#1: Your Favourite Song

When I decided to start writing this, I made a couple of rules to myself, namely to:
- embed a Youtube vid into every post, because if there's no evidence there's no point. What I can't account for is the content of the videos: alternately Youtube users deserve to be shot or knighted.
- avoid sounding like a Pitchfork twat in my descriptions. This one is very important.
- only post one song per post.

However, with something like a favourite song it's simply impossible for anybody with any interest in music to select only one. There's songs for different moods, different times, different facets of the personality. For example, the part of me that likes to go out and dance my ass off to vile 00's indie does not appreciate the dulcet tones of Leonard Cohen as 1) it should and 2) as my more, er, good side does. As such, I'm going to post THREE songs today. I know right, breakin' the rules already. Imma fucking maverick.

Favourite kick ass song for walking with a strut and feeling like a mutha'



Sister Ray really could be the greatest song of all time; seventeen-odd minutes of noisy, awry, don't-give-a-fuck rock n roll. This is what so much lo-fi wants to be and isn't; exciting, sexy, loud, fun and decidedly NOT tediously generic pop music recorded with broken instruments on broken computers. I bloody love the VU.

Favourite song for sitting in bed with headphones on, being stirred, moved, reduced to mush...


The Cure are my favourite band, and my favourite song of theirs used to be the transcendent Plainsong, but I think in recent years A Letter to Elise has gradually eclipsed it (albeit, only slightly). Robert Smith described the bands Just Like Heaven as a perfect pop song, but that was before he wrote this. So lyrically and musically beautiful, so tender, so sad and overall, just an exquisite piece of pop. Flawless.

Favourite song for witty bits.

I genuinely do believe that Frankly Mr. Shankly represents the zenith of Morrissey's songwriting. Everybody talks about I Know It's Over and the like, and they're beautiful, desperately sad songs but Morrissey was never so funny, so acutely perceptive and so witty as in this. A snarky Wildean ode to fame, the industry and allegedly Rough Trade boss Geoff Harris, it's deliciously barbed and a perpetual delight to listen to. Sometimes I like to take a bit of a break from the Smiths, but I never stray from this song.