THE FT TOP 100 SONGS
90. The Only Ones – “Another Girl Another Planet”
I cannot remember how, or why I had tickets to see The One, Peter Perrett’s mid-nineties bands playing on the fact that The Only Ones were no longer the only ones. Maybe they were supporting some no-mark Brit-pop new wave band who were trying to claim some post-punk lineage. Whatever. They were terrible and I vacillated between ignoring them and taking the piss. What a lovely audience I must have been. It was almost certainly the beginning of my disillusionment with live music, and if I don’t blame The One completely for falling out of love with live music, they had a hand in it.
They did however show the power of “the one good song”. After six or seven of these slidgy guitar based crawls, Perrett shouted something along the lines of “we know what you’re really here for” (the answer surely being the headline act). And The One ripped into “Another Girl Another Planet”. I stopped moaning, I stopped ignoring. I might even have jumped about a bit.
Sci-fi love songs are nearly always greee-eeat. Perhaps it is because they often have funny electronic noises in them, making them novelty hits sonically (I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper?). Lyrically the astronaut love story will be stuffed with references to ray-guns and zipping through space (cf the theme to Fireball XL-5). So even if The Only Ones missed out on the bleeps, and were about as direct as you can get lyrically, they were still writing a sci-fi song.
Another girl – one of pops perennial obsessions. Another planet – this is stupid sci-fi new wave fun. Set your pop phasers to stunning.