Antwon w/ Steel Tipped Dove – Lay With You

A love song. And a great sample of the Cocteau Twins’ Lorelei.

Rose Tattoo – Rock ‘n’ Roll Outlaw

My mother had Rose Tattoo’s great 1978 debut LP when I was a kid. She was pretty cool, my mum.

This is classic straight ahead, no holds barred, good time, ballsy and bluesy hard rock boogie. Great vocals, great slide guitar and an overall sound that’s a cross between The Faces and the Sex Pistols. Plus you get all that guff about rock ‘n’ roll as salvation and escape.

The lead singer is Angry Anderson. What he was angry about, I don’t really know. It could have been about the fact that he was only four foot seven or something. But then again, judging by the way he spreads his legs on stage to make himself seem even smaller, that may not have been the case. Still: grrr.

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Angel Olsen – Some Things Cosmic

You don’t need anything fancy to accompany a voice like this.

Meat Puppets – Up On The Sun

At the time of this release in 1985 I was besotted with a whole clutch of American bands that made the British scene seem a little dull: Swans, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Minutemen, Big Black, The Replacements, Husker Du, REM and Meat Puppets. Mostly coming from a hardcore or art noise background, they livened rock up a bit and paved the way for the likes of Nirvana to break through (so they could make it all a bit dull and predictable).

The title track from the Meat Puppets third LP, Up On The Sun is a deliciously pretty mix of folk, psychedelia and country. The guitar playing – the rolling lead line, the scratchy rhythm and the interplay with the bass – is its most striking and attractive feature. Slightly mournful, it’s also gloriously uplifting, especially when it all pulls in for the bridge at 1:40.

Above it all are Curt Kirkwood’s vocals which, having played this song to many people over the years, can obviously seem a little jarring: a guitar playing friend of a friend once told me that while the guitar playing was perfect, the vocals just ruined the whole thing – but that’s what you get when you ask a musician. Apparently singing off-key or out of tune, the nonchalance of his singing belies the impassioned and somewhat fantastical nature of the lyrics whose incomprehensibility starts with “A long time ago I turned to myself and said ‘You are my daughter’” and grow ever more cryptic. Rather than distracting from the song, they make it seem all the more intriguing and unique.

Taken as a whole, what we have here is a sublimely sunny piece of psychedelic folk/country rock that, as prosaic as it sounds, can brighten anyone’s day.

Nicolas Collins/Peter Cusack – Baby It’s You

This is what happens when you leave a couple of nine-year-olds alone with your tape player. Or, rather, a couple of avant-garde performance artists/composers.

The great thing about this ‘cover’ of Baby It’s You is that it sounds completely artless and clumsy. There are some lovely and compelling moments (the voice singing over itself and the monkey’s guitar solo) but they mostly seem accidental. You’d probably be just as well kicking your record player down the stairs.

And although at the time it was probably considered (at least by Collins and Cusack themselves) to be a cutting-edge slice of sound manipulation, today it just seems sweetly naive. And a little bit silly.

Aaron Neville – My True Story

What do you do with a classic Doo-Wop song so great that attempting to reinterpret it, let alone improve upon it, would be an utterly foolish and futile thing to do?

You sing it like Aaron Neville does.

Alvin Stardust – Jealous Mind

I was five in 1973. Which was lucky because British pop music at that time started to become fun again. This was partly achieved by it harking back to the simpler, golden age of rock ‘n’ roll. It helped, of course, that some of its practitioners – such as Alvin Stardust and Gary Glitter – had been around the first time. They knew their stuff.

I’m not going to make any great claims for this song except to say that it’s the perfect mix of glam rock flash and rock ‘n’ roll heartache. And despite his vocal and visual poses, Alvin sings it like he means it, especially with lines like: “You could be out with him and I would never know”.

The Clique – Superman

The best-known version of this song is by REM. This, the original, is the best.

There’s something really compelling – and really cool – about Superman. It sounds like the work of a genuine garage band. Thumpingly amateurish, the song stomps along without flair or flourish except for the backing vocals that repeat the verse while the singer’s singing the chorus and the cracking little organ that joins in at 1:50.

The song’s coolness is partly to do with the singer’s sneeringly nasal vocal, including the way he pronounces “happening” as “ha-pen-niinnng”. And despite his claim that he can do anything, he comes across as a very unlikely superhero. Especially as he’s basically using his powers to intimidate and stalk a girl: “If you go a million miles away I’ll track you down girl, trust me when I say I know the pathway to your heart.”

Maybe it’s that aspect which explains Michael Stipe’s lack of enthusiasm for the song and why the lead vocal duties went to Mike Mills for REM’s version.

The Clique, by the way, came from Texas and were essentially one man: Gary Zekley (and session musicians). Superman was the B-side to their low-charting 1969 hit Sugar on Sunday.

Paul Simon – Satin Summer Nights

With it being Valentine’s Day I thought I’d include a song about Salvador Agron, a 1950s Peurto Rican immigrant and New York gang member who, after murdering two innocent teenage boys, was sentenced to death at the age of 16 (later commuted to a life sentence). After being released in 1977, he dedicated the last ten years of his life to warning young people about the dangers of gang membership. Good for him.

That, essentially, is the story of The Capeman, Paul Simon’s ill-fated 1998 Broadway venture. The Songs From The Capeman LP, released before the show, was also a commercial failure but is now mostly regarded as an underrated classic.

Co-written with the poet Derek Walcott, Satin Summer Nights could be a song from West Side Story. It’s all New York rooftops, sweltering evenings, hints of trouble, internal conflict, adjusting to life in a new country and a passionate dialogue between two lovers: Salvador and Bernadette. Beautifully sung by Marc Anthony and Ednita Nazario, the lovers’ passion is intensified by being framed within Simon’s evocative take on doo-wop. So there’s the story itself but, more importantly, there’s also a feeling: the sense of knowing exactly where we are through the calling up of things like West Side Story or The Drifters’ Up On The Roof and even Simon’s own Late In The Evening.

What could have been a Tony and Maria moment, however, is undercut by a third narrator: The Umbrella Man (played/sung by Simon himself). A local gang leader, he pours scorn on Salvador’s amorous pursuits and offers him, instead, a route to masculine fulfillment through violence. It’s a jarring ending to the song which, of course, is there as part of The Capeman’s overall narrative.

But even with that, Satin Summer Nights is a gloriously romantic song. The way Anthony sings “Spanish eyes and soft brown curls/My love, my love/Come to me” could melt even the stoniest of hearts.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Loudon Wainwright III – Motel Blues

I had this song on the New Age of Atlantic sampler LP when I was a kid. At that point it was one of the most emotional things I’d ever heard. Going through Wainwright’s back catalogue years later I was surprised – and a little disappointed – to discover he was much more irreverent than Motel Blues suggested he would be.

In this performance the audience also seems to be taken by surprise – laughing at parts that aren’t meant to be funny. Then again, they can hardly be blamed for being caught off guard, given that Wainwright was well-known for his sardonic humour and novelty bent (as with Dead Skunk, his biggest hit).

Essentially a document of the loneliness of life on the road, what we have here is a musician who’ll say anything to secure a bit of company for the night. He doesn’t care about the girl he’s trying to seduce – or care about her age – but this is where the song’s emotional strength lies: he’s so desperate not to be alone that he’s willing to pretend (to the girl and to himself) that this humdrum sexual encounter could be a grandly romantic drama. We don’t discover whether he succeeds in getting her to stay but we can guess that he does: the line about writing her a song for his next LP is so corny that it could only be delivered by someone who has confidence in its effectiveness.

It’s telling, of course, that he has to work so hard. He obviously hasn’t got the status, or star quality, that should make it easy.

Along with the delicate and lovely guitar playing, it’s Wainwright’s voice that gives the song its depth: yearning, lost, frightened and slightly creepy. It’s a wonder he can stand to do this to himself every single night.

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