Personal Top 10 Songs of the Moment

I know you don’t give a shit (why would you?) but here’s what’s on my personal turntable right now.

Led Zeppelin: Over The Hills and Far Away

For years, I hated Zep and all that whole chest-bearing, lock-shaking guitar wankery scene they stood for in my mind. And yet somehow they’ve really gotten under my skin. We’re actually working on a cover of Black Dog right now, so getting close to the music at that kind of level has changed my thinking. Also, it’s taught me to scream.

Anyway, this track is a blast – and mixes up the pastoral acoustic side of Zep with the killer riffing that made them rock gods.

Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed: Jerry’s Breakdown

Maybe an idiosyncratic choice but I find this impossible to watch without grinning. Not all music should be serious po-faced dreck (are you listening, Coldplay?) and this is just two guys enjoying their own virtuosity in a redneck stylee.

Bananarama: Love in the First Degree

I can’t really defend this record on any other than purely personal grounds. 1987. School disco. First kiss. Still gives me prickles.

Rolling Stone: Moonlight Mile

After Brian Jones quit the Stones, they never really did much in the way of experimentation with their sound. The way-out stuff like 2000 Light Years From Home faded away as the Stones made a country-soul-blues hybrid of their own – a template which they’ve been diligently following for the last 40 years now.

This song swims in those same waters, but with a grandiloquent Eastern string arrangement and some unusual vocal colouring. Can’t beat it.

Missy Elliot: Work It

Just. As. Sexy. As. Hell. Although all the colourful sexual appellations have been lost in this slightly disappointing censored version.

Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here

Never far from my top 10 – and hasn’t been since about 1991

Madness: Michael Caine

I still think Madness are criminally overlooked in the scheme of things. They delivered hit after hit after hit, with lyrics that married sardonic wit with a very English melancholia in the grand tradition of Ray Davies and Morrissey but seem to have become something of a forgotten band. Maybe their comic use of video has conspired against them in this regard and the general unfashionableness of ska as an idiom. Anyway, this lesser-known tune is a corker.

Led Zeppelin: The Rain Song

I know… I know. Two Zeppelin tracks is probably over-weighting them in my estimation, but this is fucking awesome – and showcases an all-too-rarely seen side of the band. “Epic” is an overused word, but this is.

The Kinks: Wonderboy

Again, maybe not their best-known song, but a perfect distillation of their style around the time. Effortless melody and song structure and a timeless lyric that speaks to me on some level I can’t quite consciously articulate.

John Lennon: Instant Karma

Lennon as solo artist was a pretty mixed bag. With his enthusiasm for embracing contrarian stances, he moved through peace activism, avant garde electronica, drugs, New Left radicalism and boozily socialising with Harry Nillson in a whirlwind 3 or 4 years before pulling the plug on his career more or less entirely. During those years, he was consistently entranced by the idea of making music NOW so his fads came straight out on record. So lyrically, you have tosh like Power to the People which is made likeable just because of Lennon’s energy and the directness of the tune (another reaction to the last few years of Beatle navel-gazing). This is maybe the best of the bunch from that era: a straightforward, mean-nothing, rallying cry to be happy. Can’t argue with that.