Perfect from now on??

So straight after the last blog I packed some nutritious supplies from Lidl (their jaffa cakes are excellent, more compact and richly flavoured than McVities), a sleeping bag, a 160 gigabyte ipod containing every great song since 1950, some LSD, MDMA, and a rock of crack. I ascended the slopes of the highest mountain in the vicinity of Kells, the hill of Lloyd public park. For three days and nights, as the doggers and cottagers came and went around me, I meditated on the slopes of Lloyd, tripping out of my tiny bin on illegal substances and communing with my spirit animal (a lone prarie wolf called Gardenfang) in search of the perfect song. Not until the last speck of crack was hungrily huffed into my makeshift pipe, and the last crumb of jaffa cake digested, did I return down from that hill, as a blinding kaleidoscopic sun rose over Southborough computer parts factory in the distance.



I brought with me knowledge from a higher plane. Today I'm going to share it with you. In the strange depths of my cosmic journey, after I flew hand-in-hand over Jupiter with newsreader Anne Doyle, Gardenfang revealed to me that my search for the perfect song was futile and supercilious. "You know absolutely fuck all about musical theory Gardenhead" he growled. "You couldn't even play do-ray-me on the tin whistle in 2nd class." He was right. "Moreover all the songs you think are perfect tend to be somewhat melancholy, which suggests that there is a modicum of subjectivity at work, and that you may have had a traumatic formative experience set to melancholy music as a child." He was right there too. I got lost inside Dunnes Stores in Navan shopping centre once, and "I've gotta get a message to you" by the Bee Gees was playing over the speaker system. Still, I wasn't going to let a hallucinated wolf tell me what I could and couldn't do. So I turned around and said "Gardenfang, I may be a cloth-eared bullshit merchant, but I'm going to have a go at this anyway. Now fuck off back into my subconscious, while I go into Lynch's pharmacy to get me some valium to come down off this crack in time for breakfast."

I'm going to divide the songs into songs I think are perfect because they are perfect, and songs that I think are perfect examples of imperfection. I will post just a few off a long list. I'll put up a few more in the next post. Also, if you wish to make suggestions, please do.

Perfect because they are perfect

MP3: The Mamas and The Papas-Twelve Thirty (young girls are coming to the canyon)

A lot of The Mamas and The Papas stuff seems pretty perfect to me. This song is utterly joyous, a sort of innocent early celebration of the summer of love through the eyes of someone who moves from dreary New York to a sun-soaked Californian canyon. The chorus makes the hair stand on the back of my neck; the harmonies make me smile. However, the description of young girls pouring into a canyon makes it seem a bit like a vision of what a suicide bomber sees when he goes to suicide bomber heaven.

MP3: Cyndi Lauper-Time after Time

Jesus, I love this song. I played it to death on my sony walkman after Jessica Prezbelowski stood me up on prom night. I sat on the high school steps. I sipped a Rolling Rock, letting the melancholy synths wash over me, and wondered about how so many 80s songs are overlooked as cheesy when they are in fact completely heartfelt and majestic. Then I remembered the video where Cyndi Lauper is in bed with a ceramic dog and I smiled through my salty tears. Oh Cyndi. You would have made such a better prom date than Jessica.

Tomorrow: songs that are perfect because they are imperfect. Now I'm off to Dublin catch the potential gig of the year in Vicar street. Dan Deacon, Jape, Deerhunter and High Places all under one roof? You fucking betcha!