SF0205 The Bicentenary Poll Ep4 #55-41

Absolute epic in ‘Cortez the Killer’ kicks off this episode. As my dear departed friend Andy Bell put it, wildly historically inaccurate – no doubt, that’s true, but it’s possibly Neil Young’s masterpiece. And arguably the godfather track of slowcore. Arguably. Just a few years later, the Gang of Four produced an EP and a debut album that could barely have been more different in almost every regard. Frenetic, funky and frantic, ‘Damaged Goods’ though might have a little more in common with ‘Cortez’ than at first appears. A rejection of the mainstream and a political awareness amongst possibly other factors.

Two punk-pop standards ‘Ever Fallen In Love’ and ‘Union City Blue’ sandwich a song from this decade – the crystalline tones of Robin Pecknold and his Fleet Foxes with ‘Can I believe you’. You can, by the way. Believe me, that is. However much I might want to change song choices, I don’t. More New York, this time from the ’60s, with ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and Lou Reed becomes, I believe, the first artists to sing lead on different poll tracks. Not only that, he kicks off the second half of the countdown at #50.

Happy to see Portishead’s ‘The Rip’ get up at #49, an unusually structured song. Then two more idiosyncratic favourites in Half Man Half Biscuit and the emerging BC Camplight, followed by a run of four archetypal alternative bands and tracks spanning the ’80s through the mid ’90s. One after another, all indie classics: ‘Anyone can make a mistake’, ‘Motor away’, ‘Teenage Riot’ and ‘Going Underground’. It’s like the last 30 years was just a dream. And the last rack is perennial problem children, The Smiths, from the start of their ’80s Golden Era.

But before them one of the most idiosyncratic tracks in the whole poll: ‘White Horses’ by Low from the 2021 album, ‘Hey What’, recorded not long before Mimi Parker’s untimely death. White noise, angelic harmonising, sinister subject matter and an audacious outro, it epitomises much of what we love in the best modern music.

So, we have circumnavigated what cricket commentators like to call the ‘boring middle overs’ without getting remotely bored and are into the Top 40. From here on in, your favourite band is either a hero or a zero. But there’s only one way to find out, so do tune in for the rest of the poll, as excitement starts to palpably mount (to wantonly split an infinitive – there, I’ve done it again).