"this is not a love song" - angelou

"we can sit and talk all night, spectate and philosophise but there's no rehearsal this is the real thing. so lets just say that you got it wrong and this is not a love song"



the monkey bar was one of those places that just had to exist. by day a scratty cafe, by night host to an eclectic range of gigs and club nights. i have a strange range of happy memories of it - the gig i played there was enhanced by the singing of drunken dutch sailors, the dub night had an open african drumming circle in the upstairs room and there was psycho's.

every third thursday a weak comedian would compere an acoustic night. i saw a lot of these gigs, but the only one that is specifically memorable was seeing angelou.

now, as you may have noticed, if you give a girl a guitar i am weak around her, and if you give a pretty and talented girl a guitar i am literally putty. they sung a complete set of soul-shatteringly lovely songs, threw in the best cover of buckley's hallelujah i have ever heard and were funny and endearing between songs. holly even seemed really sorry for having to take money from me in return for a copy of their cd afterwards.
it was an evening of beauty and i walked home in a daze that night with autumn thinking about turning into winter around me.

"richard" - billy bragg

"how can he go on when noone answers the adverts in his mind?"



nadine baggott knows all about pentapeptides.
barry scott shouts about making pennies shiny.
carol vorderman knows all about loan sharks.

but none of them can compete with that "editor" from the advert in the late 90s whose conversational opening gambit "i get hundreds of letters about thrush" throws up far more questions than it can ever hope to answer.

"dhc" - the dance hall crashers

"the world's a mess some people always say. well you know they're right, but who am i to say? we keep on living and we take it all in stride 'cause if we worry too much we'll never stay alive. "


there are some bands who call themselves ska-punk because they have a horn player and a fondness for the offbeat. but one of the reasons i like the dance hall crashers is that they actually seem to know about ska. i hear vocal harmonies and techniques that i hear in the selector and the bodysnatchers, and im sure if i was more knowledgeable about the "real" ska of the sixties i could think of examples of those techniques being used then.

i generally hate songs that imply things will be ok if you just dance, hence my predominantly negative attitude towards disco. but this one is just so catchy.

"tide is high" - blondie

"it's not the things you do that tease and wound me bad, but it's the way you do the things you do to me"



whenever i listen to the best of blondie (the proper 1981 one, not any of the crummy later pretenders) i am always disappointed when this song comes on. im not even sure that i dont like it, i just know im impatient for "in the flesh" to kick in.

"j'aime pas l'amour" - olivia ruiz

"si tu crois me séduire ah ce que tu te goures. je suis sourde au désir et le désir rend sourd "



back when i had cable, and if noone else was around, i occasionally used to flick over to french-speaking channel tv5. far too often it was some news , or halfway through a tv movie or that thing about sailing, but if i was lucky the show acoustic would be on. the format was beautifully simple - set in a recording studio and artists would play a song, do a bit of an interview then do another song. then they would repeat the process for another artist, then it would all be over. i saw an eclectic variety of performances on this show, but my favourite one was seeing some cute alternative-folk girl with a heavily distorted guitar and some form of tuba in her band singing cute and funny sung "la tango de qui?" i know almost nothing about olivia ruiz except the songs on this album, but most of them are great.

"jungle music" - rico

"you must be cra-a-a-azy"


there was a time in the mid 90s when the world (at least the world i inhabited) was split between junglists and metallers. people like me who werent "cool" enough to really be into either pounding shouty dance music or pounding shouty rock music were irrelevant, but most everyone at least came down on one side or other of the divide.

it always amused me though how much of their terminology the junglists borrowed from the old ska scene. as they called each other rudeboys and roughnecks thinking they had made these terms up and only the most with-it people would know what they meant.

they must have been crazy

"tony's theme" - the pixies

"this is a song about a superhero named tony. it's called tony's theme"


fat tony runs a mediocre bar, but he runs a kickass quiz night. he knows his audience, and the questions are always easy enough that most people get a good score and feel good about themselves, but hard enough that there is a clear winner. he also plays indie disco classics whilst marking your papers. he never played this song though, despite my constant wishing that he would - the cheeky monkey

"my name is jonas" - weezer

"tell me what to do now this tank is dry, now this wheel is flat"


i literally cant remember the last time i listened to weezer, i dont mean caught their video on tv or heard them on the radio, which i'm sure has happened a few times, but actually sat down and listened to an album. its gotta be 10 years since pinkerton came out, so i reckon in the last 8 or 9 years it can only have happened a few times.


i remember when my school first got the internet. it would have been autumn of 1995. we had a teacher with some contacts and we were testing some kind of line that was pretty new at the time but i suspect is madly out of date by modern standards. everyone got an e-mail address and internet access, and like a typical internet newbie i threw myself into things. i signed up for pointless email lists (i got sent the weather in california 5 times a day, for example, and it took me forever to get off the thing that sent you sermons about star trek) and found many many ways to waste time online. i down loaded enough guitar tab to teach myself to play, i added my 2p to many discussion boards (including the early snon) and got hooked on the centre for the easily amused. im pretty certain it doesnt exist any more but at the time it was full of pointless things and links to more pointless things (oh to be able to find the enormous buttons of mild amusement again. it also had a board where you could sign up for an e-mail penpal.

i feel really guilty that i cant even remember the name of someone i corresponded with regularly for over a year, she deserves better than that for putting up with my angsty adolescent moaning for so long. if anyone reading this blog thinks im on some kind of self-absorbed downer they may find it hard to comprehend that im now a well-rounded individual having cast aside a lot of the stuff that made me such a twat in high school. in fairness, with hindsight at least 95% of everyone i knew in high school was a twat in some way or another, its an integral part of being that age isn't it.
a typical email from me at that time probably read
"hi ... blahblah ... no friends ... blahblah ... life is crap, maybe ill die ... blahblah ... some comment about music and/or pop culture designed to make me look quasi-cool in an isolated subcultural way ... blahblah ... me me memememe ... blahblah ... oh and how are you?"
and yet she still managed to be my friend (/pillar/pillow/therapist) for months. she even downloaded the complete tab to 2 weezer albums for me when they turned up the internet filter on the system to "re-he-he-ally safe" where any site that had a link to a site they had already blocked was blocked, even if that site was only blocked for linking to another site that was blocked for linking to a blocked site. maybe she saw something in me that was of worth, or maybe she was just scared to let me go in case i made a mess when i landed. either way, i owe her so much.
and i cant even remember her name

"the sidewinder sleeps tonight" - r.e.m.

"call me when you try to wake her"


at various times i have been convinced this fairly unintelligible lyric has been many things. ive known people convinced it was much stupider things ("i need a caterer" for example), but strangely for a song so prone to mondegreens it doesnt have an entry on kiss this guy . i'm not really that keen on this song - or anything on automatic for the people really since monster is a far superior album.


i was walking round the park on a chilly winters morning with my baby strapped to my chest, looking at the woodpeckers and squirrels (shouldnt they be hibernating?) humming this song for no real reason. we also saw one of those grey dogs that freak me out because they look like theyre made out of felt. there was one in the video for blue monday. dont pretend you dont know what im talking about.
[later addition - apparently its a weimaraner]

"where the wild roses grow" - chicks on speed

"on the second day i brought her a flower. she was more beautiful than any woman i'd seen"


there was something sensual about the cave and kylie version of this song. but the chicks on speed version is hauntingly terrifying. i'd never heard of chicks on speed until i saw we dont play guitars on mtv2 late one night and thought it was awesome. most of their other material that ive heard is kinda ok but the other standout track is this one. the gently nightmarish whisper of the vocal tone, the unplaceable wrongness of the production - its scary stuff.


it was dydd santes dwynwen yesterday and for various personal reasons that would only seem like excuse if i expounded on them i didnt buy my wife a flower. i must rectify that today.

"waiting" - the rentals

"i'm waiting with nothing to do. i'm waiting, just waiting on you"


a loser named greg sold me return of the rentals on cassette one lunchtime for 50p and a packet of nerds. fond as i am of nerds, with their ability to seem cool despite just being small oddly-shaped lumps of sugar, he clearly got the poor end of that deal because, whilst i would have had a total of maybe 15 minutes of pleasure from that pack of sweets and whatever i would have blown the 50p on, i have whiled away many many happy hours listening to this lo-fi newwave classic. i almost always sing along, usually with petra for some reason.


like most british people, there are some things about the way americans misuse the english language that annoy me more than others. one thats right up there on my list is using the verb-phrase "waiting on" to mean "waiting for". all right-thinking people know that waiting on someone means serving them food in a restaurant whilst waiting for someone means being in a place until they are also in that same place.

sometimes you wait for something in vain - but if it was truly worth waiting for it was worth the risk that in might never happen.
you have to know whether to give up and go home though

"not my idea" - garbage

"this is not my idea of a good time"



im a big fan of the novel the wrong boy by willy russell. sure some of the plot twists are just a little too far fetched - though many things in life just arent coincidences - but the characters are vivid and at times it has a feel of the philosphical novel about it - trying to find subtle artistic ways to expound ideas.
the idea that most stuck with me from the novel is the grandmother's insistance that she didnt want to have fun. fun is little but meaningless distraction from problems and never more than short term. what she wanted in her life was joy. a powerful, deep, meaningful undercurrent of joy in which problems can been seen in context and moved past, rather than trying to extend islands of joy out into a sea of despair - reclaiming them through hard work like holland.

i like to think that my idea of a good time is not rooted in fun but in joy

"pearl's cafe" - the specials

"its all a load of bollocks"


the first couple of times i heard this song i enjoyed it without really getting it, catching the chorus and kind of accepting that as the core of the song. it wasnt until several listens later that i realised what a sad tale jerry dammers had spun. firstly the sadness of compassion for someone whose life has been tough, then secondly the sadness of realising his girlfriend is a heartless bitch. and theres a bouncy keyboard solo. the release date of this song makes it almost exactly as old as me. things really dont change.


in finnic mythology a goddess called (i think) ilmatar is sleeping lonely in the middle of a vast ocean when a giant duck with shining eyes builds its nest upon her knees, laying two eggs. when ilmatar wakes up she knocks this nest over and the eggs spill and break, forming the earth and the rest of the universe from the pieces by doing so.
its all a load of bollocks.

"the jeep song" - the dresden dolls

"i try to see it in reverse. it makes the situation hundreds of times worse when i wonder if it makes you want to cry every time you see a light blue volvo driving by"


it still shocks me that the dresden dolls arent huge. maybe not pop huge, but certainly indie huge. theyre both scarily talented musicians, their songs are intense and beautiful, amanda is a good looking lady with an original look - surely thats the right set of ingredients and then some.

i woke up this morning with this song in my head and its still there 6 hours later. its a catchy beast - particularly the sweary bits.

there are some cars that i instantly associate with people - beat up old red fiat pandas with jack, for example - some with events - small blue fords with trying in vain to get a whole band and all their gear through carmarthenshire in one - and some with times in my life - any of the increasingly few occasions i see a morris marina will always remind me of my childhood when it was our family car.

i'm pretty certain noone associates me with a car - since i've never owned one and since my wife's estate is useful but unremarkable - but i wonder what people do associate me with. might there be things that people see and are always reminded of me or a situation involving me? i'd like to think it was something cool and musical - cheap, heavily-customised guitars and gear for example - or something quirky - like silver body paint or stripy purple tights - or maybe even something meaningful, but i suspect if anyone does associate me with anything its something rubbish. thats the thing about other peoples memories - theyre so hard to alter.

Fedde Le Grande - "Put your hands up for detroit"

"a lovely city"

This song always makes me think of my favourite blog pinkisthenewblog.com
Its writer, Trent, is from Detroit (although he lives in LA) and often talks about it. As much as I like reading about his personal life though, I prefer Trent's rants on Celeb World. He was the first one to know about Britney and Fed-ex!! Well, if he wasn't the first one to know, at least I read about the divorce on PITNB waaaaay before everyone (at least the night before). He likes Britney, Jake Gyllenhaal and Madonna and lets it be known! There are other celebs whom (which?) he slags off in a gentle but hilarious way. I don't agree with him on certain things (I'm in Team Jennifer!!) but I like the way he writes, it makes me smile and sometimes laugh. I also follow quite closely his relationship with his boyfriend David, I think they're really cute together. My dream is to have one day my name and pic on the blog (as a fan, not a celeb!), but I don't have any friends who know of PITNB with whom to take themed pictures!

If you're a fan and you read this, get in touch.

That's it. I'm out.

"in the navy" - the village people

Following some joke from my French family after my boyfriend explained his grand-parents had met in the navy, the chorus stuck in my head for a while. I only know the words from the title - no idea what the rest says.

It made me think of this picture:

"st thomas" - sonny rollins

my baby girl loves st thomas. ive known it turn her from a screaming ball of grumpiness into a giggling tiny dancer. it might not be specific for this tune - it could just be a good example of an upbeat, accessable tune with interesting rhythms - but i like to think shes developing good taste at her very young age. im probably fooling myself - but to those of you who are doubting (not unlike st thomas himself) i would ask you to give her the benefit of your doubt until she is proved to just be responding to my enthusiasm or some other theory

"saltwater towns" - monsters4GODS / sultry lemon

"we fade in and out of our saltwater towns with gardens of dreams and temples of sound"


the earworm is specifically the sultry lemon recording of this song about 70% of the time, but occasionally lapses into a more familiar m4G arrangement.


i think i'd hate to live at the seaside. i cant see what attraction all the retired people see in it. i can see how it would make more sense in a climate where there is a higher proliferation of scantily clad lovelies, but i can see those on the interweb any time i like and i dont think even that would outweigh the negatives. now i realise the cynic would argue that i lived at the coast, but swansea is more a city that happens to be next to a beach, and to me doesnt really count as the seaside. it doesnt exist to pander to holidaymakers and daytrippers. its not a depressing economic wasteland the coldest 8 months of the year. it could never be described as a resort. these are the thingsthat i associate with the seaside. swansea does share some of the other drawbacks though - such as seagulls, constant wind and the sand that gunks up the bearings on your skateboard.

"for the birds" - the juliana hatfield three

"if had wings, i’d try to fly. but they don’t make it harder to die. you can take it up to the sky, but no-one ever stays that high."


i absolutely adore beome what you are. i love juliana's voice on it, i love the guitar sounds and overall feel, and its full of songs i have to battle myself hard not to rip off when im writing. i cant believe it was released half my life ago when it still sounds so fresh to my ears - albeit that it is very much in and of the time. i hold my hands up to being a grunge casualty, so my opinion is far from biased, but so many fantastic albums were made around that time - yet this is song is from one of the standouts.


it was stupidly blustery, with trees shaking to such an extent that all kinds of things were falling out of trees onto the ground. no nests, obviously, because of the time of year, and actually mostly stick and twigs and things but i also saw several trees shaking themselves free of rubbish that had been caught in their branches like a dog emerging from a filthy pond. its been a day for looking up because you never know what flying objects you may have to avoid. i dont think i look up often enough.

"noises for the leg" - the bonzo dog doo dah band

"i found the men sir. God i wish i hadn't"



on a night when the act of getting to sleep proves more difficult a challenge than it has any right to, the last thing you need in your head is a cycling 24 bars of sinister vaguely oom-pah-esque saxophone bottom end honking topped by a theramin rendition of tortured screaming.
its not exactly guaranteed to be relaxing and restful.
it must have soundtracked some fairly warped dreams since each of the many times i woke it was still in my ears.

"rollercoasting" - helen love

"i got the mc5, suicide, nancy sinatra and neil young live, i got heavenly, peggy lee, captain beefheart and the vaselines"


some sage advice, dear reader - if you move to a city because someone you would like to meet lives there and there is the incredibly remote chance of you bumping into them you are only fooling yourself. it just wont happen. the odds are stacked against you in an overpowering way. even in a small city.

unless you take up stalking, of course, in which case you may be able to see the person every day by camping outside their home and following them up to the limits of your restraining order. thats if you can find out where they live - many people you would like to meet are known by a different name or are ex-directory.

ive never tried stalking - except a little bit on the interweb - but im pretty certain i would be rubbish at it. it takes far too much application.

"young crazed peeling" - the distillers

"are you ready to be liberated?"


theres something about the way brody screams those words that really moves me to want to care (theres also something about brody's arse in those stripey trousers in the drain the blood video that moves me in an entirely other way - but thats another story).

the best thing about the question is its use of the passive voice. too often revolutionaries ask if you are ready to liberate yourself, or be part of a movement to liberate each other, or even to liberate someone else, but brody is offering to liberate me without any effort on my part. sure i need to prepare myself to be liberated, though the implication is only that the liberation process will be easier and go much more smoothly if i am properly prepared. theres enough passion in that question to make me believe that brody is quite prepared to liberate me, whatever my state of preparation. it is the "coming ready or not" that marks the end of the seekers countdown in hide and seek. it is the "brace, brace" over the aeroplane tannoy. its that glance that butch and sundance exchange just before that final futile shootout.

to be honest, brody, im not really very ready to be liberated, but im sure ill cope when you decide the time is right to liberate me.

The Bounty Kitchen Paper Song

"Use, rinse, rinse, rinse, use"

Have you ever seen the Bounty Strictly Come Dancing spoof advert? I saw it yesterday evening at a friend's house and the "use, rinse, rinse, rinse, use" refrain stuck in my head for ages...

Even as we went to see Lukas Moodysson's latest film, it was still there, playing in my head and coming out of my mouth, annoying my friends. It only stopped when the film started.

What can I say about "Container"? That there was 6 of us in the cinema, and one person walked out. That none of my three friends liked it. That it was a succession of black and white images, to the soft, monotonous sound of actress Jena Malone's voice. That it was both beautiful and horrible. Shocking and inspiring. Poetic. It reminded me of "the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock".

"suddenly i see"/"sunday shining" - kt tunstall/finlay quaye

"she makes me feel like i could be a tower, a big strong tower yeah"
"i'm a hero, like robert de niro"


sometimes a couple of bits of songs remind you of each other so much that hearing one in your head makes you think of the other which you then hear in your head which makes you think of the first one again. round and round. this is the power of the double earworm.


it also brought back a strong memory of drinking vodbenas (a shot of vodka with a shot of neat squash as a chaser) with crissie in bar-boon. im not even sure if thats something that literally happened or a fictional composite of memories. an awful lot of drinking went on at that bar and in slightly hazy retrospect the sessions tend to blend a little. i knew crissie well enough to know she was awesome, but i wish i knew her well enough to say i knew her. i do know she is nothing like kt tunstall or robert de niro though - so maybe im associating with the strength of her figurative tower.



though i have always suspected that that line of lyric has a phallic undertone

"i begin to wonder" - danii minogue

"and i-i-i begin to wonder"


2 girls on my train were listening, at a volume that seriously distorted on their mobile phone's tiny speakers with every pounding bass note, to some androgynous-voiced r'n'b singer's pseudo-romantic whinings and singing along in between their equally loud conversation. i think between them they totalled about 40% of the notes in tune and the guy's [i think] top range was well beyond them, but there was something about their enthusiasm for this aural drivel that was infectious and a tiny snatch of it stayed with me.

as is so often the case with things you really dont know and didnt hear well enough to have any grasp on becoming earworms, it quickly mutated into something vaguely similar that i did know better, though not really in this case because it is significantly better.

"little sunflower" - freddie hubbard

standing on the platform of blackfriars station, staring down the thames towards tower bridge and the rolling hills of se16 beyond, the wintery wind whipping off the water and through my hair with this tune in my head.

for some reason i have never been able to fathom, this tune always reminds me of jacqui, whom i have never met and only know through cohabiting a discussion forum. our greatest bond was that sick determination with which we clung to the last tattered fragments of a once-vibrant community right up until we finally had to give it up as dead. ive had no contact with her in months, i wouldnt even know how, and to be honest ive rarely spared her a thought, but every time i hear this tune i remember something clever, or funny, or bitchy or just plain relevant and necessary that she contributed and it makes me smile.

nirvanaweb is dead - long live all the former nirvanawebbers in whatever it is they do now

"desperate guys" - the faint

"you were warming the bass up, your hair covered your face up, i was acting indifferent at the merch booth putting on make-up"



for a brief period about a year ago i was a bit obsessed with this song. i first heard it on xfm walking home from the train station at night after a jazz workshop. the snatch of lyric above almost literally stopped me in my tracks - even with its dodgy scansion and not-quite-as-clever-as-it-first-appears word play i just found it so evocative. theres a sort of swagger to this song that is strangely aspirational. and those ridiculous string samples. and that squelchy bass riff.
as i write its been in my head for the last five and a half hours. its that kind of song. i recommend anyone to listen to it, but only if theyre prepared for the earworm consequences.


i was never that cool, but i did at least used to be cooler than i am now. acting indifferent. putting on make up.

"mental dreamers' club"

"sina olet hyvin kaunis
porquoi est-ce que je revais
ces sentiments? about to drown this
time in words my conscious mind cant say"


this was a song i started writing for someone else at a time when i barely managed to finish anything i started , so its little surprise i let her down. one day i'll finish writing it, and one day after that i'll make her sing it.
if i can ever remember what its supposed to say

"here is what i dreamed" - mike keneally

"then i was jostled by police to hand my wallet over"



the strange, zappa-esque, mildly self indulgent hat album has been in my cd rack for some time and i'm not entirely sure how and why i came to own it. im pretty certain i wouldnt have bought (or even lifted) a cd by someone i've still never heard of in any other context, i dont think i know anyone who would have lent it to me for me to forget (deliberately or otherwise) to give it back, and its not something most people would give as a present. but however it came into my life, its an album i fairly regularly rediscover having forgotten it and there are some real gems on it.


i was reminded of this song, with its bizarre narrative of repeatedly being stopped by the police who gradually steal everything he owns, when i saw 3 policemen pushing a young black guy against a wall. despite his protests, he had the resigned look of someone to whom this happened a lot. its ages since ive been stopped by the police, but when i used to walk home alone late at night a lot it was fairly regular. i felt a strange, if fleeting, sense of solidarity for the guy, and then i started to think that maybe hed actually done something to warrant this treatment which made me worry about the moral implications of siding with a criminal.
before id had time to think about it much though, i had walked past the situation and away, got distracted trying to remember the lyrics to the earworm and forgotten everything else.

"band you love to hate" - j church

"backstage passes for the both of you, again, what does it mean to you, you think you're writing wrongs with your old typewriter, but you haven't got a clue"



i was going to write about the best gig i ever went to, but ive done that several times in several places and can wait for this blog until im short of ideas.


the only person i knew with an old typewriter was the guy we only knew as "the cool emo drummer". i cant remember the first time we met, but the second time was at an open mic night where he was drumming for 2 drunken middle-aged characters playing glam and blues covers. i cant really think of a generous way to say they didnt suck, but sitting in his own happy world at the back in an old comfortable jumper, hair flopping from side to side with every head-dance, the cool emo drummer effortlessly held the enthusiastic row into something resembling musical structure. he oozed cool in a gentle, self-effacing way and speaking to him that evening left me with the impression of the best sort of quiet man.
im ashamed to say i dont think i ever spoke to him again, though i did see him around several times. he used to sit on the steps in the sunshine writing poetry on a beat up old typewriter. i was never quite nosy enough to try to read the stanzas over his sholder as i passed, so i cant say whether he wrote anything of any artistic or literary merit. but from the little i knew of him, i wouldnt be at all suprised

"somebody kill me" - adam sandler

"somebody kill me please. somebody kill me please"


i must have watched the wedding singer on video a lot. i was one of those films my ex-girlf would put on in her room to distract us from the fact that our relationship had long-since slipped from "romantic and physical" territory into "convenient, needy and habitual" - though i for one didnt really realise it at the time. there were several videos that fell into that category - but with hindsight tws was a notable example because it reminded us of early in our relationship when we had gone to see it. its a likable nothing of a movie with two real strong features. the first is the couple of scenes in which drew barrymore looks really cute, and the second is the soundtrack. sure if you feel like being a pedant it doesnt entirely conjure 1985 - but it consistently falls on the cool side of cheesy.


the reason the song is circling my mind with accelerating angular velocity is that ive just come to a shuddering realisation of just how bored i am at my job. dont expect me to do anything about it, mind.

"body parts" - licking chocolate jesus

"i know a secret about you, touching yourself in the bathroom, watching yourself in the mirror, wishing that you could be near her"


i suffer from a strange sort of licking chocolate jesus tourettes. it affects me a lot less now than it did when i watched them gig a lot (trying hard not to be that fan who mouths the words along) but still from time to time i catch myself singing snatches of their lyrics aloud in far from appropriate situations. more than once this has led to scaring or getting disgusted looks from (or both) old ladies. most people thought that jungle was their best song, and i always had a soft spot for prosthetic limb, but every time i heard neil scream "you're a paranoid lover" it made me shudder.

lcj remain the best unsigned band i have ever seen live - and the gigs we played together were far too few since they always made m4G raise our game to try to compete.

"shape of my heart" - the sugababes

"i know that the spades are the swords of a soldier, i know that the clubs are weapons of war"


this is my favourite sting song. i know to some extent thats a bit like having a favourite flavour of corrugated cardboard - it kinda tastes the same and its all very dull - but when pushed this was always my answer. it was a much cooler answer to give in the late 90s when this was semi-obscure and a lot of people hadn't heard of it, but the fact that thats no longer the case shouldnt be a good enough reason to stop it being my favourite - even though that cooler-than-thou-wannabe inside me still tries to insist it is. i remember this song being the background music to magic tricks on some inconsequencial kids tv show paul zenon appeared on - and it that context it had an air of mystery. this was before i had really heard of sting and started to disregard him out of hand for all the rubbish he comes wrapped up these days. atom and his package sang that sting cannot possibly be the same guy from the police, though i reckon he seemed to have a smug self-importance even before the whole rainforest thing.

sting, like a wasp, is a perennial annoyance - but he did write have a hand in writing both this song and "walking on the moon" for which you have to give him a little leaway.

"beautiful girl" - the gadjits

"she's using those number systems from reading blaise pascal. she's making babies for now"



i enjoy that show where noel edmonds asks you whether or not you would like to deal.
i am sure that the decision making process should be based on maths, but have always been frustrated by the fact that - since the deal offered is always less than the expected value of the game - simple probability theory states that you should always decline the deal. i have seen the show enough times to realise that there is almost always a point where the player should have dealt.
i am trying to formulate a strategy based on my new theory that - since the offer is a function of the expected value - the probability of getting a higher offer after the next round is the probability of the expected value being greater.
but the formula is getting more and more complicated and wasting more and more of my time - and i doubt if noel would be impressed were i to ask him to wait for a few minutes while i did some calculations before giving him my response as to whether or not i would like to deal.

sometimes i think that maybe theres an argument for thinking less. certainly the vacuous and thoughtless always seem to be ok, under their own limited definitions

"brain stew" - green day

"my eyes feel like they're gonna bleed"


the first 4 green day albums are some of my favourite records ever. even insomniac which seemed to mostly pass everyone by at the time. i remember how much i was looking forward to the release of nimrod - and even more clearly the numbing sense of disappointment when i heard it. how could a band i loved make something so mediocre?
remember kids - everyone lets you down sooner or later.

i really did wake up this morning with a strange kind of headache - the entire bottom half of my head (a bit like terry nutkins' haircut) - and throbbing eyes. the riff for this song was pounding round and round - occasionally getting to this snatch of lyric then sort of tailing off and starting the riff again.

"no such thing" - John Mayer

"They love to tell you: stay inside the lines, but something's better on the other side"

I woke up with these two lines from the song in my head. Only these two - not the rest of the song, in which the melody is very different - so I wasn't sure which song it was. They're the kind of lines too, that you can sort of play backwards in your head, and they become all muddy and weird, or sometimes they sound like a broken record.A

So I must have hit the "snooze" button at least a dozen times, because I was supposed to get up at 9 and I only emerged from my dreams at 10.20am. Oh well.

I dreamt that my brother was in prison (originally it was my BF who was in prison for using the word "crack" in an email that he sent from work) and my mum and myself visited him. The prison was at the top of a sandy hill, in the middle of town yet in the middle of the ocean. We were wearing swimming suits and kept climbing up these hills to get to the top, but kept sliding off them (they then became wet), they were like huge tobogans! Once at the top we could buy some wooden dolphin-shaped hairclips made by the inmates themselves.

Did I mention it was my 6 year-old brother who was in prison?

"why can't you behave" - from the musical kiss me kate

"after all the things you told me and the promises you gave, oh why can't you behave"


i don't care how much credibility this loses me - i love kiss me kate. there is no doubt cole porter was a giant of songwriting. i love the campy 50s movie version with its ridiculous brightly coloured costumes. i have fond memories of pit-banding a school performance. i'm pretty certain its my favourite musical (though hedwig is great, and theres probably some others that come close).


in the context of the show this song is pleading and desperate - even in that painfully old-fashioned way that ann miller sings it. in the context of an earworm it appeared while i was desperately trying to make my baby daughter stop crying, which is stupid in a lot of ways. firstly because pretty much all the song's lyrics except the title were irrelevant or inappropriate to the situation. but mostly, i think, because she is far too small to know that she is misbehaving - she was just trying to express whatever was making her upset in the only way she knew how. sometimes i really feel like screaming about my hassles too. usually i just write about them

"closer than close" - rosie gaines

"lets get close, closer than close, closer than you could ever imagine us"


i hate this song.
i hate that it was stuck in my head, just the hookline round and round and round.
i hate even more that i had to try to find out what it was in order to blog it
i do not wish to dignify it by spending any more time on it

"do you remember the first time?" - pulp

"but you know that we've changed so much since then, oh yeah we've grown"


when i was in junior school i had a thing for a girl named carly halpin [if you've just googled yourself, hi, its been a long time]. at the time i was far too young to know what love was, and probably too young to even know what fancying someone was in any significant way, but my memory of her is that she was really cool and quite pretty [is that the start of a life pattern?]. looking back more recently at an old class photo she seems, to my cynical adult eyes, a fairly unremarkable 11-year-old girl but at the time i was kinda smitten. not in that mawkish-ignorant-impression-of-a-romantic way that would, in my later high-school life, cause me to make a twat of myself repeatedly, but in a vaguer, perhaps truer, way of thinking she was great and wanting to be a better, closer friend with her.

did the following happen in real life or did i dream it? it seems simultaneously so ridiculous and so plausible. perhaps some of it is truth and the rest embellishments. perhaps theres no such thing as truth anyway.
in my memory it was the summer after i left junior school on yet another saturday evening i was sat in with my family - trying really hard to enjoy watching noel's house party (which was pretty new at the time) or something similar - when the phone rang. at this time it was a sound that barely touched my consciousness since it never heralded anyone wanting to speak to me - except that this time my mum shouted that it was for me. still mostly stunned at the fairly alien concept i pressed the receiver to my face - and was promptly nearly deafened by background party noise. amidst the kerfuffle a voice i couldnt be sure i recognised said something like "is it true you fancy carly? do you want to go out with her?" my emotional immaturity - amplified by shock, confusion, disbelief, fear that it was some sort of trick and fear of looking stupid - could think of no appropriate response except to mumble something incoherent, gently put the phone down (in my memory this happens in slow motion - like a really bad horror movie cliche) and walk back to the lounge to continue numbing my brain with tv pretending the whole incident hadnt happened.

the more i try to remember it, the more certain i'm becoming that it really did happen.
i'm pretty certain she has changed as much since then as i have, though i have no idea whether she went on to be something great or just another girl with a croydon facelift, and i have no idea if it was a cruel trick or some genuine offering of an opportunity, and i have no idea if she will ever read this. but

carly, for the record, i'm sorry.

"Maybe tomorrow" - Stereophonics

"Maybe tomorrow... I will find my way home"

So I was going to talk about how last week, on the long journey from Shrewsbury to Ipswich (or was it from Soham to Bristol?), Noel Gallagher was on radio one and my boyfriend and I had a discussion about who was who in Oasis. We couldn't remember, you see. "I'm sure Liam is the leadsinger, cause this one (on the radio) doesn't have much of a nasal sound to his singing". The discussion went on for, oh, at least 20 minutes, before the boyfriend admitted he knew NOTHING and I won. Little pleasure in winning that one, as who cares about Oasis nowadays? Probably quite a number of people still, but I'm not included in the lot. Oasis is so last century.

Anyway, I was going to talk about Oasis, then when I looked up the lyrics for "maybe tomorrow" I realised that the song was actually by Stereophonics. The voice singing in my head changed slightly.

I used to like Stereophonics a lot.

"goodbye yellow brick road" - elton john

"when are you gonna come down? when are you going to land?"

i love south london. theres a part of me that worries that that might be a shameful thing to admit, but to me there has never been a question mark over it as a place to live. i carry its accent on my voice and its fingerprint in my brain. if only there were more tube stations it would be perfect. no, actually thats rubbish - its actually a bit crap, though i am convinced that pretty much everywhere else is at least as crap. its a homely sort of crap. you forgive its many flaws because it seems to hold you comfortingly and apologetically in its figurative embrace. i'm not trying to come over all "under the bridge" but lets face it, its better than la.

but despite this affinity, when it came to moving back to the smoke after those years of living away from it there was more than a flutter of trepidation. maybe this was because moving away had symbolised a break for freedom - freedom from parental control, freedom from becoming a local stereotype, freedom from all the haunting memories of the negativity of high school experience. like the baby pterodactyl in those mawkish "land before time" movies or the sheep in the monty python sketch, maybe i hadn't been flying so much as falling, plummeting with my eyes shut to convince myself that the wind rushing past my ears was the result of glorious forward momentum, destined to crash land back where i started while the face of gravity mocks me for failing to avoid my destiny of failure.

or maybe theres a sort of success in finally being able to admit:
i love south london

"everything's just wonderful" - lily allen

"ba ba ba ba ba ba. ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba"

sometimes a song runs out of words and you have to say what you want with a solo. sometimes you need to keep singing but dont have the words to continue the thought - but if you go "ba ba ba" in the right way it still means something. sometimes you just sing noises cos its fun. sometimes you get a song stuck in your head but cant remember the lyrics - which is ok if the bit stuck there doesnt have any.

i think it's voltaire's "candide" that deals with the philosophy that we live in the best of all possible worlds (i'm not sure though, i gave up well before the end - if books were only 1 page long i would be incredibly well read). it seems to me to be obviously rubbish, but from time to time all of us, like lily allen, need to belive some positive rubbish to get us through


incidently - why no third l?

"magic johnson" - the red hot chili peppers

"[dum-dum-da-da-dum] MAGIC JOHNSON"

before they were a yawnfest band serving ignorant preteens the same one ballad and one funkpop bounce over and over, before either of the albums that could justifiably claim to be their best - but slightly after that whole socks-on-penises thing - this song was a minor album track that most people forgot about as soon as "nobody weird like me" kicked in. but theres something about the chorus riff that is ear glue.

as a palace fan, i was always slightly disappointed that this never became a chant for andy johnson whilst he plied his trade with us. i guess too few of the holmesdale end faithful were aware of late 80s alternative rock. the poor ignorant fools.

"teenage rampage" - the sweet

"come join the revolution, get yourself a constitution...."

the power of historical hindsight renders this one of the least effectual rabble-rousing songs i've ever heard. maybe im well past teenagerampaging now, but even when i was a teenager i liked the idea of a teenage rampage far more than i liked this song - but like many sweet songs the chorus is a catchy beast.

it amazes me that my yearning for things to be different - my sympathy for revolution - only manifests itself in the most ineffectual of ways. in that sense i guess i'm a long way short of a teenage rampage. my revolution is barely prepubescent and my rampage fairly embryonic. i care but im too lazy to do anything about it. its the modern social disease.

"a girl like you" - edwin collins

"this old town's changed so much, don't feel like i belong, too many protest singers, not enough protest songs"

when this was one of those pleasant-enough-but-radio-saturated indie songs that characterised the mid 90s i could take or leave it, but when i heard him play it acoustically for an xfm session, where he dumm-ed the guitar riffs, it was strangely haunting - especially this third verse.

and its still true now - maybe it always was