best thing to do would be to stop making up inane tickling songs, and get inside and lock all the doors and wait for Animal Control. (Coincidentally, I’ve just finished proofreading a review of a book that “offers important insights into human/polar bear relations across the Canadian Arctic”. I’d guess that the most important insight that anyone could offer about human/polar bear relationships would be would be to carry a tranquiliser gun, and where possible stay the hell away from the polar bear.)

The sad tale of ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ is, as far as I’m concerned, a proverb not about the importance of persistence but rather of learning from your mistakes; it’s easy to marvel at the staying power of the unfortunate arachnid as he’s washed out of the spout time and time again, but I can’t help thinking that Incy’s climbing time would have been drastically reduced if he’d just found another point of entry. And the tale of the man going to St. Ives is also in dire need of a rethink: the answer is supposed to be one, with the clue being that in the first couplet the traveller announcing that he met a man while he was going to St. Ives (Cornwall, or Cambridgeshire), implying that the Utah-dwelling Latter Day Saint and his entourage (not to mention their small cattery) were all travelling in the opposite direction. This ignores the fact that they could quite conceivably met at a hotel, or even a fork in the road, but sadly this interpretation seems to have been lost in the mists of time, leaving only the literal reading that is generally acknowledged as the solution to the puzzle.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because Thomas has developed a recent preoccupation with Sesame Street, or ‘Ernie-Bert’, as he refers to it. This means that whether I’m in the study or the kitchen, I’m generally interrupted at least twice a day when a greasy DVD box is thrust into my hands, accompanied by the words ‘Ernie-Bert!’. The DVD in question is a German edition of what was known over there as Sesamstraße - specifically, a compilation of the career highlights of everyone’s favourite roommates (Ren and Stimpy aside) that we picked up in Bamburg a couple of years ago. Thomas can’t understand a word of it, but that doesn’t diminish his enjoyment – or his enthusiasm to watch – one iota.

But Thomas probably watches too much television, so we’ve tried to compromise by raiding the CD collection instead. If he’s in an Ernie-Bert mood, the album in question is Platinum All Time Favourites, which features the incredibly catchy ‘Fuzzy and Blue’, the vile and repulsive ‘Sing’ (complete with Spanish translation) and the unforgettable ‘C is for Cookie’. I should point out that I bought this album before I had any children or even met my other half. I could justify it by saying that certain songs were great on hospital radio, which I was doing at the time, and that I simply wanted to cheer up sick people, but I suspect that I’m just a little too in touch with my inner child.

It is the third song on the album that I wanted to talk about today: the irritating-but-sweet ‘The People In Your Neighborhood’, which talks, as you might expect, about the different jobs that you might find in a community. An expanded rewrite completed some years later has about seven verses, but the album version contains only two, which is quite enough. Lead vocals are assigned to Bob, one of the steadfast and reliable humans (in this case, the one that bears an uncanny resemblance to Neil Sedaka) that live in Sesame Street along with Oscar, Big Bird and Ritalin poster boy Elmo. We begin:

Bob: Oh, who are the people in your neighborhood?
In your neighborhood?
In your neighborhood?
Say, who are the people in your neighborhood?
The people that you meet each day.

[Enter a blue nondescript muppet. Muppet #1 sounds suspiciously like Jim Henson.]

Bob: Oh, hi there, little fella.

Muppet #1: Hello.

Bob: Hey, listen, know who you could be if I gave you this little hat and this bag to go over your shoulder?

Muppet #1: I could be a laundry man.

Bob: No, not a laundry man.

Muppet #1: How about Santa Claus?

Bob: No no no, not Santa Claus.

Muppet #1: What’s wrong with Santa Claus?

Bob: There’s nothing wrong with Santa Claus, but –

Muppet #1: Don’t you like Christmas?

Bob: Oh, I love Christmas. But you could be the postman.

Muppet #1: A postman, hmmmm…
Oh, the postman always brings the mail
Through rain or snow or sleet or hail
I’ll work and work the whole day through
To get your letters safe to you

Bob and Muppet #1:
‘Cause a postman is a person in your neighborhood
In your neighborhood
He’s in your neighborhood
A postman is a person in your neighborhood
A person that you meet each day.

So far, so good – although the determination of Sesame Street mail service to deliver the post in even the most adverse weather conditions is to be commended, as it’s an attitude that sadly doesn’t translate to the British Isles. Over here, we get three flakes of snow and civilisation as we know it grinds to a halt. The song continues:

Muppet #1: I’ll see you around.

Bob: Okay.

[Muppet #1 leaves, bumped into Muppet #2 as he enters. Muppet #2 sounds suspiciously like Frank Oz.]

Muppet #2: Hey, watch it. Where ya goin’? To a fire?

Bob: Hey, speaking of a fire.

Muppet #2: Fire! What fire? Help! Help!

Bob: No, there’s no fire at all. But do you know who you could be if I gave you this little shiny red hat?

Muppet #2: Yeah, Santa Claus.

Bob: No, not Santa Claus.

Muppet #2: Little Red Riding Hood?

Bob: No, no, no, not Red Riding Hood, you could be a fireman.

Muppet #2: A fireman? Holy smoke!
Oh, a fireman is brave it’s said
His engine is a shiny red
If there’s a fire anywhere about
Well, I’ll be sure to put it out

Bob and Muppet #2:
‘Cause a fireman is a person in your neighborhood
In your neighborhood
He’s in your neighborhood

Muppet #1:
And a postman is a person in your neighborhood

All:
Well, they’re the people that you meet
When you’re walking down the street
They’re the people that you meet each day.

It would be crass and juvenile of me to make jokes about shining red engines, or the length of a fireman’s hose, or to poke further fun at uniformed organisations by mentioning the similarities between policemen and polar bears (they’ve both got blue helmets). The whole album is absolutely laden with innuendo if you know where to look – the poignancy of Grover’s “What Do I Do When I’m Alone?” is dampened somewhat by the fact that there’s a very obvious answer, and it’s impossible to listen to ‘Rubber Duckie’ without wearing a smirk, particularly when Ernie announces that “Every day when I make my way to the tubby / I find a little fella who’s cute and yella and chubby”. Part of me knows that this is perfectly innocent; part of me thinks that he really ought to see a doctor. Another part of me thinks that I really ought to see a doctor.

Innuendo, however, is not the issue here. Instead, I take umbrage at Bob’s assertion that “a fireman is a person in your neighbourhood”. It’s admittedly true, at least on a technical level. Our nearest fire station is about half a mile up the road, and the community hospital half a mile in the opposite direction: living on a main street means we’re never short of traffic at the best of times, and we’ll often hear the wail of an ambulance siren heading in one direction or a fire engine heading in the other, the Doppler effect in full swing as they streak past.

But that’s the fire station, not the fire crew. In actual fact, we never see any of the fire crew. They tend not to be the sociable type; not unless there’s a village fete or a training event or a national strike. I’m lucky enough to be one of the office fire sweepers – a job with far less glamour than it sounds, as my role is simply to ensure that my assigned floor is empty, before reporting this fact to the facilities manager while sporting an appalling yellow jacket. It’s probably the only occasion I’d be allowed into the ladies’ toilets without getting a reprimand. There is, however, one perk: the occasional refresher courses where the firemen give us an hour’s lecture (complete with disturbing video footage) before taking us into the car park to use the extinguishers to put out several small fires. These courses are few and far between, and I’m still not convinced that in the event of a genuine emergency I’d actually remember what to do, but it’s fun while it lasts.

Still, that’s my one brush with the emergency services. The simple fact is that firemen are not “people that you meet when you’re walking down the street”, unless you’re walking away from a fire, and they’re running in the opposite direction with an axe. If we had the good fortune to live somewhere like Pleasantville or Trumpton, where the resident fire crews were so bored due to the lack of combustible heat sources that they’d leave the station at every conceivable opportunity to rescue a cat or put up some posters, things might be a bit different. But as it stands, they seem for the most part to be holed up in the fire station, eating toast and watching repeats of Jeremy Kyle. (You can almost imagine a bored fireman standing on the upper floor, bellowing “Hey! Does this pole still work?”) One of my friends is married to a fireman, and I never see him as he’s permanently on call. So even though she lives just up the road, thus making him a person in my neighbourhood, our paths never cross.

Perhaps it’s better that way. I’d be happy to see a postman in my neighbourhood, unless he’s carrying a brown envelope towards my front door. If it’s a fireman, it means something’s probably burning, and if something’s burning, I generally don’t want to be near it. So I view the song with a certain amount of suspicion. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but the apparent omnipresence of the emergency services makes me wonder exactly what kind of neighbourhood Sesame Street actually is: if it’s one where the fire crew are kept busy in the same way that they are in, for example, Fireman Sam (where an “emergency” generally consisted of a quick trundle round the model village, a few piddly drops of water on the makeshift flames, and then time for a cup of tea and a chat with the arsonist) then we’re laughing. If, on the other hand, we’re talking about systematic and wilful destruction of public property to the same extent that you’d expect in somewhere like Rotherham, then I suspect that the air in Henson’s urban community is anything but sweet. Still, Thomas likes it, so perhaps that’s all that matters.

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 46

November 23, 2009

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This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Johnny Cash – American IV: The Man Comes Around
Belinda Carlisle – The Best of Belinda, Volume 1
The Cure – Greatest Hits
John Coltrane – Blue Train
Nat King Cole – Let’s Fall In Love
Eva Cassidy – Eva By Heart
Coldplay – A Rush Of Blood To The Head
Crowded House – Recurring Dream
Coldplay – Parachutes
Coldplay – X&Y

The Boy Done Good

November 28, 2009

———

Billy Bragg. The name conjures up a lot of images to those who know him. If you were to brainstorm, you’d undoubtedly come up with the words ‘Essex’, ‘Socialist’, ‘New England’, ‘Left’ and probably ‘Hypocrite’. Certainly most of these are justified. Bragg’s distinctive Barking drawl has mellowed over the years (on his records, at any rate) but it saturates the early recordings, and it’s impossible to sing along to ‘The Man In The Iron Mask’ without putting the ‘oiay’ in ‘say’. Bragg’s early output can be divided into two camps: the wistful, bittersweet love songs for single mothers and local tramps on one side, and on the other his penchant for hard-line socialist leanings. Bill Bailey was perhaps the first to truly summarise his work within the context of a single song, with his satirical ‘Unisex Chip Shop’:

“I used to buy my chips from an oppressive chip shop regime.
 The girl who worked there, she seemed happy,
 But I knew it was not what it seemed.
‘Do you want salt and vinegar’, was what they made her say,
 But in the language of the ghetto,
 That means ‘Help, I’m a woman in chains’
 I wanted to free her.
In my dreams I would see her.
Running naked through the woods round Rainham,
If I had some tigers I’d train them.
To protect her
From the sexual fascism that was lurking round the gherkins.”

And so on. Bill’s delivery is typically slurred, but buoyant – it’s an absolutely spot on impression, and official endorsement from the man himself has no doubt helped. It serves beautifully as a minute-long précis, but for those wishing to dig deeper, Bragg’s 2003 compilation Must I Paint You A Picture? gives perhaps the most complete introduction to his work – consisting as it does of two-minute post-punk masterpieces from Life’s A Riot with Spy Vs Spy (1983), through the questionable lyrics of the cuts from 1991’s Don’t Try This At Home, and finally to the overtly political songs of England, Half-English (2002), performed ironically with a distinctly American twang. (The box set is worth seeking out, as the additional third disc opens with his memorably British answer to ‘Route 66’, the beautifully titled and quite essential ‘A13, Trunk Road to the Sea’.)

Personally, I’ve always preferred the earlier albums. There is something almost ethereal about that lone guitar: it’s a man recording in his bedroom at eleven thirty on a Friday night with a bottle of cheap cider, singing songs about the jilted girlfriends who by rights he should have been seeing. Almost every one of those early songs is a winner, from the unusual metaphor that is ‘Milkman of Human Kindness’ to the aching sense of loss that permeates ‘St Swithin’s Day’, where Billy drops in a frank metaphor for masturbation and still walks away with his dignity intact. He describes his education with a permanently raised eyebrow (“Just because you’re better than me / Doesn’t mean I’m lazy / Just because I dress like this / Doesn’t mean I’m a communist”), and describes former lovers with tender affection that is nonetheless always firmly grounded, musing in ‘A Lover Sings’ about “Walking in the park, kissing on the carpet / And your tights around your ankles”.

Those accusations of hypocrisy, then. Garry Bushell – the same man who was successfully sued for libel after announcing that William Roache was as boring as his onscreen character, Ken Barlow – had harsh words for Bragg in 2006, when he accused him of “pontificating on a South London council estate when we all know he lives in a lovely big house in West Dorset”. Indeed, this appears to have been one of the biggest complaints about the man – remarks that his abhorrence of racism and xenophobia are unjustified, given that he lives in a predominantly white area that presumably – praise God! – has yet to be overrun by towel-heads, which thereby denies him the opportunity of seeing the Islamic, immigrant-filled cesspit that the BNP would believe us Britain has become. In other words, Billy’s singing for a lost world and has no frame of reference on the here and now. He’s outdated; needlessly nostalgic. He’s Stephen Green.

The first time I saw Billy was some three years before Bushell’s remark: August bank holiday in 2003, where he closed the Greenbelt festival. There are few artists who can follow The Polyphonic Spree, but Billy was one of them: a socially conscious, bittersweet and utterly grounded performance, a lament for love lost and the promise of new hope – a theme that rang particularly true with me after the year I’d had – and a timely reminder of what Greenbelt is all about, contrasting perfectly with the zany antics of DeLaughter’s merry band in the previous hour. Opening with the dreadful ‘Sexuality’ (a rare low spot in a canon of general excellence), he triumphantly declared “We can be what we want to be…well, unless you’re the Bishop of Reading”.

It was funny six years ago, but it more or less set the tone. I remember a friend of mine saying that she’d gone to see him back in 1997 – early 1997, when the political climate was just starting to hot up in time for the landslide at the beginning of May. I didn’t object to Jane’s attendance at one of Billy’s concerts, it’s just that she’s a rampant Conservative and I’m frankly a little curious as to why she went. “Yeah, he was good…but well, you know, he’s a socialist.”

That night at Greenbelt, Billy announced that “they’ve been trying to get me to come here for the last few years. Frankly, I haven’t felt like it before now, but I can see that for the first time in a long while the left’s starting to come together with – ”
“ – the right?” suggested a voice from the crowd.
“Nah, the church, actually, mate,” replied Billy. “Good heckle, though.”
Cheering.
“Seriously, though,” he went on. “I just came here from Reading and Leeds. Now, there’s two types of festival. There’s the sort that’s basically a hardcore rock gig that happens to be set in a field – that’s Reading. And then there’s this sort, where you want to come, and hang out with your mates all day, and be with people. It’s great.”

It was great, and it was a sentiment that Robert Fisher had echoed earlier when the Willard Grant Conspiracy were just starting their set: “I’ve got to say, we looked around a bit, and there’s lots of families, and people hanging out, and having fun, which is just what a festival should be”.

Back to Billy, who’s now reminiscing a bit more. “I was, y’know, at a hardcore folk festival a while back. One of the Morris dancers got hammered and carved something into his arm with the stick he was holding. Tripped over his bells in the end. I went to a couple of workshops. We were trying to splice the hyphen out of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and stick it so far up the arse of the BNP that they won’t feel like spouting any more of their racist shit.”

I think I agreed with most of what he said: the need for America to get back in touch with itself, and return to the barn-raising communal spirit for which it was once famous; the fact that we weren’t cross with the country but with the administration and the lunatic who ran it (and this was 2003, the year that Bush spilled blood over oil); the need for tolerance and fair trade. It was only when he sang “There is power in a union” that I started to get a little uncomfortable – unions serve their purpose but they also frighten me a little – and by the end of the set I’d realised that we weren’t at a concert, more a rally.

“Thing is,” Billy said, retuning his acoustic, “being part of the left brings with it all sorts of undertones. If you tell people you believe in a socialist society they assume you’re a Communist. Marxism served its purpose but I want to move away from the totalitarian ideology. Even that word, ‘ideology’, seems to have a lot of baggage. But if you tell people, as I do, that you want a compassionate society, they’ll understand what you’re saying almost immediately.”

You hear this, and then you think about that house, and you wonder. Is it hypocritical of an affluent, comfortable musician to sing about the angst of the common man, even if he’s been there himself? Is a failure to share everything you have a question of failing to practice what you preach? Is Billy in danger of becoming one of the hated lords that he sings about with such venom in his fantastic rendition of Leon Rosselson’s ‘The World Turned Upside Down’? Are the walls in danger of rising up at his command?

You could argue, indeed, that any sort of materialist gains become a barrier to preaching about socialist ideals. We’ve seen it happen in the church: Jesus’ message of love and charity seems to have been all but lost in the slurry of designer-suit wearing fifty-somethings who appear on cable TV, stating that if you give them your money, God will heal your cancer. (It’s not even as if the cash is going to the people who need it; they’re spending it on satellite dishes to go on the roofs of mud huts in Polynesian villages, so that the natives can pay them even more money to hear the gospel.) I don’t want to advocate living in poverty at the expense of looking after your health: I have to think of my family, and in my experience money is a useful thing to have that enables us to do stuff. But where do you draw the line? Where does living comfortably become affluence become greed?

There’s one parable that makes us Western Christians particularly uncomfortable, and that’s the one about the rich man who approaches Jesus, asking what he should do to get into heaven. When told that he needs to sell everything he has, the man becomes downhearted and leaves, whereupon Jesus remarks that “it is easier to thread a camel through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven”. Some months ago, we examined this passage in a study group, and questioned whether we were showing sufficient compassion in our lives. The general consensus seemed to be that perhaps we weren’t doing enough, and that we didn’t even know what ‘enough’ was.

“I know what you mean,” said Anna – the pastor’s wife, a woman who in terms of giving her time is perhaps the most generous woman I know – who was leading the discussion. “But I think that in this case, Jesus’ message has to be looked at on an individual level. I think that in this instance the money had become a barrier. Jesus wasn’t saying it was wrong to have money. He was just saying that it was wrong to allow that money to intrude upon your relationship with God, and that’s what had happened to this man. So reading this parable doesn’t make me think that he wants us to sell everything we have. It just makes me think that we have to find our own particular barriers, whatever they are, and break them down.”

“I hope you’re right, Anna,” I said, “because that’s what I tell myself in the mirror every single morning. But the thing is, I know various atheists online who would argue that we’re diluting the message of the gospel to suit our own needs and lifestyles. And to be honest, I don’t have an answer for them.”

Having said all that, Billy’s one to put his money – or at least his time – where his mouth is, as is evidenced for example by his work supplying guitars to prisons. (“People are saying ‘What about the victims?’, which is fair enough,” he has apparently said. “I believe in punishment and the punishment should fit the crime. Twenty-five per cent of people, in my experience, in the U.K. should never be released again, but 75 per cent are going to be out again and they are possibly going to live next to you, so shouldn’t they be rehabilitated?”). When we saw him again at Greenbelt some years later, he’d been doing songwriters’ workshops with victims of terminal cancer. There are things going on, and perhaps there’s only so much you can do.

I mentioned all this to Emily some weeks back, and asked if Billy Bragg’s affluence made him a hypocrite.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But then, he’s no worse than a lot of the others. Look at Bono, for example.”

I think I’ve trashed Bono enough on this blog, so we won’t go down that particular road today, but she’s right. There’s such a thing as giving quietly, and for all we know Bono does exactly that: it’s wrong to misinterpret radio silence as a sign of general aloofness when it could just as easily indicate a desire to keep your good deeds away from the limelight. Jeremy Beadle, a man I detested for years, redeemed himself in my eyes upon his death when news emerged of his tireless charity work in the latter period of his life – work that stayed out of the headlines. But for all the good work that Bono might be doing, he’s still a pompous twat, and a tax exile to boot.

Some months ago I got involved in a discussion about gay musicians. The originator of the thread questioned whether it was hypocritical of gay singers to perform heterosexual love songs. This was wrong on so many levels that it was difficult to know where to begin, but let’s try and unpack it a little: in the first instance, love songs are love songs, and relatively few are unambiguously male-female. Even the ones that referred specifically to a member of a certain sex (and which were, typically, performed by a member of the opposite sex) could quite easily have had their genders reversed if necessary – in fact the field is more less narrowed down to male-female duets, specifically of the ‘Hey Paula’ variety. For the most part, the rest of them are pretty ambiguous: when I was ten or eleven and first discovering the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael and Erasure, I had no idea that any of them drove their cars on the other side of the street. It’s hard to say whether such knowledge would have made me like them less; I fear that it may have done. It’s not a very nice thing to admit, but I was prepubescent and didn’t know any better.

So I’d play songs like ‘Careless Whisper’ and imagined that George was singing to a girl; I experienced the same feelings when I first heard the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Domino Dancing’ and ‘Heart’ (in my defence, the video for the latter sees Neil Tennant wed Danijela Colic, who then cops off with a vampiric Ian McKellen). I even let the obvious camp of Freddie Mercury’s ‘Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy’ pass me by, although God alone knows how this slipped under the radar. The same applied to anything by Erasure (although when we learned of Andy Bell’s sexuality, Ewan insisted that he’d known it all along, as Bell’s lament in the chorus of ‘Sometimes’ – “the truth is harder than the pain inside” – was “clearly”, in the eyes of my learned friend, “a metaphor for bumming”).

I suspect there are twenty-first century parallels, although I can’t imagine even the most innocent schoolboy watching Will Young prance his way through ‘Light My Fire’ and not know something was up. But does it matter? Readings of songs, you see, are two-fold: they’ll always mean something different to the singer than they will to the audience. When Paul McCartney sings that “in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me”, he’s talking about the spirit of the deceased Mary McCartney, who died when he was fourteen. Most other people, however, assume that he’s singing about Mary the Mother of Jesus. I daresay that there are a few people in Liverpool who can’t see any difference (although the Beatles were more popular) but in either case it doesn’t really matter that much, even though the pedant within me is screaming to correct them. Some people choose to interpret ‘Solsbury Hill’, a song so utterly perfect even Erasure couldn’t screw it up, as a metaphor for a man leaving a psychiatric hospital (an image that Peter Gabriel was to explore later, in 1980’s ‘Lead A Normal Life’). It’s actually about Gabriel’s decision to leave Genesis, but on some levels the misunderstanding actually works rather well.

The point is that once the song is out there you can only own it so far, and I can’t help thinking that when it comes to love songs, the sexuality of either composer or performer is completely immaterial. Everyone in the audience will hear the song in a different way – the builder, the paramedic, the artist, the accountant, the teacher, all with their own stories to tell. Some will feel as if it’s being sung directly to them. Some won’t be able to identify with it at all. Love songs are like that. But the singer doesn’t need to have experienced the events of the song in order to be able to perform it to a decent standard, although it helps – the fact that ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ was a career high point for Elton John was due, in no small part, to the fact that he was bleeding an artery dry on record.

There are exceptions. I actually believe some songs shouldn’t be touched. ‘Under The Bridge’ is one of them: the manifestation of Anthony Kiedis’ heroin addiction is so raw and unnerving and close to the knuckle that I don’t believe it’s right to do it. Another, coincidentally, is ‘Let It Be’, which occurred at a time of great turbulence for the Beatles, in the midst of a period of bickering and in-fighting from which they never truly recovered. But my list is entirely subjective and I am guilty of horrendous double standards. I haven’t forgiven All Saints for covering ‘Under the Bridge’, but I embraced with fervent vigour Johnny Cash’s take on ‘Hurt’, as well as his version of ‘In My Life’ – a song that Sean Connery ruined, but which Cash resurrected years later and which remains amongst my favourite Beatles songs. The been-there-done-that world-weary sentiment of his delivery has been done to death (do we really need any more comments that “Johnny Cash was the original gangster rapper?”), but when Cash sings ‘Some are dead and some are living / In my life, I’ve loved them all”, you know how much he means it.

Viewed from this perspective, the notion that a singer should only perform sexuality-appropriate material (music by gays, written for gays to sing about gays, with no gay left behind) is utterly ridiculous. Popular music doesn’t work that way: music is not unique to the performer, and the performance of your work by others ought to be seen as flattering rather than a burden, and if you don’t want your songs out there, don’t sing them to anyone. Taken to an extreme, you’d have to enforce the draconian principle that no one could sing any material that they hadn’t written themselves, which would mean we’d never have heard Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’, The Byrds’ ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ or Roxy Music’s ‘Jealous Guy’. (We’d also have been spared The Carpenters’ ‘Ticket To Ride’ and Duran Duran’s ‘911 is a Joke’, so every cloud has its silver lining.)

If you’re going to apply this principle to love songs, would it not be appropriate to extend it to songs of social responsibility? And with that in mind, should I renege on my assertion the other week that ‘Imagine’ is inappropriate hypocrisy? Perhaps. Maybe the gravity of singing about the plight of the common man from the comfort of your Belgravia mansion is somehow more serious than singing about feelings you’ve never really experienced. Perhaps the gravity of songs about coal miners means it’s more important: perhaps Martyn Joseph’s ‘Please Sir’ is a more important song than ‘Have An Angel Walk With Her’. Perhaps.

I suppose that the question of my own hypocrisy, and the desire to sing from the viewpoint of the unfortunate when I myself have been very lucky, was with me that night at Greenbelt, as Billy led us in the last song of the night, an a cappella stomp through ‘Jerusalem’. Greenbelt’s not just about worship, it’s about awareness. The trade justice theme that ran through that weekend never seemed stronger than it did on the closing Monday, with constant references to the postcard petition that was due to be delivered to Tony Blair demanding fair trade laws, and a vibrant carnival on Monday afternoon.

I’ve long since been sceptical of the impact of such things – Live Aid was tremendous (the first. The second was shit) but, at the end of the day, barely scratched the famine’s surface – but as I said to a friend some time after the event, do you do nothing because you can’t do everything? Or do you do what you can? I’d have to add that this was pointed out to me during the carnival when I was having one of my more cynical moments. I probably don’t do enough; I try and avoid the bigger picture. But standing there, that night, part of the throng, I felt a curious mixture of elation and defiance, happiness and discontent, the determination to improve yourself and the world.

I slipped an arm round Emily’s waist and told her I loved her. And then the two of us joined the cry that appealed in one voice, however brief the sentiment, to change things for the better:

“I will not cease from mental fight
 nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
 ‘til we have built Jerusalem
 in England’s green and pleasant land.”

Whether you like Billy Bragg or hate him, it’s hard to disagree with that sentiment. Some contextual analysis is inevitable, but I can’t help thinking that we place too much emphasis on why a song is or is not appropriate to its performer, rather than listening to any message contained within it: it provides a convenient get-out clause, a way of easing our own consciences by maintaining that these would-be role models are no better than we are, all the time singing along to a rousing rendition of ‘We Shall Overcome’ before ignoring the retiring collection buckets on our way out. Perhaps we ought to be concentrating on the power of the songs themselves, rather than the baggage – or its notable absence – of the men who sing them.

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 47

November 29, 2009

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This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Sarah Vaughan – The Essential Sarah Vaughan: The Great Songs
Sarah Vaughan – The George Gershwin Songbook, Volume 1
The Village People – The Very Best of the Village People
Suzanne Vega – Retrospective – The Best of Suzanne Vega

Line on the Horizon

November 30, 2009

———

Like the tenure of the Tenth Doctor, this blog is gradually coming to an end. Also like the Tenth Doctor, I fear it may have outstayed its welcome. It began life as a way of consolidating and amalgamating all the random thoughts I was having about music and the way in which I listen to it – exploring the neural pathways that were being mapped through this new, self-imposed restriction. I fear that over the months I have gradually run out of things to say. I have thus resorted to jotting down random thoughts about music as and when they occurred to me, often based on articles I’d encountered or simply the bands I’d been listening to that week, and sometimes – when there was the need to post something but no time to write – I even recycled the odd diary entry.

I don’t do ‘coming soon’ remarks as a rule, but December will see a couple of list pieces, and an item on nostalgia that has been in the works for some time, and anything else I manage to finish before Christmas. There will be other entries that I wanted to write but which will probably have to wait: something on road trip music, for example, and an idea for a piece about bad cover versions which, like Joss Whedon’s Firefly, never really got off the ground. Perhaps it’s better, in a way, that I don’t exhaust my supply of material. You have to keep some things in reserve. I made a New Year’s Resolution that I’d write more, and I believe I’ve kept it. And perhaps that’s enough. Perhaps it is not necessary, at least in the first instance, to write well: perhaps it is simply necessary to write. Perhaps the writing well follows.

The experiment will continue next year, in some form for another – Emily is keen on that, although she recognises that the system will need to evolve in order for us to maintain interest. Nonetheless, I think the diary entries will stop. I simply haven’t got the time, for one thing, particularly since the birth of Daniel. Shaw wrote that “the true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art”. I think that the occasionally haphazard manner with which I have tackled this collection of thoughts over the course of a year has proved that I cannot count myself within the camp of the true artist; I value my family too much for that. I don’t believe in too much balance, but sometimes you have to prioritise. My children won’t wait for me to finish my first symphony before they grow up.

And in thinking about family I’m reminded, inexplicably, of Howard Cunningham’s closing remarks at the end of Happy Days: “I guess when you reach a milestone…you have to reflect back on what you’ve done and what you’ve accomplished. Marion and I have not climbed Mount Everest or written the Great American Novel. But we’ve had the joy of raising two wonderful kids, and watching them and their friends grow up into loving adults. And now, we’re going to have the pleasure of watching them pass that love on to their children. And I guess no man or woman could ask for anything more.”

Our children, unlike Howard and Marion’s, are still infants, and it will be a while before I get to see them get married, should they choose to do so. But I am proud of all of them, even if I wish they’d sleep a little more. There is a goodness inside each of them, and they and their mother have become my whole world, simply by allowing me to be a part of theirs. That my creative world has taken a back seat so that they can ride shotgun is not something to be lamented. I don’t feel bad that I’ve spent less time on this blog than I could have done, because I’d have missed out on seeing my sons develop and grow. And that’s something I wouldn’t have missed for all the albums in the shop.

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 48

December 6, 2009

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This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Amy Winehouse – Back To Black
Robbie Williams – Escapology
Jimmy Webb – Ten Easy Pieces
Various – The Wall Rebuilt
Robbie Williams – Reality Killed The Video Star
Scott Walker – No Regrets – The Best of Scott Walker and the Walker Brothers 1965-1976
Cassandra Wilson – New Moon Daughter
Brian Wilson – Smile
The Wurzels – The Finest ‘Arvest of the Wurzels
Cassandra Wilson – Glamoured

Jesse’s Playlists – Week 49

December 13, 2009

———

This week, I have mostly been listening to…

Pink Floyd – Is There Anybody Out There: The Wall Live 1980-81
Pet Shop Boys – Discography
The Proclaimers – The Best of The Proclaimers
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand
Phil & John – Old New Borrowed Blue
The Polyphonic Spree – The Beginning Stages of the Polyphonic Spree
The Polyphonic Spree – Together We’re Heavy
Porcupine Tree – Stupid Dream

That was the year, that was

December 16, 2009

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My life, like the lives of many other men, is largely built around lists. If you are a creative sort, they’re essential, because creative people can find that their brains get cluttered. I have, for the most part, absolutely no idea about what I’m doing day to day, and lists are the only way I can get anything finished. But there’s more to it than that: bullet-pointing your life enables you to remember more. It’s easier to reach into your emotional past and remind yourself of how you felt at a particular moment – and this can be a blessing or a curse – if you’re able to tune into one particular aspect that in turn helps you to remember the rest of it. Keeping lists of things that people have said can help to clarify recall. I don’t do it compulsively, but I do find that archiving your years through lists of clothes, songs, books and anything else you can think of can help to unearth a wealth of hidden memories.

This isn’t always a good thing. When I was reaching the end of the whole sorry affair with 2002’s bisexual bipolar temptress, I mentally assembled a list of songs that reminded me of her: from initial flirtatious remarks (‘The Name of the Game’) through to songs of outright joy (‘The Longest Time’) through to the realisation of imperfect dreams (‘Come What May’) and then the bitterness of love lost (‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’). I never made the CD. It would have nearly killed me, and it would have tainted the songs forever. Instead, I let the items on my playlist of misery gradually distance themselves from her, which took a while, although it happened eventually. But there are plenty of CDs I could make (and have made) about Emily: the stuff she likes, the stuff we both like, the songs that are about her or the songs that in some way remind me of her or particular times we spent together. You join the dots between the song and the moment and the two are forever linked: you can therefore see why it was a road I didn’t want to pursue with Sandy. I don’t want to dwell on an obsessive infatuation that occurred in a miserable period in my life, not when I have so much to be thankful for now. Some things are best left buried.

Emily’s ex-boyfriend was a great mix-tape compiler, and several of his compilations still grace our shelves. They are seldom played, but fondly cherished. One of his favourite things to do is to archive the year musically, by sending us tapes – and later CDs – of the songs he’d listened to, the ones that had surrounded or pestered him, the ones that had meant something. It’s a review of the musical year combined with a whiff of nostalgia, as half the songs tend to be old ones anyway – songs that seemed to strike a particular resonance or that seemed to epitomise a particular occurrence. Nostalgia can be dangerous, as I’ll explore in a future entry, but if you temper it by making your choices relevant or appropriate to the occasion, the process of archiving becomes less an exploration of the past for its own sake and more an acknowledgement that what has gone before can acquire a fresh interpretation, given a different context. Tarantino’s a prime example of this: rather than commission new songs to accompany on-screen action, he’ll try and find existing material that fits the moment. It works, as long as you’re willing to delve through the bins rather than relying on a limited set of material. (We really don’t need any more Jackie Wilson on film soundtracks.)

Anyway. Andy would send his tapes and CDS, and in 2003, I began to do the same: some six years later the series is still going strong, and we still exchange compilations every Christmas. My approach seems to be similar to his, in that I’m as interested in the older material that I’ve rediscovered and re-evaluated as I am in the newer songs. I listen to less new music than I would like, and until that changes I will have to combine the old and the new. I suppose that in the days of iPods and playlists and the apparent death knell for the humble album (something we’re going to have to deal with sooner or later) it’s probably inevitable that I will eventually switch to a different format. For now, however, the eighty-minute CD suffices: it grants me a snapshot, a window, rather than information overload. Here, for the sake of keeping a record (if you will excuse the obvious pun), are the notes from this year’s edition.

The Sugarhill Gang – Apache
Another year, another version of ‘Apache’. When I introduced Josh to this version, he immediately fell in love with its powerful, driving rhythm, and singalong chorus. We watched Will Smith and Alfonso Ribeiro gyrate their way round a Las Vegas nightclub in a memorable clip from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but one of Joshua’s favourite things to do was to get out of the bath, and then bounce all over the bed, dancing and laughing hysterically while I towelled him dry. Of course, he had no idea about the historical significance – mythical or otherwise – of the characters mentioned, and had never heard of General Custer, which meant that for some time we were greeted nightly by the sound of a small voice echoing from the bedroom, bellowing “Custard…jump on it! Jump on it! Jump on it!”.

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich – Legend of Xanadu
When I was much, much younger, my father had a recorded C90 that contained two greatest hits compilations. Side two featured the early hits of the Bee Gees: I grew up knowing the words to ‘Massachusetts’, ‘First of May’ ‘New York Mining Disaster’ and ‘Don’t Forget To Remember’ as well as I knew any nursery rhyme, and you may imagine that the later discovery that these pleasant, tuneful Australians were largely responsible for the disco craze came as something of a shock. Side one, on the other hand, contained the greatest hits of Dave Dee and the gang, and opened my eyes to the eclecticism of pop music: here were songs that embraced early heavy metal, Mexican cowboy music, tribal chanting and even Greek dances, thanks to the electrified mandolin on ‘Bend It’. The success and enduring appeal of Dave Dee and his posse was due in no small part to the songwriting talents of Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, who managed to come up with catchy, memorable tunes with lyrics that ranged from melodramatic (‘Last Night In Soho’) to plain bizarre (‘Zabadak’, whatever the hell that was about), in a variety of musical styles. Dave Harman – the aforementioned Dee – was still playing with the band right to the end, before prostate cancer took him in January. Here is perhaps their finest hour, a ghostly echo of lost love, with whips straight out of Rawhide and a fantastic horn arrangement.

Wilson Dixon – The Man With No Name
I knew nothing of Wilson Dixon until a chance encounter on Radio 2 of an evening, in a show that I waited all year for them to repeat so that I could record it and then rip the audio. The stage persona of comedian Jesse Griffin, Wilson Dixon’s Radio 2 series consisted of four half-hour shows in the company of Johnny Walker, where he sang about love, life and divorce in an authentic-sounding western drawl. This particular song marks the beginning of a lengthy tale about his pursuit of a bank robber through small town America, a land where people like to pretend they’re in cowboy films even though times have moved on, and where “We needed someone to blame, so we picked that Chinese family who run the laundry”. “He rode on a horse as big as a bus / In fact it could have been a bus,” Wilson sings, before conceding, “I didn’t actually see him arrive”. Wonderful.

Angelo Badalamenti – Twin Peaks Theme
Having exhausted ourselves with 24 in 2008, we decided we needed a break this year: the first three or four months were therefore taken up with a rummage through the vaults of what is perhaps David Lynch’s best work. It’s surprising how well the series has aged, considering it’s now twenty years old: there is a timeless, almost 1950s quality to the small town, where the inhabitants slow-dance to finger-snapping jazz and doo-wop, and everyone eats far too much cherry pie. Old jokes were heard again and characters were rediscovered – I’d forgotten just how wet James Hurley was – and despite the programme jumping the shark drastically after the unmasking of Laura Palmer’s killer, there is a tremendous amount of goodness in there, helped in no small part by Lynch’s sinister and surreal direction, and wonderful performances from Kyle Maclachlan, Michael Ontkean, Michael J. Anderson, Sherilyn Fenn, Miguel Ferrer, and Lynch himself. Nowhere else on television are you likely to see David Duchovny in drag, or hear the words “Cooper, you remind me today of a small Mexican Chihuahua.” The Wire? Pah.

Lily Allen – The Fear
To be perfectly honest, Lily Allen annoys the fuck out of me. The silly cow just can’t seem to keep her mouth shut. Determined to burn more bridges than a Venetian pyromaniac, and forever tweeting about piracy, Katy Perry and Cheryl Cole until we’re bored to the point of suicide, Lily’s behaviour is less rock ‘n’ roll rebel than it is whinging socialite hussy. But the new material is astonishing: abandoning the ska roots to be found on 2006’s Alright, Still, she explores Goldfrappesque shuffles, bluegrass and electronica that’s reminiscent of 1980s Pet Shops Boys on this year’s It’s Not Me, It’s You, and the result is a record that’s powerful and biting, if occasionally preachy. ‘The Fear’ has got pretty much everywhere this year – it’s been in danger of overexposure (much like Allen herself) but it’s an absolutely cracking song.

Malena Ernman – La Voix
In May, we were all told that Alex Rybak was in love with a fairy tale, while Graham Norton proved an adequate replacement for the departed Terry Wogan, and Britain didn’t do too badly at all, despite having a third-rate song by a second-rate composer who is well past his prime. But while ‘My Time’ did at least partly atone for the UK’s dreadful performance in the past few Eurovisions, it couldn’t hope to keep up with Norway, who walked away with a record number of points (although that’s largely because Europe keeps dividing). Here’s the Swedish entry – a song that should have done much better than it did but which was hampered by the frankly scary eyes of would-be Galadriel Malena Ernman. The ‘popera’ segment in the third minute is more than a little creepy, the changes are passé and viewed in retrospect the whole thing sounds rather jaded and 1997, but it works.

Bat For Lashes – Daniel
The birth of son no.3 took us all by surprise, not least because he was two weeks early. Emily’s waters broke just before lunchtime; she threw clothes in a bag and we bombed up the A34, and found ourselves with another child before that evening’s watershed. Daniel is a generally contented baby (except when we’re on the road) who is now in possession of teeth: he has yet to state any musical preferences but I am raising him on Dire Straits and the Beatles. The number one song on the day he was born, as I later found out, was Calvin Harris’ ‘I’m Not Alone’ – a record I bought for the sake of archiving and which I really tried to like, but which was frankly tedious. Thankfully, my sister-in-law came to the rescue, offering up this contemporary alternative from Bat For Lashes, which is full of pulsing, earthy percussiveness, sounding like 1980s Kate Bush.

Danny Elfman – The Batman Theme
In 2009, Emily and I realised we’d been married five years. But there was another anniversary: The Dark Knight became a septuagenarian. In an age of mob rule and obsession with miscarriages of justice the image of a costumed vigilante seems somehow more relevant than ever, even if he does dress up as a flying rodent. Tim Burton’s first take on the caped crusader was released twenty years this summer, a realisation which made me feel very old. While I was rediscovering that film – and yes, it’s still as good as it ever was – and introducing Joshua to the 1960s TV show, Emily and I were playing through Lego Batman, which features a cacophony of dastardly villains, a bewildering array of modified costumes and excessive use of Danny Elfman’s score, which has as a result been in my head for much of the last six months. It’s more overstated than a lot of his work, and Elfman maintains it was mixed badly, but it’s still great fun.

Swashbuckling Sea Songs – Welcome To The Caribbean
2009 was the year that Joshua officially discovered pirates. We soon found our home littered with dress-up costumes, model ships (the Playmobil one has been a particular favourite), books and activity packs, and Muppet Treasure Island has been in the DVD player more times than I’d care to count. Talking like a pirate (which in most cases consists of adopting a gravelly West Country accent and rolling your r’s; Brian Blessed does Somerset) is a curiously liberating experience, and the imaginative games we’ve played have been some of the most fun I’ve ever had with my eldest son. In June, I bought a Disney CD full of sea songs – some traditional, some from films, some commissioned – that has been much loved by all the family, particularly Thomas, who insists on hearing it almost nightly. There are some dodgy rhymes, and I’m pretty sure that the original version of ‘Blow The Man Down’ doesn’t contain any references to Jack Sparrow, but if it stops Daniel wailing in the back of the car, it must be good. Here’s one of the highlights.

The Pogues – Dirty Old Town
One of the highlights of 2009 for me was rambling through the peaks, travelling from Piccadilly (Manchester) to Haversage. The Folk Train is a monthly event that sees folk and blues bands hijack one of the carriages on a two-carriage stopping service and playing their material (and a lot of other people’s) all the way to the resting place of Little John. Then everyone troops off to the pub, and then gets back on the train again. The journey through the Peak District fairly hummed with the sound of jangling guitars, wooden sticks scraping on washboards, rustling sweet wrappers as complimentary chocolates were distributed throughout the carriage, the sound of singing and chattering and laughter and at least one mobile phone (“Yeah, I’m on a train. No, really, I am!”), and this tale of smoky Salford was perhaps the most memorable part of the set. Emily is still cross that I didn’t include a Mancunian version (“It just doesn’t sound the same sung with an Irish accent”) but it seems to be a favourite of Irish folk compilations, and MP3s of alternative versions were quite hard to track down – unless you’re going with the MacColl original, which is a bit too laid-back for my taste, you’re more or less stuck with interpretations from the Emerald Isle (and Rod Stewart, but let’s not go there). And it’s the Pogues, and I’m writing this at Christmas, and they did a song with Kirsty, so I guess it works. Kind of.

John Martyn – May You Never
John Martyn: a man I didn’t know before his death, save his bizarre acceptance speech when receiving a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Folk Awards in 2008. When I read up on what he was like, a lot of what I’d heard that night made sense. His death in the early weeks of this year was a major blow for British music, even if it wasn’t exactly a surprise. He was one of the few true characters still hanging around in an industry that’s becoming increasingly bland, and we are poorer for his absence, although his legacy remains. Here’s John with the oft-quoted ‘May You Never’, from 1973.

Yello – The Race
One of the joys of listening to music alphabetically this year was that on weeks where the letters came from the bottom of the Scrabble bag, you often found yourself having to improvise. We have nothing in the ‘Y’ department, for example, except for Neil Young and a Yes compilation. So it was with great joy that I rediscovered this little gem from Yello, when Mark Radcliffe played it on The Chain one evening: it was then that I realised I spent years listening to a re-recorded version on an old compilation CD. The video is suitably grotesque, but that brass hook is wonderful.

Theme from Escape From Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert’s pixelated creation reached nineteen years of age this year, which wasn’t necessarily cause for a party – however, fans of everyone’s favourite graphic adventure were thrilled to discover that the long-defunct Monkey Island franchise had been magically resurrected. Thus we were treated not only to a faithful, high definition remake of the original (complete with full voiceover), but also a whole new set of stories that saw Guybrush Threepwood once more take on the ghost pirate LeChuck, as well as an army of marauding zombie pirates. I spent most of my summer humming Michael Land’s irritatingly catchy theme, as well as replying to any sort of criticism with the words “How appropriate. You fight like a cow”. A lot.

Mike & The Mechanics – Word of Mouth
I’ve had a Mike & The Mechanics album in our collection for almost a decade – ever since I discovered the moving and powerful (if emotionally manipulative) eighties ballad that is ‘The Living Years’ – but it wasn’t until this year that I really started to listen to it. Rutherford and pals produced all number of great songs over the years, from the screaming-down-the-motorway-at-ninety powerhouse of pop that is ‘All I Need Is A Miracle’ (with a video guest-starring Roy Kinnear, of all people) to the apocalyptic ‘Silent Running’, but this stadium stomp about the danger of believing everything you read seemed to have particular resonance for me in a year when I became perhaps more aware than ever that most of what’s printed in the papers is either exaggerated, inaccurate or downright false. Beware the angry mob, who like who they like and hate who they hate, but who are also easily swayed.

Duke Special – Let Me Go (Please, Please, Please)
Watching Duke Special was the most fun I had at this year’s Greenbelt: travelling to Cheltenham straight from another festival that he himself had organised, the tired noble launched into a hyperactive display of frenzied, crowd-pleasing antics and dazzling showmanship, over the course of an hour or so. No crowd member was left unsurfed, and no piano untipped: it was sometimes bizarre, but it was always fun to watch. Duke’s new album is loaded with catchy pop songs, and this ‘Lady Madonna’ soundalike was arguably the highlight of his Greenbelt set, embellished as it was with guitar and Hammond solos. The impact is lost somewhat in the studio, as it is on the live version in the link above, but you get the general idea.

The Bellamy Brothers – Let Your Love Flow
Winner of this year’s ‘follows you round everywhere’ award, this Bellamy Brothers M.O.R. masterpiece in miniature first came to my attention when it was used to advertise Barclaycard – a pleasing mixture of images as a businessman descends through the financial district on an enormous water slide. After that, it seemed to be playing every time I switched on the radio. Whether this was because its use on TV shunted it up their playlist – an audience-winning tactic that runs dangerously close to advertising – or whether people were just in the mood for something light and happy has never been clear. Damned good song, though.

Kaiser Chiefs – Ruby
I’ve mentioned Joshua’s pirate awakening – as far as I’m concerned, 2009 was the year I officially discovered the Kaiser Chiefs (or Kaiser Chiefs, as they would rather be called, although personally I think the definitive article adds something). Frequently lambasted by the music press for being somewhat bland, the Chiefs have if nothing else succeeded in impressing me, largely through stomping guitar riffs, catchy choruses and insightful lyrics – any song that opens with “I remember nights out when we were young / They weren’t very good, they were rubbish” has got to be a winner. But it’s ‘Ruby’ who comes a close second to the previous cut on this collection when it comes to records that seem to follow you round. There is some dodgy word-setting in the second verse, but the chorus is great. If you get the time, the live version where the band are accompanied by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (who, are in the words of Ricky Wilson, “are also from Leeds”) is worth seeking out.

Rolf Harris feat. Rick Parfitt – Christmas In The Sun
Hurrah! Uncle Rolf’s back, and this time he’s bringing his band – specifically, stone age rockers Status Quo, who provide a jaunty backing track to Harris’ seasonal celebration of yuletide festivities down under. Refreshingly devoid of Australian stereotypes (save the beer and barbecue), this David to the X-Factor’s Goliath couldn’t really hope to make a dent on the Christmas charts; pleasing though it is to find the bearded one sing about childhood holiday periods in a land he now inhabits for only six months of each year, the melody doesn’t really go anywhere, and there seem to be an awful lot of lyrics to fit in there. Rolf’s apparently been working on this for twelve years, but it doesn’t show. Trash, but fun.

Michael Jackson – Earth Song
It’s the end of the year, and Michael Jackson is still dead. Except he isn’t, not really, because we all know that he’s faked his own passing to get out of debt and is now living on a goat farm in Fiji, where he’ll probably stay for the rest of his life. But to the rest of the world, he might as well be. And so we mourned him, an artist who’d (like Lloyd Webber) had long since passed his prime but who was responsible for more than a few cuts on the soundtrack of my childhood. The day it was announced, Radio 1 played ‘Earth Song’ just after 5 p.m., and every car on the road rolled down its windows and cranked up the volume. Everyone knows the stories behind this one, and some of them are notorious, but it remains a fantastic pop record – immaculately produced, competently scored, passionately performed and packing a real emotional punch.

The Muppets – Bohemian Rhapsody
Created in order to promote YouTube’s HD channel, this bungee jump into the Queen canon is about as anarchic as you’d expect from Henson’s finest. Choosing to neglect the more questionable lyrics of the original in favour of having Animal bellow “MAMA!” at the screen for almost a minute, the Muppets’ ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ gets even sillier once cyberspace is invaded by Bunsen and Beaker, Statler and Waldorf, Crazy Harry (“let me blow!”) and Fozzie, before the Electric Mayhem rock out (even though it’s only a mime, with re-dubbed vocals). The almost (but not quite) final word goes to Miss Piggy, perched atop Rowlf’s grand piano in utter defiance of the laws of physics, while a worried Kermit surveys the scenes of mayhem and destruction from afar. Somewhere, you can almost hear Freddie Mercury laughing. Insane, but quite glorious – and a suitably apt closing number for a slightly off the wall compilation, reflecting a surreal and occasionally hazy 2009.