In with a shot (aimed at its own head) at number 5, The Smiths' "I Know It's Over"!

How could this NOT be in a list of depressing, lovelorn songs? Depressing and lovelorn lyrics is what The Smiths do best; Morrissey could patent the art of sounding like he's spent the evening crying and writing poetry about a lost lover in his room. (Fuck, he even referenced it himself in "Ask" - "Writing frightening verse/To a bucktoothed girl in Luxembourg" - he wins for sheer audacity alone.) Even the name signifies that this is NOT a happy song. The title signifies misery and loathing and all the other fun stuff, and the lyrics could make the most hardened nasty bastard ever feel a slight pang of sympathy, even AFTER he realised that the bloke who wrote them used to gad around wearing a hearing aid with flowers sticking out his arse.
Crowning moment of misery: Oh, the whole fucking song. Like I said, nobody does misery better than The Smiths. Rumour has it that the first successful SSRI antidepressant, Prozac, was developed to counteract their influence. Not really.

Freezing it up at number 4, Porcupine Tree's "Russia On Ice"!

Steven Wilson (from hereonin called "Stevie" because it's funny) excelled himself with this four hundred year long prog rock opus, about drinking yourself silly and calling up your ex and feeling bad. Personally I think it's miserable because the poor twat is drinking neat vodka - who the FUCK drinks neat vodka? If you're going to do shots of something, do whisky, or mix selfsame with coke or ginger ale and drink it down. Vodka just tastes like shit, which emphasises the misery - since being left, he's been so penniless he's had to buy Sainsbury's Basics Vodka, whereas previously he had delicious Maker's Mark bourbon. There's also some stuff about a failed relationship in there, and some suitably dramatic strings. But yeah, the alcohol's the main bit.
Crowning moment of misery: The string crescendo at the beginning of the second chorus. You can almost feel the now-alcoholic Stevie bursting into tears and soiling himself. Well, not the latter bit, anyway. I hope.

Fuck me! Number 3's Godley and Creme's "Cry"!

Now this is proper depressing shit, right here. It's so depressing they didn't even bother writing anything except a single verse, thinking that would put the underlying sense of desolation across well enough. The song is even named "Cry", and it's about crying and tears and cheating and lies. You can tell because those four words make up pretty much the whole song. You know how you can make any Dragonforce song ever by simply strumming random chords and shouting the words FIRE, FREE, FLAMES and FREEDOM over and over again really really fast? Godley and Creme WENT FORWARD IN FUCKING TIME and stole that approach for "Cry", being magical time travelling rock warriors and all. Don't watch the video though, because Godley's got a really friendly looking face, like Bob Ross, and Creme looks like someone took Paul McCartney and spliced him with Roger Waters, which totally spoils the effect. Extra bonus points for being produced by J.J. Jeczalik of Art Of Noise, who I presume wore one of those frowny AON masks throughout the entire mixing process. You know, sort of like in this picture.
Crowning moment of misery: Hearing it in GTA4 and driving through Liberty City really slowly in the rain. It was MADE for this shit.

Locked in a padded cell at number 2, Pink Floyd with "The Final Cut"!

Pink Floyd's album The Final Cut was much maligned, with some saying bassist and vocalist Roger Waters was locking everyone out of the recording process and trying to be the leader of the band. But, in this song, we can forgive him, because now, we feel his deep pain. Roger Waters is sad and alone and he wants us all to know. He wants us to share in his unhappiness, and talk to him; just once, just so he can feel a connection to another person. He wants to show you his "dark side" and hopes you won't "send [him] packing". He wants to tell you what it's like seeing "through the fish eyed lens of tear stained eyes" (his loneliness is so epically huge that his eyes are actually STAINED WITH TEARS. That's dedication, right there.) He wonders aloud, "Could anybody love him, or is it just a crazy dream?". The answer, sadly, is no. But before leaving Pink Floyd, he could be happy, save in the knowledge that he's written and sung one of the most depressing dirges ever made. The song even ends with an attempted suicide. HARDCORE.
Crowning moment of misery: Occurred about 2 years after the release of the song, when Waters went from writing decent lyrics to making Radio KAOS, an album that makes no sense whatsoever and at any rate isn't very good. But that's another blog post, for another time. Basically, I'd have preferred he actually did slit his wrists than write that turd.

POW! That's the sound of Radiohead shooting themselves (with music!) at number 1 with "All I Need"!

"Quelle surprise!" some might say to Radiohead being named as depressive. But, really, I wouldn't class a lot of their music as "depressing" - thoughtful, maybe, pessimistic, perhaps, but depressing? Nah. All I Need, however, takes the piss. In Rainbows features numerous examples of Thom Yorke changing his focus from slagging off consumerism and war, and instead he now wants to tell us all about failed and strained relationships - "House of Cards" does the same thing, but it's nowhere near as depression-tastic as "All I Need". Obsessive, unrequited love? Check. Repeated allegories to actual physical suffering? Check. He even comes right out and says "I only stick with you because there are no others", which on the loneliness and depression scale zooms right up to the top, above even my Facebook statuses after I've drunk too much "Scottish lemonade". Its only problem - its Achilles' heel, if you like - is that the opening drumbeat sounds a little bit like "Hard Knock Life" by Jay-Z, and once you've decided that it sounds like "Hard Knock Life" by Jay-Z, you're going to forever associate the song with little kids singing with a rapper, which is perhaps not what Thom Yorke intended. Oh well. It still thoroughly deserves its place at No. 1, for being an extremely depressing and lovelorn song on an album chock full of depressing, lovelorn songs. Well done, Radiohead. Don't do it again.
Crowning moment of misery: The bit at the end where Thom starts shouting and wailing and SCREAMING because he's so VERY VERY SAD AND JUST WANTS TO BE LOVED. Can you do that, Morrissey? No, you fucking can't.

(Apologies to David Rees for almost entirely nicking his style. It's a homage, dude.)

"adium webcam 1.3" - Because if anyone knows about whether Adium 1.3 has webcam support, it'll be me. For what it's worth, it doesn't, which is a good thing; it must be hard enough to put up with my drunken bitching over MSN without having to watch something that looks like Peter Gabriel crossed with Babe the sheep pig swigging JD and cokes before pausing to sing Godley and Creme's "Cry" totally off key.

"cunty bollocks" - Yes, someone searched Google for the phrase "cunty bollocks", which until now I felt was fairly self explanatory. You're going to search for it yourself now, aren't you? Yes you are. Well, I'll save you the trouble; this place is listed on page two. So basically, someone tried to find cunty bollocks on the Internet, saw an entire page of results and thought that none of them were satisfactory, so they plumped for my website. The fucking freak.

"burger king, banking" - Fried food and finance, a combination previously seen only in Scotland, now here on Elias Q. Funtybunt's Pisspoor Pseudonym.

"adium is a piece of shit" - Now that's just a lie. Adium's damn good for what it is. It's not iChat, but then what else is? The alternatives, for me, are Microsoft Messenger for Mac, a failed abortion of an app that should either be totally rewritten or put to sleep, or aMSN, where "they" live just outside the Mayak nuclear waste dump, didn't even bother to try the abortion so that it could be failed, and were instead left with a horrifically deformed fuckup of an app that had to be handed over to its weeping parents in a jar of formaldehyde. Then there's Mercury, which is basically aMSN yet somehow worse. Adium could cause a large, metal boot to pop out from my computer desk and hoof me in the nads every time I got a new message, and I'd still be grateful that I didn't have to use any of those clients.

"Cocksit" - A new genre of porn is born! Sadly, it was born here, where people came looking for it. Sorry to disappoint anyone who came to a WordPress.com blog looking for people sitting on cocks, but they tend to frown on hardcore fuckbanging here.

""pete burns"" - The undead fuck? If you came here for the latest happenings of everyone's favourite once-suicidal gaypop frogman, you're shit out of luck. Shame, since he's one of the few people in the universe who could stand next to me and make me look attractive. They could stab me, nail a dead baby to my face, strip me naked, make me jiggle non-stop for four hours and make me read out the lyrics to every Anal Cunt song ever in an excited tone of voice and I'd still be marginally sexier than Pete fucking Burns, I swear. Or not.

"greenbee telecoms review" - See, here's something I can help with! My review is basically that the speed's good, the customer service is OK-ish, the prices are sadly insane and a 5GB download cap, even if you're like me and don't download lots of stuff, is quite restrictive. No complaints with the phone service so far though, and the online billing is good.

"if one bleeds while shaving pubi hair" - What the FUCK?

"waitrose take cheque" - Not from November, according to my contact at Waitrose Chesham (one Stevey Wevey Woo). I actually just paid with a cheque for the first time in ages, simply because I've just got a cheque guarantee card and wanted to get some use out of it.

"gay sailors fucking" - Sorry, but you won't find any fucking here, let alone gay sailors. I think Google might have seen my reference to a "gay little sailor hat" and mashed it up a bit to produce a truly horrifying search term.

"what microwave meals do waitrose sell?" - There's the As Good As Going Out range for posh cunts, the Black and White range for fat cunts, the Indian range for Indian cunts, the Chinese range for Chinese cunts, the Deliciously Different range for snooty cunts and some frozen ones, for cunts that own freezers. My personal recommendation is the pancetta, parmesan and spinach risotto on the Good As Going Out range.

Well, there you go. Now you know the depraved routes people take to get here. Christ knows why.

I pity inanimate objects
Because they can't move

'Can't move - what a ridiculous idea. How do they think I get to work in the morning?' I put the phone on the loudspeaker, so I could knit while I listened. 'On the train, of course. The same way those two would if they had jobs instead of sitting about writing ludicrous things about subjects they don't understand. I'm going to read you something' - there was a pause and I could hear her rustling about some papers, perhaps. Then she continued....

'Sometimes I think the only human being who has half a clue is Terry Bisson. You've read him, of course?'. Well, I had to confess not, but in any case Clarissa wasn't going to let me go til I'd listened to the following:

They're Made Out of Meat
From the collection
Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories
by Terry Bisson

“They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”

“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”

“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”

“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”

“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”

“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take long. Do you have any idea what’s the life span of meat?”

“Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”

“Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”

“No brain?”

“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“So . . . what does the thinking?”

“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”

“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”

“Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they’ve been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”

“Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?”

“First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.”

“We’re supposed to talk to meat.”

“That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there? Anybody home?’ That sort of thing.”

“They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”

“Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.”

“I thought you just told me they used radio.”

“They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”

“Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”

“Officially or unofficially?”

“Both.”

“Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”

“I was hoping you would say that.”

“It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”

“I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say? ‘Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”

“Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”

“So we just pretend there’s no one home in the Universe.”

“That’s it.”

“Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You’re sure they won’t remember?”

“They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them.”

“A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”

“And we marked the entire sector unoccupied.”

“Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?”

“Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen-core cluster intelligence in a class-nine star in G445 zone was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.”

“They always come around.”

“And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone . . . ”

The video is just plain creepy and the ending makes me cry (in pain) but I still like it.

Next up, Murray Head with One Night in Bangkok:

High cheese factor here (musicals, bitches!) but "I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine" does it for me.

And finally Company B and Fascinated

"I'm fascinated by your love, boy. And I'm fascinated by your love toy". What more can I say. Oh, yeah, WIGS!

There are more out there but this is a good start.

Over the last few days, I've played "Consequences" by Godley and Creme.  It's the third time I've listened to it all the way through, and it's the fourth time I've converted it from my Vinyl since I've had it.

The first time was done through my TT's USB interface, which sounded overly loud.

The second time, one of the audio cables wasn't inserted properly so the whole recording was in mono.

The third time, I'd unknowingly set the recording volume too high and, despite the recording level never exceeding 0dBFS, it was still clipping a fraction below full scale.

This fourth time, I invested some time in tuning up the TT - aligning the cartridge, leveling the platter, cleaning the stylus, brushing the vinyl, reducing the wow on the second disc (caused by its centre-hole being drilled off-centre) and digitally removing the AC hum.

Some people who have heard the album would read the above and go "WHY?!!"

It's not the most universally appealing albums - it's certainly the most critically-savaged entry in the G&C discography - and the passage of time hasn't been of any benefit to it either.  Allow me to explain why:

a) It's a concept album.  Gasp! Shock! Horror!

b) It spans 6 sides of vinyl and plays for over 100 minutes.

c) It's a glorified advertisement for the "Gizmotron" - a guitar effect developed by G&C that fits over the bridge and "bows" the strings using electric motors to make them sound like orchestral string instruments with infinite sustain.

d) 3 of its 6 sides are predominantly taken up with a "play" written and performed by a somewhat intoxicated Peter Cook

e) Only one song, a mere three minutes in length, resembles G&C's work with 10cc.

f) Of the handful of "proper" songs it contains, only one of them is a potential single - and even that flopped.

g) It was lavishly presented in a box with a booklet of production notes, making it rather expensive by 1977 standards.

h) There is no CD version currently in print.

Many would just take the 8 points above and sum it up in three words: "self-indulgent crap".  Well, if that's true, then I like self-indulgent crap!

So why do I like it?  Simple - it's different, it's unique and it's very brave - released as it was at the height of punk.  The effort that G&C put into it, and the faith that they had in it, is very evident despite the fact that though they both knew it was going to be torn to shreds by the media.  I appreciate that it's not everybody's cup of tea, but I can quite easily sit down and enjoy it - I don't feel the boredom or lack of interest that most people got.  I guess I just have a higher tolerance for anything distanced from the mainstream.

Although Kevin was somewhat disheartened by its lack of success, Lol was more positive, stating that the enjoyment of making the album, and the amount he learned making it, was far more important than how successful it was.  Right on, Lol!  Had they not made this album, how would future albums like "Freeze Frame" and "Ismism" have sounded?  Probably not as innovative as they were.

Besides - it has the greatest line ever to appear on vinyl:

"It's never a good omen when goldfish commit suicide"

Unusually for me, I listened to something on the way back that I’d never played before: “Sheet Music” by 10cc.  Normally, I go for something easy and familiar after having a mentally taxing day but, in this instance, I felt like playing something with Godley & Creme on it.  Didn’t feel like playing any of the G&C albums on my iRiver, so went for 10cc instead.  What I heard was decent enough – as with all albums with a heavy G&C presence, it takes some time to work its magic and, as I was trying t stop myself from dozing off, I didn’t catch as much as I normally would.  In the car, I’d got a cassette with Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light” recorded onto it, which woke me up a bit.

I was the only guy I knew in tenth grade who loved this song, let alone had even heard of it.  I remember seeing this video on MTV, either at the beach or at one of my friends houses, and was haunted by the melody.  It was just so sad, and it struck a chord with me.  The video was sad as well: face after face, morphing into one another (pre-computer morphing), all just simply singing the lyrics of the song.  I ran out and got the single, but I'm not sure where I could have found it, maybe at the record store in Dover Mall.  I specifically rememeber watching the video at the beach one summer.  Only a couple of my friends who lived in town had cable back then.

iTunes didn't have this song listed a couple of years ago, but it might now.  I added Godley and Creme to my Yahoo player favorites, hoping done day it would come up in the rotation.  It finally did, a couple of years later, while I was at work.  I marked it as a favorite and heard it once again a couple months later.  When I finally get an iPod, this'll be one of the first songs I get.

This is the first of my 45s I'm throwing out.  I've got to admit, I'm a little sad parting with this.  But here it goes, in the trash with it.