"our velocity" - maximo park

"i've got no-one to call in the middle of the night anymore. i'm just alone with my thoughts"
"love is a lie, which means i've been lied to. love is a lie, which means i've been lying too"


i dont know what it is about the latest wave of indie bands, but the only parts of their songs i seem to like are the bridges. the bridge is supposed to just be a break from verses and choruses so you dont get bored of them. its supposed to make you want to hear the chorus again. there are many songs i love where i struggle to remember how the bridge goes or if i havent listened to it in a while the bridge comes as something as a surprise because id forgotten it entirely.

but this song has two bridges both of which are catchier, hookier and generally better than the chorus. these bridges have been in my head for days now, but i can barely remember how the chorus goes. theres something wrong with the world when things like this happen. its just twisted is what it is.

"thou shalt always kill" - dan le sac v scroobius pip

"thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls’ pants. use it to get into their heads."


this song is going to be huge.

i heard it twice on xfm yesterday and various bits of it have been in and out of my head ever since. a glorious slice of intelligent lo-fi.
that said, by the time it's been played to death this summer - and it will be - i will surely be sick of it, but for now i just want to be excited by it.


i don't think i've ever got into a girl's pants (or head for that matter) using any other method - which is the trouble with this song - it is too busy telling you what not to do without offering advice on replacement activities

"lonely this christmas" - mud

"that's where i'll be since you left me. my tears could melt the snow. what can i do without you? i've got no place, no place to go"



there's not often any real sense of appropriateness about my earworms, but mid march is a pretty inappropriate time to be infected by a christmas classic from that glam band from mitcham.

when i was a kid i was, for a time, obsessed with watching sounds of the seventies on the bbc - though at the time i didn't really appreciate the irony inherent in pretty much all the members of glam bands being really ugly. but then glam isn't about being good looking - its not even about looking good - its just about looking.


it was really cold today, and i was alone, if not strictly speaking lonely - i guess that's why

"shiver" - horny toad

"shiver - brrrrr - shiver - brrrrrr - shiver, shiver, shiver"


the only place i've ever heard this inconsequential ska-punk track is on some free compilation cd. i like it well enough, but it's not a great song in the scheme of things. yet it seem to crop up in my mind every time i shiver.

actually, it only happens when i'm shivering with cold not with any of the more significant forms of shiver - fear, illness, erotic tension, panic, caffeine tweaking, anxiety, resonance or random unknown reasons. i like all of these far better than coldness - not just because they come without this irritating little chorus filling my head, or even just because they are warmer, but because they are deeper. it's almost always good to feel.

"there's no flaws in michaela strachan" - monsters4GODS

"i'd really love to get inside your country file"


the best way i ever celebrated st patricks day was by playing an acoustic gig. it was one of my favourite gigs i played in m4G. partly because we played well, but mostly beacuse the set was relaxed and self indulgent. we were only playing to half a dozen drunks, a soundguy and taming pandora who was playing later, and we treated ourselves by playing stuff we'd never done before - including the later verses of michaela that we didn't usually get round to, some of which got laughs from drunks.

michaela's on some wierd bbc adverts at the moment superimposed on some weak animation and trying to act. i think the fact that she's not very good at it is part of her charm. she's not a stunning beauty but she has always been nice looking and always comes accross as friendly and enthusiastic. her single h-a-p-p-y radio was much better than most people would think too. i don't think we were ever that serious about our devotion to her, despite the lyrics to this song, but she was cute back in her wide awake club days (when there's an incredibly unsubstatiated rumour she had a thing with mike myers who did some sketches for it) and she's still looking pretty good for 40.

"freeze the atlantic" - cable

these lyrics are pretty incoherent - i usually just mumble the right sort of sounds and hope for the best


i've just been out for a walk through the city. i needed to buy a mother's day card, my feelings on which i dealt with on my old blog but which this year was further complicated for the first time by trying to find a card that expresses what i think my baby would want to express to my wife on mother's day. wandering back from an unrewarding chore at the card shop eating a far more rewarding sub (with extra jalapenos) there are loads of people lying around on the ground in patches of sunshine as if it were summer already. for no real reason it reminds me of the dreadful sprite advert that this great song soundtracked which was nothing at all like this really. just summery.

"little miss can't be wrong"/"two princes" - spin doctors

"what you gonna do to get into another one of these rock and roll songs?"
"one has diamonds in his pockets that sounds great, now. this one, said he wants to buy you lockets, ain't in his head, now."



a special kind of double earworm occurs when two songs by the same artist are so similar that bits of them become interchangeable.
everyone loved two princes at the time, even though lmcbr was a much better song.
i don't think either has aged very well, but they are the sort of thing that might come on the radio every now and then and remind you that they were better than you thought.

"nice guy eddie" - sleeper

"and i said hey love i’m making it easy on us. i’ll leave and a few of our dreams turn to dust"



songs always seem to know how to end a relationship - whereas i never have.
i wish i had had the guts to use this line to break up with someone, its honesty and simplicity being surely superior to the self-justifying, circuitous babble that i managed. sure, there's a certain level of cruelty in its detachment, but it's the sort of cruelty you might get at a hospital where they know how to hurt you in a way in which you'll get better. i reckon that if louise wener said this to you in her breathy tones you wouldn't even start crying until a few hours later, and it probably wouldn't take you long to forgive her. i, on the other hand, am not really on speaking terms with any of my exes.

the way i would most like to have broken up with someone would have been to stand outside her window and, in a parody of john cusack's boombox serenade, stand silently with gone for good by morphine playing at streetwaking volume, then turn and walk silently away whilst silent tears run down her face and all dogs and babies nearby bark and cry respectively.

is it wrong to have a fantasy breakup?

"this ain't a scene its an arms race" - fall out boy

"this ain't a scene, it’s a goddamn arms race"


this song is everywhere at the moment
it sounds so much like he's singing "goblin arse-face"
so i laugh inappropriately every time

"the radio still sucks" - ataris

"every now and then i turn it on again but it's plain to see that the radio still sucks"


i remember the death of xfm.

it had been a gloriously uncommercial, eclectic station prepared to take risks, to play stuff noone else was playing, to not be rigidly trapped in a playlist. it had had to make a few compromises to get a permanent licence, and i still didn't like all of the wide range of stuff they played, but it was great because they played bad stuff, sometimes barely listenable stuff, in amongst the fantastic stuff.

it came as a shock to me, though i later found out industry people were well aware of its imminence, when in late august of 1998 it just disappeared - with a short loop of mor repeating endlessly on the frequency.

a couple of weeks later it had turned, through some black magic, into a weak virgin radio clone, and it took many years for it to re-evolve into its current state which is at least listenable, particularly at night. but it can never again, i fear, be the revolutionary force it tried so hard to be.

the world would probably be a slightly better place if it had succeeded

"deeper shade of blue" - steps

"into each life some sun must shine - well someone else must be getting mine. the days are so empty, nights are so long, awaking to find again that you've gone"



i have a grudging sort of respect for steps. they're not good. i wouldn't endorse them, i wouldn't ever choose to listen to them but, the painful (and truly tragic) cover of tragedy aside, always enjoy it at least a little when i do. sure they were throwaway pop, but they had the redeeming value that they knew they were and didn't care. also, i think they had some pretty good people writing for them. lyrically at least, there are some well crafted pop songs, with more emotional lyrics than the bland child-friendly production would imply.

someone i know mentioned recently that he had had a thing for claire. i think i over-expressed my surprise and it came across as a criticism. i would never criticise anyone for finding another person attractive, however little i understood the reason for it. i was however surprised since i'd never met a claire-person before. i know of several faye-people, and i know i'm not alone in the lisa-people, and i've even met some h-people (though that's a very different thing), but no claire-people.

chaqu-un a son gout, je suppose

my wife asserts that steps were rubbish, and to an extent she has a point, but then she tries to claim that s-club were the far superior pop band. this is clearly an error of judgement since i have rarely heard an s-club song without wanting to hurt someone (this would preferably take the form of hannah-homicide, but has a range of options right down to scooping out my own inner ear with a screwdriver). the only faintly acceptable member of s-club was jo o, and she has now proven herself, through the medium of "celebrity" "reality" tv, to be a dull, slightly racist chav.


oh dear, how sad am i to even have an opinion about any of this rubbish?
(please note that this is rhetorical)

"cement" - feeder

"i'm in quicksand sinking in again. i've got concrete shoes and i can't swim"


i love this song. it reminds me of why i used to be a fan of feeder. a combination of melody and power. a summery sort of pain. when he sings "how can i stop this?" it meant something to me. buck rogers leaves me cold.
but they've been disappointing me for a long time. when i saw them live, just before the rerelease of polythene, they were quite good but what i remember most of their set was the disappointment of the songs everyone wanted them to play but they didn't - how could they not play tangerine for example.
actually what i remember most from that gig is just how fantastic tampasm were in support. they looked great, they wore plastic devil horns, they played hard fast and tight, i moshed like a mentalist, some guy jumped on my head when i went down, i got back up and they were still rocking, they played glorified vibrator - they deserved to be much much bigger than they were.
oh and it was this gig where i spilled the beer of a music journalist, and he made me buy him another and then when he realised that meant i had no money to buy my own he said i could have as much of it as i could down in one - i was terrified i was about to hurl on his feet.

it was also on the way home from that gig that i experienced the man on the tube with the pizza hut balloon who killed rock, the saddest molko-wannabe i've ever seen and the drunk guys who thought it was hilarious to say "what rhymes with bank" over and over again.

"reginasaurus" - regina spektor

"if i was a philosophy i'd be registentionalism, and if people spoke using quotes of me they'd say reginaisms. if i was a religion, then my church would surely have a schism"


some time ago now, i got an instant message from pat. "you have to go and see regina spektor when she plays in london," she said, "my friend messaged me and told me to go and see her and i did and it was great so now i'm telling you" [i'm paraphrasing a lot here]

so based pretty much solely on that recommendation and only having heard "baby jesus" before i duly went up to islington to see her. after enduring a competent but incredibly self-involved support band and an interminable wait a slightly ditsy-looking girl with just a hint of kooky-cuteness walks out onto the stage, sits at a piano and captures the full rapt attention of the entire crowd for her full set. she makes jokes, she plays requests (and has to give up on "baby jesus" quite early cos she hasn't played it all tour), she is genuinely concerned for all the young girls fainting in the sweltering heat of a poorly ventilated box, she is genuinely likable.

i was singing this song for days afterwards and it has regularly been an earworm since. it's so not her best song but it is sweet and funny and pretty in a throwaway kind of way

"king of the kerb" - echobelly

'"sugar smile savvy"

nothing was quite as era-encapsulating of the whole britpop thing as the shine compilations. anyone with a full set has an amazing assortment of huge hits, indie gems and forgotten classics. whoever it was at polygram picking the tracks did a fine job. anyone planning an indie-disco could get by with just a few of them - as long as they were discrete and prepared not to do many requests.

i'm pretty certain this song was on shine 3 which is probably one of the best ones. i must have heard it dozens of times before i worked out what the lyrics were she was singing and i think i liked the song less once i knew what it was about, but you've gotta admit it's catchy

"dancing in the moonlight" - thin lizzy

"i always get chocolate stains on my pants"


i first got into this song on a smashing pumpkins acoustic bootleg where it is haunting and great, and then got into the original which is more powerful in its own way.

the main trouble with cover versions is that - even if you totally understand the lyric and empathise with the emotion behind it and can use it to express your own emotions - noone can ever convey the message of the words with as much emotional power as the person who wrote them.

hearing this song so much on that stupid cider advert is starting to make me sick of it - i really hope that doesn't continue.

"monday night pet shop madness" - sid shuttle and the space cadets

"if you want to have fun on a monday night, come down to the petshop with me."


when i was, i think, 9 my friend chris and i started writing poetry together in the playground. the compass grew to include jack, and the other chris and some other people, but it was our project. i remember the battered spiral-bound notebook chris would pull out at break and lunch times - chock full of the scrawlings of our collective art. in fairness, most of it was derivative or just plain ripped off, and a lot of it was ruined by trying, in our own small-child, pun-obsessed way, to be funny.

one day we realised that a lot of the better material we had written wasn't poetry so much as song lyrics and we formed a band. it mattered not a scrap that none of us could play anything (though i think i was already a very poor clarinetist by this point) - hey, many bands have formed and then worried about learning to play things.
heavily inspired by "morris minor's marvellous motors" - a popular children's tv comedy at the time - we settled on the name sid shuttle and the space cadets. i wish i could remember the ridiculous themed pseudonyms of other band members but i can't even remember which out of chris and i lost the battle and ended up being sid shuttle.

why we chose to write a song about a pet shop also escapes me, and with the cynical eyes of hindsight it all seems rather pathetic, but for a few moments we believed in something - and made some (albeit faintly ridiculous) assertions about our collective future.

i'd settle for a childish clarity now