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An alternative title for this triumphalist rant could be “When Critics Bite Back…”, but the dangers of sounding like a Sky One documentary cross bred with a doughnut addled Rolling Stone sub-editor are for now, enough to keep me satisfied with my primary path of destruction. Sure it’s a pre-occupation as old as Larry Gogan, Dickie Rock, and B.P. Fallon combined. Tearing meaty (or muttony) chunks out of these puppy love, emotional angst, and ‘light-hearted’ cringefests kind of gives us a sense of self-distinction, as if by having to endure Bobby McFerrin, the orgasmic liberation of just a sweet moment with Lucinda Williams seems as if Jesus, Buddha, and the Great Spirit have all queued up to condemn the Bill Cosby clone to the bleakest depths of hell while Williams takes us on an open top Chevy ride through a Highway 61 sunset. If music is as Mick Jagger suggests, “worth overdoing”, then a similar critical indulgence is a never contrite one, it is more often than not, a duty. Wherever Orson or Natasha Bedingfield lurk, the Caped Crusader of Laura Nyro must strike, seeing that justice is done under the creepy metropolitan skies.

 Elvis Presley – Moonlight Swim

Way Down or Rubberneckin’ should really be getting the butcher’s cleaver straight through their flimsy excuses for hearts, yet there is something useful about songs like these. For all the days of wine and roses, there is the sour milk of November keeping the classics on their toes. Proving that all untouchables have dark nights of the soul, one can also read for The Kinks Trust Your Heart, while Hot Dog must intrinsically haunt Jimmy Page’s bleary-eyed memories of Sweden circa 1978. With Moonlight Swim John Lennon’s swift dismissal of Presley’s conservative duties is right on the money. There is no ironic purpose to this bubble gum popper from the pen of Sylvia Dee and Ben Weisman. The prissy narrative sees the Tupelo boy a little hot under the collar and taking to the joys of a tranquil ocean. Sadly this kitsch with a capital ‘K’ effort from one of his movie soundtracks (that revelation was hardly out of left-field…) didn’t get munched up by sharks on the graveyard shift. Perhaps taste isn’t just confined to the ears after all.

 4 Non Blondes – What’s Up

Admit it. It’s perfectly natural to grease up the chainsaws for quite possibly the nadir of the pre-packaged hypochondriac butt end of Grunge. Those high up on the sociological ladder will argue over the stability of the term ‘universal’. Linda Whateverhernameisandwhocaresanyway, during a twisted eureka moment, made our radios bleed while at the same time provided an epistemological definition of what these boffins had debated for years. With her crusty strung out rant, people universally speaking could finally agree just how pathetic, banal, bitter, and utterly drained of soul this sorry effort of a ‘song’ really was. “And I say yeah, yeah, yeah” Whatever.

Richie Kavanagh – Aon Focal Eile

Kiss tickled our fancies in the 1980s with Let’s Put the X In Sex. Back in dear old Oireland it took us a full decade and an agrarian type from Carlow to ascend to such cunning linguistics. Unfortunately, putting the ‘P’ in poxbottle, was as far down the alphabet as Richard could go before the cows had to be milked. Don’t worry, the goats and sheep can keep you busy… And I mean that in an agricultural manner Richie, so keep your double entendre to yourself in future.

Andreas Johnson – Glorious

One for the trade descriptions act me does think. It’s easy to imagine Johnson namedropping Bono, Creed, Bush et al, as his most powerful muses while anyone who gets stuck beside him on the bus trip home is forced to listen in M.O.R. coated horror. The ‘5 Hits In a Row’ section on (insert crappy radio station of your choice here) has never been so busy since. The Script meanwhile, are kind enough to make sure Johnson’s legacy is preserved. Thanks a bunch boys…

 ABBA – Thank You for the Music

Thank you for the influx of Moccasin wearing exchange students with designs on mastering their first chord sequence via a curfew breaking pint of Guinness more like. Wow! Let the crazy summer night parties roll! ABBA are Sweden’s biggest export alongside the Volvo and nearly as exciting too. “I’m nothing special/in fact/I’m a bit of a bore.” Don’t forget devoid of charisma dork as well.

Alan Jackson - Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)

Trey Parker and Matt Stone sent this beefy buffoon up well and good but they forgot to ask Al to return the compliment. Where were you when the world started turning Alan? “Somewhere between Plymouth Rock and the shooting range with Dick Cheney and Ted Nugent” came the reply.

Aslan – Crazy World

Building site philosophy at its most profound. There must have been something in the water back in the early 1990s.

Enrique Iglesias – Hero

Did he really say “Save my asshole tonight”…? No? Awww, not even worthy of a good sneer now.

Metallica – Nothing Else Matters

Nor did the Hetfield/Ulrich axis of evil after the ultimate overdose of metal mogadon came along in 1991 and had the purists up in arms. Thoughtful intro, leave the devil at the door before entering lyrics, a tempo so staid even Lars will be able to keep in touch, all components of the group’s instant coffee themed entry into the mainstream. “Metallica have sold out!” they shrieked. Selling out wasn’t the problem, giving twatish pony-tailed buskers and sensitive toe dippers ammo for their conversion to the “dark side” constitutes the far greater evil here. The song was possibly the far more genial Dave Mustaine’s subconscious revenge on the band, they’ve certainly struggled to regain their integrity ever since.

Oasis – Stand By Me

Hold Me Up I Think I’m Losing the Will to Give a Flying Fuck Anymore was a working title for this one… Honestly…

Coldplay – The Scientist

The ‘thoughtful’ minor chords of Cwiss Martin’s key tinkling combined with Will Champion’s ‘heartbeat’ drumming make Metallica’s darkest hour seem as joyous as Phil Spector and Berry Gordy’s most beautiful celestial alchemy in comparison. Oh for the love of God, Cwiss, just go and grow and a pair will you?

Shania Twain – Man, I Feel Like a Woman

I bet Emily Davison is glad she jumped in front of that horse after all. Even the Spice Girls had more feminist gumshion than this candy coated charlatan, the fact that her music reeks from the colon of Hades doesn’t really make Mutt Lange’s blow-up doll all that endearing either.

Joshua Kadison – Jessie

Kadison, forgetting that 1986 had in fact ceased to be around 7 years previously, set out to craft such a thoughtful and meaningful mid-tempo ballad that even Joe Strummer’s heir Ronan Keating went on to cite it as a year zero moment in his Rock N’ Roll revolution. Hang on, I’m getting a little confused, well, like I said, there was certainly something odd in the water back in the early 90s. If you haven’t heard alarm bells on merely encountering a song title like Jessie then you perhaps deserve to be as emotionally unstable as me, as well as having Mr. Kadison plonked alongside David Gray and Wobbly Williams in your music collection.

When I think of John Martyn - who sadly passed away on the 29th of January -  I think of friends, spread out across time and space, with whom I’ve listened to his music. It’s natural, because for decades Martyn was an artist to be discovered. He only periodically existed on radio/tv or in the music magazines, but few who heard him could resist introducing him - via a mix tape - to a music-loving friend.

I think of my mate Cathy, who, older than me, took matters into her own hands when seeing my U2 and Black Sabbath dominated tape collection. She introduced me to Martyn’s groundbreaking Solid Air (and, at the same time Van Morrison) with a smile, knowing that it would change things for me for ever.

I think of my friend Ronan, with whom I could never agree over the genius of Doc Watson, but who introduced me to Martyn’s debut London Conversations . A more different record to Solid Air it’s hard to imagine, to the extent that you could never imagine that light folk singer of one was also the gruff, mumbling vocalist with the timbre of a tenor saxophone of the other. Genius either way.

 I think of my friends Brendan and Melissa, who one pleasant afternoon in their small flat near the Guinness brewery ransacked their record collection to find me that spectacular husband/wife album that is Stormbringer. Martyn recorded this gem with his wife Beverley, a formidable talent in her own right. With songs like John the Baptist and the sublime (used advisedly)  Sweet Honesty  the couple managed to capture on vinyl  the joy, excitement, and terrible fear of love.

I think of my mate Mick, with whom I gambled on buying a ticket to see Martyn in Dublin during the mid ’90s. The common wisdom then was that going to see Martyn was a lottery - it could be the greatest or worst gig you’d ever see, depending upon the amount of booze Martyn had consumed.  As it turned out it was a brilliant, funny, warm and inspired performance - the gamble paid off. It was the last gig I ever saw with cheerful and upbeat Mick, who dissapeared shortly after.

There are too many John Martyn songs that have moved me  to list here (though it’s worth giving a special mention to The Man in the Station), but right now I want to go back to the first song of his that I heard - May you Never.

In the context of his career, with it’s constant shifting and searching for new styles - ranging from simple folk through to jazz and blues (with many considering him the pioneering father of trip-hop) - it’s easy to see why Martyn wouldn’t have given this song more consideration. On the complex Solid Air it’s simplicity could fool one into thinking it throw-away, but thankfully it has urgency, momentum, and a hook that is hard to resist.

There are those opening bare-naked lines

May you never lay your head down
without a hand to hold
May you never make your bed
out in the cold

With Martyn’s sweet soulful voice, above a guitar-part that makes you want to learn the instrument properly, these lines manage to be sincere and moving, while in the wrong hands (like, perhaps, those of his sometime colleagues Clapton and Collins) they would risk becoming unbearably sentimental.

And there’s the darkness that was unmistakable in his music, when he moves into his catalogue of wishes

May you never lose your temper
if you get in a bar-room fight
May you never lose your woman
over night

It’s that tension, between light and dark, that makes this so powerful. It looks to the worst, and hopes for the best, all the while taking consolation in rhythm and melody. It’s a beautiful, romantic, pop song that balances on a knife edge.

He’ll be missed.

Imagine yourself in the anonymous looking high-street of any home-counties English town, on a tuesday morning. As you stroll, minding your own business, a man in a bowler hat brushes accidentally into you. The likelihood - in our admittedly contrived scene - is that he’ll akwardly issue an embarassed apology, perhaps going so far as to lift his hat in a well-practiced gesture to indicate he is no buffoon or braggart but rather an upstanding citizen who has unintentionally invaded your ’space’.

Take a hop, skip, and a jump out of your Anglo-Saxon surroundings, walk down the streets of Rome/Athens/Barcelona or Buenos Aires and you can spot the Englishman at a hundred yards - he’s the one wasting his time every two paces with unsearched for ‘excuse me’s .  ’Personal space’ is a very vague concept here, as people hustle and bustle, open to the sights, smells, and sounds around them.

In the 1980s synthesiser is the musical equivalent of the British Empire - dominant, disliked, and dull. Drop the Pilot, by the immensely talented Joan Armatrading, gives a perfect example of why. The song, a distinct departure from her acoustic guitar dominated sound (think of Love and Affection, or Down to Zero), boasts a memorable riff played on the then obligatory synthesiser. Each note is played clearly, all present in their own clearly defined and self-enclosed space. Play it on a guitar and there’s the danger of the notes bumping fluidly into each other - god forbid! 

Let’s be clear - manners and respect for the rules might be an admirable thing for the footpath, but they make your average song sterile.

That misplaced keyboard riff, coupled with the energetically unimaginative chord progression that the <em>actual</em> guitar plays on this song, should be enough to ban it from any of my playlists - and yet, it seems to often make its way back in. Close a door on it, and this brash, self-confident bruiser of a song will climb in the window without apologies (well, the keyboard riff would probably like to say sorry, but is running with the wrong crowd).

And marshalling all this together is Armatrading’s profound and steady voice, ready to sing any amount of foolishness - ‘Animal, Mineral, Spiritual, Physical, I’m the one you need’ - to get your attention focussed on her rich tones (foolish it may be, but ‘Drop the mahout, I’m the easy rider’ is one of the fineset ‘what is she on about?’ moments in pop history).

Three weeks ago I sent a pal an email. Not the kind of drunken rant fest that brings an after effect of head bowing/avoid all eye contact for at least 6 months afterwards. Conceived in an Evangelical state of purity, my friend’s cyber telegram arrived with a link to the lyrics of Idiot Wind and precise instructions to be followed to the letter; these words should be used as bullets against me should I ever again allow myself to become entangled in the fancies of a Praying Mantis.

Not just satisfied with nurturing the greatest album of all time, namely Blood On The Tracks, Bob Dylan wanted to leave something more than a vague idealistic sense of workman like contentment. Shrapnel from a poisoned relationship with his erstwhile in all but legal terms wife Sara, was the bricolage for the whiney voiced one to trigger a perfectly tuned explosion of cold showers across the mid 70s Rock N’ Roll horizon. Part of the deal for Dylan was getting his claws into that most delicately assembled of patterns and tearing it all apart again. Idiot Wind doesn’t wait until the album’s finale like some kind of pre-programmed, spectacle of vengeance, side one (let’s keep it old school, shall we) hasn’t even come to terms with its own shaky devices when Zimmy spits out some of the most toxic rants liable to be permitted before the watershed.

Imagine being in the shoes of Bob and Sara’s kids as mom and pop sacrifice the domestic bliss of New York 1970 for something so dark, that whispering neighbours are given license to indulge in “big ideas, images and distorted facts.” It’s the Christmas party scene where the tension is so bulbous everyone automatically takes on the shame and guilt, where silence burns like napalm and “everythings a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped.”

Watching divorce proceedings on second rate, two to a penny U.S. attorney shows can never be good preparation for Blood On The Tracks, this is where we find out the fate of the broken hearted, no longer content to drag their feet in the halls of mercy, there is a much more potent form of adrenalin rampaging through the veins now. Some will turn to matters so completely cloaked in darkness, it actually makes the more docile among us be thankful for poetic blessings, however vicious they may be. And therein lies the lesson, Idiot Wind is not just the gritty dirt rising in the storm, it’s the electric shocks that come for years afterwards, whenever the heart goes where the head knows better, these silver bullets are Dylan’s greatest weapons of all, and will gun down naive pleasures as quick as he is able to tell us that “I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I’m finally free.” Take the advice then, for even ’simple’ words are liable to lose patience with slow witted lovers…