"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.

"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