Where shingle meets raincoat

The Worst 200 Songs, Part IV: #140-121

2012-02-14T18:28:00.002Z

'There is no surfeiting on gall: nothing keeps so well as a decoction of spleen.'
William Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasure of Hating', 1826, Selected Writings (Penguin, 1970, p.405)

140. R. Kelly - 'Ignition (Remix)'
(2003, #1, DL)

DL: Stupid, shallow RNB dross, but have often wondered if R. previously sang ''It's the original to Ignition''. Yet I am not going to Google it to find out. I'd like to punch this song in multiple organs.

AN: In an era of remarkable efflorescence and vitality for American R’n’B, it was a shame that R. Kelly’s lowest common denominator surrealist adolescent puerility acquired such widespread credibility. The epitome of average: mainstream, mediocre, bloated, boring.

JG: The opening line “now normally I don’t do this” promises much. Sadly, the song then starts.

TM: I liked this at the time, partly out of admiration for its soulful chord-sequences, partly as a wilful liking for mainstream pop. This ‘remix’ now sounds inert and who’s actually heard the original?

139. Craig Douglas - 'Only Sixteen'
(1959, #1, RC)

DL: Yet if I used these lyrics as part of a defence in court I'd be on a register faster than you can say 'name and shame'. Especially if I professed to be the same age as her. Just painfully fluffy.

JG: Is it just me, or is this song actually about grown men grooming under-age girls?

AN: Another of Robin’s choices. I don’t feel qualified to comment really but if he chose this I feel certain it must be a bad thing in all kinds of complicated cultural historical ways.

TM: Plodding, would-be juvenilia and the earliest entry in this esteemed litany. “She was too young to fall in love”. To paraphrase Epic45, I’m getting too young for this sort of insipid crap.

138. Robson and Jerome - 'What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?'
(1996, #1, TM)

DL: It really irks me to see Cowell lauded as an evil genius, when there's really no skill involved in releasing records on the back of TV programmes. Never found his putdowns witty or insightful either.

JG: Weak pastiche of Jimmy Ruffin’s classic, and one that regrettably set the template followed by The Soldiers today; that’s actors playing soldiers inspiring soldiers playing singers. Ouch, my head.

AN: Another paragon of pointlessness, and a bar against ’90s nostalgia.

TM: The sound of a nation clutching the comfort blanket close, afraid to make strides into the future. “This land of broken dreams”; like then-PM John Major, they took refuge in dreams of rural retreat.

137. Busted - 'You Said No'
(2003, #1, TM)

DL: Was prepared to engage in some revisionism here, but now I'm listening to the fucking thing, these cod-Americanisms really grate. At least Blink 182 did/do this kind of shit with some wit and irony.

AN: I quite liked Busted’s 'Thunderbirds' tune. Another tune I don’t really have much to say about. It’s shit, obviously.

JG: The Eton Year 11 understanding of what punk rock ought to sound like.

TM: This particular future was a dead-end; a boy-band chasing after the rock ambulance. They present a whiny, brattish mode of masculinity – utterly lacking in charm in its “ME ME ME” lamentations.

Punchable, us?

136. Liz Kershaw, Frank Bruno, Bruno Brookes and Samantha Fox - 'Come Outside'
(1992, failed to chart, TM)

DL: Brookes was deemed a Radio 1 relic when he was just 35, but somehow not three years before in '92 when this alone should have seen him off. Almost endearingly crap in its long-lost, Bruno'd-up shame.

AN: The ’80s vogue for ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ committing suicide in a flurry of risible Major-era celebrity comedy awfulness.

JG: If anyone wants to understand the dark roots of the Matthew Bannister revolution at Radio 1, then look no further than this insipid vehicle for Bruno Brookes’s shatteringly conceit-driven ego.

TM: Two Brunos and two arch ladies defy all aesthetic criteria with a work that is both apocalyptically awful and weirdly enticing. As archaic in its way as #138: “slap ‘n’ tickle”, “bag of chips”.

135. Emerson, Lake and Palmer - 'Jerusalem'
(1973, #2 - album, RC)

DL: I think prog-rock may be pretty much the antithesis of what I look for in music, and this old fart's racket is typical of that which makes me evacuate any environment that it might aurally vandalise.

AN: Prog. Another genre that bored hipster revisionists should have left well alone.

JG: Listen carefully and you can hear the moorings that tied early prog rock to a genuinely grassroots artistic network tearing away as ELP develop into Great Artistes Who Really Mean It. Twats.

TM: Re-envisioning of Blake’s ‘alternative anthem’ that strips out the dissenting vision. In ELP land, the mills are a threat not to the exploited populace but the picturesque view from the country house.

134. Gary Glitter - 'Dance Me Up'
(1984, #25, TM)

DL: I certainly don't want this on my hard drive. An awful piece of glam-funk regardless of any wider context, though it does help and a violent assault on the senses. Glad I never have to hear it again.

AN: Again, this is the sort of ‘80s kitsch valorised by Shoreditch hipsters, not to mention multiple Zane Lowe-championed bands of 2008-10.

JG: Long past his insouciant pomp, and long before a well-known series of deeply unfortunate events, this is Glitter’s pre-conviction low.

TM: Horrific display of braggadocio and female objectification. It is okay as ‘he rocks’, says a YouTube commentator in a misguided application of Larkin’s Law. Oh, and the song is sheer, leering shite.

133. The Lighthouse Family - 'Postcard from Heaven'
(1999, #24, TM)

DL: Some records on our chart are there because they are wildly irritating, obnoxious, tacky or moronic. This is just nothing. Boring and empty. Like listening to wallpaper. Mahogany wallpaper at that.

AN: Hmm. The Lighthouse Family were a multi-racial Newcastle band. For that reason I’m willing to forgive them even this.

JG: Mick Hucknall’s most obvious successors were already going through the motions a mere two years into their career. This is flaccid non-pop, and Tunde’s flat, expressionless voice was never exposed to such appalling effect as here.

TM: Typically soporific slush from these favourites of Peep Show’s resident slick and unhinged businessman Alan Johnson. They came from Newcastle, though clearly from Osborne Road wine bar territory.

132. Modern Romance - 'Ay Ay Ay Ay Moosey'
(1981, #10, JG)

DL: Why do people residing in sunnier climes never make records about venturing up to our slate grey, overly built-up and dystopian destinations? I don't really mind this. If you squint, it's Joey Barton.

AN: What must going on a Mediterranean holiday have been like in the ’80s? Not good judging by this. Grudgingly, I admit that neoliberal capitalism may have been responsible for some moderate progress on the lifestyle front.

JG: The emerging New Pop spawned ABC, Scritti Politti and early Spandau Ballet. It also spawned this shite, proving that all pearls contain their kernel of turd.

TM: A rare misfire from one of pop’s greatest eras; a simpleton’s take on Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ urbane, exotic cosmopolitanism. Here’s evidence that steel drums can sound workaday, not joyous.

131. Toto Coelo - 'I Eat Cannibals (Part One)'
(1982, #8, TM)

DL: I do like a song I can relate to. Just not this one. At this point the New Wave sound of things must have reached saturation level. Reminiscent of Siouxsie and the Banshees, only completely inferior.

AN: A bad week for '80s excrement, this.

JG: Why the fuck would anyone saunter down to Woolworths and buy this shite when they could have Bow Wow Wow’s contemporaneously magnificent 'Go Wild in the Country' for exactly the same price?

TM: Inexplicable poppycock that has surely been given ‘ironic’ kudos within the context of ‘cheesy pop’ discos. 1982 was great; yet this is, as Carlin argued, an Opportunity Knocks idea of ‘raunchiness’.

130. Coldplay - 'Fix You'
(2005, #4, DL)

DL: How can such a huge sound seem so lacking in soul? Just another example of supposedly universal and all-compassing song-writing that just alienates all that aren't on board. If only Coldplay had bite.

AN: Everyone was fooled by Coldplay back in the day. Everyone. Apart from Alan McGee. Well done that man, inexplicably.

JG: Yes, they’re a pathetically easy target but they hardly help their cause with plodding neo-dadrock like this, do they? Remarkably, most recent offering ‘Paradise’ trumps this in the shit-ness department at every turn.

TM: The vague sweet-nothings of banal popular song haunted the TV dramas of Dennis Potter; in forty years time this will surely elicit bemusement not fascination. What was that about light igniting bones?

129. Inner Circle - 'Sweat (A La La La La Song)'
(1993, #3, RC)

DL: Don't you just miss the halcyon days of 1993's cod-reggae stampede? Must admit this raises a subtle grin, for those disturbing nostalgic reasons again, but ultimately it makes UB40 sound authentic.

AN: The novelty arse end of early-’90s reggae-inflected pop. At the other end of the spectrum stood Ace of Base, one of the great musical collectives in human history.

JG: Inner Circle came out of the same mid-70s Jamaican reggae milieu as Black Uhuru and slogged away for years releasing multiple albums for little reward, with plenty of personal tragedy along the way. I don’t begrudge them this money-spinning hit, terrible though it is.

TM: Watered-down, identikit reggae backs crude lyrical sentiments which desperately require some wit. The operative adjective is ‘leaden’. ‘Erotic City’ this most certainly is not.

128. Flo Rida (Feat. T-Pain) - 'Low'
(2008, #2, DL)

DL: I really couldn't give any more of a fuck about this irksome Shawty and the continent-sized club that she frequents any more than I give a fuck about Stranraer. Don't they care that they're generic?

AN: I hated these horrible, horrible R’n’B tunes from the mid-noughties, for which the formula was: tacky 808 drums, synths playing dystopian chromatic empty hooks, and notably nasty misogynistic lyrics. Usher’s diabolical 'Yeah' led the charge.

JG: It’s all a bit sad that R'n'b has become nothing more than a vacuous soundtrack to various dance-based teen movies (Step Up 2 the Streets, in this case), but such is life.

TM: “Like a pornography poster/She showed her”. Tedious ‘booty’ and brand obsession. Its parent album at least benefits from being the only Mail on Sunday ever not to feature the odious Peter Hitchens.

127. Sinitta - 'So Macho'
(1986, #2, DL)

DL: Well, gender roles certainly weren't dead in 1986. There is literally no humanity in this. Although the joke may be on me as I suspect it documents same-sex preferences as well as heterosexual ones.

AN: School disco trash.

JG: Simon Cowell’s first major pop music success, and it very nearly stalled until Iain Burton’s £5,000 loan guaranteed its release as a single. Without this, there might be no X Factor today. Burton, you absolute bastard.

TM: While hi-NRG was often great, its two envoys in this list so far have been atrocious. While the music adds irony with every orchestra-hit, the lyrical outlook is tiresomely traditional and submissive.

126. Kate Nash - 'Foundations'
(2007, #2, DL)

DL: An admittedly warm and infectious chorus with some magical and delicate production bludgeoned senseless by numerous painful lyrical howlers. Which one's your favourite? “Intelligent input”? “Fit-tah”?

AN: Good call Dave. I wish we’d had more recent stuff on this list so far (probably should have picked more meself). It’s much more worthwhile critiquing stuff that people still like or have recently.

JG: A kind of ITV version of Lily Allen with infuriating longevity; annoying in much the same way that the fact that The Upper Hand is technically Britain’s longest-running sitcom is.

TM: The video’s studied mundanity fits Nash’s accentuated mockney voice: animated socks, pink and blue toothbrushes; cup-cake feminism par excellence. The “Bitter! [...] FITTAH!” lines define ‘irritating’.

125. Showaddywaddy - 'Three Steps to Heaven'
(1975, #2, RC)

DL: Nothing wrong with the song, but as a cover version it does seem supremely pointless. I can guarantee that there'll be some very important cultural and political reasoning behind this nomination.

AN: Again, Robin Knows. I bet there’s something wonderfully savage about this on Sea Songs somewhere. Have a look.

JG: Like #133, this is failing non-pop by virtue of its total lack of discernible melody. Dave Bartram’s vocals are also strange, as though they had been auto-tuned years before such things were possible.

TM: As with the landfill indie contingent’s pilfering of Britpop, it is the idiot copyists 15-20 years down the line who deserve maximum ire. Ageing teddy boys may have found solace; I resolutely cannot.

124. Boris Gardiner - 'I Want to Wake Up With You'
(1986, #1, DL)

DL: I think someone played at their wedding reception when I was a toddler and it made me retch even then. I would like 'Come Play With Me' by The Wedding Present as the first dance when I get 'spliced'.

AN: Quite enjoyed this, for some reason. Multicultural London; sweet, pretty lass.

JG: In hindsight, 1986 was a bit like 1976 in terms of the appalling state of the pop charts (and therefore of radio). No wonder raves were only just around the corner.

TM: He had played bass for Lee Perry, yet this is a wimpy frisbee of a record. There are courtly enough sentiments, but few signs of life. ‘This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.’

The video is beguiling, actually

123. Kajagoogoo - 'Too Shy'
(1983, #1, DL)

DL: Number one during my early weeks, but I've never solved the mystery as to why anyone would want to own this song, no matter when it was released. Just an inane, ridiculous chorus that grates terribly.

AN: And this. Fucking hell this is pretty good stuff, vocals and chorus aside. Which is a good portion of the song, allowably.

JG: It would be nice to think Kajagoogoo’s music could inspire me to a wittier riposte than “too shy? Too shite, more like!” But sadly it can’t.

TM: Redolent of the worst eighties tendencies: Thatcher and machismo, with its Falklands homecoming motif. This lacks the brash, rich palette of Trevor Horn or the ideas of Paul Morley. Just galling.

122. Brotherhood of Man - 'Save Your Kisses for Me'
(1976, #1, RC)

DL: I knew 70s pop was a kitsch load of inoffensive yet somehow sinister arse from another galaxy before we started this project but now I feel this even more so. Maybe Flo Rida and LMFAO aren't so bad.

AN: More novelty tripe.

JG: More lightweight mid-70s escapism during a time of economic crisis. A musical precursor of Michael McIntyre, then.

TM: Cultural complacency, 70s-style: not a pretty sight. A heftily moustached, wing-collared dullard leads inert dance routines and mouths a mid-Atlantic ode to a three year-old. Dorries would approve.

121. Westlife - 'The Rose'
(2006, #1, TM)

DL: Are there really people out there that are truly moved by this plodding and calculated, insincere guff? This is impossible to like. 'Westlife on auto-pilot'. What an ominous phrase. Lighters in the air!

AN: Westlife must win the title for least defensible boy band. Nothing redeemable about them whatsoever. I mean really nothing.

JG: Do the people who buy this kind of shite actually like it? And if so, why?

TM: 14th number-1 from ‘the boys’, pawns of Simon Cowell in his ongoing attempt to debase pop-culture. As Hazlitt argued, ‘Anyone will be almost sure to make money who has no other idea in his head’.

I HAVE NO TIME FOR WESTERN MEDICINE,
I AM... ANDREW LANSLEY JR.!

The Worst 200 Songs, Part III: #160-141

2012-02-07T19:27:00.001Z

160. Emmy the Great - 'Mistress England'
(2011, N/A, TM)

DL: Lament to those who ‘dreamed their daughters would marry Prince William’. To paraphrase Bernard Black, “I never thought I’d say this to anyone, but… ‘Get a job’.” Charmless helping of Tory indie-folk.

AN: I’ve written about this elsewhere, and I’d sort of like to move on now. As W.B. Yeats once wrote, “Too long spent hating on risible private school cabaret / Can make a stone of the heart”.

JG: I think this conveys the sheer ennui of celebrity worship around the Royal Wedding quite wittily, if I must be honest. Not something I’d consider a Top 200 contender at all.

TM: A KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON dirge with insipid lyrics about UCAS forms and fairy-tale dreaming. A conservative’s idea of a clever song: ‘keep up appearances’ and genuflect before royalty, plebs!

159. Thurman - 'English Tea'
(1994, failed to chart, TM)

DL: Jangly Conference Britpop lost in the midst of time. Whimsical old relic that almost comes across as a spoof of that particular movement; I believe that The Fast Show's Indie Club band had more bite.

AN: Ha, this is hilarious! I’d never heard it before. ROFL!

JG: The Viva Brother of their age; boring, derivative, banal and with absolutely nothing to say. Takes Blur’s problematic, ironic “anti-grunge” stance far too literally. Infuriating “mockney” vocals too.

TM: “But if you don’t feel very loyal, you can always read about a royal”. ‘Indie’ atrocity that even Britpop laureate John Harris has castigated. No-hopers Shed Seven sound like The Kinks in comparison.

158. Bryan Adams - 'Summer of '69'
(1985, #42, RC)

DL: Can't enjoy this Boss-lite eighties constant now I know it's not named after the year but a Summer in which Adams spent embroiled in the sexual tryst of the same numerical figure. Bad taste in mouth.

AN: Sorry for the second pitiful self-plug of the week, but I said all I really want to say about this here.

JG: Appalling Reaganite re-imagining the late 60s as a time of hangin’ with the boys, chasin’ the ladies and kickin’ back the beers whilst ignoring those bloody peacenik Commies. Bryan Adams was 9 years old at the time.

TM: Played to rigor mortis, if not outright fatality. Can anyone find this invigorating now? As far as the mythologizing of childhood goes, Nas, Laurie Lee and Ariel Pink are infinitely preferable.

157. AC/DC - 'Let There Be Rock'
(1977, #17 - album, AN)

DL: If this is real music, give me disposable, manufactured, exciting and vibrant pop music any day of the week. Dull, repetitious and overlong. Each to their own but I find no depth of emotion in this.

AN: I fucking hated it when people started to canonize boring, macho rock music around about 2002. That’s why I chose this, basically.

JG: Are we seriously including AC/DC in this?

TM: This is ‘Rock’ as a religiose millstone around the neck. Don’t experiment or think for yourself, just believe in the myth and the riff. 1955 wasn’t the beginning and jazz is better anyway. Incessant.

156. Bob Geldof - 'The Great Song of Indifference'
(1990, #15, TM)

DL: If Live Aid was fuelled by a true sense of altruism, then it must be a coincidence that it prolonged the careers of narcissistic bores such as this. Emanates the intimate charm of steaming excrement.

AN: I’ve never listened to this and I don’t want to.

JG: His contemporaries A House did this sort of thing much more effectively (and acerbically) on their sneering, self-loathing 'I Don’t Care'. But they were speaking from a position of obscurity and didn’t have time for Geldof’s tiresome nonsense.

TM: Trifling pomposity from Saint Bob. Of course, writing a Dylan piss-take complete with Irish knees-up buffoonery is just bound to shake people out of their apathy. GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING EAR PLUGS!

155. U2 - 'Angel of Harlem'
(1988, #9, RC)

DL: For me, U2 were at their prime during their halcyon days of icy desolation, and this slice of plastic soul marks their initial shift from what made their sound so unique and into patronising cliché.

AN: U-fucking-2. This is ethically dubious millionaire minstrelsy. And it sounds like shit.

JG: U2 themselves freely admit that this was their most difficult period, and this tentative rock-soul tribute to Billie Holliday hangs uneasily between the two. Still, at least they were having a go.

TM: Earnest bellowing from the messianic one. This is from their tediously ‘authentic’ Real Rock phase, pilfering U.S. signifiers for ballast and lucre. The film is laughable, the saxophones sickening.

154. Avril Lavigne - 'SK8r Boi'
(2002, #8, DL)

DL: Banal faux-rebellion with punk-pop by numbers production. What irks me is the way these Kerrang! emo/metal acts seem to think that they are in any way less manufactured than your average boy-band.

AN: I quite like the key change in this. Marketed confectionary but surely we could’ve picked ‘Girlfriend’ instead?

JG: They called her Average Lavigne, but this is far more criminal than that. She’s just a female Bryan Adams, isn’t she? Harsh, but fair.

TM: I will give any record a chance, but this is irrefutably irritating in its simplistic rhymes and sham ‘rebellion’. By the 2000s, subcultures were effortlessly co-opted by the corporate mainstream.

153. Bus Stop (Feat. Carl Douglas) - 'Kung Fu Fighting'
(1998, #8, JG)

DL: My giddy arse, this is tacky. Like drawing cock-and-balls on the Mona Lisa. There's nothing quite like ad-libbed additional refrains and raps to annihilate your thoughts of smile-inducing originals.

AN: Another pointless novelty record. Ruins a decent original.

JG: The worst of all the great many cynical dustings-off of 70s disco fluff that shone so darkly in 1998. The spiritual heir of this sort of thing is nothing other than the ‘Holiday Rap’. At least that’s funny.

TM: “A kung-fu fighter in the disco!” A very late-90s cheapening of disco, missing the original’s oddity. It enters the sphere of the senseless with the MC’s gormless vocals and moronic chant-leading.

152. Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes - 'Up Where We Belong'
(1983, #7, DL)

DL: Contrary to the belief of the average Digital Spy user, I think the panel agree that both the mainstream and leftfield have faults though it's this kind of drippiness that vindicates the darker side.

AN: Ah, the eighties. They were shit, weren’t they?

JG: A relatively early example of the professional duet in which you can’t ever imagine actual people even thinking the alien, sucrose lyrics; let alone saying them to one another.

TM: Harbinger of many a syrupy film tie-in ballad to come. I have no problem with ostentatious emotion, provided the display avoids the sort of calculation and bombast on pitiful display here.

151. Paul Weller - 'The Changingman'
(1995, #7, DL)

DL: We asked 100 people to name something that sprang to mind when faced with the terms 'tedium' and 'inertia' and they all said 'Noelrock'. Astoundingly, the Mod-father was only 37 at the time, not 129.

AN: By this point Paul Weller’s voice had deteriorated into a geriatric growl. And I’ve always found him to be an especially dislikeable man. Terrible tune.

JG: I’ve always thought Weller needed Buckler and Foxton more than he’ll ever know. This is plodding semi-MOR from a man whose decline into mediocrity closely tracked that of his forebear Steve Winwood. He’s somewhat redeemed himself more recently.

TM: The ‘Mod-father’ lifts the riff from ELO’s superior ‘10538 Overture’ for the purposes of plodding, dad rock. This stodgy blues posturing belies his previous experimentation. “Jaded”? Yes, Paul.

150. Eminem - 'Not Afraid'
(2010, #5, DL)

DL: I listened to The Marshall Mathers LP the other night. It was shocking, sinister and hilariously gripping. How he re-emerged with this whiny, self-pitying, painful shite is beyond me. Retire again!

AN: Slim not operating on all cylinders at this stage. Still, could be worse.

JG: Eminem really has run out of things to say, hasn’t he?

TM: Entirely lacking the complexity and depth his earlier work possessed. One of the few to diss Dubya in 2004; in 2010, this was just a myopic irrelevance besides The-dream, Kanye, Big Boi and Janelle.

149. Lenny Kravitz - 'Are You Gonna Go My Way?'
(1993, #4, RC)

DL: Hendrix-lite, but evidently I don't like to rock as much I must have previously imagined. One of those songs I feel like defending because of the glory days of Now! albums. Perhaps my last dissent.

AN: See my comments on #157 but substitute “2002” for “1993”.

JG: Like so many artists on this list, I can’t even work out what Lenny Kravitz was trying to achieve here, or why he thought it a good idea.

TM: The first, and surely not the last, appearance for a justly maligned poltroon. Daft Hendrix facsimile riff; strutting, cocksure lyrics: “I am the chosen, I'm the one / I have come to save the day.”

148. Cliff Richard - 'Power to All Our Friends'
(1973, #4, TM)

DL: I'd put Cliff in the same bracket as Noel Edmonds and Cilla: Santa-like figures in childhood that would turn out to be a right set of arse-knobs upon adult inspection. It's no ‘Wired For Sound’.

AN: Wowzaroo. Words fail me.

JG: Power to the bees? Power to the vine? Power to the Sun (as though it hasn’t got any)???!!! What on Earth is going on here???!!!

TM: Another saviour whose day in this list has come. This Eurovision entry foists happy-clappy Christianity on us; as appealing as his Festival of Light compatriot and mad old busybody Mary Whitehouse.

147. Jamiroquai - 'Virtual Insanity'
(1996, #3, RC)

DL: I remember when it was all about saving the planet rather than arsing around in Ferraris and alighting nightclubs with a cocaine nosebleed. Bono-esque levels of integrity. Somewhat prophetic though.

AN: I have a soft spot for this, but I can see what was awful about it. Cartoon black culture for Trustafarian tossers.

JG: Revisiting this reminds me why I hold Jay Kay is such contempt, with its hackneyed, nonsense lyrics that read like a five year old musing about Aldous Huxley.

TM: This mad hatter’s no Simon Munnery, but rather a ‘quirky’ clown, setting the cause of urban music back several millennia. What whimpering ‘profundity’ at the end; actual inanity, more like.

146. Will Smith (Feat. Dru Hill) - 'Wild Wild West'
(1999, #2, JG)

DL: Smith's early Fresh Prince work is great. It embodies something of an old-school, playful, pre-gangsta sense of innocence that his unimaginative, sample-heavy hits largely selling crap films don’t.

AN: ‘Men in Black’ (tune), was actually pretty good. Not so this.

JG: Suitably “mutton-into-lamb” piece to accompany the overwhelmingly slight, CGI-drenched Barry Sonnenfeld film.

TM: While far from the rich Western vistas of Leone and Morricone, it is relatively inoffensive, disposable product. Mere merchandise, yes, but ‘tis flanked in this list by rather more heinous specimens.

145. Nick Berry - 'Heartbeat'
(1992, #2, RC)

DL: 'Heartbeat' was a magical series in its heyday, with wondrous North Yorks scenery at play plus admirable determination to never reach 1970. Nothing wrong with this. If I rated it badly I'm ashamed.

AN: Actually, maybe things have improved in some ways since 1992.

JG: Suitably dribbling soundtrack to the ITV re-imagining of the early 1960s as a kind of Middle of the Summer Wine rural idyll. Shit, frankly.

TM: Sham nostalgia in place of vivid life. The stridently bland video features the smooth Berry, an anonymous lady and the North Yorkshire Moors in what is little more than an advertisement for combs.

144. King - 'Love and Pride'
(1985, #2, TM)

DL: Other than for nostalgic purposes, there is no reason why anyone should opt to listen to this in 2012; now go back to voicing adverts for box-sets you won't find in shops, as they're fucking rubbish.

AN: Cringe-worthy as this is, I enjoyed it. I mean his voice is dire, but I can’t help but think that any band actually playing funk as competent as this deserves some kudos.

JG: League Two New Pop, not much different in principle from Thurman or Milburn. Utterly inessential in every way imaginable.

TM: Included forsooth for the gangling garishness of the self-styled ‘King’, who fronted a notably monotonous VH1 show in the mid-90s. While the music is okay this upstart was never going to best Prince.

143. The Strawbs - 'Part of the Union'
(1973, #2, TM)

DL: Until the other week, I thought that this was an empowering anthem. I do now realise that in reality it's a total exhibit of snide and condescending shit, and for that reason, I am most certainly out!

AN: What’s the consensus of the irony or otherwise of the lyrics to this? I feel like a response depends on which way you take ’em.

JG: Imagine how much more agreeable life could be today if Thatcher had gone after The Strawbs instead of the National Union of Mineworkers.

TM: This became a favourite at union conferences and picket lines; more fool them, as this is an ironical ‘celebration’. Hudson and Ford sung this with Michael Ancram at the 2001 Tory Party Conference.

142. Peter Andre - 'Flava'
(1996, #1, DL)

DL: If you thought the OK! magazine mainstay had been irksome enough since his time in the jungle, then go back to '96 to experience the worst appropriation of street culture ever. But he loves his kids!

AN: A beautiful piece of music.

JG: Inexplicably popular New Jack Swing-themed number about five years too late. Also remarkably flat-sounding, considering that this is meant to be about living the high life.

TM: Musically, this is far from inept, but it is vocally and choreographically listless. It is a drained, inert culture that treats the likes of Andre with significance rather than sheer indifference.

141. Usher (Feat. Will.I.Am) - 'OMG'
(2010, #1, DL)

DL: Why does pop music become even more shallow and inane during times of economic strain for most normal people? Is this escapism or the gritty reality of having your face rubbed in it? Entirely up 2U.

AN: A clear sign of how commercial R’n’B has (in most cases) declined since the early noughties.

JG: F this S, lol.

TM: The synth is superficially pleasant, but the song is sketchy at best. Usher’s vocals are abjectly foolish. “Never ever has a lady hit me on the first sight”: I don’t wish violence on anyone, but...

The Worst 200 Songs, Part II: #180-161

2012-01-31T16:41:00.001Z

180. MC Miker G & Deejay Sven - 'Holiday Rap'
(1986, #6, JG)

DL: A further offering of funny foreigners, this time employing that wacky and innocent hip-hop delivery that could not survive the dual-pronged assault of NWA and this exact Madonna-sampling arsegem.

AN: The Dutch haven't produced much of note since De Stijl, have they? Oh, I suppose there was Total Football. That was great. ‘Holiday’ has endless potential for creative re-appropriation, but this makes you regret that it does.

JG: Thick Dutch accents, Cliff-Richard references, misappropriation of hip-hop, “Ring a dang a dong for a holleedai”. What’s not to like?

TM: Sublimely abysmal stuff from Amsterdam rap duo whose “We’re here to stay” was presumptuous. Miker’s beat-box psychosis has only been matched by Rolf Harris; is that the first ‘shit’ uttered on TOTP?

179. Ocean Colour Scene - 'The Day We Caught the Train'
(1996, #4, RC)

DL: In an unprecedented U-turn, I’m maybe disgustingly going to have to admit this is a fine and somewhat timeless Summer tune when disassociated from Chris Evans and opportunistic neo-liberal movements.

AN: Despite my personal affection for this (memories of the first weekend of Euro '96), I can't justify it objectively, politically, ethically, or lyrically.

JG: Despite their many, many critics, Ocean Colour Scene had millions of loyal and faithful fans. Those fans were wrong.

TM: I just can’t board this bleary, laddish locomotive; can’t get with his lairy "ROLL A NUMBER!” bellowing. “I laid my plans in solid rock”: isn’t that the problem? No more rock and roll for you, lad!

178. Adam Faith - 'Lonely Pup (In a Christmas Shop)'
(1960, #4, RC)

DL: Adam Faith's reported last words were ''Channel Five is all shit, isn't it? Christ, the crap they put on there. It's a waste of space''. Surely that's some recompense for this mortifying, twee slop.

AN: Consumerist candy imitating America in the worst possible way. A good looking chap though, Adam Faith.

JG: Whilst fully endorsing the old adage that a dog should not just be for Christmas, that’s not quite how I feel about this record. Roll on 'Little Saint Nick'.

TM: Irksome enunciation of ‘oh so good’. It is a phoned-in recital from future Budgie and malign manager in Stardust. No such life here. Mercifully brief at 104 seconds, which spared it a higher placing.

177. Danny Mirror - 'I Remember Elvis Presley (The King is Dead)'
(1977, #4, TM)

DL: Surely a bizarre, ambulance-chasing sinister parody isn't the most appropriae way to pay tribute to your chosen recently-passed cultural icon? Tacky, cynical and arguably ill-intentioned.

AN: Pop beginning to eat itself. Some might say it recently collapsed on the toilet, covered in excrement, reeking of hamburger.

JG: This is a bit tasteless, no? Imagine if OMD had released a song called 'Bleeding in the Gutter' in February 1981 to the tune of 'Help!'

TM: Mirror was actually the Rotterdam born Eddy Ouwens – responsible for co-writing Teach In’s passable Eurovision winner of 1975, ‘Ding-A-Dong’. This is somewhat less catchy and drearily deferential.

176. Telly Savalas - 'If'
(1975, #1, RC)

DL: Bizarrely, it seemed the world was crying out for a spoken-word Kojak cover version of a Bread track that surpasses infinitely the original's gooiness albeit with more shuddersome threat in 1975.

AN: Consumerist candy imitating America via Greece in the worst possible sense. Telly Savalas somewhat less fetching than Adam Faith.

JG: I actually find this quite admirable, a 50 year old man striking up a Camel Light and huskily cooing his way through this standard. Pisses on Shatner’s 'Mr. Tambourine Man', at any rate.

TM: Wing-collared, follically-challenged actor speaks over sluggish sludge. "And if the world should stop revolving; Y’ know, spinning slowly down to die". Listening to this, I know how the old orb feels.

175. McFly - 'Transylvania'
(2007, #1, TM)

DL: I think that 'Transatlantic' would have been a better moniker given the drawl of messrs Fletcher and Jones. A number one hit whose week in the sun I have no recollection of whatsoever. Passable.

AN: McFly were one of those inexplicably credible shit things about the noughties, like Hollyoaks and Justin Lee Collins.

JG: This starts off promisingly enough, what with its glam rock references, but soon descends into the type of caterwauling shite that only McFly can do.

TM: Infuriating, yelping charade. There are nods to the Beach Boys, Queen and maybe even XTC but it entirely lacks wit or zest. The "sorry if we disagree" bit predicts forthcoming landfill-indie larks.

I HAVE NO TIME FOR WESTERN MEDICINE
I AM CHARLES HAWTREY!

174. Who Cares? - 'Doctor in Distress'
(1985, failed to chart, TM)

DL: Are there any recorded instances of pop videos featuring vocalists cementing their takes whilst not looking like arsecunts? Absolutely horrendous pre-Autotune terror from start to end. Exterminate indeed.

AN: I quite enjoyed this. Car crash kitsch, but interestingly bizarre.

JG: Hard to say how far this over-busy synth-heavy single-issue campaigning helped the cause of Doctor Who during its dark nadir, but I can’t imagine Russell T. Davies was listening.

TM: "Each screaming girl just hoped that a Yeti wouldn't shoot her"! The singer at 1:05 deserves this fate, with a smug Colin Baker. Sub-Hi-NRG farrago, only saved by Ainley and Courtney’s good humour.

"And the Brigadier and the Master! / And a K9 computer...!"

173. Journey - 'Don't Stop Believin''
(1982, #52*, RC)
*Originally and that's what counts

DL: Perhaps sentimental power ballad that enjoyed a 28-year ascent to the UK Top Ten. Rather than toeing the party line, I'm happy to defend this, though not quite to the hilt. It does plod on a bit.

AN: There are many better power ballads than this. It has what I'd call an "empty hook": mechanistically catchy but devoid of magic.

JG: The US’s own 'Owner of a Lonely Heart'; the sound of prog rock becoming an amazingly worse art-form (MOR). Absolute shite.

TM: Slick, airbrushed and utterly boring ‘anthemic’ rock; wasn’t good enough for 1982’s Top40 – and rightly so. As with your Bon Jovis and your Bryan Adams, a faux-rebellious anthem for complacent youth.

172. Catch - 'Bingo'
(1997, #23, TM)

DL: This senseless appropriation of cheeky, humdrum indie-pop was rudely interrupted during a repeat late-night showing of the ITV Chart Show by some breaking news story or other. It wasn't recommenced.

AN: With retrospect, I'm not sure we as a race ever recovered from this song.

JG: Needlessly complicated arrangement about virginity-loss that tries too hard. I’d rather hear about Rolf Harris’s cherry-popping instead.

TM: DesulTory tosh from the public schools. It presages Scouting for Girls and McFly with its debased 60s harmonies and utterly charmless vocal yearning for "where the films are blue"; posh Askwith alert!

171. Rod Stewart - 'Tom Traubert's Blues (Waltzing Matilda)'

(1992, #6, RC)

DL: "Can I borrow a couple of bucks from you?" No you can't. I can only hope some of those British people packed some Benylin for him to absorb post-this lifeless drag of a Tom Waits rehash.

AN: Never understood Rod Stewart. Or Australians for that matter.

JG: Musically, this isn’t an absolute atrocity by any means. I just don’t know why it exists. What is it for?

TM: Laborious mauling of the Tom Waits song; a bearded Rod milking all of the ersatz emotion he discerns, therefore missing the subtler emotions of the original. The line "no prima donnas" seems ironic.

170. Blue - 'One Love'
(2002, #3, DL)

DL: (I'M LOSING THE WILL TO LIVE HERE!) Cliché-ridden British take on swing-beat totally devoid of soul, emotion, depth and integrity. Not the last time we'll here from the then-ubiquitous combo. A colourless, gaping hole of a song.

AN: I like it.

JG: Tapping into our naive desires for (as Terre Thaemlitz puts it) shared human experience with no reference to social context. Annoyingly, it’s technically proficient enough not to be too hateful.

TM: They walk the city streets like they own them. There are some typically ‘earnest’ boy-band vocal stylings. Not the worst but somehow makes cosmopolitanism seem dull.

169. Tom Jones and Mousse T - 'Sex Bomb'
(2000, #3, DL)

DL: With the seductive power of your average Tory backbencher (Major's cabinet), this grossly unerotic offering of predatory creepiness must have poured thousands into the chastity belt industry.

AN: I tend to look back on the turn of the century as a time when dance culture was still in rude health. This vitiates my argument utterly.

JG: This is just a joke record. Ho ho, let’s get wizened Tom Jones in to sing about sexual desire, hee hee. In a similar vein to mid-1970s Carry On fare.

TM: ‘It’s Not Unusual’ is profound and deathless; this is just disastrous. A sixty year-old’s strained chortling, backed by an approximation of funk that is little more than supermarket raunch.

168. Wheatus - 'Teenage Dirtbag'
(2001, #2, JG)

DL: An inane take on the power-pop of Weezer without the poignancy, charm or eccentricity. 'Teenage Dirtbag' marks one of those rare instances where the underdog doesn't deserve to triumph.

AN: This is an enjoyable pantomime song that stands up well in comparison with, say, The Darkness, who actually made a serious career out of this shit.

JG: For anyone experiencing real Joy Division-esque angst and social isolation as a teenager, this is like Vanilla fucking Ice. Offensive, twee and making light of actual trauma.

TM: I don’t mind this too much, yet gave it a ‘7’ due to the irritating vocal timbre and excessive overplay. "Listen to Iron Maiden, baby, with me": typically retrogressive sentiments from 2001.

167. DJ Jean - 'The Launch'
(1999, #2, JG)

DL: The kind of boring, repetitive and inconsequential Euro-house so typical of a sizeable portion of late nineties/early-noughties commercial dance. If you cut it open it would bleed 'meh'.

AN: I like it. Sort of.

JG: In the mid-90s dance music produced high-charting classics by the likes of Strike and Oceanic. ‘The Launch’ was the gravestone of any such further hopes.

TM: Our first dance music selection; sums up the problems of faceless DJ culture. This is post-human, unlike electronic music where humans and machines coalesce. Living in a satellite fantasy, indeed.

166. Alannah Myles - 'Black Velvet'
(1990, #2, RC)

DL: By my calculations the 2nd tribute to Mr Presley on our countdown, but not as questionable as the first to my ears. Just your usual brooding, hackneyed 'classic' rock hit for your cunting Cadillac.

AN: Some good-ish harmonies here.

JG: To be honest, I have no idea why this middling, average, run of the mill Capital FM staple is in here. Unremarkable, but not a depth-plumber, I wouldn’t have thought.

TM: Power balladry that would well accompany the unhinged, scheming histrionics of Jill Tyrell in Julia Davis’s Nighty Night. Peculiarly late-80s/early-90s but not in the AR Kane, Badalamenti or KLF sense.

165. Madonna - 'Music'
(2000, #1, DL)

DL: Whatever happened to the melodic euphoria Madonna captured so easily up until the early nineties? 'Music' was just one of several examples of Madge bandwagon jumping. Forced, cold and calculated.

AN: This is okay, not offensive for me.

JG: Madonna was interesting when she was taking the lead in tackling various taboos about religion and sex. Here she sounds bored. Still, it’s better than the execrable “W.E.”.

TM: Cynical commercial package that marked a rapid nosedive in quality from the Ray of Light era. ‘Music makes the people come together’. This induces indifference with its conceited video and lyrics.

164. Middle of the Road - 'Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep'
(1971, #1, DL)

DL: Sometimes you just have to be grateful for your date of birth. Were terms like 'twee', 'sickening' and 'nauseating' not in the popular consciousness in 1971? At least it has a tune, unlike #165.

AN: Another pointless novelty song. Although the drums sound pretty good. Doesn't really need critiquing. Or perhaps it does ...

JG: Is it just me, or does this (vocally at any rate) set the template that Abba would strip-mine to such effect? Plus, I know a very different version of the central refrain, but let’s not go there.

TM: Moronically repetitive morsel of music; an exhibit in the case for prosecution of the pop song with its drearily senseless, insert-a-cliché lyrics. They did do better, but this is unforgivable.

163. Ja Rule (Feat. R. Kelly & Ashanti) - 'Wonderful'

(2004, #1, TM)

DL: Neurotic, self-pitying and thinly-veiled celebration of material attainment so associated with this kind of thing, the phrase 'Ja Rule featuring R Kelly' being as appetising as a nail truffle alone.

AN: Does this mark the end of the golden age of r'n'b? It's been all decline in the years since, but this still sounds good to me.

JG: One of a long run of tiresome soundalike RnB songs about bling and gangsters, designed largely for white audiences. Dull production too. Where’s Timbaland when you need him?

TM: It is a long road from Eric B & Rakim and Run DMC to this whining. Ashanti is subordinate; R Kelly is an inevitable malefactor: contribution #2 of 4 in this survey. The millionaire protests too much.

162. Blue - 'If You Come Back'
(2001, #1, TM)

DL: Gone are the days when we could unwind, content in the knowledge that the trite and shallow boy-band ballad was an obsolete form. Thanks, JLS!

AN: See above: I have (a very small amount of) time for Blue, though this is nowhere as good as 'One Love'.

JG: As per ‘One Love’ I know this is poor and over-produced fluff but I find it hard to get too worked up about it. Now I think about it; that makes for a far greater sin than the ‘Holiday Rap’.

TM: For me, more compellingly awful than #170 due to their grandstanding vocal aerobics from 2:08: “I don’t know WHAT TO SAY-E-AY!” This is ‘passion’ with all the clockwork sincerity of stage-school.

161. Hale and Pace - 'The Stonk'
(1991, #1, TM)

DL: The best thing they ever put their name to, from the one-time kingpins of the ITV Sunday night graveyard slot. And you thought May and Taylor only sold legacies down rivers post-Mercury.

AN: I guess this was a kind of nadir, yes.

JG: Hale and Pace were a Sun reader’s idea of edgy comedy. Brian May is a Sun reader’s idea of art rock. Put them together and you have this. I rest my case.

TM: Brian May-helmed abomination, not excused by its Comic Relief status. Dire, ‘honky-tonk’ music; pathetically ‘wacky’ dancing; inane, cretinous lyrics. Dave Gilmour looks thrilled to be involved.

The Worst 200 Songs, Part I: #200-181

2012-01-24T21:14:00.001Z

And so we commence... the rules being: we each write a maximum of 200 characters (including spaces) per entry - as we have 200 entries and to save time and our respective sanities...

200. Queen - 'Don't Stop Me Now'

(released in 1979, reached #9 in the UK Singles Chart, nominated by DL)

David Lichfield: Student disco staple that always marked the depressing realisation you were off home alone to vomit and weep. Queen had many agreeable hits away from the pomp and decadence, this isn't one.

Alex Niven: A good song at heart but travestied forever by its involvement in a thousand noughties nightclub Cheesefests.

John Gibson: In which Freddie Mercury confuses his supersonic with his superluminal and Brian May sounds bored, like he’s already thinking more about badgers than Queen.

Tom May: While I would’ve chosen a later Queen song, it is tediously over-exposed, with witless metaphors (‘I am a satellite, I’m out of control’) and embodies a hedonism that is oppressive, not welcoming.

199. Billy Joel - 'We Didn't Start the Fire'
(1989, #7, TM)

DL: Not hated enough by me to transcend the lower reaches. Seen as something of a bombastic, novelty track by some, with a meaningless list of cultural milestones intoned over horrific 1980's production.

AN: Don't know it.

JG: Derisory, plodding rip off of REM’s ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’ a year after that fact, as if no one was going to notice.

TM: Fukuyama pop, which devalues History with its smugly random gazetteer of post-war names and events. The nature of the ‘fire’ and America’s supposed fire-fighting are typically, tellingly indistinct.

198. Peter Gabriel - 'Sledgehammer'
(1986, #4, RC)

DL: With some crass, alarmingly un-erotic innuendo which had largely gone unnoticed by me before ('You can have a steam train, if you'd just lay down the tracks'), this flat behemoth slips in seamlessly.

AN: The sound of everything beginning to go badly wrong.

JG: More famous for its video than the song and rightly so, considering that this is effectively a Bud Light version of the Thornbridge Jaipur calibre Art of Noise.

TM: The clomping, steamrollering cadence of consumerism. Witness the promo’s frenetic inanity; adventures are shrivelled, sold. All the more dispiriting as he had been such a weird English talisman.

197. Paul McCartney & The Frog Chorus - 'We All Stand Together'
(1984, #3, DL)

DL: A perplexing snapshot of the decline demonstrated by Macca post-Beatles, 'The Frog Chorus' is the worst possible way to be introduced to this one-time icon, and is a legacy-tarnishing exhibit.

AN: Macca, what were you thinking? Although you did sneak some interesting touches into the arrangement...

JG: When we kids at school, we used the central refrain of song two years later to the effect of “bomb, bomb, bomb Libya”. This probably says something, although I have no idea quite what.

TM: Affable fare, if certainly many leagues from the genial absurdity and invention of Ram or McCartney II. It evokes the genteel socialism of E. Nesbit, rather than Ken Loach. There are worse things.

196. Peter Sarstedt - 'Where do you go to My Lovely?'
(1969, #1, DL)

DL: Nothing wrong with a lovelorn pop song, but this pseudo-Gallic portion of never-ending bile could make the most bright-eyed romantic commit acts deemed heinous in all cultures. Discount Jacques Brel.

AN: I like this quite a lot actually.

JG: I think your lovely goes away from your horrible warbling voice, Peter.

TM: A pale appropriation of the then-fashionable French chanson for dubious purposes. Sarstedt is self-satisfied in his cultural citations and presumptuous about she who he interminably objectifies.

195. Dr Hook - 'When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman'
(1979, #1, DL)

DL: You don't see 1990s chart-toppers sounding as far removed from the present as music like this did even just 11 years or so after release. Lyrically and musically off-putting, with more bad innuendo.

AN: This too.

JG: Middling, inoffensive, tepid, banal – how many words for “meh” do you want?

TM: A slither of boring, self-glorifying paranoia, which yields just as little pleasure as it did back in 1996 when it was inexplicably played by an elderly Maths teacher in class.

194. Bryan Adams - 'Everything I Do'
(1991, #1, TM)

No embedding allowed, as Adams is clearly watching out for projects like this!

DL: At the helm of the chart for a tortoise's lifetime, another tender ballad with all the convincing sincerity of a car park. The sound of Valentine's Night Jeremy Clarkson; even the radio edit drags.

AN: And this is one of my all time faves.

JG: In 1995 Bryan Adams sang a song about permanent debauchery called '18 Til I Die'. Two years later he bought the pub next door and promptly shut it so he could get to bed by 9.30. Tosspot.

TM: Not his nadir, but a deadening weight at the top of charts for four months. The emotive chords are hackneyed; this is stadium friendly, fists in the air fodder, with Claptonite guitar solo to boot.

193. David Bowie & Mick Jagger - 'Dancing in the Street'
(1985, #1, TM)

DL: Not even an unwittingly hilarious video can save this musical form of vandalism. A strong argument for compulsory retirement from the hit parade once one's creative seed has began to run dry.

AN: If you were to try to imagine an antithesis to Martha and the Vandellas in 1965, this would be it.

JG: The video for 'Dancing in the Street' marks the point at which Mick Jagger began his inexorable transformation into a clay animation of himself. Uninspired.

TM: “Okay! TOKYO!!! SARF AMERRRIIICAAAAA!!!!!” They bawl with all the subtlety of artillery and dance with the grace of the Chuckle Brothers. A garish, misbegotten 80s travesty of the Motown original.

192. Atomic Kitten - 'The Tide is High (Get the Feeling)'
(2002, #1, TM)

DL: A cover of a cover, this tacky reworking came complete with an inexcusable, banal new bridge, adonyne pop production and none of the magic exhibited by even the Blondie version. Awful, hen night pop.

AN: Like it.

JG: Tuneless, cynical reworking of Blondie’s middle-of-the-road, cod-reggae nonsense. Perhaps they should have chosen 'Rip Her to Shreds'.

TM: This has an infuriating sheen of utter blankness and blandness. Little to say other than that this reduces one of Blondie’s weaker hits to musical wallpaper, fit to soundtrack ITV holiday programmes.

191. Nizlopi - 'The JCB Song'
(2005, #1, TM)

DL: Cursed to headline tenth tents of free festivals forever, Nizlopi's one chart hit was the somewhat trite acoustic testimony of a bullying victim, from the truant context of his father's vehicle.

AN: The yelping revolution starts here. Middle-class inconsequentialism masquerading as pathos.

JG: Perhaps what’s most offensive about this is that it doesn’t even sound like a novelty/comedy record. No, it sounds like bloody Chet Atkins. Horrible.

TM: Have hated this since the first time I heard its weedy, calculated ‘folksiness’ while browsing in HMV. His voice has all the galling ‘profundity’ of a latter-day Nick Clegg. A ‘top laugh’ ‘boss’? Nah.

190. Ferry Aid - 'Let it Be'
(1987, #1, TM)

DL: If you can separate the good causes from the shite records usually released on the back of them, then it's easy to proudly announce the presence of Sun-backed abominations like this on the rundown.

AN: No clarification needed.

JG: A harsh choice, maybe, but this plodding version of one of The Beatles’ weakest moments does little for the ears. Still, you shouldn’t joke around about the wider circumstances.

TM: An inappropriately stoical response to an avoidable tragedy – sponsored by The Sun, who had given away cheap tickets for the MS Herald of Free Enterprise. Infinitely inane vocal gymnastics and guitar solos.

189. Duran Duran - 'Is There Something I Should Know'
(1983, #1, TM)

DL: Epitomising as they do all that was shallow and soulless about the 1980's, it's no surprise to see the many-Taylored quintet on the chart. One presumes that it's the unfortunate lyric that swung it.

AN: Sometimes, it matters that the people who wrote a song were complete and utter cunts.

JG: Simon le Bon – the most ironically named man in pop. This is terrible, but remarkably isn’t quite as bad as 'The Reflex'.

TM: “You’re about as easy as a NUCLEAR WAR!” We had Edwyn and Clare; Haircut 100 and ABC. Yet we opted for this brash, Thatcherite assault; assertive, finger-pointing bravado and an enduringly bad lyric.

188. Renee and Renato - 'Save Your Love'
(1982, #1, TM)

DL: Oh, get a room. Interestingly the last UK Number One single that completely pre-dates me, and I'm not entirely sure we've seen such a Cornetto advert of a song at the lunacy of the top spot since.

AN: Don't know it.

JG: Perhaps this is how Daily Mail readers imagine European integration at its best – a fat, sweating Italian murdering the art of opera to suck up to a blond from Howard’s fucking Way.

TM: The success of this typifies how many British people have seen Europe as consisting of little more than sun, sand and ‘funny foreigners’. Renee and Renato make Demis Roussos sound like John Lydon.

187. England World Cup Squad - 'Whole World at Our Feet'
(1986, #66, TM)

DL: Long-forgotten and intolerable 1986 World Cup single and reason in itself for getting New Order in four years later. And a Top 70 smash. Seemingly made up on the spot to an improvised Casio backing.

AN: Thankfully, this sort of thing doesn't happen any more.

JG: Football songs hit a nadir in the mid-80s, right up until the time John Barnes started rapping. There’s no rapping on this one.

TM: A “battle cry” rendered on the cheapest synth imaginable; a “lion’s roar” akin to a cartoon mouse. Kids’ party musical ‘flourishes’. A chorus of footballers. A world away from the ‘Motion’ of 1990.

186. Limahl - 'Too Much Trouble'
(1984, #64, TM)

DL: Another 1980s flop, this time from the man who outgrew Kajagoogoo. I'm hoping for a high placing for his former band's major crime, but this is certainly one for the 'how can anyone enjoy this' pile?

AN: Don't know it.

JG: Limahl’s haircut was once described in the NME as looking like a mullet but the wrong way round. And that’s about as much as can be said for this forgettable, piddling non-song.

TM: Achieving a staggering two places higher than its predecessor in this list, this is a tedious, flatulent eighties effort that I find hard to sit through, inexplicable cricket motif in the video and all.

185. Michael Jackson - 'Cry'
(2001, #25, TM)

DL: Exactly the poor man's 'Earth Song' you'd have expected from all subsequent albums; it's unfathomable that an artist can fall this far from grace creatively regardless of anything other decline.

AN: By this point of MJ's life/career, crying must have felt like something humans used to do.

JG: Jacko in the midst of his ongoing quest to become as irrelevant as humanly possible. A waste of a mountainous talent.

TM: Sickening, maudlin, R. Kelly-assisted shite. I have little to add to what I said here about this self-help peddling dirge. One of the very lowest ebbs of a strange career, epitomising his sad descent.

184. Glenn Hoddle & Chris Waddle - 'Diamond Lights'
(1987, #12, TM)

DL: A pretty rubbish record that can surely be enjoyed ironically. Embarrasing and cringe-worthy certainly, but I'd say, all-in-all, the world would be a worse place if we didn't have this to chortle at.

AN: Chris Waddle you mulletted wanker. This is what happens when you betray the Toon.

JG: Written by the genius behind Russ Abbot’s hits from the same period. Sounds more “adult contemporary” than Abbot's 'Atmosphere'. Terrible.

TM: A famous folly, with Hoddle ardent for some desperate glory and Waddle hanging onto that microphone stand like a life-raft. Not on the same detestable level as much of this run-down but worth a place.

183. Blur - 'Parklife'
(1994, #10, AN)

DL: Forever conjoined to class tourism, political cultural hijacking, inanity and generic compilation albums, 'Parklife' is certainly on my 'don't want to hear ever again' list, but the band are not.

AN: An offensively patronising, pseudo-working-class recitative slapped on top of two-chord oompah-oompah shite.

JG: It sounds cheesy and oh-so-Britpop now, but we have to remember that Parklife is actually an acerbic, angry record, and its 'retro' sound conveys a sense of little changing since the 70s. I like it.

TM: There is a parallel history of Britpop where Blur were as consistently on the mark as Pulp, Disco Inferno and Saint Etienne. They had great material on most albums but also belittling hits like this.

182. Pendulum - 'Propane Nightmares'
(2008, #8, DL)

DL: Why do metal fans like Pendulum so much and almost no other electronic music? Why no drum and bass fans like Pendulum? See also: Skrillex in similar pattern. I can only put it down to that emo vocal.

AN: A nightmare vision of contemporary youth culture.

JG: Metal-drum 'n' bass crossover wank. To be avoided at all costs.

TM: This possesses all the intricacy and nuance of Colin Baker’s cliff-hanger mugging in The Trial of a Time Lord. Rarely has the vocoder sounded as crass or synthesizers as artless. Utter claptrap.

181. Simple Minds - 'Don't You (Forget About Me)'
(1985, #7, RC)

DL: I can certainly see why these 1980s world-straddlers deserve a place in such a countdown, but I would have opted for 'Belfast Child'. Personally, I find this a swooping (bombastic), affable rock epic.

AN: There is absolutely nothing good about this.

JG: Q. What did Jim Kerr say when fending off a bread-wielding Frenchman? A. “Don’t you – baguette about me!”

TM: I agree with Robin’s nomination: shows a similar compromise to #198. Simple Minds were great up to and including New Gold Dream: experimental and melodious. Then came the Hollywood soundtrack swagger.

The Worst 200 Songs - An Introduction

2012-01-24T00:31:00.006Z

The Worst 200 Songs project was born several months ago, with David Lichfield and I noting just how similar many of our pet musical hates were, and sharing all sorts of odd, ghastly and hilarious YouTube videos.

The project developed into a list of 242 songs comprised of our nominations plus those of others who entered the fray. The rubric being that they ought to be big hits that most people would have heard of, with a far smaller number of curios and obscurities allowed, enabling a greater scope.

Four of us voted on all songs on the final list, on a scale whereby 10/10 meant ‘absolutely hate it, it’s utterly unredeemable’ and 1/10 ‘hmmm, I actually quite like this!’ 5/10 was, of course, an expression of neutrality – or, just a bare Gallic shrug of indifference. Everything that has made the Top 200 has garnered at least 24 points (mean average = 6/10), and is thus at least mildly despised by consensus decision.

I thank the likes of Ben Brown and Robin Carmody, who both nominated songs which have been voted into the Top 200, but are not commenting on the entries.

To kick off this subjective survey of dire music we begin with a short introductory piece from each of the main writers on this extensive project. Each will also nominate a song we despise which wasn’t hated enough by all four to get into the Top 200!

David Lichfield :
96 songs nominated; 76 in the Top 200

Some songs just have house the extra ingredient that makes them truly unbearably hateful beyond simple reason. Whether it’s an ubitiquous chart hit that repeatedly imposed four minutes of aural persecution on you, whereby simply turning off the radio or leaving the establishment in which it was being piped into was no option, or something that simply touches a nerve inside you, bringing forth personal associations and memories you simply can’t face, or a tacky novelty record with no redeeming features, it is hoped that spotting a despised record amongst this rundown along with some sort of caustic analysis will go some way towards soothing the feelings of utter hatred felt towards the offending 45. The 200 Worst Songs project is hoped to be one of the most comprehensive rundowns of bad pop music ever, taking in 60 years, a wealth of styles, numerous cultural movements, dodgy right-wing jingoistic ditties, 80s cocaine consumerism, cynical and self-serving charity numbers, inexplicable chart-toppers, banal melodies, lamentable cover versions, reheated and hackneyed pastiches, and any given number of unforgiveable lyrical howlers to unearth violent urges from even the most placid musical connoisseur. With a range of nominators having come forward to suggest their own personal bête noires, we're hoping to have left no turd unturned.

Song that should have been included in the Top 200:
Owl City – 'Fireflies'
As cynical a composition as you can imagine, this shameless Postal Service rip-off was depressingly profitable.

Alex Niven :
10 songs nominated; 7 in the Top 200

The pop song is the greatest art form we have. There are many reasons why this is true, but foremost is the fact that it offers the suggestion that, in the right conditions, every human being on the planet has the potential to attain to beauty, community, and empowerment. In other words, pop music is synonymous with democracy. If, as the following exhaustive list attempts to show, pop music is ailing, then this must mean democracy is also ailing. My fantastic hope is that in identifying the problem, we take the first the first step towards the solution of a revival of egalitarian culture, one that has at its centre the transforming, life-advocating, love-inducing metaphor of the Good Choon.

Song that should have been included in the Top 200:
Laura Marling – ‘New Romantic'
…is predictably, my nomination for the one that got away.

John Gibson :
14 songs nominated; 12 in the Top 200

Even now, there is still something in me that wants to reach for the digital remote and switch to the risible Radio 1 of a Sunday afternoon for yet another Top 40 countdown, a ritual I engaged in for several years as soon as the new chart could be compiled by the end of the week rather than midway through the following week. Oh, the excitement of Roachford climbing fully 25 places in a single week with “Cuddly Toy”. What joys.

Suffice to say that the intervening years have been less than kind. Whilst the singles chart is entirely meaningless in these days of instant downloads and X Factor nonsense, the current exercise has been a spirited one of exploring facile tat from across the ages, and acts as a useful reminder that for every Stones there was always a Peter Sarstedt, warbling inane chatter at the nation of a Friday eve. Rock and indeed on.

Song that should have been included in the Top 200:
Muse – ‘Time Is Running Out’
Diabolical, overwrought nonsense that hints at some kind of vague apocalyptical theme whilst protesting too much that it’s not a bad version of Radiohead really. Turd.

Tom May :
76 songs nominated; 66 in the Top 200

I do not undertake this exercise as a cynical moan against popular culture or pop music; indeed, I love much pop music and hold out hope for it. I love all manner of diverse and esoteric music yet there is little that can beat the compassionate delight I feel when listening to The Beatles circa 1964, the Abba of 1976 or Prince and Kate Bush of 1985; the KLF, indeed, in 1991. Recent years have seen ‘Crazy’, ‘With Every Heartbeat’, ‘I’m Not Alone’, ‘Bonkers’ and ‘Hello’: so clearly not all is lost. Supposedly ephemeral Pop can be eternal and unifying where little else is.

I approach this project with anger at what cynicism, idiocy and materialism can make of pop. Misogyny, bigotry, faceless globalisation, piety and plain old ineptitude rear their ugly heads in this roll-call of wrongness. Undertaking this project is clearly an epic ordeal; but we approach it both critically and emotionally – in the preposterous, futile hope that it can form a sacrificial bonfire of some excruciatingly awful music. To quote XTC: “Reign over good / Banish the bad”.

Song that should have been included in the Top 200:
Primal Scream – ‘Rocks’
I must, grudgingly, give old Jive Bunny a 'get out of jail free' card and propose David’s nomination of Primal Scream’s slab of reductionist ‘real rock’. This previously experimental band’s stultifying retreat into guitar-slinging machismo prefigured seemingly endless revivalism and retreats from others.

We taught ourselves the right from wrong, Ms. Mensch

2011-11-12T18:49:00.000Z

A thatcher is someone who makes a roof
or used to, when things were quieter,
was someone who sheltered people
from the rain, when things were quieter.
A thatcher took folks from the wind
and layered the skin of a human weather.
Now a thatcher exposes the dwellers,
rips off the roof in the skinning wind,
hurls down the roof on the dwellers,
who for cover snatch at the straws
the roof-makers rains
on their rainwashed heads ruthlessly
and in their teeth and in their eyes
like a war
that the thatcher unnaturally makes
on the dwellers. And the luckier,
snatching more straw cover of the undoing
thatch, despise the unluckier, the colder ones,
so that some see but many don't
or do see but not why, and think it
the way of a brave wise thatcher
that their fellows are icy and cold
in an inhuman country.
- Judith Kazantzis, 'A Thatcher' (1984), Red Sky at Night: an anthology of British socialist poetry (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2003, p.204)

How odd to accuse someone of being 'deranged' after you have made the most simplistic, smug attack on protestors imaginable?

Baker, Hislop and Merton are presented with an open goal to demolish an inept 'argument'. Of course, it is not as if she is any more diligent in her role on the Media and Communication select committee. As well as her partial attendance and supplying of Murdoch with facile questions, she is campaigning to reduce workers' employment rights: Mensch is indisputably following in the path of Baroness Thatcher. A well-to-do middle-class smugness may seem far apart from the protestant work-ethic mania of her idol. However, same mean-spirited prejudices, same inequitable policies.

The way things stand as of July 7th/8th polling

2011-07-10T15:55:00.001+01:00

A bit of amateur psephology here, looking at how the parties are doing, region by region, according to a YouGov poll published today. While of course there are myriad variables in politics, there seems to be a gradual trend against the government; clearly, it will be key whether David Cameron is mired in the sewer by his News International associations, as Peter Oborne so astutely pointed out here. It will interested to observe whether the trend continues and Labour gain a regular 10-15% lead; if the economy falters, then I would expect leads of 15-20% Anyway, here we go... The figures in brackets are the change in voting intention from the General Election result last year.

LONDON

CON 41% (+6.5)
LAB 41% (+4)
LD 9% (-13)
GP 1% (-1)
UKIP 4% (+2)
BNP 1% (-0.5)
OTH 3% (+1)

COALITION 50% LABOUR/GREEN 42% THE RIGHT 5%
Government Approval 33% Disapproval 50% (-17)
Cameron Approval 45% Disapproval 47% (-2)

An area where the Tories have been polling perhaps surprisingly well since the GE. Clearly as much of the LD vote of 2010 is as willing to consider the Tories as Labour, in contrast to much of the rest of the country. Not that I would expect many Tory gains, mind. A near three-way tie like Hampstead and Kilburn will be an interesting one to watch next time, though I wouldn't be anticipating a Tory gain. Sad that institutions like the Richard Steele has been given a corporate makeover, and the excellent Tricycle Theatre is under threat due to Arts Council cuts.

The UKIP are doing surprisingly well in an area that I would not count as natural territory, and fairly lacklustre for the Greens, clearly.

Approval for the government is low at 33% and yet the Tories seem to be doing so well as people are just about giving them the benefit of the doubt and Cameron remains relatively popular (though down from +1 in February).

Admittedly, another recent poll put Labour 6 points ahead in London, but then ones in May showed the Tories 6 ahead. As ever, London is the key... in 1992 it stuck with the Tories; in 2010 Labour did crucially well enough here - gaining an unexpected 2% lead over Cameron's Tories - to avoid an outright defeat.

REST OF THE SOUTH

Con 44% (-3)
Lab 33% (+16)
LD 11% (-17)
GP 3% (+2)
UKIP 7% (+3)
BNP 1% (-)
OTH 1% (-)

COALITION 55% LABOUR/GREEN 36% THE RIGHT 8%
Government Approval 33% Disapproval 51% (-18)
Cameron Approval 46% Disapproval 47% (-1)

Almost straight transfer from the LDs to Labour and the Greens. Not necessarily bad news for the Tories, who can probably go on to pick up some LD seats on the strength of the calamitous LD decline. A 9.5% swing from Con to Lab, however, would surely put Essex and Kent seats into play, and Labour will be able to gain a clean sweep in more urban places like Bristol, Luton and Slough. The key battles will be the aforementioned seats East of London and places like Exeter, Norwich, Plymouth and Swindon. Cambridge, as ever, will be fascinating and not necessarily typical...

UKIP do very well across the South, but a 3% transfer from Tory to UKIP is hardly going to move seats to the Farage column. It may just hamper the Tories in their battles against Labour and the LDs, however... There is increasing evidence of right-wing anger against the perceived 'leftism' of this government; whilst this is a grotesque misunderstanding, it clearly means that Cameron and others will struggle to keep all of the 10.7 million voters of 2010.

A recent poll of just the South West showed: CON 42%(-1), LAB 28% (+13), LDEM 16% (-19), GRN 5% (+4). A strong performance for the Greens, who are likely to do well in Stroud, Bath and other such places. Disastrous for the hapless LDs, as this is one of the heartland areas; these results are back to 1950s/60s levels, where Labour was the clear second party - and indeed could be a strong player on the sort of Devon council featured in the Norman Wisdom film, Press for Time (1966). While the Tories would be likely to gain from the LDs, it is crucial just how big a swing Labour achieve in Tory-held marginals.

THE MIDLANDS & WALES

CON 32% (-5)
LAB 50% (+18)
LD 8% (-12.5)
GP 1% (+0.5)
UKIP 5% (+2)
BNP 1% (-2)
PC 1% (-2)
OTH 2% (-)

COALITION 40% LABOUR/GREEN 51% THE RIGHT 6% NATIONALISTS 1%
Government Approval 25% Disapproval 60% (-35)
Cameron Approval 37% Disapproval 57% (-20)

For me, the crucial region alongside London. At least on this poll, Labour look let to win big. They currently hold 65 seats to the Tories' 72; many of those 72 would look very vulnerable to an 11.5% swing. This polling suggests a Midlands & Wales result similar to 1997/2001. A poll before the News of the World scandal broke showed the Tories on 39% and Labour on 44% suggesting a mere 5% swing. Even this would take things back to 2005, where Labour did just well enough in these regions to win. The reality is probably somewhere inbetween - a probable 7-9% swing. Midlands and Wales voters' approval figures for the government and Cameron must be deeply worrying to Downing Street: down by 12% and 6% respectively since February.

As always, the Midlands is a crucial battleground, and it is going to take a significant political turnaround for the Tories to do better than they did in 2010, or even get back to par here. Having said all that, the Midlands should never be taken for granted; its voting behaviour in 1970 and 1974 was crucial in both the defeat of Wilson, and then Heath, and it then swung very heavily to Thatcher and Blair... The recent news about job losses in Derby will hardly help the government, and, of course, future economic developments will be important. The region to watch...

THE NORTH

CON 32% (+1)
LAB 52% (+13.5)
LD 6% (-16)
GP 3% (+2)
UKIP 5% (+2)
BNP 2% (-1)
OTH 0% (-1)

COALITION 38% LABOUR/GREEN 55% THE RIGHT 7%
Government Approval 24% Disapproval 63% (-39)
Cameron Approval 36% Disapproval 58% (-22)

I am willing to predict we will see a minimum of a 15% Labour lead in the North, come the next election, representing at least a 3.5% swing. Polls in late May/early June showed swings of 6-11.5% Labour is clearly performing well, winning most of the collapsing LD vote, along with a strong Green showing. In Sunderland, the Greens outpolled the Liberal Democrats in all bar one of the council wards in which both parties were standing.

There were several seats only just gained by the Tories, such as Stockton South and Carlisle, which will almost definitely revert to Labour. Just as the South is a Tory stronghold that will always return a solid phalanx of blue-rosetted automatons, so will the North return Labour MPs - and I would estimate Labour should make a minimum of 15-20 gains across the North.

The LDs hold 11 seats in the North; Clegg's will be a fascinating, possible 3-way battle, if indeed he stays to fight it in 2015. Without Alan Beith, it is entirely possible the LDs could lose Berwick Upon Tweed to the Tories, or even Labour in what could be a close three-way battle. The Tories will clearly hold Hexham and Penrith and the Border, but many other of their 42 seats could be vulnerable. Westmorland and Lonsdale should be a LD hold, given the popularity of independent-minded Tim Farron.

SCOTLAND

CON 13% (-4)
LAB 48% (+6)
LD 5% (-14)
GP 2% (+1)
UKIP 1% (-)
BNP 0% (-)
SNP 29% (+9)
OTH 2% (+1)

COALITION 18% LAB/GREEN 50% THE RIGHT 1% NATIONALISTS 29%
Government Approval 18% Disapproval 69% (-51)
Cameron Approval 29% Disapproval 64% (-35)

Some polls this year have shown the Tories as high as 23% - which must be rogues, more clearly so than their surprisingly strong numbers in London. Absolutely terrible for the LDs - who could stand to lose most if not all seats barring their Highland fringe. Clegg's leadership has undone all of the good work Kennedy achieved for the Party in Scotland, and could take them back to the days when Jo Grimond was one of a handful of LD MPs. This poll is terrible for the Tories and the LibDems, showing the LibDem voting halving from 11% compared with February, and government and Cameron approval around 10 points more into the negative.

Scotland, like London, saw an unexpectedly strong Labour performance, and other 2011 polls have shown Labour even as low as 35% north of the border; come a General Election, however, I would not expect them to go below 40%

The SNP are the prime gainers from the Lib Dem fall, though I wouldn't expect them to challenge Labour much in a Westminster election; only a 1.5% swing is indicated here, and the recent By-Election confirmed this. I do think they could gain one or two seats where they are close behind Labour, but this would depend on the SNP administration in Edinburgh still being as popular. Salmond is clearly playing a canny social-democratic game - gaining many previous left-of-centre Kennedy voters - but then hatred of the Tories might limit the gains his party can make at Westminster.

GB

CON 35% (-1)
LAB 44% (+15)
LD 8% (-15)
GP 2% (+1)
UKIP 5% (+2)
BNP 1% (-1)
NAT 3% (+1)

COALITION 43% LAB/GREEN 46% THE RIGHT 6% NATIONALISTS 3%
Government approval 28% Disapproval 57% (-29)
Cameron approval 42% Disapproval 52% (-10)

Labour were only 49 or so seats behind the Tories at the last GE. Even given boundary changes slightly favourable to the Tories, an 8% swing to Labour would clearly lead to a majority Labour win and the end of David Cameron's political career, without him ever having won an election. The key is clearly for Labour to appeal to non-ideological voters nevertheless interested in fairness, who may easily be convinced that David Cameron, tainted by association with the most depraved elements in our media, is 'not one of us'. Of course, Gideon Osborne's great economic gamble will be crucial too; at the moment, it seems the deficit is likely to increase with sluggish if any growth and rising unemployment - and under-employment, with many having to work part-time against their will.

'Unaffordable' pensions and Dunkirk fetishism...

2011-07-03T14:08:00.004+01:00

So, public sector workers are likened to Nazi Germany in 1940. Nice to see that the "Daily Mail" maintaining its usual perspective and attention to reality. Of course, it's not the case that Gove and the Tories are picking a fight with teachers; no, it's rather that the striking workers are THE ENEMY WITHIN. With the right-wing media, it is always Dunkirk, always the 'Spirit of Dunkirk' that is invoked to keep people in their place - in abeyance to the forces of conservatism, this time represented by the government. It is presumptuous in the extreme to use the memory of Dunkirk in such a way to quell dissent, and to imply that all involved in Dunkirk would have been against decent pensions for teachers.

The point is: the Tories and their media cheerleaders are as wrong on this issue as there are on so many others. Evan Davis exposes Franny Maude's distinctive interpretation of the National Audit Office's data. The Independent presents empirical evidence to cut the decetiful 'golden plated' myths to shreds:

Then there was Michael Gove's ludicrous call for parents to act as strike-breakers by stepping into the classroom to teach. Forgetting 'formalities' such as CRB checks and indeed whether the parents have any relevant training or knowledge. Presumably a working grasp of the philosophy of a Peter Hitchens or Toby Young is enough! Even the Cameron favoured pressure-group 'Mumsnet' disagreed with this, although one poll found 37% public support for the idea - neatly correlating with current levels of Tory support.

A trade unionist speaker at Thursday's strike rally at Grey's Monument in Newcastle upon Tyne made the excellent point that public sector pension provision is placed into stark relief by the tax-breaks given to private pension funds for the wealthy.

Fellow ex-Trinity Haller, Daniel Elton, makes the point that public sympathy is rather finely balanced and not conclusive either way, although Labour's leader has taken the absurd step of alienating an important section of his vote - as lamented by Alex Niven.

The most detailed arguments for the strike were given by Nigel Stanley of the TUC at False Economy; for instance this: 'So even before anything done by the coalition government or recommended in the Hutton Report, public sector pensions had been both reformed and made sustainable. This is not union assertion, but the hard-headed view of the National Audit Office.

On top of these negotiated changes, the coalition has made a further attack on the value of public service pensions by replacing the Retail Prices Index that has always been used to uprate pensions with the lower Consumer Prices Index. This will further reduce the value of public service pensions by 15 per cent – so we have a cut of 25p in the pound if you combine this with the negotiated changes.'

The right-wing media won't even engage in logical, defensible arguments to defend their position, they will insult and smear working citizens. I was personally proud to have gone on strike on the 30th, in order to oppose compulsory working until 68 to receive a state pension, plus significantly higher contributions. All within a context of zero job security, caused by government cuts which are an ideological decision. I could make the broader economic arguments about the wisdom of Osborne going down the Irish route, of course... A few people being mildly inconvenienced for a day is nothing next to significant redundancies being imposed on people who have not caused this crisis - or indeed when compared with the wider social impact of cuts on charities / vulnerable people / the majority in society who use public services.

These videos provide a taster of the issues at stake in Further Education Colleges, often forgotten in the media with its focus on schools and universities - though The Guardian give some focus here.

The Germans do it better, again

2011-07-01T19:52:00.001+01:00

This...

...is infinitely better than this:

'That Again' has that imperiously wistful Cardigans/Stereolab feel about it. 'The Shield and the Sword' lacks any such sense of delicacy, with its strained striving for bombast and uplift.

Maguire's album is unyielding in its one-note, over-compressed sameness; the music does not breathe, but stifles in its general monotony. Lena's album tends to be much more engaging and tactile; not always compelling, but affable and sparky.'A Good Day' is winningly good-natured, with Dr Buzzard's Original Savannah Band brass and 'Come to Milton Keynes' inflections; 'Talking to a Stranger' was one of the few excellent Eurovision songs of this year, exceeding her 2010 winner with its artful, electronic austerity and icy vibraphone.

Political music in the present tense, Part II

2011-07-01T15:07:00.000+01:00

MC Nxt Gen - 'The Andrew Lansley Rap'

MC Nxt Gen - 'Stuff the Cuts'

Bars for Change project

Akala - 'Fire in the Booth Freestyle'

Dream Cargoes - 'We're in this Together'

http://dreamcargoes.bandcamp.com/track/were-in-this-together

"Non-Stop Inertia": additional thoughts on the subject of work

2011-06-20T16:05:00.012+01:00

I have recently had this book review published in the excellent Oxonian Review, as part of a special issue focusing entirely on recent Zer0 books. I express my thanks to Alex Niven, Alexander Barker and others for their help in editing; their input was crucial in guiding me towards a succint account of the book. I undertook a great deal of research, using the London Review of Books and Guardian archives, giving thought to how work has been portrayed in the wider culture. My research of seminal writing on the topic by Bertrand Russell and William Morris had to be excised from the review - probably a good thing for the purposes of concision. However, they certainly informed my perspective, as did recent reports on employment and newspaper and blog articles concerning (un)employment. I now include some of my more expansive thoughts on work - hopefully organised to an extent and not overly rambling.

So, a director's cut of additional material that is virtually 5 times the word-count of the published review... I also include a Bibliography, Videography and Musical Playlist as hopefully informative appendixes.

Bertrand Russell: ‘[T]he rich […] have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement.’

Michael Foley: ‘[The] religion of work is a relatively late addition to the great world religions, but one rapidly gaining converts and with a growing number of fundamentalists. […] Your job is your identity and status, your life. Long gone is the notion of work as a tedious necessity that supports the true life.’

The Wake: ‘Everybody Works So Hard’

Paul Seabright: ‘the traditional job for life provided not just security but structure, an ordered progression through an individual’s life […] it is likely that the flexible economy is denying to the less fortunate something whose lack it is also teaching them to feel most keenly.’

Ivor Southwood: ‘We must be sure not to take work for granted and yet be willing to be taken for granted ourselves.’

Southwood’s book is one of the latest in a succession of accessible, short critical works from the publisher Zer0 Books - following feminist polemic (Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman), a clarion call for modernist culture and architecture (Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism), insightful essays on recent British cinema (Carl Neville’s Classless), humorous satire of English nationalist delusions (David Stubbs’s Send Them Victorious) and Mark Fisher’s inaugural Capitalist Realism.

Questioning assumptions

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1877: ‘Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by any means certain that a man’s business is the most important thing he has to do.’

Client, 2004: ‘Work hard – why should I?’

In 1982, the economist, industrial chaplain and scientist Roger Clarke traced the idea of work back to ancient Greece and Rome where leisure was the ‘measure of the good life. In medieval times work and play and community jollification ran side by side.’ He went on to argue that in ‘the late twentieth century the work ethic is fading, though the economic system with which it was associated survives.’ Entering the second decade of the twenty-first century, this seems to hold true, though the work-ethic is still promoted by the media and politicians.

There may be enough work to go around, but not for everyone to undertake 40 hour working-weeks and one has to consider that we have a growing, ageing population. This presents difficulties for younger people: ‘People are now more accepting of the principle of later retirement, and believe that older workers are an important part of the workforce: they no longer support the idea of forcing people to retire early to make way for younger people’ (British Social Attitudes – The 26^th Report, 2010). This all means we may ought to share work out more fairly, addressing the disparities between those doing 60 hour-weeks and those not employed at all. Otherwise, we may have a younger generation locked out of work as the elderly keep going to ensure they receive a ‘decent’ pension entitlement.

It is a right-wing assumption, spread by the media, that government has no duty to provide a job for everyone; yet, in 2006, 56% of the public said that it ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ should. Admittedly, a decline from 72% in 1985, reflecting the influence of the Thatcher-Blair succession, but clearly these more socialist attitudes to employment and unemployment linger – even if we can be considered significantly less progressive than Spain (83%), Norway (79%), Germany (66%), France (64%) and Sweden (59%). Britain is even more out of kilter with European attitudes as to whether government should be responsible to provide a decent standard of living for the unemployed: 55% responded ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ in comparison with Spain (93%), Norway (88%), Germany (69%), France (68%) and Sweden (83%). It seems that UK citizens have relatively negative views regarding provision for the unemployed, though it will be interesting to see the impact the recession has on this.

Southwood rightly highlights the myopia of ‘cultural commentator’ Alain de Botton, who solely focused on the autonomous middle-class professional in his recent study of work. Such studies, and many television programmes – such as Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice give a false impression of what work is like for most people in the UK in 2011.

Work should not be seen as virtuous in and of itself. RBS executives investing in cluster bombs should be seen as a social evil far greater than someone who is unemployed due to the vagaries of their local economy or government spending cuts.

Labour does not necessarily bestow ‘dignity’ upon those who partake of it. In 1932, when Bertrand Russell wrote ‘In Praise of Idleness’, there was ‘educational propaganda, on the subject of the dignity of labour’ – in both West and East, manifested in Stalin’s USSR in the cult of miner Alexey Stakhanov, who was used to embody the supposed virtues of increasing productiveness within the ‘socialist’ economic system (the Five Year Plans). As Russell wrote, the ‘morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery’; we should not venerate work, whether it is as back-breaking as being down the mines or as parasitically anti-humane as working in ‘Human Resources’.

What of that old chestnut, the protestant work ethic, which the media, politicians and the public are so in abeyance to? (Even the Left, with the SWP’s recent ‘Right to Work’ campaign) Well, the main man himself, Christ, had these words on the subject: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.’ (Matthew 6:25)

Even Tories used to express doubts about its wisdom; in March 1979, Tory spokesman on employment Jim Prior said: ‘If we do not have to face higher unemployment, let’s not despair. It may well be that in the next 10, 15, or 20 years we will have a new philosophy towards unemployment. We may have to move away from the Protestant work ethic.’ But Prior was a ‘One Nation’ Tory, a ‘Wet’ of the type displaced by ardent, “on your bike!”-bellowing Thatcherites. Attitudes to the unemployed are not really much different from 1877, when Robert Louis Stevenson articulated his unease: ‘Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.’

Complete passivity would be problematic, if it equated to an avoidance of difficulty and challenge in life and work. The sort of ‘idling’ advocated by Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson perhaps too readily conjures the image of bearded slackers urging one to “chill out” against the backdrop of ambient music. However, Hodgkinson has a point with this: ‘In an idler’s world, the emphasis will be on quality of work rather than speed of execution and hours put in.’ Idling may in itself be a dead end, but that is not to say that we wouldn’t be helped by working less, by the finding the sort of work-life balance advocated by Bertrand Russell and modern liberals like Natasha Walter. Of course, where the cultural norm is to work long hours and identity is significantly formed by your occupation, idleness may not be so readily accepted. As Ken Coates observed of Peter Townsend’s study of working-class communities, idleness is ‘always conjoined with varying degrees of want, [it] is either an affliction, or an imposition.’ In 1977, Professor Tom Stonier of Bradford University made the still pertinent argument that education should not simply ‘prepare students to make a living but how to live.’ An education system that merely aims to prepare students for full-time jobs that may not exist or be viable in the long-term is surely failing them.

British public attitudes seem to have hardened, not just against welfare claimants but single-parents; in 2007, 79% believed that lone parents’ benefits should be reduced or stopped (up 4% on 2000) if they failed to attend an interview at the job centre. A quarter of respondents believed their benefits should be stopped completely, a significant 7% increase on 2000.

We should refuse work if it is as mind-numbing and pointless as the sort of menial, temporary jobs undertaken and described by Southwood. We should also question the assumption that everyone has to own property, which is the significant factor behind the absurd, astronomical amount of over-time worked in the UK.

You Get What You Deserve?

Above: Nalini Malani's interpretation of Bertolt Brecht's 'The Job'.

In the days of William Morris, ‘precariousness’ was created by the mechanisation of heavy industry. Now as then, it serves those in control of society to have others feeling that their jobs are ‘precarious’. At its extreme, ‘precarious labour’ can be a matter of life and death, as witnessed by the deaths of 21 Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay, employed by gang-masters.

Southwood notes the ironies of precariousness, as in this passage: ‘Employers are unhappy if their worker takes unscheduled time off or vanishes suddenly, conveniently forgetting that their own demands for short-term flexibility encourage exactly this sort of pattern. The applicant must often be available to attend interviews and start work immediately, regardless of whether he happens to be working elsewhere at the time.’ He presents the situation of managers ‘grumbling about temps’ unreliability, as if it were they who had somehow exploited the good will of the poor capitalist.’ As with so much in the world of work today, this would be pure farcical comedy, were the stakes not so high for the people unlucky enough to be afflicted by precariousness.

It should indeed be noted that managers – whether in public or private sector workplaces – are often paid to an extent that is obscene, when compared with front-line staff. And, as in the age of Morris, it remains the case that those with the greatest financial riches are often shirkers; we are supposed to be dazzled into submission by vacuous celebrities, superstar footballers or financial alchemists working in ‘The City’. Morris’s words in 1884 are appropriate for the state-owned banks today, such as RBS and Northern Rock: ‘they have to be kept at the expense of those who do work, just as paupers have, and are a mere burden on the community.’

Southwood also focuses on interview technique: the importance of the ‘gift of the gab’ in ‘selling oneself’. These are ‘unpaid duties’ of the jobseeker, who is effectively a ‘postmodernised inversion of the 1980s “gizza job” persona.’ In terms of what is like to work today, there is Southwood’s ‘looking busy’ and Michael Foley’s comparable focus on stagecraft: ‘we are acting without even being aware of it, even believing this to be natural behaviour – and entirely sublimating all negative feelings.’

The case of the Virtual Assistant (VA) brings home the loss of a focal point for dissent and organisation. As the laughable ‘feelgood’ discourse has it: “YOU ARE YOUR OFFICE”. Never mind about enriching social interactions with colleagues or trade unionist solidarity in a common cause. Never mind, even, the benefits of getting out and about. Atomisation is wonderful and something to be aspired towards, you modern workers!

Southwood draws on Raymond Williams, comparing the precarious workplaces he has experienced to TV’s ‘reiterated promise of exciting things to come, if we stay’. This is brought out in the temp’s compulsion to ‘look busy’ so that they might be kept on in preference to others.

Politically, we have had avowed protestant workaholics at the helm – such as Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown. They have reflected back to us our visions of work and produced a society that is intolerant of anyone who ‘works to contract’ or does not work full-time. They have insisted upon the fallacy that more work is necessarily better, whilst living out this dream themselves – leading to destructive results, both to their own health and society's.

Positives of work

Work can be enjoyable and enriching, provided there is a social purpose informing the work being done – as in William Morris’s distinction of ‘useful work’ as opposed to ‘useless toil’. Work can occupy the mind and bring one into constructive union with people and may be preferable to mere ‘idleness’. A functional item well made, knowledge passed on, children brought up, infirm relatives cared for: these might be defined as ‘useful’ work, where manipulating money would not. Work need not merely be about attaining enough money to live on; as fellow Zer0 writer Nina Power argues: ‘we are also interested in meaning and justice and always were’.

The worker ‘may provide services rather than commodities, like a medical man […] he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. To this extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only.’ Russell here is strong on the ‘responsibilities’ agenda that should be reclaimed for liberal-leftism from its co-option by the Daily Mail and New Labour. The difference being that we should appreciatethe valuable work being done that slips under the radar in a marketised, GNP-driven economy.

We should not work ‘to support others in idleness’, primarily, of course, the super-rich. Application of political economy is required to ensure that all were contributing and that useful, remunerated work was available to fit people’s divergent capabilities. Russell makes the point that ‘Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system.’ Diversity of work should be essential, to counteract the Stalinist and market-Stalinist ideas of a uniform workforce.

William Morris believed that ‘all must work according to their ability’. He also argued that variety of work was as important as quality of work – suggesting that a craftsman could engage in other duties valued by the community. Personally speaking, I want to be engaged in work that uses my brain and which benefits other people in society; with a main occupation taking up a 20-30 hour week, I could be free to do other useful community tasks for some of the remainder.

Work as portrayed in the culture

Mr Alleyne to Farrington in Joyce’s Dubliners, 1914:

“You always have some excuse or another for shirking work.”

Amerie, 'Gotta Work', 2007:
'Sometimes it's gonna be days like this
Sometimes it's gonna be rain like this
Sometimes you're gonna feel pain like this
Sometimes you gotta work hard for it'

Morris, News from Nowhere, 1894:
‘She led us up to the door of the unfinished house, where a rather little woman was working with mallet and chisel on the wall nearby. She seemed very intent on what she was doing, and did not turn round when we came up; but a taller woman, quite a girl she seemed, who was at work nearby, had already knocked off, and was standing looking from Clara to Dick with delighted eyes. None of the others paid much heed to us. The blue-clad girl laid her hand on the carver's shoulder and said: "Now, Philippa, if you gobble up your work like that, you will soon have none to do and what will become of you then?" […] "Don't talk nonsense, Kate, and don't interrupt me if you can help it." She stopped short when she saw us, then went on with the kind of smile of welcome which never failed us. "Thank you for coming to see us, neighbours; but I am sure that you won't think me unkind if I go on with my work, especially when I tell you that I was ill and unable to do anything all through April and May; and this open air and the sun and the work together, and my feeling well again too, make a mere delight of every hour to me; and excuse me, I must go on."’

Brecht, ‘The Job’, 1933:

‘Courage, physical strength and presence of mind can be shown by anybody, man or woman, who really needs a job. In a few days the woman became a man, in the same way as men have become men over the millennia: through the production process.’

Southwood illustrates his case with relevant, varied examples from across the culture – he explains how the fraudulent, relentlessly upbeat mantra of ‘flexibility’ is satirised in electro-pop band Client’s ‘In it for the Money’. He goes further back to discuss Bartleby from Herman Melville’s 1853 short-story as a textbook example of resistance to dulling labour. The detachment of management is demonstrated by the recent film Up in the Air. A further film example of the workplace as site of perpetual acting and corruption is Office Space, as analysed by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism. The work environments experienced by Southwood are akin to the 'retail park wilderness' identified previously by Owen Hatherley and the filmmaker Chris Petit (Content, More4, 2010).

He could equally have focused on the rich vein of workplace satire within British television: The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, The Office, People like Us or Alan Bennett’s underrated play for LWT, One Fine Day, in which Dave Allen’s disaffected estate agent sleeps on the roof of the tower-block he works in. Alan Plater’s Play for Love: the Party of the First Part – recently released on DVD http://www.networkdvd.net/product_info.php?products_id=1341 – contains Michael Gambon’s character, who escapes from his dulling daily grind via humour and silliness in his home life. One could also mention Steven Moffat’s Press Gang in which his adolescents are effectively initiated into the adult world of work with all of its conflicted narratives: is the Junior Gazette a moral mission, a means of individual career advancement or a facilitator of togetherness within the social group? Few easy answers are provided in Moffat’s intriguing series, still – to date – his masterwork.

Foley argues that ‘it is a curious and significant fact that there are hardly any novels set entirely in the workplace’. True, but it is worth considering the myriad psychological portrayals of workers, such as the disillusioned left-wing teacher Patrick Doyle, working under capitalism in James Kelman’s first-person narrative, A Disaffection. Kelman reveals the supposed autonomous position of ‘middle-class professionals’ to be rather more complicated than de Botton would have it. Samuel Beckett’s Watt sounds interesting; according to Lezard: a ‘great hymn to pointless drudgery.’ Then there is William Morris’s News from Nowhere, a utopian imagining of a future society engaged in useful work. Foley also fails to consider short-stories or poems.

James Joyce details discontent with menial clerkly work in his short-story ‘Counterparts’, from Dubliners (1914), demonstrating how this adversely affects Farrington’s extra-work life, with its bleak ending where he returns home. Of course, such cases as Farrington and Doyle could be said to be ‘individual’ and ‘isolated’, but then there is Bertolt Brecht with his acid portrayal of a society absolutely desperate for work: his short-story ‘The Job’ (1933) depicts a woman impersonating her dead husband for a position he was due to take up as a factory night-watchman on the cusp of his death. Brecht captures the experience of deep recession in contemporary Weimar Germany – the lengths which citizens will go to obtain work and the tenuousness of that work itself with the ‘reserve army’ of labour waiting.

One could also highlight televisual portrayals of joblessness – whether Boys from the Blackstuff with its humane treatment of a bleak existence on the dole, or The League of Gentlemen with its broad-brush depiction of the absurdities of job-centre courses. Pauline is an enforcer of capitalist realism, ramming the ‘one size fits all’ system down the throats of the hapless ‘jobseekers’: a system clearly designed to meet targets and provide a willing workforce for businesses – reducing the Daily Mail-perceived ‘drain’ on the state.

Popular music can be critical of work – as well as Client, there are the Pet Shop Boys, with satires such as ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’ and ‘Single-Bilingual’. There are also examples of musical endorsements of the ‘work ethic’, such as Amerie’s ambivalent ‘Gotta Work’ (‘I do it ’cause I love it’) and this ghastly, infinitely crasser polemic for neo-liberalism from Mick Jagger.

The uses of leisure

Just as the concept of work as automatically positive must be questioned, so must leisure. It would be foolhardy to make no distinctions whatsoever about how people spend their non-working time – liberalism without social consideration can too easily merge with Ayn Rand’s unhinged, ‘libertarian’ ideas. As Russell stated: ‘The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education.’ Wisdom must involve consideration for others and the context of one’s actions.

Leisure should not resemble the thoughtless, detached decadence of today’s super-rich, as exemplified by so many premiership footballers. Again, Russell’s words are salient: ‘The method of a leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. […] The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.’

Russell also spoke of ‘using leisure intelligently’; this needs definition, as if greater ‘leisure’ time means an expansion of irresponsible consumerism, the effects would be ecologically damaging and socially unjust – as exemplified, above all, by Dubai. As Nina Power argued in the Guardian recently, ‘we have been coerced into thinking about quality of life in terms of owning and accumulating more things.’ People entirely ‘doing their own thing’ in the neo-liberal culture ends up costing society and the planet.

Solutions – what is to be done?

Jimmy Reid, speech to students at Glasgow University, 1972:

“Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement.”

Fiona MacCarthy, The Guardian, 1994:

‘Harold Laski, visiting Northumberland miners in the Great slump of the 1930s, found copies of News From Nowhere in house after house, even after the furniture had been sold.’

What is required for us to live well? Stability and security of employment; to be employed on permanent contracts, with generous holidays and some flexibility of hours – avoiding the Reggie Perrin routine – but not an expectation of overtime.

We should consider four hour working days, sharing the work around to reduce unemployment and over-employment. It should be noted that European countries such as France, Belgium, Sweden and Norway work less hours, but record significantly higher productivity. As LRB contributor Barry Schwartz counsels: ‘Reduce the working week so that people will have more time to spend as citizens, partners and parents.’

Russell spoke in 'In Praise of Idleness' of many being overworked while others were unemployed and makes the case that work should be shared more equitably – today, we might argue for a ‘maximum working week’ of 20 hours, or, more realistically 35, as the French have tried. It has been estimated that, across the EU, overtime working consumes the equivalent of some two million potential full-time jobs. Government can and should step in to provide Morris’s ‘useful’ work – localism on a national scale. A precedent would be how FDR created 3million new jobs in the New Deal through creating the Civilian Conservation Corps, who built 44 new wildlife refuges and planted 2billion trees.

Trade unions have to be willing to support compromise measures such as flexi-time and job-sharing for the greater good. The long-term demographic trends make ‘full employment’ of the 1950s kind a practical impossibility; we are going to have to live differently – difficult when the public's expectation is home ownership and consumer abundance. Instead of reflexively supporting the status-quo, unions and left-of-centre organisations need to question the present pattern of work, whilst supporting quality public service provision.

Southwood posits mockery and camp as possible solutions, within the workplace and outside it. As well as the aforementioned Client, he mentions Susan Sontag, Bertolt Brecht’s ‘estrangement effect’ and the ‘manic engagement’ of prisoners given a task in the film Cool Hand Luke. Brecht spoke of ‘stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them’; Southwood suggests that degrading work practices can be most effectively attacked through their lampooning – exposing their essential absurdity.

However, to achieve significant change, there must also be collective action, whether in whole workforce strike action, or the boycotting of market mechanisms; undirected anger is useless. Foley gives the example of how his colleagues rebelled against performance-related-pay: ‘teachers understood that teaching could not be accurately evaluated and that introducing rankings would be divisive. So they agreed that no one would apply’ for the higher-paid roles. Whether this works in every case will be down to specific workplace organisation and the vagaries of human nature. The hopeful humanist would say it could, but the British public-sector worker of 2011 might question the likelihood.

Within work itself, Foley suggests that a sensible strategy might be: ‘surrender to the task but not to the taskmaster, become absorbed in the work itself but never absorb the work ethos.’ Fair enough advice, provided the market-driven ethos does not infect the task. Foley recalls Seneca on the Stoics, proposing the worker takes a more detached position: ‘Quarrelling is a form of emotional involvement that establishes a relationship – and there should rarely be a genuine relationship at work.’ However, 'getting even' can surely only come about through organised strategies: trade unionism, satire and targeting of the systems which are the nerve-centres of neo-liberal institutions. Foley’s analysis seems akin to the sort of individualist anarchism that ultimately supports the very system deemed so harmful.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Ben-Galim, D. (2011) ‘Dead end jobs’, The Independent, 17^th March http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/03/17/dead-end-jobs/

Ben-Galim, D., Krasnowski, K. & Lanning, T. (2011) More than a foot in the door [report], IPPR http://www.ippr.org/publicationsandreports/publication.asp?id=810

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Brecht, B. Short Stories 1921-1946. London: Methuen. ‘The Job’ is also to be found at: http://socialiststories.org/sites/default/files/liberate/The%20Job%20-%20Bertolt%20Brecht.pdf

Butt, S., Clery, E., Curtice, J., Park, A., Phillips, M. & Thomson, K. (eds.) (2010) British Social Attitudes – The 26^th Report. London: SAGE

Capek, K. (1935) ‘In Praise of Idleness’, The Manchester Guardian, 23^rd July, p.18

Clark, N. (2011) ‘If Cameron really cares, he will act on unemployment’, The First Post, 17^thMarch. http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/76477,news-comment,news-politics,if-david-cameron-really-cares-he-will-act-on-unemployment#ixzz1GsOLVC6C

Coates, K. (1973) ‘Books of the Day - Work for the poor: reviews of The Social Minority by Peter Townsend and The New Poor, ed. Ian Henderson’, The Guardian, 18^th October, p.14

De Selincourt, B. (1935) ‘The Blessedness of Mesopotamia: Mr. Bertrand Russell and the Socialist World, The Observer, 6^th October, p.9

Elton, D. (2011) ‘Mail masks Thatcher’s true legacy: Unions busted, hours extended, productivity held back’, Left Foot Forward, 5^th May http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/05/thatchers-revolution-unions-busted-hours-extended-productivity-held-back/

Fairhall, J. (1977) ‘Education ‘must fill idle hours’ in automated age’, The Guardian, 31^st December, p.2

Ferris, J. (2007) Then We Came to the End: A Novel. Viking

Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley: Zero Books

Foley, M. (2010) The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy. London: Simon and Schuster

Fromm, E. (1960) The Fear of Freedom. Routledge and Kegan Paul

Gannon, Z. (2011) ‘What does responsibility actually mean to those at the top?’ Left Foot Forward, 14^th June http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/06/ed-miliband-social-responsibility-for-all-what-does-it-mean-for-those-at-the-top/

Harford, T. (1980) ‘It’s time to ask subversive questions about work’, The Guardian, 3^rd September, p.15

Hobson, J. A. (1935) ‘Books of the Day: Bertrand Russell’s Essays’, The Manchester Guardian, 15^th October, p.7

Hodgkinson, T. (1994) ‘Positively idle’. The Guardian, 9^th November, p.A6

Irvine, S. (n.d.) ‘All Play? Limits to the ‘Leisure Society’ http://www.sandyirvine.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/PDFs/Essay%20All%20Play%20Limits%20to%20a%20Leisure%20Society.pdf

James, O. (2007) Affluenza. Vermilion.

Joyce, J. (1914) Dubliners. Harmondsworth: Penguin (1966 edn.)

Kelman, J. (1989) A Disaffection. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.

Large, P. (1977) ‘Trade unions are in the lead in the lead in the debate on the computer society’, The Guardian, 18^th July, p.14

Large, P. (1979) ‘Work ethic may be on way out, says Prior’, The Guardian, 22^nd March, p.3

Lawrence, F. (2005) ‘The precarious existence of the thousands in Britain's underclass’, The Guardian. 10^th January http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2005/jan/10/immigrationasylumandrefugees.asylum?INTCMP=SRCH

Lezard, N. (1999) ‘Blood, sweat and toil’, The Guardian, 10^th April, p.B10

Lukes, S. (1967) ‘Marx plus alienation: review of Socialist Humanism, ed. Erich Fromm’, The Guardian, 1^st September, p.5

MacCarthy, F. (1994) ‘Socialism’, The Guardian, 29^th October, p.A33

MacIntyre, A. (1961) ‘Russell as moralist’, The Guardian, 3^rd May, p.9

Meek, J. (2011) ‘In the Sorting Office’, London Review of Books, Vol.33 No.9, 28^th April, pp.3-9 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/james-meek/in-the-sorting-office

Melville, H. (1853) ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, at: http://www.bartleby.com/129/

Morris, W. (1884) ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’, at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1884/useful.htm

Morris, W. (1890) News from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics (2003)

O’Grady, S. (2011) ‘Osborne to target workers’ rights with review of employment law’, The Independent, 12^th May http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/osborne-to-target-workers-rights-with-review-of-employment-law-2282716.html

Pai, H-H. (2008) ‘Chinese migrant workers: lives in shadow’, Open Democracy, 30^th May http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/people/chinese-migrant-workers-lives-in-shadow

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Power, N. (2009) One Dimensional Woman. Ropley: Zero Books

Power, N. (2011) ‘Happiness has been consumed by capitalism’, The Guardian, 12^th April http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/12/happiness-capitalism

Reid, J. (2010) ‘Still irresistible, a working-class hero’s finest speech’, The Independent, 13^th August http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/still-irresistible-a-workingclass-heros-finest-speech-2051285.html

Russell, B. (1932) ‘In Praise of Idleness’, at: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Schwartz, B. (2007) ‘Stop the Treadmill!’ Review of The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 by Avner Offer, London Review of Books, Vol.29 No.5, 8^th March, pp.32-33

Seabrook, J. (1982) Unemployment

Seabright, P. (2002) ‘Who is the villain?’ Review of The Future of Success by Robert Reich in: London Review of Books, Vol.24 No.16, 22^nd August, pp.24-25

Self, W. (2011) ‘The Frowniest Spot on Earth’ Review of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, London Review of Books, Vol.33 No.9, 28^th April, pp.10-11 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/will-self/the-frowniest-spot-on-earth

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Southwood, I. (2011) Non-Stop Inertia. Ropley: Zero Books

Stevenson, R. L. (1877) ‘An Apology for Idlers’ http://www.library.wisc.edu/projects/glsdo/feraca/idlers.html

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Walter, N. (1997) ‘Get a life or get a job’, The Guardian, 20^th July, p.22

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Watson, T. (1997) ‘Labour’s welfare lie’, The Guardian, 24^th December, p.9

VIDEOGRAPHY

Cool Hand Luke (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), BBC

The League of Gentlemen (1999-02), BBC

The Office (2001-03), BBC

Office Space (dir. Mike Judge, 1999)

One Fine Day (dir. Stephen Frears, 1979). London Weekend Television http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/865903/

People like Us (1999-01), BBC

Up in the Air (dir. Jason Reitman, 2009)

Upstairs, Downstairs (1970-75), London Weekend Television

When the Boat Comes In (1976-81), BBC

MUSIC PLAYLIST

Camberwell Now – ‘Working Nights’ (1986)

Saint Etienne – ‘Got A Job’ (2005)

Darren Hayman & the Secondary Modern – ‘Compilation Cassette’ (2009)

The Durutti Column – ‘They Work Every Day’ (1988)

Jake Thackray – ‘I Stayed Off Work Today’ (1977)

Donna Summer – ‘Working the Midnight Shift’ (1977)

Mick Jagger – ‘Let’s Work’ (1987)

The Smiths – ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’ (1984)

Pet Shop Boys – ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’ (1985)

Luke Haines – ‘Never Work’ (2002)

Michael Jackson – ‘Workin’ Day and Night’ (1979)

Scritti Politti – ‘Don’t Work That Hard’ (1985)

The Wake – ‘Everybody Works So Hard’ (1984)

Amerie – ‘Gotta Work’ (2007)

Client – ‘In it for the Money’ (2004)

Humanism

2011-06-17T20:46:00.000+01:00

'You can live your life lonely
Heavy as stone
Live your life learning
And working alone
Say this is all you want
But I don't believe that it's true'

Pet Shop Boys - 'Love Comes Quickly' (1985)

'You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and signalman who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your dinner with good company?'

Robert Louis Stevenson - 'An Apology for Idlers' (1877)

'Oh don't you think, that people are the strangest things? Design
Of desire, means all that the heart requires, is what it can't
Recognise, Oh no'

Wild Beasts - 'Loop the Loop' (2011)

Adventures Behind Enemy Lines... Part 1

2011-06-12T13:46:00.002+01:00

This was fair comment, delivered with a conviction that the Leader of the Opposition could do with mustering. I decided to follow the discussion on that bastion of the Right, the Daily Telegraph, and the Guardian on the left-hand side.

The Guardian had a predictable amount of knee-jerk atheist attacks on Williams, which did not address the content of what he said. I assume some of these were right-wing 'trolls' trying to sway general Guardian-reader opinion against the Archbishop's comments - trying to play upon the readership's general skepticism towards religion.

The Torygraph had several comments to the same sort of effect, but putting across more of an emphasis on Williams's supposed socialism or - most absurdly - his status as a Marxist guerilla about to destroy the nation. This sort of hysterical inexactitude was the type of thing I had not really encountered for years; perhaps going back to my days as intermittent contributions to a UK political 'news-group'. The right-of-centre people I have encountered in person have largely been polite and I am able to have a reasonable discussion with them.

There were a few somewhat rational comments, critical of Williams, but the DT commenting crowd seems to be comprised of would-be retired Majors or bitter, infantile 'libertarians', pushing Hayek's The Road to Serfdom as their holy text. If one is after an insight into what it is to be incoherently angry and misanthropic, you could do worse than check out the Daily Telegraph's comment-threads.

Upon reading, I was so exasperated that I decided I would have a go at posting - under the moniker 'ordnancesurly', taken from a song of mine. Clearly any attempt to 'get through' to these people will be 99% wasted effort, but I thought... why not have a go at reasoning with them and see what emerges? Try and plant a few seeds of doubt.

There were multiple articles assailing Williams, but I alighted on two in particular; firstly one from Benedict Brogan, he of the John Majorish accountant's accountant-style Tory visage. Deputy editor of the paper, no less.

There were a reasonable number of sane, agreeable commentators:

But then there were the absurdly sanctimonious Thatcher fans, talking about toxicity without reference to the Iron Lady as the defining influence on modern Blighty:

Needless to say, there was no response to my last points.

I was baffled by the odd religious 'vision' of jeongu, which they were not willing to clarify for me:

Dynamic phrases such as 'the frocked coward' are routine on these boards. People without any sense of balance or even awareness of how even-handed Williams has been in his comments:

I was able to probe the perennial post-Thatcher Tory tensions: between loving the free-market and hating immigration, the EU and immigrants:

I note the maniacal conspiracy theorist, PP, who provides no link to evidence backing up his fraud claim or the electoral statistics that would prove it made the difference:

Such absurd hyperbole from Edward Green, that made me link to this famous old clip of Jimmy from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin - oh, and yes: I got told to read Hayek, after suggesting that the bellicose nutter might read a true 'conservative' like Edmund Burke...

'Rabid emotionalism' seems about right to me. Their 'realism' is a fantasy:

They conflate individuals' debt with government debt; the old 'we've maxed out the nation's credit card!' stupidity, again not fully understanding Rowan Williams's longer-term position and consistency:

The above bit on the role of the church was actually my first entrance into the debate, highlighting what I would have thought were obvious points.

The other article that was graced by an ordnancesurly intervention was a shoddy piece of work from Cristina Odorne, bizarrely - on this evidence - a former deputy-editor of The New Statesman. An admitted Tory voter in 2010, Odorne is also a Catholic, and one would at least expect a temperate view to be taken with the head of the Church of England. However, she attempted to score points in precisely the manner she was accusing Williams of doing. This is truly the sort of journalistic trifle that could have been thrown together without even having read RW's words, and makes Brogan's comments seem a model of sanity in comparison. It is a stock response that one can imagine she had filed away ready for the next time Williams came into the news. When it turns out that his comments are not slavishly approving of the Tory policies of the Coalition, then it is fair game for the attack dogs to be unleashed!

Attack dogs who do not fail to trot out this sort of tired nonsense, which has been thoroughly discredited post-economic crisis, if it was not before:

It was good to have had some support in the debate, as from norto here. While I suspect he/she (though, he really... when have women been known as avid frequenters of DT comments-threads?!) may be a bit of a Blue Labourite, good points were made.

This article did receive far more critical comments, attacking the style of writing and half-baked arguments, but there was still a nauseating level of support - as one would expect:

I made a few more contributions to that thread, but I think that is an appropriate note to end on. I doubt I will be logging onto the DT's site on a regular basis - it would frankly be a waste of time. Much better to argue with open-minded people elsewhere, and try and steer the discussion on the Guardian CIF threads in the right direction. There are articles to write, there is music to make and listen to; there are interesting films and television programmes to watch. There are indeed people to meet in the outside world and communicate with online. It would be a dead end to spend time trying to destabilise a stultefying discourse. Only the occasional intervention on certain issues. Maybe my next intervention will be with that vile organ, the Mail - so rightly attacked by the Speaker of the House of Commons last week. One that has a far greater readership and influence than the Torygraph.

2010: Albums of the Year

2011-04-18T19:17:00.002+01:00

'Those mornings, when the burden absorbs me
Those mornings, everything’s on pause
Hours go by, it continues to match me
Hours go by, no constraints or cause'

This article arrives belatedly - to an absurd degree! But no matter, here are my favourite albums of the year.

I have listened to many more albums than for most previous years in the 2000s decade; many were pretty indifferent with the thoroughly capable resting on their laurels just a tad (Goldfrapp, Brian Eno, Mylene Farmer, Belle and Sebastian, T.I., The Divine Comedy). There were those with a trick or two who just didn't entice over a whole album: Die Antwoord, LoneLady, Geneva Jacuzzi.

Before I get on to my top twenty, positive mentions should go out to returning veterans with life and ideas in them yet (The Fall, Edwyn Collins, Wyatt/Atzmon/Stephen, Autechre, Paul Weller, Momus). There were occasionally great but ultimately flawed explorations (Caribou, Actress, SALEM, Forest Swords, Gorillaz, Owen Pallett). There was impeccable, if not overly consistent indie-pop from the studied Beach House and MGMT. If their respective albums had lived up to 'Walk in the Park' and 'Someone's Missing', they would unquestionably have made my main list, but there a sameness to the slickness. Arcade Fire's album is twenty minutes too long, but was close to making the roster - at its best, it is transcendently beautiful. Too often, however, it ploughs a circuitous route around the same old suburbs.

I enjoyed articulately wistful indie (Darren Hayman & The Secondary Modern, Chris T-T) and proficient, if derivitive, music that could have been calculated to appeal to me three years ago (These New Puritans and Moon Wiring Club). There was enjoyable, crafted pop (Robyn's Body Talk Vol.1, the new Kylie, much of Rihanna's Loud, The Golden Filter show inspired flashes and the easy-going Living Sisters project beguiles, to an extent). On the guitar-rock front, I was rather bored by the much-hyped The National, but there were steady, workmanlike efforts from Foals and Frightened Rabbit, with just enough about them to charm. Reliable mavericks like Skream and Sufjan Stevens created eclectic, uneven but likeable records.

My new discoveries included Serafina Steer, Devlin and Nedry. I would highlight the first two in particular: Steer has something of the Alison Statton about her, recording beguilingly English songs, with harp and synthesizer. She has a novel approach and sound that shames these chancers with their facile, Tory rusticity; if you can imagine pre-pop Human League with Mary Hopkin singing, you might begin to imagine what this is like. 'Motion Pictures', 'Drinking While Driving' and 'How to Haunt a House Party' are magnificently deft creations; unassuming folk meeting austere post-punk. Her flawed album just misses out on my Top 20 of the year, but I am certain that Ms Steer is capable of consistently great work. Likewise, Devlin; a fellow Londoner born at the more recent end of the 1980s. His Bud, Sweat and Beers does contain some relatively ordinary material, but also much that is enormously heartening: this is a Grime MC with a social conscience, a vivid chronicler of our unhappy, unforgiving times. Many of the tracks have deeply evocative musical textures and embedded samples: 'Days and Nights' in particular is redolent of down-at-heel London, eliciting memories of the Peddlers and even the dance-band era; inviting some useful comparison with (The Real) Tuesday Weld. 'Yesterday's News' is a rather humbler variant on the usual hip-hop privileging of the ego - an interesting Dagenham counterpoint to Kanye's 'POWER'.

So, I keenly await more music from Steer and Devlin (who almost sound like a Dickensian double-act!). I do not await music from insipid bunting-lovers.

Now, onto the list; few albums have struck me as creating self-contained worlds in the way that Hounds of Love or Jordan: The Comeback do. There tend to be several tracks that compel, and others that leave me rather indifferent. Yet there is so much that is great within these twenty records that it cannot be said that 2010 was a poor year for music.

20. Mucchu - Adventure We Go

A cusp-of-spring album, listened to this February half-term, during a half-day at work, whilst heading up to a cafe via Newcastle Central Station. It does occasionally veer towards the twee ('Coral and Shell'), but this is largely a winning album of 'indietronica'; a well-heeled, optimistic pop music that sounds a bit like the Sundays filtered through a Four Tet gauze. Warm, unguarded ingenue vocals from Milky (yes, Milky!), that lend themselves perfectly well to abstract cut-up ('The Place That Knows Me'). There is a delicacy and bittersweet laptop melancholia reminiscent of Owl City's sublime #1 single, 'Fireflies'; just listen to 'Songs in My Room' and 'Getaway Train'. 'Dancing With a Ghost' is worthy of Kate Bush or Thomas Hardy.

19. Ikonika - Contact, Love, Want, Have

'Ikonoklast' is one of the year's finest preludes, and this Hyperdub album manages to delight for long stretches, even if it has occasional longuers. There is a pleasing mixture of stately electronica (the oceanic urban expanses of 'Yoshimitzu') and the genially cartoonish ('Psoriasis' is all computer-game bleeps; Aphex Twin meets 8-bit Bassline). 'Fish' is probably the highpoint, with its skittling dubstep rhythm precociously painted all over with scarlet and purplish synths. I'd love to experience this song in a social context, with a juggernaut of a soundsystem.

18. The-Dream - Love King

First hip-hop entry, and The-Dream is pleasingly free from the aggressive attitude so often exhbited within the genre. Prince and Akon are obvious analogues for what Terius Youngdell Nash achieves with this album; these are worldly, gossamer light songs of yearning and seduction. The astonishing centrepiece is 'Yamaha', with Prince's Minneapolis sound reincarnated, angular rhythms and celestial synths striving towards the Sublime: this is a sound carefully balanced between the courtly and the carnal. It also has the best ending for any 2010 song, that galloping pick-up in the rhythm at 4:43. Then there is the grave 'February Love', an abstract slow-jam of uneasy piano and languid rhetoric. There is much else besides on an album that never detours into mere mush. Yes, like most hip-hop albums, it does last too long, but only fractionally so.

17. Mark van Hoen - Where is the Truth

This is an especially welcome return from the ambient pop meister van Hoen, whom I have liked for a while - ever since I bought his Playing with Time (2001) in Cambridge and lapped it its serene ambience.

In the context of 2010 politics, 'Where is the Truth', the title-track, feels like passive but not forlorn protest. '1979' sounds like a memory; this is a more personal, evocative 'hauntology' than D.D. Denham achieves. 'Beautiful' is van Hoen at his best: there is a seismic, widescreen impression of unearthly stasis. 'Photophone Call' is Penguin Cafe Orchestra gone electronic, deploying all manner of delays and glitches.

16. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles

You simply cannot get away from 'Celestica'. It may even have been playing in one of the rare scenes of 2010 Coronation Street that I witnessed on the old gogglebox! A maximalist incorporation of blissed-out Slowdive/MBV noise to a techno beat. Unmistakably pop but not as we know it, it sounds like it is arriving simultaneously from centuries past and future. A dancefloor stormer, a rallying of disparate, dissident spirits. 'Suffocation' is its more sedate, equally epochal sounding sibling. 'I Am Made of Chalk' is a spliced-up child of van Hoen in its doleful reverie.

I like the latterday dream-pop exemplified by Crystal Castles; a cross-continental sisterhood that includes M83 and Cut Copy, not to mention Ladytron and Nite Jewel.

15. Television Personalities - A Memory is Better than Nothing

More downtrodden, heartfelt songs from Dan Treacy; his music sounds especially apt in these awkward times. From the anguished, numbed 'Funny He Never Married' to the rueful, crushed 'Walk Towards the Light', this is clearly not the sort of mindless uplift peddled by nominal 'indie' bands. This is rather an awkwardness to cherish; the snatches of happiness all the more poignant for the surrounding darkness: 'She's My Yoko', with winsome guitar strumming supported by communal organ and slithers of synth. It is a heartbreakingly open declaration of love, the sound of a troubled man coming through the other side. 'People Think That We're Strange', but 'Come Back to Bed' indeed.

14. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today

More music for the sad-eyed boys and girls among us. I listened to The Doldrums during my October stay in Southwark, where Simon Reynolds' favourite album of the 2000s started to sink in. It is a truly magnificent evocation of grey sunsets, strange fires and the uncanny, uncontrollable yearning of 'For Kate I Wait' - which summons all the morbid desire of Wuthering Heights. This 2010 album is not quite up to the same consistent standard; some of the rough edges have been sanded down, but who can begrudge the relative success this has achieved? My favourites are 'Fright Night', with its John Carpenter-film spirits dancing to serene D.I.Y. Italo-disco, and the awesome 'Round and Round', which sees Pink taking his patented dreamt pop into the sensual stratosphere.

13. Ellen Allien - Dust

Ellen Allien is my favourite German techno artisan along with Barbara Morgenstern, and this is, to my mind, an absurdly underrated album. The minimal, liminal beats of 'Our Utopie' evoke light-rail transit systems while 'Flashy Flashy' is as defiantly blank and severe as European music gets. 'My Tree' can be compared with the exquisitely glacial music of Antye Greie, as featured in Chris Petit's Content. The fourth track, 'Sun the Rain', enters like the sun on the neck after a lifetime of winters, with an entirely uncharacteristic use of insistent guitar.

'Walking down the street you take my hand.'

It is heartstopping when listened to after the previous three tracks; like Kay in 'The Snow Queen', being dragged away from his puzzles towards the land of the living. The album does fade slightly after this point, but 'Huibuh' is a masterly (or rather mistressly) five minutes. A slinky, sinuous rhythm reminiscent of Prince (a guiding influence on much great 2010 music), spare minor-chord chimes and bewitching, languorous vocals from Ellen. Yes, Berlinette and Orchestra of Bubbles remain her strongest work, but Dust is a strong release and significantly more engaging than the rather flat Sool.

12. Vampire Weekend - Contra

Not quite as fresh seeming as the debut, inevitably, but an impeccably crafted record of cosmopolitan pop. It peaks with the cantering 'Run' and the sublime 'Diplomat's Son', with its programmed afro-beats, end-of-the-pier piano and urbane, Paul Simon-esque vocals. They are resting on laurels slightly, but the essential template is strong enough to see them through.

11. Field Music - Field Music (Measure)

A marginally over-extended album, but only just. This is an astute cycle of art-pop songs, anchored by vocals wonderfully lacking in smugness or histrionics. The second side contains a winning use of found-sounds. These are Sunderland's finest exponents of indie music; indie as in independent-minded, not in lifestyle-accessory - a band who now include as their bassist a former classmate of mine at Barnes Primary School.

Do listen to the rippling 'mackem XTC' loveliness of 'Measure' or the urgent should've-been-number-1 'Them That Do Nothing'. Lyrics are as elliptical and oblique as ever with these Brewises, but far from lacking in meaning if you dig under the surface. 'Precious Plans' speaks of a thousand compromises; heads being kept down through fear and circumstance. My generation - early 1980s born - realising that the dreams they were sold are illusory. The burden of self-promotion - Nina Power's description of people having to ask as walking-CVs - and dream homes bringing heartache:

'Where are those future-less precious plans / Where we have a place to get to'.

10. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Where the brothers Brewis are unassuming and lyrically guarded, Kanye assumes that you know that he is the centre of the pop universe. This is a grandiose, egocentric record that celebrates the self, with all the attendant melancholia and braggadocio. 'POWER' is the stampeding juggernaut that one could take to be West's own persona, mutated hip-hop or schizoid capitalism writ large. He samples Fripp's Blair-anticipating '21st Century Schizoid Man' from Blair-favourite album, In the Court of the Crimson King. 'All of the Lights' is a compelling urban rallying-call, masses of horns welcoming and including the listener. There are crucial contributions from Drake and, especially, a refracted, automated Rihanna. 'So Appalled' is grave in the same manner as much of 808s and Heartbreaks, and is followed by my two favourite tracks: the celestial 'Devil in a Blue Dress', revisiting the sublime pitch-shifted vocal bliss of his debut album. Then, expectant single piano notes lead into the epic expanses of 'Runaway' - the second great track of that name in 2010 (see Devlin's).

9. Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

A bit of a revelation for me, this, and slightly stronger even than West's lauded album. Big Boi attains a grace and subtlety here only matched by one other urban album of 2010 that I've heard.

What to say of something like 'Be Still'? An exquisite jewel of a synth ballad to match Amerie's gorgeous 'Crush' from 2007. Enveloping emotions and intimations of spring; if synths can hug, these manage it.

Elsewhere, plangent electric pianos ('Turns Me On'), Wu-Tang and Soul II Soul-citing spaceship soul ('Shutterbugg'), sensuality ('Night Night'); above all, oceanic Avalanches of soul in 'Shine Blockas', with its masterly contrast between vibraphone-led vastness and dub sparseness. 'Hustle Blood' is rather unsatisfactory in its limited world-view, yet has an undeniably formidable use of rhythm and wah-wah. 'General Patton' is another of the three centrepieces; a suitably martial, cinematic cavalcade that evokes that mighty actor George C. Scott.

8. Gayngs - Relayted

Minneapolis melancholy-pop, directly inspired by 10cc and Godley and Creme's imperishable hits 'I'm Not In Love' and 'Cry'. Gayngs is a Broken Social Scene-like amalgamation of elements from various bands, including the Bon Iver singer, Justin Vernon (who also surfaces on album #10 in this list). Songs like 'Ride' are really not that far from the sad urban electronica of Junior Boys. 'The Last Prom on Earth' has some of the most moving use of auto-tune I have heard since Momus' 'Nervous Heartbeat', treading deftly between emotionalism and suave pretence, like Yello did in their prime.

All songs are underpinned by the tellingly sensual/glacial 69bpm rhythms of 'I'm Not in Love'.

7. The Radio Dept. - Clinging to a Scheme

Most of this album is eminently winsome indie-electronica of the estimable Swedish school, and is more arresting than jj's latest, which is dream-pop to the point of passive quietism. What elevates it so high in my list is the heart-on-sleeve commitment of 'Heaven's on Fire' with its spoken anti-capitalist broadside at the start and regretful focus on charlatanry. They won't be to everybody's taste, but they are for this fan of New Order ('The Video Dept.' - sigh), Saint Etienne ('Never Follow Suit' - gasp) and the delightful - and much missed - The Embassy. Oh yes. It is music grounded in a lineage I love, and I cannot get enough of it. 'Memory Less', 'David' and 'A Token of Gratitude': hazy, huggable delights.

6. Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record

Probably the most consistent record in this list. Maybe it does not quite reach the conquering heights of previous BSS albums, but this is a cleverly conceived, artful album full of mature, beguiling music. Its sheer dogged consistency raises it above the more lauded Arcade Fire album; whilst there is nothing here to match 'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)', it is a compulsive record, much easier to revisit. They have another artful, distinctive female singer, Lisa Lobsinger, to add to Leslie Feist and Emily Haines (who makes a sedate appearance on 'Sentimental X's'). The communal 'Forced to Love' and 'Water in Hell' suggest that rock in 2010 is not necessarily an irrelevance. 'Meet Me in the Basement' is a thrilling, intricate instrumental; 'Art House Director' bursts with vitality - listen to that swooning transition from 1:48 and those celebratory horns. BSS retain their pre-eminence in terms of creating unpredictable, experimental rock music with a humane ethos.

5. Stromae - Cheese

Could this gent be any other than Belgian? He has something of the worldly oddity of Brel and the fresh face of Tintin as refracted through the vision of Rene Magritte. These synths possess a lifeforce quite of their own, which D.H. Lawrence might have understood had the dirty old bastard lived into the twenty-first century.

Stromae will not, simply CANNOT deviate: he sticks to his euro-pop formula over the context of a 39-minute album with the same sort of focus as David Guetta. This is not the sort of music to parade its eclecticism, as evinced by its single-minded devotion to the beat and those storming, swarming synthesizers. There is an unapologetic European hedonism of the sort admired by Jonathan Meades in the Hamburg segment of Magnetic North; one also thinks of Serge Gainsbourg - brought to prominence again with a well-judged biopic, which I saw at the Tyneside Cinema in the summer. 'Peace or Violence' and 'Rail de Musique' should have been domineering number-ones across the continent. 'Summertime' evokes balearic house with its blazing colours; 'Dodo' starts tentative, becoming a wistful techno lullaby. 'House'llulah' is a rave-informed hymn of devotion to house music and dancing. The title-track brings the album to a rather pensive close with chords just as wistful as usual, but without a beat of any sort. It is a powerful way to end what is perhaps 2010's finest and most characterful dance album.

4. Clubroot - II: MMX

Operating at a junction (or, rather, lock) between idm and dubstep, the St Albans-residing Clubroot is an excellent discovery, recommended by a good friend Andrew Saffrey. If 'Orbiting' is a glorious opener, then 'Waterways' ascends like a dubstep Cathedral Gardens. As well as the ambient John Foxx, there are hints of Eno and the architecturally-minded OMD; Dan Richmond seems to be influenced by that thoughtful strain of British electronica that contains u-Ziq, Ultramarine and Orbital. 'Waterways' gets me thinking of, well, British waterways like the Regent's and the Hackney-to-Stratford canals that I walked for four and a half hours one day in late July 2010. The kaleidoscopic, jarring mix of architectural styles observable along the 14-mile route, suggesting a good many Britains - and always the still, serene green of the water.

It is a testament to this album's hold on me that it seemed to fit equally well with a walk from South Shields metro, through the bleak market square and down to the ferry terminal and the Alum Ale House. 'Running on Empty' speaks of times past and begs for a future - you never want it to end. This is not purely cerebral music; it feels corporeal. Living, breathing humans kiss and caress like weeping statues: 'Cherubs Cry'. One thinks of epochal British children's books like Moondial and Tom's Midnight Garden with their protagonists' immersion in the past. One thinks also of the sensation of holding hands.

3. Hot Chip - One Life Stand

More statues on an album cover. More excellence from this original art-pop band; certainly a much stronger proposition than Made in the Dark - despite that earlier album's featuring Robert Wyatt. This does end and start on the slow side, but really gathers pace with the middle section - tracks 3 to 8. 'I Feel Better' is a wimpy canter, autotune deftly deployed. The title track is a powerful case for monogamy that necessarily feels very social in its embrace of the dancefloor. 'Brothers' wins out through virtue of its unfashionable virtue. Things step up with 'Slush', which does evoke the chill darkness of the Bonzo Dog Band's song of the same name, but applies some choir-boy yearning and good cheer to its doleful waltzing. Next is the album's masterpiece, rightfully praised by many: 'Alley Cats'. Weightless and yet worldly, simultaneously. Listen to in conjunction with Falty DL's 'Discoko' (with its own epiphany coming at 2:05).

The song contains many heartstopping moments: the higher vocals coming in at 2:12 and the ghostly loveliness of the submerged organ chords and voices from 2:38. You might draw comparison with English eccentric Robyn Hitchcock and his animal/plant preoccupations. You might just say it's bloody lovely and sensual as hell - or rather, Mabuse. The album reaches its apex with the following dubstep raver, 'We Have Love'; certainly one of the cleverest bits of sequencing on any album of the year to move from 'Alley Cats''s celestial poise to this gadding merry-go-round.

2. Janelle Monáe - The ArchAndroid

A significant advance on a promising debut mini-album, The Arch-Android is the sound of a young artist taking things as far out as Prince managed, whilst maintaining a sure grasp of pop. Classical, jazz, soul, folk, electronica and hip-hop infuse these glorious 68 minutes in roughly equal measures; this is surely the most diverse album to come under the 'urban' or 'hip-hop' bracket since Cody Chestnutt's The Headphone Masterpiece (2002). Of course, OutKast are a guiding spirit, with Big Boi appearing on the sure-footed 'Tightrope', though Solange is perhaps the closest direct comparison in terms of non-tunnel visioned hip-hop. This is a true afro-futurist pop - Kelis, Common and Erykah Badu might also be mentioned as kindred spirits.

There are lovely segues between the tracks: for instance, we slide from the Motown-goes-into-outer-space propulsion of 'Faster' to the even more urgent 'Locked Inside', which sounds likes an impossibly well-adjusted Michael Jackson. The pop-rush of its chorus is fucking glorious. This fades out to be replaced by the stately hush of 'Sir Greendown' with its Dudley Simpson organ and medieval courtliness. It is a wondrous sequence of music; one of the most confounding and lovely to be heard in 2010.

'Oh Maker' is a soul song underpinned by a two-note folk guitar loop - all fed through the sort of Boards of Canada gauze that her contemporaries Solange and Amerie have deployed. 'Neon Valley Street' is like the retro pop-deco of Dr Buzzard's Savannah Band submerged in some intangible future world. And if it cannot seem to get any more celestial we have a 'Strawberry Fields' Mellotron entering the scene, and then a regretful guitar solo that rivals the best of the Purple One...

'Wondaland' achieves that glacial/warm dichotomy with the spry insolence of a Cristina or Annie; a Then the Gregorian calm and ancient-sounding folk strains of '57821': a gorgeous chorale accompanied by a plaintive guitar.

Such is the expansive quality of The Arch-Android. There is even a ukulele at an most unexpected moment; one of so many life-affirming moments on an expansive album that suggests a future for pop itself in the long-playing format. This is music to be savoured and treasured; both danced to and played to death on wistful Sunday afternoons.

1. Darkstar - North

And so, to the last album of this list - my favourite of all 2010 albums, though I first heard it in 2011. It spoke to me deeply at an important time; it seemed designed to reach me at a strange time in my life, with its songs of fragility and fortitude. Darkstar were supposed to be dubstep, I thought; then, they go and make an album of sensitive synth-pop that features more piano than bass drops. It is the album that My Computer's Vulnerabilia (2002) attempts to be, but cannot quite manage.

This is music of the post-industrial north as recalled from London with Proustian intensity. Yes, there is the Human League cover - which I did hear last year, via Paul Lester's excellent Band of the Day mixes on the Guardian website. This links them in my mind to other thoughtful electronic operatives - not just Human League, but David Sylvian and Thomas Dolby. 'Deadness' has the melancholy of Robert Wyatt and Ultra Nate's 'Free' (that guitar from 2:50); it has the sort of rich, full synthesizers that loom over and haunt the whole album. 'Aidy's Girl is a Computer' is dubstep - indeed it had been on a previous Hyperdub compilation - but it is dubstep very much as intelligent-dance-music; it might be filed alongside Aphex Twin in its sense of fun and adventure. Erstwhile computer game synths are dragged out to the point of serenity. 'Under One Roof' is shattering, with its shards of rhythm and lead synth the perfect accompaniment to a rueful late-night train journey home. 'Two Chords' is an even more up-front Junior Boys, capturing a boy in a bedsit, bewitched and bewildered by memories.

If you had doubted where you were, there is the corrective of 'North', which captures the region in all its infernal beauty and chipper desolation. The rhythm is like Portishead's 'Machine Gun' in its brutalist compulsion; amid this clatter, there are chiming, minor-key chords drawn out with wintry sustain. One thinks of Wuthering Heights and of the Holy Trinity Church in Sunderland; this is music that is doleful, hymnal, pitiless, resigned. 'Ostkruez' conjures up 'Twin Peaks if it was set in the north of England' - I simply cannot better Kode9's description, but will note the absence of an otherwordly, angelic Julee Cruise to offer consolation amid Badalamenti's melancholy chords.

Then the towering edifice of 'Dear Heartbeat'; first, a patient, tick-tocking intro of about 45 seconds, then the canvass expands: immense bass and synths interweave, evoking a humane Sublime comparable to the J.M.W. Turner or William Blake paintings I pondered in the Tate Britain last October. This is truly an electropop elegy for the ages, to rival 'Being Boring' and 'So This is Goodbye'.

'When It's Gone' laments lost love, that piano resurfacing, heralding Beckettian sentiments - 'I can't go on, I must go on'. Sudden pangs of pain, yet the survival instinct asserting itself.

An astonishingly acute break-up album? An Abstractions of the Post-Industrial North, transposing Basil Kirchin into 2010? A certifiably ace, dubstep-electronica opus? A soundtrack to emotionally-charged journeys north on the East Coast Mainline? Whichever - or all - of these, this shakes me to the core like nothing else in this year. It is a sustained 39 minutes and 36 seconds of unfettered melancholy; an encapsulation of the 'sweet distress' abundant in affairs of the human heart.

'Dear heartbeat, I need something to soothe me
Dear heartbeat, medicate a dose
Sweet distress, touch and presence not welcome
Sweet distress, now it’s time to go'

We're public spirited

2011-03-28T21:52:00.003+01:00

I was part of a 50-strong Sunderland anti-cuts contingent that joined the TUC March on Saturday. A contingent that was a microcosm of the larger march: citizens united by a long-justified hatred of the Tories and what they are doing to us.

This march of probably 500,000 people felt like the best of Britain out in force to defend valued public services against the Tory-led Coalition, with its individualistic synthesis of the Gradgrindian and Ayn Randian - barely tempered by ineffectual Liberal Democrats. A coalition of ghastly Goveians claiming to know the price of everything, yet patently knowing the value of nothing.

There was earthy humour and righteous anger at the country we are becoming, with public servants being made to pay for a crisis they did not cause; government refusing to make the tough decisions to reclaim unpaid taxes and increase progressive taxation, in order to fund vital public services. This government is trying to re-establish a dangerous and anti-academic 'Our Island Story' narrative in History lessons and - absurdly - turn the Arts and Humanities Research Council into a cheerleader for the Big Society. It is also trying to pull up the ladder for students in FE, is happy to see libraries closed and is intent upon dismantling the NHS as a managed, national service without vast disparities - opening it up to ruthless, competitive forces.

This remarkably astute song encapsulates some of the mood of Saturday; providing an instance of the sort of political hip-hop - supporting the underdog and decent values - too long absent:

The media have tried to represent a fundamentally peaceful protest as irrelevant beside the direct action of a small minority (some of which might be supported, e.g. peaceful occupations). The media are foolish to imagine that they can pull the wool over the public's eye, when the public is about to feel the affects of the Coalition's deliberately punitive and divisive cuts agenda.

Serafina Steer's wistful song captures part of the essential character of the marchers; these were not face-scarved anarchists or rent-a-megaphone fantasists. There was a cross-section of Britain in all its diversity: Christians, Greens, Labour councillors, working and middle-class families and teenagers. There were obviously Guardian-readers and long-time leftists, but they were merely one section of an enormous gathering. Tellingly, I spotted 'Charities against the Cuts' and even 'Conservatives against the Cuts', plus all manner of trade unionists, including uniformed firemen behind FBU banners. Ordinary citizens of this country showing that they care about having a society with strong provision for the social good.

'I remain optimistic
By nature [...]
No ear-plugs here,
No invitation needed;
We're public spirited,
You can hang around here
You can hang around here
Don't go quietly...'

-- With thanks to Gary Duncan for the photos

Political music in the present tense, Part I

2011-03-06T18:39:00.002Z

Enter Shikari - 'Fanfare for the Conscious Man' (2009)

Learned about these via some of my sixth form students; it is the sort of symphonic rock that ELP could never have advanced - informed by electro and righteous politics. It has been rare to hear such an estuary accent (they are from St Albans) declaim such socialist sentiments. Perhaps the sign of changing times.

Devlin - 'Community Outcast' (2010)

I'd be interested to hear whether there is much more politically conscious British music in this vein. The R&B and grime genres have rarely seemed to yield much political insight in previous years, but surely this has to change.

Digital Mystikz, feat. Spen G - 'Anti-War Dub' (2006)

Was speaking to a second-year A Level student recently about how to answer an exam question that concerned the interaction of pop music and politics. The article (from a recent past paper) concerned Cameron's quotes on the Smiths and mentioned the likes of Bragg and Weller. I asked the student about dubstep and he didn't seem to think it could be political, or that the audience could be politicised. This track seems to suggest at least an anti-imperialist current within the genre, and a BBC journalist seems to have picked up on some dubstep influence within the student protests last year: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/12/470259.html

Chris T-T - 'A Plague on Both Our Houses' (2005)

'The house of money and the house of God' - an earnest attack on fundamentalist belief in religious and in the neo-liberal market.

Future of the Left - 'Fuck the Countryside Alliance' (2007)

Dan Le Sac Versus Scroobius Pip - 'Stake a Claim' (2010)

Civil disobedience.

Rude Corps - 'Imperfect (But Alive and Trying)' (2010)

Toddla T, feat. Benjamin Zephaniah & Joe Goddard - 'Rebel' (2009)

Humane Sheffield electro with Hot Chip singer Goddard and Benjamin Zephaniah. Wise call to rebellion.

The Unthanks - 'The Testimony of Patience Kershaw' (2009)

The good old days.

The Durutti Column - 'How Unbelievable' (2009)

That great European elegist Vini Reilly and, movingly, the late Anthony Wilson, lament twelve wasted years.

Suburban Kids with Biblical Names - 'Europa' (2009)

The evocative sense of a continent held together by 'people being terribly nice to each other'.

PJ Harvey - 'Let England Shake' (2011)

Martin Parr-like video; this is the title-track (previewed last year on the Andrew Marr show in front of a transfixed Gordon Brown) from a fascinating, meticulously constructed new album.

Comedy and politics

2011-03-06T14:29:00.004Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/06/jim-davidson-play-rightwing-standups

Interesting article from Stephanie Merritt, spurred by the curious fact that the objectionable, arch-Thatcherite Jim Davidson has penned a stage play called Stand Up and Be Counted, in which he stars as a 'bigoted' stand-up comedian who might just resemble himself; who, don' you just bet, will triumph over his 'politically-correct' competitors. Although this follow-up interview suggests at least recognition of defeat for his previously held values.

This sort of comedy is invariably reactionary and right-wing; this man is Davidson's spiritual mentor:

The Manning/Davidson school is appalling and we must move beyond it definitively. Trevor Griffiths' Comedians was written over thirty years ago (and adapted as a Play for Today, TX: 25.10.1979) and sought to criticise the stale, regressive old-school - whilst maintaining some affection for the legacy of music-hall. Clearly the 'alternative comedians' at least initially acted upon its agitational impulse. The desire to undermine evidently bigoted and regressive views. Of course, many of the alt-comedians might have done well to remember that it wasn't all bad in the past - what about Robb Wilton or Frank Randle? There were interesting, unusual figures who emerged from the working-class tradition of music hall.

Much of the early-1970s 'mainstream' comedy was backward-looking, yet an emodiment of a strongly masculine world, before levels of unemployment began increasing rapidly and before the Equal Pay came into effect. You see this in the leery, inconsequential silliness of the Confessions... films and presumably in the Wheeltappers and Shunter's Social Club. It is not a comedy we can or should return to, and nominally progressive or forward-looking comics should be ashamed of offering it up for us today, with their sheepish pretext of 'irony'. Irony is an altogether subtler thing than merely re-iterating the stunted prejudices of your forefathers, Frankie Boyle and Harry Hill.

Comedy and satire is successful when afflicting the comfortable, not in putting the boot into a media-defined underclass. No doubt many will feel personal antipathy to being in close social contact with 'charvas' who match the Little Britain depiction. There might be role for some social satire, but not the same old tired attacks on what is a broad-brush stereotype.

If Michael McIntyre's comedy is non-political - as Merritt suggests - perhaps this is a reflection of our times. It represents the wilful ignorance of many who have never been taught or do not understand the centrality of politics to everything in our lives.

Better 1970s-era comedies tend to be the sitcoms: Fawlty Towers and Rising Damp satirised right-wing authority figures, afflicting them but with some human sympathy. David Nobbs's The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is a middle-class cry of despair against regimented, predictable institutions - work, marriage, consumerism (in the second-series).

There is a practical reason there cannot be right-wing comedy in the mainstream media - there is not the audience for it, nor the 'talent' within the comedy world, as indeed Misterbaxter argues: 'Actually, the comedy scene in this country is driven by a thriving live circuit - venues of 150-500 capacity putting on mixed bills of three or so stand-ups twice or more a week. [...] The audiences are not by any means Guardian-reader lefties. On the whole, they are young-ish, mostly male, working (although not necessarily working-class), fond of a beer or two, usually out with a crew of mates (or work-mates); not especially racist, sexist or homophobic but open to humour that explores those issues. The BBC simply skims off the top of this thriving subculture; the fact is that right-wing comics simply are not emerging from the live proving-grounds. Perhaps it's because British humour favours the underdog. Rich people laughing at poor people isn't that funny. Comfortable middle-class people laughing at struggling immigrants isn't that funny.'

It also ought to be said that our governments have been economically right-wing in the last 32 years, and generally socially liberal - so a right-wing insurgency will not develop in these circumstances. I anticipate some more satire of rootless liberalism; you see some good satire of this Peep Show and David Mitchell seems to be a rare case of a 1970s-born 'left wing fogey'. However, satirising rootless liberalism is clearly a harder task than assailing neo-liberal fundamentalism, which is more likely to be the tenor of current comedy. This is one of Fry and Laurie's most sublimely funny, telling sketches with clear political commentary:

We have a mainstream media that parrots the neo-liberal, right-wing line, and Merritt neglects to mention that there is comedy that does not fit the left-wing tag. As mentioned in CIF, we do have comic minds who are to the right: Ian Hislop is a Tory, though patently of the One Nation variety, hence his preoccupation with things like the scouting movement. We have, of course, Top Gear, a show far from progressive in what it shows or what its participants say. Many of the alternative comedians turned out to be reactionary - or at least happy to associate with some very reactionary people. Of course, there was also Kenny Everett with his "Let's kick Michael Foot's stick away!" at a Tory Party Conference. There is also the self-righteous, right-wing demogoguery of Noel Edmonds, whose television work ought to count as unintentional comedy rather than light entertainment.

Merritt could do with acknowledging that other forms of comedy are heterogenous and deal with left as well as right wing politics: Armando Iannucci's superb The Thick of It assails both Conservative and (New) Labour politics without compunction. It highlights systemic follies and failures, as well as giving a deeply humane portrait of human absurdities and frailties:

There are also 'comics' such as the Viz, which is even-handed in poking fun at those from all parts of the political spectrum.

Likewise, one couldn't easily pigeonhole the comedy of Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python's Flying Circus or The Day Today other than that there are small-a anarchist and small-l liberal tendencies. The impulse may be slightly more left of centre, simply because right-wing politicians tend to be in power and left-wing politicians are drawn to the right when in power. Comedy has to tackle the powerful, and that is where many so-called left-wing comedians went badly wrong in the Blair era by aligning themselves with Blair; obviously, there were exceptions: Linda Smith, Mark Steel &c.

My favourite current stand-ups are the absurdist Simon Munnery and the provocative, Bill Hicks-influenced Stewart Lee. Lee's more abrasive form of left-wing comedy is especially notable as he is willing to attack cultural relativism:

Lee openly advocates something he believes in (William Blake), whereas the likes of Boyle and other amateur nihilists merely peddle a debased 'irony'. On CIF, Dogstarscribe instructively compares these comedians with their traditionalist predecessors: 'Ken Dodd, who's hugely successful in his format with his audience, is another very conservative comedian. So was Manning - although Frankie Boyle would probably kill for the Manning riff, working a Catholic social club, where he looked at the life size crucifix on the wall and asked 'What did he do? Rob the bandits?' (Which probably says a lot about where Boyle actually sits on the political spectrum - there's nothing socialist or optimistic about cynical nihilism that says we're all shit really - that's the language of the right, not the left).'

Comedy should not seek to play to people's ignorance; if Clarkson does not really believe in the reductive views he spouts he should stop: he does harm and narrows horizons with every cliche he utters. Comedy has to reflect human nature, but also has a responsibility not to make things worse. As Orwell explains in the passage below, comedy will always reflect some of the 'lowness of outlook' that exists in society; this need not necessarily be conservative, homophobic, racist etc, but be rooted in common experience. Perhaps the sitcom went onto take over from the seaside postcards that Orwell is ambivalent - but finally tolerant - about.

'It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.

The comic post cards are one expression of his point of view, a humble one, less important than the music halls, but still worthy of attention. In a society which is still basically Christian they naturally concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if they had any freedom of expression at all, they would probably concentrate on laziness or cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or another. It will not do to condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed low-ness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of ‘higher’ influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm's-eye view of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in hand. Their existence, the fact that people want them, is symptomatically important. Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue. They express only one tendency in the human mind, but a tendency which is always there and will find its own outlet, like water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time'.
(George Orwell, 'The Art of Donald McGill', 1941)

Edgelands and left-wing fogeyism

2011-02-27T00:51:00.002Z

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2011/02/british-problem-auden-moss

During my customary, leisurely read of the New Statesman on Saturday, two particularly interesting book reviews struck me. One might also highlight Rachel Cooke's political reading of South Riding but I am holding off from commenting on that until I have read more of the novel (currently 40 pages in) and watched the 1970s and 2011 TV-adaptations.

Firstly, Ken Worpole's review of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts' Edgelands: Journeys into England's True Wilderness, two poets' enquiry of our 'bastard countryside': 'Like their hero John Clare, they have found their poems in the fields'. Worpole begins by mentioning independent-minded Marxist Raymond Williams' The Country and the City (1973), which explained that stark distinctions and demarcations between country and city were no longer valid. He then mentions a similarly-minded 'ecological polemic', Richard Mabey's The Unofficial Countryside and also the anarchist Colin Ward and sociologist Dennis Hardy's writings about life "on the margins", in areas not simply city or country or suburb: 'where they found plotlands, allotments, caravan sites, camping grounds, small-holdings and children's hiding places, as well as outposts of artisan industry.'

As well as books I plan to read like Roger Deakin's Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain (1999) and Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (2007) and Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places (2007), one is brought to mind of two television programmes. Firstly, Jonathan Meades' 'Severn Heaven', which focused on the improvised dwellings and plotlands along the river Severn near Bewdley - which grew up in response to the Great Depression.

Second is Alan Plater's rather neglected BBC1 Afternoon Play, The Last Will and Testament of Billy Two Sheds (2006), which saw the veteran playwright attempting to bring together disparate dissenters (old socialist trade-unionist, a 1960s hippie, disillusioned but chipper career women &c.) against neo-liberalism. They are brought together by their senseof shared community around their allotments, situated just outside the city where Jodie Whittaker's student studies and works part-time in a burger bar.

She comes into contact with this community as a means of unfinished business: her beloved grandfather kept a shed there, and she re-encounters his ghost (a wonderfully warm James Bolam) whenever she re-enters it. He instills in her a non-conformist love not just of stories and dreaming, but of people and places - the allotment and its varied 'eccentrics'. While the play has its significant flaws and moments of ingrained, 2000s-era BBC blandness - inappropriate, bet-hedging choice to have Mercury Rev playing at the end where Plater clearly would have relished some vintage jazz - it is a distinctive writerly piece that takes its time with ideas, characters and ambience. Watched today, it seems a poignant, stranded refugee of the Play for Today ethos amid a largely barren era of British television drama seeming to be hypnotised by Hollywood.

Worpole's review makes decidedly relevant mention of Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010) and Paul Kingsnorth's Real England: A Battle against the Bland (2008). It is interesting to compare Kingsnorth's intensely felt localism and (Deep, if one considers the whole Dark Mountain project) Ecologism with Hatherley's feeling for European socialist futurism. It may seem difficult to bridge the divide between socialist urbanism and anti-growth small-is-beautiful ecology, but both writers share a concern with urban localism disappearing: they variously document Sheffield and London working-class markets under threat. Perhaps Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music (2010) has a place in this, mentioned approvingly in The Wire's end-of-2010 highlights by another excellent Zero Books author, Nina Power.

Some Green writers, such as Ernest Callenbach, are excellent on encouraging an ecological greening of city life, but also in stressing human interactions, neighbourhood diversity and Enlightenment values. The promotion of open public spaces (and parks), education and public transport can surely unite socialists and ecologists. Callenbach, author of an interesting-sounding ecological utopian novel, Ecotopia (1975), is no Luddite, but promotes a selectivity about technology. He actively encourages city apartment block living as ecologically and socially preferable to the sort of suburban or rustic retreats presumably beloved of many romantic British environmentalists - who tend to share the architectural outlook of Pevsner or Betjeman. I think there has to be a middle-ground on this - an encouragement of enlightened city values first and foremost and a defence of modernist architecture up to a point. It would be folly to say that Newcastle Upon Tyne would be a better city if its Georgian heart had been entirely demolished as per T. Dan Smith's masterplan - too many factors mitigated against this: the innate small-c conservatism of many working-class people, the gradual consumerisation of society during the 1945-79 period of social democracy in Britain.

There has to be unity against capitalist materialism and by definition this has to include over-consumption, which lead to the sort of bland environment documented in Chris Petit's rather haunting recent TV documentary/essay, Content (More4, 2010) - intriguing reflections on the influence of technology and neo-liberalism dominance over the marginal spaces explored also by Patrick Keiller as well as Meades.

The second book review that interested me was Geoffrey Wheatcroft on David McKie's Bright Particular Stars: a Gallery of Glorious British Eccentrics, not so much for the comments on the book itself - fascinating and enjoyable though that sounds - but more for Wheatcroft's assessment of McKie himself. This long-time Guardian writer has published extensively on British politics and more recently on the eccentric and locally distinctive. Wheatcroft places him as perhaps the last of a breed of provincial, non-metropolitan left-wing writers and journalists:

'As his discerning fan club knows, McKie himself is, if not eccentric, salty, sesquipedal and offbeat,but also alittle poignant, as befits one of the last of an endangered species or tendency. It might be called the fogeyism of the left - "Radicals for cricket, railways and real ale" - which once had a billet at the Guardian, whose deputy editor McKie was, and where he later wrote the Elsewhere and Smallweed columns.

There was a time when that paper, too, or rather the Manchester Guardian as was, embodied certain virtues - dissenting, unfashionable, provincial - which are today not so much discounted or despised, as quite vanished. Much more significant than the politics of our media now is their tone: modish, sneering, intensely metropolitan. It is a world that would have disconcerted not only McKie's far-flung villains, but also his heroes.'

One could mention Alan Garner, Alex Glasgow, Jake Thackray, Hunter Davies, Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and - of course - Alan Plater as others not writing from an exclusive, metropolitan mindset. Who do not automatically sneer at most life outside the capital or assume the worst of people; who embody a kind of humane socialism alien to the patronising, would-be left-liberals, the lifestylers of today. Of course, there are exceptions among those born after 1940; those not entirely giving themselves over to the new individualism: Paul McCartney and Michael Palin to an extent; Roy Harper, Robert Wyatt and Kevins Coyne and Ayers for sure. There were of course English libertarians to whom neo-liberalism was absolute anathema, but who had to play the game.

The 1930s born generation were the last to have personal memories of the Great Depression or WW2. I have written previously about Robert Westall, born just a few months earlier in 1929, though no one embodies the particular generation's strain of socialism as well as Alan Plater. Jazz over rock 'n' roll. Social liberalism within the context of strong social institutions and bonds; an interest in people and life rather than the iconography of self-destruction that is the hallmark of the rock 'n' roll cult.

'All I would say is that those whom with some deliberateness I called enemy artists — I don’t just see
them as different, I see them as enemy — endlessly harp on the failure of relationships, the dislocation of communities, the defeat of noble efforts, the end of idealism. This really is the only thing with which they can defend this social order: not that it’s good, but that it’s inevitable.

People aren’t good enough to live in better ways — this is the heartland of their system. They don’t any longer try and say it’s better. They just say, ‘We understand people, we know they’re out for themselves, we know that if they try something good it fails.’ And because of that there is what I called a bourgeois dissident form of art which shows all this with great power . . .

Everyone who has lived in this actual world already has enough doubts, has enough knowledge of weakness
and of how often things fail. It may be some kind of therapy to see it endlessly replayed, but the moment when
people feel the break from the possibility that at least something can move, some-thing can be got right,
something can be felt . . . I think that at the moment, that kind of celebration of possibility is the most profound
need.'

(Raymond Williams, quoted in: BRITTON, Andrew, ed., 1991, Talking Films: The Best of
Guardian Film Lectures, London: Fourth Estate. p.127-9)

'Will Trotter, who runs the drama outfit there, approached me with a proposition. Essentially, it went like this:

"Would you like to write an Afternoon Play?"

"Tell me more."

"This is the fourth series. We get a very good audience share, which is why they're letting us do some more. But there's a down side."

"Tell me more."

"Because it's an afternoon slot, you've got to shoot an hour-long play in eight days with two cameras. And everyone's paid less - but it goes up again if you get a peak-time repeat, and that's beginning to happen."

"Tell me more."

"Again, because it's an afternoon slot, there's no explicit sex, no drugs, and nobody's allowed to say 'shit' or 'fuck'."

"You've just described Jack Rosenthal's career. And mine, too. If we can ban rock'n'roll as well, you're on."

(Alan Plater, 'The Renaissance of the Standalone Drama', The Independent, 17 January 2006, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/the-renaissance-of-the-standalone-drama-523379.html)

Defending the forests

2011-02-26T21:23:00.001Z

My first, and so far only, entry into public political debate:

http://sparksunderland.com/2011/02/02/greens-and-tories-respond-to-forest-plans/
(unsure whether the files are still uploaded)

You can almost tell that the Sunderland Tory councillor interviewed, like so many of his kind, did not really believe in this policy. It was clearly introduced by PR man Cameron in order to be jettisoned and gain facile plaudits - the government is 'listening' to the public et al, ad nauseum.

We now have to be concerned about stopping the wider cuts-agenda; an ideological crusade, rightly identified by coalition cabinet member Vince Cable as 'Maoist' in its unseemly rush to attack the principle of local government and the provision of public services beyond adherence to the profit motive.

For Cameron, Gove and Hilton it is about 'frontloading the pain' in order that we might have tea and crumpets, five years down the line... i.e. Fictitious financial-services derived 'Growth' and tax cuts for Middle England. Grotesque and cynical politics; if we willingly acquiesce to it, we may well even deserve a majority Tory government.

Social and Liberal Democracy and other enigmas

2011-02-26T21:09:00.002Z

This first PPB is well constructed and argued, with Cleese acting as a liberal pedagogue. He personally represents the sort of well-schooled and open-minded professional middle-class person of his generation who was disquieted by Thatcherism's effects on society overall but personally did well out of it. The kind of social-liberal who could never vote Tory, particularly Thatcher-era, but did not rely upon the public services himself.

It could of course be sharper in identifying how Thatcherism was destroying the sort of 'decency' and 'moderation' presumably cherished by liberals, certainly of the David Steel and Jo Grimond ilk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTLR8R9JXz4

This second PPB of course carries a rather grotesque irony in that the Con/LD coalition is now about to carry out more extensive public-services cuts than were ever carried out by Thatcher - one has to recall that Thatcher decimated heavy industry and presided over manufacturing decline but not especially significant cuts to education funding per se.

One wonders whether Brian Eno is as staunch an advocate of the party now as he was during the election campaign - wherein he sanctioned the use of his gloriously evocative Apollo theme in the above broadcast. Eno is perhaps one of the few figures to aesthetically provide a bridge between Europe and America, where Blair so epically failed on a political level. The Apollo album is a merging of European minimalism - think Gavin Bryars and Ligeti - with the wide open spaces of the US: 'Deep Blue Day' and its cavernous, submerged country twang:

It evokes the awe so many young people felt in the Space Age, but also an academic distance and intellectual thoughtfulness that is particularly European. Of course, he had previously evoked an Englishness redolent of Britten, Ballard, MR James and Paul Nash, amongst many others. A Britain that is not Tory or Labour, that we might associate with the venerably irreverant Jonathan Meades or the liberal paternalism of Sir Hugh Greene. A cultural lineage that greens and socialists should be seeking to claim now that it has been abandoned by Clegg, with his attachment to the Carlton Man/Murdoch racket.

The Owen and Steel-led Alliance in 1987 received a marginally smaller percentage of the vote than Clegg's Liberal Democrats in 2010. One doesn't suspect that Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins or David Steel would have countenanced serving alongside Thatcher in the event of a hung parliament; David Owen might have, as he was the proto-Blair/Clegg, with a modicum more social democracy about him but with careerism put before principle. There may have been an arrangement of case-by-case, policy-by-policy support 'in the national interest', but no Coalition. Orange Book free-market ideology has clearly overwhelmed Social Democracy or Beveridge Liberalism within the Liberal Democrat party. Clegg is the willing advocate of a rightwards-shift in political and economic policy.

Poole on the language of 'austerity'

2011-02-01T15:34:00.003Z

'Naturally, though, we can see why a government proposing austerity measures would not want to call them “Give Us More Of Your Money And We’ll Spend It On Fewer Of The Things That You Want Measures”, or, I don’t know, wallet-fucking measures.'

http://unspeak.net/austerity-measures/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Unspeak+%28Unspeak%29

R.I.P. Trish Keenan (1968-2011)

2011-01-15T12:35:00.001Z

...Of the magnificent European and British band Broadcast. Unquestionably one of my favourite bands of the 2000s they produced evocative modernist electropop music that chimed unequivocally with my instincts.
Trish Keenan's voice and plaintive words take this music to a higher level than much more superficial 'hauntological' music.

Ten songs to remember her by:

1: 'Illumination' (2000)

2: 'Distant Call' (2000)

3: 'Come On Let's Go' (2000)

4: 'Unchanging Window' (2000)

5: 'Winter Now' (2003)

6: 'Before We Begin' (2003)

7: 'Ominous Cloud' (2003)

8: 'Black Cat' (2005)

9: 'Michael A Grammar' (2005)

10: "I See, So I See So" (2009) (with the Focus Group)

That television blog, up and running...

2011-01-09T22:56:00.000Z

http://quarmby.blogspot.com/

The colour scheme et al may need slight tweaking, but it's on the go, with a few introductory pieces and a pointer towards a new Adam Curtis venture.

If anyone else is interesting in writing for this new blog, send me a message: mysteryofthefence@googlemail.com