Kierkegaard's Lunch

Instalment #13 of 64 brings us to one of the greatest albums of all time. It was that good 51 years ago, and it still is now. I was 13 when Wish You Were Here was released by Pink Floyd, the follow up, as if I need to even tell you, to the legendary Dark Side of the Moon . It's here, with its title track, instead of Dark Side (which some might, with justification call the best album of all time) perhaps because this is the album that introduced the band to me. In 1975 I'd just gone up from junior to senior at the anonymous boarding school to which I was sent when I was 10, in Somerset, England. In the era before anything was digital, we had one way of listening to music (radios - apart from the clandestine, contraband ones we smuggled in) were banned; a Dansette bakelite record player located in our Common Room (a kind of communal room where we could hang out during free time). Even by 1975 this thing was long in the tooth - probably over a decade old - but in a time before ...

Well, I'm almost through a fifth of my 64 songs now, and here's another that you may not know, though the album from which it came did chart highly. But know it you should, as it's a wonderful song. As it had to be to beat I love you by Fontaines DC by a short head to claim the top spot for 2022. Press play on the link below and listen. The video is brilliant too.  100% Endurance is one of the few that is on this list because of its poetic lyrics and their meaning. The lyrics are at the bottom of this post. Yard Act? Post-punk. From Leeds (always a good sign). Formed in 2019 just in time to run straight into Covid and its dreadful effect on live music venues, but they produced a corker of a first album ( The Overload ) in 2022 and got nominated for a Mercury Prize with it. They're one of those talk-sing bands, making narrative-heavy songs rich in texture and character, reflecting on life, class, and all that.  100% Endurance is a brilliant expression of well, how else...

It's 1978. I am 16. Why am I not picking Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street, with its immortal sax hook, its nostalgia and melancholy that's still takes you to 1970s London, almost 50 years later? Why not The Doobie Brothers' What a Fool Believes , which is just heartbreaking and feels very personal (the song could have been written about something that literally happened to me in my twenties) and which showcases the voice of the fabulous Michael McDonald? Why not the post-punk, menacing and thunderous, Because the Night by Patti Smith? What about the Bee Gees' Night Fever , Talking Heads' Take Me To Th e River, or Blondie's Heart of Glass ? Because it has to be FM by Steely Dan. A song that I have played year after year since I first heard it all those years ago. Which has come to mean something to me. An idea, an ambition. It's ambition that's now in serious jeopardy. I am soon to enter the second half of my sixties and I feel like I may have lost m...

  First an explanation. This song didn't, of course, first appear in 2019. It first came out in 1985, on Chris Rea's album Shamrock Diaries. Various remixes have appeared over the years, and one of them became a chillout hit in Ibiza and elsewhere in 1988. That remix may have been this one, but there were a number out there so I can't be sure. The first time I can positively identify the song appearing on an album is on Chris Rea's re-release of The Road To Hell (Deluxe)  in 2019. This version was on it as Josephine ( Remastered ). When did I first hear it? Certainly some years before 2019 - exactly when I cannot say. Perhaps even ten years.  That's why the song is cropping up under 2019 and not over 30 years earlier. It's the best date I've got - and it's my list so there you are! 😉.  So that's a whole lot of stuff about a song you may not really know, which is I guess a diversion from answering the question - why have I included a song that...

So now we come to the first giant on the list. Not the greatest song maybe, not the most legendary , but one that is rooted in me with such a strong emotional hook that it’ll be with me till my last breath as a Top 5 Lifetime Tune. Much of it is actually sampled from elsewhere; a song constructed of the parts of others. Yet I play this song all the time, 22 years after it was first released, and it (specifically a particular remix) is absolutely embedded in a joyous memory. It’s 2004 and I’m running my market research business with my (now) ex. I did qualitative research, mostly what Blair’s government poisoned by embedding the American term ‘focus groups’ into the public consciousness and then misusing it, and them, cynically, but which we old-skoolers called ‘group discussions’. I’m doing pretty well at it, running it all out of our country home in the last few years of the industry's golden age before the internet and lately AI wrecked it, at first by ripping the economic botto...

The song came out in 1985, but first and foremost it takes me back to four years later. And another song that is part of my list but actually puts me in another country (something that's making me take stock a bit as it's going to happen again later). It's July 1989, the French Bicentenary is happening, and I am with my first wife in Paris. A few days I'll never forget. We are with a friend in his Ford Escort Cabriolet (the chic😉!), obviously with the top down, cruising a packed city, electric with heat, excitement and increasingly pissed but good natured French people. Millions of them. I'm 27.  All three of us work in a fancy London ad agency, and yes, it's all still a bit Mad Men there . The lunches are long, the money is good, the morals are mostly missing. I'm in Account Management - think of me as more Ken Cosgrove than Pete Campbell (I hope). I'm doing very well, getting promoted fast and on the agency's biggest and most lucrative account (th...