CHAPTER 51

 

#50: SHED SEVEN

"Dolphin"

from the album Change Giver

Released: September 1994

 

The first thing is you have to disencumber yourself of the fallacious notion that this is a vertical list rather than a horizontal one. The songs don’t become bigger as the numbers grow smaller. No, think instead of an elaborately elongated list where every song is next to each other, not above or below them.

 

Certainly there’s no great logic to how the Spotify algorithm assembles these lists. As I’ve already said, this century of songs does not indicate my real listening habits. They’re mostly just nice titbits to put on in order to make the day evaporate faster. They are less random than the contents of Dylan’s Philosophy Of Modern Song, that is if they really are. I read that book and figured that I could probably do it better. But I am not a key figure in the last century of music whose innovations may have altered the world, and not just the way in which we perceive it. I have no baggage and as a consequence no passport. Nobody knows who the fuck I am. Why should anybody be interested in a Spotify playlist-inspired book by a never-was (not even a hasbeen)?

 

Therefore, why should you care that four places above “Unfinished Sympathy” comes a song by Shed Seven? Except it is four places ALONG from Massive Attack – thank you, Mark Sinker - like neighbours down the same long road. I listened to it a while ago because it’s peppy and reasonably urgent but mainly because it sounds like Haircut One Hundred minus the saxophone. I don’t wish to delve any further into the intent of the song, which I suspect is enveloped in a cesspit of misogynistic bollards – it just sounded fresh in 1994 when Hammersmith was still happening, the sun was still shining and the future was yet not to happen. It makes me move and shake as much as I can do either at this physically dismal stage of my life. It grooves. It doesn’t celebrate a culture, vanished, suppressed or otherwise. If there is a culture present, it probably isn’t worth celebrating anyway and no I didn’t go to boarding school and do not attend a private clinic for healthcare purposes.

 

In 1994 “Dolphin” played like someone had thrown open the window and let life into the room of staleness. The hit still hits. Bruno Brookes on the Sunday teatime BBC Radio One Top 40 show mispronounced the album title as Change Jiver and that is what I remember, not the lyrics from The Downward Spiral or whichever. That is perhaps all that this book is about. A nonentity listens to some songs and this is the semi-story he builds around them. Such crass egotism.