"Music was my first love / And it will be my last ..." - John Miles, 1976
So here we are. 2014. Journey's end. After more than a year wandering around the highways and byways of pop's history we've arrived at the run-out groove on side two of this blog.
We'll leave the summarising and totting up until next week (see it as a bonus track if you like), but it's worth saying that what we have been leading up to in this space for the last 60 plus weeks is a partial history of pop music (with variants in the line below the Comments label - thanks Bill, Robin et al) and, I guess, a partial biography. A musical notation of myself. I could have done it via books or movies (the latter is still a temptation), but music makes most sense. The perfume of pop lingers longest.
This year of course we can only be provisional. We've only had half a year. The best may be yet to come. Come back and ask me in six months if I still hold to this choice.
In a perfect world I'd pick something you have never heard of. Some thrilling new direction. But maybe I'm not the one to go to for novelty any more. Instead, the track I've loved most so far this year comes from two familiar names, Brian Eno, ex of Roxy, vital ingredient in the best records of Bowie and U2, and Karl Hyde of Underworld, both of whom have haunted the margins of this blog for the last 30 years or so. Perennial other contenders making a bid for the front right at the end.
Daddy's Car works for me because of its supple approximation of African highlife energy, those deep eighties synths, the rattle of the percussion, the smell of summer that floats through it and the impressionistic half lyrics ("street lights shimmering"), their evocation of (possibly) happy memories seen from a distance of time and space and love. It sounds like a memory of some perfect childhood July.
And maybe that's appropriate enough. What is pop - what is this blog - if not a form of time travel?
Thanks for making the journey with me.
Other Contenders
Seasons, Future Islands
Water Fountain, Tune-Yards
Istanbul, Morrissey
Before, Wye Oak
Digital Witness, Saint Vincent
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