Love Songs

Those that know me as a writer say I don't write many stories about love. I'd disagree with this and indeed in my latest collection there are a couple of heart-rendering love stories, but yeah it's true, they don 't end well. Actually, there's a third story "Eyes In The Back of His Hands" that's an intense portrayal of love with a blind lover. You can read it here.

So I thought my next music themed chart should be love related. But I'm not really one for the classic pap love song, sorry I meant pop love song. But here's ten of my favourite love tinged songs.

Ramones - "Baby I Love You"
Two-minute thrash rockers go all slow strings and syrupy on this track and I Loooove it!

Keith Rowe - "Groovy Situation"
When Keith belts out "This is how I feel" towards the end, it sends shivers down my spine. He means it he really, really means it. He's in love, with all of his soul. Mesmerising despite a reasonably unpromising beginning to the song.

Undertones - "You Got My Number (Why Don’t You Use It?)"
Hey I never said the love had to be requited in these songs did I? Love this song as I did of so many of the Undertones' output. Perfectly crafted 3 minute pop-punk, cheeky and belligerent at the same time, with catchy choruses, which when push comes to shove, no one really gets hurt in the end.



CSS - "Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death from Above"
Probably wins the award for best titled live song. Don't know if anyone else feels this, but it has the feel of a post-coital song to me, lying back on the bed, smoking a cigarette and letting your thoughts float free. Oh just me then...

Infadels - "Love Like Semtex"
The only song of theirs I really liked. It's not particularly coherent lyrics wise, but it manages to convince through the beat and the delivery.

New Order - "Love Vigilantes"
Joy Division wrote the searing "Love Will Tea Us Apart" with it's mea culpa and realistic sensibilities about the flaws and failings  within a relationship. New Order pen this potty ditty about a soldier returning home from war to his wife who believes him dead. It lacks any gravitas or even much in the way of credibility, but it's bouncy and hummable and I like it in spite of myself.

The Rezillos - "I love My Baby Cos She Does Could Sculptures"
What better reason could there be? Never overlook the significant part Art Colleges played in the rise of UK punk in the middle of the 1970s. Perhaps that's why Paul Weller penned such an acerbic song called "Art School" to distance people from the notion that The Jam were associated with punk. Anyway, hilarious intro to this song about how the band hated each other.

The Pogues - "Kitty"
Shane Macgowan was a master of writing aching love songs full of loss and regret, often tied up to exile and leaving your country behind. Of course everyone knows "Fairytale Of New York", but for sheer weary emotion I don't think you can top this.

Boss Hog - "I Dig You"
Husband and wife team Jon Spencer and Cristina Martinez pen a daft song pledging their troth towards one another. But I loved this band with their blend of swamp dirt blues and Spencer's later incarnation Jon Spencer's Blues Explosion that deconstructs and reconstructs the Blues with a particular 21st Century spin.



Gun Club - "Fire Of Love"
The primal sound of love, lust, concupiscence the whole shooting match. The fire of love, does exactly what it says on the tin.



Gang Of Four - "Love Like Anthrax"
Okay, so I just couldn't help myself and reverted to type. A song that deconstructs the notion of love as mythologised in 3 minute pop songs. Apart from what's going on musically, this is really interesting in the way the two vocal narratives cut across one another with no concern as to which one the listener gloms on to. A bit like a married couple having an argument, which kind of summed up the relationship of guitarist Andy Gill & lead singer Jon King who periodically broke up and came back together/. I think right now King has left the band again.

Let's Talk (Sing) About Sex - 12 Sex songs

It's what all pop music is about isn't it? Boys meet girl... girl loses boy... boy moons after girl... they do the bump 'n grind and boom shallack la boom! So plenty to sink our teeth into here, although Right Said Fred's "I'm Too sexy" is disqualified because it's about looking sexy rather than doing the do!


1) Gun Club - "Sexbeat"/ "Fire of Love"
"Sexbeat" in its driving rhythm absolutely expresses the urgency of teenage fumbling, while "Fire Of Love" is the most primal swamp blues of hot lust you are liable to hear.  Late lead singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce led a dissolute life but I always associate him with the excesses of drink and drugs rather than sex, despite his rough good looks. (In this concert footage he gives a typically chaotic performance). Meanwhile Patricia Morrison on bass remained the perennially cool Goth ice maiden. I encorage you to track down studio versions of both these songs for the full effect.




2) Au Pairs - "Come Again"
Au Pairs deliciously send up the etiquette of politically correct sex, with the supposed emphasis on simultaneous orgasm and forever asking your partner if 'you're doing it right'. Lacks the edge of some of their other songs like "Sex Without Stress" in which singer Lesley Wood's voice almost perennially seems like on the point of cracking with the emotion of it all.



3) Gang Of Four - "Love Like Anthrax"
Always ones to burst pop's fantasy bubble, Go4 tell it like it as with regards to love in what remains one of the most musically experimental songs to come out Britain. I want to write literary equivalents of what this song achieves in its structure.



4) The Stranglers - "School Mam"
This was probably one of the first overt songs about sex I was exposed to and um it probably scarred me for life! Don't think i had a teacher like this at my school.




5) The Tubes - "Don't Touch Me There"
Kings of camp deliver an priceless antidote to the Meatloaf world of "Bat Out Of Hell".



6) Sensational Alex Harvey Band - "Gang Bang"
I'm not a fan of twelve bar blues shuffle, it seems a bit flippant in this case to accompany the story of a gang bang, but I offer it as an example of its kind.



7) Tone Loc - "Wild Thing"
You can't do a chart about sex songs without including some hip hop or rap. I had to reject most of the contenders for fear of causing offence to 50% of the population, but at least Tone Loc takes the rise out of himself as much as anybody else in this song.



8) CSS - "Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above"
Great title, great song, great one-album band obssesed with all things sex.



9) The Vapors - "Turning Japanese"
Oh come on you didn't fall for the travelogue style video did you? Never trust a british band that spell American style without the 'u' after the 'o'. Turning Japanese referred to one's narrowing eyes at the point of climaxing at a self-administered hand-job. Sorry if I've now opened your eyes and spoilt the innocence of this song for you!






10) Dead Kennedys - "To Drunk to F-ck"
Okay so technically this isn't about love making at all, but hey we need a little reality and balance to pop's sickly sweet world right?



11) Marvin Gaye - "Sexual Healing"
In contrast to all those nasty cynical punks (Johnny Rotten described sex as 2 minutes of squelching noises remember), Marvin puts the 'S' back into 'sex'. Luscious...



12) Frankie Goes To Hollywood - "Relax"
The song that really stirred the pot for us all by getting banned for its explicitness (and gay sex at that) and still we all fell under its sway. A song that tore through the early days of the AIDS epidemic and our fears.