Tomorrow, my wife and I reach a significant milestone: our twentieth anniversary of being together, and our ninth wedding anniversary. We’ve lived together in Sheffield, London and now Hythe, Kent, we’ve been through ups and downs, we’ve travelled across much of Europe and America, and had a lot of fun along the way.

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This week is about anniversaries, but mostly about what signifies them in wedding anniversary terms: the various objects and precious stones and metals that are traditionally given as wedding gifts when you reach a certain point. We’ve had a lot of fun gifting each other appropriate dragons and dalmatians over the past nine years, but with some upcoming anniversaries, this might become more difficult…

As well, my parents were married for less than a decade (and two years of that, they had already separated), but their respective second marriages have lasted considerably longer: indeed my dad and step-mother mark thirty-five years married this May (their Coral wedding anniversary).

Anyway, this is another one from a set of suggestions that’s been kicking around a while – in this case since September 2022. Not because I wasn’t happy with it – it was just waiting for the right time, and our twentieth anniversary seems like exactly the right time. Thanks, as ever, to everyone who takes the time to offer suggestions.

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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/Goodbye Mr. MacKenzie
/Now We Are Married
/Hammer and Tongs

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Best known to the wider world as the band Shirley Manson started out in, before ending up as the frontperson of Garbage, Goodbye Mr. MacKenzie deserve more attention than that: their dark-edged alternative rock being maybe a bit ahead of their time (The Rattler being the track to start with, by the way). This song is a charging rock song, that celebrates the deep love of a couple who are married and looking forward to the rest of their lives together – and is unusually positive for a band of this ilk, at least at face value. Also, it – just – meets the criteria this week, with the closing coda mentioning “silver and gold” repeatedly…

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/3 Colours Red
/Copper Girl
/Pure

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Because of the nature of the gifts that we usually give each other for our anniversaries, we’ve switched between the UK and US variants as it suited. Salt, for example, was a whole lot easier last year than bronze, while this year, we went to paint pottery rather than trying to find copper dalmatians and dragons. But I’m turning back to copper for nine years in song, with nineties rockers 3 Colours Red. Like much of their material, it’s energetic, anthemic rock that meant they were regulars in the charts for a while. Lyrically the band are musing on a woman lost to the past, whose presumably copper hair meant they were memorable and striking, but won’t be coming back anytime soon.

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/Skinny Puppy
/Tin Omen
/Rabies

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Next year we’ll reach our tenth wedding anniversary: the tin anniversary. In the wider world, mind, it seems they won’t be much to celebrate by next year, with the chaos being wrought by the new American Government and the various unelected cronies that are wreaking havoc. Back in the early 1990s, Skinny Puppy unleashed their searing tirade Tin Omen, long a live and fan favourite for the direct rage that manifests within – SP were rarely this direct. A song that rips into Governments that unleash terror on their own people, particularly protesters, the title is a play on (Square), but it also references the Kent State Massacre (1970) and Mao’s cleansing the class ranks (1968). But importantly in these times, it also reminds of a universal issue: tyrannical Governments will also be keen to turn the working class against each other to ensure that they don’t rise up against those in power – something we are seeing play out yet again in the US at the moment.

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/LCD Soundsystem
/Sound of Silver
/Sound of Silver

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We now jump a few (crystal and porcelain aren’t exactly inspiring for song, for the most part), to twenty-five years, and silver – a metal that I had an awful lot of options for.

James Murphy has gone on record saying that this was a cynical dig at the second never being as good as the first: being told by his father that parenthood was a silver medal, for example, as all their energies went into raising children, not to mention the sneering to Murphy that a second album could never be as good as the first. Which is ironic, seeing as Sound of Silver turned out to be his meisterwerk.

The title track is an epic, funk and techno-influenced track that has a hypnotic rhythm and a looped refrain, complete with Underworld-esque synths and a general sense that James Murphy was so determined to prove everyone wrong that he created near-perfection.

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/All About Eve
/The Pearl Fishermen
/Scarlet and Other Stories

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The pearl, the symbol for thirty years of marriage, has been a prized item in many cultures for centuries, belying their humble origins – created within the shell of a mollusc in the sea, but they are rare and not every mollusc will create one. Perfectly round, iridescent pearls are highly prized for their beauty (and often sell for a price to match).

The folky, ethereal sounds of All About Eve – and thematically often linked to the sea – was a perfect match for a song about the trials and tribulations of two pearl fishermen, fighting among themselves to find the perfect pearl – and woman, even if it will kill them doing so.

According to some research, the average length of a marriage in the UK is 30 years, so five songs into this post, and we’re already at that point.

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/Rancid
/Ruby Soho
/…And Out Come the Wolves

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Forty years is a Ruby anniversary, and this gem, one of the hardest wearing on the Mohs scale, has been found and mined in many countries across the world (including, apparently, even Scotland at one point). Forty years married is some considerable time, too.

One relationship that would never have made it that far – indeed it barely got off the ground – was that depicted in the classic Rancid single Ruby Soho, which is apparently about a woman one of the band met on tour, but the pressures of being in a touring band meant that he sadly had to let her go.

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/The Hold Steady
/Yeah Sapphire
/Stay Positive

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Interestingly, forty-five years is a Sapphire anniversary, and the sapphire is a different variety of gemstone that comes from the same source as ruby (corundum – aluminium oxide), and comes in more colours than just blue – indeed my wife’s engagement ring has a number of (very small!) pink sapphires in it.

A rare appearance in this series from US rockers The Hold Steady (whom a good number of my friends hold very dearly indeed). This rough-and-ready song feels tailor-made for live shows, the raucous instrumentation providing the backdrop for a tale of murder, crime and love, and one that ends well for no-one involved (including the titular Sapphire).

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/Simple Minds
/New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84)
/New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84)

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Gold marks fifty years married, which is a point apparently only 6% of marriages actually reach (which is understandable, it’s a hell of a long time!). Gold is an aspirational metal, one that is relatively brittle, and gold reserves held by nations literally guarantee ability of money and financial supply.

New Gold Dream was the point where Simple Minds became the stars they wanted to be. They’d struggled at the margins somewhat prior to this, and something just clicked with this album, and this triumphant song is Jim Kerr realising that his dreams are about to be fulfilled. They perhaps never got better than this album, either…

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/Shirley Bassey
/Diamonds Are Forever
/Diamonds Are Forever OST

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Figures seem to vary on how many marriages make the extraordinary milestone of sixty years – one figure from over a decade ago suggested just 2% make it this far, but the ONS in 2012 predicted that as the population ages, 16% of marriages will make this milestone in the future, which seems optimistic.

The diamond is the gemstone for 60 years of marriage, and is aptly used: harder than any other gemstone, it has many industrial uses because of that, but is also a common symbol of marriage by being used in wedding and engagement rings, partly thanks to their beauty and clarity. But this use is mostly thanks to marketing in the 20th Century by the biggest producers of diamonds, De Beers.

There are many, many songs about diamonds, but probably the best known is Shirley Bassey’s mighty title theme for the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, a song with as little subtlety as the shine of a diamond in bright light…

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/Thin Lizzy
/Emerald
/Jailbreak

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I’ve been to one Diamond Wedding Anniversary party, but never an Emerald one – just five years longer at 65 years. The emerald is a vivid green gemstone, but one less durable and strong than diamond, but still one of extraordinary beauty.

Ireland is also known as the Emerald Isle, thanks to the mild weather and lots (and lots) of rain that makes it a very green landscape, and Irish rockers Thin Lizzy celebrated their homeland on this song. Amid galloping, Gaelic-influenced riffs (and what a riff!), Phil Lynott celebrates his Irish ancestors who stood up and fought their occupiers across the ages, eventually getting independence in the first half of the 20th Century.