Funny thing is, I grew up and through a life writing about and categorising music, exploring and improving histories, and still Eartha feels more like a handy prevarication move than a name to conjure with: someone people kind of know about, for sure, and maybe like (maybe a LOT), but without a set place, or role, or handy symbolic meaning. Actually she was RCA’s biggest artist before Elvis arrived and the World Changed™ — but even in all the battle, begun in the 80s really, to rediscover undismissive unconfused perspective on pre-Elvis time, nothing apparently re-centred Eartha where she belongs in it.

Not sure how de-confusing it is, but there’s a very intriguing interview with Kitt in Vol.One of RE/Search’s “Incredibly Strange Music”, where she casually demolishes pretty much EVERYONE’s received cartography of values and politics and pop. Certainly she stomped all over LBJ’s notions of the politics of pop: in 1968, Lady Bird Johnson had invited her (along with 50 other women working in various communities across the nation) to the White House, to discuss what black kids want, and what could be done about it. And Kitt told her: in terms she apparently never expected to hear, from a mouth and a compass-point she was (one imagines) quite unaccustomed to processing. So yes, Kitt at that time belonged — as the White House promo department had judged — to a passing age of Las Vegas-y mainstream entertainment, still hugely popular but very much NOT the standard-bearers of the rising young rock-focused political wave. So what was causing riots in urban neighborhoods, Kitt was asked: Vietnam, of course. Reward: being made presidential persona non grata, and banishment from the US light-entertainment universe for many years.

Her fame had started outside America, and she didn’t need its unoffended custom to thrive: in fact she’d spent the years after the war on the left bank in Paris, in the kinds of dives that James Baldwin and and Jean Gabin and Sartre and de Beauvoir could doubtless be found. And well, even setting aside this handily existentialist self-education, the pop-cultural mainstream that rock was busy scorning was surely at least as just as fascinatingly uneasy and complicated in its wit and seemingly shallow opulence as any of the noisier pop that followed, muffling it.

Thursday’s Child is the 1957 LP that “Just an Old-Fashioned Girl” comes from, and it’s the LP my dad had at home (and I have now). It’s a concept album — as so many 50s LPs were — but there’s a sophisticated wit, a subtlety of the unspoken to the concept that’s an unfathomable distance from anything we seemingly habitually associate with this term today. The title phrase comes from the old nursery rhyme: Monday’s child fair of face, Tuesday’s full of grace, and so on. Thursday’s has “far to go” — and the LP is presented as a succession of places Eartha’s been and what she’s seen, dance troupes and night-clubs in New York, Hollywood and Vegas, but also Paris, Istanbul, south and central America. And it’s genuinely an “album” — that’s to say a selection and cross-section of unexpected styles of song, a succession of snapshots and atmosphere — that take us from the delicate, intelligent, definitely somewhat threatening vixen on the cover (shades of Roxy Music) back into the past that made her. Exotic imagined glimpses of the bohemian life and loves of a dancer or singer — of the kind of interzone that gets called “transgressive”, at least by writers determined to drive all joy and energy from the world — further conjoined with an an extract from EK’s first autobiography, also called Thursday’s Child, printed on the reverse of the sleeve (and blurrily reproduced below). As you can read, it’s an intensely evocative passage about Kitt’s mother (a displaced sharecropper, part black, part Cherokee), leading through two barefoot children through the South Carolina night, trying to find somewhere they can all sleep safely. EK was fathered by rape, by the white son of the owner of the farm she was born on — and more or less completely disowned by future stepfathers. As a child she was often dismissed as the ‘Yella Gal’ and — as she wrote and often noted — spurned on all sides; and so she ran away to all the world, to punish all such tiny-minded local bigotry, by becoming an inescapable global success.

Part of the thread of this possibility you can trace via Kitt’s conductor-producer for Thursday’s Child: a New Yorker called Henri René, French mother, German father, musical director for the international wing of RCA Victor from the late 30s, leading his own orchestra from the 40s, he’s best known today — better known than she is in some places — as a pioneer of the “bachelor pad” mode of wittily arranged, lushly recorded music (in “living stereo”), a sequence of LPs released across the 50s, their titles alone a muddled key to the story: Paris Loves Lovers; Passion in Paint; Music for Bachelors (cover feat.Jayne Mansfield in a negligee); Music for the Weaker Sex; Compulsion to Swing; Riot in Rhythm; Listen to Henri Rene (Dynamic Dimensions; Portfolio for Easy Listening; In Love Again; Melodic Magic; White Heat (ha!); and Swinging 59….

The wit is a deeply musically informed wit — the strength and allure of the LP is its breadth, as much as anything — and the “lushness” a very deft use indeed of new-found studio possibility, so that orchestration has a precision and 3D stereo presence in and around the singer. Kitt switches between personas and deliveries and the arrangements do likewise, cinematic jumpcuts that juxtapose, undercut, gather and playfully debate, ironise — “ironise” in an important way, that’s so common in 40s and 50s film, that doesn’t necessarily have a jargon term, at least when it’s deployed in non-film music, where the “soundtrack” amplifies the emotion of a scene or an action or a section in a story by being its exact opposite.

(The classic example comes from Hitchcock: the circus music rising to a loud climax during a nasty murder at fairground’s edge: the sound obscures and distracts from the material nastiness of the story, and — one step back — foregrounds the unconcerned happy world as it carries on having fun only yards away, which of course means that as viewers — two steps back, as it were — we’re complicit in these two clashing worlds, and thrown doubly hard against the pathos of the victim by sharing the last sounds she hears, and recognising her solitude…)

The layered, lush, learned irony here is an invocation — as much as anything else — of the ugly side of a woman’s success in this kind of world: and this is the use of irony I want to stress here — the conscious, amused, wise adult alertness to the fact that every one of us is embedded in conflicting worlds and roles and perspective, torn between loyalties and obligations we agree, for the sake of moment-by-moment social enrichment, to share and acknowledge. This is where the intensity and horror of Hitchcock’s irony arrives, because it demonstrates how often we fail to negotiate a settlement between clashing worlds; but this is also where the release and dark joy of Eartha Kitt’s irony operates, which insists that sometimes we can, and it’s thrillingly and heartening when this happens — just look at her!

Let’s get back to to ‘Old Fashioned-Girl’, a song that meets the contradictions of past and present head on, and playfully explores the way role-play suffuses our response to both. Or we can dig sideways a bit more — noting for oblique confirmation that René’s White Heat, made for Imperial after he left RCA, includes a version of the Woody Woodpecker themetune: and actually this (of all things) brings us back . Because the best comparison I can make for the image stream in “Fashioned” is decadence-era Tex Avery: as he eased himself away from the nihilistic anarcho-libidinal energy of his earlier cartoon shorts, the director made a group of animations that seem somehow to predict (and tease) the Bachelor Pad set, even though they’re not more than streams of quickfire visual puns, each at once cutely witty and instantly forgotten, an affectionate giggle at modern market culture as pure silly cornucopia: The House of Tomorrow; the Car of Tomorrow; the Farm of Tomorrow; and TV of Tomorrow

“I want an old fashioned car, a cerise Cadillac/
Long enough to put a bowling alley in the back”

“I like the old fashioned flowers, violets are for me/
Have them made in diamonds by the man at Tiffany”

“Our little home will be quaint as an old parasol/
And instead of carpet I’ll have money wall to wall“

The arrangement’s terrific: a dense harpsichord clatter bouncing behind her, as speed-read gesture at the “olden days” (and at more recent craft-enclave opulence: Wanda Landowska playing Bach on harpsichord had been released as an album of 78s in a pioneering subscription issue before the war, the cognoscenti paying upfront for a quality document that would never have received mainstream release). She sings the words bell-clear, enunciating like a guide to elegant ways to speak, as the words spool out, relentlessly, into an impishly self-mocking cartoon of material-girl cupidity, Avery-style images as sung sight-gags (“I’m just a pilgrim at heart, oh so pure and genteel/Watch me in Las Vegas while I’m at the spinning wheel“). The fold-over irony of the role she plays not so much straight as a wide-eyed and coolly understated innocence, holding your gaze, challenging you to call her on it all. As emphasis on the elegance there’s even just trace of a mimicked accent when she sings “Old” — and it reminds you how hard it is to guess or hear her own real accent anyway; her default mode isn’t not quite as wildly mutable as Nicki Minaj, say, but nevertheless they’re soul-sisters.

Eartha was hot and she was witty and quick, and her voice darts across backdrops of cartooned identity; a knowing actress flickering between roles, momentarily sketching them, chuckling about them, chuckling at you so fascinated by the growling codeshifts, as we’d call it today. “Old Fashioned Girl” is a portrait of a type — impishly material-girl in the way it mocks cliches of piety — but it’s self-mocking too, mocking the type, mocking the performer sketching the type, mocking the audience the performer has in the palm of her paw, mocking the need for the relationship we’re all in, in contrast to… what?

Mocking cliches of piety — maybe this is why Kitt seem to sit so resolutely outside the legacy of “soul” as a singer, and only somewhat overlaps with jazz (I have a rather nice 1991 LP with a stupid title, Eartha Kitt: Thinking Jazz), no more part of its canons than (say) Louis Prima. Anyway, as we can see — to return to particulars from airy and confusing generalities — Kitt’s sensibility was never about the fetish for some idealised cultural home-space blessedly free from roleplay or powerplay or the erotics of hierarchy. Nor (of course) should anyone’s idea of soul or jazz have been, but somehow the UK factions in the post-punk critical generation worked together to effect exactly this: perhaps the single greatest failure of this era was our collective inability to open up a language and an ethos that encompassed the new music in front of us, the post-Elvis tradition, and a grown-up non-symbolic understanding of soul, of jazz-as-ethos… and of everything Eartha seems to carry about her, on this LP above all.

RE/Search were attempting with this particular collection and its 1994 follow-up to re-purpose several lost strands of music, from electronica to what became known as loungecore, and venturing in the process a little clumsily through the usual stages of a re-evaluation: between a forgotten and a rediscovered pleasure lies an awkward stretch of ambiguously evolving attitude, easily tagged (and dismissed) as “ironic” or “guilty”. I don’t think it’s an accident that Kitt fell into this area for them: as a collective RE/Search had travelled from old-skool west coast punk-rock ‘tood (the zine was then called Search and Destroy) via Ballardian Industrial Culture (which was fascinated with celebrity and mediation and muzak and such figures as Martin Denny) to its not-very-clear slightly self-congratulatory 90s identity, which embraced tattoos, scarification, circus freaks, and the “Angry Women” project (which Kitt fairly easily belonged in, truth to tell). The “irony” this kind of project risks having imposed on it is a feeble ghost of the mode that Hitchcock or Kitt are so confidently deft within and so unsettling deploying: you see the generous motive behind a title like “Incredibly Strange Music” (to recast something seemingly over-familiar and uninteresting as utterly weird), and yet it’s fairly tricky not also to be feeling that much of this music is really only “Incredibly Strange” if you start from an “Incredibly Self-regarding and Parochial” viewpoint. Which perhaps RE/Search felt its readers mainly did?

(Actually there’s a lot to be written about 90s attempts to resolve the 80s impasse — but I’ve already written quite a lot, and don’t intend to pursue that issue here.) (Phew! and indeed Hurrah! cry the long-suffering FT readers…)

To follow every hint and glint of this music, we have to be drenched in a world that’s gone: I can laboriously patch in some of the relevant backstory, but the labour drags down away at the intended effect. We’ve forgotten too much, if we ever even knew it. Examine the label credit — to chase up the provenance of the songs, which were at some point very deliberately selected and agreed on, even before René’s arrangements were written, and work on the sense of conceptual unity begun — and you’re instantly embrangled in a tangle of typos, long-dispersed modish approval, forgotten events and musicals and names: George Shearing (‘Lullaby of Birdland’) and Marvin Fisher (‘Just an Old-Fashioned Girl’) were well enough known in some circles, as perhaps are Mack David (co-composer of ‘If I Can’t Take It With Me When I Go’) and Murray Grand (co-composer of ‘Thursday’s Child) — but Jean-Piere (sic) Moulin? Who was Mesi Julian? ‘Oggere’ seems to be by the Afro-Cuban composer Gilberto Valdés (the label credits just say “Valdez”), and the “Tabares” of the ‘No Importa Si Menti’ composer-credit may be Baz Tabranes, but who was “Tore”, the sole fragmentary indication of the identity of the composer-author of ‘Fascinating Man’? And has no one else ever sung this song? Really? (Don’t say Falco — only the title’s the same… )

(None of the above is actual real proper historical research, mind you: I didn’t even hunt through my own books, just set off on a few lightning google-trips across the internet — I wanted to out the post up before the actual end of time — so any clues others turn up or already know are very welcome. Orson Welles called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” and cast her as Helen of Troy in his staging of Dr Faustus: she also crossed over into semi-highbrow Broadway appearances, such as a musical based on archie and mehitabel, called Shinebone Alley, one of the first with an all-integrated cast, which I want to know more about. I’ve gone nowhere near her role as the third Catwoman, as nuttily perfect as Sun Ra’s Batman project, or the free shows she gave to East Londoners, one of which I saw in the very early 80s… )

Which all brings us back, the long route, to the ‘prevarication move’, and how it was I had something I could baffle the older kids with in 1975-ish, even knowing none of this. Something happened in the late 50s and early 60s, a cultural ruin of sorts, and whether you blame Elvis or “rock” or Vietnam or perhaps even the Vegas swing culture that was one victim of the ruin, that’s allowed songs like to be artefacts that hide more than they reveal, and escape more they connect; for performances like this to be mysteries more than they’re windows. Gather together nothing more than the languages Kitt sings in on this LP — Spanish, French, German, some kind of apache street pidgin in ‘Mademoiselle Kitt’, whatever Cuban patois is featured in the sinister and magnificent ‘Oggere’ — and the scattered dance styles that René unifies into his own orchestral voice, and you’d faced, in the end, with the masked pain, which is also very much the mastered pain, of a performer who never had a home to go back to her; whose family are the multicultural band of outsiders of the Josephine Baker orphanage; a smart, highly political girl-pirate, a feminist Vegas showgirl, who made the stage her best trusted place.

All revolutions go down in history, yet history does not fill up, as another old-fashioned left banker once wrote.

I think everyone hears a record in their youth which suddenly reveals a whole new world of possibilities. It could be a three minute punk song, where simplicity and lyrical fervour suddenly make the business of writing your own songs seem possible. Maybe hearing the Aphex Twin opened a world of atonal computer music, bedroom techno that saw no instuments at all. Or think of the kid coming home from yet another tedious trumpet lesson hearing the joyous release of Two Tone and looking in a whole new way at his instrument.

For me it was the Theme To S-Express. I knew drum machines existed, I knew sampling was going on. But hearing the cut and paste of S-Express suddenly suggested that my tape recorder was not just a way of listening to music, it was also a way of making music. I crudely stitched together my own extended version, interpolating bits of Pump Up The Volume, and latterly made a frankly tedious twenty two minute version of Beat Dis which barely held its own beat for twenty seconds. The beat franlly was the annoying bit, if I could get that to match up it sounded fine, but I couldn’t add my own samples over that beat, it would cut out when I tried to add a speech from Ripping Yarns.

But I had seen the future of pop and was insanely excited about this new sound. Then as soon as it happened, this sampladelic revolution got subsumed into Acid House, dance music and the wit and joy of finding vocal samples seemed to vanish into single hooks. The Jigsaw of S-Express had its moment in the sun then vanished. The KLF were doing some things like it off of my radar, but even when they got big, they were inventing their own lunacy.

And then, five years later, when I wasn’t looking for it I heard Little Fluffy Clouds. A song which has a laconic bubbling up beat under the longest strongest intro sample I had heard in ages. And that is before we get on to the frankly astounding Rickie Lee Jones sample.

“They went on for ever and they when I we lived in Arizona and the skies always had little fluffy clouds and .. they were long and clear and there were lots of stars, at night. And when it rained it would all turn, it, they were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire and the clouds would catch the colours everywhere, that’s, its neat because I used to look at them all the time when I was little. You don’t see that.”

The secret of a good sample is for it to be compelling, fit the song and withstand constant repetition. This one does more than that, for all of its stoner simplicity, its seeming near idiocy, the American pastoral nature contrasts nicely with the previous very English sample. The beat isn’t anything special, the tune is pretty unremarkable, but the playful cut and pasting of the sample yet again shows endless possibilities if you find some interesting content. Compared to much of its parent album (the fantastic Adventure Beyond The Ultraworld) Little Fluffy Clouds is positively stuffed with content. But even by itself it seems laconic, laid back – the very essence of ambient house. I loved it and still do.

And the song is about its own method, Layering different sounds…

Rickie Lee Jones, her of the sample, didn’t love it. Annoyed that the track made her sound, well, stupid and or stoned she sued. And since she makes up the lions share of the song, Bog Life settled out of court. I do feel a little sorry that Rickie Lee Jones’s extensive musical career may have a highpoint represented by sounding a bit. On the other hand, perhaps she should be proud that The Orb found this obscure sample and made it into this track. After all, not many of us could give such a good response to the question.

“What were the skies like when you were young?”
“Mainly grey.”

Every now and then another jigsaw ambient track pops up to impress me. Nothing will ever blow the doors down like The Theme To S-Express, or perfect the form such as Little Fluffy Clouds. And I still believe I could make that brilliant bit of bricolage. And then to get myself in the mood, I listen to the Orb again. Which stops me, I could never beat it. The Theme From S-Express opened that door, Little Fluffy Clouds perhaps closed it. The problem with near perfect art is that it sometimes stops any form of imitation.

“You might still see it in the desert.”

So instead why not look at the conspiracy theories which swirl around the song. From the sabotage of the BBC Top Of The Pops orchestra to the misspelling of Althea on a record sleeve, its a song with a fair share of odd stories attached to it.

Here is that Top Of The Pops performance. Backing is terrible, ripping the guts out of the rhythm and almost turning it into elevator music. Althea and Donna are out of sync, and fluff the words occasionally, look hugely out of their depth and you can see why the song plummeted after this. Everything wonderful about the record has been destroyed here, and you can start to smell the one hit wonderdom that befell them, I would have cried all night if my genius slab of pop had its largest audience in this version.

And so to the single cover here as well. Its a tatty piece of seventies artwork where at least A&D look better than they did on ver Pops. But Althia? Wither this spelling? Have we been misspelling her name all along? Has the Guinness Book Of Hit Singles let us down? The real story is this cover, attache dto Tom’s Popular piece, is the US single cover, released by Warners trying to sell it on its UK hit status. Or rather it “TOP TEN IN ENGLAND” status, where ENGLAND is represented by a Union Jack. That being the ENGLISH flag and all. Looking on google images for other covers throws up a few potentials but I have a sense that Lightning Records probably just released it in a dust sleeve – perhaps one that advertised hairdryers.

I could go on further and talk about Pop Will Eat Itself sampling it on X, Y and Zee, but as much as I liked it at the time, none of this is doing anything but detract from the lightning (cheers) in a bottle that Uptown Top Ranking was. Sometimes pop comes out of nowhere, and sometimes it goes back. It leaves us the records and that is what counts.

NOT SO FAST, IMMIGRANT! You’ve made your choice and you can never go back!

[pic: also, in America, girls don't wear ponytails on top of their heads. Join us in the first world, chiquita!]

Rosalia is pretty much erased in the film version to make way for a fiery musical skirmish (I know, another one!) between RITA MORENO and GEORGE CHAKIRIS and some other dancers of various non-white ethnicities. But she lives on in the stage version and ORIGINAL BROADWAY CAST recording ft CHITA RIVERA LA-LA-LA-LA-LA.

It’s a rare song that is not quite as racist as it first sounds, as this one is with all the exaggerated Spanish accents and slightly awkward English. The film version, which everyone knows better (sexy dance-off! boys vs girls! it’s just like the end of High School Musical 2 only with more than one Latina!) is sharper about the social commentary; the original is basically a group of teenage girls pressuring another teenage girl into conforming, and by “conform” they mean “assimilate into majority white culture”.

Which is something the creators were familiar with. Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music) and Arthur Laurents (script) were all middle-class Jewish guys whose parents or grandparents had moved to the US from eastern Europe and Made Good. All their families created the kind of success for themselves that allowed their sons to loll around on the Upper West Side fucking around in music school and making a “living” off arty stage musical concepts that are, it must be said, pretty wanky.*

So when it comes to immigrants to the US, West Side Story is firmly on Team Stop Complaining, You’re Lucky To Even Be Here. Because if Stephen Sondheim’s white immigrant grandparents could make it in this country fifty years ago, so can you! To its credit, the film (1961) corrects this with the Puerto Rican characters complaining in unison, “Your mother’s a Pole, your father’s a Swede/But you were born here, that’s all that you need”. But that level of self-awareness hasn’t made it into the earlier (1957) stage version from whence this version of the song comes.

Laurents, Sondheim and the characters all seem to have forgotten that in the mid-1950s, when the story is set, Puerto Rico was in the middle of a tremendous violent military revolution against the US government. The only hint of this conflict in “West Side Story” is the Sharks’ warlike visages (although the violent arm of the Puerto Rican nationalist movement was mostly led by women, which is pretty great) and Anita’s throwaway line, “Always the bullets flying…” during the intro verse. The revolution involved the US National Guard bombing several major Puerto Rican towns and, in 1954, Puerto Rican nationalists storming the US House of Representatives with handguns and wounding five congressmen. You’d think that would come up sometime. But the way Laurents and Sondheim write them, except for one, these Puerto Rican women don’t care about Puerto Rico, don’t want to be Puerto Rican, don’t even want to think about Puerto Rico unless it’s an extended sarcastic putdown that turns into a feisty, flirty dance number with a nice catchy tune.

But it’s a fair cop really if you think about it! I mean, who needs independence when you can have a Cadillac and a washing machine?

*Thank you Mirisch Studios for cutting the tediously surreal “Nightmare Ballet” sequence and playing up the jolly songs like “Gee, Officer Krupke”.**
**Although that said, it is always worth mentioning that “Gee, Officer Krupke” is in COMPLETELY THE WRONG PLACE in the film, since the whole POINT is that these kids are singing “We ain’t no delinquents, we’re misunderstood/Deep down inside us, there is good” AFTER THEY HAVE JUST KILLED TWO PEOPLE IN A GANG FIGHT AND ARE TRYING TO PROCESS THAT IN THE ONLY WAY THEY KNOW HOW BECAUSE THEY ARE KIDS. HONESTLY. Worst misstep in a film adaptation of a musical since __________ (fill in your own in comments).

- attitude of complete indifference to all events
- inside-out knowledge of everything that happened on telly last night, especially Friends
- Rimmel Black Cherry lipstick
- copy of Sugar magazine (RIP :`()
- some trendy jeans

Wearing the WRONG SORT of jeans would mark you as an outcast forever. Pepe Jeans? No. Lee Jeans? HELL NO. Levi’s was the only option, and Levi’s 501s at that, even though they looked terrible on most girls. I suppose having ’501s’ at the end of ‘Levi’s’ makes one more comfortable about Levi’s inconsistent use of possessive apostrophe. I wore Reebok tracksuit bottoms for most of the decade not because my coolness levels were already so stratospherically high I didn’t need them (which of course they were) but because Mum, anticipating a Hulk-style growth spurt at any second, was understandably reluctant to fork out for expensive jeans which I would shortly render as useless as Bruce Banner’s. However my adolescent body refused to ‘spurt’ in any way (easy now), choosing instead to remain steady in its progress and jeansless in its covering. By the time I’d reached my final height I had to buy my own clothes, and anything costing more than a tenner was unthinkable when there were CDs queuing up to be bought. To this day I have never owned a pair of expensive, unflattering Levi jeans. THANKS MUM.

The thing is, by the time Flat Eric turned up in 1999, the cool kids weren’t wearing jeans either. A couple of years beforehand, Steps discovered that wearing an apron over the top of your trews was a good way of concealing that said trews were in fact from Tesco, and All Saints realised that if you were going to cover up the label of your jeans you might as well wear combats instead. Even Levi’s seemed to stop bothering with major advertising campaigns for a while – perhaps because of the disappointment of ‘Underwater Love’ by Smoke City only getting to #4 after the excellent chart-topping work done by Shaggy, Jas Mann et al.

Obviously something drastic needed to be done. Levi’s decided to base their ‘Sta-Pressed’ advertising campaign on a cult puppet belonging to French DJ/film-maker Mr Oizo. Flat Eric was neither flat, nor called Eric, and I don’t know of a single person who bought a pair of ‘Sta-Pressed’ jeans. This last ditch effort may have regained a brief glint of chart supremacy, but the last ten years have not been kind to Levi’s. Apparently are now millions of pounds in the red, as 501s aren’t skinny or elasticated enough for the kids of today who can’t even be arsed to read Sugar magazine. If they did, they would discover in the final issue under the ‘Hot or Not?’ section the new rules of cool: ‘must listen to French techno at all times, preferably accompanied by amusing Muppet video on Youtube’. Flat Beat kills both birds with one stone!

Air Hostess is a puzzling piece of their discography -lots of Busted’s songs namechecked being in a band but this was the first one to talk about being famous. More than foxy uniforms, this is a song about being the kind of international popstar who takes planes, who goes through crowded airports surrounded by paparazzi flashbulbs and gets away with throwing peanuts down the aisle. Which sounds like highly antisocial behaviour on an aeroplane and so is almost certainly pretty rock and roll.

Air Hostess also follows the common theme from the band of “unattainable women” but where most of the other objects of affection have ended in a fantasy romantic situation, the air hostess “can’t because [she's] working, the paparazzi’s lurking, [she] doesn’t know [they're] in a band, it’s not that people know [them], one photo’s worth a hundred grand.” This sounds like quite an inflated idea of Busted’s pap stock but I’m no financial analyst and so I’ll concentrate instead on the dynamic here- Air Hostess was the first single off Busted’s second album, coming from a successful tour they were confident, no question as to whether the lady will fall for them, no more dreaming of Miss Mackenzie: we’re in business class now, even if they have messed their pants as they flew over France*

The difference between being turned town at the disco and only being held back from joining the mile high club by paparazzi is pretty substantial- this was Busted’s announcement of their arrival, with a relatively expensive video and the opener for the cockily-titled A Present For Everyone album campaign. This is the sort of ballsy move that used to be reserved for rockstars and top rappers, not snotty pop bands but it was the sort of obnoxious move that sat well with the increasing punk-style pop criticism that had been building in what I feel an urge to stuff my own fist in my mouth to stop myself calling “the blogosphere.”

Yes, Popjustice was a big fan of Steps but it was the bolshiness of groups like Busted and Girls Aloud that came to characterise the pop resurrection and supremacy of the 00s; suddenly, a series of popstars appeared who appeared to (ok, possibly not James) “get it.” Air Hostess isn’t Busted’s best song but it was a massive herald of an era of amazing pop songs which were largely amazing because they didn’t care if they were stupid. Essentially, the exact antithesis of everything that Matt Cardle stands for and simultaneously, completely the opposite of what someone like Jessie J is trying to do- Busted upset people by being a pop group without apologising for it (well, until Charlie decided he would) to which the upset was just a sideline, rather than being the point of the thing.

It seems ridiculous now to imagine the amount of rock press column-inches that were devoted to saying how rubbish and stupid a band who sang a song about wanting to have sex with an attractive woman on an aeropane were and retrospectively, it’s hard to believe there’s anything controversial about the band at all but I can guarantee there’ll be several comments going ‘Busted were shit you don’t have ears they didnt evun play they’re instruments worst list ever how dare you put this on the internet’ within a week here. And that’s a pretty mighty legacy for a defunct, two-album boyband if I ever heard one.

I can only find versions of the video ripped off (at this point, in its twilight years) Saturday morning kids’ TV so it misses out all the rude bits. And that’s no fun. So I’m afraid you’ll have to have the audio version-

Air Hostess

*This line has always been troubling; I assume they mean to imply premature ejaculation but it sounds like a deeply unalluring scatological travel nightmare.

Edit: something seems to have gone deeply wrong with the Youtube embed thing? Did I miss this?

Ash have never been asked to write or perform a Bond theme.

But if you ever are asked to write and/or perform a Bond theme, I suggest your first point of reference should be Goldfinger. Which is a remarkably odd song. Interpolating Monty Norman’s (John Barry’s) James Bond theme into a swooping horn heavy full on diva piece which refers to the titular baddy and how cold his fingers are, Goldfinger is the archetypal Bond song. For starts it has the secret ingredient all PROPER Bond songs are, ie the name of the film is the name of the song no matter how tricky it is to make that name into a song. (Which is why, Quantum Of Solace really should have gone with this). I’M LOOKING AT YOU ALL TIME HIGH.

There is something strange about pieces of art which end up representing a greater body of work. Goldfinger is thought of as the defining Bond film, the one where the levels of action, humour, gadgets, girls and goofiness seemed properly calibrated. Creepy gimicky bad-guy sidekick, tick. One-liners ahoy, tick, Pussy Galore, tick. And a theme tune with a brassy diva, brassy lyrics and just plain brassy Bassey. But Goldfinger is probably not the actual best Bond film, and Goldfinger as a track may not be the best Bond theme as a record. But it is THE BOND THEME. And Bassey is THE BOND DIVA. If you are making a Bond parody, its the Goldfinger well you visit. I’M LOOKING AT YOU GOLDMEMBER.

So I don’t know what Ash were thinking frankly. It makes them look more than a bit silly.

To explain it, and to excuse saying much more about it than calling it “a robust but one joke gag on one of Kate Bush’s best tracks” it probably would make sense to explain again how this list was made. Since in the next couple of months we will finally make it to number one after this six year journey, let us go back to a room above the Jeremy Bentham pub on the 29th December 2004 and see how that group even suggested The Hounds Of Love by The Futureheads.

First remember that everyone had been drinking for at least four hours. Remember it was Christmas, post party season where any dancing aspect of Christmas paries would have been slim pickings indeed. In this era of landfill indie anything which stood out or had at least some claim to musical greatness (which The Hounds Of Love certainly does, less so in this version) would be a fig leaf from pop heaven. Consider how funny Geordie accents are. Take all this into consideration before thinking that at this point in time the list making will have been going on for just over an hour. About 150 tracks would have been suggested, some given quite fulsome consideration, others thrown out on their ear. A song required a proposer, a seconder but four vetoes around the room would have kicked it out. Early on songs got in on a good vibes nod. But when you start getting to the top twenty, things slow down considerably. You may get five songs in a row vetoed because they are not top twenty material. And all the time people are getting more drunk, some are also getting bored.

Enter our previous number. House Of Love, by East 17. Remember that this party took up the entirity of the pub floor, was noisy and some people did not hear House Of Love, they heard Hounds Of Love. Humourous banter ensues to clarify which if the songs is voted in. East 17 makes it on a whisker. Smart arse coming up next then says Hounds Of Love, BY THE FUTUREHEADS. Laughter ensues, voting goes through on a nod because it seems like a good idea at the time.

And if anything sums up Hounds Of Love by the Futureheads its: Seems Like A Good Idea At The Time.

Mind you their remix of Fit But You Know It is terrific.

*Or indeed the cold light of 2000 days later.

The great necessary thing about rivalries is that if you’re an outsider they should baffle you a bit. Take That and East 17 – seriously? What’s the difference? They’re both boy bands right, both manufactured, you shouldn’t be listening to either of them, you should be listening to oh, I don’t know, Consolidated or something. And isn’t the rivalry all a hype thing anyway? I had those conversations a few times in 1993.

But hype is the brassiere of pop rivalries, it lifts and separates but there’s got to be something there in the first place, some real division the marketing can draw to your attention. East 17 were rough lads, not cheeky, Londoners, ravers maybe – they were singing “House Of Love” at a time when the words HOUSE and LOVE were code for DRUGS and DRUGS. Well, maybe. Would you get Gary Barlow with his songcraft making anything so rambunctious and mucky and unchoreographed as “HoL”?* Would you get Tony Mortimer and his crew of chancers making anything as sleek and crushable as “Pure”?

There were real differences, but proper rivalries don’t just rest on real differences. They rest on the unspoken tribal things the groups bring to the surface, which were waiting there ready for bands to incarnate them for a few months. Those deeper things are why people feel however briefly that the rivalries matter, because unlike silly stuff like Coldplay v Crazy Frog they dredge up the hidden splits WITHIN a group you might be inclined to think of as a mass. After a bit the baffled voices receded and everyone KNEW what East 17 vs Take That ‘meant’. We have hardly anything like that now and it’s a shame.

*or indeed singing “So many bombs in the world it’s like a LIVING MINE”

(By the way I love that London Records reissue sleeve: way to go to miss the point).

This perceived perfection is the problem with Be My Baby. Not that it is too good. But in marrying Spector’s production to this wonderful mid-tempo stompathon it unwittingly gave us the template for “proper pop”. You know, the pop that never really existed, the pop that people are always talking about when they are sniffy about S Club 7*. Brian Wilson loved Be My Baby so much he wrote Don’t Worry Baby as some sort of drug whacked out response (there is nothing in Be My Baby that suggests Ronnie or indeed the Ronettes, were particularly worried, though with Phil Spector in the background perhaps they should have). So perhaps we can imagine a world where Be My Baby never existed, and how different it would be?

Well Mean Streets and Dirty Dancing would be down a key song each. Don’t Worry Baby would be off any Wilson / Beach Boy touring repetoire. And The Rubettes and the Raveonettes probably wouldn’t exist – thus Luke Haines would have had to riff on something else to make a creepy commentary on the state of pop. But part of me wonders if this hole in the musical canon would be skirted around forever, as the ultimate idea of a wonderful record that we cannot quite attain. In avoiding such a great record because it makes ours or other efforts look lame in comparison are we not just throwing Be My Baby out with the bathwater?

We do not need to imagine the world without Be My Baby. Instead use it as the base of some sort of half-arsed ontological argument being rehashed for the pop era; doesn’t the existence of a record like Be My Baby imply the possibility or existence of even better records? This very list suggests the existence of sixteen better ones (though there are plenty of caveats to be taken with that statement). The Ronettes and Phil Spector didn’t just get lightning in a bottle with Be My Baby, they kept trying and often got close. Others ploughing a similar furrow equally get close. And others go all over the place to chase the ideal. I hope we don’t attain it. Because the truth is, as great as it is, Be My Baby has never given me goosebumps. Because it always existed. Perhaps we need flaws, we need the near misses, to prove we are fallible. Be My Baby is not a template to get there, but other routes are constantly available. But while we wait, watch Ronnie and the girls come as close as you should come to perfection. But :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7pmwqDLxU0&feature=related

*This argument has weakened considerably of late! Hence S Club 7.

I liked this song in 2003 or sometime in the past when this list was compiled and I was mostly drunk. I do not look back on this period in my life with much fondness or pride (or clarity), and can only apologise to my friends and society in general for suggesting this track as part of the Top 100 Songs (I’m not even sure I did suggest this, almost certainly, I was drunk). This song, although catchy, features mostly puerile humour about drinking, which nowadays we know is neither big nor clever. The track also features least one instance of burping, which, in my opinion, is vulgar and has no place in popular music. I have yet to establish for certain what it is that the Alkaholiks do only when they’re drunk, but the lyrical evidence points towards calling their daddy a punk, something about a gun, vomiting and fucking an ugly b1tch, though not necessarily simultaneously. In their defence they do advocate against drink driving, and the bassline isn’t too bad.

But if Alix hasn’t put you off here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txvp-avuSv4&feature=fvw

Or even worse the CRAZY TOWN COVER:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb7RDKSERZ0&feature=related

And what a cover that Crazy Town album has!

So in lieu of saying anything about Billie Jean, here are some other prominent Billie Jeans, or Billies Jeans.

Billie Jean King: Probably the most famous Billie Jean, and almost certainly the most important female tennis player of all time. But was Michael Jackson a big tennis fan. It would certainly make sense when Mike says she is not his girl though, by 1983 she had been outed. Certainly if Mike chose the name to honour her, he would have been way ahead of the US: she did finally receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama last year. But apparently Quincy Jones (who never liked Billie Jean anyway) wanted to change the name of the song because he though people would think it would be about Billie Jean King.

The Battle Of The Sexes is what I mainly know Billie Jean King from, the 1973 match up between on top of her game Billie Jean King and ex-male champ Bobby Riggs. In winning it Billie Jean struck a serious blow for feminism DESPITE it being a game, and Bobby Riggs being 26 years older than her. Indeed I had not realised the age thing until recently, and it does put a bit of a spin on it. Feminism has since been repealed since Jimmy Connors beat Martina Navratilova in 1992.

The Legend Of Billie Jean
Mike clearly isn’t talking about the heroine of this, the second nail in the career coffin of Helen “Supergirl” Slater, as this film came out in 1985. In it some kids get bullied for talking like Jack Nicholson (Christian Slater – no relation), being pretty (Helen Slater) and talking like Bart Simpson before Bart Simpson was invented (Yeardley Smith). I vaguely remember seeing it on video back in 1987, and it is a wonderful piece of its times, plenty of neon cut down wetsuits, denim, power ballads and EMPOWERMENT BY CUTTING YOUR HAIR. Indeed as the clips below show, EMPOWERMENT IS 90% hair cutting. (The other 10% seems to be watching Jean Seberg be burnt at the stake in Saint Joan, which is meant to be a meaningful scene though its hard to note anything like emotion in Slater’s (no relations) face, as she is probably more interested in Seberg’s ginchy bob and making the obvious link between EMPOWERMENT and HAIRDO’S).

As befits a 1980′s teen movie all the characters have ridiculous names (except for Billie Jean, which is merely an unusual name to tie into a song which has nothing to do with, and is not in, the film). Christian Slater (no relation) is called Binx, Yeardley Smith is called Putter and there is even a character called Hubie. If I remember rightly Billie Jean’s rampage of disorderly behaviour all comes about because a mechanic doesn’t fix her brother bike properly, which means she is basically playing the Texas version of Watchdog with Lynn Faulds Wood. With better hair (but then LFW never made Hairdo of the Year, did she?) The teen rebellion is also inspired by Billie Jean watch The driving power rock soundtrack featured Pat Benatar’s Invincible (which also has Helen ‘Did Anyone Say Outrageous Fortune’ Slater all over the video), which Pat always often introduces as being from “the worst film ever”. Truly Legendary.

Billie Jean in Eastenders
Apparently on Eastenders in November they played Billie Jean in the Queen Vic, when Billy and Jean were having a conversation. THAT’s why its the 48th best TV drama of all time!

Clams on the half shell, and roller skates. Roller skates!

Possibly the greatest image ever conjured in song.

You can’t beatmatch “Good Times” because it’s played by a band rather than locked into a computerized timeline. This is infuriating for DJs but serves as a kind of protective bubble when played in a nightclub – the song basically gets played from beginning to end without too much funny business in between. If you’re attentive and know the song well, however, you can mix an acapella rap over the long instrumental breakdown (warning: most raps will be too slow!). It’s complicated though, due to the aforementioned BPM wibbling; far easier to just get a friend to rap over it instead.

Hmm I get the feeling someone’s done that already.

p.s. I have always loved the juxtaposition of Chic dressed up in heavy winter coats with the words “Warm Summer Night” emblazoned below them.. Hot, baby.

Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart (Highest UK chart position: 13)

OK, so misanthrope is overstating it – he was a joy to drink with. It was only the constant skim reading of the ‘off-beat’ yet actually fashionable literature of pain and suffering, Ballard Hesse Gogol, and his own emotional insecurity that led him to vandalism – to take a watercolour chocolate-box confection and piss all over it. BLACK IT’S ALL BLACK. SO COLD, ALWAYS SO FUTILE!

Curtis, we know, was not to allow himself to mature as a writer, to progress beyond imitating the authors he worshipped and alluding to books, like Atrocity Exhibition, that he would never get around to reading. Not that any of this makes LWTUA less enjoyable on its own terms. Musically it’s paralysingly lovely, much like its antecedent though along a different axis of appreciation. Lyrically it’s a list song for Goths, “We Didn’t Start The Fire… But We Could Easily Have Done So And Maybe You Should Consider That When Your Loved Ones Are Sleeping”. But it is a more direct and honest sounding lyric — a step above a lot of his work that comes off like the internal narration of Batman, all brooding hurt, ‘the city is full of filth’ and fist-shaking at the injustice of the world.

Scooter – Ramp! (The Logical Song) (Highest UK chart position: 2)

They accentuated the positive “When i was young…beautiful magical” first half of the verse both by helium-voice ‘chipmunking’ of the vocal to kick things off distinctively and by literally eliminating the negative second half of amateur-emo in favour of bellowed motivational sound-bites. “GOOD MORNING!… are you ready…Peace, Love and Unity” and so on like Sportacus’s novelty alarm-clock stuck on ‘pumped’.

Many people dislike the enforced jollity of an aerobics instructor — the constant Up rubs the wrong way against their hard-earned Down. “A-and it’s all chemically enhanced and fake, right?” Such people are miserable, or idiots, or both. The joy here is as enforced as Joy Division’s misery, and is as genuinely felt. Scooter really do want you to have a good time all the time. It’s just the constant Joker’s grin that makes the sceptic presume idiocy. But The Joker’s grin hides an unhinged and eclectic intelligence bent on thievery on a grand scale.

Compared to Scooter, the Brinks-Mat job was a second-rater. Their appetite for mainstream and arcane music casts them as the stock villain who robs the world’s most famous museums of their priceless works of arts for the love of it. The Thieving Magpie with ADHD, they blur the distinction between cover, sample and homage, taking from folks songs and rock operas about dragons and lifting riffs and lyrics from films (the 60s Miss Marple films), rap (Talib Kweli), indie (Blur) and techno (Kraftwerk, RMB). Most head-spinning of all, they have based TWO of their songs on one track by UK 80s indie band Stump:

Seriously. Stump. Dude. Most often of all they swipe work from established master thieves The K, The L, The F and the -ology — a none-more appropriate appropriation used in this track. Scooter are the stick-up boys, the Omar Littles of pop, taking from the dope-hook pushers and working by their own paradoxical code of honour. In Ramp! they took a sad song and made it Harder Better Faster Stronger.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better…

– TS Eliot

The Puppini Sisters: They spread their Beverley Sisters for the noughties magic over Kate’s tragic, and in the process sing it as if they do not understand any of the words. Indeed they pronounce Cathy as Caffeine. Not trusting the original to be nuts enough they also add wacky milk bottle instrumentation, a musical saw and a thorough disdain for anyone who liked the original.

Angra: I think its a non-native English speaking male singer trying it in a gentle falsetto. It is! Brazillian power metal, which only really comes on in a few drum fills and some underplayed choral guitars. Possibly a little bit too respectful, for a metal version the original has more oomph. Not bad though.

Hayley Westenra: I am guessing a country singer, again played straight but with an interesting set of lilting flutes in the background. Actually the backing is so tame we are tiptoeing into potentially Irish ballading/easy listening. Oh, she is a NZ classical music singer who later joined a Celtic band and is apparently quite big. Competent but bland.

Pat Benatar: Now this one I was aware of but have never heard. The mid-eighties production understands to trust the voice, and goes for gentle but monolithic chords in the chorus. Again she treats it significant kid gloves (there’s even a faux harpsichord in the mix). The way the song builds means there is always a potential surprise around the corner, but this rocks a little bit more – with an odd breakdown squeal. But it still doesn’t get anyway near the rush of the original.

White Flag: I expected Black Flag (and you will be pleased to hear the 3 Colours Red version is not on Spotify), but instead this is more pop punk, almost psych on the vocals. Its a jolly strumalong version with a few nice little guitar licks that you would want from a pub band. Oh, they are from the US – and it turns out that this is the only band on this list where a member has kipped on my couch! Go Ken Stringfellow. Actually much more fun than I expected.

The Sweptaways: Hooray, the lady Flying Pickets – a female acapella choral version. Worth it for their treatment of the “My only monster” line, and a choral stab at Kate’s accent. Lots of fun as a novelty, but actually the first one to really “get” the otherworldliness aspects of the song. Recommended – if only once.

Studio 99: Its a lady club singer version! Warbling half cocked stab for some sort of Top Of The Pops albums, which doesn’t disappoint to disappoint. Excellent stereo effect on the drums, complete lack of feeling from the vocalist. You don’t need top understand what Wuthering Heights is about to get it, but you do need to at least know what the individual words mean.

Dannilu: It starts with a minute and a half of penny whistle, Lloyd-Webber moody synths and an ominous tolling bell. And then becomes, er, a straight instrumentation with another non-native English male falsetto mangling some of the lines. I am guessing Italian because they are trying to sound Italian. And Dannilu is….another super talento Brazillian: there is a video. Beware.

Janine Kitzen Straight version, probably another classical singer as she is over pronouncing the words, relishing the high bits and the backing is cheap synths. Mind you it throws in the kitchen sink and violins and in later stages someone appears to have left a drum machine on playing a completely different track in the corner of the room which enlivens it. Turns out to be German, good accent then.

Zoom Karaoke: A soft but faithful karaoke version with no guide versions. A good way of checking how simple the original is, and how it builds. Guitar solo at the end sounds like it was recorded in a different country. Nice ending, no fade.

Madeline Le Roy: With a name like that she must be French. OMG, its some sort of electronic goth version sung by a woman eating some hot chestnuts. Wonderfully menacing throbbing backing, with excellent out of tune backing vocals (probably by Le Roy). Its not a radical reinterpretation but its much more interesting than most of these. It is the goth version that Bella would approve of (Edward would rightly find it too sappy). See it performed in all its goth glory here. Filmed the same time as Dracul Follow Me!

Top Of The Poppers: See Studio 99 but with slightly higher production values, and a singer who is happy to just do a straight impersonation. It is a tough impersonation to do though , and this one falls into cockney vowels sometimes.

The Klone Orchestra: OK I can now spot a straight cover in two seconds. Very casio preset piano, but the singers voice does the best impersonation yet but frankly, I have the original on Spotify why would I listen to this except for the small strangling sounds in the chorus.

Susan Egan: This is an actress right? Yes, well recognised Pete, she did Belle in Beauty and The Beast on Broadway first and she goes all out for theatrical here. A really interesting version full of obvious overdubs, and relying on a string section instead of the piano. A completely different stab at the unstrung heroine vocals, its not actually that good, but top marks for trying something radically different.

Ameritz: The Spotify Karaoke name to trust. Actually pretty shonky vocal free version which almost turns into Hey Jude until someone turns on the Casio autofill button. Doesn’t even bother with the guitar solo! ROPEY.

And not strictly a different version there is a soft glitchcore remix of the Sweptaways version which if it had just boshed it up might have been good but takes a sweet novelty and makes it even more annoying.

So my conclusions? Well the absence of 3 Colours Red’s indie dash through the song means this is incomplete. Indeed lack of a proper bosh version also surprised me. But the main conclusion is that the song is way to scary for anyone to mess with too much. A few have noticed the goth potential, but instead it seems to be the token pop track for classical singers. None of them take it as seriously as Kate, NOT EVEN THE GOTH, and thus fail to make an impact. None of the versions really add much to the original, though I am glad I now have Dannilu in my life!

Rachel was the pretty one from S Club 7. Well, according to the lads mags anyway, who had anointed her as such, and being the lad mags favourite she also became the favourite for a solo career. Bear in mind that this happened a few years ago when it looked like Girls Aloud were going to split up, Sarah Harding was the one tipped to have the solo career, again because she charted higher in the FHM Top 100. But of course Girls Aloud were clever and stayed together because they learned the lesson of Rachel Stevens.

The lesson of Rachel Stevens is simple. It doesn’t really matter how good your pop singles are, how many column inches you get and how high you are in the FHM wank charts. A solo artist hasn’t got a band persona to hide behind, and in Rachel’s case that meant that to maintain A-list, or even S-list, status she had to do the work of seven people. Sweet Dreams My LA EX, and in particular Some Girls she did everything right. A fgood, and cool producer in Richard X. A solidly nagging pop hook (wanna wanna, other other) and even a stab of making the song sound a bit like the Tardis. A schaffel beat, spot on in 2004 made the whole thing feel that the detached singing style of Stevens was done on purpose. But look at the video below and you see the problem. What about this song has Rachel’s personality in it. The hordes of women coming out of the sewers overwhelm her. The song was co-opted by Sport Relief, for no obvious reason, but that becomes bigger than anything Rachel can stamp on it. The most telling point is that through most of the video Rachel is dancing, with six other backing dancers. You can take the girl out of the 7, but she will still grasp for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Keh_PeUKqgM

Basically Some Girls is a terrific record. But nearly everything that makes it terrific is nothing to do with Rachel herself. And as soon as that became clear, the media got bored with her goody goody, ex-S-club ways. Whilst she recorded a few more OK singles, the media started sniffing around girls who could talk and have personalities. Seven does not become one easily. And that is the lesson of Rachel Stevens.

Actually there are two lessons of Rachel Stevens. The other one is that whatever you do, don’t call your first album “Funky Dory”.

Craft — the mastered techniques of ordinary pop, word AND music, from a sprawling and unusually broad clutch of decades — is Costello’s thing: his focused strength and his limitation. And at this moment (early 79) — when punk was revalorising the 3-minute single, and “getting into the charts” was considered (by everyone except the bleedn Clash) a radical act, a reignition of a latent power — the compacting into one another of a song built round an Abba riff and a lyric exploring the states of a soldier’s mind, — this was an announcement of thrilling potential. LOOK WHAT WE’RE OPENING UP! Where we’re going is just so RICH, pop but deep, pretty but dark, direct but clever, we can sing about ANYTHING NOW etc etc.

I don’t want to take away from that feeling — it’s my own youth and idealism and excitement, and I’m not going to repudiate it — but I do want to look at how it became a problem, how openness went closed. Costello today is imprisoned by his gifts, and I think all of why is on show already here, in this his biggest hit.

OK what I like about the words are, yes, the compression, the perspective shifts — I don’t know exactly when this device became part of rockand/or expressivity, but of course the Pistols had just pushed it to a kind of dizzying limit, every line of every Pistols song a different idea in a different mind — and the resultant ambiguity of cryptic image-collage and POV in OA achieves sympathy as well as critical distance. Only push a bit further in, and I think the crit begins to blur: the Mersey/Thames/Tyne couplet, in full, is as follows: “We could be in Palestine/Overrun by the Chinese Line/With the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne.” Actually google and lyric-sites have “Chinese Lion”, but that doesn’t make much sense either, in terms of geopolitical precision, or cliches about world affairs we know and love [any better ideas or explanations, put em in comments]. I’m not sure that’s such a weakness in this song — it’s just a line that’s never quite parsed — but the punning, rhyming crossword-puzzle density would turn into a shtick, a habit, a way of staying away from the centre of some of (a lot of?) his later material.

The song was written after Costello — real name Declan McManus — visited Belfast, and experienced for himself what it was like to be in a militarised zone, the British Army — descendent of the professionalised forces, loyal to Parliament, fashioned in the English Civil War by Oliver Cromwell (a blood-soaked figure justly loathed in Ireland, whose rep in England is on the whole far more complicatedly positive, precisely bcz the political revolution he set in motion, the ending of the divine right of kings, the establishment despite er hiccups of modern democracy, also established Britain as the hub of an Empire) — wielding guns which pointed, as he suddenly saw it, at himself and those like him: “All it takes is one itchy trigger/One more widow,/one less white n!gger…”

Verses one and three are about the romance of the military — wanting to join up (“My mind goes sleepwalking/While I’m puttin’ the world to rights”), and the sheer vivid energy of possibility, of escape into exotic glamour, of swift-sketched peoples and cultures shimmering and clashing: Kipling said that Empire was great for the British because it encouraged them to escape from their ingrained fubsy parochialism, to encounter the teeming variety and imagination of all humanity. Verse two, the reality from an outsider perspective, recalls the then-famous takedown joke of a Army Ad Campaign of the era: “Join the Army, Travel the World, Meet Exciting, Interesting People — AND KILL THEM!”

And verse four — well, I don’t really get verse four. It mentions Churchill and Johannesburg, and closes the song down in a somewhat formless hint at more knowledge than it delivers: it may be an attempted portrait of how the would-be squaddies are kidding themselves, about how it works when they join up: out of luck, out of work, join up, hey presto you’re side-by-side with the Historical Greats of empire, a tourist in other culture’s energies. I don’t know. What I do know is the perfectly balanced fusion of polar opposite pulls in the chorus: “I would rather be anywhere else than here today” — this is Costello the working-class Irishman, seeing himself as a restless native and thus potential target on Murder Mile, hating it and wanting out; and the unwanted teenager in the Recruitment Office, dreaming of warrior nobility in the world’s dazzling troublespots, and wanting out. I wonder if verse four is there as a wised-up counter to the extraordinary — and I think daring — chorus link: to reassure the punkier, more insecure punters — viz me then — that we’re not being led into WRONG THOUGHT by this linkage, that we DO KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS, and so on and all…

This is getting a bit long, but bear with me two and a bit more paragraphs. The second embedded flaw — which at the time seemed such an enticing portal — is Costello’s commitment to “clever pop”. The problem being — tho this wasn’t clear at the time, indeed I think he was bending the stick in the correct direction — that his rehabilitation of despised craft technique, whether from Cole Porter or Stax or Nashville or Abba, was underneath it, a kind of a revised stands-the-test-of-time announcement, that here were a bunch of ways of approaching the song which deserved to enter the pantheon of deeper intelligence; that complacent rock culture could be opened up. And yes, along with this opening up, we get to rescue pop from being shunted over into the “mere brash ephemeral stupidity” column, where pre-punk rock had shunted it. All of which seems like a great idea — except (over the long haul) it undermines that other thing chart pop provides which considered art is much less good at, that idiot flash of energy and insight (the two inseparably yoked) that you get from a line or a hook or a bodymove: Johnny Rotten’s scornful laugh, Mel and Kim’s hair, Adam Ant’s [select and insert from list too long to include]…

[Threes near-subliminal examples of such flashes in this song: the odd way he pronounces "Arabs"; the way the chorus goes "Oliver's Army is...."/Oliver's army are..." -- another perfect economical statement of an army as both a group and a unity, as disparate unity; and of course Steve Nieve's triple-stab piano]

Oliver’s Army — maybe Armed Forces as a whole, it’s a long time since I listened — is an impacted sketch of ambivalence, of the lure of bad things, ugly emotions and desires, and “I would rather be anywhere else than here today” is the posterchild motto of this, memorably and chart-toppingly both-ways-looking as we reach for escape from the mundane into, well, something maybe much worse (worse for others, if not for us). This was his highpoint — the ebullient, slightly overpumped and convivial fullness of sound, singalong anthemic pubrock punctuated with these startling flashes of otherwhere, seizing the attention of coach-potato poets and organ scholars– and gradually Costello went with his best skills, and why shouldn’t he, except it was a step away from something also. Heroic workrate, enviable facility in wide range to styles, persistent fascination with complex states of mind and nasty states of life assembled themselves into a large, detailed lego-palace labyrinth of work which exactly muffles exactly this kind of WTF this-here-now surprise inreach, into ourselves (artist-audience) when wide open and maybe unalert, ourselves when undefensive and undefended.