Kierkegaard's Lunch

  Is this the most beautiful song on my list? It may well be. For me it's tender, human, hopeful, real. Goosebumps rise as I listen to that bass theme and harmonica coming in at the start and for all of its 2 minutes and 41 seconds (the demands of radio play back then were brutal) they stay there. And then there's the close harmony of the gorgeous chorus.  And yet it's also a song that brings me deep sadness, because for me it represents an era, a project and a hope that now seems to have come to nothing.  Meet Me On The Corner is from Lindisfarne's well liked 1971 album Fog on the Tyne, a flourishing of Geordie folk-rock that made its mark over half a century ago. For most of the time since it was a song (released as a single in 1972, hence my locating it in this year) that I knew and loved but which was probably not one to claim a place on this list. Starman by David Bowie would perhaps have made it instead that year. It's here because of something that happene...

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...