MNP's 100 Greatest Songs of All-Time!

Music
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season 2 GIF by Twin Peaks on Showtime

  1. Adam & The Ants - Stand & Deliver. (1981).

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These things have to start with Adam and The Ants, right? No other way I could kick this off. I have the top 20 or so in solid form, but over 240 songs vying for the other 80 slots, I’m going to need a bigger notepad. Jumbling them into place. Decided to go with what are mainly actual Singles but songs in general will feature in places also.

In May, 1981 Adam & the Ants released their first single since their breakthrough 2nd album Kings of the Wild Frontier the previous year. It was one of these moments, even as a 4th year Junior School kid you could feel this was a band at a commercial peak. Everything aligned for this song. It was anticipated and boy did it deliver.

With an outrageously brilliant video for the time, almost like a short action film, it had huge impact on the actual music video format I feel. The song was equal to the video, better even. Everyone one at school loved it to pieces and Adam & the Ants were like these Pop gods all of a sudden. I bought the single week of release, it debuted on the Charts at Number 1, this very rarely happened back then at all.

Stand & Deliver stayed at Number 1 in the Singles Chars for 5 weeks, and 5 weeks when you are 10 years old is an eternity, this, of course, was not a bad thing but a very good one. You’d listen to the Chart countdown weekly and actually celebrate that it was still Number 1, because that meant you would get to see the video AGAIN on Top of the Pops. Every week it was Number 1 TOTP would cut the video a bit shorter and you watch in hope they didn’t cut it before he jumped through the window!

The phrase “Stan get yer dinner” was shouted in playgrounds midway through games of slam, you’d hear loads of fellow school kids yelling it. No one didn’t like it. I miss that kind of unity and being carried along with something.

Stan get yer dinner was mimicking Hilda Ogden from Coronation Street. Not long after this I went to Solihull Town Centre one Saturday to look around. I went to the library to look at the records and in the walkway entry was a lady sitting at a small table, with a charity box in front of her, collecting for charity. No one else at all was around. I figured I’d put 10p in the box and this old lady looks at me smiling and asks me my name, I tell her and she signs a picture of Hilda Ogden. Properly confused I look at her, then there was this most wonderful moment where she realised I’d realised she was the lady that played Hilda Ogden, Jean Alexander, neither of us said anything, such a cool memory.

Stand & Deliver was Pop supremacy with a little edge and drama and just bags and bags of fun. No better way to start.

Qua diddley qua qua.

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  1. Department S - Is Vic There?. (1980).

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At the very end of December, 1980, Department S, a one-hit wonder band if ever there was one released a moody, catchy song that wasn’t quite Pop, wasn’t quite Punk, wasn’t quite New Wave, a strange mix of all three genres. Peaking just outside the Top 20 singles chart in the U.K. it somehow got through to resonate much more than its sale volumes suggest. It felt, at the time, like it was pushing the early 80’s scenes on, and like Adam & the Ants it appealed to people who, themselves were new to music. Dark, accessible, and a great hook. Cool Dark Pop to kick-start the 80’s. Still sounds exactly the same and vitally fresh in 2023…

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  1. Low Roar - Don’t Be So Serious. (2017).

L

Low Roar included on their 3rd studio album the song Don’t Be So Serious. It would go largely unnoticed until it was included on the 2019 Hideo Kojima game Death Stranding. The moment that music broke in that game is a moment of awe, you pause the game and look up the music, the game becomes secondary and as good as that game is it is overtaken breeze-like by the sound. Dreamy, Radiohead meets Aphex Twin in some kind of perfect soft collision. It wasn’t released as a single, at the time or since. These factors do not stop it from being a remarkable, sublime song.

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I 100% did this when playing that game.

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This is great. Very post punk / goth feel to it.

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  1. Ice T - Lethal Weapon. (1989).

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In 1989 Ice T released Lethal Weapon as a single from his 3rd album (The Iceberg). The song didn’t bother the charts. No one noticed until he appeared on The Late Show on BBC2. Then. We listened. Simple as that. The direct lyrical attack. Words of wisdom. Hip Hop was going places and this track was taking it further with confidence and assurance.

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Yes, like a proto The Bravery or something, many years before, it really stood out in very early 1981, I think it charted first week of that year.

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  1. CSS - Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above. (2005).

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In 2005 Brazilian Electro-Pop band CSS released the single Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above. I’d never heard of them, but after hearing this got tickets to see them live immediately. The song is outrageously warm, catchy and, I don’t know, just the feel of it is so lovely, the way it plinks-and-plonks along. Slinky. I think part of the reason that it wasn’t a bigger hit single - was that none knew who it was. A slow burner that was re-released a few years later and dented the very tail end of the Top 40. Love it to bits.

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  1. Kruder & Dorfmeister - Deep Shit Pt 1 & Pt 2. (1993).

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In 1993, Austrian Trip-Hop pioneers Kruder & Dorfmeister released an E.P. G-Stoned. It did exactly what it said on the tin. Import copies found their way to the U.K. and it was given a U.K. release in 1995. This strange looking Simon & Garfunkel copycat sleeve was intriguing, the music was like setting some new blunted dance groove, the likes of which we’d not really heard before, well, not this good anyway. Deep Shit Pt 1 & Pt 2 would have wide influence on the (not yet going) Mo Wax scene and seldom gets that credit. You’d play this post club, the perfect environment for it back then, probably still is now - and everyone would want to know who it was. Blunted grooves that were blissful perfection. Laid back fried total quality sounds…

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Never heard this. Sounds incredible, will play on way home from work.

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Where do you find the time?! Looking forward to following along, I’ll need to make a playlist of these I think.

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If you do - and enjoy it - @BigAl maybe try the K&D Sessions double album, many of the tracks from which you may have heard without knowing what it was necessarily. It’s one of those sorts of albums. Personally, one of my favourites, and my original intro to K&D back in the day. Here’s CD1

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You started the album countdown with my first ever album and this one with my first ever single! Good work. I have traded/sold 100s of records in my life, but thankfully had the foresight to keep both of these.

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Okay.

Real head scratcher this whole (thread) theme. So, I’ve decided that all tracks onwards, will be tracks released as actual singles, or feature on E.P.’ s. There will be one very high numbered song that is an album track, might decide against this, still unsure to be honest, but it is one track I really want to feature - and feel it belongs.

Reasoning being, the best track of all-time list, all-encompassing, is nigh on impossible to compile. Also, singles / E.P. tracks jump out at me more. Only Low Roar so far that have featured don’t meet this criteria, so that is broadly what I’m going with.

The good news is the list is compete, ordered and good to go.

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  1. Ruth Copeland - The Medal. (1971).

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… and I’m going to break this rule immediately, but will reel it right back in, promise, from looking at a finalised list there are a few (very few) that are just album tracks left, that I simply do not want to remove. What’s done is done now.

Anyway, I first head this on a music podcast about 10 years ago that was just a music mix of early 70’s psychedelia. All of the songs I had heard before - then about three quarters way through this mix this drops. The podcast didn’t list the songs, so I installed Shazam just to find out what this sprawling yet tightly structured psychedelic / pop / gospel monster of a song was. Accessible yet raw. Polished yet profound. I loved the early 70’s vibe of it immediately. I was amazed I’d never heard of Ruth Copeland or even read anything written about her at all. I’ve never investigated further, it’s almost like this song is enough. Reading up on it today (The Medal), I never knew Madlib has more recently sampled this track, leaving it largely the same.

An absolute belter of a song…

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Immense.

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It is absolutely great LOUD :melting_face:

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  1. Sex Gang Children - Sebastiane. (1983).

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In the early 80’s a nightclub / venue started getting a lot of attention. All manner of new emerging Goth bands would play at all hours through the night. The music press picked up on this. Nick Cave, The Cure, Alien Sex Fiend, etc.

A band no one had heard of (Sex Gang Children) released a single Sebastiane in 1983, which didn’t bother the mainstream charts but hung around the Independent charts for an age. I would have been too young to go to the Batcave, but heard and taped this song from late night radio sessions. The sound, kind of exactly what you imagined the Batcave would be like should you have visited. This kind of scary sound that rattles into an almost impossibly catchy chorus. It was a record of focus for a lot of people and served to be a real root of this genre gradually finding daylight.

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Huh. Despite being a bit of a goth for years I never listened to Sex Gang Children. They sound kinda like I expected, except with a fiddle…

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Weren’t Sex Gang Children an early incarnation of Culture Club?