Here’s what The Gang of Four had to say on their song (Love like) Anthrax, in answer to the question as to why they didn’t write love songs:-
“Love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about, ‘cos most groups make most of their songs about falling in love or how happy they are to be in love. You occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time – it’s because these groups think there’s something very special about it; either that or else it’s because everybody else sings about it and always has. You know to burst into song you have to be inspired and nothing inspires quite like love. These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love or so they would have you believe. Anyway these groups seem to go along with what, the belief that love is deep in everyone’s personality. I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love, we just don’t think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.”
Stephen Merrett wrote an entire album of 69 love songs, none of which, he claimed were love songs at all, but songs about love.
And talking of meta, Twelfth Night by Shakespeare is a play about the concept of love rather than actual love. Yet it’s got one of the great melancholy love songs at the heart of it:
Mistress mine where are you roaming? O stay and hear, your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low. Trip no further pretty sweeting. Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
What is love, ’tis not hereafter,
Present mirth, hath present laughter:
What’s to come, is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty:
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Unlike The Gang of Four, I really like a good love song. Only a handful have actually been called ‘Love Song’ and a smaller proportion still are any good (God knows, I listened to enough of them constructing this podcast). So, here’s the final selection.
