More of the songs I decided my son Sam needed to know to help him succeed in life...
Track 13: It's Immaterial - Driving Away From Home
I like a good talky song. Sam's Mum, on the other hand, isn't a fan. She will regularly complain that Neil Tennant talks in too many Pet Shop Boys songs, rather than actually singing, and whenever this particular track pops up on the car stereo, her response has generally been, "It's just some bloke wittering on about driving up the motorway". To which I would reply, if I ever dared disagree with her, "Yes, it is - and that's why it's a work of genius!"
I'll tell you what Why don't we cross the city limit And head up north Through Manchester I mean all you've got to do is put your foot hard down to the floor And we can call on people I know in Newcastle And maybe even Glasgow There's a lot of nice places to see up there Without a care in the world
I love this song, even if I don't really gel with the sentiment. I mean, it's about the freedom of the open road, and that may have been all very well in 1986 (three years before I passed my test) but I don't find anything pleasurable in being behind the wheel these days. Funnily enough, Sam asked me the other day, "do you enjoy driving?" and my response was NO - I like it as an idea, but unfortunately the roads are full of idiots who want to kill you.
All you gotta do is put your foot hard down to the floor And we'll go through the lights Across the junction Through the council estates Past the detached houses and the semi-detached Past the high rise And out onto the country lanes Maybe even hit a motorway There's nothing to stop us I mean after all We haven't got a care in the world...
...other than staying alive and not letting that arsehole in the Audi run you off the road because it'll mean he might reach his destination ten seconds sooner.*
(*Lyrics cut from the original recording.)
I fell down a bit of a rabbit-hole reading up on It's Immaterial. I kind of knew about the two main guys, Jarvis Whitehead and John Campbell, and their slow rise to success - starting in 1980 with the superb debut single Young Man (Seeks Interesting Job). What I didn't know was that Henry Priestman was also a member at one point, before he went on to join The Christians, and then release a couple of excellent solo records that I think I recall Martin recommending sometime in the dim and distant past. I also didn't know that ItsI finally finished their third album, 30 years after they started it, in 2020. Clearly, as with Timbuk 3, further investigation is required. And just like on the Timbuk 3 song that kicked off this compilation, It's Immaterial's biggest hit benefits greatly from the addition of a harmonica. See, Louise - it's not just a bloke talking!
Driving Away From Home currently has 99,000 views on the tube of you. Let's see if we can get it closer to 100K.
Track 14: REM - Get Up
I figured REM would be one of the bands most regularly featured on these compilations, and a quick tally reveals they are in joint fifth position with two other acts that won't surprise long-time readers of this blog but would horrify the cognoscenti.
I'm on safer ground with REM, though you do have to be careful with the hardcore REMmies who sneer disdainfully at anyone who discovered the band after their IRS days. Green, which this track comes from, was their mainstream WEA debut, and as such will be seen by a small group of extremists as the beginning of the end. Or maybe just the end, full stop. I myself would offer Green up as a contender for Best REM Album, probably as a vote-splitter with its follow-up, Out Of Time. Automatic For The People is too obvious - see, I can be a snob too!
Get Up is the sixth REM song to feature on these compilations - for the record, the first was Stand (from the same album) back on the very first Sam CD I created. Some of the bigger hits followed, but I'm intrigued by why I included this one before either Orange Crush or Pop Song 89. I guess it's got a very simple repeated chorus which I figured would hook in a youngster's head. Apparently, Michael Stipe directed the lyrics at Mike Mills who would often sleep late during the recording sessions.
Track 15: Scissor Sisters - I Don't Feel Like Dancin'
When the Scissor Scissors broke onto the scene in 2003, I was very interested. Laura sounded like a classic 70s pop song, yet it had that contemporary edge which separated it from the retro-acts. The band followed this with their bizarre cover of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb which... whisper this... I preferred to the original. Then came Take Your Mama and Mary, proper pop songs in an era of Auto-Tune and Landfill Indie. I had high hopes for this band...
Ta Dah! That was their name of their second album, and it started very well for them - with this song, a worldwide Number One. (Well, worldwide if you exclude their home country of the USA, who never really took to them - too much irony in their act? Or could it be homophobia? The band did well in the US dance charts, but never crossed over to the mainstream.)
After that... I'm not sure what happened. Other hits followed, but maybe they were trying too hard to court the pop stations and they lost that early edge. Whatever, my attention wandered.
I was about to close by saying this was the best Bee Gees song the Bee Gees didn't write in the 21st Century. Turns out Jake Shears and Babydaddy did have a co-writer on this tune though... one Reginald Kenneth Dwight, formerly of this manor. Well, you learn something new every day.
Track 16: Shed Seven - Disco Down
Ah, speaking of "Landfill Indie". No, I won't have that said about Shed Seven - besides, they were around in the Britpop days, the LF label can only really be applied to humourless post-Millennial indie dirges. Actually, Shed Seven started way back in 1990, and this was their final Top 20 hit, from the year before the Y2K bug devastated the world. And look, it's fun! It's got a disco beat and the kind of lyrics the Scissor Sisters would be lauded for five years later.
Shed Seven are pretty high on my list of Britpop bands that should have been bigger than Oasis. Bear in mind that list also includes Strangelove, Geneva, Marion and even Menswear. It's hard to think of a Britpop act that doesn't deserve that accolade... in my humble opinion.
Roland arrived at Grange Hill a year or so before I went to High School. He didn’t have a good time of it, being the fat kid who everyone picked on… his only friend being annoying Janet with the whiney voice. He was singled out by school bully Gripper Stebson, who made his life a misery, and towards the end of his first year, he ended up in hospital after running out into the road in front of a speeding car.
I missed the episode where Roland got run over, so somehow I managed to convince myself things had got so bad he’d tried to commit suicide. The internet tells me, years later, that it wasn’t actually a suicide attempt, but Grange Hill went to some dark places, so I’m not 100% convinced.
The reason I’m telling you about Roland is that when I started High School, the bullies and the wags soon twigged to the fact that I share the first three letters of my Christian name with the Grange Hill character played by Erkan Mustafa. And even though the end of my name was different – who cares? Rol became Roland… and the sound of kids mimicking whiney Janet’s catchphrase, “I only want to help you, Ro-land…” was soon echoing through the halls of our Secondary. And I hated it.
Author and neurobiologist R. Douglas Fields created the acronym LIFEMORTS to summarise nine triggers in our brains that cause us to get angry, lose our shit and full on HULK out. Last time, we looked at the first of these – L for Life or Death Situations. Today, we’re looking at I… for Insult.
I’d argue that many times, getting hit by a stick or a stone – even if it caused us the long term inconvenience of a broken bone – is preferable to many of the insults we’ve received in our lives. The insults the cut us to the quick. The insults that we lay awake at night recalling. The insults that leave permanent scars.
Unsurprisingly, scientists have studied the way our brains react to insult, and they compare the effect to a “mini slap in the face”…
The researchers found insults uttered by a fictitious person triggered short bursts of brain activity in the front part of listeners' brains, regardless of who the insult was directed at, themselves or somebody else.
These very rapid responses, which the researchers say are akin to a slap in the face, did not diminish over time; offensive statements continued to grab the brain's attention, generating large responses of similar magnitude, regardless of how often the invectives were heard.
Insults elicited a larger response in brain activity than compliments, and they continued to do so throughout the session, the experiments showed.
Ouch. Insults have a bigger impact and stay with us longer than compliments. So much for “names will never hurt me”!
It's a telling reminder of how our brains tend to fixate on negative events more intensely than they do positive things – what's known as the negativity bias.
Get that – what they’re basically telling us here is that our brains are much more likely to brood over negative things than they are to get zuzzed up by positivity. Our brains are essentially miserable emo/goths. It’s a wonder we’re not all on Prozac.
The reason our brains don’t like being insulted goes way, way back to the dawn of man when our very survival often depended on being part of a fledgling community, and hierarchies became suddenly very important. The higher you were up the hierarchy, the more chance you had of surviving. Of getting food and water, or having others help you by sharing resources and skills. Of finding a mate and being in with a chance of passing your genes on to the next generation. However, even back then, there were lots of buffoons who made it their business to try and batter other people down, and if they couldn’t do it physically, maybe they could do it verbally. The insult became as much a threat to our position in society as the stick or the stone… and our brains, whose primary job is to keep us alive, began to realise that insults could be deadly.
When Swanny chanted out, “I only want to help you, Ro-land,” and the other kids laughed, he was knocking me down the hierarchy ladder, and cementing his own position near the top. And this made me angry.
According to Psychology Today though, Anger is the absolute worst response to Insult. Whereas the strongest way to respond might well be… acceptance.
When someone insults us, we ought to consider three things: whether the insult is true, who it came from, and why. If the insult is true or largely true, the person it came from is reasonable, and his or her motive is worthy, then the insult is not an insult but a statement of fact, and, moreover, one that could be very helpful to us.
Which seems fair enough… although in that case, it is really an insult? Aren’t we just talking about constructive criticism there? Some people have a hard time with that too – any form of criticism – but it still differs from an insult.
On the other hand, if you think that the person who insulted you is unworthy of your consideration, you have no reason to take offence, just as you have no reason to take offence at a naughty child or a barking dog.
I think that as we get older, it becomes a lot to ignore insults from dingbats who aren’t worth expending a breath on… but when you’re a teenager, that’s much harder. Everyone’s opinion matters to you in the deadly hierarchy of the school yard.
As kids, we’re more likely to return the insult… I know you are, you said you are, but what about me? That doesn’t quite work when the insult is linked to your name though. I suppose I could have tried to come up with an equally stinging riposte linked to Swanny’s name – yeah, well, you look like a swanee whistle (maybe I could have imitated the sound of a swanee whistle every time he walked past?) Or could I have compared him to a Swan Vesta – you’re a hothead, Swanny… where’s your vest? It’s hardly Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker, is it? And chances are he might just have (to use another swan analogy) broken my arm in return.
The fundamental problem with the put-down, however brilliant it may be, is that it equalizes us with our insulters, bringing them up to our level and us down to theirs. This gives them, their behaviour, and their insult far too much legitimacy. Returning the insult also risks injuring the insulter (who, in all probability, is fairly fragile) and inviting further attacks.
Depending on the power differential in the relationship, fighting fire with fire is rarely a smart move… not when the other side has bigger fists and is more than prepared to use them.
If you can’t use humour to deliver a stinging rebuke then, perhaps you can use it to defuse the situation in another way? When Swanny piped up, “I only want to help you, Ro-land,” maybe I should have replied, “Cheers, Swanny – any chance you can do my Maths homework for me?” Or turn the mockery back on myself to show him it didn’t bother me at all. “Ouch – that hurts. I’m going to have to go do what Roland would do in this situation… eat a few pies and wash them down with a gallon of Irn Bru.” Of course, it’s all very well thinking of witty ripostes after the fact (shades of L'esprit D'escalier), particularly 40 years after the fact! But I think eventually this was the strategy I began to adopt in terms of dealing with insults. I got in there first. I insulted myself, put myself down, before anybody else could. Take the insulter’s power away by showing them I had an even worse opinion of myself than they did. It works… to a point… but no wonder I ended up with low self-esteem.
The biggest name we've lost recently though is Gene Hackman, along with his wife and his dog. As I write, the true story of their tragic end has yet to be revealed, but I don't want to dwell on that. I just want to remember Lex Luthor, Popeye Doyle, Sheriff "Little" Bill Daggett, Captain Frank Ramsey and, best of all, the heroic sacrifice of the Reverend Frank Scott in The Poseidon Adventure.
We're back with another idiom and some pop songs which appropriated it. This post was supposed to run yesterday, but...
See what I did there?
The album cover at the top of the page is from Eddie & The Hot Rods' 2004 comeback album, their first in 9 years, hence the title. Other than that, it appears to be business as usual. Hot Rods lead singer Barrie Masters sadly passed away in 2019... and if you're wondering about Eddie, he was just a shop dummy brought on stage in the early days, but they soon got tired of dragging him around...
Sadly, that album didn't have a title track. And because I reckon you've waited long enough for a song named after this week's idiom... here it is. Better l...
You normally can't go wrong with a bit of Motown. The jury's still out on Bobby Breen though, who sounds to me like he's singing while gargling mouthwash...
And purely because they've never appeared on this blog before, nor on my previous blog, meaning that I haven't given them even one mention in almost 18 years of blogging... ladies and gentlemen, I give you...
Country star Tanya Tucker was 13 when she had her first hit single in 1972... which makes her just over 20 when she released this belter in 1979... I dunno, she looks older on the album cover.
Pick of the bunch today comes from My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James. I always have time for a good two minute pop song - they're useful for filling up the last slot on a compilation CD...
I wish I could swim like dolphins, like dolphins can swim. But the closest I got was the huge inflatable dolphin I clung onto during my earliest swimming lessons, while I was also wearing armband, a foam rubber float, and reaching out for the hooked pole the swimming teacher was offering from the side of the pool. And still I sank. I did eventually learn to swim, but my mum swears the instructor had a nervous breakdown first.
I realise there were a bunch of other 7 bands I could have chosen to illustrate what's shaping up to be the biggest edition of this countdown to date. Bands like...
(I've never heard of them before either, but Jim in Dubai is a fan. I honestly had to check the lead singer wasn't a young Simon Cowell.)
However, I always had a lot of time for Shed Seven, or "what Oasis might have been if they hadn't been a bunch of absolute Aresholes" as I like to think of them. They put out a bunch of cracking Britpop singles, never took themselves too seriously, and always put on a good live show.
Here's a Positive Song For Negative Times from them...
And now on with the show, which will, by necessity, be a lot of your tunes and very little of me talking this week, if I'm to have a cat in hell's chance of getting through all the 7 songs you suggested.
(Update: well, that didn't happen, did it?)
At least The Swede got his artists and titles the right way around this week...
Day off today and up late, yet still the first one in!
I know, it's like they all have better things to do first thing on a Tuesday morning, isn't it? But what could be better than this? Anyway, on you go, Swede...
Lynchie recalled: I met the prog rock band Egg at a bed & breakfast place in Dundee sometime around 1970 if memory serves me well. Can't say I was a fan.
George wondered: Of Dundee or Egg?
Lynchie replied: Both!
I used to write ads for the radio station in Dundee. Never got the opportunity to visit.
Well, it's definitely the best thing Neneh Cherry ever put her name to.
Oh wait, here's Alyson again...
My pick would be Youssou N'Dour/Neneh Cherry though with 7 Seconds as wrote about it recently so found out so much more of the back story - Again, don't include this bit, but here is a cut and paste:
Sorry Alyson, I need something to break up the endless list, so you're subbed.
'7 Seconds is apparently about the first positive 7 seconds in the life of a newborn child, a child who does not know about the problems and violence in our world. Three different languages were used in the song: English, French and Wolof, which is a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania.'
See. That was far more interesting than just another boring list, wasn't it?
You sure about that, Douglas? My research says it was written by Elvis & Jimmy. And I pulled the Deluxe Edition of Blood & Chocolate off the shelf to check. That would have been my choice, anyway.
I have a lot of time for Guy Garvey, but I know I didn't spend enough time on that last album. That's lovely.
Alyson, meanwhile, is still worrying about appearing cool. Listen, Alyson, Martin proudly suggested Sting, so you've got nothing to worry about!
My hard drive obviously comes from Planet Uncool as very little overlap with the above choices at all. Other than Love and Youssou N'Dour, I have the following:
Pretty sure I'm going to irk a lot of musos with that lot.
Like I said, Martin too that crown this week. And it's not like you suggested Ken Dodd again, is it?
And, as a 7 band, my hard drive is littered with material by those giants of pre-teen pop S Club 7 as my daughter was just the right age for them at the turn of the millennium.
Surprised that hasn't come up yet. Graham Fellows (Or Jilted John as some people may know him better as)- Seven Pints & a Suicide
Or John Shuttleworth, adds Rigid Digit, a truly right thinking man if ever there was one. Who else could impart the panic and shock of opening the fridge and findings two margarines on the go.
I woke up this morning with the riff from 7 Reasons by Revenge running in my head, the best New Order song not by New order.
Back to Doug in Canada...
Okay, this time I am still late, and despite the whopper load of songs already listed, I see there are a few left to nab! I would of course have taken R.E.M, myself, but on the philosophy that they can't win two weeks in a row (can they?) I am glad my second favourite choice of all 7 songs is still available, so here goes:
More like it. Mr. Gedge has far more chance around here than Mr. LeBon.
Audience--Seven Sore Bruises
That actually has featured here before, even though it's not the far superior Sophie Ellis Bextor band. Unfortunately, the version on youtube appears to have been hacked by the Russians, possibly as a revenge attack for The Scorpions. (See Sunday's post if you don't know what I mean. Do keep up.)
(Speaking of Ms. Ellis-Bextor... this was obviously a b-side...
Boy, talk about left with the scraps! I was going to wow you with Wah! Heat's Seven Minutes To Midnight,and that has already been mentioned at least twice! All of the best ones are taken, and even most of my songs from the B squad are already here. Time for the C squad:
And finally comes Alyson, with some sage advice...
Think you're going to have to trim this list down, probably...
I'm trying to avoid trimming at this late stage... much as I may live to regret that decision in the remaining weeks. ...but as is tradition I will throw in an oldie for sake of completeness:
I'm guessing that's a different Paul Evans, though I stand to be corrected.
Good luck with getting through that little lot above (no pressure remember to deliver every week).
Good job too, considering how I failed to get through all this last week.
All of which leaves me with only the scrapings from my own hard-drive... but I may whittle that list down a little for my sanity this week. Lots of 7" mixes I had to skip past while searching through these.
However... when I began this countdown, approximately 77 years ago, I knew immediately what number 7 would be on the Hot 100. Just as I've known all along what #1 will be.
Looking up at the list above me now, I can see a number of tracks I might pick instead of this one... some truly excellent tunes that I couldn't be without. But this is what I'm going with, as suggested by The Swede, because... erm... I don't really know why. But it's Prince, and that'll do nicely.
Plus the video is absolutely bonkers...
Only half a dozen to go. And so, as George once sang... I Want Your Six!
Let Me Entertain You with the answers to this week's Saturday Snapshots. No Regrets if you got any wrong. You're all Angels for taking part...
Charity Chic was this week's winner with a last minute goal (lots of football references this week - perhaps The World Cup had more effect on me than I realised).
10. Aussie lady is loyal to honey in orbit with Roger, initially.
Australian ladies are known as Sheilas.
If you're loyal to honey, you might have bee-devotion.
If you're in orbit, you could be in Space, with the initial letter of Roger...
Ron Atkinson was a football-type, meaning he was part of the Football Association and would be interested in winning the F.A. Cup. FA + Ron = blimey.
Early would be 4 in the morning.
Some debate over whether this was actually a photo of the singer in question - Martin committed the heinous crime of google image searching and google mistakenly informed him that the above photo was of "of long-dead minor character actor Louis Jean Heydt". Which just goes to show that you can't trust google image search to help you with this quiz because THIS is "long-dead minor character actor Louis Jean Heydt"...
However, if Martin's image search had revealed the answer to be Don Draper, I might have been hard-pressed to dispute that suggestion...
Perhaps this would have been easier if I'd used the photo I originally selected for this week's competition...
...but luckily I spotted the rather large clue in that image before I clicked 'post'.
In the end, I had to offer an extra clue to help you solve this one... Prefab Sprout! Every little sentiment's an antique. Charity Chic finally worked it all out, helping him clinch this week's title.
Saturday Snapshots: I don't just throw it together, you know!
3. Young Beckham crosses the East River - that's as bad as it gets!
Beckham's son is called Brooklyn. (To be fair, until I researched this clue, I thought Brooklyn Beckham was a girl. Shows what I know.) The Brooklyn Bridge crosses the East River. C claims this quiz gets harder every week, but she still solved this week's hardest clue.
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