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

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.

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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

Shelton, T. (2011) ‘RBS revealed to be investing in banned cluster munitions’, World Development Movement, 2^nd June http://www.wdm.org.uk/blog/rbs-revealed-be-investing-banned-cluster-munitions

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

Toynbee, P. (1956) ‘Man and Symbol: review of Portraits from Memory and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell’, The Observer, 16^th September, p.17

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

Ward, C. (1987) ‘Rebels finding their cause’, The Guardian, 12^th October, p.14

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

'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

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

'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'