Since he was born, I have done my best to introduce my son to as wide a range of music as possible. I've written here before about my Joy, Joy, Joy whenever he takes a particular liking to one of my selections... but I decided I'd like to expand on that. Keep a diary of his favourite songs as he discovers them. I'll probably witter on a bit about fatherhood in these posts too, and tell cute kid stories. It'll lighten the mood in between bouts of middle-aged angst.
As he grows older, I'm sure Sam will reject many of his father's favourites, but at least he'll have heard them. And maybe he'll introduce me to a few new discoveries of his own. As long as he doesn't get into dance music. That is surely any MOR dad's greatest fear.
This is a Neverending Top Ten because I never want Sam to stop falling in love with new musical discoveries. I know I never will.
As he is four years old today, I thought I'd start with this. Four years ago today, at a little after 8pm, my boy entered this world. They had the radio on in the delivery room. This was the first song he ever heard. It will always make me cry.
1. Manic Street Preachers - Show Me The Wonder
Show me the wonder I have seen the purpose of our universe...
None of us can deny that we have a far greater life expectancy than our parents did. Even my own parents, both now in their late 80s, have lived far longer than any of their parents did. My last grandparent, my dad's mother, died when I was a teenager. She was in her mid 70s, which was a good age back then. Current life expectancy in the UK is 79.1 for men and 82.8 for women, so both my parents are bucking the odds, but then my dad's old mentor, the man who trained him to be a joiner back in the 50s, lived to be 101.
There's been a lot in the news lately about how the increase in life expectancy in this country has ground to a halt recently and that's been put down to everything from unhealthy lifestyles to austerity to Brexit. My other half works on the legal side of pensions and part of her work involves calculating life expectancy for employers so they know how much money they need in the pension scheme for their former employees. A lot of the pensions industry is in a bit of a mess because of some bad calculations and rubbish predictions 20 years or so ago about just how long we'd all live for after we give up work. Nobody wants to be one of those people who retires then drops dead the following week... but there are probably some companies out there who'd breathe more easily if we did.
Of course, life expectancy is a lottery, and all kinds of horrible things can happen to us on the road to our three score and umpteen. 14 years ago today, one of my favourite singer-songwriters died of cancer at the young age of 56. When asked by US chat-show host David Letterman if his illness had taught him anything about life and death, Warren Zevon famously replied...
I was never a John Wayne fan. I found him a pretty unpleasant character on screen... and I believe he was actually quite a bit worse off-screen.
My dad though... my dad loves John Wayne. If there's a John Wayne film on TV, he'll stop everything to watch it, even though he's seen it a hundred times before. Therefore, this Top Ten's for my dad...
Scottish rock band gets upset that all their culture is imported from the States. Consider...
Every time there's a story, I turn around, you're turning into John Wayne, You're turning into John Wayne, Now here's a grey Scottish theory, Have you lost latitude and longitude? Your latitude and longitude.
Now I know that I'm contradicting Everything I own was made in the US of A, Made in the USA
Directed and produced by Wayne, many still believe this movie to be an accurate historical document, despite an iffypedia-quoted expert saying, "there is not a single scene in The Alamo which corresponds to a historically verifiable incident". Songwriters have been fascinated with this famous battle for years too: see The Ballad of Davy Crockett, The Ballad of the Alamo and even Remember The Alamo... which doesn't have quite the same message as the Indelicates song of the same name.
John Martyn believed John Wayne to be a very scary man.
Don’t you dare look behind you
For you know I will be there
You’ll feel my breath on your neck
Turn, face me if you dare
I’ve come to measure you
I’ve come to fix you up
I’ve come to measure you
Fix you up. I am John Wayne
I believe I’m John Wayne
You know, my name is John Wayne
Get on your horse!
John Wayne becomes the perfect metaphor for callous, hard-hearted rejection from this little-known Irish indie band...
You know your neglect
Is the reason that I'm so obsessed with you
And when I asked you your name, you said John Wayne
And I guess it's true
'Coz then you shot me down
Doubled over and I hit the ground right in front of you
I guess in the Wild West
It's OK to shoot the pest that's annoying you
1. Buddy Holly & The Crickets - That'll Be The Day
Perhaps not the most obvious Number One... until you realise that one of the biggest hits of the rock 'n' roll era is actually named after a line from The Searchers. 60 years later, this is still one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded.
Which one makes you want to get off your horse and drink your milk? (John never said that, apparently. It was Little & Large.)
RIP Walter Becker (right), one half of Steely Dan, pictured with the other half, Mr. Donald Fagen, above. Over the past five years or so, pretty much since I turned 40, Steely Dan have become one of my favourite bands. I long since resigned myself to never seeing them play live, but they are the only band I've ever paid money to watch a tribute act for (Nearly Dan: brilliant). To put that into perspective, I never got to see The Smiths live either... but I've never had a hankering to see a Morrissey & Marr tribute act.
Ten plus years ago, a former colleague of mine tried to persuade me of the greatness of Steely Dan, but I think I was just too young. He was a huge Springsteen fan and liked a lot of the bands I liked at the time (then again, he was also a huge Rod Stewart fan) and couldn't understand why I didn't dig the Dan. I didn't hate them. The tracks I knew - FM, Rikki, Reeling In The Years - I thought were perfectly good pop songs. But the albums... I just didn't have the time.
A few years later, I gave them another go, starting with Can't Buy A Thrill: surely one of the greatest debut albums ever recorded. Since then, rarely a week has gone by without Steely Dan cropping up on my headphones at least once.
I firmly believe Steely Dan are a band you have to grow into. Maybe in the 70s, a bunch of teenagers were really into them... but even then, I doubt it. I reckon their prime audience has always been made up of beardy middle-aged musos... and I'm now severely guilty on two of those scores. Never fancied a beard.
Steely Dan were witty, mysterious, a little bit mental, jazzy in all the wrong ways... they're the least rock 'n' roll band you'll ever hear, which you could argue makes them the most rock 'n' roll bad you'll ever hear. Since such definitions really mean nothing. Donald Fagen understood that, and so does Walter Becker. But man, they could play.
They were also an albums band - never a singles band. And with the deepest respect to Led Zeppelin and Yes, they must be the greatest albums band ever. Which makes picking a Top Ten Steely Dan tracks impossible... and pointless. The songs below are all brilliant, but they're so much better when you hear them in their original context, in the albums that made them brilliant. And each of those albums contains eight or nine other brilliant tracks as well.
For Walter Becker then, ten of my favourite Steely Dan tracks. Not numbered, because I find them impossible to rank...
OK, so I know L7 weren't named after a Liverpool postcode... but my cred is already in tatters, I'm not about to open a post with a picture of East 17.
Anyway, songs named after (British) postcodes. A challenge I just couldn't resist. I couldn't think of any named after American postcodes... or zip codes... though I'm happy for you to suggest them. The closest I came was Kitchen by The Lemonheads, because they were "thrilled to be in the same postcode as you".
Here's ten songs that even Postman Pat should be able to deliver to the right address...
"A parody of the Sex Pistols." Which is all very good, but if ever there was a band that were perfectly capable of being a parody of themselves without any help from anyone else, it was the Sex Pistols.
Inner city Manchester... although the person who uploaded the song to youtube filled the video with pictures of the South Bank. You can imagine the comments!
Lets the stars shine on Until the break of dawn Let the stars shine on And let her move, move like a queen Of Longsight M13
I was disappointed to learn that M5 by The Fall is about the motorway, not Salford.
Ray writes a letter to the editor from his home in Muswell Hill, complaining about the state of Britain today... a recurring theme from the infamous Little Englander.
I close my eyes and lay back and I think of England I dream about that green and pleasant land we knew as England That throne of kings, that sceptred isle set in a silver sea Has turned into a laughing stock divided without harmony
I've never been a football fan, but I'm a huge fan of Matt 'Skint & Demoralised' Abbott, and although I've no interest in Leeds United (despite them being a local team to me and the team my dad followed when he was younger) I can hear Abbott's passion in every word of this chant.
I'd love to think this track was an autobiographical account of Shane's arrival in Hampstead...
When I got down to the smoke It was 1963 I got a job doing meals on wheels Round NW3 I was terrorising grannies For ten lousy bob a week I was smashed and blacked And drunk and yawning in NW3
...except that he would have been 6 at the time. Still, this is Shane MacGowan we're talking about, so anything's possible.
I stayed in Hampstead once. Walking down the street, I saw the "comedian" Michael McIntyre talking very loudly into his phone. I'm not a violent man, but I had to be physically restrained from punching him hard in the nose.
1. New Model Army - BD3
The track that inspired this particular Top 10, so I thought it deserved to be Number One. Despite working in Bradford for 20+ years of my life, I never really listened to one of the city's biggest bands while I was there (I was always more of a Terrorvision man) but I stumbled across this pretty recently and couldn't stop listening to it. Further investigation required...
We close early when the nights are slow Hit the Shell garage, Thornton Road Take a long drive up on the moors Park up in a place we know In the back seats getting stoned To forget everything at home Mess about with the bleeping phone Gazing down on the city below Where no one's really sure if this is home
And it's not where you're from or where you've been It's not a matter of blood or of family tree Everybody believes what they want to believe But they come from some kind of refugee Running from something, turned out of somewhere All looking for somewhere, exiled from something And no one's really sure if this is home
Very appropriate lyrics for anyone living in Bradford. Unfortunately, when I google search Pudsey (BD3), all I get is hundred of pictures of the Children In Need bear. The video below is probably more accurate...
Know any other songs named after postcodes? Send your answers on a postcard.
