Songbook

  ‘The Calvary Cross’,Richard andLinda Thompson

  From the album I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. Linda Thompson’s 2002 album Fashionably Late, her first recording for seventeen years, is a delight.

  ‘Late for the Sky’,Jackson Browne

  From the album Late for the Sky.

  ‘Hey Self Defeater’, Mark Mulcahy

  From the album Fathering. This year’s top tip, via my friend Dan DeLuca of the Philadelphia Enquirer: The Instigator by Rhett Miller.

  ‘Needle in a Haystack’,The Velvelettes

  From The Best of The Velvelettes. They did the original version of ‘He Was Really Saying Something’, also on this compilation.

  ‘Let’s Straighten it Out’, O.V. Wright

  Available on The Complete O.V. Wright on Hi Records Vol. 1, a double CD that is pretty much all good, if you can stand the whistling teeth. You can find Latimore’s original version, with its long, moody organ intro, on Straighten It Out: The Best of Latimore.

  ‘Röyksopp’s Night Out’, Röyksopp

  From the album Melody A.M. The Gotan Project’s La Revancha Del Tango is the best and most innovative ambient album I’ve heard – even its Starbucks-y ubiquity hasn’t entirely ruined it for me yet.

  ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’,the Avalanches

  From the album Since I Left You.

  ‘No Fun/Push It’,Soulwax

  From the album Too Many DJs, although this particular track is also on a (bootleg?) album called The Best Bootleg Album in the World . . . Ever!, which you can find in the better class of independent CD shops.

  ‘Pissing in a River’, the Patti Smith Group

  From the album Radio Ethiopia. Land (2002) anthologizes just about everything you’d want – including this track – on a two-CD set.

  Favourite songs of 2002

  ‘Our Love’, Rhett Miller; ‘Dy-Na-Mi-Tee’, Ms Dynamite; ‘People of the Underground’, Marah; ‘There Goes the Fear’, the Doves; ‘Good Man’, Eileen Rose; ‘Flesh and Blood’, Solomon Burke; ‘Jesus Etc’, Wilko; ‘High Class Music’, Roddy Frame; ‘All I See’, Linda Thompson; ‘It’s Not’, Aimee Mann; ‘If You Only Knew’, Jurassic 5; ‘Hunger’, Boo Hewerdine; ‘Trouble Over Me’, Tift Merritt; ‘Seven Years’, Norah Jones.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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