Finally, a long-overdue appearance in these pages from the magnificent Antje Duvekot. Vertigo comes from Antje’s 2009 album The Near Demise of the Highwire Dancer.
It’s a love song:
You’re on a highwire and I’m climbing out
And I feel the danger as I steal a kiss from your mouth
It’s a love song, and a metaphor. The frisson of simultaneous fear and excitement of a new love, a new adventure—we’ve all been there—wrapped up in the imagery of the circus, the big top, the high wire. The excitement of putting on a show, whilst being utterly terrified.
Antje steps out on that wire, taking her physical and emotional life in her own hands. There is no safety net:
There’ll be no safety net
When I fall right out of the sky
There will be no ambulance waiting
And I have no wings to fly
It’s a beautiful surrender:
I will break all my bones
The redemption is in the confession:
I lied about the vertigo
I guess we’ve all pretended to be braver than we really are from time to time, only for our bravado to be caught out by life, by love. A beautiful song. Thank you, Antje.
⁂
You’ll hear more from Antje Duvekot in these pages. The song, and in fact the album, are produced by another Threehundredsongs favourite, Richard Shindell, and features his Cry Cry Cry bandmate Lucy Kaplansky on vocals too. So I’ve worked some of their music into the playlist too. Enjoy.
If you need cheering up, you can always turn to Richard Thompson:
There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow
There’s nothing to grow up for anymore
In 1972, having spent a few years pioneering British folk rock with Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson went solo with Henry the Human Fly, to mixed acclaim. A couple of years later he’d teamed up both maritally and musically with the beautiful person and beautiful voice that is Linda Thompson, leading to the release of the magnificent I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight in 1974.
It’s a wonderful album from start to finish. The title track alone is worth the price of entry. The solitary lament of a woman ready to get out there, painting the town both literal and figurative shades of red:
Meet me at the station don’t be late
I need to spend my money and it just won’t wait
You wouldn’t argue with Linda on this matter. The night rolls on, and so do the drunkards:
See the boys out walking, the boys they look so fine;
Dressed up in green velvet, their silver buckles shine!
Soon they’ll be bleary eyed, under a keg of wine –
Down where the drunkards roll
Royston Wood of The Young Tradition sings his inimitable bass on that one, and boy does it work.
The whole album is a masterclass, full of hidden depths. There simply is not a weak track on I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. But we digress: this is a project about individual songs, and I’ve chosen The End of the Rainbow:
I feel for you, you little horror
Safe at your mother’s breast
This is Richard’s pep talk for a new-born infant:
No lucky break for you around the corner
‘Cause your father is a bully
And he thinks that you’re a pest
And when I say “pep talk”:
Your sister, she’s no better than a whore
This is a brutal, honest exposition to the neonate: life actually does suck, and you’re welcome to it. Written at the time Richard & Linda welcomed their own first-born into the world, Linda was livid. How dare you tell our kid that there’s nothing to live for? But:
Life seems so rosy in the cradle
But I’ll be a friend, I’ll tell you what’s in store
Is Richard just being a friend, preparing the kid for the harsh reality of the human existence? Or is he simply an old curmudgeon, wishing misery on an innocent life? Is there really nothing to grow up for? You decide.
⁂
On a personal note, I own the CD, and must have listed to the album countless times, barely noticing the song. But a BBC documentary made me sit up and take notice:
As for the playlist, I’ve added the title track from I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, perhaps in part to prove that the entire album isn’t all doom and gloom, but mainly because I think Linda’s magnificent voice and personality both really shine on that one.
There’s some solo material in there too, plus it would be inappropriate not to include Nanci Griffith’s storming cover of Wall of Death from 1998’s Other Voices, Too—her version a duet with Richard himself. The Bunch were new to me: a collective of Island Records artists including Richard, Sandy Denny and notably featuring a pre-Thompson Linda Peters on vocals.
Here at Threehundredsongs, we’re a big fan of Memphis, Tennessee’s Lucero, so you’ll probably hear a great deal more from them in these pages. Lucero’s first single was 1999’s My Best Girl, released as a very limited-numbers 7″ vinyl recording, backed with a cover of Jawbreaker’s Kiss the Bottle.
The song starts off in typically melancholy Lucero mood:
Well I’m a sucker for some pretty eyes
But they’re going home with some other boy tonight
We’ve all been there, mate. Chin up fella.
Hell, I guess I’ll be fine
’cause there’s one girl whose all mine
She’s seen it before, she’ll see it again
Because those other girls going home with him
And I’ll go back to her and she don’t mind
…
She’s my best girl by far
Aww, that’s kind of sweet, isn’t it. Told you it would all work out OK.
She’s got six strings
Wait, what? Ah, yes. This is a paean to the timeless love between a man and an inanimate object. Songwriter Ben Nichols clearly has his prorities in order:
The only girl a boy can trust
Is his guitar
Trustworthy, reliable, won’t let him down etc. Dude clearly doesn’t own a Gretsch, am I right, guitar nerds? [Disclaimer: Threehundredsongs owns a Gretsch]
An album release followed in 2000, with The Attic Tapes. I’d say studio album but then it was quite literally recorded in an attic. A mere 13 or so albums have followed, culminating in 2023’s Should’ve Learned By Now, while My Best Girl resurfaced on 2003’s eponymous Lucero. There’s a lot of good stuff in that back catalogue, so do spend some time discovering the band.
As for the playlist, I’ve mainly added a bunch of Lucero songs that I think you’ll like. I can’t find many more love songs about guitars, but then I think I’d feel pretty weird about posting them anyway.
In October 2014 Taylor Swift released 1989, a synthy, poppy offering designed to distance her brand from the pseudo-country roots she, or rather her handlers in the music business, had been cultivating in the early years of her career. The time had come to shepherd her towards the mainstream mega celebrity she was inevitably to enjoy.
In September 2015 serial album-generating machine and huge Taylor Swift fan Ryan Adams released 1989, ostensibly a like-for-like cover of the entirety of the Taylor Swift album.
The Internet Feminists did not like that one bit: Adams was accused of “mansplaining” Swift’s songs back to her (conveniently ignoring that the songs on the abum were almost exclusively written by men), and drawing attention to what must be “fragile masculinity” on Adams’ part, since clearly he couldn’t stand to let a mere woman have all the success and attention.
Sadly there’ll always be that demographic—you know who they are—who seek to further their agenda and increase their currency—both literal and metaphorical—by slinging mud, and riding the coat-tails of high-profile men. With his abject lack of people skills, and deep reluctance to engage with the media circus that inevitably dogs successful creative artists, Adams has always been seen as something of an easy target in that regard.
Heaven forfend we countenance that maybe, just maybe, Ryan just really, really liked the songs. Taylor Swift, for her part, loved the reimagined album too. She probably didn’t mind the little bonus on top of her royalty check either.
That Ryan’s record garnered more attention in the “serious” music press than Taylor’s was deemed to be blatant misogyny and musical snobbery. Heaven forfend we countenance that maybe, just maybe, Adams simply made a more interesting record.
It could be any track on the album, but I’ve chosen Style. Just a great, driving guitar-pop song about a star-crossed young couple who’ve had their ups and downs but can’t keep their eyes or indeed hands off each other:
We never go out of style
There’s a groove and intensity and perhaps even a sense of fun that the rather po-faced, 80s-lite original desperately needed. Adams modifies the lyrics, seemingly to espouse the point of view of the male protagonist, in counterpoint to Swift’s heroine of the original piece:
You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye
And I got that red lip classic thing that you like
…
So it goes
He can’t keep his wild eyes on the road, mm
Takes me home
The lights are off, he’s taking off his coat, mm, yeah
You’ve got that Daydream Nation look in your eye
I got that pent up love thing that you like
…
So it goes
I can’t keep my eyes on the road
She takes me home
Lights are off, she’s taking off her coat
They didn’t like that at all either, but then, had he not given them something to moan about, they would never have listened to a Taylor Swift record, let alone a Ryan Adams record, in the first place. So, y’know, joke’s on them.
Artist:
Ryan Adams
Album:
1989
Writers:
Ali Payami, Karl Johan Schuster, Martin Sandberg, Taylor Swift & Ryan Adams
There can’t be a single chap of my generation who doesn’t vividly remember the day in 1988 when gap-toothed froggy sexpot Vanessa Paradis burst onto our TV screens, into the charts, and into our hearts with Joe Le Taxi.
Vanessa was just 14, but that was OK: we were 12. We didn’t understand a word she was banging on about—except perhaps “Joe”, “le”, and “taxi”—despite the best ministrations of Mrs. Rhodes, whose francophone eagle eyes spotted a nailed-on opportunity to get a room full of pubescent boys to at least pay attention in French lessons for a change.
Joe le taxi
Y va pas partout
Y marche pas au soda
Joe the taxi driver doesn’t cover all parts of town (“South of the river this time of night? You ‘avin’ a giraffe?”) and he clearly likes a drink or two. Let’s hope our route home doesn’t involve any Parisian underpasses, am I right? Still, Joe and his saxophone do know the city by heart, including the dodgy bars and dark corners. We’re in good company:
Son saxo jaune
Connait toutes les rues par coeur
Tous les p’tits bars
Tous les coins noirs
Et la Seine
Et ses ponts qui brillent
And Joe has pretty classy taste in music too, his night shift being soundtracked by rumba and mambo, which resonate in his cab as he plies his trade:
Dans sa caisse
La musique a Joe resonne
C’est la rumba
Le vieux rock au mambo bidon
…
Joe le taxi
Et Xavier Cugat
Joe le taxi
Et Yma Sumac
Fittingly, the instrumentation is all swampy baritone sax and cha-cha-cha rhythms, creating a brooding atmosphere recalling searingly hot, daringly late Parisian nights.
It might be easy to dismiss Joe Le Taxi as a kind of one-hit-wonder, novelty sort of single, but there may be a serious aspect to the song. There are anecdotal claims that songwriter Étienne Roda-Gil was inspired by the tale of one Maria-José Leão Dos Santos, a Portuguese émigré who fled the authoritarian Estado Novo regime due to her homosexuality, settling in Paris and becoming a taxi driver and “nightlife figure”.
True or not, I’ll admit I hadn’t noticed the backstory myself until I started researching this piece, but then the lyrics are primarily about rum and saxophones. And in French. So my conscience is clear.
Vanessa went on to pursue a very successful career in singing, modelling and acting, despite it not being terribly easy to pinpoint exactly where her talents lie. Well, beyond getting her quite delightful bits and pieces out for all to see on film, and pursuing ill-advised relationships with famous men.
Regardless, she’ll always have a special place in the corner of your author’s heart and indeed in pop history.
Deacon Blue first came to broad public attention in 1988, with the release of their debut album, Raintown, fortified by the re-release of the 1987 single, Dignity. Decades later, Threehundredsongs is still coming to terms with quite how wonderful Deacon Blue were. (And probably still are: remind me to make a note to check that.)
Dignity is the tale of an ageing yet irascible street sweeper, presumably in songwriter Ricky Ross’ home town of Glasgow:
There’s a man I meet, walks up our street
He’s a worker for the council
Has been twenty years
And he takes no lip off nobody
And litter off the gutter
…
The children call him Bogie
Bogie works away diligently, day after day, quietly saving his hard-earned pennies and planning his retirement:
He let me know a secret about the money in his kitty
He’s gonna buy a dinghy
Gonna call her Dignity
It goes without saying that the boat is a framing device for the character’s escapist dreams and a metaphor for freedom and, well, dignity, obviously:
And I’ll sail her up the west coast
Through villages and towns
I’ll be on my holidays
They’ll be doing the rounds
They’ll ask me how I got her I’ll say, “I saved my money”
They’ll say, “Isn’t she pretty? That ship called Dignity”
Here’s the original music video:
Looking back, it’s gratifying to think that while the UK charts were adrift on an endless ocean of Rick Astley, Mel & Kim, Pepsi & Shirley and a surplus of further Stock Aitken Waterman-produced lowest-common-denominator codswallop, genuine quality, truly original bands like Deacon Blue could still get a look in.
In fairness, I could have chosen any Deacon Blue song from this era. For example, When Will You (Make My Telephone Ring), also featured on Raintown, is as fine an example of mournful singalong blue-eyed soul as you could imagine emanating from Scotland, Wet Wet Wet notwithstanding.
Fergus Sings the Blues, from 1988’s follow-up album When the World Knows Your Name, begins with one of the greatest opening lines I can remember:
Fergus sings the blues
In bars of twelve or less
Any songwriter would be justifiably proud of that, and the fact that the joke might be lost on a few non-musos doesn’t compromise it.
Real Gone Kid, also from When the World Knows Your Name, is a paean to delightful serial muse Maria McKee, alongside whom Deacon Blue toured while she was in Lone Justice. That man Adam Duritz was similarly taken with her:
Maria came from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand
She said she’d like to meet a boy who looks like Elvis
Brian Fallon was clearly listening:
Maria came from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand
I always kinda sorta wished I looked like Elvis
Anyway, we digress. Back to the matter in hand, Dignity. I’ve plumped for this song as it very much resonated with a teenage Threehundredsongs: trudging the streets of a northern town in the rain at the crack of dawn, diligently delivering the neighbourhood’s newspapers and saving my own scant pennies for an undetermined future meant I felt something of an affinity for old Bogie here.
The song takes an unexpected twist towards the end, with Ricky co-opting the narrative just to tell us about his fancy-pants holiday in, I guess, Turkey:
And I’m telling this story
In a faraway sea
Sipping down raki
And reading Maynard Keynes
Lucky you, Mr. Ross. Lucky you. But the redemption is there: even our narrator is dreaming of his own Dignity, if perhaps not the Scottish weather, and echoes Bogie’s own words:
And I’ll sail her up the west coast
Through villages and towns
I’ll be on my holidays
They’ll be doing the rounds
…
And I’m thinking how good it would be
To be here some day
On a ship called Dignity.
We’ve only touched on a few of the better-known singles here, but Deacon Blue’s back catalogue is a bit of a goldmine: still going strong, they released their eleventh studio album, Riding on the Tide of Love, in 2021; they continue to tour, and you can currently pre-order two forthcoming anthologies prior to their release in September 2023. These are the rather cleverly-named All the Old 45s, a singles collection; and You Can Have it All, a 14-CD boxset comprising every Deacon Blue album to date.
Poor old Richard Manuel. Not content with him being dead, songwriters keep rubbing it in by writing songs about how dead he is:
Richard Manuel is dead
Richard Manuel is dead
There are probably more, but you get the point. At least Elton John didn’t name a kid after him, so there’s that.
Danko/Manuel is obviously Isbell’s tribute to Richard Manuel and Rick Danko—the latter also dead—of The Band. Jason wrote this during his tenure as one of the three writer-vocalist-guitarists in the mighty Drive By Truckers. That band were, and remain, a Southern Rock behemoth, but I guess that along the way, Jason felt a need to spread his wings, personally and professionally.
Jason opted out of the rock n’ roll lifestyle…
I ain’t living like I should
A little rest might do me good
…instead finding love and happiness sharing a nice big house in Nashville with the magnificent Amanda Shires, a beautiful baby girl named Mercy, and one of the most expensive guitars on the planet. And honing his art to become arguably the very finest living songwriter. But I’m repeating myself.
You can’t begrudge a man his sobriety, success and happiness, not least when he’s evidently worked so damn hard for it. But I can’t help missing the angry, sweaty, bloated, loud Jason giving it blood sweat and tears, if not more bodily fluids, on some of the earlier stuff.
Can you hear that singing, sounds like gold?
Maybe I can hear poor Richard from the grave
Singin’ where to reap and when to sow
When you found another home you have to leave
I’ve opted for this version, from a super-rare EP recorded live at Twist & Shout Records in Denver back in 2007, as it seems to hit a sweet spot between those two eras.
Anna Begins is possibly the greatest love song ever written. The album version sucks enormous ass, so that’s why we return, time and again, to this live, acoustic version from the Jools Holland show in…I don’t know. Before you were born, anyway.
I am not worried,
I am not overly concerned
Yes you are, Adam Duritz, and that’s the reason you wrote the song.
She’s talking in her sleep
It’s keeping me awake
Well, that’s what you get for falling in love with a woman. You can’t say you weren’t warned.
Maybe I should just snap her up in a butterfly net and just pin her down on a photograph album
…
I’m not ready for this sort of thing
Well, they have travelled from the far corners or the universe, and from billions of years in the past (or future: they’re non-committal about the specifics) to share their message of good will and sage advice to all humans, so it would be rude of us not to take a moment to appreciate the totally bonkers wisdom and lore of the mighty HENGE.
HENGE have been observing the humans from afar for some time now, and find it difficult to understand how a life form so “advanced” could be so hell-bent on destroying its own host planet:
Zpor: “We should warn them”
Anonymous spaceship minion: “They already know!”
Zpor: “We should warn them again!”
And warn us they do, setting the co-ordinates for Planet Earth, and travelling with great haste through time and space to a playground in a Manchester park, wherein they disguise themselves as small children, hoping to “blend in”. What could possibly go wrong.
This is rather urgent, humans, you don’t have the time to waste!
It’s critically important, humans, that you now proceed with haste!
It will not be long before the ice melts and the gas escapes!
A tipping point is coming, humans, when your ecosystem breaks!
A small but perfectly-groomed army of mini-HENGElings are recruited, and proceed to plant a modest amount of earth-vegetation, collect some litter, and summarily berate Barry Shitpeas for dropping yet more litter. Suitably chastened, he picks it up and scampers away to safety. A dance routine—clearly choreographed by the child performers’ dads—breaks out, and one rap later…
Better get a wriggle on!
Better get up!
Better get arse in gear!
Shoulda got a grip by now!
Shoulda woke up!
You should not dither here!
…the earth is presumably saved for another year or two.
Threehundredsongs was lucky enough to see HENGE live whilst at work a week or two ago—along with a thumping support slot from Elf Traps. Happy memories of hanging with my super pal and colleague Charlotte while we somehow dealt with a room full of several hundred earthling humans who were, to use the medical parlance, tripping balls.
It would be easy to dismiss HENGE as a novelty act, but no. This is important stuff, humans. We only have one planet (though HENGE apparently have several, which seems a little greedy). Get a wriggle on!
And hand me a bottle of that youngulisation serum, please.
