Volume 1 appeared just a couple of weeks ago. In case you missed it, the premise is that last year, SWC over at No Badger Required turned 50 years of age. As part of the milestone, he embarked on an epic series for the blog:-
200 songs in order of greatness from 200 to 1. The greatest 200 songs in the world, the only songs you will ever need in your life etc etc.
It began in January and went all the way through to September. I took note of every one of the songs as I intended to, in the fullness of time, make use of SWC’s writing to accompany the occasional mix.
mp3: Various – Blame It On The Badger (Volume 2)
1. Queens of The Stone Age – Feel Good Hit Of The Summer (#82)
When Josh Homme wrote ‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer’ he had apparently just emerged from a three day bender that consisted of him seemingly consuming vast quantities of drugs and drinking his own body weight in alcohol – and considering Homme is about seven foot tall and ripped like a freaking steak that ‘s a lot of alcohol. He claims to have written down the list of drugs that he had taken in case anything bad happened afterwards and from there somewhere he turned that list of drugs into one of greatest ode to narcotics that we’d ever heard.
Lyrically the song is pretty simple, the verses just list the drugs, that’s it.
“Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol” and the chorus does the same thing but adds on a snort of “C-c-c-Cocaine…” just for good measure, like Homme had somehow forgotten the mountain of cocaine he’d consumed in that three day bender. So far so rock cliché and if it was just about the lyrics, we’d all raise an eyebrow and nod our heads and move on to the next rock band and their song about shagging models or something.
But.
What Josh Homme did is he added a gargantuan riff to the whole thing and made that list into a shuddering juggernaut of a tune that crashed and bounced and thumped its way around your eardrums, which made what should have been a stupid list of drugs into something that bordered on the essential and it pretty much turned Queens of the Stone Age into one the most exciting rock bands on the planet.
2. Taylor Swift – Shake It Off (#106)
The last time I compiled a rundown of the greatest songs in the history of the world. Ever. Ms Swift would have been absolutely nowhere near it. I would have been laughed out of several hip and trendy bars for even suggesting it. This time round I find myself questioning not only if I have chosen the right Taylor Swift song but also whether or not it is too low down in the final placings.
You can of course blame my daughter if you like. She pretty much played Taylor Swift non stop during lockdown and in a now legendary ICA that she wrote for JC over at the Vinyl Villain, she described ‘Shake It Off’ as,
“My favourite track in all the world” and then declared that she “wants to be like Taylor Swift when she grews up” and the then declared that “Taylor Swift would make a better PE teacher that Joe Wicks” and gave it 185 out of 10.
None of which I can immediately disagree with. Especially the thing about Joe Wicks, I mean just imagine how good lockdown PE would have been if our children were dancing to Taylor Swift songs instead of being barked at by some chancer from Essex.
It’s not just that my daughter loves (or more likely loved, because her music tastes are very much moving on) Taylor Swift that means she makes this list, I mean it helps, but actually, it (along with the entire ‘1989’ album) has become one of those records, that provides me with memories. For instance, I remember vividly driving along a deserted Exmouth seafront one windy lockdown morning with my daughter in the back and ‘Shake It Off’ playing stupidly loud and both me and her singing along to it with massive grins on our faces.
It’s a ridiculously catchy song, and yeah lyrically, its probably not her strongest moment, but it is pretty close to pop perfection.
3. The Fall – Touch Sensitive (#58)
JC interjects…..there’s no commentary on the actual song as this part of the rundown was in the middle of giving the account of the reactions of a number of deranged individuals when attending the reading of the will of PJ Montgomery-Phipps, an event that takes place in the offices of Quigley, Cramp and Proctor in Exeter. I’ve a feeling SWC’s imagination was running a little on the riotous side…..
“Mr Montgomery Phipps or PJ to his friends had a vast fortune. Most of this was made through his business. People laughed at him when he designed the worlds first orange pip removing device, but it made PJ a multi-millionaire at the young age of 25. By the time he was 40, 270 million people owned the PJMP Pip Remover and from there he had amassed a fortune well over £200 million pounds and now aged 47 he was dead. PJ died after he was attacked by several angry swans on his own private golf course. He had been mithered to death by them after one of his golf balls went a bit rogue and thwacked a baby cygnet right between the eyes. The only thing that was confusing about this tragic incident is which one of the swans was carrying the crowbar that smacked him over the back of the head.”
The deranged individual whose tale accompanies Touch Sensitive was Sir Marmaduke Bubble, who had made his fortune in the crochet business, but who later fell on hard times (down to his last ten million) and so accepted an offer from a TV production company who were making a reality TV show for Channel 5 called ‘Know Your Enema’ in which famous people had different types of enemas live on camera whilst house band the equally hard up Manic Street Preachers, played reworded tracks from their disappointing ‘Know Your Enemy’ album.
Marmaduke had firstly a coffee enema live on television and then a week later, after surviving the public vote, people got to see him have a fluid made out of liquidised apricots and pineapples squirted up his rectum whilst James Dean Bradfield did a bored if not ironic sounding reworking of ‘Ocean Spray’. Marmaduke didn’t survive the public vote a second time, losing out to a grinning Denise Van Outen and a still crying Dean Gaffney….
4. The KLF – 3:AM Eternal (1988 Pure Trance Mix) (#105)
As any music lover will know, about 4000 different versions of ‘3AM Eternal’ exist but for me the definitive version is the acid house pop version that climbed into the UK Top Ten back in 1991 and can be found on their fourth (and final) ‘The White Room’ album – actually come to think of it, why didn’t the Musical Jury vote in their thousands for ‘The White Room’ when we debated Rocks Greatest Fourth Albums?
Sadly, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty remain very pixieish where the streaming of their music is concerned and as such the definitive version that can be found on ‘The White Room’ isn’t that commonly available so I have stuck up the ‘Live at the SSL’ version instead which is taken from the excellent ‘Solid State Logik 1’ compilation that surfaced (and remains streamable) in 2021. Its pretty much the same song to be fair and to be just as fair, it still rocks, admittedly not in the same way as the KLF vs Extreme Noise Terror does though.
5. Belly – Feed The Tree (#194)
‘Feed The Tree’ was the second single to be taken from ‘Star’ the debut album from Tanya Donelly’s post Throwing Muses and Breeders splinter group, Belly. It showcases Donelly’s knack for a magnificent chorus and a delicious pop tune. Helpfully, ‘Feed The Tree’ also came wrapped up in a wonderful riff which entwines itself around the verses and an escalating bass that rattled alongside it. It is one of those songs that you hear once and then hum away to for the rest of the day, the change in vocal style by Donelly just before the chorus kicks in, when she raises her voice slightly and drags out the last word is a thing of beauty.
‘Star’ itself is something of an underplayed gem (and rather like its songs, it sits quietly waiting for the Nearly Perfect Album Picker to erm, pick it). ‘Star’ is one of those albums that seems to have slipped between the cracks as the musical merry-go-round continued. It is an exceptional record, one that is laced with delicious pop tunes.
6. Leftfield – Phat Planet (#150)
‘Phat Planet’ is all sorts of marvellous, that bass that echoes and twists, those beats that frankly bang relentlessly, that distorted vocal that is intended I think to scare the life out of you and that synth that is made to sound like a siren all work together brilliantly.
7. Primal Scream – Come Together (Farley Mix) (#17)
Meet Dave, that’s not his real name, I’ve just changed it. He looks like a Dave, saying that I know some very nice Dave’s, my old man for one, and the bloke who fixed my bike about six months ago, anyway, meet Dave. He is a ‘figure’ in the local village. He sits on (unelected) on the parish council and generally throws his weight (which is fairly considerable) about. He shouts at people, normally females or horse riders and is generally one of the most disliked people in the village. The other day I saw him strolling through the village with his dog (I say dog, it’s not really a dog, more a gerbil with longer legs) and he was wearing a Screamdelica Tshirt. It wasn’t a good one either, more a cheap bootleg one and momentarily every last shred of love and loyalty I had for ‘Screamadelica’ ebbed away from me.
I walked home and told my wife what I’d seen and this is genuinely what she said.
“I saw him in ‘Psychocandy’ T shirt the other day, in fact it was just like the one that you own”.
Which didn’t help – I think (hope) she was kidding, and she is still smarting from ‘Dreamer’ being lower down in the countdown that ‘Just Like Honey’. I smiled at her and said,
“I don’t think I can ever listen to ‘Screamadelica’ ever again. It feels tainted.”
And this is what she said.
“Alexa, play the Farly Mix of ‘Come Together’ by Primal Scream”
Which helped me realise that I’m being ridiculous, obviously, we can’t just dislike bands or things just because somebody we don’t like also likes it. That would be madness and would probably lead to me burning my entire record collection and never eating a Tunnocks tea cake even again and I don’t want to go there.
8. Sultans Of Ping FC – Where’s Me Jumper? (#29)
If the Badger was here then he would take over the writing for this one. He would tell you a lovely story about the time he left a black jumper of his in a pub in downtown Leeds (right next to Crown Court for those who know Leeds). A jumper he called Bob, because it was vaguely reminiscent of one that Robert Smith from the Cure wore. A jumper he loved and cherished, largely because he was a student and poor and the jumper kept him warm in those cold Yorkshire nights (which is all of them).
Anyway, he traipsed back to the pub, hung over from the night before and waited outside the pub for it open and as the landlady went and found his jumper, he sat in the window seat of the pub and cradled a lemonade and then wandered off to get the bus home. At the bus stop he bumped into a girl he knew called Angela – or the Lovely Angela to you and I – who just happened to be waiting for the same bus and as they waited, the small rosebuds of romance sprouted in the most unlikeliest of places, a shabby bus stop that stank of cigarettes, sweat and piss opposite Leeds Crown Court.
OPG had a jumper like Bob. She didn’t call it Bob though, it was just a jumper to her, it was about three sizes too big and it hung off her shoulder where the neck had stretched beyond repair. The sleeves dangled over her arms, so that at times it looked like she didn’t have any hands but mostly she looked like a kid who was playing dress up with their dad’s jumpers. She didn’t leave it in a pub either. In fact, if I remember rightly, and lets say I do, for the sake of this story, I think she lost it at the Great Xpectations Festival in London’s Finsbury Park and she spent the rest of the afternoon singing ‘Where’s Me Jumper’.
She almost definitely didn’t do that.
Two things that you should probably know about ‘Where’s Me Jumper?’, the first thing is that the band have revealed that the song is based on a real life incident. This incident took place in Nottingham at a pub called The Black Orchid. Although according to the band it was a cardigan that was missing and not a jumper. Just image how rubbish a song called ‘Where’s Me Cardy?’ would be and thank your lucky stars that they changed it.
The second thing is that according to my research and a quick look at the rest of the countdown, ‘Where’s Me Jumper?’ finishing 29th on this list makes it the winner of the ‘Rocks Greatest Question’ Contest that wasn’t really being run in the background. Musical Jury members should consider themselves lucky because I was seriously considering that as series.
Two things you should probably know about the Sultans of Ping FC, the first thing is that their name is a play on the 1978 Dire Straits song “Sultans of Swing”, dating from a time when,
“It was sacrilege to say anything whatsoever funny or nasty about Dire Straits“.
The second thing is that according to the Internet and therefore its almost certainly true. The singer of the Sultans (as they are now known) Niall O’Flaherty is a professor of nuclear physics.
9. David Bowie – Ashes to Ashes (#43)
Yes, number 43. A position which some of you will say is ‘ridiculously low’ and you’d probably be right, but here’s my rather lukewarm reasoning. When I was a kid, none of my friends were listening to David Bowie. None of mates walked up to me as I sat eating my lunch and thrust copies of his records into my hands and told me “stop what I was doing and listen to this” and so until about 1993, I largely ignored David Bowie. Maybe Bowie wasn’t so relevant in the mid to late eighties. Who knows. It definitely doesn’t matter.
My dad listened to David Bowie, or rather my dad listened to ‘Low’, and ‘Scary Monsters’ but even then plays were sparse, and his records were in the middle of the cupboard way behind the records of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, the Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds and as I rarely ventured past the Yardbirds, Bowie’s records remained largely untouched.
So it was left to Ted, a lad who I went to college with. Ted, lived and breathed David Bowie and if you ever went to his house or he gave you a lift in his battered out VW Beetle, every second of that would be soundtracked by David Bowie and my education in Bowie largely started and ended with him.
“Start here” he would say and hand me ‘Low’. A week later, when I told him I thought ‘Low’ was great. He’d smile and hand me a pile of CDs and say “try these, in the order that I have given them to you…”
That order was ‘Hunky Dory’, ‘Scary Monsters’, ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and ‘Young Americans’.
10. Neneh Cherry – Buffalo Stance (Sukka Mix) (#89)
JC interjects…..again there’s no commentary on the actual song as this part of the rundown was in the middle of giving the account of the reactions of a number of deranged individuals when attending the reading of the will of PJ Montgomery-Phipps (see above).
The third person to leave the offices of Quigley, Cramp and Proctor when the will of Peter John Montgomery Phipps was supposed to have been read was Brendan J Montgomery. He was another cousin of PJ’s and the only thing we really need to know about Brendan J Montgomery is that aged 19 he changed his name from Colin Montgomery to Brendan J Montgomery in order to make himself sound more middle class.
PJ and Brendan had for the first ten years of their lives been pretty inseparable. They had done everything together, every Saturday they would jump on their bikes and ride off into the woods and return nine hours later, knees muddied from tree climbing and exploring. They played in the same football team, Brendan at right back, and PJ at left back, the pins that held the team together according to their coach. Then suddenly and without any warning about two months before Brendan turned twelve, he was told that he wasn’t allowed to speak to PJ anymore. Within weeks of Brendan’s twelfth birthday, he and his family had moved away from the Devon village that they lived in to the bright lights of Gloucester.
Of course, Brendan asked his family repeatedly why he couldn’t speak to Peter anymore and was told that he was too young to understand and that it was “family stuff” and he should “just leave it”. So, leave it he did, until his eighteenth birthday when spurred on by two pints of Woodpecker Cider, Brendan grabbed his father, Nigel and demanded to know the truth. His dad lit a cigarette and sat Brendan down on their rather unpleasant green sofa.
“It was Christmas, you have to understand, we’d all had a lot to drink. I’d had two spoonfuls of brandy butter son” Nigel started, “we were playing charades and it was my turn and our side of the family was losing, we always lose to the Phipps at charades and, perhaps it was the brandy speaking I don’t know”, sweat had started to form on his forehead and Brendan noticed that his hand had started to shake a little.
Ten maybe eleven years later, PJ was of course something of a household name, having made his millions and become best friends with various members of the then Labour Cabinet. It was through his semi celebrity status that Brendan became reunited with PJ. Brendan turned up at his head office dressed in his finest suit and for a while it was like old times, though of course, instead of riding their bikes into the woods and playing football together, the pair instead had lunch and occasionally went to exclusive nightclubs and danced with models and members of Girls Aloud. Brendan became almost as famous as his rich cousin because of his whirlwind romance with the Danish popstar Whigfield.
Brendan was reportedly distraught when PJ succumbed to the injuries caused by the feral swans but it was Brendan who spoke to the media and requested “privacy and time” in front of the cameras. It was also Brendan that was photographed by the Daily Star comforting the even more distraught Tamara Thruppenny Bit at Gnashers, a small intimate burger bar on Plymouth’s Barbican a couple of weeks after PJs death.
Brendan J Montgomery, was left something by PJ in his will. His solicitors delivered it to him just yesterday. It was a letter, or rather it was a note, written on PJMP Industries Notepaper. It was short and to the point.
“Saint and Greavsie is not and never has been a Television Programme, Colin.”
11. Working Men’s Club – Widow (#177)
It’s probably been mentioned before, but Working Men’s Club were the last band I saw before all those pesky lockdowns kicked in and you were forced to watch gigs that were reliant on your broadband not packing up. That night in a packed Cavern Club they were incredible. They played most of the tracks from their debut album, which is a terrific blend of New Order basslines, icy synths, post punk riffs and in Syd Minsky Sargent they possessed one of the most visibly intense singers since, well Ian Curtis.
Then the pandemic hit and Working Men’s Club did what all decent bands did, they retreated to the studio and the rehearsal spaces and wrote songs about it and about isolation. Which manifested into incredible albums about hope and fear. Which is where ‘Widow’ comes in. It is a playfully warped single with a fuzzy bass, brazenly bouncy electronica and a riff that lifts the song just before Syd’s bruisingly blunt vocals about the effects of the pandemic on society. Just stunning.
12. The Hives – Hate To Say I Told You So (#170)
In the early part of this century, rock music made a little bit of a comeback. I say comeback, it hadn’t really ever gone anywhere and didn’t really need to make a comeback – it just needed to be a bit better, a lot of people blame Britpop and the countless identikit bands that emerged out of that – but in reality, all rock music needed to do was to go back to basics. Enter then, The Hives, armed with a series of sharp suits and an even sharper set of riffs.
If it was solely down to the Hives, it is probable that all rock music would be as straightforwardly basic as ‘Hate to Say I told You So’. You wouldn’t get four minute bass solos if the Hives were in charge, nor would you get intricately crafted soundscapes, serene washes of ambience or for the matter any pop songs where singers get to display their full vocal range. Whether that might be a good thing or a very bad thing, the jury is still very much out, but if they were to use the formula behind ‘Hate To Say I Told You So’ as a base for any arguments then we might just find it hard to disagree with them.
It starts with a repetitive guitar chord. A chord that churns away before exploding into a huge hook and riff. Seconds after the hook kicks you squarely in the jaw, a drum thump that is just as repetitive and just as magnificent joins it and then a bloke who calls himself Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist without a shred of artistic irony being on display, literally yells down a microphone at you. The fact that all that happens within the first 30 seconds of ‘Hate To Say I Told You So’ makes it all the more irresistible.
13. Beastie Boys – Sabotage (#10)
Welcome then, finally to the No Badger Top Ten. The ten songs that I think are the most important pieces of music ever recorded. You will almost certainly disagree with all of them and I truly hope you do, because otherwise the next ten posts will be dull and rather predictable. So after 190 songs that started with a political charged song about police racism by a secretive soul collective and then took us on a proper musical journey and a strange detour to a story about a murdered secretive millionaire (the movie rights to which Netflix have just bought, after a fierce bidding war, for 78 pence) and a made up birthday party, we reach the Top Ten of the No Badger 200.
And the Top Ten starts, as you will have already guessed with The Beastie Boys.
‘Sabotage’ is astonishingly good, that instantly recognisable drum kick that launches the song the chugging guitar and that yell that brings in Ad Rocks manic yell rap. The thing about the Beastie Boys that always stood out was the way that the were happy to combine elements hip hop, rock, metal, punk and literally anything that they wanted to into their music, and nearly always made it accessible and likeable – even their goofy, bratty early work – the exception to this are the parts of ‘Ill Communication’ that veer dangerously close to freestyle jazz jams and some of their ‘instrumental’ sections.
‘Sabotage’ is according to the official documents, a spiteful rant against a producer who kept messing with their sound, which is easy to understand when you hear the sheer venom that comes out of Ad Rock’s mouth. However, in 2020, Ad Rock revealed that actually there was no agenda against the producer (Mario Caldato) but it seemed like a good idea for an angry song.
14. Mazzy Star – Fade Into You (#11)
I first heard ‘Fade Into You’ through one headphone, the other was in the ear of OPG and they were attached to a Walkman. We were on a train and there were five or six other people in that compartment, and we were all heading to London to see a band, Mint 400 at the Highbury Garage, I think. She sat so close to me that I could feel her breath on my neck and I could smell her perfume, which was something from the Body Shop. She sang along to the song, softly and sweetly and she looked me straight in the eye when the line “I think it’s strange you never knew” came along and it felt like we were the only people in the entire world.
Folks, ‘Fade Into You’ is one of those songs.
In the summer of 2005 I went to three weddings in the space of a couple of months. Luckily for the couples involved, I managed to get my hands on a job lot of second hand toasters so they were sorted for presents. Anyway, the first and third of those weddings both had ‘Fade Into You’ as the first song at the after party. Neither couple was at the others wedding and neither as far as I can work out at the time were massive Mazzy Star fans.
Fast forward a few years and another wedding, this one is in Kent and is being held in the rose garden of a big old house on the outskirts of the excellent town of Faversham (fun fact, if you reverse back up the lane where that house is situated, the very next house you will see belongs to Sir Bob of Geldof, although he wasn’t at the wedding. Although I did once stand next to him in the bar of The Elephant pub in Faversham). Anyway, as the bride walked down the aisle – or in this case, cobbled path, ‘Fade Into You’ belted out of the speakers tied haphazardly to each of the wooden posts. The bride grinned as her heels clattered against the cobblestones, and as she tightly gripping her dads arm, the groom sobbed almost uncontrollably as the Best Man handed him a bundle of tissues – there is a back story to all that, but I won’t go there right now, well not really, but suffice to say ‘Fade Into You’ mattered to that couple and the groom will tell you that it helped save his life (although, Nick, if you are reading, you saved your own life).
Because, folks, ‘Fade Into You’ is one of ‘those’ songs. One of those songs where everything contained within it works beautifully. Everything from Hope Sandoval’s vocals, which are all breathy and tinged with country vibes to that gorgeous slide guitar and slightly lonely sounding piano that give the song such structure. All of it is beautiful.
It is the sort of song that thrives on its isolated nature and its general sense of vulnerability and its one that no matter how many times you listen to it, and no matter where you are in life, it will relate to you, whether it be because it was your first dance at a wedding, or it is the song that helped you stay off the drugs or simply because when you were eighteen, or nineteen or fifteen or fifty three, a girl who stole your heart sung a line from it to you as a train you were sitting on pulled into Bromley South train station.
JC/SWC
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 