1. John Cale – Dying on the Vine
I first heard this on a Best of…. of his but there are a few different versions floating around the web. It’s a brilliant track whichever way he does it. Of the ones I can find on youtube, I’m not sure which version I like best so here are two.
2. Depeche Mode – Enjoy the Silence
There are a lot of Depeche Mode tracks I could have picked but I picked this one because MTV Europe seared it into my brain in 1990.
http://www.videolog.tv/video.php?id=724337&ordem=1
3. Ramones – Sheena is a Punk Rocker
Ah yes.
4. Scott Walker – Farmer in the City
From Tilt, his 90s record. I’ve just looked it up to check the year and, on Wikipedia, it says the album reached number 27 on the UK charts in 1995 which surprised me a little. It’s a great album but I’d never have imagined it made any sort of impact on the charts. His music has been rediscovered, or re-exposed, to some extent in the last few years but it’s been resilient so far to all strains of X-Factor and talent show and they haven’t got their evil music hating claws into it yet.
‘Farmer in the City’ is about the late Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini by the way which explains the line ‘Can’t go by a man from Ostia’, Ostia being a suburban seaside town just outside Rome. Kind of like singing ‘Can’t go by a man from Malahide’. He sings it epic.
5. Mumiy Troll – Takie Devchonki (These Girls)
I lived in Moscow for a few years so perhaps there’s a touch of the dreaded nostalgia about this one but it’s always on any writing playlist I make.
They’ve tried to break America recently and produced a couple of albums in English but it loses something when it’s translated – the lyrics are not always entirely serious and depend a lot on Russian word-play and the sounds of Russian. I was in California a few years ago, doing some readings, and noticed their name up on the Roxy venue in Hollywood; I think they’d played a few nights before. It was a bit odd, to see this Russian pop-rock band playing in LA the same time I was there. If I was a narcissist I might have thought they were following me. They were not, obviously.
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Alan Jude Moore is a writer from Dublin. His most recent book, Strasbourg, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2010. He also edits the online literary magazine, the Burning Bush 2. He will be reading at Electric Picnic next month with Poetry Ireland.
Website – www.alanjudemoore.com
Twitter – http://twitter.com/moorealanjude
Magazine – www.burningbush2.com
