27. THE WATERBOYS – “Church Not Made With Hands” (1984)
This feels, to me anyway, like my most idiosyncratic choice – a 1984 single that’s very very much in their “The Big Music” phase, which is neither an ethos or a sound I would say I have a lot of time for. Windswept Celtic pomp-rock – all my early life as a music fan trained me to take the piss out of this stuff, so it takes a song of particular force to break through my cynical reserve about chest-beating hollering passionate guys who have more than a few Van Morrison records (Kevin Rowland gets a lifetime pass, though).
Anyway this particular song hooked me by the sneaky method of starting with a reference to C.S.Lewis’ Narnia books, and not just any Narnia book, the second most controversial and first most mad one, The Last Battle (the most controversial one is controversial for being extra-racist, fortunately nobody’s making records about that) (I hope). “Bye bye Shadowlands! The term is over and all the holidays have begun!” yells Mike Scott, strongly implying that either he or us are all dead.
Further up and further in! The rest of the song is urgent jangle rock with a big horn section to give it some whoomp, the favoured trick of 1980-era Dexys and The Teardrop Explodes, so this is a late deployment of the sound but I’ve always liked it and still do. The song feels a bit like reading one of Pat Mills’ comics in that phase where it was all about the Goddess and the mysteries of Womankind: Mike Scott sings about sings about something personal and spiritual which could be Christian, could be pagan, could be highly individualised nature worship, while the horns blast away behind him. As this write-up shows I am not sure why I have listened to this song dozens of times, I like hearing guys connect with something that’s clearly real and True to them even if I can’t do it myself.
26. SCRITTI POLITTI – “Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry For Loverboy)” (1988)
There was no question I would pick a Scritti Politti song. They’re the only band I’ve seen live more than once in the last 10 years, and it was actually the first of those times which guided my hand here. It was the first time they’d tried this song live – it has one major barrier to doing it (aside from whatever personal dislike Green may have of the Provision era, the only time he’s tried to repeat his last record’s formula) which is that Miles Davis plays the wistful trumpet solo. A few minutes’ work for Davis which both gives this gossamer record some depth and creates a tricky problem for the band. They had a guy on stage – from memory a young lad – whose job it was to be Miles for the night. He did very well, of course, and I was thrilled to have heard one of my favourite Scritti songs get its debut.
Beyond that it’s a sad record. “We tried together to discover how we failed the test of our times” speaks to me as a line more than it did even that night at the start of 2016. “I got so tired of concluding that there’s nothing for us to conclude”, on the other hand, is a Scritti-by-numbers line (though not a bad one) and a sign that the continental-philosophy-as-pop game might soon be up. I wish he’d stuck longer with his next brief phase, the ragga-pop covers of “She’s A Woman” and “Take Me In Your Arms And Love Me”, the second of which was almost a highly perverse pick here.
25. WIRE – “Outdoor Miner” (1978)
One of the oddest stories of the post-punk era is that EMI tried to buy this single into the charts and got caught, leading to a Top Of The Pops appearance being cancelled. How might the world have been different? Not appreciably, let’s be honest. But from another angle you can see why they did it – this is Wire’s prettiest single, one of the prettiest by any of the post-punk awkward squad, the flowering of that real gift for an attractive chord progression that shows up occasionally even at their most aggressive or abstruse.
As I delighted in pointing out when I nominated it for the World Cup Of Animals, it’s about a caterpillar (the Serpentine Leaf Miner, fact fans) and indeed boasts a density of beasts few songs can match. Leopard’s eyes (rhymed with jeopardise, chef’s kiss), lambs, silverfish, and the creature itself. Why did they write about this? I do not know. I find the lyrics completely inscrutable and extremely poignant. “In fact it’s the earth which he’s known since birth” – I feel you, little guy, even though I’m not sure why.
24. NEW RADICALS – “You Get What You Give” (1998)
This one is a pinch-hit, drafted into the list after Simple Minds’ grandiose “New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)” was eliminated due to only being a single in Italy. I wanted something which summed up an era for me as well as that does and which had the additional similarity of daring the listener to take it seriously.
“You Get What You Give” fits that bill. It’s an odd record, in that it says things about the late 90s now which it didn’t seem to at the time. On release its aggressive sincerity stuck out like a sore thumb in an alt-pop landscape which was still full of post-grunge wariness about saying too much of what you mean. “You Get” anticipates some of the heart-on-sleeve attitudes of 00s indie rock – your Arcade Fires and your Sufjan Stevenses. But those groups never did anything as anthemically pop as this song: it’s so funny that he calls out Hanson of all people, since “Mmmbop” is probably the only other contemporary hit that’s catchy and eager and naive in this particular way.
But the late 90s aren’t always remembered for being as cynical and ironic as they actually were: they are also mythologised now as a time of bright-eyed optimism, where fixing society and the world’s problems seemed possible. “You Get”’s calls to arms are ridiculous but they’re also bittersweet given… everything that happened this century, pretty much. It’s one of the few songs which actually lives up to that idea of the 90s as some kind of land of lost content, even though that’s a distortion of the lived truth of it. A richer text than Gregg Alexander probably intended, in other words. Courtney Love would still pulverise him, though.