"beheaded" - the offspring

"the way his body is severed in two his vocal cords are gonna be hard to use"



i'm not quite sure when the offspring turned into a parody of themselves. maybe it was the shift to the major label placing different expectations upon them. although ixnay was on epitaph and there are a few novelty-ish songs that kinda point to the direction they ended up going in for columbia.
but right back in the dying moments of the eighties there were tracks like this that blended so-cal punk with a twist of the cartoon horror of the misfits. this song is as much about finding ways to silence those try to control you as it is about collecting heads in a sack under your bed.

"mambo number five" - bob the builder

"a little bit of tiling on the roof, a little bit of making waterproof, a little bit of concrete mixed with sand, a little bit of bob, the builder man"




oh no. oh please no. a million times no.
inane drivel with gratingly poor scansion.
for several hours.
my poor poor brain

"the most beautiful girl in the world" - the artist formerly known as prince

"when the day turns into the last day of all time i can say i hope you are in these arms of mine"



everyone knows that the most important question in understanding a person's musical taste is "elvis or the beatles?"
in my opinion, though, the second most important question is "michael jackson or prince?"
the third question i usually add in is "ramones or sex pistols?"

i think its the second question that people don't seem to expect and is really more telling than you would think.

i don't like michael jackson. almost nothing he has done since his earliest stuff has really done anything for me. i have respect for him as an artist, he has written popular and influential songs, though i'm not keen on them. i have less respect for him as a person - i'm never sure if i believe the rumours and allegations but i do know i can't relate to him on any level. i don't think i let that influence my opinion of his music much, though its possible i do.
prince is notoriously weird. i very much doubt there's much about his life i could relate to either. but i do know he writes incredible songs, seems to play every instrument ever invented with amazing passion and somehow manages to touch me.

but i think the question - like the elvis or the beatles issue - goes deeper than your specific preference between these two artists. to me, although their styles could be considered similar they diverge enough to make the comparison significant. jackson to me represents all forms of dance and soul music, while prince represents all forms of rock music . jackson represents commercialism, prince experimentalism. jackson mawkish sentimentality, prince genuine expressions or powerful emotions.

maybe thats just the way i see it.

someone once tried to argue with me that i was just asking people to choose between black music and white music - but it's not about that, it's really not.

"don't let me get me" - pink

"every day i fight a war against the mirror"


i know it's not a universally held opinion, but i think pink is gorgeous. she's had so many looks but they are pretty much all good. once upon a time one of the music tv channels (the hits i think) was having a pink weekend where all her videos were available for selection so she was on about every 4th or 5th video. i foolishly decided i wasn't going to go to bed until i had seen them all - which at the time was eight videos i think. at about a quarter to five on sunday morning they finally played the most girls video and i could finally get some sleep. by this time i think i had seen the lady marmalade video 5 times. the biggest problem was that most of the videos in between were the drossiest pop which was quite soporific.

on world aids day diva's bar had a porn star themed charity fancy dress night. like most fancy dress occasions this was generally an excuse for girls to look slutty whilst guys generally made as little effort as possible. i'm pretty sure i saw several people whose costume consisted of sticking a name label to their chest of a punny porn-star name. anyway, i had decided at that time that the sexiest moving image i had seen was pink's video for like a pill and that, although there was no actual sex or nudity in it i had drooled over it more than enough times for it to count. so i decided i was going as pink. the biggest obstacle i faced was that i am outrageously cheap and i had to go as pink on a budget of a couple of quid. so i went on a charity shop crawl. so that gorgeous flowing gaping black jacket was substituted by a "silk" robe (made by killing genuine acrylics) , that tiny tight skirt was replaced by the smallest skirt i could find and legally wear without being arrested for exposure, i already had some stockings so that wasn't a problem, the shoes i gave up as a dead loss on my budget and hoped people would be too distracted by the rest to notice, i copied her eyeliner style as well as i could, put loads of product in my hair so it came across my face "just so" and then came my big mistake. a feature of this outfit in the video is the crosses of black tape across her nipples. i'm pretty sure pink is wearing insulating tape, but the only tape i had was gaffer tape. now, as you are probably aware, insulating tape is much less sticky than gaffer tape. suffice it to say that removing the gaffer tape from my nipples was more than a little painful (pixie chris did it for me).
i had clearly made more effort than most of the males there put together.
a good night though.

"watch this" - the slackers

" i cry but i can't complain. i supply my own ball and chain"



this song is about fear of commitment. strangely i've never had that fear of commitment in relationships that's so stereotypical of men - i found an awesome woman and i married her - but i have a real fear of committing to a job, to a task, to a role or to a routine.

maybe i'm just scared of some pathetic idea of selling out

"pavlov's bell" - aimee mann

"nobody knows thats how i nearly fell. trading clothes and ringing pavlov's bell"



despite the fact that several of the ones i used to go to have closed down, there is still some choice of cinemas in croydon. admittedly your choice is mostly the big vue in the centre of town or the big vue next to ikea, but there is also the david lean cinema. its a strange little place, 3 or 4 rows of chairs in a surprisingly small room tucked away in a fairly obscure part of the clocktower complex - past the museum of croydon, past the bar - and they usually get things at least a few weeks after the bigger cinemas.

because its so small you can really get a feeling for what the other people around you think of the film. when i went there to see magnolia i got a real sense at about 2 hours in that the room was split into two approximately equal groups. the first group - including the girlfriend i went to see it with - were clearly of the opinion that it was confusing, boring and crap while the second group - including me - found it complex, subtle and fantastic. strangely, about 45 minutes later as things were tying together and making more sense some of the people who had been enjoying it were beginning to flag under the sheer length of the thing whilst some people who had been hating it realised that it had all made some sense all along and realised they enjoyed it.

my advice to you is that you don't buy the soundtrack album though. get aimee mann's ultimate collection instead - a much better album. and then buy lost in space that this great tune is on - even if just for the comic in the inlay.

"tell him" - the exciters

"i know something about love"



i have had a sad evening. not earth shatteringly tragic in the scheme of things, but enough to put me in a real downer.
my wonderful wife bought me a saxophone from e-bay. not just a saxophone, a 1954 conn 12m baritone - the sax of my dreams (though in my best and pickiest dreams its a mid 40s model with mint gold plate finish - and for free rather than the many thousands market forces would expect for such an item). i was so excited that it was arriving, but then so shocked when i opened the case. it instantly didn't look right, though the true horror was hidden until i lifted it up. the loop of the crook had taken a serious blow in transit and was bent right up against the body. this crushed the octave key meachanism, bent the top f key and snapped the top e key right off. coupled with the sadness of disappointment was the greater sadness of seeing something so beautiful that had been abused so badly. and it really was beautiful. and it really was brutally damaged. in its own way it was kinda heartbreaking.

stupid parcelforce clumsy delivery drivers. what have you done? what have you done?

"losing ctrl" - whale

"it's not as easy losing control"


this song leaps aggressively at you out of the middle of all disco dance must end in broken bones and always, but always, makes me want to scream along. it is, in and of itself, an opportunity to lose control, which i guess is its strength. and points out that often what we are uptight about is our own uptightness.

"sos" - rihanna

"you on my mind has got me losing it"



kurt cobain would have been 40 today. i really wanted a suitable nirvana earworm to celebrate it and give me an excuse to write about him, but i've been getting tiny bits or fleeting visits from about 50 different nirvana songs and thus none of them count.

instead i got this. i couldn't even remember where this line was from for ages until it clicked with this song. somewhere in the murky grey area between sample, mashup and cover - a pretty enough girl with a mediocre voice and a riff everyone's sick of by now even though it comes from a classic song.

maybe there's a connection

probably not

"down in a hole" - alice in chains

"don't understand who they thought i was supposed to be. look at me now a man who won't let himself be"



it's a common misconception that there's no such thing as the truth. the trouble is that everyone has a different truth and they can be incompatible. like extreme said - the three sides to every story are yours, mine and the truth. in reality its more like that fable of the blind men and the elephant. there is an absolute truth but for the most part we don't have the ability to perceive enough of it at once to understand it. concentrating too hard on the bit of the truth you can see will stop you understanding that the bit someone else can see can still be the truth.

i think this is even more true about roles. nobody else's idea of who and what you should be is right, but in all honestly yours probably isn't either.

"ten shades of grey" - terrorvision

"it's night again all the time - shadows are lurking but i can't find mine"



one of the times i came closest to losing respect for a friend was when fred claimed that in his opinion regular urban survivor was a better album than how to make friends and influence people. its not just because he was clearly wrong, but because that album holds a special place for me. even though i have heard it and played it many times in many situations it will always be the summer of 1995 to me. on holiday without my family i was finally - at not quite 15 - able to step away from the roles i had been cast in in my normal situations and start to become myself. making friends, flirting outrageously with girls (by my standards) and generally not being dismissed by people out of hand gave me a boost of self-worth that was severely lacking in my life around that time. this album was everywhere that summer, and its bouncier songs like oblivion and time of the signs set the soundtrack for a slight tempo shift in my life.

"the sound of silence" - simon and garfunkel

"people writing songs that voices never share and no one dared disturb the sound of silence"



i don't get the graduate. there's nothing sexy about it. hoffman is too old looking at 30 to convincingly be young. bancroft at only 6 years older is too similar an age for the age gap thing to be believable. i know the jumpyness is part of the mood but it just irritates me - as does the whole formality of pretty much noone having a first name. far be it from me to disregard what is widely regarded as a classic - but i honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about.

and then there's the soundtrack. maybe my modern ear expects too much from a soundtrack but it mostly seems to consist of variations on mrs robinson and sound of silence over and over again - doing nothing to enhance for me the viewing experience.

but here's the kicker. i don't get simon and garfunkel. i don't understand why anyone would choose to listen to them - let alone get excited about them. i'll give you that paul simon is a talented songwriter with a pretty good voice - but i'm not really sure what garfunkel is for. the pretty much live versions of the same songs on "the paul simon songbook" are much more listenable. but i still don't really like that material. his eponymous album, or even graceland, are so much better and have videos where he takes pride in beating children at baseball or pretending to be chevy chase.

and if i never hear bridge over troubled waters again it will be much too soon.

"hedonism (just because you feel good)" - skunk anansie

"how do you remember me, the one that made you laugh until you cried. i hope you're feeling happy now"



stuck in a traffic jam on the south circular and this came on xfm. i had no choice but to crank it up and sing along (though i have to drop out the really high bits). hours later i was still singing it. it probably only just scrapes into my top 10 tracks of theirs but its great. the band is great. the songs are great. if you don't own either of their first two albums then shame on you.

i used to be really bothered about how people remembered me. surprisingly much more so than what people thought of me in the moment - which i never really cared about. i remember writing long quasi-deep meanderings in the school leaving books of people i had barely given a second thought to most of the years we had coexisted. it always meant more to me if someone mentioned a long time later that they enjoyed one of my gigs, rather than straight after which meant quite little. being memorable was its own way of ensuring i was being significant. being memorable is a far greater aspiration than being popular, or even than being liked.

go out there and be memorable, readers, go.

"all your way" - morphine

"i was raised with the strong of heart but if you touch me wrong i fall apart. i found a woman who's soft but she's also hard, while i slept she nailed down my heart"



there's something deeply attractive about a strong woman. i don't mean by that that i get off on images of female bodybuilders or have an obsession with world's strongest woman contests. the strength i'm referring to is something less physical. she and her strength may take many forms but the beauty is still there. it may be some form of emotional strength, mental strength, sexual strength, strength of character, strength of will, strength of determination, or some combination of the above. its the spark of controlled power. she knows how to destroy you but chooses not to.

that's probably what sea bass is about.

there's probably something attractive about a strong man as well but i've never met one.

"sea bass" - monsters4GODS

"my makeup will etch my sorrow on your face. you're smiling, telling me they're just laughter lines"



i never really knew what this song was about, even the bits that i wrote, yet at some level it always meant something to me. it definitely wasn't about seabass though. he came from uruguay, and there are rumours of his immortality.

"monstarr" - bis

"can i not be normal cos i'm not a size ten. play music, be in films or even show my face. should i be embarrassed if it's such a crime. funny how yr life depends upon yr waistline."



i must be getting old. it's a sure sign when my 31" jeans now fit me less well than my 34" jeans. when, like me, you are scrawny and unfit putting on weight is a weird experience. it just seems to arrive in bits that don't fit with the rest of your body - making me feel even less proprtionate than i ever did. a man this scrawny should not have a face this fat. don't expect me to do anything about it thou, i'm just too lazy.

partly because of my grunge casualty status, i often used to wear 2 or 3 pairs of jeans. this has the added effect of making your waist look really narrow in comparison to your hips and thus your reflection seems a bit slimmer. but then i usually used to wear 3 t-shirts and 2 shirts as well. this is mostly because this is a good look. just you wait, one day the fashion cycle will complete and looking this 1992 will make me cutting edge again. but i did always feel a lot better knowing that my body was a long way inside what you could see. hiding in plain sight.

"white chocolate space egg" - liz phair

"i'll see you around. every hollow has its favourite sound and my heart is holding on"



something of a shortage or earworms lately. lots of those self-soundtracking scraps of song that fly into your mind with powerful urgency and then flit off forgotten, and several ghost earworms (where something that was an earworm recently comes back for a bit even though you thought you were rid of it - which doesn't count as a new earworm), but no genuine unshakable, barely-able-to-think-of-anything-else earworms.

until this hit me and i had to fight from singing it aloud

i can't stand white chocolate. don't get me wrong - i am a fan of most things that fall under the category of confectionery and if offered some white chocolate would not be churlish enough not to accept it and obtain some enjoyment from its consumption - i just can't bear its intrinsic untruth. how can anything containing no cocoa solids or cocoa mass have the gall to call itself chocolate? (i have a similar gripe against red liquorice - but don't want to get distracted mid-rant) if i wanted the taste of milk i would drink some milk - good grief, if i wanted a confectionery taste that was reminiscent of milk i would eat milk duds - but when i eat chocolate i want it to taste of chocolate. i want it to be dark brown and laden with cocoa solids. i want it to scream "CHOCOLATE" at my tongue. i want it rich, dark and aromatic. i want to savour the subtle interplay between sweetness and bitterness. if i'm going to destroy my vocal chords i want it to be worth it.

and don't get me started on the milky-bar kid.

"london's brilliant parade" - elvis costello

"the lions and the tigers in regents park couldn't pay their way and now they're not the only ones"
"the lovely diorama is really part of the drama"
"i'm having the time of my life or something quite like it when i'm walking out and about in london's brilliant parade"



arriving too early for a jazz band rehearsal i decided to have a wander. in and out of brick lane past the boasts and come-ons of the curry house pimps, up and down the side roads with their road signs i can't understand, onto the outskirts of the mildly intimidating estate with its small clusters of bored youth, into the ethnic grocers where the smells instantly bring back memories of amman foods. i'm a south london boy and i wouldn't want it any other way, but i'm glad the east end is there.


my dad is a big elvis costello fan and i grew up with his albums on in the background and his songs part of my understanding of music - not this track so much, obviously since it wasn't released til the mid 90s. i still struggle not to rip him off too much as a songwriter as i find myself always wanting to slip a nice pun, triple rhyme or clever piece of wordplay into the middle of the second verse. and importantly he was one of the main bonds i had with glyn that i didnt really have with anyone else - part of the sharedness of where we were trying to come from and where we were trying to go.

"police officer" - smiley culture

"me and my colleagues have got a few questions to ask ya. you'll be on your way as soon as we get an answer"


walking home from the pub. outside selhurst park a pair of cops are hassling some drunk, scratty woman. all i can think about is this song. if only that woman had recorded the song cockney translator she could have gotten away with anything.

this song has a special place in the hearts of everyone who lived at byron acres. it was the highlight of vh1's worst videos countdown and we all loved it. many's the time we drunkenly acted out the comversation from the middle eight, though i think we usually got the words wrong.

"sleep to dream" - fiona apple

"i tell you how i feel but you don't care. i say tell me the truth but you don't dare. you say love is a hell you cannot bear so i say give me mine back and then go there for all i care"


i got into fiona apple simply on the recommendation of some guy on the old nirvanaweb board known as apple. his opinions on everything else were pretty much spot on, and he loved her, so she had to be worth checking out.
when i finally got my hands on a copy of tidal i was blown away. the whole thing is good, but there are 4 or 5 tracks with real emotional power i could happily listen to round and round.

i don't seem to dream much any more. i guess i mostly just go to sleep to sleep.

"mr blue sky" - elo

"running down the avenue see how the sun shines brightly in the city on the streets where once was pity mr blue sky is living here today"



i hate getting this song as an earworm. it never never goes away.

and the weather is a dreadful thing to have a conversation about, so how much worse should it be considered as a subject to write a song about.

it's probably a euphemism though, right

"white wedding" - billy idol

"it's a nice day to start again"



i think this was my unconscious mind's idea of a pun as, barely awake, i trudged through the virgin snow trying to keep each crunching footfall on the snare drum beat.

i am cold

the only thing that might make snow less than perfect for a white wedding would be that the desire to remain sufficiently warm not to die would necessitate the bride wearing something other than the traditional styles of wedding dress. i'm sure there would be a sartorial way around this. a bit like when you see cheerleaders at snowy american football games in costumes that still try to look slutty without the unpleasantly unattractive possibility of losing an extremity to frostbite.

im sure there are people out there who would quite like to see slutty cheerleaders with missing fingers and toes, but im pretty certain its a small enough minority for it not to be worth catering to.

"today" - the smashing pumpkins

"today is the greatest day i've ever known"


today is one of the best songs about suicide ever written. it is also right up there on the list of songs that people misunderstand and like for the wrong reasons. these are mostly about suicide or drugs. i think the way that song about heroin by the las keeps getting used on adverts probably puts it at the top of that list though.

almost every day i read emma kennedy's great blog which today featured the recounting of a dream she had. the line of dialogue "i will never be as happy as i am today, i am going to die" was one of those step-back-and-say-whoah moments of random beauty that spark off strange thought processes and cause earworms.

as well as this song i also have the opening to this poem punctuating it in my head. i wrote it when i was 17, so please forgive the mawkish angsty romance

when i die i want to be
happy. when you're with me
i feel happier than i ever have before
so let me walk down to the shore
of your cheeks and drown my-
self in the ocean of your eyes
my love
let me drown in the ocean of your eyes




the really sad thing is that there were originally several stanzas of this drivel i can no longer remember

"when i argue i see shapes" - idlewild

"i'm not really sure of all this pressure. i'm never going to lose any of my old letters"


i think this is the best idlewild song. by a long way. every other song of theirs ive heard just makes me wish they could do something this good again.

my favourite solid shape is the rhombicosidodecahedron. i think its great. by which i dont mean i think its a "great rhombicosidodecahedron" which is what some people call a truncated icosidodecahedron because although they both have 62 faces theres something about the decagons i really dont like. although strangely the truncated cuboctahedron is much better than the rhombicuboctahedron.
anyway, im getting distracted. the point is that the best archimidean solid is definitely the rhombicosidodecahedron, though i can see why someone might try to argue for the more familar truncated icosahedron.
search the interweb, find yourself a rhombicosidodecahedron net and make yourself one. it might start off looking like a fairly random assortment of hexagons, squares and triangles, but theres beauty in the end product. and, i suspect, a sense of achievement also. its many years since i made one



here, look, ive even done the searching for you

"bastardo" - charlotte hatherley

"and in the morning when i woke there was no antonio, just some money that he’d left for the memory of me. and oh my beautiful guitar, that’s what really broke my heart, had been stolen by the two-faced lothario"


when i saw charlotte hatherley in the carling tent at reading festival a couple of years ago it was at least partly just to kill time before something i really wanted to see. i had never heard her solo stuff and my expectations werent high, but i was pleasantly surprised with how good her bouncy indie set was. i did leave early to see whatever it was i had been waiting for though.

"saints and sailors" - dashboard confessional

"this is about as social as i get now"



i like the first two dashboard albums. theres an undercurrent of something smug about the band i dont really like, and the over-reliance on open tunings feels weird on my ears after a while, and the songwriting is occasionally mawkish or linguistically awkward, but there are just some lines that leap out at you from the middle of songs. lines you feel a real empathy for. lines that sum up a moment so well that all similar moments from then on seem to be soundtracked by it.


i cant remember when i last did something properly social with a real friend


i do want to kick in the head all of the muppets singing along on the dashboard confessional mtv unplugged album. but something of the band's sound has coloured or informed my acoustic playing since i heard them.

"war pigs" - hand of doom

"generals gathered in their masses just like witches at black masses"


i dont really know much about the hand of doom album, but its great. it seems there isnt a sabbath song that melissa auf der maur cant sing really well. i love her voice - its a real, powerful rocker's voice. especially over the sparse arrangement of the beginning of this song.

and she is probably the most beautiful lesbian i have ever seen.

"cure" - metallica

"everyone's got to have the sickness cos everyone seems to need the cure"


one of my internal battles - what's the best metallica album? without question the answer is master of puppets. which metallica album would i most want to listen to? load. not that ive listened to metallica much for quite some time. or ever really cared that much when i did.

i waited in the doctor's waiting room with a grumpy baby with a cold for over an hour. it was one of the most soul-destroyingly boring things i have ever done.

alphonso bonzo theme tune

in the kids tv show of my childhood, alphonso bonzo was an italian "exchange student" who would exchange some boy's everyday item for a similar item with magic properties. i have a vague memory that at the end he wanted to swap his life and it was all a bit twisted. the most memorable thing though was the annoying tune he whistled all the time.