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One of the pleasures of being a hypocrite is that Pete Townshend empathises completely. Not that one should go on any particular *ahem*, ”nostalgia” trip, circa 2003. Instead, cast your attention upon “Quadrophenia”, Townshend’s emotional, sexual, primal, whatever you want to call it mindfuck from some 30 years previously.

Laying down a sequence of particular character foibles in honour of the project’s motivational title, Daltrey, the anything but cowardly lion is branded “”A tough guy, a helpless dancer.” Entwistle obviously had a penchant for aligning himself with the meandering emotions of William Wordsworth, while a few floors below him, television sets were sent on recon missions without the assistance of any parachutes, hence he becomes a beaming romantic via the somewhat schizoid pulsations of “Dr.Jimmy”. Keith, dear boy, wasn’t it the most deliciously unsubtle touch, that YOU should carry the bags out, a retreat from usually chucking them across airport runways? Well perhaps not. In a moment of confusion, the idea of  “a bloody lunatic, I’ll even carry your bags,” doesn’t seem to fit into Townshend’s somewhat fractured Modtastic jigsaw puzzle, especially given that a still relatively unknown Sting should occupy the celluloid persona of the great one’s inner metronome, a judgemental slip while profiles were assembled on the dusk embambled road back from Brighton.

Still, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, and Pete’s Jungian observations afford a grand finale that Franc Roddam conjured into a back alley release for Phil Daniels’s Jimmy Cooper, and Leslie Ash as Steph, long before oikish fuckwit Neil Morrissey was demeaning the late 20th Century male with his designs for her booty. Anyway, forgive my digressions. Townshend, “A beggar, a hypocrite, Love Reign o’er me.” is at the mercy of his confessors, what his particular neurosis turns out to be is by common experience, anyone’s guess. But by cleansing himself of his own demons, ones plauged by insomnia, “dry and dusty roads” et al, Quadrophenia’s most epic confession, does not only stand as kind of “equalise before the opposition score” (apologies to Danny Blanchflower) philosophy, what Townshend’s craftiness epitomises in The Who’s bona fide masterpiece, is yet another crossroads, with four signs pointing in the most obscure directions, at once infuriating and fascinating. And from that hypocrite’s confession a redemption is gained, his shallow artillery lays shattered on the rocks below him, his burden is released, that sunset is all his.

Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, put his finger on it when he wrote in his 1950’s poem Advent, ‘We have tested and tasted too much lover, through a chink too wide comes in no wonder’. Experience too much of something, and you become immune to its splendour. So, it should come as no surprise that it’s a Manchester band, rather than some Californian sun-drenched slackers, that majestically captures the spirit of waking to a beautiful day.

There are songs, few and far between, that immediately befriend and impress you. Within the first minute of On a day like this by Elbow it’s apparent that it’s going to be one of those. Nuanced and swelling, from the strings through to the well-judged lyrics of singer Guy Garvey, this is quite simply gorgeous. Which is just as well, because, as a rule, I’m obsessively against rock bands - of any ilk - using string sections. At best they usually just padd out a song, and are a lazy shortcut for the band to stress their importance and profundity to the listener. At worst they conjure up images of panoramic videos. Once you’ve listened to this song once, though, it’s hard to imagine how they could effectively have done it any other way. Perhaps it’s because Garvey’s voice goes so well with the violins, straining in and out of the lines in tandem with the strokes of the strings.

And stroke is the key word for this song, from the movement of the violinists to the lyrically broad brush strokes which create an overall picture by the song’s end. Atmospheric without wandering into Prog-Rock excesses, this is a brilliantly judged marriage between indie-rock simplicity and elegant ambitious song-writing.

The song opens with an introduction which establishes the main melody - no doubt a musicologist would be muttering ‘opening movement’ at this point. Gentle to start, a melodic expression of what it’s like to open one’s eyes, building into a lush and unabashed melody. Then, the indie element creeps in as Garvey switches the emphasis onto the lyrics. The opening line, sung with a gentle mancunian drawl, “Drinking in the morning sun” is beautifully ambiguous. Are we looking at the morning sun through the eyes of a Patrick Kavanagh, or a Liam Gallagher - or a combination of the two (Kavanagh like all penitents was more than capable of indulgence - one night,after a ‘couple’ of pints, he found himself floating in Dublin’s Grand Canal, unsure of whether he’d been pushed by some companions jealous of his genius, or had drunkenly stumbled). The verse continues, pointing us to the latter conclusion:

“Blinking in the morning sun
Shaking off a heavy one
Yeah, heavy like a loaded gun
What made me behave that way
Using words I never say
I can only think it must be love
but anyway, it’s looking like a beautiful day

Let’s turn back to the orchestra, momentarily. Usually, at the risk of repetition, an Orchestra gets dragged in to satisfy the pretensions of some tossers who think themselves above your average songwriter. It’s a production choice, and a bad one at that, which goes some way to explaining the burst of popularity that MTV’s ‘unplugged’ enjoyed at the start of the ’90s. Throughout on a day like this, though, the entire band demonstrate that they have the ears to match their undoubted ability - making the right choices. The orchestration is right. The understated but essential rythm section of Pete Turner and Richard Jupp acting like conductors to channel the song. Garvey, lyrically also makes the right choices - allowing himself to be open to joy (no minor feat for an Englishman), without having to shade it excessively with poetic caveats. The crescendo of the song is perfect

“So throw those curtains wide
A day like this a year would see me right”

Listen to the rest of their superb new album, The seldom seen kid, and it brings home to you exactly how deliberate On a day like this actually is. Songs like An audience with the Pope and Some Riot show that they’re no strangers to lyrical and melodic complexity (not to mention melancholy).

So, when you feel giddy and uplifted at the end of this particular tune, you’ve arrived exactly where these craftsmen intended to bring you. Thank god for the Manchester rain…

The Rolling Stones have, with a few honourable exceptions (sympathy for the devil, and perhaps Street Fighting Man), had very little of consequence to say over their lengthy career. It’s the skill and swing with which they’ve presented their unbearably light offerings that has made them one of the greatest rock n’roll bands of all time, and of this there is no better example than Waiting on a Friend from 1981’s Stones album Tattoo You.

The song was, in actual fact, first developed during the Goat’s Head Soup sessions ten years earlier, while Mick Taylor was still in the band - and his guitar overdubs, while not directly credited, made it through to the later sessions when Producer Chris Kimsey (who had engineered Sticky Fingers, without doubt the Stones’ finest album - forget the orthodox claptrap that values Exile on Main St above all else) resurrected the song. This song, along with the upbeat Start me up were the saving graces on Tattoo You, a cynically conceived album of out-takes put out to justify a lucrative Stones tour.

Amidst all the great Stones moments from the seventies, this song stands out for two different reasons. The first, a sentimental one. The song was initially shelved in the early seventies because there were no lyrics - Jagger then came through with a lyric dedicated to friendship precisely at a time when relationships within the band had broken down. A genuinely touching lyric, valuing frienship over womanising, coupled with a Michael Lindsay-Hogg video shot in New York’s St.Mark’s Place (with Peter Tosh hanging out, for good measure) made an impression with fans everywhere, perhaps overly worried about the band’s future.

The second reason, though, is purely musical and highlights the band’s overlooked key strength as musical directors (though the more cynical might use the word ‘profiteers’ instead). This song is dominated on the surface by the iconography of the Jaggers/Richards relationship, but the best music is provided by guests who - with the notable exception of Taylor - never made it as ‘official stones’. The first thing you hear on the record, after Taylor’s simple and effective guitar intro, is the gentle and soothing piano of Nicky Hopkins, perhaps the most influential session player ever. Hopkins had a long association with the Stones, first playing with them during the sixties, and contributed to albums by the Beatles, The Who, The Kinks, The Small Faces, and the Jeff Beck group amongst others. His piano sets the tone - which is as close as one can aurally get to an early summer’s evening - for the song, setting up a framework for the other musicians to converse.

The other important voice on the song is the heart-stopping saxophone playing by Theodore Walter “Sonny” Rollins, one of the Jazz world’s finest tenor saxophonists, who had come to prominence in the fifties with Miles Davis in the Modern Jazz Quartet. When his voice breaks in to the song at the one minute fifty six second mark the song has well and truly arrived, as if all this waiting was not about Jagger waiting for Richards, or Richards waiting for a dealer (as has been suggested by morbid fans who presume that patience is a virtue exclusively for the narcotically inclined), au contraire, it’s been between a guitar and piano awaiting the warm arrival of Rollins’ sax to make them complete.

There’s enough space in the song to drive an articulated lorry through, but with characteristic ‘vibe’ the stones manage to keep it all hanging together, to make one of their most over-looked songs ever. The stones have rarely been concerned with beauty, but on this track they prove themselves perfectly able to capture a beautiful and tender moment and preserve it for ever. Genius.

I’m a fence-sitter (as painful as that may be, literally and metaphorically) when it comes to the dread argument about Politics in music. Like most things in life, it all depends on how it’s done. When you forget the primacy of the song, whilst evangelising, you’d be better off - and equally effective, which is to say not very - handing out Socialist Worker Party flyers on a wet and windy afternoon in any given Northern city. When you feel obliged, as M.I.A. (the artist otherwise known as Maya Arulpragasam ) has a number of times, to declare your politics over and above the structure of the song you’re singing, then you need to be judged not on aesthetic grounds but according to ideology, and precious few songwriters have ever been accused of effecting social change through their MTV delivered tracts.

But, on the other hand, I take exception to the rule that great tunes need to have a lyrical content equal-to-but-not-exceeding ‘Sugar, honey-honey, you are my candy girl, and you’ve got me wanting you’. It’s a question of starting points - and M.I.A.’s starting point on Boyz is revolutionary, first and foremost in the sounds used. Listen to the opening beats, and tell me you’ve heard something like it before, and I’ll call you a liar. THe closest touchpoint you can have for it is her previous work, on her debut album Arular’s Bucky done gun, but this is a huge leap forward. Before M.I.A. was undoubtedly interesting, now she’s indispensable.

The musical force behind the song is a mash-up of rythms and musical cultures. At the forefront is the urumi drum, a traditional drum played (usually by untouchables) in the Tamil Nadu state of India and in Sri Lanka, from where M.I.A’s family emigrated to London. Mix that in with some Trinidad ‘Soca’ style, and you have a world-beat that’s less to do with the worthy sounds of Manu Chao & co. and more to do with calypso clashing with, well, the clash.

So, on a musical level, this is in itself political - without bragging about it. It calls into question the rythmic and melodic mores that dominate the global music industry - where the only ‘third-world’ nation allowed to break out of ‘world music’ boredom is Jamaica with its reggae and dancehall cultures. In a culture where innovative sampling simply means finding a ’70s tune that had middling success first time around, and rapping over it, M.I.A.’s sampling of musical cultures is art.

The lyrics take on a stock-standard hip-hop call out and turn it on it’s head.

“HOw many boyz are crazy
How many boyz are raw
HOw many boyz are rowdy
How many start a war”

Brash, sexy, and not just a little bit sexist - but, when the oppressed turns on the oppressed and makes them dance at the same time, then, to recall Lenon’s revolution, you can count me in.

Rolling Stone nominated this #9 in their list of the 100 top songs of 2007 - an oversight, considering they had the likes of Rhianna and her vapid bubblegum Umbrella at #3 (not that it’s a bad song, when done right - check out the Biffy Clyro version that’s doing the rounds). Nobody, for this monkey, has done anything as remotely innovative or catchy as this in a long time - or political, for that matter.