If Music Be The Food Of Love - Songs about food

American Pie, songs about women called Candy, bubblegum pop... food is meat for coverage in music. So feast your senses on this cornucopia of nourishment, or not as we tuck into a chart of ten songs about grub. Enjoy!


1) Lee Scratch Perry - "Roast Fish & Cornbread"
Traditional Caribbean repast, traditional (ie pre-commercial) reggae. If you listen to some of the songs of this era, you can hear the water background as befits an island culture. Moreish.



2) Gary Clail - "Beef"
A song lacerating the treatment and slaughter of cattle for our consumption of meat. People preferred Morrisey's reedy exhortation that "Meat is Murder". I know which one gets my vote. Juicy.



3) The Undertones - "Mars Bars"
Throwaway song on the B-Side of the "Jimmy Jimmy" 4-track 7" single, but it grew a life of its own. More boyish than laddish which encapsulates the band. Toothsome.



4) Pink Floyd - "Apples And Oranges"
One of Syd Barrett Floyd's last offerings, this is a curious mix of the Beatlesque and psychedelic. it almost seems that the vocals are trying to catch up with the instrumentation, or that there are too many words to deliver and fit into the rhythm. Very odd. Tart.



5) Gang Of Four - "Cheesburger"
I love Go4 but they really seemed to have lost it by the time of their fourth album "Hard" where this track came from. Maybe they'd just sung all their protest lyrics that they had and run out of ideas, while the punk-funk vibe jarred with the critical nature of their lyrics. Since their recent return however, they seem to have rediscovered their mojo and their first album in years isn't half bad. Gristle.




6) Cop Shoot Cop - "Eggs For Rib"
If you want a bit of beef in your music, or even a bit of full English behind it, takes a bunch of Americans to deliver this glorious greasy spoon fry up of a song. No idea what the lyrics are on about, but love it all the same. Calorific.



7) The Carpenters - "Jambalaya"
Carpenters do Cajun, who knew? Hey it's the Carpenters, so what could be bad right? Is it in bad taste to include anorexia sufferer Karen Carpenter in a food-themed music chart? Piquant.



8) Jack White - "Sixteen Saltines"
Do the English have saltines? I love my crackers, Ritz, Water Biscuits etc, but can't say I've ever knowingly bitten into a salteen. To me it sounds like a dried fish or something like anchovies. Still it's a good riff and a half decent song. Seasoned.



9) Squeeze - "Pulling Mussels From The Shell"
A classic. I myself don't trust seafood as to its healthiness given the pollutants pumped or jettisoned in the seas, so don't indulge. But then I guess this song warns against trusting too much as well so I seem to be in step with its sentiments. Squeeze were one of those bands who you were glad populated the charts with a level of edge and quality that kept the bland pap music in check, but you never actually went out and owned any of their records yourself... Brackish.



10) Portishead - "Biscuit"
Not sure what this has to do with biscuits, but oh my what a voice dripping emotion. Savory.

Strings Attached - Rock'n'Roll With Strings

10 great pop and rock tunes, guitars and string sections in perfect harmony (sort of).

Enjoy!

1) The Ramones - "Baby I Love You"
Kings the warp speed guitar punk slow it right down and get in a string orchestra to beef up the hollowness that would pertain otherwise.



2) Portishead - "Glory Box"
this one actually makes sense since Portishead's music was always suggestive of soundtracks for as yet unwritten movies and this works perfectly.



3) Rolling Stones - "As Tears Goes By"
The Stones had a few songs with lush classical accompaniment. I think it was more acceptable in the 60s when rock and roll was still trying to throw off the shackles of the establishment such as the BBC, when every entertainment programme seemed to employ a backing orchestra. Well it's all just music right?



4) Einsturzende Neubauten" - "Armenia"
I'm not sure if this counts because I don't think they ever played with an orchestra but simply took the tape of an Armenian folk song and um did their deconstructionist musical thing over the top of it. But this is my blog, my chart, my rules and they're one of my all time favourite bands!



5) Goldfrapp - "Clowns"
There's no doubt that a string section add textured lushness to what would otherwise be a very brittle song indeed.



6) Led Zeppelin - "Kashmir"
Bloated bombastic rock epic saved by classical strings. Actually that's not quite fair since the Arab tonal textures make it interesting enough.



7) Aerosmith - "I Don't Want To Miss A Thing"
See this is the problem with adding orchestras to hard rock bands, they believe it makes them all serious and respectable. Whatever happened to those who were enjoined to "Walk This Way?". In this song they're invited to sit down and take the weight off...



8) Massive Attack - "Unfinished Sympathy"
While heavy metal and punk bands glom on some strings either to lend credibility that they are making 'classic' music, or in an ironic fashion, Trip-Hop bands like Massive & Portishead who were mixing and weaving together different types of sounds in their tonal landscapes which meant that the strings sounded more organic and embedded into the ensemble. As in here. Boring video though.



9) The Verve - "The Drugs Don't Work"
The Verve's two biggest hits, this and "Bittersweet Symphony" both employed string sections. I can't even name any of their other songs, don't know if that says anything?



10) REM - "Everybody Hurts"
Lush, lush, lush and now not a description of Peter Buck allegedly in a plane...



Bonus Track - Lou Reed "Perfect Day
Perfect symbiosis, nothing more needs to be said. RIP Lou

Seven Songs - 7 songs er with the number 7 in them

I was going to do a chart counting down 10 songs each with a number between 1 and 10 in their title. But when I considered number 7, there were so many good songs I couldn't pick one, so decided that it needed a chart all of its own.

1) White Stripes - Seven Nation Army
A great primal swamp-blues riff made this song eminently chantable at gigs and festivals. It's not the bands' fault that football fans across Europe adopted it so it was heard on the terraces proclaiming parochial allegiances. Even heard at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.



2) Culture - "Two Sevens Clash"
1977, celebrating the close musical links between punk rock and reggae music both as protest music. Even Bob Marley recognised the synergies with his song "Punky Reggae Party". Ah, halycon days...



3) The Clash - "The Magnificent Seven"
The Clash were always open to exploring different musical styles and having relocated to the USA (despite singing "I'm So Bored With The USA" in 1977), here they dabbled with dance music that was sweeping NYC's clubs. Not their finest moment in this humble correspondent's opinion, but it was the opening track of that magnum opus "Sandinista" triple album which did more than anything to raise awareness of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua who were trying to resist the might of US black ops and desytabilisation. Triple albums, remember them? Wouldn't happen today with everything downloadable and disposable. If it did, discs 2 and 3 would merely be remixes of disc 1.

4) Wah! - "Seven Minutes To Midnight"
One of the late, great John Peel's favourites, I never really got Wah!  This song takes an awful long time to get going and is a bit shouty-preachy for me, but there you go. Synchronise watches...



5) The Herbaliser - "Return Of The Seven"
I love this, with the Western theme spliced with a Japanese musical motif to acknowledge the "Seven Samurai" origins of the "Magnificent Seven". Just has a real urgency to it.



6) The Kills - "Dead Road 7"
Can never decide if I like The Kills or not. Still, decide for yourself



7) Portishead - Seven Months
Great atmospheric music soundtracks for imaginary films and Beth Gibbons' voice so full of emotion. yep, all in all just another Portishead song really...

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...