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It’s hard to choose just one song from Loudon Wainwright’s skeletal, bruised, shocking - and yes, at times extremely funny - 1979 live album a live one. Wainwright is a far more versaitile songwriter than he’s often given credit for, and this collection, perhaps more than any other, shows off his talent in a raw expose.

I brooded over School Days, a beautiful song, full of melody, passion, and sex - not bad for a pigeon-holed folk song! But it took a step-backwards, admitting a certain po-faced seriousness as its limitation. To choose a song by Wainwright, that fails to provoke even a twitch of laughter, seemed somewhat pervers. I smiled and swayed to Whatever happened to us, with it’s bilious narrative (”you said I came to early, but it was you who came too late”) set to the folk-world’s equivalent to the classic rock riff, simple, repetitive, and unforgettable. It, though, declined the honour, aware that its gurned final line - “it’s a whole-lot of crap about a tender trap, what it is is a suicide snare, all I want to do is to forget you, and our lousy love affair” - while fitting, leaves the song leaning to much on smart-arsed ryhme. One song, more than any, stood out - albeit in a ’sitting in the back of the classroom uncomfortably’ kind of way.

Red Guitar is one of the shortest songs on offer on the album, or elsewhere for that matter. It clocks in at just 1.58 seconds (including opening applause), and within two lines has Wainwright’s almost-too-smart signature:

“I used to have a red guitar, till I smashed it drunk one night
I smashed it in the classic form, as Peter Townshend might”

It’s a song that hinges on drama. It opens with an action - and a violent one at that. The old dictum that ‘character determines action - action reveals character’ was never truer, and in less than two minutes an arch storyteller manages to create a complex tragedy.The action, smashing the guitar, is initially jokingly underestimated. It’s treated flippantly, but with savage brevity the act is put into a different context.

“I threw it in the fireplace, and left it there awhile
Kate she started crying, when she saw my sorry smile”

No laughing matter, the narrator and the listener are jarred. With that simple line, we’re suddenly thrown into history - without underlining it, it becomes obvious that this is an action that is characteristic, and so lined with tragedy. 

While the two, presumably, lovers contemplate the burning guitar, we have a moment to consider the weight of the word red. Now, it’s perfectly plausible that the song was provoked by an actual incident involving a red guitar. In that context, there’s little to dwell upon. It could also be simply that to sing ‘red guitar’ instead of ‘guitar’ helps the metre and rythm - true. Instead, we’re going to read too much into things - because a sparse and haunting song like this deserves that, at the very least. The color red takes on a different significance, when paired with the word used to describe the replacement guitar that our narrator buys in New York city at the end of the song. The replacement is a ‘blonde guitar’. Now, pause a moment, and recall the last time you heard a guitar described as ‘blonde’. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the last time was, in all likelihood, never. So, suddenly our red and blonde guitars announce themselves as something else - and what do we most often describe as ‘blonde’? People, or, more often than not, given the patriarchy, women. So with this contorted, but substantiated line-of reasoning, our singer’s destruction of one guitar in favour of another, has a much darker resonance. No wonder Kate cries, and tells him ‘you are a fool, you’ve done a foolish thing’ (a line that, perhaps, has been devalued in recent years thanks to forest gumpery).

Thus far, we’ve paid scant attention to the music, but the bare piano that pauses and plays alongside the narrative makes the song. It’s simplicity incarnate, and yet it poses plenty of questions in and of itself. Wainwright plays the majority of his songs (more than ably) on the guitar. The one song about a guitar is played on a piano - go figure. And yet it provides a narrative coherence - as, in the universe of the song at least, he is guitarless by the end (let’s not give away the ending exactly, though, eh - you have to listen to the song, as part of the deal). The simple melody, that moves between major chords, and - dare we say it - the minor falls, is devastatingly appropriate. They’re small steps, that giddily balance the song between positivity and despair.

End the song, and while you think you’ve been told so much, in reality the question that is begged from the opening lines has remained defiantly unanswered. Why did he smash the red guitar? And, after the traumatic journey in the song, has some kind of self-awareness been reached, or are other ‘guitars’ in for the same treatment?

Add in to the mix Wainwright’s voice, which while lacking the multi-range versatility of his son Rufus, makes up for it tenfold by unfussedly allowing the words to speak, as it were, for themselves, and you have a near-perfect song, from a song-writer who, more-often-than-not during his career has sabotaged himself.

Or maybe it’s just a throw-away ditty, about a guy with a Who fixation.

I had reservations about picking a tune so newly-lodged in my mind for the Monkeys Tunes (great idea, by the way - reviewing single songs). Ever-mindful of the ‘o.k computer fallacy’ (where Q readers voted radiohead’s then latest album as the greatest album of all time), I was more inclined to pick something sure to stand the test of time.

But then again, this is a tune that almost immediately provokes a number of questions that, in themselves, make it worthy for discussion - plus, I’ve a sneaking suspicion that in years to come some version or other of this Zutons song will still, rightly, being played (like O.K Computer).

The main question the song begs relates to authenticity. Prized, almost above all-else, in criteria for evaluating a ’serious’ artist, sincerity or ‘keeping it real’ has become a weighty millstone around the neck of modern rock. You might not be able to sing brilliantly; you might not be able to write a sophisticated bridge; you might not even - god forbid - look the part, but as long as your song is sincere you’re liable to be taken seriously by someone somewhere. Is this a good thing?

The first version of this song that I heard was on the BBC Radio One live Lounge album. A bluesy admirably drawled-out version by the Diva Amy Winehouse. Now, the first time a song sticks in your head, that particular version has an automatic head-start on any other - as I find out to my detriment when it took me years to displace Gary Moore’s pompous bombastic version of the Yardbirds Shapes of things in favour of the immensely superior earlier version by the Jeff Beck group (with the much-maligned Rod Stewart singing his soulful heart out).

So the second version of the song was always going to have a hard time competing, even though it came from the original authors of the song, the Zutons, performing a live version on the self-same BBC album. Not a bad version of the song, with plenty of space, and cracked vocals oozing world-weariness from the Liverpool band. When weighed with the other versions bouncing around, though, this version of the track sounds uncomfortably like a busking band (albeit a good one) making a decent stab at it.

The third version was the actual studio version by the Zutons, which strangely swings more than their live performance - in particular the guitar punctuates the melodic bass line allowing the song to pulse and swell. The band get, in a sense, to reclaim their work.

It’s at this point that we finally get to the version chosen above all others, as this Monkey’s tune - and it’s down predominantly to the role of producer Mark Ronson. From the opening drumbeats, this is a song ramped up into an entirely different and better context. The beats could be straight from The Supremes You can’t hurry love, but this is no pastiche. He takes an earnest indie love song, and through crystal clear ’50s beats and the extraordinary voice of Amy Winehouse (finally channeled into something worthy of it) manages to make something that sounds current, captivating, and just the right side of edgy. The gender confusion of Winehouse singing throws out questions:

“‘Cos since I’ve come on home, well my body’s been a mess
And I’ve missed your ginger hair and the way you like to dress
Won’t you come on over, stop making a fool out of me
Why won’t you come on over Valerie, Valerie.
Valerie, Valerie?”

How do we interpret Winehouse’s voice? Should the song then be read as a call to herself? Should it be taken as a Lesbian love song? Should it be taken as a simple example of brilliant technicians performing a role? We’ll take this song, obviously written by a man for a woman, and get a woman to sing it convincingly with 100% soul, just to show you we can. The singer as performer and actor, and take your authenticity and shove it. ‘ 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of big-producers, who can take a song and wrap it in their trademark sound. If I had a Papal dispensation, I’d round up the Mutt Langes and Timbalands of this world and dispatch them to a console-less pit. Ronson will probably get on my nerves just as much, should he continue to be flavour of the month (though he’s done an admirable job of improving Maximo Park’s apply some pressure, a song I already loved). In the meantime, though, let’s celebrate the crafted elevation of a good song into a brilliant one. Its a credit to all involved.

The artist Robert Luxemburg, in the thought-provoking Steal this film II (freely available through bit-torrent - download it, watch it, pass it on), talks about the absolute fear that record companies and the film industry have that the average consumer will, with the aid of cheap technology, morph themselves into producers. With the aid of filesharing and sampling software, the idea goes, we’ll be able to see that the Emporors really have no clothes on.

Where does that fit in with this brilliant tune from a Dublin vanished-without-a-trace band called  Moneypenny? Well, it’s a song that encapsulates that moment when admiration mutates into inspiration, when a band finds a voice of its own.

The local health authorities can attest to the fact that during the mid-late ’90s Dublin had the highest infestation level of singer-songwriters in the English singing world. Turn a corner in the Hibernian capital, and you were likely to run into an angst-ridden, seldom-washed troubadour busking their latest sparse offering claiming some direct connection with Rimbaud, or Van the Man at least.

Against this backdrop, a blues guitarist/singer Dave Murphy bravely held an open mic night in Dublin’s decidedly dingy International bar. The open mic (or lack of mic, in reality, as the venue was so small it needed no amplification) dragged both the best and the worst songwriters out of the woodwork, and every tuesday night you could hear the sublime (Mundy, at the start of his career), the ridiculous, and a collection of dirges that would have been better off remaining in the bedsit where they were composed. On various occasions, though, a truly special song would shine through, and become week in and week out an anthem. Moneypenny’s ‘hangin out with excellence‘ easily became one thanks to its immediate melody, its lightness of touch, and its limpet-like ability to stick in your mind.

“Hang out with Einstein, he knows it all
Hang out with Jesus, if your name is Paul
Hang out with God himself, he gets it right
Come to the International Bar, on a Tuesday night”

Self-referential without being arrogant or elitist (they cast themselves very much on the ‘hanging out with’ side of the equation); passionate without being earnest, and clever without being either calculating or slick, this is a perfect pop-song (it clocks in at just over 3minutes) which captures the uncertainty and longing of a band’s first faltering footsteps

One of the other reasons I love this song is because it has become that rare thing, a song that stands on its own, uncontaminated with images of the band that produced it. Ask me to tell you something about Moneypenny, aside from the fact that they crafted this genius of a song, and I’ll draw a blank. Blame it on the fact that there’s a richer American band of the same name, perhaps. Search for information on the band, and you’ll be dissapointed. I saw them, at most, two times, and yet the chorus of their song burned in the back of my mind, until, thanks to the charity of file-sharing, I stumbled upon the song and managed to get a copy. Now it’s a regular in any playlist - holding its own in the company of excellence