It's Not Me, It's You - Personal Pronoun Songs

1) De La Soul - "Me, Myself & I"
When I was at university, there was this party where some young kid was going round anyone who'd listen brandishing this cassette tape (Yes I'm that old) in which he claimed he'd recorded a song that de La Soul had ripped off to become "Me, Myself & I" and a huge hit. No one would give him the time of day and of course there's no proving the provenance or the timing of his tape, but it was virtually a clone of his version. Don't know quite how De La Soul from New York came to hear a home made tape by some kid in East Anglia, but there you go. We begin this playlist with a conspiracy theory.



2) Delta 5 - "You"
I wish this band had made more records. Part of that new wave scene from leeds that included Gang Of Four and Mekons, they made great funky, angular music with potent lyrics.



3) Sly & The Family Stone - "Thank You Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin"
And talking of peerlessly funky... Just a point on the economics of rock music, as great as it it, when you have this many members of a band, it is impossible for them to make any money, apart from the writer of the songs who has music publishing points.



4) Stone Roses - "She Bangs The Drums"
The second best Stone Roses' song



5) Gang Of Four - "He'd Send In The Army"
I wish guitarist Andy Gill & singer Jon King weren't always falling out as they could have made loads more great music than they actually did. They made the album "Content" after a hiatus of some 20 years and then King promptly left the band again.



6) Ice Cube - "Now I Gotta Wetcha"
Most helpful of Mr Cube to explain at the start of the song that "wetcha" is not referring to the hosepipe start of a wet t-shirt competition.



7) Public Enemy - "Miuzi Weighs A Ton"
Did you what what they did there? Mi Uzi elided into Miuzi. As they say in the North of England.



8) MC 900Ft Jesus - "The Killer Inside Me"
A white rapper who largely went under the radar but produced two rather wonderful albums.




9) Pink Military - "Did You See Her?"
This song gets me every time. One album wonders.



10) NWA - "Express Y'self"
For all the confrontational angst of their first album, this little dance gem popped out as well. And great it is too. Not just because it rhymes "Moving like a tortoise, full of rigor mortis"



11) Gang of Four - "It's Her Factory"
perhaps not surprising that Gang Of Four whose songs were all about the politics of the personal appear twice in this chart. This was only ever a throwaway B-Side but packs an off key punch, but then Gang of Four never really did anything throwaway.




12) Norris Reid - "Protect Them"
Environmentalism in reggae before anyone had really coined the term let alone formed a viable political movement. Like so many religious theologies, the notion of the precious interconnectedness of all life as god's creations, somewhere gets lost along the lines of religious practise.



13) Cop Shoot Cop - "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose"
Celebrating bands with two bass guitars rather then the usual guitar and bass line up. My favourite type of music noise!



14) Arctic Monkeys - "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor"
Didn't they used to be a thing a few years ago?



15) Clipse - "I'm Not You"
Clipse's debut album is fantastic rap but then they seemed to suffer from the pressures of success and subsequent albums seemed to have them on the point of emotional breakdown as revealed by their lyrics. Definitely a rap group to track down, coming from neither the bloated hip hop traditions of New York or California



16) Boss Hog - "I Dig You"
Husband and wife duo in soppy mood, though being Boss Hog this is completely out to lunch.



17) The Tubes - "I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk"
Were they punk? Were they Meatloaf in a band format? Either way they did have a couple of top tunes.



18) White Stripes - "I'm Slowly Turning Into You"
I never really bothered with the back story, playing at brother and sister when actually they were married, but I did like the songs.



19) Funkadelic - "We Hurt Too"
I think Funkadelic were my favourite of all George Clinton's incarnations. The "America Eats its Young" is a fabulous album without a weak track on it.



20) Sonic Youth - "Protect Me You"
People bang on about the signature guitar sound of a Johnny Marr (Smiths) or Slash (Guns N Roses) but there's nothing quite as unique as Sonic Youth's guitar sounds with their odd tunings.

10 Songs About Time

My new novel "Time After Time" already has its own playlist of songs that soundtrack the action. But here is a chart of songs directly about time for your delectation:

1) Pink Floyd - "Time"
Possibly the most famous song about time, from the meg-selling "Dark Side Of The Moon" album. Pink Floyd were the first ban i properly got into in the sense of wanting to chase down every single recording they had ever made. That sort of collector-worship boys are eminently susceptible to. However, once punk rock came along, the tempo of Floyd's music was just to slow for my ears craving souped up rhythms. So this was time undermined by too slow a passage of time in the end...



2) The Doors - "Love Me Two Times"
The Doors were one of the few 60s band I can listen to.  I don't particularly buy into the Jim Morrison mythic status thing, and in this video it's a tad irritating that you have to wait until he stops burbling about a minute and a half in before the song starts, but it's a good'un when it does arrive.



3) MGMT - "Time To Pretend"
It's perhaps ironic that the vocal and music of this song actually do suggest the 1960s in a song full of yearning and hearking back to a more innocent age.  When this song came out in the Noughties, it was heard absolutely everywhere. But with good reason I feel.



4) Beastie Boys - "Time For Livin'"
It's not quite the momentous act of Bob Dylan plugging his guitar into an amp, but when the Beastie Boys didn't rely on samples quite as much and picked up their own instruments and returned to their punk roots, it gave all their subsequent albums a huge diversity of punk, hip-hop, rap and reggae. And I loved them for that.



5) Depeche Mode - "Question Of Time"
I was never a big fan of Depeche Mode, but the music in my novel covers virtually every style, so continuing that here in my "Time" chart, I give this a platform and let you dear reader/listener decide.



6) MosDef - "Life In Marvellous Times"
This is just such a superior song, that builds and builds and has unbelievable tension that never quite peaks. Masterful.



7) Cyndi Lauper - "Time After Time"
I've never been a fan of chart pop tunes, but while I was writing the novel and I'm not sure how, but this song presented itself to me. Of course I recognised it from the dim and distant past, because that's how ubiquitous chart songs are, you just can't avoid hearing them and how insidiously they permeate our brains. But as it goes, this song not only fitted my novel, but the fit was so perfect that it went on to become its title. And I seem to remember we always accredited Cindi Lauper some credit for being slightly subversive in her attack on pop music. maybe we were fooling ourselves. A bit light for my tastes, but I can see it's a well crafted song.



8) Funkadelic - "Everybody's Going To Make It This Time"
I do love my funk and George Clinton's cosmic madness. Yet this is a rather wistful political song about past failures and a hope that this time round there will be no casualties in the various fights for rights and freedoms.



9) Portishead - "Sour Times"
I suppose songs about time that either look back or look ahead, are prone to being melancholic, chockfull of regret or despairing hope. And this is one of those as Beth Gibbons puts a whole lifetime of emotion into her singing, while the arrangement rattles along reedily as if to suggest time's flimsiness itself. There's a different Portishead song referred to in the novel.



10) Misty In Roots - "How Long Jah"
Roots reggae's gorgeous, simple appeal to how long must they wait for the Messiah? An eternity it seems. An eternity of pain and suffering...

10 Devilish Songs

They say the Devil has all the best tunes. Judge for yourself with these ten diabolic ditties. So many top tunes in fact that Cliff Richard's "Devil Woman" doesn't quite sneak in...

1) Robert Johnson - "Me And The Devil Blues"
From the original Grandaddy of all things devilish and selling your soul for the gift, comes this song from the crossroads where only the unholy got buried...



2) Pink Floyd - "Lucifer Sam"
A bit 60s psychedelic, but dem were the times. Animal familiar of the Devil rather than Old Nick himself, still that's hippies for you...



3) Laibach - "Sympathy For The Devil"
A Rolling Stones cover version, made suitably diabolic by the totalitarian posturing of this group from war-torn Yugoslavia. The Stones' song had a film dedicated to it made by Jean Luc Godard "One Plus One" when people really did think the Devil was about to inherit his realm with all the revolutionary upheaval of the late 1960s.



4) Daniel Johnston - "Don't Play Cards With Satan"
Daniel Johnston's mental disorders (schizophrenia and bi-polar) lend his art a heart-wrenching intensity (think of a musical version of Van Gough maybe). Just listen to his voice in this track and you have to credit that Daniel really, really believes in the Devil. Even the guitar strumming sounds possessed.



5) Funkadelic - "Miss Lucifer's Love"
Funky devils and why not? The devil in this case is almost certainly human and mortal, but when it's George Clinton you're talking about, that can be pretty other-worldly anyway! Groovy little devil.



6) Beck - "Devil's Haircut"
Beck doing what Beck does best and with the usual impermeability of his lyrics. Just a good song really...



7) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Up Jumped The Devil"
Seeped in Southern Gothic as Nick Cave is, Old (horned) Nick was going to make an appearance sooner or later in his music.



8) Big L - "Devil's Son"
Rappers are often portrayed as Folk Devils threatening the moral fibre of society. Here's a song that certainly had its fair share of trouble because of its extreme subject matter and kept getting pulled from release. Big L imagines that he is indeed Satan's offspring and goes on the rampage against Satan's enemies; er that would be Christians...



9) B52s - "Devil In My Car"
Just to lighten the mood a touch, the B52s bubble-gum rock camp it up when they discover that the devil has hitched a lift with them...



10) Butthole Surfers - "Sweatloaf"
The Devil always pops up in heavy metal music, but I'm not a metalhead really. But the Butthole Surfers always wanted to be Black Sabbath and this song is as funny as hell. Literally. Its starts quietly, so give it a chance. It was always great live, when lead vocalist Gibby Haynes ad libbed the intro with his insane mental jottings. Great fun.



11) Max Romeo - "Chase The Devil"
If Heavy Metal pays lugubrious homage to all things satanic, you'd imagine Reggae would play it for real as the enemy of their beliefs. And Max Romeo here does exactly that to fine effect.

My Top 25 Albums - Part 1, 25-13

Who has the patience to listen all the way through an album these days? Hell, most bands failed to sustain the standard across a whole album anyway, beyond a couple of stand out tracks, which were probably released as singles anyway.

But I have to admit, I'm still a sucker for an album. Following its flow all the way through, between great, good and filler tracks. I don't buy that many albums now, but my I-Tunes tells me I have 10.4 days worth of tracks, of which only the 0.4 are individual tracks flying free of albums.

Here is a chart in two parts of my 25 all-time top albums, with a representative track from each. I hope some of them you share a liking for and maybe others you've never heard of you may come to try out.

25) Husker Du - "Zen Arcade" 1984

All 3 band members were really accomplished musicians, all three contributed songwriting and despite the internal pressures that ultimately ripped the band apart, they came together seamlessly to produce this double album of power guitar pop with a despairing edge.

24) Dizzee Rascal - "Maths And English" 2007

What I like about this album is that it's a quintissentially English retort to US Hip-Hop. Sure Dizzee presents a similar tale of gangs, violence and laddish lairiness, but it's done in London argot, with British rhythms and lashings of cheek. Check out his duet with Lily Allen if you don't believe me.

23) South Central - "The Owl Of Minerva" 2008

I was never a raver. Never into summers of love and being spaced out dancing in a field. And yet I do really like this Nu-Rave album, and yes it does make me want to get up and dance. But not in a field, holding a glo-stick.

22) Funkadelic - "America Eats Its Young" 1972

Beam me up to the Mothership and take me to your leader George Clinton. This a music that puts you in a mood like no other style. Fabulously mad, but oh how funky! With tracks on the album like "Loose Booty" and "I Call My Baby Pussycat" rubbing up against the more politically astute "If You Don't Like The Effect, Don't Produce The Cause" this double album is just a joy to sail along to (I'd say 'drive' but I don't have a car. Nor an 8-Track to play it on).

21) Clipse - "Lord Willin" 2002

This was Clipse's debut album and though I had other of their LPs, I only came by this recently and it just blew me away. I think what I really like about it is the tight musical theme, a recurring set of beats and distorted electronic squalls. Yes the lyrical content is the usual hip hop fare of street dealing, girls and male prowess, but there is just something here musically that carries it to a higher level.

20) Gun Club - "Miami" 1982

If their debut album was a wonderful mess of swamp blues, this follow up was a lot tighter and polished. Confusingly stand out track "Fire Of Love" was actually the name of their debut album, although it's actually a cover version of a Jody Reynolds song, but the Club's version is just about the most primal rock and roll you could ever wish to hear.

19) Gang Of Four - "Entertainment" 1979

A few years ago and this would have been in my top 10. I do still love it, but years of playing it endlessly have slightly jaded my palate for it. I still think the track "Anthrax" is one of the most radical (anti-?) rock and roll songs musically and lyrically as it deconstructs the pop love song.

Andy Gill's choppy guitar style is still jaw droppingly amazing to listen to.

18) The Specials - "The Specials" 1979

Like I suggested above, every new musical movement produces one great album that knocks all the others into a cocked hat. You can keep your Madness and The Beat, for me Ska was The Specials and this wonderful debut. The range of world wearyness to pleading in a band so young was like a punch to the solar plexus. A wake-up call to us all back in the dark days of the early 1980s. But then there were also the really cheery, dancey upbeat numbers too, just so we didn't get too downhearted.

17) Spacemen 3 - "The Perfect Prescription" 1987

It was really hard to decide which of the first 2 Spacemen 3 albums I prefer, so almost perfect are they. Consummate stoner rock, paeans to other worldly states of mind and the gentle (sometimes distorted in feedback) ambient guitar rock to soundtrack such journeys. Blissful is the only word and I've never even smoked weed in my life. Listen to this record and it's succumb to the effects of secondary inhalation!

16) The Fall - "Grotesque After The Gramme" 1980

And by way of complete contrast, the snarling, state of the nation address by one Mark E Smith. In truth there are many fine Fall albums, but for me this one marks them for greatness, not least for the two singles that preceded it (both of which made John Peel's all time favourite songs) but never made it on to the original album in that perverse way of Smith's. Fear not pop pickers, I'm pretty sure both tracks are included on any current version of the album.

15) The Bug - "Pressure" 2003

Dub-Step. Atmospheric, minimalist slices of the urban cityscape rendered in sound. What I really like about The Bug, is that he fills in some of those tripped out spaces with some really heavy sounds and some of the vocals doff their backwards baseball caps in the direction of Rastafarianism's relationship to the Old Testament. The visions on this album are truly more apocalyptic than the usual dub step incoherent vocal fare.

14) Big Black - "Atomizer" 1986

Intense, relentless, blue collar post-punk Mid-West of America. Live they played their strings so hard, their fingers bled. Lyrically they only dealt with taboos. I love it.

13) Mos Def - "The Ecstatic" 2009

Don't let the heavily lisping delivery mislead you, this is rap of the highest intelligence. There isn't a duff track on this album, it's that good.