A second set of songs from the #UncoolTwo50 project, launching on Monday night/Tuesday on Bluesky – have you finalised your 50 tracks yet? This set is still in the “nearly-made-it” category, though we’re starting to see things which I might yet suddenly relent and put in if I think something isn’t working. We’re also starting to see names which are likely to figure in the final countdown of 250 tracks that Arron’s running – more Americans taking part this time should mean a better showing for Prince than in the original poll. (Cue Anakin meme as they might all vote for, I dunno, Bush or Spacehog or something)
90. ULTRAMARINE ft ROBERT WYATT – “Kingdom” (1993)
I think if I was going to write one of those David Hepworth style “the year that changed everything” books it would be about 1993, because it was a year that didn’t change anything but where – with hindsight – the possibilities of music felt a little bit wider than they did even 12 months later, after Cobain’s death, Definitely Maybe, and the acceleration of dance music along its superclub axis. A lovely, hard-to-pin-down year full of untaken paths, like this odd team up between folksy techno duo Ultramarine and old prog hand Robert Wyatt singing (I believe) a 17th century diggers song. At the time this felt better-on-paper but over the years it’s lodged in my brain to the point where it works to sum up the era.
89. DAWN PENN – “You Don’t Love Me (No No No)” (1994)
The 50 tracks that didn’t get in are studded with huge bangers which I just wasn’t in the mood for in the sliver of time in which I made the list. Might suffer from having TOO GOOD of an intro, the Crazy World Of Arthur Brown of its day.
88. DAVID BOWIE – “Ashes To Ashes” (1980)
Bowie tends to be well covered in these social media polls. I do think this is his best ever single, dig around in the Popular archives for why. But in the last challenge (1954-1976) I voted for what I think is his best ever song – Mott’s “All The Young Dudes” – and it didn’t even make the top 250. So I’m taking my metaphorical space capsule and going home. I am not going to deny that I seriously considered picking Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom” instead, which has to settle for narrowly being the second best song about the guy.
87. THE VALENTINE BROTHERS – “Money’s Too Tight To Mention” (1982)
So here’s where I have to remind readers that this is actually the second “Uncool 50” challenge – the first of them covered 1977 to the present day, but was so skewed towards a tiny patch of said era that challenge-master Arron rejigged the entire thing and now we’re covering those years again. This was one of my picks last time, in fact it might even have got some ‘bonus points’ to nudge it onto the list. It is a wonderful record, a classic soul jam about being caught in the crushing jaws of Reaganomics, later remade (not really as well) by a youthful Mick Hucknall. But I wanted to ring the changes a bit, so a handful of tunes I picked before narrowly miss out.
86. GANG OF FOUR – “At Home He’s A Tourist” (1979)
Another one I picked last time, another brilliant single, the way the guitars chop the song into a set of abstract spaces absolutely radicalised me for post-punk when I heard it in 1991 or so. Not quite as in the mood for abrasion this go-round, so this classic falls by the wayside.
85. NEW ORDER – “Run 2” (1989)
Ah, New Order, who ended up hugely overrepresented in the first run (ho ho) of the Uncool 50 poll. Another one like Bowie where I can’t fault the body of work but individual singles are either “heard it too much” or “not strong enough”. This hidden treasure from Technique came close, though – ultimately me not being sure I’d actually heard the single version remix (hence the “2” in the title) told against it. The lyrics on this are typically Barney-ish but in that zone where his tossed-off lines are actually funny and evocative – “You don’t get a tan like this for nothing” – and he’s not trying to rhyme which is always a mercy. The main attraction though is that languid last two and a half minutes of New Order just being New Order instrumentally, flowing together in ways that are barely a song but immediately them.
84. WAYNE SMITH – “Under Me Sleng Teng” (1985)
A thorny question that always comes up in these polls is historical importance. I’m increasingly inclined to think “fuck it”: the role importance plays is in getting me to listen to things in the first place maybe, but it shouldn’t do much about determining whether I love them or not. Of course I do love “Under Me Sleng Teng” – who couldn’t? – and I hope other people find room for it. But I hope I’d love its infectious bounce even if it hadn’t birthed most of a genre.
83. LLOYD COLE AND THE COMMOTIONS – “Rattlesnakes” (1984)
A lot of mid-80s indie reminds me of the awkward adolescent I was, and the awkward adult I became doesn’t particularly enjoy that sensation. Lloyd Cole stands out not just for how relatively peppy his jangle sounds, but for not evoking that stuff as I never could even aspire as being as cool as the narrator of his songs, whose habit of wearing his taste on his sleeve now registers as endearingly cringey: famously he doesn’t know how to pronounce Eva-Marie Saint, but nor do I so I’m not that bothered.
82. GREEN VELVET – “Preacherman” (1993)
Another one I put into the Uncool 50, and also into a poll – it was a bunch of people’s first encounter with “Preacherman”, which takes the classic 80s/90s ‘sample a preacher over some beats’ move about as far as it can possibly go, an entire sermon about “playing house” – imagine Green Velvet’s glee when he found that one! – with the acid-y music ebbing and surging at the level of the increasingly maddened sermonist. It’s ironic, sure, but there’s also a sympathy and conviction evident in the treatment of the source material that makes it less of a surprise to learn Velvet was himself born again years later.
81. PRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION – “Anotherloverholenyohead” (1986)
First but not last Prince track – again I fell into the Bowie and New Order chasm of “bored of the really famous ones for now” but fortunately with Prince there really are always singles you haven’t thought about for a while that are just as good as the big ones. “Anotherloverholenyohead” walks that most sublime of Prince boundaries, the place where a song meets a jam.