It’s the impending Bank Holiday Weekend, which means only one thing for us: it’s Infest this weekend in Bradford. /amodelofcontrol.com will be reporting back, of course, with the usual full coverage and photos after the event. If you’re there, come say hi.

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At a great many Infests over the years (this will be my twenty-fourth, including online in 2020 and 2021), all of us have made questionable choices. Mainly over what we drank – sometimes what we ate too, going along with someone’s insane plan, even sticking around for a band that turned out to be terrible, or we just stayed out way too late.

This week, then, /Tuesday Ten /564 looks at a litany of bad ideas and bad decisions in song. As a friend rightly pointed out in the original suggestion thread a few weeks back, an awful lot of them were bad shags…

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/mclusky
/To Hell With Good Intentions
/mclusky Do Dallas

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I’ve featured the savage, sarcastic, taut hardcore of mclusky a couple of times in the past year, and here we go again, with one of their signature songs. Like many of their songs, there’s not a lot going on – anthemic non-sequiteurs, mosh-friendly choruses and repeated phrases throughout – but it all comes together to be vastly more than it first appears. The important point, though, is the chorus: “We’re all going straight to hell!“. Yep, after taking all those drugs, torching the restaurant and yer dads fighting, they – and we, the listeners – probably are. With mclusky soundtracking it, it’s a bad idea gone good…

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/“Weird Al” Yankovic
/Dare to be Stupid
/Dare to be Stupid

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The mighty “Weird Al” Yankovic – long an artist who’s had a lot of fun parodying other artists, and is pretty much the last word in doing so – had his biggest hit with this marvellous take on Devo. Rather than reworking their songs directly, though, he created a song that is unmistakeably a riff on the Devo style – referencing at least four different Devo songs – and then just went nuts with the lyrics. A whole host of stupid things to do – they very definition of a bunch of bad ideas not to try – include putting your head in a microwave, letting bedbugs bite and…becoming a normal person.

If you’ve not seen Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, by the way, do so: a marvellous pisstake of the rock biopic in a very Weird Al way…

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/The Beach Boys
/Sloop John B
/Pet Sounds

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Undoubtedly one of the shining technical and musical achievements in music history, years ahead of it’s time – not to mention that Brian Wilson was just twenty-two when he got started on it – and an album that has influenced practically anyone and everyone that has made music since, it’s sometimes easy to forget that Pet Sounds is stacked with fantastic songs as well – even if it proved to be exceptionally difficult to reproduce live.

And while writing this, today I learned that Sloop John B is a cover, of a Bahamian folk song originally published in 1916! Brian Wilson changed a few words, but broadly left the base of the song as it was, and it’s a great example of an event in a song that turns into a really bad idea. The narrator has joined a voyage on a sloop, and along the way he and his grandfather get hammered in Nassau town, fighting their way out – even before they set sail. Then when they do, the first mate gets drunk, the Sheriff comes, the cook ruins the food… I’ve had a few voyages sailing in the Solent with my late Grandfather in my youth, but thankfully none were as disastrous as this!

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/Afroman
/Because I Got High
/The Good Times

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A great many songs suggested this week involved drinking or sex – two pastimes that very much lend themselves to bad ideas formenting – and we’ll come to those shortly – but first up, we have a short interlude where our protagonist gets absolutely binned.

Oh yes, it’s Afroman, and he had lots of plans. He wanted to clean his room, he plans to retake his college year, he plans to go to court (and a whole lot more), but every plan is stymied because he’s going to have a toke on that joint first. While it’s a humorous, laid-back stoner song in feel, there’s this feeling that it’s also something of a warning: constantly getting caned might affect your quality of life.

The video is very much of it’s time, too, with the assistance of Jay and Silent Bob, two film characters who definitely knew one end of a blunt from the other.

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/The Levellers
/Just The One
/Zeitgeist

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The sixth in a remarkable run of seven studio singles that all made the UK Top 20, Just the One is something of a flipside to the band’s first big hit – the searing takedown of the alcoholic barfly that is Fifteen Years. There’s no humour in that song, as the character in the song literally drinks their life away, but in Just the One, it’s from the perspective of that friend for whom a “swift half” will never be the case. Instead, that first hour turns into two, then three, then, wait, where did the night go? You know it was enormous fun, but fuck, you feel like shit the next morning. Then, you probably won’t drink at all for the following week…

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/Art Brut
/Alcoholics Unanimous
/Art Brut vs. Satan

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Anyway, about the morning after, Art Brut have you covered. Eddie Argos is wondering what happened last night. He thinks he had a good time, but he’s pretty sure that he’s got some apologies to make, he’s wondering what those bruises are from, and he had such a fuzzy head that took ages to get dressed. Tea, or coffee, or both, would help too. Yep, I drink a whole lot less than I used to, and for me, it remains one of those vices I’m going to keep, but moderating my intake somewhat. Sometimes I wonder how some of us survived some of the nights out we used to have.

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/Olivia Rodrigo
/bad idea right?
/GUTS

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Olivia Rodrigo’s quite marvellous single from last year’s album GUTS is a song that accepts from the off that what’s about to go down is a terrible idea. She has an ex, and he’s got in touch offering no-strings fun. Despite the chorus of friends (backing vocals) telling her not to, it ends up, naturally, that she “tripped and fell into his bed“, and amid a chaotic musical accompaniment that owes as much to 90s Riot Grrrl as it does 60s girl groups, it’s fantastic entertainment, even if most of us are probably cringing at our own youthful attempts to get back with someone we should never have seen in the first place…

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/The Aloof
/One Night Stand
/Sinking

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The electronic group The Aloof were something of a footnote amid a rush of similarly downtempo bands (indeed, member Jagz Kooner was better known as a producer and a member of The Sabres of Paradise), but their glorious single One Night Stand wsa string-laden and bitter with regret, and worth hunting down alone. Like so many such songs of the era, it’s a song for the morning after that big night, where the cold light of day – and likely sobriety – brings a new focus and a new appraisal of what happened, and it’s likely that regret has now set in. That unnamed, unknown partner – who you’ll likely never see again – has gone, the moment of joy and ecstasy gone with them. It seemed such a good idea at the time.

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/The High Level Ranters
/The Sandgate Girl’s Lament / Elsie Marley
/Northumberland Forever

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A traditional song from the North East is a song perhaps warning of picking your suitors carefully. The lass in question here is a woman who chose the wrong man to marry – a low-level Keelman who brought in the coal from the bigger ships, and in her words, he’s “a bloody buffoon“. She spends the song telling of his ineptitude and violence, his ill-faced looks, and reflects otherwise of staying in bed with a better man, or marrying a wealthy merchant, or just a good man. Instead, she’s stuck for the rest of her life with this hopeless man who brings her only misery.

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/MC 900ft Jesus
/Adventures In Failure
/Welcome To My Dream

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Also regretting their wider life choices is the character in MC 900ft Jesus’ excellent song. Here, one bad choice begets another, and so on. A crappy job and home to an unhappy marriage (and noisy kids). Then, he has a beer, and escapes the noise of the house for junk food, before not paying attention and crashing his car… It only gets worse from there, as he just walks away from a lifetime of terrible ideas and terrible choices.

Not, I’d suggest, good life advice from MC 900ft Jesus…