Chic- Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)

The first step on Chic’s rapid ascent to becoming the best band in the history of the universe, and something of a statement of intent; as a manifesto it sums up their predilection towards pursuit of the groove neatly, but it’s also amazingly fully-formed for a first single.

Trying to single out any one musical highlight of a Chic song is like trying to find a needle in a massive pile of needles; every last minor flourish of this is basically perfect. Those majestic string swoops sound like God. The bits where the brass augments them is whichever rank of celestial office is the one above God. I mean like, actually the best sound there is. The core Thompson/Edwards/Rodgers groove is absolutely relentless and would probably induce at least some minor juddering in the comatose. This all provides the backing for the singers’ recurring, ecstatic command to “Dance! Dance! Dance! Daaaaaaaaance!“. It’s certainly a more ethical method of persuasion to dance than firing a revolver at the feet of a hapless vagrant, but the end result’s the same - how could you not?

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Colin Newman- Life On Deck

A personal favourite from Newman’s excellent 1980 solo debut A-Z. From start to finish it’s a delightful, clattering mess, featuring buzzsaw guitars, creepy synth chimes, mandolin twanging, absurd Munchkin-like backing vocals and Newman barking a stream of impenetrable non-sequiturs in his own inimitable style. It may be his best vocal performance, just for the sheer vigour of it; on the chorus he sings, in a comparitively fragile tone, “not mind we jolly jack tars, I’m in disgrace/the cat sat on the carpet, I just lay here like a lump”, which is not only quite bewildering but rapidly escalates into one of the most joyously intense pieces of insane shrieking ever recorded. By the end it’s just a load of gleefully meaningless chaos and it makes me very happy.

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Life Without Buildings- Philip

A short-lived Glasgow-based indie band who split in 2002, featuring the unique vocal stylings of Sue Tompkins. These involve a stuttering, stream of conscious tirade, occasionally fixating on odd little phrases, repeating them over and over with different inflections as if obsessively trying to drag some sense out of them. Lines that seem either completely nonsensical or just too ambiguous to read anything into end up sounding bizarrely poignant with her catatonically stretching the syllables all over the place to a backing of morose indie-jangle; here she repeats various lines, mostly “couldn’t understand science” and “do we need order”, but most affecting is the insistent way she yelps the word “darling”. There’s just something about it, y’know?

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