Self Deluded Cranium Dump

Ah, music. Anytime anything in my life is really truly going "tits up" (and I use that phrase perhaps more literally than ever at the moment), there is always some scintillating sphere of MP3 majesty that I can dig up. Something that will remind me of a childhood comfort blanket; or a tear on my teenage eye that reminds me I'm alive emotionally; or a juggernaut of unstoppable invincible rock music from my Bohemian student days; or a cracked confused corpuscle of melting-pot music that confirms the existential crisis of my thirties. Only... that collection of lovely tunes is being raided one-by-one. Why?

Music isn't just made up of beautiful melodies and cascading cadences, it's also interminably linked to the time and place that the tune was born. How frankly bollock-numbingly tedious is it that I find another nugget of creative genius has been tainted, nay, sullied by some dumb media Nathan Barley cunt somewhere. You want proof? Here's the none-too-subtle "top tens" beloved of frustrated blog writers when they want to play with the format a little. This one's a top ten of "tainted love" moments (cunningly named after a Marc Almond tune - did you see what I did there?) where some favourite tuneful treat of mine has been wrestled from my naive palm and shat on in front of me.

10. Tainted Love - Marc Almond. Let's start at the beginning. My brother's helpless nudging at my young teenage crush leaving a nasty taste in my mouth. And that's not even speaking metaphorically, really - I had quite a good imagination and was only too aware of an Almond bulb of salty goodness lolling around on my tongue. Marc Almond was apparently carted off to hospital to have his stomach pumped, after "pleasuring" some rather plucky groupies. Luckily, this is number 10. The grubby episode proved to be a rather pathetic urban myth that has since been disproved and "Tainted Love" is thankfully restored in my own head to the electro-motown mini epic that it always was (that's also a sullen admission to it being a cover, but the man did elevate it).

9. Lust For Life - Iggy Pop. Somewhat harder to swallow (stop laughing at the back, we've moved off the Marc Almond song) is Iggy Pop's image being sullied by a car insurance advert. It's made worse today, of course, because said insurance company wouldn't sell their product to musicians, so the advertisers were straightforwardly lying (lying advertisers? Say it ain't so).  Also, "Lust For Life" is the song beloved of lazy TV producers (when they can't steal a Prodigy dance track) whenever they want to soundtrack a "crazy character" who is up to no good. "Trainspotting" did it fucking years ago, advertising "gurus", get over your post-ironic posturing at Oxford University.

8. Ready To Go - Republica. I used to quite like this song in my student days. Yes, I knew it was sub-Garbage or sub-Sneaker Pimps student fare, but it was always good to jump around to if you'd had about five ciders in the students union and had failed to pull that stupid student girl who had pink pigtails and looked like a Fraggle. Now, I hear this song all the time on fucking carpet adverts and commentaries on football matches. Football, fucking football. Lower than the lowest common denominator from here-on-in. Dirt on my shoe now.

7. Clubbed To Death - Rob Dougan. This was a clever bit of dance music that encapsulated a dark, foreboding feeling of anxiety not really heard before in a lot of club music. It also smartly did what a lot of truly great pop music does, which is reference some bit of classical music (Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor). When I first heard this, I loved playing it while coding in my (then current) dark Edinburgh flat, which was next to the seedier end of town that housed three strip joints nearby, as well as a forbidding looking Catholic church opposite. Puritanical fury standing next to a salacious mecca next door.

Of course, this song quickly started being used ad nauseum in every reality show going, with "Big Brother" predictably using it first. Rather more famously, it's used to quite tedious regularity in "The Apprentice". I know it's used regularly because, despite me being the one person in the UK that doesn't watch that show, I always hear that song throbbing over any clip I catch of besuited wannabe Alan Sugar cocksuckers. Unhappily, I now can't hear that "club classic" being played without thinking of that cockney cock Big Brother contestant, Bubble, tripping over an armchair.

6. Killing Me Softly (With His Song) - Roberta Flack. I know my pal, Casual Egotist, is with me on this one. A shockingly fantastic song with a clever chord structure and gorgeously intricated melody, it's now been reduced to "that song sang in the cinema with that cunt from the Fugees wittering 'One Time' over it". Even though I shouldn't, the original song always now has the Tourette's echo in my mind forcibly stuck over it. Terrible.

5. Seasons In The Sun - Terry Jacks. I thought this song was indestructible. Nothing could sully it. Even a lawnmower advert using it as a soundtrack couldn't hide the beauty of this song. Of course, the sprinkling of stardust on this song is the fact that it originally came from the pen of Jacques Brel. As if to confirm this, the list of people daring to cover it come from a somewhat magisterial elite of songsmiths. The Beach Boys, Bad Religion, Black Box Recorder (my own personal favourite, created by Britpop naysayer and misanthrope, Luke Haines) and Nirvana. All with their obviously individual take on it. Each building on the original's nebulous wonder. Then Westlife covered it, nay, wanked over it - before jetting it up to number one and persuading the rest of the stupid public that it was their song. You're blonde, you're Aryan and you're brainwashing those teenage girls into thinking they can only breed with the likes of you and utterly re-writing the past. Way to go lads, you really are the musical equivalent of the Nazis.

4. American Pie - Don McLean. Covered by Madonna. Fuck me, do I have to actually give an explanation as to why she ruined this? Do I have to lead you by the hand everywhere? Go home and listen to your Phil Collins albums, you lobotomised fuck-knuckle.

3. You Can't Hurry Love - The Supremes. Covered by Phil Collins. Ah, obviously, I do have to lead you around by the hand. Okay, just for starters, "You Can't Hurry Love" by The Supremes used to paint an utterly compelling prototypical vision of black 'n' white Motown in the ascendancy during the 1960s. The Supremes version was first played to me, as an impressionable six-year old, by my dear Mum. After Phil Collins dutifully pissed all over it, like a particularly bald Bulldog marking out it's territory, I can now no longer hear the original without seeing the smuggest member (the drummer, for fucks' sake, the DRUMMER) of the smuggest prog rock band smugly warbling in his smug echo-chamber production studio. The receding-haired bell-end just splurged musical masturbation over my childhood, like the repressed memory of an abusive paedeophile Uncle. Then he appeared in breezy Brit movie, "Buster", as a cockney loveable rogue, just to add to my agony. Why's he still alive, someone?

2. Suspicious Minds - Elvis Presley. Covered by Gareth Gates. In a leather jacket. If I really have to explain this one, you've obviously just been skim-reading this blog entry, my life really is a pointless exercise and I'm just going to stop writing now. Fuck off.

1. Ain't Got No Money - Nina Simone.

This is without doubt number one. Nina Simone was capable of elevating the scumminess, dinginess and nightmare dread of her early everyday existence and achieving a spiritual salvation. Her lyrics and her music combined, meant that the most atheist amongst us could transcend the hollow roots of humanity. How utterly soul-destroying is it that those Muller-Lite motherfuckers have decimated that song by completely negating the "build up" of minor chords, minor melodies, shift of nuance and eventual octave leap to just the major key ending. Now it's just a "jolly song" for yoghurt. As if to compound this annoyance, there's a large section of the population that think that the song now doesn't have lyrics anymore and the melody is just a whistle from your friendly neighbourhood window-cleaner, plus they act surprised when they hear the rather large "intro" of the original Simone version. Here's the original - bold, harrowing and utterly brilliant. But the ending really has been ruined for me; you Nathan Barleys in the advertising agencies have stolen something preciously sacred to me. Thank you so fucking much.

UPDATE

1. (joint) One Day Like This - Elbow. Somebody pointed out to me that this blog entry reminded them of Charlie Brooker's stuff. This annoyed me slightly, but not because I don't like him (he's a hero of mine, frankly - hence my reference to Nathan Barley, which Mr Brooker co-wrote). It's because this blog entry was the first (and possibly only) article that I wrote entirely in first draft form with no revisions. Such was my fury at the subject matter of favourite songs being ruined, this literally was an angry cranium dump. So, any plagiarism of Brooker's style is entirely accidental. However, it does remind me that Brooker himself has kindly ruined a musical gem for me - namely, "One Day Like This" by Elbow. He used this track to highlight how "journey documentaries" tend to use stirring and uplifting tracks to add emotion to paltry televisual scenes. He then uses "One Day Like This" to soundtrack a bleak hillside scene of a bunk of blokes urinating. The entire sketch is extremely funny. In fact, it's so funny that I've now cemented "One Day Like This" to that scene. So, cheers, Charlie - while being very amusing and erudite, you've ruined another fantastic and favourite song of mine. Anytime I hear that song now, I don't feel like punching the sky, because all I see in my mind's eye are some blokes weeing onto a hill.

Now you know that we live in the dry desert of musical soullessness. It only remains for me to say what my pal, Milky Bar Kid, told me a few years ago. I was grinning from ear-to-ear when normally stagnating music industry "The Brits" awards saw fit to hand a trophy to musical genius, Beck. Milky Bar Kid turned to me and said, "Who is that? Why's he won it? Why didn't Moby win it? His music is so good, even adverts use it!".

Chris Nicholson wrote this blog entry while David Davis MP, Conservative, discussed the merits of "Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols" on a BBC 4 programme. I'm not going to disseminate this; only to add that one of the reasons I liked John Lydon was precisely because he wasn't a typical teenager singing about drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll. He was a teenager already acting like a grumpy angry pensioner, ranting about the state of the nation. As if to compond this, I feel he's grown more and more comfortable, as he's fitted into his skin of Great Britain's real-life answer to Albert Steptoe. Admittedly, he does live in California now... :-(