Music can be a life-affirming celebration, an arms-in-the-air care-avoider, a memory marker for your loveliest moments. Yes, that’s all well and good for people with stuff to celebrate and be cloyingly happy about. For the rest of us, however, it’s something to wallow in as we blunder through life pinballing from one emotional catastrophe to another. Here’s half a dozen of our anguish anthems.
ABBA ‘The Winner Takes It All’
Just a pop band, right? Not at all – haven’t you listened to ABBA lyrics? Every good song contains a crippling lack of confidence, even the Alan Partridge-adored ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’. Taking the Fleetwood Mac model of all getting divorced and then making an album about it, ABBA upped the ante with the blokes writing the songs and getting their exes to sing them. Brutal. “Tell me does (s)he kiss, like I used to kiss you?” asks Bjorn of Agnetha through her own voice. Still, there’s some pretty pianos near the end. (JK)
Johnny Cash ‘Hurt’
Pretty much overlooked in its original Nine Inch Nails incarnation, the Cash injection to his cover version was one of pure woe. And who can blame him – he recorded the song and its attendant video knowing he was on the way out, with its derelict museum imagery and piano cover-closing finale hammering the point home like blunt nails in a coffin. His missus June skulks about in the clip too, offering no light relief to the situation with the hindsight of her own imminent demise. Poignant, poetic and perfectly pessimistic. (NC)
The Smiths ‘How Soon Is Now?’
A mid-80s student staple that continues to cheer the modern miserablist malcontent, this song challenges all others in the affliction stakes of gloom. “We’re going clubbing – that’ll be fun, right Moz? Cheer you up a bit? Well, it won’t if you go and stand on your own, leave on your own, go home and cry and want to die. You’re really not trying, are you?” Morrissey’s lyrics are unfairly maligned – the Pope of Mope etc – but in this case he’s really only got himself to blame. The suicidal whining of his words combined with the life-affirming lift of Marr’s music remains one of pop’s most perfect conundrums. (NC)
Simon & Garfunkel ‘The Boxer’
It doesn’t matter how good a person you are, how hard you try – get struck down by bad luck and the big city can chew you up and spit you out. The pugilist in question has been fucked over, having “squandered my resistance on a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises”. He’s not looking for much, just a low paid job but ends up taking comfort with prostitutes, the only place he can find affection. Wow, he’s really been beaten down. Still, ends on a positive note, right? “I am leaving/but the fighter still remains.” The towel has been thrown in. (JK)
Malcolm Middleton ‘Devil And The Angel’
Pave your heart over with slabs of sleet-beaten, stone-cold concrete on a suicidal Sunday in Glasgow. You could pick most tracks from Malcolm Middleton – the former Arab Strapper with song titles like ‘Death Love Depression Love Death’ and ‘Ballad Of Fuck All’ – and be left profoundly morose. The amazing Scottish singer songwriter hints at salvation among the despair in trademark style in this one, but as usual there can only be one winner. Guitars multiplied by gloom to the million. (BM)
The Pogues ‘And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’
“Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood” said author Frank McCourt. Similarly, worse than the ordinary miserable song is the miserable Irish song, and worse yet is the miserable Pogues song. Dental role model Shane McGowan excels in writing romanticised tales of woe, but here he covers an Australian 70s folk song about a boy plucked from his carefree, outback-wandering life and sent to Gallipoli to get his legs ripped off by Turkish artillery in WW1. Incredibly, this has never been used to soundtrack a forces recruitment ad. (RK)
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That was Six Of The Best, here’s two more.
Dire Straits ‘Romeo & Juliet’
Long before Baz Luhrmann had a go at updating Shakespeare to the modern world, Mark Knopfler was “laying everybody low with a love song that he made”. Essentially Romeo has been dumped and pretty much forgotten by Juliet, who’s shacked up with her new boyfriend while he’s pleading under her window, cataloguing her promises of eternal love. What makes it so sad is not that Romeo hasn’t moved on but that – thanks to punching way above his weight – he knows he’s never going to. Throw in a mournful Knopfler guitar solo and we’re heartbroken too. (JK)
Terry Jacks ‘Seasons In The Sun’
Can anything be more inherently miserable than a deathbed lament? Yes, if it also includes the dying protagonist coming to terms with his life partner shagging his best friend. Based on a Jaques Brel torch song, the single line “Goodbye Papa it’s hard to die” chimes a chord with anyone who has ever lost someone. Black Box Recorder’s gender switch version is probably the greatest of recent years. Westlife’s anodyne interpretation making Christmas Number One just adds to the misery. (AP)
Words By Nick Coquet, James Kendall, Rosie Kendall, Ben Miller, Adam Peters
