Kierkegaard's Lunch

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...

I have spent a couple of days mulling over which year to cover next. Today the answer came as I heard the news that Gary Dwyer, drummer from The Teardrop Explodes has died. That immediately made the answer 1981, and the song, Reward . It's hard to overstate just how damned exciting The Teardrop Explodes were. Liverpool was on fire with music around then - bands like Echo and The Bunnymen and OMD clustered around a club opposite the old Cavern. Holly Johnson cut his teeth there before forming Frankie, with Big In Japan, along with the guy who formed KLF, Ian Broudie who founded The Lightning Seeds, and Budgie who later became the drummer in Siouxsie and the Banshees. Plus the The Teardrop Explodes, led by the gorgeous Julian Cope, a man with so much musical charisma you wanted to lick it off his naked body. There really hadn't been anything like this song or this band before and it was a massive crowd-puller - even the video had loads of them in it, careering around a burning do...

I've changed the title of this blog series. The previous one has felt melancholy and possibly off-putting. As yet, I'm getting very little interest from others in this list. So be it - I am writing it for me principally - though I started to wonder if people don't really know how to take it if they think I'm having some kind of grief-stricken breakdown about all this. Leaving England is very hard after all these years (though its behaviour to someone of my background month after month has made it easier), and this is part of my process. It's helping. I'm writing about myself, who and where I was as these songs emerged, or when they entered my life. But I am also writing about music and my love of it. So maybe a little less self-indulgent pain in the title and a bit more focus on the memory of these great tunes? Which makes sense for this song especially because, alongside pointing out that Mourning England in songs didn't preclude me from adding bands that ...