The Worst 200 Songs, Part VI: #100-81

'The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography'
Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 (Norton Critical Edition, 2007, p.3)


100. Mick Jagger - 'Let's Work'
(1987, #31, TM)



DL: Reminiscent of and from the same period as George Harrison's seminal 1987 cover version 'Got My Mind Set On You', only totally dreadful. Somehow not as hilarious as his current guest spot though.

AN: Thatcherism dressed up as a rootsy work-song. I often ponder over the mystery of how The Stones’ best singles (‘Sympathy for the Devil’, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘Gimme Shelter’) were so gloriously transcendent, when they were clearly such massive twats.

JG: Somewhere in the depths of a dark cellar, Iain Duncan Smith is assessing the potential of this shite as the soundtrack to a workfare advert near you. Scrub that toilet you lazy fuck!

TM: A personal bête noire: a ghastly paean to Thatcherism from the new establishment’s Stakhanovite ‘rebel’. This is a millionaire haranguing the “lazy”: like a triumphalist Tebbit speech set to ‘music’.

99. Templecloud - 'One Big Family'
(2011, #24, TM)



DL: One of many stripped back, 'haunting' and rubbish 2011 cover versions of middling rock records alongside Birdy and Charlene Soraia's efforts, this time flogging KFC. Really, who covers Embrace?!

AN: The remarkable credibility of cabaret in the 21st century: how did it happen? Quite liked the original though. In fact, I’ve just revisited 'All You Good Good People' and can confirm that it’s actually definitely better than completely mediocre. It uses the pentatonic scale, which is the magic one. I hope to speak more about this in future.

JG: This was complete toss when Embrace did it. What’s the point of a new version from a karaoke Winehouse? 

TM: Slushy middlebrow song in symbiotic relationship with KFC advertisement shock! This is more fraudulent family championing in Cameron’s Britain, appropriately harking back to late-90s insipidness.

98. The Thrills - 'Big Sur'
(2003, #17, DL)



DL: Typical of much charting indie-pop of the noughties. Backwards-looking, empty, ironic pretentions of musical authenticity. Oozing with desperate West Coast clichés at every turn. You're not American!

AN: The Thrills are Irish, so I forgive them. Almost everything about Ireland is good. Except Bono obviously. And sectarian violence. And the conservatism of the Catholic church. But I stand by my point.

JG: Right, I see. Shoehorning completely unwarranted Kerouac references into song is the way forward, is it? What’s next? Wipe those Dharma bums? 

TM: Merely another sort of middlebrow; this is in the Top100 ahead of Viva Brother due to its higher chart placing. This embodies dull competency and the line about “monkeyin’ around” is undeniably irritating.

97. Heather Small - 'Proud'
(2000, #16, DL)



DL: Takes me back to 2003 again, and a bleak pub jukebox on very narrow rotation when no one fed it with money. What have you heard today to make you want to rip said jukebox off wall? Insipid bullshit.

AN: Don’t mind this. Black female Londoners scarcely need criticising, even if this isn’t particularly brilliant.

JG: The main issue here (other than its contribution to the commodification and cheapening of the amateur sport of athletics) is with the appalling grammar – “What have you done today to make you feel proud?” Yourself, surely? 

TM: The message of the ‘motivational speaker’ in song form. Emblematic of the wilful self-delusion and ‘feel-good’ cajoling of the management culture that has served us so well in recent years...

96. Tonedef Allstars - 'Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Jurgen Klinsmann?'
(2006, #13, TM)



DL: Have there ever been any good unofficial football records other than 'England's Irie'? As a footballing nation, we really don't do sophistication very well. The musical equivalent of a tabloid spit-roast.

AN: Another football novelty song. Nowt more to say on this meme, I’m afraid.

JG: No. Just fucking no. 

TM: Not just deluded, but odious in its xenophobic idiocy. English ‘pluck’ is embodied by Warden Hodges and Frank Bruno. You think it can’t reach lower depths... and then the “It’s a Wayne’s World Cup!” sequence rears its repugnant head.

95. LeAnn Rimes - 'How Do I Live'
(1998, #7, TM)





DL: Celine Dion-lite late-nineties hit penned by restraining order pop architect Diane Warren. I'm sure it has tugged at the heartstrings of people with no personality the world over. Haven't missed it.

AN: LeAnn Rimes was a poor woman’s Shania Twain, whose ‘I’m Gonna Getcha Good!’ is one of the all-time great pop tunes.

JG: Conservative US music culture is all arse over tit, no? Here’s a good honest clean-living 15 year old girl from the flyover states wondering how she “gets through a night without you”. Oreos and soda pop, presumably.

TM: Rimes’s singing is incontinent in its deployment of melisma: “bab-e-eh-e-eh-y-aiiirrrrrrrr!” “no-o-ow-ow-ow!” Tedious, routine, compliant: monumentally unappealing in every conceivable way.

94. Barenaked Ladies - 'One Week'
(1999, #5, JG)





DL: I will get into trouble, but unfunny, annoyingly smug surprise UK hit that really must have worked better on the other side of the Atlantic. Pre-cursory caution for future rap-rock chart hazards.

AN: Don’t mind this either, largely because of some neat little harmonies in the bridge. As with ‘Teenage Dirtbag’, I feel like this is open about its frivolity, unlike, say, Ed Sheeran, who dresses up frivolous shite as bankable emo-lite pseudo-art.

JG: Not even the late Scatman John (clearly the template for this vapid nonsense) would have allowed a line such as “chicken de China, the Chinese chicken” to slip through quality control.

TM: There is an exasperating conceit in the singer’s delivery; you can practically hear the goatee beard. This is ‘zany’, but sadly not the Marx Brothers. It at least keeps its twaddle within 3 minutes.

93. East 17 - 'Thunder'
(1995, #4, JG)





DL: Particularly low ebb from a band approximately a billionth as treasured as their one-time equals Take That. It's this kind of lineage that leads up seamlessly up to N-Dubz. May sound good on 12 Es.

AN: Yeah this is pretty crap. I live right next to Walthamstow now. Weird.

JG: This song starts: “When the thunder calls you / From the mountain high / Better spread your wings and fly.” It’s all downhill from there.

TM: Pompous piano chords. Egregious Brian Harvey posturing and gesticulating in the video, alongside scantily clad ladies. “When it calls you!” “Whoah-oh-oh!” Plus, a silly backwards-vocal bit. Cretinous.

92. Mike Batt with the New Edition - 'Summertime City'
(1975, #4, RC)





DL: Oh such luck! There's a reason that some of these seventies hits haven't endured. Maybe sentimental and nostalgic for some, but surely vacuous, cheap and vacant to everyone else. I hate the 1970s.

AN: A pretty shockingly cynical co-option of the vitalism of funk and disco that quickly descends into MOR froth after an attention-grabbing intro.

JG: Bloody hell, did this flaccid, uninspired, sub-Mike Love crap really get into the Top 10 when The Beach Boys’ own Surf’s Up album sold about five copies?

TM: Carrot-topped Tory songster produces wimpy, inane ode to the weather, the city and a baby. He was later responsible for a preposterous science-fiction concept album and TV-musical (as brilliantly featured here).
 

91. 50 Cent - 'Candy Shop'
(2005, #4, TM)





DL: Misogynist 50 Cent really is a caricature of an absolute penis isn't he? After Eminem, such a shame to see Dre back something so cliched. Worst euphemisms for blow jobs in the history of music too.

AN: 50 Cent is so, so fucking terrible. For me he will always epitomise the awful mood of 2003, the year casual venality broke: Bush, Blair, Iraq, reaction in the air; The Darkness on the radio, Jonathan Ross on the box, Mohican haircuts, and just around the corner was the next entry …

JG: This is the sound of 50 Cent ordering a young woman to perform sexual favours for him. Hideous.

TM: Can he sound anything other than arrogant and unpleasant? Ah, what great days in 2005: Bush and Blair; the public lapping up sub-prime mortgages, thinking they can live the 50 Cent life. Fuck 'bling'.

90. The Libertines - 'Can't Stand Me Now'
(2004, #2, AN)





DL: Self-mythologising, glorified demo from band who were for the most part pure image over substance. Typifies the gaping universe between their popularity and rather non-existent cultural contribution.

AN: Thankfully I feel like I don’t have to go to any great lengths to convince people why The Libertines were so vastly obnoxious any more. But I would just like to remind people that Pete Doherty once tried to justify his heroin habit by saying that his mum would rather he was a drug addict than a vicar.

JG: I appreciate the autobiographical nature of this song, but I never really got the Libertines. It all sounded like a bit of an East London in-joke to me. Plus, that Carl Barat is an offensively earnest little runt, no?

TM: I wouldn’t put this higher than #108 or #102, but it is bog-standard stocking filler from Hexham’s most improvident son. Just a bit dull, really; sign of the undue sway of folk like The Strokes.

Well facking futile, indeed.

89. Adele - 'Chasing Pavements'
(2008, #2, BB)





DL: Can't say it does much for me, but it doesn't drive a grinding churn into the very pit of my stomach like the opening notes of 'Someone Like You'. Big hit, but now dwarved by omnipresent successors.

AN: Adele is just so boring isn’t she? Even FATM has some vaguely interesting arrangements. Watch barely human Guardian journalists attempting to justify their complete lack of conscience/consciousness here.

JG: The more I think about it, the more this song is basically a reiteration of Shed Seven’s ‘Chasing Rainbows’. At least choose ‘Getting Better’, if you must.

TM: Is she a one-woman boon for UK exports or a selfish objector to the 50p tax rate? Either way, the grain of the voice has always agitated me; this is so fucking tasteful and wearisome: leading nowhere.

As captivating as a crime scene in an ITV cop show

88. True Steppers & Dane Bowers, Ft. Victoria Beckham - 'Out of Your Mind'
(2000, #2, DL)





DL: Seems this was to the underground garage movement what Skrillex and Nero are to dubstep now. Hook-less arsewank that was deservedly beaten to the punch by Groovejet. This tune's still punishing me.

AN: I loved UK garage, hence I have a soft spot even for its more risible commercial incarnations.

JG: Somewhere in the bowels of deepest hell, Satan is assessing the potential of this shite as the permanent soundtrack to an eternity of being hosed down with Bernard Manning’s diarrhea.

TM: Particularly early-noughties pop stylings here. Misapplied drum ‘n’ bass and techno tropes; dismal vocals from ‘Posh’ and Dane: “Ice cream, you’re out of your mind”. Maddening, airbrushed opulence.

87. Oasis - 'All Around the World'
(1998, #1, DL)





DL: Ah, we meet at last. Thankfully I'm only having to endure the 5 minute edit (!) and am saved the 2,000 key changes and extended sense of coked-up, bloated aural violation of its 9-minute plus form.

AN: I am a committed and long-standing Oasis apologist, but my argument hinges on the fact that, post-Morning Glory, they did absolutely nothing of any worth whatsoever. Except for ‘Stay Young’, which is quite good. And ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’ which is a nice Neil Young pastiche (listen to the harmonies on line “alone under stormy skies” about half way through).

JG: The remarkable sound of Oasis ripping off their previous ripping off of Badfinger’s ripping off of The Beatles. 

TM: Epically bloated farrago from their disastrous folly Be Here Now. With every 8/10 review and sycophantic comment, you could sense people’s musical horizons narrowing. “Yeah I know what I know!”

"Yeah I KNOW WHAT I KNOW!" / Aye, all too little...

86. Little Jimmy Osmond - 'Long Haired Lover from Liverpool'
(1972, #1, TM)





DL: Why would you adopt a Scouse persona to snare some paedophiles somewhere? It's again an utter enigma as to why anyone would have not only wanted to listen to, but pay actual good money for this.

AN: Everyone knows this is shit, and why.

JG: It is patently ridiculous for a nine year old child to be singing a song such as this.

TM: What is ‘cute’ about this infernal little tyke singing a post-coital ode to a Scouse hippy? It is about as appealing as the prospect of a nuclear winter spent in Slough within earshot of Lee Newell.

85. Boyzone - 'You Needed Me'
(1999, #1, TM)





DL: It's constantly hard to comprehend that the people who identify with these teeth-grindingly blank records on any level are capable of fully-functioning emotions. Thank God boy bands have evolved!

AN: ‘Love Me for a Reason’: magic. Everything else they ever did: black magick.

JG: Isn’t the point of these slow schmaltzy songs for the singer to admit to a feeling of vulnerable dependence on another? Rather than the other way round?

TM: Hubristic and hyperbolic: you just know that it won’t end happily. Pedestals and human peculiarities don’t mix. He apparently ‘lies’ but is somehow redeemed by her God-like influence.

84. The Killers - 'Mr Brightside'
(2004, #10, DL)





DL: Yet another cheesy noughties indie-disco number totally inferior to the records it alludes to. Very popular this one, possibly more so than anything else so far, so reactions will be interesting.

AN: Hmm. Controversial. The Killers were obviously an utterly pernicious cultural force but it’s difficult to argue with this tune taken in isolation. The bass line in the chorus is particularly nifty.

JG: This song would be improved with the following lyrical amendment: “But it’s just the price I pay / Destiny is calling me/ Open up my eager eyes / Cos I’m Norman Whiteside!” Youngest goal scorer in World Cup history, I’ll have you know.

TM: Another entry damned by ubiquity. Not that it stands up that well to aesthetic criteria in its contrived ‘uplift’ and early-80s pilfering: having ‘influences’ doesn’t make your music interesting.

83. The Woolpackers - 'Hillbilly Rock Hillbilly Roll'
(1996, #7, TM)





DL: The most successful line-dancing hit our shores have ever produced? Or simply: the only one? The thing is, Emmerdale is shit, and God knows I've persisted with it. Stood no chance with awful genre.

AN: I never did try line dancing.

JG: Do you know, I think I preferred 'Old Pop in an Oak' by the Rednex to this. At least that had a (very, very) faint whiff of anarchy about it.

TM: Foreign influence can sometimes embed backwardness, as with this silly Emmerdale spin-off. As Meades argued: ‘Insularity and rural indigence prompt the same emotional landscape wherever they’re found’.

82. Paul Oakenfold, Ft. Shifty Shellshock - 'Starry Eyed Surprise'
(2002, #6, JG)





DL: As you may have gathered, rap-rock makes my skin crawl in a way not much else can, and even when one of its vocalists takes his dubious talents into other waters, the delivery continues to grate.

AN: Not great, but not all that bad.

JG: By the early 2000s, superstar DJs were the Rick Wakemans of their day, living comfortably in the sticks, inviting Crazy Town to appear on their half-arsed songs and pilfering the opening lick from Harry Nilsson’s sublime ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ like right bastards.

TM: The inane flipside of dance music’s utopian dreams. Nilsson’s sampled ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ is stripped of its splendour amid the downright gormlessness. “Seeing stars! Seeing stars! I’m seeing stars!”

81. Curtis Stigers - 'You're All That Matters to Me'
(1992, #6, RC)

DL: Some of these 'love' songs really are soulless. Said it before and I'll say it again: the only romantic love worth penning a song about is that of the dark, sadistic unrequited variety. Total shit.

AN: Crazy midi percussion track. Bizarre.

JG: Jesus, this is boring shit. Have we got any Michael Bolton songs coming up?

TM: Neutered horns, smugly clicking percussion, sanitised ‘gospel’ backing vocals, a waist-coated man earnestly emoting: is anything less liable to connect with me than an early-90s AOR ballad? So humdrum!

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

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.

Social and Liberal Democracy and other enigmas

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.

5. Margaret Atwood - 'In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain' (1987)

Rich, literary in style - attuned to the minutiae of behaviour and characters in a way not quite seen previously in ASSAD. Description instantly draws attention to itself: 'hard fungi with underlines like dewed velvet sprouting from them.' (Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg, Vintage, 1987, p.229)

Atwood's story is about as far from pulp genre fiction as possible; the more immediate thrills offered there - or the cosmic, as in HPL - are disregarded. There is even a dig at Agatha Christie - 'when I am re-reading a bad Agatha Christie dating from the war' Albeit a dig at the middlebrow generic*. This is a piece most characteristic of what is popular with the literary praetorian guard today, and with a substantial body of readers; it is sophisticated, focused on human relations and delicate symbolism.

This story was chosen simply as it was the shortest in the book and I am pushed for time today - I have got lesson plan and associated survey results to compile for a final teaching-observation I am undergoing tomorrow. This is all unfair on it, but that can be the way of things; hence, this piece being relatively cursory. I can certainly say that I enjoyed this, in its quiet way; a hushed, doleful study in the transient: humanity going on to mirror the nature that the narrator's father always fears is ebbing. Some of the stuff on memory is not really that far from Beckett-Pinter territory, but dwells longer on the observational side of things. The father could almost be one of Beckett's tormented old men - Henry in that implacable piece for radio, Embers (1959), for example. His influence on the narrator, his daughter, is quietly unsettling: 'I have lived with this list all my life, and it makes me uncertain about the solidity of the universe.' (p.232) The uncertainty of memories and old age are explored with a clear, unsentimental writer's eye; there is a deadpan, absurdis bathos to the presence of Scottish Life magazines at the end, to preface the carefully uncertain resolution.

Overall, nice to have a low-key piece of deliberately literary writing for a change of pace. The crucial concern is to juxtapose mankind and nature as similarly affected by temporality: 'Birches have only a set time to live, and die while standing.' (p.229)

8/10

* I am willing, as is in the spirit of this exercise, to try out any writer at all and give them a due chance. At present, I cannot say I am rushing to read AC; Sayers, Reg Hill and Sjowall & Wahloo will do for the moment, crime-wise, at least in terms of full-length novels.