I’m continuing my current policy of using up as many older suggestion threads as possible: I’ve asked for songs on lots of subjects over the years (over 200 suggestion threads, in fact), and still have quite a number to use up.

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This week, then, I’m looking at the subject of body modification. Interestingly, in song terms, that meant tattoos in a large proportion of the songs suggested, but it also covers piercing, self harm (there’s a content warning this week as a result), and injury too.

A great many of my friends have gone into body modification in a big way, with many of them covered in tattoos, piercings or both (and indeed a number of my friends are professional piercers and/or tattoo artists). I never really went down the same route: I’ve had a grand total of three piercings, of which only one remains (which I got re-done a decade ago last weekend), and I never got tattoos, even though I thought about it for a time. For some considerable time, too, it was very much the thing to cover up most of both if you had them and wanted an office job, but as I note below, times have changed and many workplaces are now much more relaxed about it.

Anyway, let’s get on with the songs.

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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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/Bowling For Soup
/Girl All The Bad Guys Want
/Drunk Enough to Dance

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First off, I did not know that Rhys Fulber is credited as one of the producers on this pop-punk album – one that’s chiefly remembered for this ultra-catchy song that rather sums up what many of us went through as nervous teenagers in the alternative scene. Oh yes, those gorgeous alternative girls with piercings and cool outfits that were way too cool for people like us. We didn’t have the internet that could tell us stuff in the mid-90s – not in the way that we can now – and we had to find our own way, making mistakes and gaffes along the way. I got my first piercing when I was twenty-one or so (to be fair I only ever had three), and never got tattooed, despite considering it a few times. I found my own way, although I’m not convinced I was ever exactly cool.

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/Six By Seven
/Get A Real Tattoo
/For You

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For a band that I adore so much, I’ve perhaps not featured Six By Seven as much as I should (although that said, this is their fourteenth appearance in the series). But then again, Chris Olley’s lyrics are often obtuse and deliberately difficult to unravel – although these days, I have a copy of The Things I Make, which pulls most of the lyrics into one place and explains more about each song.

Get A Real Tattoo was an early B-side and occasional live favourite, mainly for the pulverising power and volume that the song possesses, at least when it gets going. Otherwise, it’s a taut exercise in tension and release, as Chris Olley claps back at an ex-partner who thought he was wasting his time in a band, the title being a sneer at fakery.

Then again, fake tattoos are more than likely rather more believable these days than they might have been in the past. Not that I suspect any of my friends have tried to pass one off…

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/Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine
/Let’s Get Tattoos
/Worry Bomb

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Carter USM were perhaps something of a spent force by the time of Worry Bomb – while their singles were still charting, musical fashions had moved on somewhat and they didn’t have the same impact. Which is a shame, as Let’s Get Tattoos is a great Carter song about living for the moment and remembering to enjoy life. Which in this case, is forget your troubles and go out on a session with your best mate, go get that tattoo you’ve wanted to get for ages (although perhaps not when you’re drunk). I perhaps could have used this as a pep talk a bit more often when I was younger.

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/Proyecto Mirage
/Piercing Ring (Human Mix)
/Gas Alarm!

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It turned out that songs that explicitly mention piercings are actually fairly unusual, so here’s an old industrial noise dancefloor favourite from 2004, by Spanish noise duo Proyecto Mirage. The vocals aren’t especially clear amid the barrage of beats and noise, but it appears that Alicia has lost a piece of piercing jewellery on a club dancefloor, and is offering rewards for finding it. One of the perils of being pierced, of course, is that it is possible to lose all or parts of the jewellery. I lost one of the balls on my navel piercing after knocking it while moving house, and took a few years to get ’round to replacing it. It took a trip to Cold Steel, where my girlfriend was getting a piercing anyway, to get it replaced, and that navel piercing remains the only one I’ve still got (I first had it done back in 2003 or so).

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/Collapsed Lung
/Let’s Get Jobs
/Zero Hours Band

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An interesting take on body modification comes from Collapsed Lung. Perhaps a song that reflects the life of most jobbing bands these days – can anyone afford to make their band a full-time thing nowadays, with a handful of exceptions of artists that either tour endlessly, or are big enough legacy acts to earn on past royalties and massive tours. But here, the chorus suggests getting a job is like a tattoo, in that you’ll likely regret getting both in due course. Something that seems unlikely for most of my tattooed friends (even if the odd one is covered up or amended)…

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/Fightmilk
/How You Move On
/Not With That Attitude

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Then again, the marvellously catty lead track on Fightmilk’s debut album does deal with regret of tattoos, but perhaps not regretted by the person who got it. Vocalist Lily spins a tale of a bitter ex-boyfriend who gets a tattoo that “represents” Lily as a person, it transpires that this isn’t the first uninspired tattoo that they’ve got, and they are appalled to find that they are represented by “some stupid bloody tree”. The coda contains some gloriously catchy advice: “lasers are painful but I think you need it / lasers cost money but it’s an investment“.

I’ve long wondered if this was inspired by a true story, such is the rich detail in the song…

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/Momus
/It’s Important To be Trendy
/The Philosophy of Momus

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Scottish artist Momus has been around for decades, and can perhaps be blamed/thanked for the rise of some Britpop bands (he was a big influence on both Jarvis Cocker and Brett Anderson, and was one of the early champions of Suede), but has never lost his sardonic nature lyrically. On this song from 1995 – with a trip-hop-esque, minimalist shuffling beat providing pretty much the only backing – he casts an eye on what it is to be “cool” and “trendy”, including piercing your cock, your eye, and tattooing your anus.

I’ve never considered any of these, but it is perhaps notable just how attitudes have shifted in recent years. When I began working for a telecoms firm in 2010, the very fact that I had a beard was notable: nowadays, visible tattoos, facial hair and even visible piercings are barely commented upon in many roles.

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/Lunachicks
/Less Teeth More Tits
/Luxury Problem

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A first appearance in these pages for NYC all-woman punk band Lunachicks, and they are preoccupied with the lengths some women will go to improve their own looks and perception by themselves and others. While it is apparently about Beauty Pageants in particular, it could also be taken to be about the general male-dominated gaze and expectations around female beauty, which result in surgery and changes to make them more “suitable”. Of course, as this song notes, “You can’t wipe out all our progress” – i.e. these changes don’t exactly help the feminist cause. But then again, personal choice is key: if you want to make changes to your body, go for it. But the key message here, do it for yourself, not to please someone or anyone else.

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/Last July
/Scars (Lost Floor mix by Pretentious, Moi?)
/Perceptions

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A first appearance here for UK goth act Last July, too, with a thumping electro-goth remix of one of their tracks (here’s the more restrained original version). As Alixandrea from the band explained on the suggestion thread, this song is from the perspective of someone dealing with their self-harming scars. There are some alarming statistics about self-harm: according to Young Minds, no less than 24% of 17-year-olds in 2018-19 reported having self-harmed in the past year, and around the same time, over half of 17-19 year-olds had self-harmed that had a diagnosable mental health disorder.

Despite various mental health wobbles over time, I never did self-harm. Friends and partners of mine in the past have, though, and they are not scars to point out, or touch, or talk about without their permission or wish to do so. Needless to say, they are reminders of difficult or triggering times.

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/Throbbing Gristle
/Hamburger Lady
/D.o.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle

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Not all body modification is by choice, of course, and one of Throbbing Gristle’s nastiest, most notorious songs is about one such case. Genesis P-Orridge quoted a letter from Blaster Al Ackerman, retelling a tale from Ackerman’s work on a burns unit. It is of an unnamed woman, suffering from horrific burns that will alter her life entirely if she survives, altering other people’s perceptions and altering their self-image for ever. Throbbing Gristle, as was their wont, used this for shock value, and on that front, they succeed absolutely, with the woozy, unsettling electronics only making the real-life tale all the more shocking and horrific.