Thom writes about love songs.

As with any artist whose work traverses multiple eras and varied collaborations, it’s irresistible to play the game of ‘what might have been’ with the career of David Bowie. What if, instead of working with Queen on ‘Under Pressure’, Bowie had met with the band a year earlier to assist on their epochal soundtrack to Flash Gordon (sessions which proved fractious, as Bowie brought along Brian Eno whose insistence on employing the chance elements afforded by his Oblique Strategies cards clashed with the doggedly scientific methodology favoured by celebrity astrophysicist, Brian May. ‘Ah yes,’ Roger Taylor would smile ruefully in BBC4 music documentaries thirty years after the event, before giving a throaty chuckle: ‘the battle of the Brians…’). Or what if, after joining Placebo for a regrettable cover of ‘20th Century Boy’ at the 1999 Brit Awards, Bowie enlisted the band’s irksome androgene, Brian Molko, to star in Ziggy Played Guitar, a pioneering jukebox musical celebrating the sights and sounds of the glam-rock scene (a show which proved fractious, as Molko consistently missed the cue for his opening rendition of ‘Tiger Feet’ by Mud to instead arrive onstage purposely late and deliver the lie fondly remembered by those who saw Placebo play the 1999 ‘Big Day Out’ at Milton Keynes Bowl: ‘I’m sorry I’m a little late, but I was busy backstage having my cock sucked by Marilyn Manson’). And what if, instead of living into fruitful old-age, Bowie had died of cancer in 2016, and thus not lived long enough to write more than a handful of songs that would ever seem suitable for a blog about love songs? For, as those who write blogs about love songs know, Bowie tracks that appear to be about love usually prove on closer inspection to be not about love at all, because they stubbornly insist on being about space or isolation or Nietzsche instead. So instead of looking for Bowie songs that declare amorous passion or document the experience of heartbreak, let’s turn to Bowie’s copious and loving affirmations of shared isolation, whereby singer reassures listener that singer loves listener and understands their pain (aka, the ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ trope). A smashing example can be found in ‘We Are the Dead’, a track that originated in Bowie’s aborted 1984 musical before ending up on Side 2 of Diamond Dogs (with its title phrase taken from the Orwell book). Gothy and preposterous, ‘We Are the Dead’ finds the singer addressing his partner in a forbidden relationship (‘People will hold us to blame’), set against the backdrop of a nightmarish dystopia (‘Dancing where the dogs decay/Defecating ecstasy’ and the like). The song pitches its emotional state straight at the heart of adolescence, describing the preciousness of a relationship in the midst of a cruel and uncaring world (‘Pressing our love through the night/Knowing it’s right, knowing it’s right’). As a result, the song’s overwrought emotional high-stakes evoke teenage experience as much as they do life under a dictatorial regime and, depending on the inclination of the listener, the line ‘Oh dress yourself, my urchin one, for I hear them on the stairs’ could suggest either the goosestep of forces of totalitarian oppression or, more prosaically, irate parents disapproving of you spending time listening to mordant music with your boyfriend/girlfriend when you should be revising for your GCSEs. The refrain ‘Because of all we’ve seen, because of all we’ve said/We are the dead’ becomes a positive affirmation of the singer and listener’s shared separation from the outside world. Bowie knew better than most how important shared connection through music can be, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that all music that intelligent teenage outsiders have felt an impassioned connection to ever since has owed something to ’70s Bowie. R.I.P.

Van Halen, 'Can't Stop Lovin' You', 1995. One doesn't automatically associate the partying rock colossus Van Halen with the post-punk experimentalists Coil, whose combination of sex magick occultism and dark sonic textures is beloved by subscribers to Wire magazine. Yet in his day job as commercial video director, Peter Christopherson (one half of Coil/one quarter of Throbbing Gristle) directed the promo for Van Halen's 1995 single 'Can't Stop Lovin' You'. Anyone hoping that creative input from this unexpected source might have taken Van Halen in a more challenging and Aleister Crowley-indebted direction will be disappointed to learn that the 'Can't Stop Lovin' You' video consists of people enacting demonstrations of love whilst Van Halen mime the song in the living room of someone's quite nice house (Eddie Van Halen sporting the perfunctory facial hair favoured by classic rock acts in the post-grunge era). It's unlikely that Van Halen were familiar with Coil (even the band's hits like 'The Anal Staircase'), and at first glance the two have little in common. However, parallels may be found via Coil's 1984 release, How to Destroy Angels, famously described on its sleeve as 'Ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy'. The sleevenotes further suggest that, 'for maximum potency', How to  Destroy Angels should only 'be played in circumstances that are exclusively male and/or onanistic in nature'. This advice is also startlingly appropriate for 'Eruption', the very fast guitar solo on Van Halen's self-titled 1978 debut album that delivered Eddie Van Halen's patented two-handed tapping technique to a world of grateful teenage boys. With regards to 'the accumulation of male sexual energy', readers may be interested to note that, whilst Coil's How to Destroy Angels lasts for 17 minutes, Eddie Van Halen's 'Eruption' lasts for less than two. Apropos of self-love, the Wikipedia entry for Van Halen's 'Can't Stop Lovin' You' claims that Sammy Hagar wrote the lyrics to the song 'from his ex-wife’s point of view, believing that she was still in love with him'. This means that, when you watch the above video, every time that Sammy Hagar sings the refrain 'I can't stop loving you', he's imagining that he's his wife singing those words to himself. Like all the best claims on Wikipedia this comes with no citation, but nonetheless it's definitely true.

It's a truth universally acknowledged that the best way of assessing a work of art's success is to measure the extent to which its audience is left thinking, 'Ooh, I wonder what happened next'. This ancient and noble impulse received a boon in recent years, as the invention of online fan fiction allowed legions of ambitious creatives to produce spin-off stories from their favourite bits of culture (like the woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey, and the man who got arrested for his rape fantasy about Girls Aloud (Regina v Walker, 2009)). Outside of the internet, spin-offs from beloved cultural artifacts can be hard to come by, with devotees of Jane Austen patiently waiting 196 years to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Happily, fans of Lesley Gore's imperishable 'It's My Party' only had to wait two months for the song's mean-spirited follow-up single, 'Judy's Turn to Cry'. Readers no doubt remember the regrettable events documented in the original song: Johnny vanishes from Lesley Gore's birthday party, only to return with Judy (now wearing Johnny's ring). 'Judy's Turn to Cry' updates the action of 'It's my Party', as Lesley Gore reveals Judy's karmic comeuppance: 'One night I saw them kissing at a party/So I kissed some other guy/Johnny jumped up and he hit him/'Cause he still loved me, that's why'. This is the kind of courtship ritual that used to be popular in the days before anyone was familiar with the word 'problematic'. As Lesley Gore sings the title refrain of 'Judy's Turn to Cry', she intriguingly and encouragingly suggests that there are a finite number of tears in the world, and that the object of living is to pass your unhappiness to someone else. 'Man hands on misery to man', indeed. RIP Lesley Gore.

‘I’ve had relations, with girls from many nations/I’ve made passes, at women of all classes’. Billy Bragg’s ‘Sexuality’ (not a phrase I’ve ever typed before) begins in remarkably similar fashion to the songs of Bon Scott-era AC/DC. Lest the listener be wrongsided into thinking that in 1991 Billy Bragg abandoned progressive politics to dust off a lost outtake from Let There Be Rock, the next lines of Billy Bragg’s ‘Sexuality’ don’t sound like AC/DC at all: ‘And just because you’re gay, I won’t turn you away/If you stick around, I’m sure that we can find some common ground’. Because Billy Bragg’s one of those left-wing people that they had in the 1980s he’s confident that, if only given enough time, he’ll find commonality with even the most intransigent homosexual. Hooray! (To clarify, I’m not suggesting that if you were gay then AC/DC would turn you away, but I did once read a story about Bon Scott punching a man from the record company who propositioned him in the toilet). Though a jubilant celebration of freedom of choice, Billy Bragg’s ‘Sexuality’ becomes hectoring at times, not least when Billy badgers his listeners to ‘Stop playing with yourselves!’ (raising the intriguing possibility that Billy Bragg suspects his fans use his music as their onanistic soundtrack of choice). Mainly though, Billy Bragg's 'Sexuality' is just harmless fun. The song's sprightly video was directed by TV funnyman Phill Jupitus, who I once saw switch on the Christmas lights. Another time I saw Phill Jupitus was when I went to a Billy Bragg gig in Bradford and, for the encore, Phill Jupitus was brought onstage on crutches to sing his comedic reworking of Billy Bragg’s ‘Sexuality’, entitled ‘Bestiality’ (did I mention that Phill Jupitus was on crutches at the time?). Despite Billy Bragg’s laudable attempts to further popular debate on sexual politics and the future of the left, now whenever I contemplate human sexuality and/or the death of the welfare state, all I can think about is Phill Jupitus’ ‘Bestiality’.

In 1964, 216 American servicemen were killed in Vietnam. Understandably no-one cared, because that same year five times as many young Americans died on home-soil from what soon became identified as a drag-race epidemic. Cultural theorists posited that, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, America’s youth had become hell-bent on an auto-based death trip. As a result, by summer 1964 every American town (no matter how small) boasted at least one Dead Man’s Curve. With increasing drag fatality rates causing grave concerns for the country’s future, President Lyndon B. Johnson called an emergency summit to discuss how to tackle this cancerous growth on the face of Uncle Sam. Johnson’s advisors unanimously agreed that the best way to communicate an anti-drag message to the youth of America was through the medium of surf. So it was that the wife of a high-ranking government official was recruited to record ‘Don’t Drag No More’ (a Beach Boys knock-off penned on the desk of the Oval Office) under the pseudonym ‘Susan Lynne’. Johnson’s government were taking a gamble that America would take heed of Susan’s words, as she implores her lover, ‘Baby, please hear what I say/Won’t you put your keys away for me?’ Sadly few people heard this message, because the single flopped and drag-racing teenagers continued to die in their droves. As a result of the fact that ‘Don’t Drag No More’ failed to climb the hit parade, America elected to pursue the war in Vietnam (the government having calculated that the more Americans they sent to the jungle, the fewer Americans would be able to drag-race back at home). The plan worked: over the next ten years, a mere 57,735 Americans were killed in Vietnam (less than half the number of estimated deaths that would have occurred through drag-racing had America left the war in 1964). Though the true identity of Susan Lynne remains a closely guarded secret, every time you pass a busker playing the theme from The Deer Hunter remember to thank Susan’s failed single for the continuation of the Southeast Asian conflict we all know and love so well.

Taylor Swift used to be a country singer, like Blaze Foley or Townes Van Zandt, but now she’s good instead; now she’s an actual pop star. This means that in the space of the last two months her latest single, ‘Blank Space’, has had three hundred and twenty-seven million YouTube views. To put this in perspective, I installed Google Analytics on Thom Writes About Love Songs to survey my own number of hits over the same period of time. This allows me to confirm that ‘Blank Space’ by Taylor Swift is two million, seven hundred and two thousand, four hundred and seventy-nine times more popular than this blog. Therefore, Taylor Swift is two million, seven hundred and two thousand, four hundred and seventy-nine times more better than me. This is unsurprising, because I keep a list of all the things I've ever done, and ‘Blank Space’ by Taylor Space is at least two million, seven hundred and two thousand, four hundred and seventy-nine times better than any of them. For the half-empty-glassed among us, it’s refreshing to hear a rumination on a nascent relationship that confidently promises, ‘Wait, the worst is yet to come’. Throughout her emotional maelstrom, Taylor Swift invests 'Blank Space' with a disarming conversational immediacy and breadth of expression that effortlessly runs the gamut of all seven known female emotions (Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, Dopey, and Zeppo). Do boys only want love if it’s torture? Answers on a mascara-stained postcard, please.

Wait, what’s this? A post on Thom Write About Love Songs about a song by Bon Jovi called ‘This Ain’t A Love Song’? Surely, Thom Writes About Love Songs entails Thom writing about songs that are nothing other than love songs? Surely, given that ‘This Ain’t A Love Song’ manifestly ain’t a love song (as evidenced by its title, which announces it’s not a love song), then the one song that could never be written about on Thom Writes About Love Songs must be ‘This Ain’t A Love Song’ by Bon Jovi (along with ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ by Public Image Ltd., and ‘This Ain’t A Love Song’ by Scouting For Girls). Yet, get beyond the title and listen to the chorus. and you may begin to ask yourself, do my ears deceive me? Though ‘This Ain’t A Love Song’ insists it ain’t a love song, nonetheless this song sounds suspiciously like a love song. Surely, this is impossible, because a song can’t be a love song and simultaneously not a love song. And this leads us to ask ourselves: is Jon Bon Jovi evoking Schrödinger’s Cat? Like Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, is Jon Bon Jovi singing ‘This Ain’t A Love Song’ in an attempt to disprove the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics (which states that a particle exists in all states at once until it is observed) by showing the impossibility of a song being both a love song and not a love song at once? And if so, why is Jon Bon Jovi so interested in physics? Gentle reader, worry no more: a closer listen to ‘This Ain’t A Love Song’ reveals no cause to imagine that Jon Bon Jovi even knows how to spell ‘physics’ without having to pause for a moment or two first. Because, for all its protestations, ‘This Ain’t A Love Song’ actually ain’t not a love song. To wit, the chorus: “If the love that I’ve got for you’s gone/If the river I cried ain’t that long/Then I’m wrong, yeah, I’m wrong/This ain’t a love song’. Jon Bon Jovi is using the dramatic technique of irony, to prove to his listener the following truths; a. the love that Jon Bon Jovi has isn’t gone; b. the river that Jon Bon Jovi cried is that long; c. Jon Bon Jovi isn’t wrong, no, he isn’t wrong, and; d. this is a (rotten) love song.

‘Let’s dance to Joy Division/And celebrate the irony’: so sang indie motorway-pile-up The Wombats in 2007 (not that anyone had asked them to). Growing up in a small town afforded me many opportunities to celebrate irony, but few chances to dance to Joy Division outside of my room. This was until 2004, when a shift in the cultural topography saw a new crowd of 16 year-olds infiltrate the Tuesday night rock night. Many of this fresh breed had haircuts, most had MySpace profiles, and all had bodies that were the same size as their clothes. They were the first generation to have spent their teenage years with ready access to the internet, and it showed. The younger crowd’s intuitive understanding of musical fashion led to a heady atmosphere in which the possibilities of a Tuesday night rock night became radically redefined. Songs by The Killers and The Strokes began to be slipped into the playlist, in place of ‘Painkiller’ by Judas Priest and every song from side one of Appetite for Destruction. It was in this torrid climate that one night the sticky walls began to reverberate to the opening chords of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. Did my ears deceive me or was this the sound of revolution? Had post-punk finally broke? Would future Tuesday night rock nights spurn the live version of ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’ for the Peel Session take of ‘The Fish Needs a Bike’ by Blurt? As the synthesizer refrain of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ rang around the room, the DJ reached for his microphone (the DJ had a microphone), raised it to his lips, and slowly intoned, ‘Ian Curtis… killed himself because he realised that his band were shit.’ He lowered the microphone gleefully, and order was restored. The 16 year-olds got A-Levels and went to university. Here, they learned that not all DJs carried microphones to heckle the music that they played (see also, ‘In Bloom’ by Nirvana: ‘Some say tortured genius… I say selfish coward…’). No-one danced to Joy Division ever again.

Voila! Now your songs are sexier than all get-out, though still probably not on a par with ‘Since I Had You’ where Gwenda Hambrick contributes wordless vocalisations that alternately suggest orgasm, mourning, and childbirth. I can’t claim to be an expert on women’s sexuality, like Hugh Hefner or Lars von Trier, so I’m at a loss to know what particular actions would elicit Gwenda’s more enthusiastic responses (certainly the sound she makes at 2.28 suggests a particularly sensitive spot has been reached (and, fact alert for biology fans: scientists call these areas ‘erogenous zones’)). If you’re a teenage reader tired of mephedrone and sexting, you may want to live dangerously by adding the album I Want You to your i-tunes playlist and putting your i-pod through the car stereo on shuffle the next time that you go on a long family journey. The fear of the intense embarrassment that would ensue if ‘Since I Had You’ started randomly playing in the company of a parent will liven up even the most tedious of traffic jams. Having once had a browse of the Wikipedia entry for the theory of relativity, I know that if you engage in sexual activity whilst listening to ‘Since I Had You’ and mimic the song’s erotic sounds exactly, then you (and your partner if you have one) will travel in time and/or quantum leap. Enjoy yourselves readers, and stay safe.

For anyone who ever listened to Led Zeppelin II and found the fruit-based double entendre of ‘The Lemon Song’ impenetrably oblique, here come Warrant and their 1990 smash ‘Women’s Genitals’ (aka, ‘Cherry Pie’).  The song’s fixation with sweet-tasting foodstuffs takes the filthy lyrical heritage of the blues (‘I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None Of My Jelly-Roll’, ‘I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl’, etc.), and drags it by the poodle-locks into the hair metal ’80s (sorry, the hair metal ’90s). Whilst the benign surface level of ‘Cherry Pie’ gleefully extols the virtues of women’s genitals, it’s easy to miss the song’s hidden subtext, which gleefully extols the virtues of women’s genitals. Should anyone remain pathologically slow on the uptake, the song’s video helps out, with alarming imagery that includes a visual pun with a firehouse that’s more extreme than all of the pornography on the whole of the internet. The lyrics to ‘Cherry Pie’ were written down (which itself seems surprising) on a pizza box later bought by the Hard Rock Cafe in Florida (by which I mean the Hard Rock Cafe in Destin, Florida, not the Hard Rock Cafe in Orlando, Florida where you might have actually been). As of June 2014, the Hard Rock Cafe have closed their Destin branch, thus scuppering my long-held dream of filming a stoner road movie about a group of dissatisfied middle-aged men reliving the halcyon summer of 1990 by driving to Destin to see the ‘Cherry Pie’ pizza box (whilst hoping to sample female genitals and/or cherry pie along the way). Sadly, sexism is over now, so songs like ‘Cherry Pie’ don’t get written so much.

When Dexys Midnight Runners emerged in 1980, it was as self-styled ambassadors for the ‘new soul vision’ (precise details of which remained a little vague). The band’s uniform clothing and NME manifestos helped disguise the fact that said ‘soul vision’ was in fact a Trojan Horse, enabling the band to sneak into the charts with their one and only aim: to inflict singer’s Kevin Rowland’s varied neuroses on the listening public. Dexys’ crowning achievement, ‘This Is What She’s Like’ finds Kevin struggling to describe the woman he’s hung-up on, whilst repeatedly getting sidetracked by his compulsive need to get things off his chest. So grandiose is the result that the song comes in three distinct movements. The first begins at 0.00 and is called ‘Amateur Dramatics Group’s Cack-Handed Improv’. Opening with the sound of Northern men speaking aggressively, the song begins like an especially forgettable installment of Play For Today. Listen out for Kevin sticking doggedly to the key improvisational rule of asking lots of questions when you can’t think of anything to say (“I know what you were all talking about” – “Oh, you do?” – “Yeah. I know” – “Yeah? How’s that then?” – “Come on, tell me” – “Tell you what?” – “What’s she like?” – “Who?!”). Things pick up with the second movement of the song, which begins at 1:26 and is called ‘Kevin Rowland’s Pet Peeves’. Here, angry Kevin finds himself only able to express his love in the rhetoric of 1980s class war, defining his beloved in opposition to the kinds of people that Kevin doesn’t like (suffice to say, if in 1985 you invited Kevin Rowland to a dinner party, you’d be best off making sure you didn’t sit him beside any of the following: people who put creases in their Levis; the English upper classes (in general); anyone from Notting Hill, London; anyone from Moseley, Birmingham; anyone who owns a hi-fi; anyone with a home bar; anyone using the words ‘tongue in cheek’, ‘wonderful’, ‘fabulous’ and/or ‘super’... in short, any Thatcherite fucker who might be reluctant to embrace Kevin Rowland and his new soul vision). The third movement begins at 7:53 and is called ‘The Greatest Song In The World’. Over a sublime horn melody, Kevin wails away as the listener smiles and says ‘oh, so that’s what she’s like’, whilst backing away nervously and being secretly none the wiser. It takes the entire running-length of ‘Stairway To Heaven’ to get there, but the final third of ‘This Is What She’s Like’ is one of the best expressions of love and devotion ever put to disc.

Once upon a time, plucky young go-getter Patti Smith moved to New York City to become rich and famous/a bohemian artist. On arrival in the Big Apple, Patti diligently applied herself to making French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) seem simply the coolest thing. Groundwork had already been done in this area (mainly by fifties Beat writers and some things that Bob Dylan said in interviews once). But Patti took Rimbaud-adoration to a newly relentless pitch. Rimbaud mad, she was! Still is as well! Check out 2008’s interminable documentary Dream of Life, where she rubs her body against Rimbaud’s gravestone – it’s classic Patti! The talismanic appropriation of a dead writer would be embarrassing if Horses didn’t remain one of the best albums out of all the albums there is: “Go Rimbaud! Go Rimbaud! Go Rimbaud and go Johnny go!” Cross-pollinating the erotic power of poetry and rock and roll, Patti inspired generations to define themselves through their personal litanies of artistic inspirations (something that people do nowadays on Tumblr). Cementing Rimbaud as an unspeakably alluring figure of youthful rebellion and sex, that one moment on Horses was so good that, after 1975, no song ever needed to mention Rimbaud again. Which is why no song ever did. Which is why the Dum Dum Girls’ most recent single wasn’t called ‘Rimbaud Eyes’ and didn’t juxtapose the refrain “You got/Rimbaud eyes” with lines quoted or paraphrased from the poet’s visionary work of 1871, ‘The Drunken Boat’ (with the inference that the reflections of Rimbaud’s boat demonstrated the emotional state to which the singer of the Dum Dum Girls song (the one that doesn’t exist) had been reduced by the ‘Rimbaud Eyes’ belonging to the second-person protagonist of this (non-existent) song: “Truly I have wept too much [...] Every moon is atrocious”, etc.). I like the Dum Dum Girls and cherished their second album, so I’m glad they didn’t write, record or release this track, because in my head ‘Rimbaud Eyes’ sounds terrible. If, hypothetically, William Burroughs were to incorporate passages of ‘The Drunken Boat’ in his 1983 book The Place of Dead Roads, I’d be inclined to think it was an act of transformative artistic potency. If, hypothetically, the Dum Dum Girls were to incorporate passages of ‘The Drunken Boat’ in one of their songs, I’d be inclined to think it was an act of impoverished imagination (especially if the Dum Dum’s Dee Dee had described Horses in a recent Pitchfork interview as “the most impactful record that I’ve ever listened to”). Fortunately, when it comes to literary inspiration, there are plenty of other poètes maudits to choose from, all of whom had eyes as well (‘Lautréamont Eyes’... ‘Radiguet Eyes’...). Memo to all young bands: no-one needs to sing about Rimbaud again.

Like Alan Bennett’s TV play A Woman of No Importance from the same year, Abba’s 1982 valedictory yarn ‘The Day Before You Came’ comprises a tedious monologue by a boring woman (albeit with Agnetha Fältskog taking the place of Patricia Routledge). A musical theatre epic in the guise of a pop single, the song’s portrayal of a lonely third-rate life offers an image of femininity more suited to a novel by Barbara Pym than a pop chart smash (and, incidentally, ‘The Day Before You Came’ stalled at number 32 in the UK charts). As the singer lists the mundane mediocrity of her daily routine, the stilted vocal delivery and awkward lyrical phrasing (coupled with the documentation of a massively naff life: “There’s not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn’t see”) help characterise an unassuming woman unaccustomed to self-expression. Fittingly, this presentation of a life devoid of glamour provides one of pop music’s most underwhelming literary references, as the singer’s choice of bedtime reading sees her cosying up with “the latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style.” Presumably the reference is to the bestselling novel The Women’s Room rather than to French’s first published work, a critical study of Ulysses (though it’s well documented that literary criticism rivals pharmaceutical codeine as an efficacious means of ensuring a good night’s sleep). Of course, ‘The Day Before You Came’ neglects to answer the central question of whether the singer’s implied relationship (the one that commenced the day after the title character came) was responsible for completing the singer’s life or for tearing it apart and, as the song nears its end and the arrival of the offscreen figure draws ever closer, the understated longing becomes devastating. ‘The Day Before You Came’ reminds us of the thrilling and terrifying fact that the future is always unknown, along with the reassuring fact that life is excruciatingly boring for 99% of the time.

In the days before Wikipedia and NHS Direct, medical professionals and the general public alike turned to pop music for advice and information regarding medical conditions. Sadly, hit parade guidance regarding the identification and treatment of serious ailments was often fatally flawed. Psychosis is properly typified by hallucinations and delusions but, in Count Five’s ‘Psychotic Reaction’ (a salutary reminder of the fine line dividing mental illness and love), psychosis consists of little more than feeling “depressed” and feeling “so bad” (a condition more accurately known in medical parlance as ‘being on a real bum trip’). Following the success of ‘Psychotic Reaction’, medical diagnoses of psychosis rocketed in America throughout 1965-66, with all manner of physical and mental symptoms blanketed under the umbrella term “a case of the Count Fives”. Given that ‘Psychotic Reaction’ not only describes the supposed symptoms of a psychotic reaction, but also attempts an aural approximation of its effects (see the instrumental break that follows the cry “And it feels like this!”), doctors would frequently ask their patients “And how does it feel?” only to receive in reply an a cappella imitation of minor pentatonic fuzz-guitar noodling. As Count Five’s song offers no solution to the problem of psychosis, it was long believed that no effective treatment existed, until the invention of the internet in 1998 (as we now know, the cure for love is suicide and the cure for psychosis is leeches). Since Lester Bangs famously exalted ‘Psychotic Reaction’ in his 1971 Creem magazine opus ‘Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung’, allow me my own indulgence in gonzo journalism as I relate an inconsequential event from my past under the guise of cultural commentary: I once had a pair of glasses. I lost the pair of the glasses on the dancefloor of the Faversham nightclub, Leeds, when they fell from my face as I danced to ‘Psychotic Reaction’. The glasses were never found. R.I.P. Lester Bangs.

I once wrote a short story set in the American Midwest in 1974 on the day that Evel Knievel failed to jump the Snake River Canyon. On one level (the level of plot, characterisation and action), the story was about a boy’s disillusionment with his stunt-cyclist hero. On another level (the level of hamfisted analogy), the story was about Watergate, the death of ’60s innocence, and bits of Vietnam as well. When I described the story to a friend, the friend suggested I should write about something I knew (I should clarify, I’ve never been to the Midwest or to 1974). After a year of artistic struggle, I stopped writing the story. On reflection, R.E.M.’s ‘Kohoutek’ (from Fables of the Reconstruction, the best album by R.E.M.) captures the hazy sense of loss that my story was supposed to evoke, only it does it in a better and more finished way. Eggheaded frontman Michael Stipe takes Kohoutek (the comet that appeared in 1973 but turned out to be rubbish, and so disappointed America just like the rest of the seventies did) and uses it as a clever simile for the end of a relationship: “Courage built a bridge/Jealous tore it down [...] Like Kohoutek, you were gone”. The lyrics are largely indecipherable, but that needn’t prevent you from singing along at home (for instance, at 2:00: “Bathing out the choired/Scissors, paper, stone/If you stand amartyred/Who will stoze a tone?”). The song’s nagging strangeness brings to mind Super-8 footage of other people’s dreams, which is one of the best things that songs can do. Of course, after Fables of the Reconstruction (the best album by R.E.M.), Michael Stipe learned to enunciate his lyrics, and from there it was but a slippery slope to posting naked self-images on Tumblr a mere twenty-six years later (slim consolation for much of the music in-between). Evel Knievel, Richard Nixon, Michael Stipe... all the heroes of our boyhood disappoint us in time. If you ever write a story where a stunt rider falls into a canyon in his X-2 Skycycle and it’s all a big metaphor for the downfall of a president, I will sue you shitless.

Imagine a gun made of love and/or capable of firing love. Now imagine a gun made of love and/or capable of firing love being held by a man in face-paint that must have taken ages to apply, howling “No place for hiding, baby! No place to run!”. If you’re a woman with even the faintest inclination towards heterosexuality then chances are you’ve conjured this mental image before. Browsing Nancy Friday’s ’70s bestseller My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies until the rain had stopped and I could leave Waterstones, I was unsurprised to learn that the afore-mentioned scenario is one of the most common erotic fantasies of all the women in the world (irrespective of age, religious background and annual income). Hence, it’s understandable that ‘Love Gun’ by Kiss remains universally adored across all cultures and creeds. In today’s so-called ‘politically’ so-called ‘correct’ times, the notion of a man from Kiss targeting a woman in the sights of his love gun may seem problematic. However, the astute listener will note that the refrain to the song goes “You pull the trigger of my/Love gun”. So it’s the woman, rather than the man from Kiss, who’s responsible for triggering this saucy firearm. That is to say, the woman’s bringing the results of the love gun upon herself. By which I mean to say, the woman is asking for it. Which means that what I’m definitely saying is, if afterwards the woman says she wasn’t asking for it, she’ll certainly be lying (and probably looking for money). When explained in these simple terms, even the most obtuse feminist thinker will gladly concede that ‘Love Gun’ by Kiss isn’t problematic at all. It’s interesting that the manly boast of the song’s opening lines (“Let’s get together, we can/Get hot”) rapidly subsides to a more underwhelming promise: “Girl, I can make you feel/OK”. Only OK, Paul Stanley from Kiss? Is that the best you can do? It’s a welcome insight into the male insecurity that comes from being a member of a phenomenally successful rock band and knowing that, even on a good day, the length of your penis is significantly shorter than the height of your heels.

CHRISTMAS SPECIAL #4: “And when we both get up on Christmas morning/I’ll kiss him on his chromium-plated head/And take him in to say ‘Hi’ to Mum/And frighten Daddy out of his bed”. Speaking from experience, there’s never an ideal moment to tell your parents that you’ve just spent the night with a mechanically-housed war-mongering mutant from the planet Skaro. Nonetheless, to bring a Dalek unannounced into your parents’ bedroom on Christmas morning seems an especially inconsiderate form of coming-out. With its vocal delivered in the Violet Elizabeth lisp of a child in eminent need of extermination, ‘I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a Dalek’ is a notable entry in the annals of what connoisseurs lovingly refer to as ‘1960s novelty shite’. As this particular 1960s novelty shite has a tangential relationship to Doctor Who (one of the world’s major industries), ‘I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a Dalek’ has been subject to an inordinate degree of attention, and at least one person has undoubtedly spent at least some time wondering how to fit this song into the official Doctor Who universe. Personally, I’d suggest that the action of the song takes place around the events of 1988’s Remembrance of the Daleks (set in London, circa 1963), during which perhaps a Dalek went AWOL and wound up spending Christmas with a progressively-minded family overflowing with Christian charity. According to Doctor Who lore, the Daleks are a chilling analogue for the atrocities of the Third Reich. ‘I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas With a Dalek’ suggests that the Doctor’s arch-nemeses have a gentler side. There’s something oddly affecting about a metallic voice incapable of expressing emotion croaking the words “I love you – you love me”. When all is said and done, Daleks just want to be loved, same as the Nazis and the Elephant Man. Plum pud-ding and cus-tard for everyone, and merwy cwistmas one and all.