Things are a bit fucking crazy in the world right now, as the repercussions from the political events in the US begin to ripple across the world.

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This has had a good number of us wondering if the world has gone fucking mad. Either way, the future feels pretty bleak right now. Thus, it had me digging back into my previous unused suggestion threads, and nearly seven years ago, I asked for suggestions for songs around the subject of madness, which quite frankly seems apt right now. Thanks, as always, to everyone that suggested songs.

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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/Seal
/Crazy
/Seal

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Apparently inspired by the profound global changes of 1989 (the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square in particular), this was Seal’s way of reacting to it. Produced by producer extraordinaire Trevor Horn, as is usual with his work there’s more going on than there first appears, but this song is all about that mighty chorus, where Seal’s soaring voice is accompanied by dramatic piano crashes. But as well, it is the sound of one man trying to work out what the fuck is going on in the world around him, with no real idea of how the chips will fall. Thirty-five years on, we’re back in what feels like seismic political times, but to most of us, there doesn’t feel like there is anything at all to celebrate.

On a lighter note, another of Seal’s hits got another lease of life recently in a Mountain Dew advert directed by Taika Waititi that had me questioning my sanity. Speaking of which…

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/L7
/Questioning My Sanity
/Hungry For Stink

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This last few months in particular – especially when seeing pretty much anything in the news – has probably had most of us questioning our sanity. In various ways, too, like “are these people for fucking real?” or “how did people vote for these clowns?” or “how the fuck is this person apparently ruling the world?”. L7, mind, are questioning things at a much smaller level, as they deal with mental health and depression. Lying in bed unable to do anything else, living in filth, hallucinating while watching the TV.

It’s entirely ok to feel powerless and not be able to do anything to fight against the tide of absolute shit that seems to be engulfing the world right now. Some of us just cannot.

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/Cypress Hill
/Insane In The Brain
/Black Sunday

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The lead track from Cypress Hill’s most celebrated album, surprisingly, has origins as a diss track. That said, the diss has got buried a bit in the lurid imagery of the song (which mostly circles around the idea of being intensely paranoid while stoned out of your mind), and that thundering squall of a beat, punctuated by screaming horn samples. The title phrase, apparently, is a reference to LA gang wars, and announcing that you were “insane in the the brain” or suchlike was a pronouncement that you were not to be fucked with, some statement to make when Crips, Bloods and the Police were locked in a ruinous war.

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/Fun Boy Three
/The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum)
/Fun Boy Three

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“Forty years on, nothing’s changed” said the two surviving members of Fun Boy Three just over a year ago, and frankly, it’s even worse now. This song was the group’s first single after Lynval Golding, Neville Staples and Terry Hall left the Specials, and there is definitely the same eerie feel that made Ghost Town so extraordinary. Here, though, they are fearing nuclear war and whatever other chaos Ronald Reagan may have unleashed, and the gentle, swaying rhythm and bright sound only adds to the sense of dread. The lines “Take away my right to choose / take away my point of view” feel chillingly apt as well in 2025.

Unusually, there is an exceptional cover in “our scene” of this, too: Collide released fantastic cover on Vortex, their 2004 remix and covers compilation, which remains one of the greatest such albums I’ve ever heard.

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/Dizzee Rascal
/Bonkers
/Tongue n’ Cheek

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Dizzee Rascal had already had a Number One by the time of the release of this, but he teamed up with Armand van Helden to create a monster festival hit – just check this absolutely ripping take from Glastonbury 2009. There’s thumping house, there’s industrial noise, there’s utter fucking chaos going on here, as Dizzee satirises the mainstream view of a pop star like him, just living for basslines and thrills rather than being just a person that makes music. Perhaps, though, pop stardom did cause him issues, but that’s nothing new sadly – many younger people that get stardom thrust on them struggle, and that’s an indictment on an industry always looking for the next big star without any thought of what it might do to them along the way.

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/Gary Numan & Rico
/Crazier
/Hybrid

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An unusual track, this one, as both artists involved released versions of the track where they were the lead – and the Gary Numan-led version, which was released first in 2003, was Numan’s first top 20 hit in nearly twenty years (and Rico’s only hit – here’s his version), and arguably the point where Numan’s post-millennial critical renaissance began – including an excellent TOTP appearance. This searing song examines their own mental health issues, and how they fight against stigma by indulging their own whims and being better versions of themselves.

While Numan has gone from strength to strength since, his importance in the evolution of electronic music now assured, Rico retreated from recording music to help the next generation in his native Glasgow, before dying aged just 51 in 2022.

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/Therapy?
/Die Laughing
/Troublegum

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The mighty Troublegum turned thirty years old recently, and the passing of time has not dulled the impact of an album that concentrates on the mental health struggles of young men while the wider world around them is engulfed in chaos (it should be remembered that the members of Therapy? came of age while their native Northern Ireland was engulfed in The Troubles). Die Laughing was one of a number of singles that charted surprisingly high upon release, and is one of the most obvious songs on the album about Andy Cairn’s headspace. A world where he’s dissassociative, struggling to sleep and fighting to deal with his own place in the world – it’s a song that very much struck a chord with teenage me, even if I didn’t quite understand my own mental health issues until much later on. It’s also a fucking great song, mind.

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/Suzanne Vega
/Blood Makes Noise
/99.9F°

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After the relatively gentle folk rock – laced with social commentary – that Vega had made her name with in the eighties, much of 99.9F° was a bit of a shock, as it experimented with electronics and a radically different sound. Nowhere was this transformation more stark than on the vivid, robotic electro-funk of Blood Makes Noise. Apparently the sound was sculpted around the idea of what you hear when you can feel the veins pumping the blood around your head, amid times of mental stress or attraction. This was, like Die Laughing released just a year later, a song that I would understand later, as I became more aware of my own mind and how I reacted to stressors. At times of extreme stress I can barely hear anything inside my head other than the thumping sounds of my body, so I’d say Vega’s attempt at replicating it is pretty fucking accurate, actually.

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/The Avalanches
/Frontier Psychiatrist
/Since I Left You

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It appears that even The Avalanches themselves don’t know how many samples are used on their extraordinary debut album Since I Left You – apparently there are well beyond 3,000. WhoSampled lists twenty-eight known samples for the joyous chaos of Frontier Psychiatrist, and there are doubtless more. The titular sample – and core of the track – comes from post-war Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Schuster, and a truly bizarre sketch where they pay tribute to early psychiatrists, but have enormous fun doing so. But amazingly, this is one of the only songs I can think of that – at least in part – celebrates psychiatry and the profession.

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/Ozzy Osbourne
/Crazy Train
/Blizzard of Ozz

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The classic, lead single from Ozzy’s first solo album – and with the kind of riff most metal bands would kill for, by the late, great Randy Rhoads (who died just two years later in a plane crash) – is another song that references the fear of Cold War annihilation. Ozzy, of course, had been kicked out of Black Sabbath after a towering decade where they had pretty much invented heavy metal as we know it, but drugs in particular had resulted in some pretty crazy times. Despite fears that Ozzy would fail, his solo career turned out to be a success, he rejoined Sabbath, put his name to a wildly successful festival tour, featured in an equally successful reality TV show: perhaps the latter was the craziest of all for the Prince of Darkness.

Black Sabbath bow out in their native Birmingham this coming summer, with a star-studded (and frankly obscenely expensive) stadium show at Villa Park. Ozzy looks like he’ll only be onstage for a small proportion of it, but that’s perhaps to be expected: he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease some years back, and one last goodbye onstage for him and his bandmates – all of whom are in their late seventies now – is fitting.