Summer Hating - 15 summer songs for the English Rain

Summer, balmy weather, holidays abroad and the concept of the Summer Read for lazing around on deckchairs and not having to engage your brain. All concepts which are pretty anathema to me. I don't holiday anymore, I write, but even when I did I took those books that demanded my full concentration which i could never give them during the daily hurly burley of normal life.

So with that Mr Scrooge in mind, here are some songs not celebrating summer in an overly optimistic way like the Travolta/Newton John song from the film "Grease".

1) "School's Out" - Alice Cooper
Remember when you couldn't wait for your schooldays to end? That last summer before the plunge either into University and overwrought romantic drama after drama and essay crises after essay crisis, or the full  lunge into the workaday world. Either way that's why the carefree, responsibility-free days of school don't seem quite so bad in hindsight "school was the happiest days of my life" etc. And all the time that last extended summer holiday punctuated by the anxiety of waiting for your exam results to determine your fate... I dunno, maybe Alice Cooper wasn't too bothered whether he passed woodwork or business studies exams or not, cos he knew he was headed foe the top anyway.



2) "Summer Wine" - Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood
Summer wine? More like copious narcotics to judge by the lyrical content. But you gotta love it anyway! Not to be confused with the awful cover version by Lana Del Ray and her *Boyfriend In The Band* scenario. He ain't no Lee Hazelwood that's for sure.



3) "Long Hot Summer Night" - Jimi Hendrix
Now Jimi may have been as high as a kite, but his guitar and almost spoken word delivery conjured up a vision of cities in the summer that are totally inhabitable ("Crosstown Traffic" anyone?) Of course the Hippie Summers of the late 60s of festivals and flower children messed things up for all progressive politics and culture ever since, but you can't fault them for trying.



4) "Summer babe" - Pavement
When Pavement came around, everyone was hot about how different and trailblazing they would be. But to me they were the logical extension of West Coast bands from Creedence Clearwater Revival through The Tubes to American Music Club (and today's BlackRebel Motorcycle Club). Maybe it's the vocal delivery. They are to rock what MacSweeneys is to literature. I still like them though! Just think head honcho Stephen Malkamus' solo stuff is way more interesting.



5) "Here Comes The Summer" - The Undertones
Short, stripped down & to the point. The rush of the delivery as you change out of your scholl uniform and into a t-shirt and shorts and pelt out into the garden to the paddling pool. But as with most undertones' songs, you just know that holiday romance is going to end badly. Most of The Undertones' songs invoke the summer somehow, probably because of their indefatigable upbeat optimism in the delivery of the songs.



6) "Hot Fun In The Summertime" - Sly And The Family Stone
This song almost, almost breaks me out of my curmudgeonly carapace and doff the peak of my sun hat in the direction of the bright star in the azure sky. What a fabulous arrangement of the band on stage too. They don't make them like this anymore. Thanks Britain's got talent...



7) "Celebrated Summer" - Husker Du
Husker Du's songs were always a world of pain,so even when singing about the summer their faces were fully grimaced, attacking their guitars with the full fury of those spurned at the beach cos they're in Speedos when everyone else is in Nike.



8) "Indian Summer" - Beat Happening
We'll be lucky to even get an Indian Summer in this rain-soaked season we've had so far (though as I type this today is sunny and warm). Calvin's vocals were always suffused in the it's too hot to really go for it vein, even though I believe they came from Washington State which has very cold winters. REM covered this song, so it must be cool. Beat happening the best band you probably never heard of.



9) "Holiday in Cambodia" - Dead Kennedys
From summer listlessness to its complete obverse. All the rage fuelled punk of the Dead Kennedys singing about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge when at the time most of us struggled to locate Cambodia on a globe, let alone understand what was happening there in the isolationist state.



10) "Long Summer Days" - EMF
This band got lots of stick because they were part of the Madchester dance/rave scene, even though they came from the country bumpkin land of Gloucestershire. I don't care what anyone says, "Unbelievable" was a great song, but yeah it's probably true, to judge by the evidence of this, they took every recognisable element of the scene and stitched it together to form an identikit band. Oh well. They're unbelievable!



11) "Holiday"- Happy Mondays
And so to the real thing! For their latter career, all year round was one long holiday and let's not forget the multi-car-crashing, drug binge stay in Barbados the band had which probably brought their record label Factory to its financial knees. This song just drips holiday from its first notes. But then it turns...



12) "Sunshine" - Mos Def
Over its classic summer sample Def lays his bleak litany of disappointment and cynicism. Wonderful juxtaposition.




13) "Holidays In the Sun" - Sex Pistols
"Cheap holiday in other people's misery" and there we have misery tourism in a nutshell. Do they still offer holidays to drug-fuelled ghettos and active warzones? I find this troubling.



14) "The Holiday song" - Pixies
Kim Deal just left the Pixies recently. Hasn't Black Francis ballooned up? The last band I ever saw live before I retired from moshing.



15) "Summer Jam" - The Cool Kids
See in the US you can probably get away with an outdoor jam, but here in soggy old Britain you've no chance! (Yes I know the band are rehearsing indoors here, but feel that vibe!)

School's Out For Half-Term - 10 songs about school

Since my kids are about to have a week off for half-term, thought I'd do a school-themed music chart in honour of having to cook two meals a day for them instead of just the usual one. But as they've got older, this half-term they're going to have to revise for their first serious external exams.

1) "Mary Of The 4th Form" - Boomtown Rats
Before he became beatified for shouty importuning on behalf of starving Ethiopians, Sir Robert of Geldof was the frontman of Irish punk band Boomtown Rats who to my mind didn't quite get punk rock. But that was okay, they knocked out a few half-decent singles that saw them regularly on our TV screens in the Pop Charts. Like Clockwork really...



2) "High School" - MC5
Remember when Bands were so politically dangerous the US authorities chased them from pillar to post, harassed them, arrested band members etc? No? Well Bobo & Simon Cowell could hardly prompt such fears now could they? Admittedly this is not one of their best tracks, but I love the band and this track is about school, so there! Kicks Out The Jams MFs!



3) "School's Out" - Alice Cooper
And though from a similar part of the post-industrial US decline in Michigan, Alice Cooper was non-political and just aimed to put on a good show. I was never a fan, but this is still a great anthemic song.



4) "Art School" - The Jam
The Jam always came in for a lot of stick form their contemporaries because they wore suits and looked
more like Mods and covered Who and Wilson Pickett songs. I always wondered whether this was partly their riposte to that wing of British punk that emerged from Art Schools such as Adam Ant and the Malcolm McLaren/Jamie Reid influence on the Sex Pistols.



5) "Headmaster Ritual" - The Smiths
Arggghh! Anyone who follows me online knows I really don't like The Smiths and yet here is the second recent one of my charts in which they appear. Guitarist Johnny Marr may well have been a fretboard wonder, but I always found his jangly sound reedy and thin. And yes Morrisey's reedy and thin vocal probably did compliment the guitar wonderfully well, but I just found it equally irritating. Still loads of people loved them so what do I know?



6) "I Don't Wanna Be Learned" - The Ramones
You gotta love The Ramones right? Millions of songs played very fast lasting no  more than two minutes and then all sounding exactly the same! Sort of Status Quo but played faster. And then they go and play a goofy love song with a string orchestra backing them - genius! ("Baby I Love You")



7) "Playground Twist" - Siouxie And The Banshees
It's funny, those first two Siousxie And The Banshees' albums were really a cutting edge of punk, taking it away from being dumb one-chord thrash (take a bow The Damned) and into a really quite arty precursor of New Wave and yet Siouxie is never mentioned in the same breath as the New Wave bands like Gang of Four, Joy Division, Magazine et al. Partly because she went Poppy quite quickly, quite Gothy soon after that and because the two musical masters behind that early Banshee sound, Kenny Morris and John McKay departed the band after those two albums. What might have been eh? Instead Siouxie released "Hong Kong Garden" and "Israel".



8) "Another Brick In The Wall Part 2" - Pink Floyd
'But Marc' this has no mention of school in the title' I hear you cry. True, but it has the inimitable refrain "We don't need no education". Lead singer Roger Waters was thrown out of the same school I ended up attending and has said in interviews that it was his experiences at school that lie behind the whole concept of "The Wall" album. There, that's my shared claim to fame! I too was scarred by attendance of such a school! Though I failed to be expelled. Didn't even get a detention, ever.



9) "School Spirit" - Kayne West
With albums called "The College Dropout",  "Graduation" and "Late Registration" Mr West takes this education thing very seriously. Still, the usual cussing and bad mouthing of rap, plus the ridiculous vocal manipulation makes this sound more like David Bowie's "Laughing Gnome". Ergo hard to take seriously...



10) "School Mam" - The Stranglers
The dirtiest bass intro in rock gives way to um a real smutty fantasy. I'm just going to leave it there...