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366 Songs 087: Black Steel

“Black Steel” wasn’t the first Tricky track that I’d heard, nor the first Public Enemy cover, but it was the first of both that made me, on first listen, pretty much jump up from my chair and wonder what the fuck was I listening to, and make me wish I could rewind the live TV in front of me (Oh, TiVo, if only you’d existed twenty years earlier). I was entranced, astounded and decided that I would buy the album as soon as I had the chance, which would have to be after the weekend I was going to spend at a friend’s parents as part of a… birthday party, I think? Maybe I’m mixing up reasons and events in my brain. Nevertheless, on one incomplete hearing, “Black Steel” stayed playing in my brain for the three hours or so it took me to get to said friend’s parents’ house, a continual loop of my memory’s version of the song with me knowing that it was completely lacking the… what, the synthetic passion of the arrangement, the detached disdain of the vocals, the way it felt different from everything else I was listening to at the time? All of that, perhaps.

I got to the friends’, and asked if anyone else knew the song or listened to Tricky and was given the kind of response you’d expect from the Britpop-centric crowd we were that day (which is to say, “Tricky who? Isn’t he one of those Trip-Hop people?”). For the next two days, in amongst real life, the riff played in my head at low volume. I bought the album soon after, and realized that I didn’t even like the song that much in comparison with everything else on there.

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366 Songs 085/086: Supernatural Giver/Children of the Revolution


A surreally strong musical memory was hearing a Radio 1 DJ go from “Supernatural Giver” by proto-Britpop band Kinky Machine (If nothing else, their single covers were Menswear’s aesthetic about three years early, right down to an identical font) to T-Rex’s “Children of the Revolution” as if they were one song, just letting “Giver” end and the chug-chug of “Children” start as if it was some weird, awesome coda to the last song. I can remember really clearly sitting at the desk in my bedroom, trying to study for some upcoming exam and being… distracted wasn’t the word; I couldn’t concentrate on work at that moment because there was something about the obvious connection between the new song and the old song, the way they sounded related, the way that the T-Rex song didn’t sound like anything I’d heard before (Maybe I’d heard “Get It On” before this, but I’m not sure, to be honest) and I thought “I need to listen to more glam rock. This is what pop music should sound like.”

It wasn’t the power of one song or the other. It was the power of the moment where the two crossed over, if that makes sense.

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366 Songs 084: Right Here, Right Now

“Right Here Right Now” was the exclusive soundtrack to my grieving process for my dead grandmother. I say it like that, quasi-sarcastically, out of defensiveness for the subject and everything around it, but this song was genuinely one of the few things that gave me some break from the confusion and sadness that I fell into after my father’s mother died in… 1991, I guess it must have been? Again with the missing the point of the lyrics – This is, after all, a relatively optimistic if painfully sincere and worthy song – but there was something about it that matched the fragile feeling I was wearing at the time, as much as that embarrasses the post-hipster me I am now to admit. It wasn’t even a single or anything at the time in the UK; I’d hear it so much because it was big in the US, and I wasn’t sleeping and so saw a lot of the imported America’s Top 10 chart shows that’d play at 2:30 in the morning. But there was something about this song, insomnia and sadness that fit together too well at the time for me.

(I also liked other Jesus Jones songs, for my sins, but we might get to that later.)

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366 Songs 083: Cannonball

There’s a moment in everyone’s life, if they’re doing it right and being lucky, when someone unexpected will come along and go “That thing you’re into that you didn’t think anyone else was, and you were totally alone? I like it too” and change everything. Not just whatever the topic of that particular lonely obsession might’ve been, but the idea that someone will understand and get whatever you’re into, and you just have to find them. “Cannonball” by the Breeders was that thing for me, and the person who said “Have you heard this song by this American band…?” in such a you-probably-haven’t-it’s-weird-never-mind tone of voice was that person who, without knowing it, told me it was okay to not be into everything everyone I knew at school was.

So thanks for that, Christine.

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366 Songs 082: Brown Girl In The Ring

For my sins, Boney M’s “Brown Girl In The Ring” reminds me of Sunday afternoons with Aunt Betty (who was, if I can decypher familial definitions properly, actually my great aunt – My mother’s aunt, that’s right, right?) when I was a little kid. We would spend Sunday afternoons there, my grandmother, my sisters and myself, while my parents had something resembling a break, and in between being bored and being fed with cupcakes and weak tea, all of the kids would have have to perform in some way (“Singing for Your Supper”, as it was called back then). I’m fairly sure that I never sang this song, but I couldn’t tell you did – just that it was sung, more than once, with enthusiastic handclaps and singing along from the adults in the room who were more than likely far more aware of all the racial weirdness contained in the lyrics than the three under-ten-year-olds who couldn’t wait to go home.

(Boney M, in general, were a fascinating band; Milli Vanilli years before the real thing, named for a Dutch TV detective and with one genuinely great song in their ouvre: “Rasputin”.)

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366 Songs 081: Any Time At All

The Beatles’ A Hard Days Night album was one of those objects that you idolize and fetishize when you’re a kid, something that has some inexplicable magic that you can’t explain when you’re an adult years later – It was the Beatles album that my parents had with the most interesting cover (There was Hard Days Night, Beatles For Sale and… another one, I can’t remember which. Something early, though), and that was the sole reason I kept playing it when I was a kid, skipping from track to track and always hearing the end of the one before or the start of the one after because I could never get the needle up or down on the record at the right time. With vinyl and the crappy record player we had, there was a weight to the drum snap at the start of “Any Time At All,” a thud that made the pre-teen me excited because it felt like something important was happening, something more than just a song starting.

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366 Songs 080: Jubilee

The summer before Britpop was about to take over the world – well, the country and my life at the time, at least – and Parklife was still just a successful album instead of being named as ground zero for any kind of movement. I was still a Blur-skeptic at the time, and it was my older sister who owned the album, even if I’d steal it from her and listen to certain tracks over and over again, with this being one of the ones getting repeat performances. Summer stillness and lack of wind outside, lying on the floor next to the CD player, closing my eyes and thinking about the weirdness of what lay ahead in art school (I’d just finished my first year), the welcome emptiness of the weeks ahead and the sound effects that took over what would’ve otherwise been some kind of instrumental break of this song, I’d try not to wonder if I empathized a little too much with the “He dresses incorrectly/No-one told him how to do it” outsider aspect of the whole thing.

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366 Songs 079: Happiness

The first time I heard this song, I barely heard this song. I was teaching – this was back when I was trying to do that, not having any idea whether or not I was doing any good or not – and trying to make a point of staying in studios that were listening to Radio 1 because Elliott Smith was doing a live session on the Jo Whiley show and was apparently going to perform a song he hadn’t recorded yet. How could I miss that, I thought, ignoring the fact that I was working and should’ve done that, instead. I can’t even remember who I was talking to as the song was performed (so new, he said, that it didn’t even have a name yet), just that I was trying to say things that were supportive and helpful while playing as little attention to them because my ears were focused elsewhere, on this pretty, fragile plea that was far more honest and universal than I could make out at the time.

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366 Songs 078: Whatever

Two specific memories for Oasis’ “Whatever”: The first, wandering home after a night at a club with student friends as we all prepared to say goodbye for the holidays, and somehow this song being sung by everyone somewhere between sneery snarky making-fun-of and secretly just loving the song, and the second, listening to the single at my parents’ home, days later, sitting next to a Christmas tree as the sun found itself shining outside in an unseasonable moment of calm. There’s something about the way this song is built – the fact that so much of it rests on the strings – that I find remarkably comforting and reassuring, to the point that even the obvious “I Am The Walrus” rip-off doesn’t sit too awkwardly when I hear it.

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366 Songs 077: In It For The Money

I am open to almost any and all answers of the question “Where did it all go wrong for Supergrass?” as long as they don’t include this perfect opener from their second track, which has it all – Harmonies, repetitive chimey guitar, tension-and-release, a horn section that makes you feel triumphant and a sudden cut at the end that makes you think that something went wrong with your CD player if you were me back in the day. For no immediately obvious reason, this song always makes me remember a particular day in Aberdeen as I was approaching the end of my bachelors’ degree and running out of both money and time, slowly wandering around town and wondering how everything could end up well (Spoiler: It did).