The song of love is a sad sad song (etc.)

Given my speculations on the possible superiority of love songs over the thing itself, I feel duty bound to volunteer a few of my favourites in the genre. Love songs, that is, not loves. Although, not surprisingly, the songs that see us through assert their claims through association. Certain songs absorb as much as they impart, like sponges of sentiment. It’s time I gave them a squeeze.

Not surprisingly, most of the songs I value most are of the melancholy kind, for, as I never tire of asserting, or letting Nick Cave assert for me, “I believe the Love Song to be a sad song. It is the noise of sorrow itself”. Or, as he more melodramatically puts it, with reference to his own clutch of such, “lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man”.

And yet, not all love songs are obviously sad, and not all are ballads. A few manage to cover up the tracks of the tears with a convincing ecstatic mask. As we’re just setting out, I should fill the floor not your hankies, so let’s start with some of the very few happy, toe-tappy love songs in the Helioholic’s hit parade. In no particular order, and in sporadic instalments here’s some of my favourite love songs.

Just to spite him, I’ll start with a rare instance of up-beat love lyricism from Mr Cave himself. Now, generally, love is a fairly anguished business for our old Nick, and I’ll have a few choice examples of this more characteristic mode in good time. Love is more likely to have him reaching for a handy rock – “for all beauty must die” (‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, from Murder Ballads) – than standard sentimental endearments. Which is why ‘Breathless’ from The Lyre of Orpheus is a surprising little gem. Nick, happily married Nick, doesn’t sing about love much these days, because contentment doesn’t suit his muse. But this finds his satanic majesty full of the joys of spring, with nature chorusing his happiness.

“It's up in the morning and on the downs
Little white clouds like gambolling lambs
And I am breathless over you”.

(The heavy smoking Cave, getting up early and striding across the Sussex Downs, might have something to do with this condition, but I won’t spoil the moment for him). There’s a plaintive flute weaving in and out of the simple acoustic accompaniment, suggesting a merry troupe of minstrels prancing along behind the besotted Bad Seed whose let love in. And how.

“The happy hooded bluebells bow
And bend their heads all a-down
Heavied by the early morning dew
At the whispering stream, at the bubbling brook
The fishes leap up to take a look
For they are breathless over you”.

It’s surely the mark of genius when an artist can go so far left-field of his usual patch so convincingly. And yet, he’s changed the tempo, changed the tone, but the anguish is still just beneath the surface and between the lines. This is still a lifeline from a drowning man. The clue’s in the title.

"I listen to my juddering bones
The blood in my veins and the wind in my lungs
And I am breathless without you".

He kinda means it, somehow turning a rather sweet little ditty into a visceral immolation before the beloved. You just can’t keep a good Goth down.

And this applies equally to one of the most perfect Emo-anthems to love, ‘Just Like Heaven’ by The Cure. Big sounds, Big hair, are usually a Big turnoff for me, symbolised by one of the aural nadirs of a dodgy decade: The Alarm. But it’s difficult not to have a sneaking admiration for Robert Smith, who found a look and stuck with it, long after the backcombed bandwagon left town. Dear Robert is just a bit too cuddly to be a scary Goth, or convince us with the shadow puppet diablerie of his suburban psychodramas. Bless, this Creepy from Crawley can’t even put his lipstick on properly, and you can almost imagine a fussy aunt giving him a spit wash with a hankie to clean up the proper mess he’s made of it while he wriggles teetchily from her grasp. Michael Bracewell clinched it in his brilliant book, England is Mine, when he said in Smith’s songs “the soul is not so much bared as reduced to wandering around in its dressing gown all day”.

But that’s just why a song such as ‘Just like Heaven’ is so perfect, and speaks to tortured suburban romantics everywhere. Boys do Cry. Love is big, and its emotions are big, even when worn moochily by gauche adolescent suburbanites. It captures something of the child-like glee of love. Partly through the tumbling jangle of heart-catchy guitars (making Altered Images sound like Slipknot), and partly through the wide-eyed love-stoked wonder of Smith’s lyrics:

“Show me show me show me how you do that trick
The one that makes me scream" she said
"The one that makes me laugh" she said
And threw her arms around my neck
"Show me how you do it
And I promise you I promise that
I'll run away with you
I'll run away with you"

It should be fey, but somehow it isn’t. (A grown man with a thatched head and fright slap gushing thus). But twee soon turns Wagnerian, as Wuthering Heights comes to Worthing on Sea.

"Daylight licked me into shape
I must have been asleep for days
And moving lips to breathe her name
I opened up my eyes
And found myself alone alone
Alone above a raging sea
That stole the only girl I loved
And drowned her deep inside of me".

In other words, I woke up and it was all a dream. Too much Merrydown on a Sussex cliff and this is bound to happen. Yet it has everything in this song to delight the sensitive suburban soul. Soaring from glee to Goth gloom in 3 perfect minutes. A soaring love anthem for the eternally lost and lonely.

Finally, and this might surprise you, but what romp through the vinal vales of lyrical loves past would be complete without ‘Come on Eileen’? Yes, I know it’s been tarnished by overexposure, with faux school discos flogging the dead horse of popular nostalgia, but I still really love this song. It is a landmark for me, as one of the very rare instances when I like what everyone else likes and join in a national enthusiasm. I usually go the other way in principle, but not this time. Few people don’t like ‘Come on Eileen’, and everyone loved it when it reached no. 1 in the summer of 1982. It floated from countless open windows, capturing the youthful mood of summer. Agreed, it’s rather pompous, Rowland is a plonker, and their charity shop Romany Romanticism fooled no one. But sometimes you’ve just got to go with it. It was the year of my first proper love, and my first broken heart. But not yet, when Dexys topped the charts and stomped the boards, that love was at its height. It was the very sound of love, and I was happy to stomp along to its tune, forgetting all in adolescent abandon. An instant exit from Croydon. For that is what it is about. Escaping, the destined drudgery of background:

"These people round here wear beaten down eyes
Sunk in smoke dried faces they're so resigned to what their fate is,
But not us, no not us we are far too young and clever.
Remember Toora Loora Toora Loo-Rye-Aye
Eileen I'll hum this tune forever".

He’s right. We have. Forever 15 and in first love, restored by a record.

(I've no idea how to embed Youtube widgets like the clever blogs do, but here are the links. Enjoy.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb45RkfWjV0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ThWaMnlSZM&feature=PlayList&p=1598BC8EB2044468&playnext=1&index=57

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5StFADI9NM

Are love songs better than love?

It's a genuine question I'd like to ruminate on and, I hope, debate (as well as a pretext for some smart-assed sophistries from a sentimental cynic). Of course, it largely depends on the love song or love in question. I think I would be prepared to endure the worst parts of the worst relationships for eternity rather than hear 'Lady in Red' for a fraction of that time. But I think there is more than intrinsic 'quality' at issue here. I didn't know those relationships were going to be painful when they started out, we both of us must have had the highest hopes, the best intentions. But surely Chris De Blurgh knew what he was doing when he unleashed that abomination on the world, and for this his song must be confined for eternity on Anthrax Island* So, I think, love songs have at least the potential to eclipse that about which they purport to warble. How?

Ars longa, vita brevis (life is short, but art is long), teaches the sage, and that applies to the art of the love song. Nick Cave, who knows about these things, gave a lecture on the love song, telling how he wrote his song 'Far From Me' over 4 months, during which time the relationship he was writing about changed, in fact ended. What started out as a lament for a distant loved one became one for a lost love. As he concludes: "The peculiar magic of the love song ... is that it endures where the object of the song does not. It attracts itself to you and together you move through time". The Smiths's song 'Rubber Ring' says something similar, with that eternal malcontent Morrissey resenting the fact that his songs of loneliness might be forsaken when his public (oh, but never he), are: "dancing and laughing / And finally living / Hear my voice in your head / And think of me kindly". Songs, he claims"were the only ones who ever stood by you". And they do. But lover's don't. They always leave, as Ryan Adams sings, when you need them most. Songs are long, and life, and love, are short.

And yet, songs aren't long, and that also makes them superior to love itself. In three minutes you can have rapture, reconciliation, even rumpy pumpy when you want them. Love songs know when it's over, know when to shut up. Before the rise of the Chavson d' Amour of the Lilly Allen school started churning out love songs that make a merit of mundanity, gnawing the gristly Greggs pastie of pop), love songs offered excitement and wonder. You can have variety without promiscuity or satiety. Rapture here - 'ain't love the sweetest thing'; regret there - 'Nothing compares 2 u'; and reverie - ' Lover, you should have come over' - to complete the cycle. Neat, complete and in your control. Who would bother with the real thing when the world is full of silly love songs.

When love has let you down, they're there to comfort, console and instruct. They've been through it all before, and can help you get through it too. They can make sense of what makes no sense at all. What does love teach us? Plenty. Do we learn from it? Rarely. Love songs have clarity, coherence and completion, while love is messy, ad-hoc, mendacious, and never quite finished. It ain't over even when it's over. With love songs you can chose the mood to suit. Can love ever be like that? You know where you are with them, following a tried and trusted formula. Love so often changes its tune when least expected. You might start out walking on sunshine, but end up crying in the rain.

If I'm considering pros and cons, then love is decidedly the latter. The oldest one in the book. Whilst we retain the discernment to judge a good love song from a bad, how difficult is it to do the same with love? Yet if we are conned by love, love songs are partly to blame. Their perfection, their subtle sophistries lead us astray, teaching us to believe and to deceive in love's name. Hence the danger of love songs, both good and bad. Lady in Red drips poison in the ears of the besotted, smooching closer to the clammy chimera of 'Romance', and getting a whole breed of bastard offshoots even viler than their progenitor. 'Unchained Melody', 'I'm in the Mood For Love', 'Love is Stronger than Pride', might delight us, but they also deceive us into believing their mighty fables, and introducing the canker worms ino the bud of our poor mortal loves.

I first sketched these notes when I was on a plane. It was during takeoff, and so all electrical equipment had to be switched off, including my iPod. I looked across the aisle and saw a couple holding hands while the plane took off. I had my notes and the love songs I couldn't play, but they had each other.

*Anthrax Island Discs is a game I think I invented, which is the nightmare counterpart of the weedy luvvy fest of radio fame. You decide which records you hope to never hear again for as long as you live (I promise I thought of this before Room 101 came along, but what do you care?). For your information, along with Chris's golden classic are, of course, 'I Just Called to Say I Love you', 'Hello' by Lionel Ritche, Bohemian Rhapsody, in fact most of Queen's backlist, and if there's room Oaasis too (except 'Don't Look Back in Anger'). I'm sure I used to know precisely which songs should be suffering there, but maybe I've mellowed with age, or just stopped listening to the radio, or being invited to weddings (well. would you?). It grew out of that where's my revolver instinct triggered by the incessant drek-bath that is listening to the radio. I have long since let the poptastic wireless fall silent, and am a good deal more clement as a consequence.

This is a weeping song(s)

I'm launching rather prematurely into a topic I'm destined to obsess over in this blog. This will be the first of many postings on the pleasure of melancholy music, or weeping songs as the gentleman to my left calls them. I pre-empt a more planned rumination on this subject because I went to see Nick Cave live a few nights ago, and he is much on my mind. I thought I'd simply get off my chest something that's been bugging me for years about Cave. How to reconcile the two sides of Nick Cave's art - the tender lyricist of some of the most heart-rending reflections on lost love, and, a barn-storming, hell-raising, fire-and-brimstone, demonic preacher of twisted despair, damnation or redemption.

Nick Cave generally rocks. He came from rock - a cauldron of punk-goth-Cramps noise making in his earliest days as The Birthday Party from down under, and he seems determined to return to hell in his latest handcart, the rather noisy Grinderman venture. His latest studio albums, and also his live performances favour the rock side of things, and are very very noisy. He shouts, he struts (he even did a crowd dive the other night, something I had never seen him do before, and which a 50 year old should think twice about), and he and the band have a wail of a time kicking up an aural rumpus, and the fans love it too. Now, that might be stating the bleeding obvious to long-standing Cave fans, or serious musos, and simply describing what he has always been about, with a possible, and in their mind, rather regrettable period around 97-01, when he did a lot of ballads and took the tempo and noise right down. The thing is, that's when I got into him, and that's the Cave I know and love and need. I'm not a big rock or noisy rumpus fan (vide my Lexicon of Love posting), and so for me this middle period was at his best, albeit unhappiest.

The Nick Cave of The Boatman's Call, and No More Shall We Part, who was getting over a very messy break up with P J Harvey, and poured a lot of his grief - both general and specific - into his piano and typewriter. In 1999, the first time I went to see him at the Royal Festival Hall, he did nearly all ballads from The Boatman's Call (with a few of the old hell-raisers for the encore just to please the crowd and give his band of hardened rockers The Bad Seeds something to justify their bus fares), and I thought I had died and gone to hell - a happy hell of melodic misery. But this seems impossible now. When he throws the occasional ballad into his live shows now, it seems out of place, and the audience doesn't know what to do with it. I do, I stand there with wet eyes wishing it was all like this, that his heart was still broken, and he would carry on penning what he once called 'lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man'. He was describing what all love songs should be, and he was talking in 1999, when his certainly were back then.

But he's happily married, living by the seaside now with wife and kids, and no longer drowning but waving. I miss the misery. Songs like 'People they ain't no good' (the title says it all); 'Brompton Oratory', and 'Love Letter'. The last I've even written about in a chapter I wrote about love and love songs in a book I wrote about sunshine (about the weather imagery in the song), but I haven't exhausted it, and I haven't stopped playing it. And I didn't stop playing these slices of eloquent anguish through a very rocky emotional patch I went through just as I discovered Mr Cave. They are so entwined with my emotional memories of a messy break up of my own back then that they now have a near Pavlovian potency, inducing a second-hand heartache when the actual wounds have healed. These songs are aural gin for me. Best mixed with tears. And that's why I needed him then, and why I bitterly resent him now howling away and waving to me from the top deck of the happy bus of rock.*

*I confess I'm guilty of absurd simplification here, as any Nick Cave fan would testify. The man released an album called Murder Ballads after all, and so the 2 sides - the howling hell-raiser and the heart-break balladeer - are of the same highly original coin. It comes down to what I would like to call 'eloquent anguish', which Mr Cave, howling or weeping, has by the bucket load. I do enjoy many of his barn-stormers (The Mercy Seat, Papa Won't Leave you Henry, Yes, We Have No Bananas), when he serves them up, but I'm just making a rather sulky point that I wish he wasn't so happy now. His gain has been music's loss in my view, and I'm still standing here needing lifelines to the galaxies.