Song #2 Ian Dury & The Blockheads

Another day, another shit storm. My daughter ended up in hospital with an infection, ambulance paramedics, doctors, antibiotics - the full monty. She got home though which is a real relief; and she looked a lot better when she got to bed, even if her throat made her sound like an out-take from a possession.

Song #2

I don't want this to be chronological, I want the songs to be stand alone. The connections will be pigeon holed, kept in the bubble. The memories are often intangible, there might be something there but I reach out and touch froth, and the image escapes me. I decided to throw a load of songs into a hat, to pick the music by lottery, but that felt like too much trouble... So I ended up using shuffle on my mp3 player.

Most of these tracks are going to have a distinct British feel to them, not all of them by any means, but a lot, and there's something quite beautifully perfect about the Englishness of Ian Dury & The Blockheads. Dury wrote a vernacular English poetry which was matched up to an incredible punk-funk by The Blockheads, especially the lovely basslines of Norman Watt-Roy. (My love of bass guitar is almost an obsession, I even dreamt of Barry Adamson from the Bad Seeds playing basketball a week or so ago. Is that a dangling modifier?)

Of all the tracks that I could pick I'm going with "What A Waste". I remember buying the single, and I remember the glorious hook and all the usual stuff that Stiff Records produced to go with it. The lyrics were stunningly poetic - "I could be the ticket man at Fulham Broadway Station".

I went to a gig with Rob, a mate, I can't remember the gig or the band, but I remember the vodka, the Newcastle Brown, and "What a Waste" playing on the PA. Hauntingly wonderful. Poetry, sax, bass, guitar, melancholia.

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