It’s fun making playlists. I made one for Martha, she made one for me, and now our new songs are going to sound like Bruce Springsteen and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.

I wrote some notes about my playlist because I’m that guy. They’re quite personal but I’m sharing them here for completist sake.

Ana Ng, They Might Be Giants

“And the truth is we don’t know anything…”

The American Half Man Half Biscuit. Infuriating, inadvertently funny, and getting better with age. They had a proper hit, Birdhouse in your Soul, and just sort of hovered slightly below the zeitgeist for decades. I saw them at the Royal Festival Hall a decade or so ago and cried a lot. I saw them at the Barbican more recently, and cried less, but that’s more a reflection on me than them.

Fun fact: I was djing at a music festival at a steam train museum in Derbyshire and put on “Don’t Let’s Start” by this band. A man came running out of the toilet and into the tent to say he’d been waiting his whole life to dance to it. And despite all the above, this was the coolest I’ve ever been.

Teenage, Veronia Falls

“I’ll let you listen to the music you like…”

I’m not a goth and I’ve never been a teenager. But this chorus is everything. I can taste the sepia.

Indiepop took up a lot of my life for a wild old period, and I haven’t really returned to much of it due to painful memories. But I’m just about ready to delve in the crapulence of faded intense emotion.

Sweetest Thing, Camera Obscura

“When you’re lucid you’re the sweetest thing…”

Overlooked album filled with pop bangers by Scotland’s answer to Scotland’s Belle and Sebastian. The early death of Camera Obscura’s keyboardist hit the close-knit scene hard. I interviewed their bassist about Doctor Who once, for a fanzine called Hospitalised for Approaching Perfection.

This song is approaching perfection.

Fix It So She Dreams Of Me – Half Man Half Biscuit

“Underneath her bed their lies a collection of ammonites…”

The Wirral Half Man Half Biscuit, not to be confused with Sunderland’s It Ain’t Half Man, Mum, a covers band Nigel tricked the Guardian into saying were real.

I could have chosen twenty songs here but I went for this, as it’s one of the best examples of their unique genre of “cryptic crossword you can sing along to”. An immediate song that takes a lifetime to understand.

Say Valley Maker, Smog

“Bury me in fire and I’m gonna phoenix…”

There are three eras of Bill Callahan, the genius behind Smog. There is the early, popular-ish, alt-country era, with flippant and sometimes unkind songs about dressing sexy at funerals and cold blooded old times. 

There’s the very brief “actually happy” album, which shouldn’t detain us here.

And here’s the pared down, rich, guitar-picking material about birds, rivers, wells, and being from Texas. A River Ain’t Too Much To Love has everything you need.

Think I’m In Love, Spiritualized

“Love in the middle of the afternoon…”

The ultimate breakup album, and one jokingly referred to as “the only good thing Richard Ashcroft ever produced”, after he copped off with J Spaceman’s girlfriend, Kate Radley. 

Free jazz, blues, gospel, and synths as pure as dope, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space was love, death, heroin and religion (the four genders). It stands up beautifully, but it’s weird to think a song as weird of this was performed on Top of the Pops.

Roll Bus Roll, Jeffrey Lewis

“Harlem looks so good tonight…”

Comic book artist, anti-folk mainstay and absolute weirdo Jeffrey Lewis wrote lots of simple but beautiful little songs. I have fallen asleep to this on a coach departing New York because I am a fucking cliche.

Little Poliver, Monkey Swallows The Universe

“You were overcast throughout…”

Nat, the singer-songwriter for MSTU, is one of Sheffield’s finest, and am absolute dreamboat of a singer and a person, sardonic, weird and kind.

Regrets, I’ve had a few, and this song is suffused in them.

This is as twee as it gets, and features the only acceptable use of the word “bunting” in all popular culture.

But the “suddenly you’re not mine…” gets me every time.

When the Haar Rolls In, James Yorkston

“So I busied myself with the flippancy of art…”

Listened to this album on dangerous repeat in the months after my marriage broke down, with a glass of wine and a series of unsuitable lovers. 

The Fence Collective, and shows in small venues in seaside towns in Fife, flow through these seemingly endless lyrics by James, a fellow balding ginger depression sufferer. 

One half of Fence became Howlin’ Fling records, and our cathartic ventures to Eigg for adventure and no police for miles beyond the shoreline.

Nightlife, Kenickie

“We are young for your desecration, destroy what you find…”

The best, and most intellectual, teenager purveyors of youthful hedonism of all time. Kenickie wrote six or seven perfect pop songs, confused all male middle class music journalists, then fucked off to become underwhelming tv presenters (Lauren Laverne, here represented by the amazing middle eight), sociologists at Goldsmiths (Kate Montrose), folk singers (Marie Du Santiago) or music producers (Johnny X).

Wickerman, Pulp

“Yeah, the river flows on, beneath pudgy fifteen-year olds addicted to coffee whitener…”

I wasn’t sure whether to go early or late Pulp for this mix, this seemed the most suitable the way the thing has developed. 

From their Scott Walker produced, and entirely ignored, last album, this is very much the highlight. Some classic Jarvisms, and I remember the genesis of this song – he wrote an article about urban waterways, and the Wicker in Sheffield, for the guardian. Two years later, this masterpiece turned up.

My own suburban river is Beverley Brook. I grew up near it, and one day I will follow it wherever the river may take me.

Tennessee, Silver Jews

“You know Louisville is death…” 

A very personal song, and as with the Yorkston I’m glad the memories are far enough away for me to enjoy it again. I bought this in a second hand record store in Louisville; there are more genius lines in this song than in most bands’ careers; and I don’t know about you but I’m off to the land of hot middle aged women.

Birdy From Another Realm, Lisa O’Neill

“It’ll all come out in the wash ya know…”

As well as being white supremacist, this mix is far more male dominated than I’d like. It’s just what fits together honest guv, the next one will be very different.

I think I do a lot of my listening to music on trains, and I hit a bit of a rut a couple of years ago where I wasn’t really listening to anything new. And that’s a problem for me, because I form new memories through musical associations. 

I first saw Lisa supporting The Divine Comedy, and she immediately transported me to another world. She’s a master storyteller, a slightly jarring spirit-embodiment of an Ireland that doesn’t exist, and loves the birds like I love life itself. 

Are You with Me Now?, Cate Le Bon

“It’s not unusual, baby, to feel the shadows and cry…”

I first discovered Cate Le Bon singing dead-eyed electronic lust with Neon Neon, Gruff Rhys’s side project concept album about the inventor of the DeLorean.

There was just something immediately otherworldly and clever about how she sings. None of her albums disappoint, but this is a simple, beautiful, lovelorn pop banger.

Lazy Line Painter Jane, Belle and Sebastian

Wondering how you got your name and what you’re going to do about it…

I spent a lot of my youth at indie discos, leading the clap-alongs and generally being a bit of a skinny hipped wastrel. 

Belle and Sebastian have long since descended into self-parody, but those first few EPs and albums were extraordinary: an immediate, weird, self-contained world, which exploded into the last pre-internet indie-obsessive sub culture that straddled the world.

Not bad for a bunch of unemployed fey lads and lasses from Glasgow who recorded their first album on the 90s equivalent of a YTS training scheme.

I don’t think they ever topped this tune, for its imagery, beauty, and slowed-down Scot approximation of northern soul. 

Tallulah, Allo Darlin’

“It hid the fact I was hiding…”

I met Elizabeth at How Does It Feel To Be Loved on New Year’s Eve 2006. We probably danced to the above. She was beautiful, impossibly gregarious, and had just moved over from Brisbane to work in post-production.

I saved her in my phone as Elizabeth VPL (Very Pretty Lady), and went to the Red Lion in Soho to meet her a week later, with very little idea of what she looked like.

She had a boyfriend still over in Australia, and wasn’t quite sure where she was at. I was quite nervous around her in a way that probably wasn’t very attractive, but we became a brief thing anyway. 

The thing I loved about Elizabeth was her confidence and her sense that anything was possible. She couldn’t understand why I was doing a shit moderation job for the Guardian.

She asked me to be in a band with her – I said no for the obvious reason that I couldn’t play anything, ha. She met a Swedish man, I met Morgan, and we stayed friends as her band went (indie) stratospheric.

It was that eighteen months or so where I actually felt part of the cool gang.

This song always made everyone in a room shut up when it was played; a magical skill. It’s clearly about those early days after she moved over, enjoying everything Europe had to offer, and still half in love with the man and the live she left behind. 

Sly and the Family Stone, Hayman, Watkins, Trout and Lee

“I’m a kept man…”

Darren is the guy I bumped into on the tube in January, who used to be in indie legends Hefner. Elizabeth wrote a single about him. Where’s my single Elizabeth? Prick.

There was a massive alt-bluegrass scene in London in the mid noughties. This is something of an indie/bluegrass supergroup. What I liked about them is that they got the spirit of Americana but transported it to their own lives and experiences, and – most importantly of all – sang in their own accents.

Farewell Transmission, Songs: Ohia

“Mama here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws…”

I know absolutely nothing about this band, other than the singer killed himself a number of years ago. I spend a lot of time being bemused and offended by the banality of the Spotify algorithm; this is the one song I’ve come to love that I would never have heard if it wasn’t for the robots.

The outro is so beautiful. I think I listened to it three or four times in a row when I first heard it. I’m so relieved I’ve rediscovered my love for music, which was lost along with my music collection in the Great Schism.

Sbia Ar Y Seren, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci

“Sbya ar y pel bach oren…”

Gorky’s are probably my second favourite band after HMHB, and I wish they’d reform one day. They’re the only band I know who I say that about – it’s not nostalgia, it’s just these songs are too beautiful not to be played.

Euros is the main songwriter but they’re all beautiful oddballs. Most of the songs are about the sea, the summer, girls, or girls by the sea in summer. Which I now realise makes them the melancholy Welsh Beach Boys.

The band sang in both Welsh and English, sometimes over the course of the same song. I have no idea what this song is saying and I don’t want to. 

Vodka and Wine, Murry The Hump

“I took a sexual peek at your naked feet…”

I loved these guys, and thought they were going to be huge.

They released one album and were never seen beyond Aberystwyth again. 

I played this album so much that this, the last track, skipped something rotten. So it’s a relief to find it frozen in carbonite in the doomed forever fields of the internet.