The M M & M 1000 – part 59

Here’s the latest batch of Music Musings and Miscellany’s unapologetically subjective selection of the twentieth century’s best 1000 singles.

FLAMING LIPS – Waiting For a Superman / mixes (Warner 1999)
Is this a metaphor for global warming? About how no one wants to act in the hope that someone else will sort the problem out for them. Some things are just too big for even the proverbial superman.

EVERLY BROTHERS – Wake Up Little Susie / Maybe Tomorrow (Cadence 1958)
And is this a veiled reference to teenage sex? – not something you could explicitly deal with in a pop song in 1958.

FOUR TOPS – Walk Away Renee / Your Love Is Wonderful (Motown 1967)
Of course it’s a song by psyche-popsters the Left Banke, but good as the original is, they didn’t have the mighty Levi Stubbs. And a song this full of hurt was just made for him.

CANNON’S JUG STOMPERS – Walk Right In / Whoa Mule! Get Up the Alley (Victor 1929)
Gus Cannon’s group and Will Shade’s Memphis Jug Band were probably the two biggest jug bands of the late twenties / early thirties. By 1962 when the Rooftop Singers covered Walk Right In and took the song to the top of the Billboard chart, Cannon was a largely forgotten figure. In fact, so forgotten, that the story goes that everybody assumed he was dead and never thought to check. It was only when he heard it on the radio that he had any idea that the song had been remade. It ended well for him, and although in his late seventies, he enjoyed an Indian summer of recording and acclaim.

EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL – Walking Wounded / mixes (Virgin 1996)
Many people sneered when Everything But the Girl ‘went drum & bass’, but they absolutely nailed the fusion of late night melancholy pop and quicksilver beats. In retrospect it’s not so surprising that it worked. Omni Trio (who provided a remix) and others had always had a sad, downbeat air to their tunes, and Tracey Thorn had proved with Massive Attack that she had the perfect voice for that late twentieth century urban loneliness.

HOWLIN’ WOLF – Wang Dang Doodle / Back Door Man (Chess 1960)
Two great slices of bad boy blues from the big man. What more can you add?

EDWIN STARR – War / He Who Picks a Rose (Gordy 1970)
It’s kind of ironic that Berry Gordy, one of the most reticent label bosses when it came to allowing real life and real issues to infect his feel-good pop factory, eventually issued a string of songs that were some of the most profoundly political pop of the era. Edwin Starr’s War is just one example – an angry blast that no Iraq or Afghanistan demo would feel complete without.

KILLING JOKE – Wardance / Pssyche (Malicious Damage 1980)
For me, Killing Joke never really delivered on the promise of their debut album’s furious, dense industrial punk. Wardance is a vicious, tribal yell, but it’s Pssyche that gets the blood flowing. Youth’s bass is like a battering ram and Jaz lets rip with some real fury, although the targets of his ire seem almost random. And there’s something uncomfortably Nietzschan about the line Dodge the bullets or carry the gun, the choice is yours.

ATLANTIC OCEAN – Waterfall / Mimosa (Eastern Bloc 1994)
Sometimes a melody can be so simple and yet so effective. This house / proto-trance track sounds like it could’ve been thrown together in five minutes, but still sounds terrific.

TLC – Waterfalls / mixes (LaFace 1995)
I’m not the biggest fan of modern R&B. Too much is just dreary. I always liked TLC, though. They had a bit of grit about them that was lacking in most of their contemporaries and acolytes. They also could harmonise effortlessly and turn in a ballad that actually felt like it came from the heart. Then tastes changed to the sub-Gospel wailing of Destiny’s Child and their ilk, and TLC got bumped to the sidelines as the cult of celebrity became the be all and end all. Pity.

KINKS – Waterloo Sunset / Act Nice and Gentle (Pye 1967)
A love letter to Swinging London that somehow captures its death throes, a year before Grosvenor Square bashed out the chippy innocence for good.

TEMPTATIONS – The Way You Do The Things You Do / Just Let Me Know (Gordy 1964)
One of the best songs from the group’s Smokey era, before they really found their own voice. That happened in the first twenty seconds of Ain’t Too Proud to Beg, two years later.

POP GROUP – We Are All Prostitutes / Amnesty Report (Rough Trade 1979)
A band that burned like a magnesium flare. A band that foretold the future with chilling accuracy, and one that still stands unique thirty years on. There are no Pop Group soundalikes.

We Are All Prostitutes
Everyone has their price
And you too will learn to live the lie
Aggression
Competition
Ambition
Consumer fascism

Capitalism is the most barbaric of all religions

Department stores are our new cathedrals
Our cars are martyrs to the cause

We are all prostitutes

Our children shall rise up against us
Because we are the ones to blame
We are the ones to blame
They will give us a new name
We shall be
Hypocrites hypocrites hypocrites

Now available as a ringtone (true). FFS!

SISTER SLEDGE – We Are Family / Easier to Love (Cotillion 1979)
By 1979, disco’s name was mud. It had become ubiquitous and ridiculous, a bandwagon jumped upon by every chancer from Rod Stewart to Barbra Streisand. And yet it was the year that produced the two greatest albums of the genre – Chic’s Risqué and the Chic produced We Are Family. Both are rhythm led, with songs as seductive as they are simple and as dancefloor friendly as you can possibly get. They are also chock full of optimism of the kind that is hard to do without coming across as twee or just plain gormless. Those two albums alone produced half a dozen great singles of which this is but one.

ANIMALS – We Gotta Get Out Of This Place / I Can’t Believe It (EMI Columbia 1965)
One recurring feature on this list is the classic bassline, and they don’t get much better than this. I admit to being sold on the bassline in some cases, even if the rest of the tune isn’t up to much. Not the case with this one, though. It’s like one of the great British kitchen sink dramas full of angry young men and downtrodden women. Or Our Friends In the North encapsulated in three minutes.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG – We Have All the Time in the World / Pretty Little Missy (United Artists 1969)
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was an odd Bond film. Firstly, it had George Lazeby in his only appearance as 007. Secondly, he got married in it (and became a widower). Thirdly, the official theme tune was the instrumental of the same name, with Louis Armstrong’s beautifully rendered ballad demoted to the end credits. My Bloody Valentine’s version is a swoonsome thing that’s well worth hearing too.

THE BAND – The Weight / I Shall Be Released (Capitol 1968)
Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed? / He just grinned and shook my hand, and “No!”, was all he said. That line always makes me laugh out loud. It’s just the mental picture it conjours up.

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The M M & M 1000 – part 48

Here’s the latest batch of Music Musings and Miscellany’s unapologetically subjective selection of the twentieth century’s best 1000 singles.

FLAMING LIPS – She Don’t Use Jelly / Turn It On (Warner Brothers 18131 1994)
Simple and surreal, “She Don’t Use Jelly” was Coyne and cos first singalong song which, unlike many, never seems to pall with repeated listenings. It’s just gleefully absurd, simple fun.

POP GROUP – She Is Beyond Good and Evil / 3.38 (Radar 29 1979)
Perhaps the Pop Group’s most accessible song, this is still evil sounding Faustian funk that lies somewhere between Chic and free jazz. They were a band whose tension between deep dub-funk and stellar jazz was stretched to breaking point, and topped with the borderline madness of Mark Stewart’s paranoid vocals, created a distopian soundtrack to societal, political and personal breakdown. The tension that drove them inevitably destroyed them as the group was pulled in too many conflicting directions, but their small ouevre is a truly great legacy.

PJ HARVEY – Sheela-na-gig / Joe / Hair (Too Pure 8 1992)
Part Pixies part riot girl, Polly Harvey stripped out the fat and fancy from her music, but still sounded a world away from the basic rock template. She infuriated and thrilled people in equal measure for her steadfast refusal to be labelled, or dragged into ‘scenes’, and still does. Her secret is a paradoxical combination of self-doubt and self-confidence that leaves her restless and continually inventive, but at the same time, never capriciously flitting from style to style.

RAMONES – Sheena Is a Punk Rocker / Commando / I Don’t Care (Sire 746 1977)
They sounded dumb but were never stupid. The first three albums fire off crackers like this every couple of minutes without ever sounding weary. That they ultimately became a cliché was inevitable. They either progressed and lost the raw simplicity, or stayed the same and became a self-parody.

HALL & OATES – She’s Gone / I’m Just a Kid (Atlantic 3332 1974)
In the eighties they became pop giants, but their music became plastic and soulless. In the seventies they couldn’t get arrested, but came out with some amazing Philly soul-drenched pop. “She’s Gone” is a powerhouse of impassioned vocal interplay.

YELLO – She’s Got a Gun / The Evening’s Young (Do It 18 1982)
While a lot of Yello’s early music was fairly brash, electro-influenced synth pop, my favourite side to the duo was always the atmospheric noir-ish stories relayed in tracks like “Lost Again” and this one. Dieter Meyer’s image fits the world of darkened railway stations, femmes fatales with guns and the fading decadence of a Europe living under the burden of its own catastrophic history.

HOUSE OF LOVE – Shine On / Love / Flow (Creation 43 1987)
About as good as indie guitar music gets. The House of Love’s first single was emotional, exciting, crisp and concise. It sold diddly squat, despite being on a fashionable label. Some things are just unfathomable. Over the last two decades, they’re a band I’ve introduced to people more than any other I think, and the reaction is always glowing. And I’ve met other people who rate the band’s short tenure at Creation as highly as I do.

ROBERT WYATT – Shipbuilding / Memories of You (Rough Trade 115 1982)
Elvis Costello’s brilliant response to the Falklands War isn’t a angry polemic, but a confused reflection of a character whose livelihood has been secured by it, and feels guilty about that fact. I have no problem with Costello as a singer, but he has a rather sarcastic tone that really can’t carry off the emotional conflicts of the song. Robert Wyatt, however, has the right mixture of pathos, vulnerability and deep unease to convey it perfectly. A masterpiece.

BOYS NEXT DOOR – Shivers / Dive Position (Mushroom 7492 1979)
Before they discovered their true mettle as the Birthday Party, the band’s previous incarnation peddled a kind of jerky, spiky pop. This Rowland Howard song sounded nothing like either. It’s a brooding ballad that oddly has far more in common with some of Nick Cave’s later work even though it wasn’t his song. It’s appearance in the film Dogs in Space is a perfect cinematic moment.

MIRACLES – Shop Around / Who’s Loving You (Tamla 54030 1960)
Along with Barrett Strong’s “Money”, “Shop Around” is one of the two major hits of Motown’s first year that has one foot in doo wop and rock ‘n’ roll, and the other in the future, world-dominating Motown sound.

MAGAZINE – Shot By Both Sides / My Mind Ain’t So Open (Virgin 200 1978)
With a riff so good that former Buzzcocks partners Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley both used it (see “Lipstick” by the Buzzcocks), “Shot By Both Sides” introduced Magazine with a bang. It was a winning combination punk’s excitement and sharpness and the more expansive, almost prog, sound of bands like Roxy Music.

JUNIOR WALKER & THE ALL STARS – Shotgun / Hot Cha (Soul 35008 1965)
Motown anomalies in that they owed as much to Booker T & the MGs and James Brown as they did to the sound of the Motor City, Walker’s All Stars were a funky rhythm and blues outfit who were as much about the groove as they were about the song. “Shotgun” is a blast (sorry).

THE CARDINALS – Shouldn’t I Know / Please Don’t Leave Me (Atlantic 938 1951)
The Cardinals were one of the great proto-doo wop ballad groups, but one who seem to have fallen through the cracks of history. The only available compilation is a stingy 10 song collection that appeared on the Collectables label in 2006 and is only available on import from the US for a silly price.

STEELY DAN – Showbiz Kids / Razor Boy (ABC 11382 1973)
“Showbiz Kids” is another one of those great Steely Dan tunes that subverts the kind of smooth, self-regarding, nouveau riche types who probably listed the band as one of their favourites. Only this time they did it with a brazenness that only an idiot could fail to see: “They got the house on the corner, with the rug inside / They got the booze they need, all that money can buy / They got the shapely bodies, they got the Steely Dan T-shirts…” and as a final coup de grace: “Show bus’ness kids makin’ movies of themselves / You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else“

More soon

The M M & M 1000 – part 43

Here’s the latest batch of Music Musings and Miscellany’s unapologetically subjective selection of the twentieth century’s best 1000 singles. A start to the Rs.

FLAMING LIPS – Race For the Prize / Riding to Work in the Year 2025 / 3000 ft of Despair (Warner 494 1999)
Flaming Lips are an unusual rock band in that they never seem to moan about anything, never seem to be unduly negative about anything and yet also manage to avoid all the ‘up’ clichés of calls to party / rock / dance etc. It’s a rousing anthem about the dedication of scientists, praising the self-sacrifices of scientists working for the good of mankind, that makes science sound heroic and romantic in a way usually reserved for war heroes. Heart-warming.

GENE VINCENT – Race With the Devil / Gonna Back Up My Baby (Capitol 3530 1956)
It’s kinda like an update of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal for the rock and roll generation, with the game of chess replaced by a hot rod / drag race. Saying that, I’m now getting daft images in my head of Max von Sydow and Bengt Ekerot zooming down the track in souped-up Chevys!

PAST SEVEN DAYS – Raindance / So Many Others (4AD 102 1981)
Past Seven Days were one of the great what-ifs? of the post-punk era. From Sheffield, they combined the doomy atmospherics of the Joy Division generation with a spacious, ACR type punk-funk and staccato guitar lines straight out of the Andy Gill school. “Raindance” is a six minute, brooding and quite brilliant piece of music. Sadly, they didn’t last much more than seven days, and this remains their only recorded statement

BROOK BENTON – Rainy Night in Georgia / Where Do I Go From Here? (Cotillion 44057 1969)
Randy Crawford’s cover is probably better known, but Benton’s original is the definitive reading. Like Lou Rawls, Benton had a wonderfully smooth and pure baritone, and like Rawls too often wasted it on MOR standards. “Rainy Night in Georgia” is probably too lushly arranged to be considered a typical southern soul tune, but it has a beautiful, dreamy sadness about it.

PAVEMENT – Range Life / Raft / Coolin’ By Sound (Big Cat 77 1995)
Ignorant dismissals of Pavement as Fall clones seem to have become more widespread as time passes. It’s no more relevant than to dismiss the Fall as Monks clones. The band were one of the most consistently interesting of any nineties rock outfits. Their genius was to blend elements that all seemed ramshackle and off-key on their own (especially the vocals) and make them into something engaging. Like a portrait painter whose detailed central study is surrounded by broad strokes tailing off into blank canvas, Pavement left their edges rough, and that always made their songs sound more interesting. “Range Life” is actually quite smooth for them, although Malkmus’s cracked whine is hardly typical of your average ballad singer.

BUDDY HOLLY – Rave On / Take Your Time (Coral 61985 1958)
It’s interesting to speculate how Buddy Holly’s career would have panned out if events had allowed it. He wasn’t just a songwriting genius, but a bit of a technical wizard too. It would have been such a shame if he’d ended up on the easy-listening or bog-standard country treadmills. He definitely had the potential to take music into new directions and perhaps completely have changed the course of music history. We’ll never know, and will just have to be satisfied with the great records he left us.

FOUR TOPS – Reach Out (I’ll Be There) / Until You Love Someone (Motown 1098 1966)
Melodramatic perfection. Fave bit? The brief bass and percussion pause that allows Levi Stubbs to get his breath back between “Reach Out” and “I’ll Be There”. Magic.

SWELL MAPS – Read About Seymour / Ripped and Torn / Black Velvet (Rather 1 1978)
Must be the shortest song on this list. It starts out almost conventionally for a post-punk record with a verse-chorus structure, before disintegrating into a barrage of clatter and noise. Swell Maps were essentially English eccentric experimentalists in the Henry Cow tradition with a DIY ethos and an instinct for carving melody out of chaos.

DELFONICS – Ready Or Not Here I Come / Somebody Loves You (Philly Groove 154 1968)
The song’s better known in its revamped form by the Fugees, but they didn’t really add anything to the two minute marvel of the original with its unusual horn motif.

CRASS – Reality Asylum / Shaved Women Collaborators (Crass 5249841 1979)
Still shocking, still awesome, I wrote about this here.

PUBLIC ENEMY – Rebel Without a Pause / instrumental (Def Jam 651245 1987)
Yo! Bum Rush the Show is a great album, but the step up to It Takes a Million… is astonishing. “Rebel Without a Pause” was the first taster for the second LP, and was louder and more intense than anything before in hip hop history. This was a mere eight years after the genre’s first recorded statement. Things haven’t really moved on that much further in the following 22.

SEBADOH – Rebound (plus 9) (Domino 17 1994)
I’ve probably stretched the definition of a single well beyond breaking point here since “Rebound” was track two of a ten track EP called (with typical Sebadoh contrariness) 4 Song CD. Hell, though, everyone treated it like it was a single at the time. After their cynical “Gimme Indie Rock”, they did just that to perfection with “Rebound”, a fat free 132 seconds of alt-pop-punk.

McCARTHY – Red Sleeping Beauty / From the Damned (Pink 12 1986)
Witlessly lumped in with the C86 brigade, it seems to me that McCarthy became damned by association. Which is a shame. Like Easterhouse and Crass they came from the radical left (Crass would bristle at being branded lefties, but they shared the same distaste of the hierarchical establishment), but Malcolm Eden preferred satire to sloganeering, often voicing the establishment view with enough of a gentle twist to make it sound ludicrous. “Red Sleeping Beauty” is suitably dream-like musically, with a spare, subtle lyric that alludes to the lack of an effective socialist opposition during the height of Thatcherism. “Nothing Stirs Us, We’re Sound Asleep, We’re Sound Asleep”.

BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS – Redemption Song / version (Island 6653 1980)
The final track from the final album released during Bob Marley’s lifetime and astonishingly for such a well known song, never a hit. Unlike anything else he did, this was just Marley and guitar, and feels like a last will and testmanent. Even for the faithless, an undeniably moving song.

STEELY DAN – Reelin’ in the Years / Only a Fool Would Say That (ABC 11352 1973)
This early Dan tune stands out from their usual smooth west-coast jazz ouevre by being unashamedly rock, with some superb guitar playing by Elliott Randall. Randall was never officially a band member (in fact he turned them down when asked) but would play on many of their records.

JACKIE WILSON – Reet Petite / By the Light of the Silvery Moon (Brunswick 55024 1957)
Some classic songs are just there, and you forget how extraordinary they are simply through familiarity. Jackie Wilson’s singing on this record is nothing short of extraordinary – from the rolled r’s, always in rhythm, to the incredible range, he never misses a note or a beat, even by a hair’s breadth. It also has trombones, and there should be more trombones in pop.

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