My Best Tunes

This week’s Spotify playlist is a collection of songs I’ve pulled together while rummaging around Spotify. Some are old. Some are new. But there’s no theme, no rhyme and no reason. Enjoy.

This week’s Spotify playlist is a collection of songs I’ve pulled together while rummaging around Spotify. Some are old. Some are new. But there’s no theme, no rhyme and no reason. Enjoy.

The singer and the rapper just can’t leave each other alone. Where’s Obama’s beer summit when you need it?

“And I was like, why you so obsessed with me?” That’s Mariah Carey, kicking off her song Obsessed, allegedly one long diss directed at Eminem. She never dated him, it was nothing, he needs to let it go – this is the gist of the song. To reinforce this point, she dresses up as the rapper in the video. But Eminem cannot let it go.

In new track The Warning, leaked today, the Detroit rapper lays into both Carey and her new husband Nick Cannon, liberally applying a series of nasty adjectives for roughly three and a half minutes. No one really comes out looking that great in this bitter feud, but it’s Cannon we feel sorry for. If neither party can move on from an alleged relationship said to have happened in 2001, there must have been some deep feelings between them. Either that, or they’ve both got a new album to promote.

WARNING: explicit lyrics.

We’re back! Well, sort of. After a month-long break (yes, it took us that long to get over Glastonbury), Alexis Petridis sits in Paul MacInnes’s chair to bring you a new bands special to kick off August. We begin with feedback-loving group the Big Pink, whose founding members Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell met with Rosie Swash to discuss their new album, A Brief History of Love. There’s also some strange chat about white noise, and whether the “girls, love, and going out” tag does their music justice.

Singles Club returns with a bang, as guardian.co.uk’s Culture edtior Alex Needham hails hip-hop’s “big three” – Jay-Z, Kanye West and Rihanna – on new track Run This town. Alexis comes over all retro with Shit Robot’s DFA-distributed track Simple Things, while Rosie enjoys silly wordplay with Simian Mobile Disco’s Audacity of Huge.

Completing our new bands double whammy are the XX, gentle souls from south London who make equally tender lo-fi indie. Joint lead singers Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim describe their journey from being childhood friends to musical partners, their love of R&B and how they overcame shyness on stage.

That’s nearly all, but it wouldn’t be Music Weekly without the Feature With No Name, would it? Rebecca Nicholson puts on her nostalgic hat and remembers 60s soul-pop group, the Daisy Chain.

Let us know what you think of this week’s show, the guests, the music, the panellists, and you can become our “friend” by searching Music Weekly on Facebook. We’ve missed you, we hope you feel the same.

Last week was all about standing and staring. This week, we’re after songs that recognise when things have gone wrong

A monstrous seven days on the readers recommend blog that provided two of my favourite lists. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this week’s music. If pop is good at anything it’s standing and staring and reporting back on what it’s seen. Frankly, pop likes to watch. But what about when that all-seeing eye is turned against it?

It’s easy to rail against surveillance, but, as we’ve learned this week, it can also be a lot of fun to put someone else under precisely the same thing. Why is that? How is it that our brains don’t make more of a fuss when they see at least some of what we’re trying to do? Perhaps pop music can explain.

The B-list:

David Bowie – Big Brother
While, over in the A-list, Stevie Wonder berates the idea of a super-powered over-seer, Thin White Duke-era Bowie positively cries out for a bit of iron-willed surveillance. “Someone to claim us, someone to follow,” he sings. “Someone to shame us, we want you Big Brother, Big Brother.”

Parliament – I’ve Been Watching You (Move Your Sexy Body)
From 1976’s excellent Clones of Dr Funkenstein album, this snail-paced hymn to staring at a particularly attractive lady – I’m guessing it’s a lady – is an attempt to show a little of the positive side to this whole surveillance debate. Extra points awarded for Bernie Worrell’s brilliant horn arrangement.

Gary Numan – You Are in My Vision
Think of him, in a lot of different ways, the anti-Parliament. While they revel in their lechery, Numan remains aloof, cold, above it all. “Staring at the ceiling as she gyrates all around me,” he sings, desperate not to catch the eye of the woman who’s “paid by the hour” to dance for him. “I am trying to forget she’s done this all before.” Good plan, Gary.

Helen Reddy – Angie Baby
There’s this young girl – she lives in “a world of make-believe” – whose only friend is the radio. One night her parents go away and, “a neighbour boy with evil on his mind”, is as usual, “peeking in Angie’s room”, through her window blind. He pops over and gets, literally, shrunk by the music and Angie keeps him as her “secret lover”. God bless the 70s.

Dire Straits – Private Investigations
It was assumed that no Dire Straits track would ever make the cut. But I have some love for the headband wearing freaks, despite Walk of Life being, without doubt, one of the three worst songs of all time. Anyway, this track is basically why the CD player exists and the lyric, “Confidential information, it’s in a diary, this is my investigation, it’s not a public inquiry,” are why it’s on the list.

Rush – Red Barchetta
I would put a Rush track on every single week if I was allowed. This one is from their wedge-cut and leather tie years and it concerns an over-watched young chap whose only weekend desire is to, “elude the Eyes and hop the turbine freight, to far outside the wire where my white-haired uncle waits”. It’s a metaphor for sexuality and freedom, you see.

Dennis Brown – Sitting and Watching
Brown brings some meditative flavour to proceedings with this self-actualisation anthem. “Sitting here watching fools like themselves when,” he sings, “they should all be thinking of getting to know themselves.” Dennis surveys those giving their “heart and soul to vanity” and he knows they need to change. But will they?

Robyn Hitchcock – My Wife and My Dead Wife
Hitchcock’s got himself into an unusual situation here. He has one very much alive wife and one very much dead one that watches him, speaks to him, even asks him for cups of tea. Despite being dead. “I turn round and my dead wife’s upstairs,” he sings. “She’s still wearing flares, she talks out loud but no one hears.” Lucky man.

Rockwell – Somebody’s Watching Me
One of the all-time great one-hit wonders. On the one hand this is a piece of irredeemable cheese, a veritable suckfest of blank-eyed, heart-crushing tom-tittery. On the other hand, it’s got a good chorus. “I always feel like, somebody’s watching me,” he sings, adding, should you be unable to make the connection yourself, “and I have no privacy”.

George Formby – When I’m Cleaning Windows
It wouldn’t work if he pronounced them, “win-doughs”, would it? Only “win-duz” makes sense. As a nation, we seem to have an unquenchable thirst for this song. Singing of a past-her-best movie star – a “flapper on the screen” – he sees on his round (which, it’s clear, is simply a way of staring into strangers’ houses), Formby sings: “She pulls her hair all down behind, then pulls down her … never mind, and after that pulls down the blind, when I’m cleaning windows.” Genius.

This week’s topic is songs about failure, songs that have lived hard and tasted the pain of it all going wrong. The song might tell the story of a disastrous life decision, a relationship that’s gone belly-up, a band that crumbled under its own weight, an ideology that, ultimately, let everyone down. Extra points will be awarded for songs that are able to crawl through the wreckage and come up with reasons to explain what just happened. Personal, creative, political, emotional, social failure – they’re all perfectly valid.

Deadline is midday Monday; please note that posts should not contain more than one third of a song’s lyrics. Your tools await: A-Z, archive, index and Spill. Collaborative playlist here. Good luck. You’ll need it.

Julian Plenti may well be Skyscraper – whatever that means – but he’ll be better known to you as Paul Banks, British-born frontman of Joy Division wannabes Interpol, whose recycling of new-wave cliches hoisted their album Our Love To Admire to a top-3 chart position a couple of years back.

As I observed a couple of weeks ago while reviewing Busta Rhymes’ dismal latest effort, these days British hip-hop is by no means the poor cousin to its American elder brother, an opinion borne out handsomely by this solo debut from former New Flesh and Gamma rapper Juice Aleem.

Julian Plenti may well be Skyscraper – whatever that means – but he’ll be better known to you as Paul Banks, British-born frontman of Joy Division wannabes Interpol, whose recycling of new-wave cliches hoisted their album Our Love To Admire to a top-3 chart position a couple of years back.

As I observed a couple of weeks ago while reviewing Busta Rhymes’ dismal latest effort, these days British hip-hop is by no means the poor cousin to its American elder brother, an opinion borne out handsomely by this solo debut from former New Flesh and Gamma rapper Juice Aleem.

It’s been a while since we had a new folk collective. Since Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in the late Sixties, the last folk supergroup was probably Pentangle, starring Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Danny Thompson, back in the Seventies. By the end of that decade, folk was failing to attract new listeners and slipped into the underground