All Time Top 100

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

David McNamee: On Life and Love Songs.

We had the wonderful David McNamee on the other week – and very good he was too, have a look at his chart on the site. David took the time to make and distribute on the night some lovingly constructed fanzines about his, and some of his friends’, fave tunes. And, being an experienced journo (for Careless Talk, Plan B, NME, Kerrang, The Fly) responded to our standard pre-chart prep questions with wit, eloquence and aplomb. So considered and impassioned was this particular response, it’s been replicated in its entirety here. Please leave us a comment if you would like a copy of David’s limited-edition-very-special-one-off-fanzine.

Is there a record in your All Time Top 100 that reminds you of a lover – past or present?

No, I’ve never been in love. However, the vast majority of songs in my ATT100 I would describe as being, in one form or another, love songs. “Love songs, and, therefore by definition, sad songs,” as Nick Cave said. My biggest unrealised project is to compile and write a book essaying different love songs. I don’t think the transmission is any less powerful or moving for not having experienced the root ingredient – that would be like saying you can’t understand the music of Acid Mothers Temple unless you’ve taken acid! What interests me about the form of the love song is that I think it often has more interesting and involved functions than either providing the soundtrack to wooing, or proffering a simulacrum of the experience. Love is the most ferocious, tangible instinct in the human psyche and falling in and out of love is probably the most dramatic, existential experience any of us can hope to comprehend as mere 9 to 5 mortals. As much as anger can be used in music as a source of extreme energy by dislocating it from a destructive intent, I’d argue that love songs can similarly be used to refocus the human perspective. Anger is an energy, but love is a drug.

In Stop Making Sense, David Byrne sings his most perfect ballad, ‘This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)’, to an electric lamp. For Byrne it was partly an academic game, constructing these abstract, non-sequiteur cut-up poems that had no real genuine or specific meaning and then imbibing them, in his emoting, with all the gushing, liquid delivery of the solid gold Heart FM standards he and Talking Heads were attempting to subvert. The result could be a love song to electricity, or a hymn to homeliness, but the song itself is so moving that what it could represent, whether you’re the singer or the listener, is a small pocket of safety in sound – a talismanic place to hide and heal yourself in. ‘This Must Be The Place’ wraps itself in all the cosiness and conventions of the love song – it’s ecstatic, comforting and wired to the tits on this weird, non-specified desperation or panickiness - or even paranoia - that mimics the early stages of becoming besotted but never surrenders to that obviousness. Instead it disconnects itself from the conventional love song – by not being, directly at least, about love at all – and rides the tension in its lines like a high, getting off on it and collapsing back in on itself, constantly seeking succour.

‘Are You The One (That I’ve Been Waiting For)?’ by Nick Cave and ‘Willing To Wait’ by Sebadoh are the most conventional love songs in my ATT100. They’re very masculine love songs: aggressive, narcissistic, bullying and incredibly handsome. ‘Willing To Wait’ was one of a suite of songs that Lou Barlow wrote, he confessed, to ‘bully’ his wife into getting back to him. There’s a hard edge of male competitiveness to ‘Willing To Wait’. The song urges his ex to reveal to her current beloved the details of what the singer and her have discussed privately, “Tell him everything that you told me,” the song urges, an angel-with-horns on her shoulder. “Tell him that I’m still your friend… and maybe you would like to see me again”. The entire song gestures extravagantly towards the new couple, ‘if I can make something this beautiful then what can he possibly ever give you to compare?’

‘Are You The One’ is Nick Cave doing what he does best, for him love is a suit and he wears it well. In this song though, this love is a suit of armour, and on Cave it radiates a shocking dignity – concealing, almost, the deeply fallible nature of its motives. From Cave’s most honest album, ‘The Boatman’s Call’, ‘Are You The One’ is the key cut – opulent, grand, searching, proud. You can imagine him singing it from the prow of a ship. The album was borne out of a series of poems and letters written to Polly Jean Harvey, a tangled, complicated and beautiful account of ruthlessly attempting to make someone fall in love, and then detailing in the same breath that relationship’s fractured fall-out. Here Cave has nothing to lose but everything - his dignity - and so the song has to be the most elaborate, fantastic vessel of sentiment that he’s ever crafted. The song has a life of its own, and a mission to complete, but it must also be strong enough to protect Cave, to shield him and to sail him back to refuge when the spell wears off. He didn’t have to make those bits of poems and letters into songs and release them, ‘The Boatman’s Call’, after everything had ended – exposing himself. But maybe he needed to. Maybe by then they were for him – both as an ego mirror in which he could better admire himself, and hard, cold comfort where whiskey and memories wouldn’t work.

Some of the other songs in my list are less obvious. ‘Nature’s Hated’ by Orlando doesn’t seem to be directed at anyone more than its author. It’s an accusing and morosely self-pitying song, that, perfectly, unfurls like the soundtrack to the last slow dance on a prom night in heaven: the best and worst night of your life, compounding every unrequited hope you’ve ever had and echoing bravely and sadly throughout you forever. Reading the lyrics between the lines, it could be expressing the loneliness and frustration of someone stranded in homosexuality – cruelly quarantined by nature into a unit of one. On a bigger and more general scale, it’s just epic loneliness made more beautiful and pathetic by charging it with hope and cynicism and casting it, a sullen and wretched child, into the twirling promenade of a thousand similar-sounding, better-looking, better-functioning love songs. Mostly, ‘Nature’s Hated’ is about hating yourself, but needing to love someone else, and feeling that paradox slice at your psyche like knives.

‘Be Mine!’ by Robyn and ‘Heartbeat’ by Annie are brilliant pop records. ‘Be Mine!’ is like a modern, Scandinavian Shangri-La’s – painful and pleading, but sanitised enough to wipe clean away all the decapitations, rape, illicit pregnancy, drag race death and domestic abuse that was implicit in Shadow Morton’s songs. ‘Heartbeat’ is glowing, gorgeous, understated and utterly fallinlovewithable – it feels like a first kiss, it shudders. But still, it’s effervescent with sadness. The song recounts just one night – dancing, a stranger, hearts beating. The words are simple and precise, but hovering in the heart of ‘Heartbeat’ is a void – it feels a bit like Annie isn’t telling us something, and that maybe it could be because the something is bad.

‘Heartbeats’ by The Knife, which was issued around the same time as ‘Heartbeat’, employs a similar thematic scenario. It perfectly summarises the rushing sounds and swoons of every perfect short-lived chemical romance: “Ten days of perfect tunes” starcrossed with “two heartbeats in one night.” It feels like falling in love on drugs, everything here is surface and tantalising texture. It’s utterly artificial. It completely emphasises the artificial, chemical nature of not only drugs, and love songs, but love itself.

Of the only two completely ‘happy’ love songs in the list, we know the context of David Lynch’s ‘Falling’ far too well to be fooled by it, but not nearly well enough to not break down a little each time we hear it. Of The Field Mice’s dance-pop classic ‘Missing The Moon’ I once wrote: “…seven minutes long, gliding and revolving for a small eternity in a swirl of sunset synths. It’s the closet cousin of New Order’s ‘The Perfect Kiss’, sleek, modern and borne upwards on a conveyor belt of machines lest the utter ache of humanity and fallibility that permeates the song cause it to crumble to the ground. Bobby sings almost entirely in sighs as he trades verses with Anne Marie, each gentle cadence of electric guitar underpinning the bold, understated chorus: “I do… I do believe this love’s to stay/I believe that/Love shall remain”. It made you want to fall in love, just so you could fall in love to that backdrop of foreverness. It was a perfect kiss, and it will last forever.”

Despite providing the soundtrack to a popular indie soap opera (the diarised relationship of The Field Mice’s Bob Wratten and Anne Marie Davis), in retrospect I often now find the wide-eyed superhuman hope in Wratten’s songs somewhat superficial. In his songs with The Field Mice, his overriding obsession with love as a concept almost feels like an autistic response to something necessary and abstract.

My obsession with love songs is probably similarly autistic, but I think my engagement with them is genuine. Love songs depict people at their most vulnerable and honest. Love itself can be ugly, but love songs provide a channel for the messy energies in our heads to unravel with grace, and for other heads to take comfort, or a kind of electric, from that. Genuinely, with no academic shirtiness intended, I love all of these songs.

But to answer your question properly, the only song here which even vaguely recalls any experience of my own is Hefner’s ‘The Hymn For The Alcohol’.

posted by: Jim Brackpool @ 2:48 PM

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