Texts are the new novels: Part 3

Okay I'm completely addicted to these. Even when they don't start off that funny the cumulative effect just has me on the floor eventually. Go on, tuck in ...

Dry it on the curtains

Swear to god I've just seen a guy who's in Triga Scally soccer orgy pushing a fucking pram up oldham street

I had to eat quiche and look at holiday photos off my box

I'm in bed with the yorkshire ripper

I’m doing my paper round

I'm gonna learn all the words to otto titsling

do i look like a spanner?

I'm on marie's side. You're a cunt.

Come for a drink then you won't have to look at his beautiful large ass

Question: If there was a pill to take to forget about him in between would you take it?

Is that a bar? I've never heard of it or you or manchester. *kills self*

Yeah. Thought as much. You're fucked and so am I.

God i can't WAIT to have a hangover

Oh. Em. Gee. Fit. Dad. Capital of britain.

I'm not eating spray cream straight from the can are you?

Just gonna go home and play 'This time i know it's for real'

Have been roaring laughing at memory of duncan from school calling a car a ‘fanny magnet’

Every time i open a window 800 flies pour in

I'd throw a milk bottle full of piss at her

the guy in Safad is the most beautiful sad world weary kebab guy in the whole of Manchester

Please google all gay bars in scarborough and text details asap

I am so drunk that milk has come out of my eyes

I've just been at the gym for 45 minutes watching jam and Jerusalem

Do you think i should just spray cream onto maltesers?

Music emergency! Go and listen to terrorvision doing perseverance. BRILLIANT. I'd love to hear it at Bollox.

If i look at a picture of this man one more time i am going to burn a hole in my screen

The website is designed by blind interns

Please note we are no longer dealing with diarrhoea or gonorrhoea as these are causing repetitive strain in the girls typing the invoices

Am in york with the hangover from hades

Just had angel delight for breakfast

I'm having a mai tai in OUR tiki bar! Wish you were here!

Totally shameful sight of four gays flirting madly with a mixologist

Go to a sauna. Art blows.

Mostly germans and jews and gays, oh my!

Oh my god i look like steve tyler from aerosmith

Woo! Craig no smoke without fire charles!

I have repeat visions of me sitting on the edge of the nasty candlewick bedspread. Alone.

I just read the rest of your foreskin posts

I'm sorry i live in such a monstrous place

My one pint turned out to be the size of a swimming pool

She chopped up her boyfriend in the bath. She's such an inspiration.

*prepares dance of the seven veils*

Kylie's not short, she's just far away

My opening chapter has been vastly improved. I'd not only publish me, I’d fuck me over the desk at random house. Dance break!

Can't you simply procure a standard issue plexiglass disease bubble from outpatients to roll about the streets in like a big hairy hamster?

just watched the scene in league where Ross fucks Pauline

CHOCOLATE PUDDING!!! *dry humps chair*

'She looks like she might burn down a plantation' is my favourite line

One time he escaped out of the bath, ran downstairs and straight into the patio doors. Didn't speak to us for days.

Were your massive big ears burning?

Went to WHSmith, bought a card reading 'Happy birthday to a nana who's loved lots and lots' and Attitude: The sex issue. As predicted i look like a methhead.

Come off it I've got suicide written right through me like the cheap stick of blackpool rock that i am

Girls, girls, girls ...

After this sorry showing recently, I shook myself good and proper and delved into some much-loved lady music to redress the balance, and I'm so glad I did. Songs that have hit me like a ton of bricks include 'Dying' by Hole, 'These Colander Eyes' by Alison Moyet and the whole of PJ's Stories From The City ...once again. Outstanding newbies to me are Nina Simone's cover of 'No Woman, No Cry' (just, cry), Randy Crawford's Now We May Begin album. Madonna's first LP I haven't heard in years. and sounds amazing.. simply shit loads of great stuff. And album of the year at this halfway point? Still It's Blitz for me. Anyone heard anything better yet ...?

Last Day In New York: “I have to maintain a calm demeanour! Somebody has to stay strong!” (Hysterical woman on cell phone, Second Avenue)

Bleary bleary morning. Following last night’s Brooklyn madness we wake late and decidedly dry of mouth. Outside is the last of our Manhattan morning birdsong, in fact everything we do today will have the melancholy ring of finality to it. Intense sunlight pushes at the slats of the blinds to remind us, as if we could forget, that the heat wave is still defiantly on. Day six, 88 degrees.

Sketchy plans for the day include finding somewhere cool, in every sense, to look at art. Our flight isn’t until much later tonight so we pack, leave suitcases at the hotel and drag our collective hungover ass streetwards. Five days of incessant schvitzing has made the populace fractious and irritable and totally New York. The quote above is one of many from people on the edge of deciding to become completely hysterical.

After a short walk we take refuge in a blissfully air-conditioned St Marks Bookstore where I peruse art journals and books about black magic and graffiti. Anticipating a park stop at some point in the day I decide I’ll need a novel and settle on Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story which I ought to have read immediately upon coming out, but better late than never. I also grab a New York magazine to see what scandal, gossip and events have been happening under our noses this week on the island.

From St Marks it’s a mere three or four blocks to Washington Square Park where we are unconsciously drawn by the promise of shade, running the gauntlet of punishing sunlight through Astor Place to get there. The park is inevitably buzzing with people of a similar persuasion. The swing band from earlier in the week has been replaced by a jazz ensemble and a more relaxed, if heat-stricken air. Shade is more of a premium than real estate. We bag a not especially comfy and slightly dusty spot for ourselves, but it’s beneath some beautiful blossom trees and is perfect for people/dog watching.


We both snooze, oblivious to the possible theft of our stuff, until I’m roused by piercing hollers from the enterprising girls selling iced water at a dollar a bottle to grateful punters and their hot little mutts. Leaf through New York magazine, wishing I could stay here, drink water, coffee, smoke cigs, have another nap. The jazz band appear to be playing the best parts of Miles Davis’s A Kind Of Blue and I wish for my life to be like this always.

We don’t appear to be going anywhere in a hurry so we chat idly and somehow verge into a hilarious conversation in which we attempt to decide what our drag queen names would be if we were to jack it all in, move here and make a career of it. We settle on Susan Seran-wrap for me and Tina Foil, or possibly Cilla Tape, for Joff, with dresses made from the appropriate materials of course (Cilla is to have miniature rolls of sellotape for earrings). We waste the sweet afternoon like this and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I drink it all in and save it for home.


Too too soon it’s time to leave and before we know it we’re negotiating a crippling cab fare to Newark, the radio news warning us that the lethal Mexican swine flu won’t be confined to that continent for much longer. The traffic drags to New Jersey but I don’t mind, the rear window of the cab offers one last glimpse after another of the city, teasing out the goodbyes until by the airport toll only the Empire State is once again visible above the heat haze of Manhattan.

On the plane I get a deep and horrid feeling, just like last time I left New York six years ago, that it won’t be there again when next I look, or worse, the magic will have disappeared altogether from the skyline, the store fronts, the streets. I have the feeling I’m heading for somewhere I don’t belong and leaving somewhere I do. I want to play The Raveonette’s ‘New York Was Great’ and REM’s ‘Leaving New York’ but I have neither on my player. I play random shit from the plane selection instead and find Barry Manilow’s rendition of Phil Collins’ ‘Against All Odds’ moves me intensely, which should tell you something about my mental state.


I pick up my novel as soon as the plane begins to taxi, I want to be somewhere else. A Boy’s Own Story is Edmund White’s first autobiographical novel, a young gay boy, a fractured family, a life starved of beauty and kindness. It’s 1950s America and a world away but some of the sentiments might have been lifted straight from me ten, twelve, fourteen years ago, if not the fantasies of rough trade and older men then certainly the persistent, beautiful solace of the dream of a one-way ticket to New York City. That’s when I recall distinctly what New York once meant to me, at sixteen, a lifeline out of an ill-fitting life, a fantasy bigger than the real city could ever be, even, perhaps especially, now that I have walked across it a dozen times and seen the whole of it from the sky.

I think with affection and some dread about the empty flat that’s waiting for me in England, which I can barely afford now. Edmund White writes: “’I don’t belong here!’, I shouted at them silently …” and my lip trembles a little bit.

New York is a shoal of lit fish beneath us. I touch the tiny scabs of the three day old tattoo below my hip. It reads: i am mine.

100 Songs

‘To all who pass that they may see
Rock 'n' Roll was a part of me’ 
- Nik Cohn

There’s a scene in Educating Rita where Frank is trying to find Rita and ends up pissed at the disco. He’s dancing and smoking spliff with some students and the track playing in the background is just amazing. Whenever I watch the film I always have to rewind that bit several times (I can dance exactly like Michael Caine). I always suspected it was an obscure Human League track (are there any?). When I eventually got round to looking it up I discovered it doesn’t feature on the official soundtrack release (neither does the brilliant pub singalong). Other interested minds persevered and it turns out it was originally released as the B-side to the 7" of the movie theme by keyboard maestro David Hentschel. Lo and behold, the track, ironically called ‘I Can’t Dance’ (sorry Michael) is there in its entirety on youtube. God bless the internet.

But it didn’t stop there. Mention was made of a remix and this I also managed to find as a free MP3, mixed into a glorious nine-minute epic by disco-bod Glenn Rivera. I was ecstatic and have played it every day since. ‘This is going straight into my top 100 songs ever,’ I proclaimed, and that’s where it started.

For the record, 100 songs is just not enough, and moreover this list is not my favourite 100 songs of all time. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ isn’t here, nor ‘Animal Nitrate’, ‘Manchild’, ‘Be My Wife’, ‘Sheila Take A Bow’ or ‘Sir Duke’. The ground rule, because there had to be one, is that each artist could only appear once. (I bumped Jeff Buckley’s ‘Last Goodbye’ for his duet with Liz Fraser and don’t think it was easy).


Turned out to be a very strange list in the end. Seems I pretty much like really sad songs or ones that make you shake your moneymaker, and not very much in between. Even Del Shannon’s early 60s beaut ‘Runaway’ is here in part for the line ‘And I wonder, where she will stay, my little runaway..?’ Sniff. I’m also frightfully more mainstream and gay than I thought, there’s no Donna Summer or Abba, but whither the greasy guitar bands I was reared on? No Wedding Present for Christ’s sake. Or Teenage Fanclub. No punk even, despite it being the best single-release genre of all. I did try to shoehorn ‘Bodies’ by the Pistols in at one point, just cos, and then I remembered Sam Cooke and, well, what can you do? Even Blur and Blondie have been mercilessly bumped for a one hit wonder and a dollop of doo-wop. No Leonard Cohen either (contender for greatest lyricist of all time) but an album track by Frente there, and largely because of the lyrics (‘I suddenly hear the worst words explode into love at my ear …’).

There are a couple of shockers, I don’t really know what to say about Boston other than I’ve been playing air guitar to it for most of my life and I can’t let it go now. Nothing by The Carpenters, Fleetwood Mac, Dusty, Neil Young or Pet Shop Boys. Countless others noticeable by their absence, but this is all about the song and in the pop world the one-off gem is just as vital as the consistency of a great songwriter, which is why John Lennon’s solo career simply can’t hold a candle to something like Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ and you all know it.

The songs aren’t in any kind of order other than vague groupings I have given to some for ease of reference. So here you have it, I can’t explain it, but oh how I love the madness of actually wondering, ‘Do I like ‘Get Me’ by Dinosaur Jr more than ‘A Little Respect’? Well do I??’ My last move was to swap Sonic Youth’s ‘Bull In The Heather’ for Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’. What might this mean?

Lots of tracks are here for personal reasons of course but that’s what makes an ordinary person’s Best Of better than one more Rolling Stone trawl through the ‘classics’. Each song represents a little stitch in the tapestry of my life (yawn), who knows, without one of them the whole thing might start to come undone …

Here’s the Spotify playlist to go with it, which has a few holes in of course, and that’s it. Oh and I ain’t ashamed of nothin’ I did …



I Can’t Dance – David Hentschel (Glenn Rivera Mix)


There’s A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends – Morrissey
I originally chose ‘Lost’ then ‘A Swallow On My Neck’ (which might be my favourite ever love song). I prevaricated over ‘The Ordinary Boys’, ‘Don’t Make Fun Of Daddy’s Voice’ and ‘Sunny’, then almost settled for ‘Last Of The Famous International Playboys’, but eventually it had to be this, the closing track from second studio album proper, Kill Uncle. A wry, terribly sad piano ballad composed by undervalued genius Mark Nevin that’s utterly non-representative of the album or Morrissey’s output thereafter, is over in less than two minutes, has no proper verse or chorus but which stands alongside the very best of Billie Holiday or Leonard Cohen for lessons in plaintive and painful swansongs.


Atmosphere – Joy Division
The death scene in 24 Hour Party People has cemented the status of this song for me, the windchime noises one minute in and Ian saying ‘Don’t walk away…’ are forever sad and beautiful.


Scary music...

When I was a kid there were two kinds of music you were ‘warned about’, music that made you scared when you heard it, then excited, and finally addicted. The first was acid house and all the beepy mainstream variations thereof which inevitably led to drugs and ultimately death. I can’t communicate the excitement of hearing Evapor8 – Altern8 for the first time. Those four big belching electric bass notes are haaardcoooore. I thought just watching the video would make me want to overdose on acid and Ecstasy in a cave in Cumbria. I’d only just turned 14, it was unlikely. Watch it below. They eat cereal and buy a tank.


Everybody In The Place – The Prodigy was a scarier and more mental prospect than the previous cutesy ‘Charly’ and is still my favourite of their tracks. I tried to replicate it on our keyboard at home while dancing like Keith. I was marginally more successful with the latter.

The other scary devil music was hip-hop, not gorgeous love and peace rap like Eye Know – De La Soul (my first loves) or even slightly tougher fare from Run DMC (my second loves but absent from the list) but the real Black Power no-shit party-hard sound of the projects, and I loved it to death. Almost in the list was Straight Outta Compton – N.W.A. which was that band’s calling card and which still sounds the shit today. N.W.A. were slightly more of a party posse but it was tracks like Rebel Without A Pause – Public Enemy that gave hip-hop the tough political edge that for a time saved it from being diluted in the mainstream, where it has never really belonged. ‘Rebel’ is one of those amazing early hip-hop tracks that’s a microcosm of Black America, there’s a dozen spoken and played samples on it, black American history is screaming and wired and condensed into three minutes. ‘Rebel’ usually takes a backseat to ‘Fight The Power’ and ‘Don’t Believe The Hype’ as favoured tracks from It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back but for me the screeching clarinet/sax sample and those drums just nail this one. The former is from the intro to this and the latter is from here, 5.40 in and just … wow …


Listen carefully to the almost discordant piano from Everybody Dance – Chic and tell me that Sweet Harmony – Liquid isn’t its rightful successor on the dancefloor. It’s my funeral and I want these bitches played back to back.


I Want You Back – Jackson Five
This song could make roadkill dance.


Everything Counts - Depeche Mode
My first memory of the Mode is seeing them do ‘Shake The Disease’ on Top Of The Pops. Because of Martin’s hair and the bit where he sings ‘Understand me…’ like a lovely lady, I think I thought they were the Thompson Twins. I was only seven. A few years later at senior school some older boys from sixth form had a band called, I think, Imbalance, and they played this and I thought they were geniuses in the making before I discovered it was by Depeche Mode. I filled in the gaps and tentatively began to let keyboards into my life.


Tumbling Dice – The Rolling Stones
Clued me up to the Stones where ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Satisfaction’ had failed.


Heaven Help Us All – Stevie Wonder
Upwards of a dozen Stevie songs belong here but having gone around several houses I went back to this one, written just as Motown started to become political and interesting and first heard by me on my favourite piece of vinyl, Motown Chartbusters Vol. 5, which also houses politico-soul gems ‘War,’ ‘Ball of Confusion,’ ‘Abraham, Martin and John’ and ‘Forget Me Not’. ‘Heaven Help’ is a checklist of societal ills that compels us all to look at one another and only the uplifting gospel choir and heartrending key change stop this from being a paean to despair. Magic.



U-Mass – Pixies
Almost picked the sublime ‘Velouria’ but this track is just as good and packs a little more historical punch. Listen to ‘U-Mass’ then ‘Teen Spirit’ then ‘Cannonball’ and see how Frank Black provided the perfect template for quiet-loud guitar forever. It also has the words ‘cock’ and ‘cunt’ in it.


All Flowers In Time Bend Towards The Sun – Jeff Buckley and Liz Fraser
Two of my favourite voices of all time together in a song that should be so much more famous than it is.


Postcards From Italy – Beirut
Late entry from precocious tearjerker. When you play it try to imagine a very elderly couple dancing together in the street of a tiny Greek village, remembering their youth. That’s what I do. Gets me every time. Thankyou Katie.


Samson – Regina Spektor
‘I loved you first…’



Make It Easy On Yourself – The Walker Brothers
The last act of kindness to someone who’s about to leave you, even the choir-of-angels backing make him into a martyr. It really is all about the sad songs.


In My Life – The Beatles
Typical me that I’m a McCartneyite through and through but my favourite Beatles song is actually this one by Lennon and dear Paul hasn’t made the list so you can stop scanning for ‘The Frog Chorus’ right now.
French Disko – Stereolab
From back when John Peel routinely threw dynamite sticks of pure thrills into our lives.


Explode – Frente!
I’m not kidding, I love it that much.


Since Yesterday – Strawberry Switchblade
Early Top Of The Pops memory and actually a touching break-up song dressed up behind those pretty pop ribbons.


Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana
Oh god what a Q magazine choice, right? When I was thirteen we got Sky TV, then soon after we got rid of it again. During this brief multichannel holiday my sister and I graduated from watching the DJ Kat show before school to religiously watching MTV where this seemed to be the only video they owned and you could sometimes get two viewings in during breakfast. It soundtracked entire days for me in 1991 and opened up all kinds of avenues, some of which were dead ends (Stone Temple Pilots) and some of which I’m still walking now (Sonic Youth, Pixies). At Glastonbury 2003 Scratch Perverts blew up the dance tent with it. Come on, it still sounds as good as it ever did.


The Drowners – Suede
The beginning of it all.



God Only Knows – Beach Boys
My tongue-in-cheek but sad funeral song (‘God only knows what I’d be without you …’) and Carl Wilson at his most angelic.


Light My Fire – The Doors
Kick-started teenage obsession with Jim Morrison and thereafter all things sixties. I could recite his poems by heart and watched Oliver Stone’s The Doors weekly. My first counter-culture hero proper and the first time I felt born at the wrong time, see rest of life from then on for further examples.




Got To Be Real – Cheryl Lynn
Say what you like (it’s disco-lite, it’s too gay, it’s been Sex and the City’d to death) whatever, I loved it first. This bitch has got me out of the door many times when all I really wanted to do was stay home and self-harm to Bauhaus.


Wuthering Heights – Kate Bush
Pop songs about books! And it’s even better than the novel! Much as I adore Morrissey, when people say that he introduced literacy into pop music, I always recall: ‘You had a temper like my jealousy, too hot, too greedy’. It’s hardly ‘Ooh baby, baby yeah’ is it?


Italian Fireflies – Black Strobe
Taught me everything I needed to know about overdoing it on the dancefloor in very dark clubs.


Push It – Salt ‘n’ Pepa

Sea Of Love - Phil Phillips 

Mars – Fake Blood
It’s still up there.


Love In The First Degree – Bananarama
At the school disco me and Joff would dance in a circle with the girls to this, the ‘Nanas greatest moment, and actually do the proper moves from the video while getting ripped to the tits on popping candy and Lilt. Cue zero dropped jaws when the pair of us came out.


There Is A Light That Never Goes Out – The Smiths
‘Whatever happens to the world The Smiths will never die’ read the famous graffiti in the toilets of the Brighton Dome. This was the first Smiths song I heard and I instantly fell in love with it and them and him, then thirteen years later it was the song I actually fell in love to, on a dancefloor, almost at first sight, just like in a film. I can’t play it yet. Any day now …


Lullaby – The Cure
Contains some of the finest lyrics ever written. I bet Angela Carter loved this song.


Wear Your Love Like Heaven – Definition Of Sound
It’s possible a cassette still exists somewhere of me and my sister singing along to this with home-made percussion instruments with Mum shouting ‘Tea!’ in the background.


The Tracks Of My Tears – Smokey Robinson And The Miracles
My most-played seven inch single.


For Love – Lush
Before their slightly unfortunate ladette makeover circa Britpop, Lush occasionally made such sparkly noises that the Cocteau Twins themselves might covet it and this is their finest, plus one of the best indie singles ever.


Stay With Me – Lorraine Ellison
This was one of Cilla’s Desert Island Discs you know.


Hide And Seek – Imogen Heap
Vocoder perfection.


Emerge – Fischerspooner
In the slutty heyday of electroclash this track cut to the chase and perfected that throbbing two-tone bassline that everyone had been itching to dance to (see also Ladytron’s ‘Seventeen’, I-F ‘Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass’). I’ve had more inspired and jubilant moments clubbing to this than I could ever remember.


Hush The Warmth – Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci
Back during ‘The Madness’ I would go to my therapist, walk home exhausted, buy some chocolate, have a fag, try and stay awake till the end of ER then curl up under my duvet and put this song on repeat until I felt safe. Still works.


Karma Chameleon – Culture Club
I can’t remember a time before this song and I don’t know why but despite its blatantly jangly upbeat ways I still think there’s something touching about it, that first minor chord in the chorus makes me wobble.


Can’t Cry Hard Enough – Judy Collins
About which more here.


One Day In Your Life – Michael Jackson
God love him.


Bacharach's Diva Corner ...
I only realised after the final count that three of Burt's ladies were here. These versions are not interchangeable, poor Dionne couldn't quite cut it with any of them I'm afraid.

Anyone Who Had A Heart – Cilla Black
Cilla's finest, even more so than 'Alfie', she can't work out whether to go posh or not but the tremulous power of her lungs simply pours forth.

A House Is Not A Home – Shirley Bassey
Lest we forget that the lady Bassey can do plaintive and restrained as much as pure bombast, listen for the last wobble as she turns the key, and pleads ... incredible. Also has my favourite surreal pop lyric ever: 'a chair is not a house'. Quite.

I Say A Little Prayer – Aretha Franklin
Not just for the vocals, she's done better, but for the way she has to hold herself back just to keep it all in, she doesn't even sing the chorus herself, she just chips in until eventually she has to yell. And for the romantic humdrum of the life she describes, the bus, the make up, the coffee, the quiet yearning for him, whichever unsuitable bum he turns out to be. Sigh.


This Is How It Feels – Inspiral Carpets
Carolina In My Mind – James Taylor
My erstwhile karaokoe opus.


No Woman, No Cry – Bob Marley



Nag Nag Nag – Cabaret Voltaire
Sounds like it was recorded in a cardboard box with Fisher Price instruments.


Vapour Trail – Ride
Even better than My Bloody Valentine.


My Funny Valentine – Ella Fitzgerald
Somebody once sang it to me and meant it. Awww.


Waterloo Sunset – The Kinks

Back To Life (However Do You Want Me) – Soul II Soul
Caron Wheeler and Jazzie B made Britain cool again way before Britpop. I always imagined myself walking through Ladbroke Grove while this played from every car and open window. Unlikely, given that I was an eleven year old white boy in Blackpool, but this record hasn’t worn itself out a jot for me.


Birdhouse In Your Soul – They Might Be Giants


It Takes Two – Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock


Raspberry Beret – Prince
You Got The Love – The Source featuring Candi Staton
Spawns legions of unforgivably drab funky upfront vocal bollocks to this very day, but the blueprint is epic.


Piece Of My Heart – Erma Franklin
All my favourite bits of this song happen in the first thirty seconds, that lazy booze-sodden piano, Erma’s barely there first words then the sidle up to the first high note of ‘yoouuuu…’. You’d never guess an Aretha-esque hollerin’ chorus is just round the corner.


Bette Davis Eyes – Kim Carnes

Time After Time – Cyndi Lauper

Joga – Bjork
It’s a magical spell.


Blue – Joni Mitchell
'Acid, booze and ass, needles, guns and grass...'



Same Old Scene – Roxy Music
Hands down fave Roxy track.


Are ‘Friends’ Electric? – Tubeway Army
No, we love you anyway.


Buddy Holly – Weezer


A New England – Kirsty MacColl
Still looking.


That’s Us / Wild Combination – Arthur Russell
This was probably the first decent gay love song in decades. Arthur was ten kinds of musician and could play everyone at their own game. He only came into my life recently, this song means he’s with me for keeps now.



My Baby Just Cares For Me – Nina Simone
Painfully populist choice I know, but for all the sad majesty of ‘Sunday In Savannah’ or ‘Wild Is The Wind’ this song showcases what Nina really was, a tremendous multi-genre pianist who was shoehorned into being a singer. The cod-classical middle piece that somehow eventually trills its way back to the plinky-plonky main theme is her genius fingers at their very best.


Changes – David Bowie
This took even longer than my Morrissey choice. It’s partly down to the quote at the start of The Breakfast Club, partly because Idecided it had to be something from Hunky Dory, my favourite Bowie album, and partly because I don’t think anyone would believe me if I’d put ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’.

I Wanna Be Your Dog – The Stooges
My favourite intro of all time in which the squalling guitar feedback of the naughty rock ‘n’ roll Stooges is suddenly brought sharply into line by John Cale’s rhythmic sleigh bells and single Velvet’s piano chord. At heel boys.


Father And Son – Cat Stevens


Venus In Furs – Velvet Underground
I knew this song long before the rest of VU’s work and I confess I was sorely disappointed that it didn’t all sound like this. I’ve never really gotten over it. This is bohemian music perfected, hurt-cat violins soundtracking dark sexual practices. This is all their sunglasses and leather and androgyny and anti-flower-power powers distilled to shiny screeching tinfoil cool. Pass me my Beatle boots, my Breton shirt, my heroin.


Runaway – Del Shannon

Will You Love Me Tomorrow – The Shirelles
No ‘Still’ in the title, and no question mark either, that’s me told. Goffin/King’s greatest ever thing, the pinnacle description of teen courtship anxiety and the transience of romance, plus if you listen to it as though they’ve just gone all the way for the first time in the back of his Chevy you’ll understand why she’s so worried about what she just gave away.


Satellite Of Love – Lou Reed
I know what you’re thinking, this is just an excuse to get another Bowie song in the list. Yeah, it is actually, it really is tremendously good though, and what would Lou and Dame Bowie be without each other anyhow?


More Than A Feeling – Boston
Oh come on. It's been watched nearly four million times on YouTube and only a million of those were me.


Outdoor Miner – Wire
Art-rock five-chord haiku majesty from one of most important and original bands in world ever dot com.

Weekend In New England – Barry Manilow
Listen to it as though it’s about two gay men who can’t be together. Barry didn’t write it though, Randy Edelman did.

Georgy Girl – The Seekers
The Clash are not on this list because of this song. Deal.


I Can Give You The Starlight – Mary Ellis
Mary Ellis sings like an actual saw. This particular Ivor Novello gem nearly smashes all your windows on the high notes and is supremely exhilarating and I can’t believe Spotify has it.


O Holy Night – Mahalia Jackson
She will make you believe in Jesus if you let her.


Chalet Lines – Belle & Sebastian
The best song ever written about getting raped at Butlins.




You’re So Vain – Carly Simon
So much is unique about this song; the witty Catch 22 of the premise, the weird horror-movie bass on the intro, the peculiarly literate diction of apricots and clouds in my coffee and the wife of a close friend, the thrilling knowledge that it’s all real life, the way it goes quiet on the sad bits, the way it’s so frank and the way it works those seventies harmonies that were tighter than their jeans, it’s all so good.


Where Angels Play – The Stone Roses
I always preferred ethereal numbers such as this and ‘Going Down’. This song, all chugging and spangles, easily stands alongside anything off the first album.


Needle In The Hay – Elliott Smith
Ed Harcourt didn’t make it but Elliott did and I always think of them as something like kindred spirits. ‘Needle’ has the most hypnotic guitar, it seems to fight itself all the way through and the vocals are uncharacteristically right there in the mix, he seems to be in the room with you. If only he could be.


When Will I See You Again? – The Three Degrees
Somewhere In My Heart – Aztec Camera


I Only Have Eyes For You – The Flamingos
First heard in Lady And The Tramp and loved ever since, those echoing vocals are a production masterwork, they make everything sound so black and white and far away.


Motorcycle Emptiness – Manic Street Preachers


A Little Respect – Erasure
Is there a club where this wouldn’t work? I even like the Wheatus version.


Aerodynamic – Daft Punk
Another one plugged by Peel I seem to recall. I even had to put down The Exorcist, which I was reading at the time. ‘Is that a guitar?,’ I remember thinking. It’s like how people in the past thought the future would sound. Brilliant.


Ol’ Man River – Paul Robeson
The notes come from somewhere under his boots, where the ghosts are. I think he is simply wonderful, an all-time hero, a cultural giant. This song is over seventy years old. Re: the whole slavery thing, it’s just not the same when Judy Garland sings ‘Tote that barge, lift that bale’, is it?


Soul heartbreakers... A Change Is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke These Arms Of Mine – Otis Redding
Melodically related, at least they seem so to me, the chord changes alone in these songs do for me, but those voices … it’s something else to try and describe them. The evocation of all the struggles to come for Black America makes the former particularly moving, as does the fact beautiful Sam never lived to see the record chart. The line ‘It’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die’ nods, perhaps unconsciously, to the Robeson line from above, ‘I’m tired of living and scared of dying’ and brings two vocal giants momentarily together. As for ‘These Arms Of Mine’, the relative albatross of ‘Dock Of The Bay’ can take a backseat as far as I’m concerned to this restrained but monumental heartbreaking two and a half minutes. Somebody once played this to me in bed when I was nineteen and I smile about it still.


Downtown – Petula Clark
The sound of city streets on headphones at night, Leicester Square, Oxford Road, La Ramblas, Second Avenue, wherever you are, it really does make you feel better.


Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue – Crystal Gayle
Yeah, it do.


Together In Electric Dreams – Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder
Uplifting Casio Utopia.


The judge's decision is never final ...

… missed connections …

Me: 6’1” - dark hair - glasses - headphones - grey T shirt. You: 5’10” or thereabouts - royal blue polo shirt - jeans - rucksack - brightly coloured belt. I was on the 142 Magic Bus, you got on around the corner at the Palace Hotel. You glanced over as you walked up the aisle. For a second. You were handsome, beautiful in fact, dark, Mediterranean-looking, black curly hair, perfect smile, hairy chest behind your blue shirt. You looked like you had just got good news. You had the right money. You didn’t notice me. We didn’t share a moment. It was just me. Please please get in touch.

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