50 Songs

or Now That’s What I Call 50!

It’s my fiftieth birthday this year and, for a bit of fun, I thought I’d make myself a mixtape, a playlist of The Fifty Greatest Songs* of My Life…

*OK, so perhaps they’re not objectively the “best” songs that have been written in my lifetime, rather they’re the songs I have enjoyed most or which have resonated with me on some level. There’s also a practical element in that the playlist has been put together to soundtrack a birthday roadtrip my partner Katy and I are taking at the end of November. But that’s another story.

Some of the 50 songs are purely emotional hyperlinks to a time in my life that the music brings alive in a particular way, songs that vividly conjure up places and people dear to me. Some are earworms that ruled my brain for extended periods of time for no other reason than I happened to be especially receptive to being imprinted with music at that moment. Some, particularly the ones nearer the top of the list, are songs I come back to again and again, that are woven tight into the fabric of my life. Reflecting on the process of putting the list together, it’s clear how much the live experience has shaped my love of music – both as a player and performer and as a listener and fan.

I have put these songs in order – not necessarily a Best Of order, but an order that makes sense to me, both as a measure of how long the song has been a part of my life, as well as the depth of resonance it has on me now. There could easily have been another fifty songs here, endless permutations, but to get to this fifty I felt I had to use some selection criteria, namely:

1. Does the song still spark joy?
2. Is it, in the widest possible interpretation of the word, a banger?
3. Can I imagine requesting this song to be played at my funeral.

With all that in mind, here’s the fifty songs with tweet-length commentary to boot.

50. I Got No Common Sense by Ivor Cutler

• Speaks for itself, really.

49. Welcome to My World by Jim Reeves

• I used to think my parents weren’t really music lovers. Music was something they played for vibes at dinner parties. But in Gentleman Jim’s soothing baritone, I hear my Dad’s own voice and know that he savours every note.

48. Alpine Slopes by Dermot O’Brien 

• The music I grew up to. Scottish country dance music meets European polka. I was initiated, aged 7, into the rudiments of accordionism at the stubby grubby hands of sadistic maestro “Wee Joe” Vettriano.

47. Petite Fleur by Acker Bilk

• My accordion tutors hated me playing by ear but in high school my music teacher Mr Morrell was all for it. He gave me a clarinet & a tutor who wasn’t mental. This was the 1st song I learned off a record & my intro to jazz.

46. Don’t Be That Way by Benny Goodman

• I adored the sound BG made on the clarinet more than anything for what felt like years. Weekly trips to the EK music library took me in new directions, with new kinds of music to get obsessed by. My true musical education.

45. Let ‘Em In by Wings

• Homage to the car tapes of our classic orange Ford Cortina estate that took us on countless holidays from Devon to Moray, France to Monkton. I hear that litany of names in the chorus and remember all my brilliant aunts, uncles, lost pals…

44. Labour of Love by Hue & Cry

• Local Lanarkshire pop heroes. Took my brother to see them Nov ’89. Only learned much later the lyric is about Thatcher & her toxic Tory politics that fucked working class areas like ours for generations.

43. You Take Me Up by The Thomson Twins

• Another song about “working”. I was a big fan of these guys. My music teacher was always asking me about the music I was listening to, what it was I was responding to. Dunno. Maybe it was the hair.

42. Locomotive Breath by Jethro Tull

• One-legged rock flute! Beards! Men in tights! I became a Tull fan in my late teens after my cockeyed stoner drummer pal Les introduced me. Edinburgh Playhouse ’89 (my first proper gig), then a freebie in Berlin ’91.

41. Willie Stewart by Eddi Reader

• The songs of Robert Burns always seemed a dour exercise in heritage interpretation. Eddi Reader & her band magic them into catchy, dancy, joyful pop songs, which, it turns out, is what they had always been all along.

40. Bağlama Uvertürü by Çetin Akdeniz

• The Keith Richards of the Turkish bağlama. Abiding memory of a line of young Turks dancing down the aisle of a coach barrelling around the twisting country roads of central Anatolia on a school day out. Glorious.

39. S’agapo by Alkistis Protoptsalti/ Goran Bregovic

• “I love you
  I love you because you are beautiful
  I love you because you are you
  I love
  I love the whole world
  Because you live in it”
  
  (Bit much?)

38. Harramt Ahebak by Warda 

• The Belly Dancing Years.
  
  The song translates as the opposite of the one previous. Literally, “I have given up loving you”.

37. Snip Snip by The Tiger Lillies 

• In an alternative universe, I am a lairy old clown in the spirit of Martin Jacques of The Tiger Lillies and I sing a jolly falsetto like this in a never-ending cabaret of doom and debauchery across the world…

36. Start Wearing Purple by Gogol Bordello

• In a different alternative universe, I am dirty old and useless clown in the spirit of Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello and I make gypsy punk party music like this in a never-ending carnival of chaos across the world, etc.

35. La Marée Haute by Lhasa

• “The head is satisfied, but the heart has not enough”. Story of my career right there.

34. Le poinçonneur des Lilas by Serge Gainsbourg

• Referred to by my mum, when I listened to it incessantly at home over a period of months, as “Dipty Troo”.

33. I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango) by Grace Jones

• Russell introduced me to her amazing One Man Show – which I’m immensely grateful I got to see at Barrowlands in ’03. This song, accordions & all, set me up for Astor Piazzolla much later.

32. Oblivion by Astor Piazzolla 

• If my soul was a musical instrument, it wouldn’t have the sound of the clarinet or the saxophone, or even the accordion, but the bandoneon. And it would sing like this. Maybe.

31. Legend by Huun-Huur Tu/ Angelite Bulgarian Voices

• Witnessing this performance at Greyfriars Kirk at the Edinburgh Festival in 1999 was as close to a transcendental experience as I’ve ever had. Utterly utterly incredible.

30. Chicken Payback by The Bees

• Just one of the greatest songs of all time.
  Also, that video.
  Also, RadMac.

29. Three Hundred Pounds of Joy by Howlin’ Wolf

• “Hoy, hoy! I’m the boy!
  I got three hundred pounds of heavenly joy
  I’m so glad that you understand
  I’m three hundred pounds of muscle and man”

Howlin’ Wolf gives voice to my inner bluesman.

28. Accra City Blues by Blitz the Ambassador

• Spent several days googling flights and investigating travel possibilities to Ghana on the strength of a single hearing of this song on 6Music one night. Sometimes the music just finds you.

27. Yekatit by Mulatu Astatqe

• Sometimes the music just finds you (Part II).

26. Life’s What You Make It by Talk Talk

• Sometimes the lyrics just speak to you.

25. Europe Endless by Kraftwerk

• “Life is timeless, Europe endless.”

24. Prenzlauerberg by Beirut

• There was a time, in the mid-to-late 2000s when this band, this album, ruled my world entirely. The songs just dance along ecstatically, one into the next, like an evening revelry spinning through hot southern European streets.

23. Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd

• Started playing in bands in the late 80s. Everyone seemed to be into prog, esp Floyd, exemplified by my pal Brian & his pal (who became my pal) Russell. InterRailed across Europe to see this show at the Berlin Wall in 1990.

22. Love & Hate by Michael Kiwanuka

• Just a beautiful, soulful piece of music – that voice, that arrangement – in the spirit of the great soul singers of the past. I met Katy at Kiwanuka’s gig at the Art School in October ’16, the beginning of a great adventure.

21. Real Gone by Sam “The Man” Taylor

• This cured me of thinking I had to enjoy widdly jazz just bcos I was a sax player & absolved me of the guilt of preferring stuff the jazz snobs I knew sneered at. Big blues. Big tone. Big joy.

20. Hideaway by David Sanborn

• In El Paso, my band pal Clarissa gave me a cassette of Sanborn’s music when I was still just a clarinet player – but I was 100% alto sax from that moment on. That sound of his lives in my bones.

19. Tahah by Masada

• Mid 90s Edinburgh, this on repeat for months on my portable CD player. Experienced their unbelievable intensity at Queens Hall in 98, again in Aosta, Italy, in 2005 with Luca & Roberto.

18. Lonely Woman by Naked City

• Zorn’s genre-mashing jump-cut speedjazz has been a gateway drug to a lot of weird shit. And more Zorn, obvs. Visited NYC in ’92 & bought this. Saw him at the Knitting Factory (with Lady Kitay); missed him at the Stone on NYE 2016.

17. My New House by Sonic Youth

• We saw The Fall at QMU a year before Mark E Smith died, their final gig. (He didn’t look well tbh.) Katy hated it. This isn’t The Fall.

16. Rock Music by Pixies

• Another gig with my brother in ’91 at the SECC. They aborted after three songs cos the crowd was going mental and someone down front got hurt when the stage collapsed. The whole thing was terrifying, but also sort of cool.

15. Spanish Key by Miles Davis

• My greatest gig regret was not going to see Miles at the SECC in 1990, a year before he died, choosing instead to see a trio of randoms called The Pointy Birds. By all accounts I didn’t miss much, but still. Miles fucking Davis.

14. Make it Rain by Tom Waits

• Tom opened with this at the Bourla Theatre, Antwerp, when I saw him there in 2004. I’d say it was an unforgettable experience – which it absolutely was – if only I could remember the actual concert…

13. Nude by Radiohead

• I avoided them for years, thinking they were too “obvious” a band for me to like lol. Then they found me during a break up and stayed with me all the way to a rebound in Vancouver. This song came in at the end of all that.

12. Women of the World by Jim O’Rourke

• More Cutlery.

11. Fireworks by First Aid Kit

• Apparently, it’s about “the goals and demands you put on yourself in life and how they can break you down to emptiness & loneliness.” Whatever. I will forever associate their angelic voices with Katy & I decorating our new living room.

10. Graceland by Paul Simon

• I was so excited by this when it came out. It just opened up so many musical worlds. Listening to it again, it’s easy to forget what a perfect piece of genius this album is.

9. Jacket Hangs by The Blue Aeroplanes

• Bought the cassette on a whim from Our Price and instantly became a fan4lyfe. Again with Graham, back-to-back gigs at King Tut’s, him very underage. We swaggered and swanned, let our arms rotate like helicopter blades.

8. Home by David Byrne/Brian Eno

• There’s a lot of David Byrne songs I could have included but this is the one that found me when I knew I had found, in Katy, the person I would finally make a home with. It – all of it – still fills me with joy, love, hope.

7. Lean on Me by Bill Withers

• It was a toss up between this one and Lovely Day, which became the theme song to Sophie’s 6th birthday last year. But my God, the power of this song and the grace with which he carries it…

6. Amsterdam by Jacques Brel

• The force of nature that is Brel’s voice was introduced to me by my wonderful flatmate Victoria in Girona. That voice, those songs, subsequently tore through my life like a hurricane. I’m still picking up the debris.

5. Go Or Go Ahead by Rufus Wainwright

• A couple of previous relationships had introduced me but it never really felt like Rufus was my guy – until I met Katy and we both sort of re-discovered him. Excited to see him in Amsterdam next year.

4. Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads

• And you may find yourself
  Living in a semi-rural location
  And you may find yourself
  With a beautiful wyfe
  And a smol sectional concrete outbuilding
  And you may ask yourself
  
  WELL HOW DID I GET HERE?

3. Ana fil houb by Lili Boniche

• In Arabic it means “I’m in love”, as I have been with this song since I heard it played at a beach bar in Dahab in summer 2003. Deliriously, passionately, tragically doomed love. It’s all I ever want in a piece of music.

2. I Believe in You by Talk Talk

More about this song here…

1. A Doughnut in My Hand by Ivor Cutler

• The song lends itself well, I find, to making up your own verses and is endlessly adaptable to many different situations. You should try it.

Thanks for joining me on my journey through my fifty best songs. You can watch/ listen to the entire playlist, below…

Uncle Dave

Dave Henderson, my uncle, was a legend. No other word for it.

To me, growing up, he was this larger-than-life superhero figure, like Jacques Cousteau or James Bond. I even thought the guy in the Milk Tray ads that were out at the time had a slight air of Uncle Dave about him. There was just no-one else in my life who even remotely resembled him. And though the mystery that surrounded him gradually diminished the more I got to know him, my respect and admiration for him never did.

He passed away recently, at the legendary age of 80. I thought he’d live to a hundred. I remember him as a singularly athletic man. He was lean and wiry with the sort of relaxed physicality and poised energy that came from years of military discipline, someone used to being ‘at ease’. I remember playing in my Nana’s garden with Dave and all the cousins. A ball got bounced into the busy main road and Dave, to our astonishment, leapt over the hedge in a single bound to rescue it. It was only a hedge, but for us it was like he’d jumped over a tree.

Dave walking my mum into church on her wedding day.

He lived quite far from us, so we saw him only occasionally. My mum, Dave’s wee sister, told us he had settled in the south of England to get as far from their mother as it was possible to be while still living in the same country.

I don’t know how true that was but Annie, our beloved Nana, was a strong-willed woman with high expectations of her children. Dave, coming of age in the late fifties, early sixties and possessed of a will every bit as strong as his mother’s, had a fresh set of inclinations and modern ambitions that were in fierce opposition to the stern Catholic mores of his elders.

They clashed frequently and, as soon as he could, Dave took flight. Literally. His ticket out of Glasgow was the RAF. He joined the military band and travelled the world, eventually settling in Portsmouth where he trained as a telecommunications engineer and married his sweetheart, my wonderful Aunt Jan.

I only ever heard about Dave’s early conflicts with Annie in a roundabout way, alluded to in passing and quickly glossed. Sometimes you picked it up in a roll of Dave’s eyes when she was mentioned. My mother occasionally hinted at Annie’s strict and demanding nature, but never went into any detail. Age had evidently mellowed her – Nana was nice as ninepence to my brother and I and all our cousins, to the point of spoiling us. Annie was as sharp as a tack and possessed a wicked sense of humour. Brilliant at cards. An amazing wordsmith. She could be cunning but never malicious, and a wiser, more generous, more loving person I have never known.

Annie, Dave, Jan and Thomas

Dave featured large in the tales that Annie and Auntie Maxie used to tell about the two sides of the family, the Hendersons and McArthurs. They loved to conjure the world they grew up in over endless pots of tea and rounds of toast in front of the ‘living flame’ gas fire in their living room. It was a beautiful little cosmos, lively with characters who all seemed to be called Tim and John and Martin. It was in their telling that Dave became this mythical hero of lore. A legend. An actual legend. And the fact that we saw him so seldom allowed the legend to grow.

We heard about the time Dave performed in the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. They described how Dave marched out with the RAF band onto the Edinburgh Castle Esplanade and, without missing a beat or breaking stride, waved up directly at them. It seemed so improbable to them that he should be able to pick them out in such a big crowd, but to hear Dave tell the story years later, Annie and Maxie wrapped up against the dimming northern night in their tartan blankets and rain-mates cut rather a conspicuous figure amongst the tourists.

There was Dave the deep-sea diver. He’d got into scuba during his years in Singapore and the far east. When he returned to civvy street and was living on the south coast of England, he was part of the dive team that did some of the reconnaissance work on Henry VIII’s sunken warship, the Mary Rose, before it was raised from its 450 year old bed in the Solent. Apparently, Dave’s local scuba club knew all about the wreck of the Mary Rose and had been diving it for years before there was talk of raising it. We watched him being interviewed on the news one day in his wet suit and diving gear. Legend status assured.

He and Jan lived for a while in the tiny town of Selsey, stuck on the tip of England that pokes into the Channel known as the Manhood Peninsula. Television’s Patrick Moore was their starry neighbour. My only memory is of a house filled with mysterious artefacts – strange looking shells, bells, ship’s wheels and assorted treasures from the deep, many of which he’d personally recovered. Their house was the first time I’d ever seen tropical fish and I’d stand at the massive tank, soothed by the sound of bubbles and mesmerised by the darting neon tetras and the languid swooshing angel fish.

There was Dave the jazzer. Nana had an album filled with fabulous photos of Dave from his military days, pictured in various far-flung locales. He played alto sax in the RAF dance band who had a regular gig at a hotel out in Singapore. He also had a jazz combo that jammed after hours in a kind of West Coast cool/ Paul Desmond/ Dave Brubeck vibe. Dave’s instrument was a super-stylish white plastic Grafton alto sax – one of the classic saxophone makes of the 50s, made famous by the likes of Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker and Johnny Dankworth. In one of the photos, there’s Dave and his band with Buddy Rich – one of the greatest jazz drummers of all time. He was on tour, passing through, and came to sit in on one of Dave’s jams. Absolutely legendary.

No surprise, then, that I became a sax player. After my very first school music class at high school, I impressed my teacher enough for him to offer me an instrument to learn at home. I chose the trumpet. I came home excitedly that night and showed it to my mum. She didn’t much like the idea of an apprentice trumpeter in the house and I was sent back with it the next day with the explicit instruction to ask for something quieter, a “nice gentle instrument” like a flute or a clarinet “like your Uncle Dave plays”.

That clarinet took me into the military too, years later, as a bandsman in the 51st Highland Volunteers (the Black Watch Territorial Army band, based in Perth – which is a whole other story). I played first clarinet there for five years and the money I made allowed me to travel extensively throughout Europe in my early 20s and even paid for my first saxophone. I didn’t quite get to see the world with the TA, but it took me to some interesting places with some weird people and the music was never less than glorious.

I loved how musical Dave was. My Dad and I went down to Portsmouth to visit him and Aunt Jan. It was not long after his younger brother, my uncle Tom, had passed away, and the same year my daughter was born. During our stay, Dave took me up to his music room in the attic. He’d long since parted company with that gorgeous Grafton alto, but there was his clarinet which still sounded silky warm and woody, even in my unpractised hands. And there was the old diatonic button accordion that had belonged to his father, Hugh, my grandfather. There was a banjo ukelele that he’d had since he was a boy, given to him by an old aunt. And there was his newest addition – an electric guitar. At the age of 74 he had decided to learn and was teaching himself with YouTube and a Tune-a-Day book. He was just inspirational.

We didn’t keep in touch so well between visits. A few emails now and again, but I found it hard to sustain any kind of correspondence. Dave was always much better at that sort of thing. For years he phoned Annie every Friday to check in, swap stories, exchange news. And he continued this tradition with Maxie long after Annie died, calling her every week at the appointed hour until she too passed away.

Dave was a warm, wise and gentle soul with a streak of shining steel. He had a quick and ready laugh and a big, generous smile that began at the corners of his eyes and radiated out. He listened eagerly and with compassion. He was always interested in you, and in what you had to say. He loved sharing stories of the old days, about the Hendersons and the McArthurs and preferred to tell those rather than recount his own adventures. He knew all the old songs that his aunts and uncles used to sing at Hogmanay.

Dave reminded me of my Nana a lot. And apparently I reminded people of him. Auntie Maxie used to call me by his name. I looked nothing like him and thought the whole thing was nonsense but I guess people who knew us both recognised our kindred spirits.

One of my lasting regrets is that we never went on a bike ride together. Dave was a die-hard roadie, out doing time trials every weekend well into his 60s. My kind of cycling has, for the most part, been of the functional, get-around-town sort. I’d done a few cycle tours in Europe and completed the Land’s End to John o’Groats, but I only got into proper road cycling in my late thirties, by which time Dave was getting ready to hang up his bib shorts. I knew he and his club buddies went over to Normandy ever year for a long weekend – the Tour d’Honfleur, I think they called it – and I asked if I could tag along one year but I was politely rebuffed on the grounds of general infirmity and dwinding health among the group, not least Dave who was then struggling with various heart complications.

Dave teaching me how to fly a kite. Portsmouth 1980.

I did, however, get to play music with Dave. That afternoon in his music room, Dave took his guitar and started to play. I took out the clarinet and we sat and jammed together, gently, quietly. The first and only time we ever did. No Buddy Rich. No Brubeck. No legend to print. Just two kindred souls, conjuring notes in air, finding not just the joy in music, but the deeper joy of making our own.

Dave Henderson was a legend of the best kind, someone who lived his life truly and well. He was a brilliant, soulful human being with a knack for the new and a talent for excellence. He had a restless, questing mind and an unquenchable sense of adventure.

He was many things to many people, as the best of us often are, and we shall miss him dearly.