I now turn to the second of what will be six posts about exclamations or fill-ins in songs. After “Hey!” last week, this week we’re going “Na Na Na”.

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It’s been a whole lot of fun considering the songs and writing about them – as my wife pointed out, these are perhaps lists that lean toward the mainstream a bit more than usual, with more pop songs and a whole lot more earworms.

Thanks to everyone who suggested songs for this, and for every thread I put up – we recently passed 27,000 suggestions (and, indeed, over 1,000 unique contributors and nearly 18,000 unique 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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/P!nk
/So What
/Funhouse

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A problem with being a pop megastar – and P!nk, having sold tens of millions of records since the Millenium, is definitely one of those – is having every aspect of one’s life being pored over by the press and across social media. P!nk has been no stranger to this, and their huge hit So What, from 2008, deals with their separation from husband Carey Hart around that time, both in the lyrics and and in the video (Hart features prominently, and various headlines from the gossip press pop up too). Happily, they did get back together, and remain married to this day. This song, too, is like many this week, an almighty earworm, at least partly thanks to the litany of “na-na-na-na” hooks that pepper the song!

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/Gala
/Freed From Desire
/Come into My Life

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“My love has got no money, he’s got his strong beliefs” not “…he’s got his trombolese”. Yep, one of the most notorious misheard lyrics of all, it was also a giant hit across Europe in 1996 and 1997, reaching the upper reaches of the chart across all of the western end of the continent. It’s not hard to see why when you listen back: a bog-standard Eurodance beat provides a platform for Gala to sing her heart out with a continent-straddling chorus and a bridge and coda that are entirely “na na na na na na”…

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/Ini Kamoze
/Here Comes The Hotstepper
/Stir It Up

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Remember Robert Altman’s flop Prêt-à-Porter? No, me neither, but you will remember this song. Ini Kamoze has actually been a recording artist since 1981, but intermittent releases meant his career never went particularly far, until this song exploded into popular consciousness in 1994. Apparently it picks apart a few old R&B and Disco tracks for much of the origins – the “na na na na” hook that everyone remembers was actually taken from Wilson Pickett’s Land of 1000 Dances – but what resulted was absolutely Kamoze’s ticket to the big time. Pretty much a one-hit wonder, mind, as none of his other singles charted, but when you have one giant hit, that could be enough…

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/Deep Purple
/Hush
/Shades of Deep Purple

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Originally written by Joe South for Billy Joe Royal, and later covered by Britpop also-rans Kula Shaker, and indeed all three versions were suggested this week – but I’ve gone for the Deep Purple version, recorded for their debut album in 1968 that was one of the original heavy rock releases, and thus a release that inspired an awful lot of music to come. A song of love and infatuation, it has a swinging groove that feels surprisingly restrained in retrospect, but really it’s all about the use of that organ in the mix, and, of course, the “na na na na na na” element that opens the song, and fills in the gaps throughout. Also, this is amazingly the first time I’ve featured these rock veterans across the entire series.

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/The Alarm
/X
/Forwards

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A band dear to a number of my friend’s hearts is Welsh rock band The Alarm. The final track on their last album from 2023 appears to be a reflection on the chaos of the lockdown periods during the COVID-outbreak – particularly as someone who was no doubt at high risk from infection. Unlike many of the songs here this week, the use of “na na na” is a bit more subtle, and is very much just an element in the song, rather than being the main, prominent hook.

Mike Peters died in April, having first been diagnosed with lymphoma in 1995, surviving that and then later suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, which later returned and he succumbed to. In the meantime, he received an MBE for his services to cancer care, with vast amounts of his time taken up fundraising for cancer care and charities.

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/Bananarama
/Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)
/Deep Sea Skiving

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Also a cover this week, this was written originally for a fictitious band Steam back in the late 1960s, and a need for a chorus when they were writing the song saw Paul Leka fill in the gaps with “na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na” (the thinking apparently being “na, na…” fills in the gaps when you’ve not written anything else – and not for the first or last time, they worked so well that it stuck and was retained for the final song.

British girl group Bananarama – who incidentally reached the Guinness World Records for their 32 charting Top 50 UK singles by an all-girl group between 1982 and 2009 – covered the song in 1983, and when you listen to the original, you realise that aside from their trademark harmonies, Bananarama didn’t actually change much of a winning formula…

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/My Chemical Romance
/Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)
/Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys

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After a set of songs were ditched from recording sessions for their next album, the band came up with an idea for a comic book based around Killjoys, a group of people in a post-apocalyptic world, and apparently this song is based in that universe. It’s less dry and dark than that inspiration may suggest: instead, a hyper-energetic, chaotic pop-punk song results, with choruses and hooks apparently stacking on top of each other, and almost all the lyrics backed with the band repeating the title or variants thereof. Thus, it probably has more “na na na” phrases in it than all the other songs featured this week, and even though I only listened to it a few times, it is now firmly stuck in my head whether I want it there or not.

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/Björk
/Isobel
/Post

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Björk was never exactly short of striking singles, but perhaps Isobel is one of the most striking. Inspired by a butterfly she saw landing on her, and a subsequent hundreds of pages of diary entries she wrote fleshing out a story of a woman from the wilderness who is baffled by life in the city – the final lyrics were written by collaborator and Icelandic poet Sjón. The strange, tribal rhythms give way to a spectacular metamorphosis into shimmering, orchestral beauty, before Björk drops into the chorus melody again, but this time simply made up of “na na na”. The video – one of the few she did with Michel Gondry – is another work of wonder.

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/Opus
/Live Is Life
/Live Is Life

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Interestingly, both the band that wrote the original song, and the band who did probably the best-known cover of it, have had decades-long careers. Austrian pop-rock band Opus only disbanded in 2021, just two years short of fifty years active, while Laibach were formed in 1980 and continue to this day – the reason I’ve gone for the Opus version here is because Laibach stripped out the instantly recognisable “Na na na na-na” hook for synths! Apparently conceived as a live song, to celebrate the bond between band and their fans (and so explicitly encouraging audience participation!), that hook made up of five “na” phrases appears no less than twenty-four times according to the printed lyrics, and so people only faintly familiar with the song could be forgiven for thinking that this is all the song is made up of…

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/Nine Inch Nails
/The Day The World Went Away
/The Fragile

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Aside from a few notable soundtrack appearances and a jagged, brutal remix album, it was five long years between The Downward Spiral and The Fragile. Times had clearly been tough for Trent Reznor in the meantime, and I’ve long held the view that The Fragile, with a bit of editing, would have made an extraordinary single CD album, rather than the sprawling, overblown double album that takes in twenty-three tracks and lasts 103 minutes. Unlike The Downward Spiral, too, which debuted with the rampaging single March of the Pigs, there was an unusual choice as the lead single.

The Day The World Went Away has no drums at all, and in many ways is a dark ambient piece, made up of droning synths, processed guitars and voices – and that’s it. As a result, it is probably the best-performing dark ambient track ever, reaching the Billboard Top 20 and remains, amazingly, one of the biggest hits Nine Inch Nails ever released. I very much remember the slight bafflement the first time I heard it. There’s twenty-one year old me, in a pretty grim place physically and mentally as my Uni hopes and dreams were finally imploding once and for all, not quite hearing what I might have expected from NIN at the time, but ending up listening to this album an unhealthy amount during the autumn of 1999.

So where are the “Na Na Na…” parts? They emerge from the murk of the drones and guitar riffs with about 75 seconds left in the track, gradually taking precedence in the mix, to finish what is an irredeemably dark track on a surprisingly hopeful note… before it throws us back into the dark with The Frail and The Wretched…