744.
Abba - the
visitors
Overheard at a
movie theatre when I was maybe sixteen.
"Listening to Abba is like having a bath, then going to bed with
freshly cleaned sheets." But that was the 70s. By the time the 80s hit, the culture no longer required such
luxuriant cleanliness. So Abba
tried to change, got darker, deeper, even a bit paranoid. Which worked for me, but I can't say
I've ever heard The Visitors popping up at a wedding.
743.
Roland Shaw +
his Orchestra - On Her Majesty's Secret Service
Not the version
that was actually heard in the movie, but a cool take nonetheless. If you were a kid in the 60s and early
70s, your life was full of this kind of stuff. Various orchestras taking on the hits of the day, mostly
sucking all the life out of them.
But every now and then, someone got it just right, like Roland Shaw and
his crowd. Soundtrack for bombing
around on your bike, rooting out all those evil geniuses who were laying low,
plotting world destruction from their suburban lairs. Mr. Sonsteen, for instance.
742.
U2 - celebration
In which that
band from Ireland (not yet a household name), make it very clear what it is
they believe in: the atomic bomb,
the powers that be and
the halls of Christ's Church. All
worth celebrating apparently.
741.
Sex Pistols -
holidays in the sun
Lead off track
from arguably the most important album ever released. Actually, I'd argue it's a bit less important than Bob
Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited … but you get the picture. Damned important. And what's so damned important about a song about a cheap
holiday in other people's misery? The truth of it. The world ain't equal.
Your fun and good times is almost always a piece of some other guy's
misery. True in 1977. True in summer 2000.
739/740.
Clash - brand
new Cadillac + the card cheat
Two from the
greatest rock and roll album ever released at the very end of the 1970s, which
made London Calling the first indisputably great rock and roll album of the
1980s. Commercial radio only
played two songs but all four sides were nigh on perfect – the power and rage
of full-on punk tempered only enough to allow EVERYTHING ELSE to burst on
through. With Brand New Cadillac,
that meant old school rock and roll delivered with the kind of bite you could
only wish Bruce Springsteen had in him.
With The Card
Cheat, that meant epic folk-inflected widescreen Technicolor rock all brassed
up and gunning for the promised land, again miles beyond Mr. Springsteen, who
I'm only mentioning here because his 1980 double album The River had no problem
getting played all over the radio.
And it was mostly boring.
738.
Strange
Parcels - to be free
The first Gulf
War was over, the horrorshow that was the 80s had finally blown its wad and
suddenly there was all this cool music getting released out of Britain. Big beats, soulful melodies, lots of
cool dub tricks. And the very best
of it was coming from Adrian Sherwood's On-U sound, the Strange Parcels being
just one of many outfits that found its way through his mixing board, and onto
one of his superb Pay It All Back compilations.
737.
Au Pairs - it's
obvious
A solid reminder
of a damned interesting time (early 80s) when white punks were discovering
funk, messing around with it, not being remotely pure, and it was all the
better for it. Gave it the
bulletproof edge you needed in those dangerous days.
736.
Undertones - love
parade
One more selection
from that lost alternate reality wherein the 1980s were everything they should
have been and a song like Love Parade hit the toppermost of the poppermost –
epic, soulful, full of light, and so damned popular we all got sick of it. But it wasn't so we didn't. And man, that Feargal Sharkey can sing.
735.
Ian + Sylvia
- more often than not
I mentioned my
friend Andrew's mom already, who even if she didn't much like me, I liked her,
because she was the only parent I knew who had decent records, and seemed to
generally care about music. Nothing heavy or anything – just good solid pop like Neil
Diamond, Simon and Garfunkel, and more obscure stuff, particularly in her 45s,
which Andrew and I spent many hours exploring – both of us still young and
fresh enough to dig something even if it wasn't loud, scary, driven by heavy
guitars and appeals to Satan.
732.
Sir Douglas
Quintet - she's about a mover
If this was
Texas, this song wouldn't be on this list. Because we'd all know it for the classic it is, maybe even
be sick of it. But here on the
fringes of the crumbling west, She's About A Mover is a rarity at best, the kind of
thing you find at a yard sale, in the back of a box of 45s, not even in a sleeve. Cost me twenty-five cents.
731.
Peter Tosh - stepping
razor
Peter Tosh
covers an obscure Jamaican ditty about being dangerous, sharp as a razor, makes
it very much his own. Released in
1977 but I never connected with it until the late 80s when Gangsta rap was
starting to hit hard, turning the uttering of threats into a functional musical
vocabulary. Ah, the good ole days.
728.
Can - Mother
Upduff
It's 1969 with
the European hippie underground is in a state of serious flux and eruption,
what with all uprisings and insurrections of 1968 still playing out. Nevertheless, Can (four German weirdoes
and their American singer, poet, madman) find a few moments to throw down a
strange little ditty about the Upduff family and their troubled holiday in Italy. WARNING: if your grandma dies while
traveling in a foreign country, don't wrap her up in a tarp and tie her to the
top of the car.
727.
Neil Diamond
+ The Band - dry your eyes
Even at the
time, the experts were calling it one of the great moments in rock and roll
history. The Band's last concert
ever (which it wasn't, it turned out, just Robbie Robertson's last concert with
them), with all their cooler than fuck all-star friends dropping into lend a
hand, share in the backstage messing around. But what the hell was Neil Diamond doing there? He was barely cooler than Barbara
Streisand. What he was doing was
delivering the goods, in leisure suit, shades, freshly-styled hair – looking
all those hippies hard in the eye and destroying them with a song that told the
hard, sad truth about what time does to us all. It removes us, but maybe if we did them justice, our songs might
remain.
725.
Green on Red
- brave generation
This song really
hit a nerve with me when I first heard it. Because I'd never really thought much about MY generation –
the ones who were still just little kids when the hippies were running wild,
storming heaven, doing more than just talk about revolution. Of course, by the time we hit puberty, that
was pretty much all over. The
Beatles had broken up, Richard Nixon was getting re-elected, Vietnam was still
dragging on. But life carried on,
with no particular purpose. Not
unlike one of those gritty 70s movies, everything vaguely overexposed, raw,
existential. Which, I guess, made
us brave more or less by default.
724.
Jethro Tull -
For Michael Collins, Jeffrey + Me
July 20,
1969. The argument's been made
(and not just by Americans) that humanity's never had a better day. Because even if there were brutal wars
going on in various places, children starving, good people being tortured – a
man was walking on the fucking moon (two of them actually), and we were
watching it on TV. Including
Michael Collins who was the guy stuck back in the command module circling
around the moon while his two buddies got all the glory. Which is what this song's about. To be that close, yet so unfathomably
far away.
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