So, somebody asked me about my Patti Smith top five.  Can you people see just how cruel that could be?  I mean this is Patti Smith!!!  The woman I voted for in the Sounds poll for 1976 as the sexiest woman, man, androgyne or any other kind of gender.  The woman I worshipped when I was a downtrodden, broken up bullied and gender dysphoric fifteen year old.  THAT Patti Smith!

First things first then, thinking of the ones it absolutely hurts to leave out.  Naturally that begins with Piss Factory.  There was no rap in those days, or if there was, I'd never heard of it, and I heard this, poetic, beautiful, ripped still bleeding from the pages of Babel (and that, OMG THAT was the book it really hurt to sell when I was so desperate for food that I walked with a suitcase full of books from Leytonstone to Barking to Rodney's, a shop I knew would give a good price.  Selling that book was like ripping out my own heart). So that's the first, number one I guess.
1 Piss Factory

So then what comes next.  Another beautiful lyrical injection of Patti's words perhaps?  Something iconic?  Oh and yes of course, I remember watching Millennium as Land was shot as a 9 minute music video while Lara Means lost her mind. It's also the reason I bought Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons' book "The Boy Looked at Johnny".  This is a rollercoaster, steam roller, JUGGERNAUT of a song, that rolls over Georgia and leaves smoking ruins in its wake.  Of course I love it.  I hate it too (of course I do, I wish to Gahd I'd written it!) but mostly I love it.
2 Land

Two monsters of songs that bleed into my skull and leave my brain wrung out and bleeding with the pain of such an early comparison with all the shit I'll ever write myself.  Even though this comparison was what brought me closer than anything else I have ever thought of experienced to suicide.  They are just too beautiful.  I am reluctant to include a song that Patti didn't write for herself, even though she took this into the charts and made 1977 more tolerable for me than it might otherwise have been. It was decades before I found out that she had written this with Bruce Springsteen.  In the end though, I couldn't leave this one out even though my heart will bleed to leave out others in its wake.
Desire is Hunger is the fire I breathe
Love is the banquet at which we feed
And this was recorded AFTER she recovered from a broken back.
3 Because the Night

You all know where I grew up by now.  The place that I call Deliverance.  Listen to the lyrics to this one.  Feel the rhythm.  Dance to it and feel the taste of human flesh as it clings to your teeth. Feel the lust that binds you, the sex that makes it feel okay before they rip the flesh from you in sacrifice.
And I laid upon the table, another piece of meat!
4) Summer Cannibals

And now we come to the final place and I know that when I say 'hurts to leave out' this time, I mean it.  I am so torn about this.  There are at least three songs that are holding me hostage and demanding that each of them get the last place.  Well sorry songs, much as I would love to, you can only have one.  And I guess that the big time sensuality of Distant Fingers beats out both the spiritual excess of Dancing Barefoot and the politico-economic clarity of Glitter in their Eyes.
5 Distant Fingers


Hurts to leave out... and this time it's not just a formality.  I Can hardly bring myself to leave out the aforementioned Dancing Barefoot - a glorious song about woman as angel and woman as drug.  And of course Glitter in Their Eyes - a lovely song about the theft represented by international trade agreements.
Yes but that's not all, I ache to leave out: Ask the Angels; A Room In Lebanon; People Have the Power; Privilege (Set Me Free); Tramping; Peanuts; Ain't It Strange; Boy Cried Wolf; Space Monkey; Waiting Underground; Frederick; Kimberley;  I think you get the picture.  It broke me as a child to know that I could never grow up to be her, even if I could find some musicians to work with that even half understood what was in my head.  I hate and love and worship and wish... but that is sharkbait.

Lucinda Williams. My My My!

Here is my Lucinda Williams top five. Why was I not told she was so awesome before?

1. Drunken Angel
Damn this is sensual, and bitter and sweet and loving and hating and wishing. Oh my but it brings tears to the eyes and whisky to the glass. Love it. Love, Love, Love it.

2. Compassion.
Beautifully showcases her voice. The words are so blue: so blue and dark and marvellous. It's also great advice. 'You don't know what wars are going on down there where the Spirit meets the bone.' Simply magnificent.

3. Are You Alright
An emotion that comes and stays too long. The missing is never easy. A few tears don't make it better all of a sudden and the gone stay gone. Yes, she understands that utterly, perfectly and the song is marvellous. Whar's that there hound dog of mine?

4. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Cinematic pictures painted behind our eyes. Apparently this was her big hit. It's more rocky that the other stuff, but you know what, Lucinda Williams does rawk just as well as country. Like it? Love it.

5. Something Wicked This Way Comes
A favourite novel from my preteen years. And she's clearly read it, not copied the story but it's there, the way wickedness tempts. AND the bass is awesome and her voice, again her voice. This is not country whatever they say, this is something else, something older, something greater.

Hurts to leave out "Still I Long for Your Kiss", "Cold Day in Hell", "Sweet Old World", "Passionate Kisses" and if I keep on listening, there will be many more so thank you Kevin P. Burns for introducing me to her. She's lovely.

Bjork (including the Sugarcubes etc.)

My Bjork top five. I have a top million for Bjork, but let's go with some songs that i really really wish more people could hear.

1) 107 Steps - this is not a single, not a record, but it's definitely a song. It's from Lars von Trier's film Dancer in the Dark. Bjork plays Selma, a blind Czechoslovakian woman executed because she refuses to spend on a lawyer, the money she needs for an operation that ensures her son, who has the same hereditary condition, will see. This song is her walk to the gallows. The guard starts the rhythm because when there is music, Selma is not afraid, because nothing truly dreadful ever hapens in musicals unless they are directed by lars von Trier. This rips the tears from my eyes.

2) Deus - From the Sugarcubes album "Life's Too Good". The Sugarcubes were - what can I say, a breath of fresh supercooled Icelandic Air. Deus is beautifully antireligious and shows of Bjork's voice wonderfully. Rock and Disco and a hundred other things and it has Bjork and it is marvellous.

3) Venus as a Boy - This is Jazz, most definitely, and maybe a bit of swing as well. There are interesting percussians and strings doing glissando and her voice, and the words and it's so so delightful. If I did not believe in beauty, I would now because this is beautiful, so beautiful.

4) Army of Me - Listen, this is brilliance. I'm posting the version she did with Skunk Anansie because I love it more than almost anything, and yeah, 'cause I love Skin too.  So Skin AND Bjork doing a song which, as someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder I think of as my song, that is very heaven.

5) Violently Happy - Yes, she makes me so, I feel so, i'm a crazy person, how could I not include this. Oh Bjork. Goddess Bjork. You make me/us so. Yeah

Hurts to leave out anything else she ever did.

Joy Division

Here's my Joy Division Top 5. It would be hard to pick if this wasn't a band I already loved because my computer is playing silly buggers with the sound. Fortunately, that is not the case. I have resisted the temptation to choose five tracks from Closer, not least because this is the first thing of theirs I heard. I remember the shock when Ian Curtis died and people started writing to Sounds claiming he died for our sins. That pissed me off to say the least because it's a cop out, not for Curtis but for those who worshipped from afar and could not accept that their idol was (a) human, and (b) deseperately unhappy.

Anyway, enough of my angry rant. I choose this as number one. I know it's the most popular but I LOVE the way it's used in urban horrorflick "Series 7: The Contenders". Ladies and Gentlemen, Love Will Tear Us Apart.

2) "Colony", Ladies and Gentlemen. "God in His wisdom took you by the hand". Normally I'm a fan of singers and Ian Curtis was marvellous, but listen to the rhythm section on this. To die for. Did I really type that and not delete it? The perfect club mix and it's effortless. Love it Pop Pickers.

3) I've always wanted to write. Everything else came a distant third after writing and suicide and so, In the eighties, every time Interzone (the only market for SF short stories in the UK) sent me a rejection slip, I was tempted by plan B (which involved a belt and a bang). But then I would listen to this and sing it loud and think 'fuck 'em, they ain't worth it'. Interzone is my number 3.

4) After this it gets harder, but this song is another for blowing away the green cloud in my head and silencing the growling of the bears. After all, Ian Curtis clearly put his trust in me. So this song for me does what it says on the tin. It's "A Means To an End".

5) For last place, I lined up the ones it would hurt to leave out and rolled the dice. It came up snakes eyes and so I had no choice but to choose "She's Lost Control".

And the others it hurt to leave out? The Atrocity Exhibition. Isolation. Ceremony. Disorder. Something's Gotta Break. New Dawn Fades. Pretty much anything else. What can I say? I'm a fan.

Nina Simone

The time has come for me to try to narrow down my appreciation of Nina Simone to a top five. That is not easy but, never being one to back down for a challenge unless it involved doing some actual you know, like work, I'll have a go anyway.

1) Nina Simone is not the most accessible of artists and it makes a big difference how you come to her music. My number one is a song that incites anger at the world she grew up in, and delight at her appreciation of the music she brought together from blues and soul to classical. So, my number one. Mississippi Goddam.

2) Nina Simone is known for a whole load of awesome versions (I won't say covers because she always made them her own). Here she takes on Screaming Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You".

3) The greatest thing about her, for all her training and drop-down gorgeousness, is her clear eyes. She sees into the future, the one we're living in now and she sees clearly, so very clearly what is needed. "Revolution" baby, revolution.

4) The next one is an education in itself. It should be illegal for a child to reach adulthood without hearing it. This is 'Roots' in less than five minutes. "Four Women". It should really have been my number one, but it makes me cry too hard to type in the others.

5) And of course, she's so Goddam GOOD at good old-fashioned love songs like this one. "Love or Leave Me."

And all that's left to say is how much it hurt to leave out "My Baby Just Cares For Me" and "Sinnerman" and "Ain't Got No - I Got Life" as well as half a hundred other songs. A hundred, two hundred, a thousand years from now, Nina Simone will be remembered and her songs sung beneath other suns long after Elvis is forgotten.

My Human League Top Five

Here is my Human League top five (only five). In the time when they dominated the charts along with Kraftwerk, I would sit in my room in Cambridge YMCA and try to make sure they heard Travelogue in Trumpington.

My love goes even further back though, to the name itself. Before Dungeons and Dragons was released, I had come up with a roleplay game of my own. It changed a bit but eventually, I adopted rules from the SPI boardgame, Space Marines. The game had several factions for players to be including two separate human factions: The Pan-Human Hegemony and the Human League. Any band picking that name would have my attention.

SO here goes.

1) WXJL Tonight - a thoroughly disturbing track in which a DJ is plugged into the system so that it HURTS when the ratings fall. I hate the idea of popularity bing that important because there is no world in which I could be popular but this song, this song I love.

2) Dreams of Leaving. Repetitive electro-beat with a melodic sound over the top, then chaos for a second before refugee status arises. But of course, being a refugee is not a solution and the second half of the song shows this. Magnificent.

3) Being Boiled - I bought this when it first came out, solely on the basis of a review in Sounds. I didn't even have a record player so I had to wait until I got my own from my mum's house before I could play it. I liked it so much, I've stood on stage and done an acoustic version.

4) Empire State Human - first because I identify with this and second because I've used it as a lullaby for the kids.

5) Sound of the Crowd - This is a representative of the later stuff. I preferreed the old stuff, of course I did, but Dare made the Human League popular, and also paved the way for the magnificent Heaven 17, so I refuse to reject it. This is my favourite example of the later stuff. 

Hurts to leave out "Crow and a Baby", "Don't You Want Me", "Tom Baker", "Austerity".

Hope this works this time

Help

Folks.  I haven't clue one what's going on with the displaying of some of the elements on this blog but if anybody knows how to fix it, I'd be real grateful for a lesson.