Fourth Movement
Music may be the last remaining piece of magic we have.
The most memorable – certainly the most moving – encounter I had with music this decade came on Fifth Avenue in New York in the spring of 2005.
My iPod’s shuffle function dealt up Gravity by Embrace.
Embrace seem to have been around forever, pumping out a stream of unremarkable, grandiose, guitar and strings based rock that occasionally bothered the charts’ lower reaches.
Given the immensity of Danny McNamara’s ego, it must have irked him no end when Chris Martin and Coldplay emerged soon after his own band and promply conquered this and all other worlds with their slightly more remarkable, grandiose, guitar and strings based rock.
However, the two became friends and during Martin’s purplest of patches (2003-4, when his cast-offs would even become unlikely hits for the likes of Jamelia), which coincided with something of a commercial slump for Embrace, Martin threw a track called Gravity in McNamara’s direction.
Gravity relaunched Embrace’s career in 2004, becoming the band’s first UK Top 10 single in six years and even giving them a modest American hit.
The Minister’s life had taken something of a wrong turn in 2003-4 – a marital separation followed by one of the least pleasant and most profoundly depressing phases of my so-called career – so while I wasn’t necessarily at my best during those few days in New York, the marriage was in the process of being repaired and I had an imminent new job to anticipate.
The sun was shining as I gambolled aimlessly through the skyscraper-sided, concrete-covered canyons and, trite as the song’s lyrics may read on screen here and now, in one of the glorious moments of synchronicity sometimes life concocts, precisely the right piece of music was played at precisely the right time to precisely the right person in precisely the right place:
Honey, it’s been a long time coming
And I can’t stop now.
Such a long time running
And I can’t stop now.
Do you hear my heart beating?
Can you hear that sound?
’Cause I can’t help thinking
And I don’t look down.
And then I looked up at the sun and I could see
The way that gravity turns for you and me.
And then I looked up at the sky and saw the sun
And the way that gravity pulls on everyone.
Baby, it’s been a long time waiting:
Such a long, long time.
And I can’t stop smiling.
No, I can’t stop now.
And do you hear my heart beating ?
And can you hear that sound?
’Cause I can’t help crying
And I won’t look down.
And there I stood, by St Patrick’s Cathedral, crying, smiling and for once, briefly, not minding that I was – and at that moment looked like – a prize twat.
Magic. And magical.
I composed myself and headed in the direction of the Carnegie Deli for cheesecake.
Gravity does not appear on this list.
20 R.E.M. – Leaving New York
R.E.M. began the decade with their biggest UK chart hit – The Great Beyond from the movie Man On The Moon making #3 – and with the Minister and Minister’s Wife bouncing (gently) up and down in Trafalgar Square to a truncated set including Losing My Religion and Man On The Moon, but with the benefit of hindsight this is a band that lost its way in the late 90s – probably not entirely coincidentally the time that drummer Bill Berry called it quits.
The last hurrah was this advance single from 2004’s album Around The Sun, by some distance the poorest album of the band’s career. Leaving New York, a #5 UK hit in September 2004, is Michael Stipe’s love letter to his second home. Its wistful lyric and sublime melody would enable it to hold its head high on Automatic For The People.
Its release hinted that the band might have recaptured something of its former glories but the album – like Up before it and Accelerate after – proved a massive (and massively hyped) disappointment. Within weeks of release the album’s other tracks were deleted from my iPod library and the CD was on eBay.
Five years on, R.E.M. have managed just two live albums and only one further original collection – and three of the four singles taken from 2008’s Accelerate deservedly failed to trouble the scorers.
It’s a sad, sad situation and it threatens to get more and more absurd: at this rate, the most important band of the mid-80s to mid-90s will follow the Stones’ path and grind out global stadium tour after global stadium tour until they drop, becoming ever wealthier as their relevance recedes and their importance is forgotten.
19 Lily Allen – The Fear
Dazzling. By far the best lyric to reach number one in the UK charts for a very long time, The Fear – the lead single from Allen’s second album, It’s Not Me, It’s You – built upon her early promise and proved she had staying power. In terms of this decade’s emergent lyrical talent, Allen is second only to Alex Turner and she may just be the closest thing this country currently has to a bona fide pop star.
She can’t dance for toffee, though. Watch the video if you don’t believe me.
18 The Pipettes – Pull Shapes
Daft but great. A manufactured band, designed to ape the Spector girl group sound, and with an ever shifting cast list – the band seems to have a different line up every time I hear of them and has had more members than Destiny’s Child, Atomic Kitten and Sugababes combined – the Pipettes can probably now safely be categorised as a flash in the pan, notable only for their solid 2006 debut album, We Are The Pipettes, which occupied the territory representing the triangulation point of the Shirelles, the Supremes and the Shangri-Las.
Briefly, however, through the summer of 2006, the band were all over the music press and Pull Shapes was all over the radio. The band’s highest placed single, it reached #26 in the summer of 2006.
17 Keane – Bedshaped
Five years after their emergence, I’m still not absolutely sure about Keane. Hopes And Fears was an excellent debut album and both their subsequent releases have had splendid moments. They’re released a really good body of singles. Tim Rice-Oxley is a fine songwriter. It’s good to hear a band lead with a piano instead of a guitar once in a while. And Tom Chaplin may be a bit of a dildo, but he’s got a great voice. Yet I’m not entirely convinced.
Like Coldplay, I think they’re probably just too upper-middle class to love. (Is it me or are pop stars getting posher?)
But Bedshaped is a copper-bottomed classic. It was released as the third single from Hopes And Fears, reaching #10 in August 2004.
16 Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
The record that heralded the appearance of the Second Horseman of the Apocolypse – War, sitting atop his red horse – as the first download-only single to top the UK singles chart.
Life Would Never Be The Same Again.
Crazy took up its place atop the UK singles chart on 2 April 2006 and remained there for nine weeks as it became the year’s biggest seller. Only Rihanna’s Umbrella (see #50=), with 10 weeks at number one in summer 2007, topped that achievement this decade.
Later in the summer of 2006 the single spent seven consecutive weeks at #2 in the Billboard Hot 100, stuck behind Nelly Furtado’s single Promiscuous (no, me neither).
This song was so catchy, so overplayed and so often (and quickly) covered that its appeal remains slightly blunted to this day. If you can still hear it without feeling jaundiced, however, it remains a genuinely great pop single.
Gnarls Barkley | MySpace Music Videos
15 Kings Of Leon – Sex On Fire
The best number one of the decade, according to this chart: none of the 14 singles I have ranked above Sex On Fire topped the UK singles chart.
On paper this record sounds fatally contrived – a title like that combined with lyrics like “head while I’m driving” (which is just reckless, people) from a band swathed in religious overtones – but it nevertheless carries it off with a joyous stomp and swagger.
The single went straight in at number one on its digital release in mid-September 2008, before the CD single even reached the shelves.
Perhaps of all singles this decade, Sex On Fire has most captured the public’s attention: the single is currently the fifth longest serving record in Top 75 history and has had the longest chart life of any number one.
At the time of writing, it has spent 64 weeks on the UK singles chart – its sole, three-week absence since its release came this summer when the lower reaches of the chart were briefly renamed Michael Jackson’s Greatest Hits. It powered back into the Top 10 a year after its release just because someone sang it on The X Factor.
Needless to say, in the neo-Puritan post-Janipplegate era, American radio felt a little differently about the record. Accordingly, it reached only #56 on the Hot 100.
Kings Of Leon | MySpace Music Videos
14 Santana – Smooth
Smooth topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 weeks through the summer of 1999, becoming the best performing rock song in the history of that chart, and was finally released in the UK the following spring, reaching #3.
But let’s bust one myth. Smooth may be a Santana record but it’s a Rob Thomas song. Carlos may have taken the applause and Grammys – Hell, he might even have deserved some of them – but Thomas wrote the song for his wife (who appears in the video) and brought it to Santana.
As a consequence, this is a very unusual Santana record: not absolutely every hemi-demi-semi quaver is stuffed full of guitar. And it’s all the better for it.
13 Coldplay – Trouble
When they lay off the bombast and pretension, I quite like Coldplay. The problem is that they seem increasingly wedded to bombast and pretension.
By the time their ostentatious cover version of Ricky Martin’s Viva La Vida Loca finally fell off radio playlists after a mere three centuries I was ready to hunt down Chris Martin, force feed him a veal entrecote dinner and write the band off for good. Then they went and recorded the gorgeous Now My Feet Won’t Touch The Ground on their Prospekt’s March EP, a track that withstands comparison with their earliest, most restrained and very best work. A fucking annoyingly contrary band…
That track rekindled memories of minimalist songs such as Don’t Panic and Trouble from their 2000 debut album Parachutes, the latter being their third proper single release and the second to reach the Top 10, cresting at #10 in November 2000.
12 Plain White T’s – Hey There Delilah
This record was more than two years old when it finally became a hit in 2007, topping the Billboard Hot 100 in July of that year and reaching #2 in the UK two months later.
Written by the band’s singer Tom Higgenson after meeting American steeplechaser Delilah Di Crescenzo, this diaphanous ode to unrequited love struck a nerve with the record-buying public because it reinvigorated the genre. The earnestness of the lyrics have been the subject of much parody but the story they tell is universal and they tell it as poetically as any teenager could:
Hey there, Delilah; I’ve got so much left to say.
If every simple song I wrote to you
Would take your breath away, I’d write it all.
Even more in love with me you’d fall…
[PxSx]?DARKNESS? | MySpace Video
11 Kaiser Chiefs – I Predict A Riot
After four brilliant and wildly popular chant-a-long singles from their first album, Employment, Kaiser Chiefs found themselves under criticism from some quarters for their populist, popular chant-a-long style.
Their response? To release the slightly different, almost as brilliant and almost as wildly popular single Ruby as the lead track from their second album, Yours Truly Angry Mob.
Its opening lyrics? “La, la, laa, la, la, laa. La, la, laa, la, la, laa.”
Its chorus? “Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby: do ya, do ya, do ya, do ya?”
Get in.
I Predict A Riot was the Chiefs’ breakthrough release, its initial chart run – #22 in November 2004 – opening the way for a string of near-classic early singles through 2005 (Oh My God, Everyday I Love You Less and Less and Modern Way). After those successes, I Predict A Riot was re-released and reached #9 in August 2005.
Fact: the only hit in the Noughties to feature the word ‘Leodiensian’. Apparently there aren’t too many pop songs written about or featuring old boys of Leeds Grammar School. Odd, that.
10 Newton Faulkner – Dream Catch Me
The debut (and still most successful) hit from Reigate’s finest, reaching #7 in August 2007, Faulkner co-wrote this song about falling in love with former Longpigs singer Crispin Hunt.
(Faulkner’s live rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody – solo on an acoustic guitar – is rightly the stuff of legend. Seek it out.)
9 Elbow – One Day Like This
If you need me to tell you anything about this band or record, you’ve probably been living in Tora Bora for the past two years.
For me, this record will forever be associated with a bunch of men having an alfresco piss on in front of Konnie Huq. (One for the Screenwipe fans, there.)
8 David Ford – I Don’t Care What You Call Me
In my first year at university I was familiar with – and liked – three or four Stone Roses singles but not their eponymously-named debut album from 1989, about which a couple of friends had been raving (no pun intended) since its release. In particular they lauded the album’s closing track – I Am The Resurrection, something they claimed was a kaleidoscopic eight-minute epic of guitar, drums and false endings that proved the band were the true heirs to The Beatles.
As the band became bogged down by criminal damage prosecutions and litigation with their record company, Silvertone Records sought more and more ways to exploit what remained of their back catalogue and eventually hit upon the idea of releasing I Am The Resurrection as a single. But 1992’s Radio 1 was never going to play an eight-minute wall of guitar, was it?
So Silvertone viciously edited the track down to three minutes; removed Reni’s astonishing drum track and replaced it with a drum machine; and turned the bass pot on the mixing desk down to zero.
My two friends knew none of this, though, and insisted I would soon be a full Roses convert. During the Easter holiday the three of us went to my hometown’s tiny indie record store so we could hear it and, inevitably, buy into the Roses mythology.
As a tinny, fey facsimile of the song – bastardised to the point of unrecognisability by Silvertone – limply plopped into our ear canals, the colour drained from their faces. I thanked them profusely for wasting my time as we all trooped out of the shop empty-handed.
It would take a further four years before I gave the Stone Roses the proper respect they deserved. Today, in its original version, I Am The Resurrection is one of my favourite tracks of all time.
And what does this have to do with David Ford’s 2006 single, I Don’t Care What You Call Me? Well, it explains why my favourite song of the decade appears only as my eighth best single of the decade.
In its original format – a six-and-a-half minute affair – the song was the first (and perhaps foremost) of many highlights on Ford’s stunning debut solo album I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I’ve Called. But its original format scared Ford’s then-record company, Independiente, who advised him that it needed to be re-recorded, speeded up and re-arranged so that the drums would kick in before the 1:00 mark if it was to pick up any radio airplay.
Ford complied, shot a great one-camera, one-take video, toured his arse off… and the single promptly plummeted into obscurity.
A great song’s a great song come what may, but while I’ll admit I am one of Mr. Ford’s most strident fans even I am hard-pressed to suggest this particular version of the song deserves to beat out the great singles ahead of it.
The original album version appears first below (audio only) for comparison with the single version – which, if nothing else, boasts a very funny video.
David Ford | MySpace Music Videos
7 Snow Patrol – Chasing Cars
Some people, I understand, dislike Snow Patrol.
Those people are wrong.
It’s not the band’s fault the producers of Grey’s Anatomy fixated on this track.
Thank you.
A UK #6 and Billboard #5 in 2006, Chasing Cars has so far spent 94 weeks in the UK Top 75, making it the second longest-running performer in UK singles chart history.
Con perdon para los subtitulos en Espanol:
6 David Gray – Babylon
I’m a sucker for a lyric that tells a story and Gray’s first hit – a #5 in the summer of 2000 – after he’d spent a decade on the fringes deservedly picked up the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically in 2001.
Friday night I’m going nowhere,
All the lights are changing green to red;
Turning over TV stations,
Situations running through my head.
Looking back through time
You know it’s clear that I’ve been blind;
I’ve been a fool
To open up my heart
To all that jealousy, that bitterness, that ridicule.
Saturday, I’m running wild
And all the lights are changing red to green.
Moving through the crowd, I’m pushing,
Chemicals all rushing through my bloodstream.
Only wish that you were here,
You know I’m seeing it so clear:
I’ve been afraid
To tell you how I really feel,
Admit to some of those bad mistakes I’ve made.
In another example of record companies treating the people who pay their wages as idiots, listeners to Gray’s album White Ladder know that the song’s story is resolved in a third verse, something denied to those who bought or heard only the single edit. And record companies wonder why they’re dying…
Sunday: all the lights of London shining,
Sky is fading red to blue.
Kicking through the autumn leaves
And wondering where it is you might be going to.
Turning back for home,
You know I’m feeling so alone
I can’t believe.
Climbing on the stair
I turn around to see you smiling there
In front of me.
5 The White Stripes – 7 Nation Army
I laughed uproariously when I recently read Meg White’s drumming style described as “guileless”. Anybody who’s ever spent more than 20 minutes in my company in a pub will know I consider Ms. White one of the two least convincing drummers ever to have made a profession out of drumming. This track is no better than any other White Stripes track in that regard.
But in every other respect this is a glorious pop anthem built around an earworm of a bass riff – played by Jack White on a heavily-processed guitar (so as to stay true to the band’s creed, natch) – that Jarvis Cocker (the true King of Pop in the Nineties) recently accurately described as “this generation’s Smoke On The Water”.
Accompanied by one of the decade’s most memorable videos, 7 Nation Army saw the White Stripes reach the UK top ten for the first time – the single peaking at #7 in May 2003.
4 Death Cab For Cutie – I Will Follow You Into The Dark
If there was a better lyric written this decade than Ben Gibbard’s:
If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
And illuminate the “No”s
On their vacancy signs;
If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks,
Then I’ll follow you into the dark.
…then it has yet to hit the Minister’s ears. Simply beautiful, and the finest ‘love and death’ song since Natalie Merchant’s Beloved Wife.
I Will Follow You Into The Dark reached #66 in July 2006.
Two videos made, don’t know why:
Death Cab for Cutie | MySpace Music Videos
3 Snow Patrol – Run
I firmly believe both that records do not stick around the charts for months on end unless they are very, very good records indeed, and that the very best songs can be interpreted in wildly different manners and still shine through.
The original version of Run – dark and brooding with layers of guitar – was a #5 hit on its release in early 2004 and has re-entered the charts regularly since downloads were allowed in the charts’ computation.
Leona Lewis then popped up the song to within an inch of its life – complete with orchestra and gospel choir – to send it to the top of the charts in December 2008.
Wildly different, both are fabulous records – perhaps because Run is a slight but compelling song. The original, however, is exceptional.
Fact: I am reliably informed this is one of the easiest bass lines to learn for beginners. The Minister’s Wife might be hearing a lot of this track in early 2010.
2 Johnny Cash – Hurt
An object lesson in how to own a song. Even its author, Trent Reznor, had to concede:
“I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn’t mine anymore.”
(I have still haven’t heard Nine Inch Nails’ original and, with no disrespect to Mr. Reznor, I don’t think I want to.)
Cash’s Hurt first emerged in November 2002 on his American IV: The Man Comes Around album. A video was shot by Mark Romanek, featuring Cash and his wife June Carter at their flood-ravaged home, The House Of Cash, but the single’s release was delayed first by Carter’s death in May 2003 and then by Cash’s own demise four months later.
Hurt, accompanied by Cash’s version of Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, was finally released as a posthumous single in November 2003, going on to win 2004’s Grammy for best video.
The single reached #39 in the UK singles chart.
The House Of Cash, subsequently bought by Barry Gibb, was destroyed by fire in April 2007.
Video of the decade:
1 The Killers – Mr. Brightside
This list was put together before Absolute Radio and XFM broadcast the results of their respective ‘Songs Of The Decade’ polls, but on this occasion the wisdom of the crowd was spot on.
Brandon Flowers has subsequently proven (take a bow, Human) that there is no point in analysing his lyrics but this is the simple tale most of us have imagined, where the object of our desire is doing things with someone else that you’d rather she was doing with you:
How did it end up like this?
It was only a kiss…
Now I’m falling asleep
And she’s calling a cab
While he’s having a smoke
And she’s taking a drag.
Now they’re going to bed
And my stomach is sick
And it’s all in my head
But she’s touching his chest now;
He takes off her dress now;
Let me go…
I just can’t look, it’s killing me
And taking control…
Flowers told Q magazine in 2009 that the song was ‘inspired’ after he found his girlfriend in a Law Vegas bar with another man.
He exacted his revenge by becoming a wildly successful and immensely wealthy pop star. Eat it cold, dear.
Everything about this record is right. From the filters on the vocals (apeing You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’) and Flowers’ vocal desperation, to the guitar and synth lines (harder than they sound, as the plentiful YouTube tuition videos prove) and the rhythm section relentlessly propelling the song along, this is the closest the decade came to pop perfection.
It launched The Killers’ career, the band going on to be one of the best singles bands of the decade: Somebody Told Me, Smile Like You Mean It, All These Things That I’ve Done, Read My Mind and Human all made my longlist.
Mr. Brightside, replete with its Ode To Joy overtones, peaked at #10 on both the UK singles chart in June 2004 and the Billboard Hot 100 in June 2005.
I have compiled 50 of the 52 tracks in this list into a Spotify playlist for your listening pleasure (the absentees being the Oasis and David Ford tracks):
http://open.spotify.com/user/truthminister/playlist/7DAt1qsRTT9UMPYKbPWZXb