Right then: part three of exclamations, and we’re onto “Woo!” this week.

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This week was perhaps even more difficult than the previous two to pull together: a good number of the songs that I might have considered first – particularly Song 2, Bohemian Like You, Cannonball and Rocket Skates, as well as the roof-raising “Woo!” that opens New Noise – had all long since been used in this series, so new thinking was needed.

…and it provided some great songs, and mostly songs that are euphoric and energetic in nature. Thanks, as ever, to the veritable army of contributors that supply so many great ideas to add to the handful of my own. I’ll be resuming exclamations on /Tuesday Ten /591 in a couple of weeks, /590 next week will be the usual /Tracks of the Month.

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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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/And So I Watch You From Afar
/Set Guitars To Kill
/And So I Watch You From Afar

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We’re going to start, unusually, with an instrumental, the first song off Northern Irish post-rock band And So I Watch You From Afar’s (ASIWYFA for short) debut album. Post-rock, too, can have a bit of a (deserved) reputation for being cold, broody music – so the stomping of many, many feet that accompanies the opening moments of feedback and crashing guitar riffs of Set Guitars To Kill may come as a bit of a shock. But then, AWIWYFA were always a bit more expansive in their sound, remembering that to play in a band is actually something to celebrate, and this song sets the tone for what is to come – enthralling songs and a great line in song titles (see also Clench Fists, Grit Teeth… GO! and Don’t Waste Time Doing Things You Hate, among others). And after three minutes of peak after peak, everything stops for a solitary “WOO!” that might be the most celebratory moment in post-rock. It’s a total, utter joy.

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/Busta Rhymes
/Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check
/The Coming

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Busta got his big break – after being a member of Leaders of the New School since he was fourteen – guesting and stealing the whole damned show on the greatest hip-hop posse cut of all (Scenario) when he was just nineteen, and wild single Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check was Busta’s debut solo single five years later. Like many classic hip-hop songs, it borrows from elsewhere – the title refrain adapted from 8th Wonder by the Sugarhill Gang, and the bassline from Galt MacDermot’s Space – but there’s no doubt that the song is all Busta’s. It’s crazy. The beat lurches and seems to stretch time, as Busta speeds up and slows down his rap to exclaim or to try and fit an apparently limitless set of ideas into a finite space – some of which apparently came from a freestyle rap battle with ODB (!). Then there are the gang bellows of “Woo-Hah!!” that punctuate the chorus, adding an element of almost comic humour to an epic boast. But then, Busta had the chops to back up his boasts.

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/Supergrass
/Richard III
/In It For The Money

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Supergrass, as was often the way during the Britpop period, had an extraordinary level of success with their debut album, hitting number one in the album charts and selling far more than most indie bands might have normally expected. What’s more, the second album then sold even more, and this song provided them with their second single to reach Number Two in the charts. Supergrass had form with excellent intros – Lenny from the first album repeats the opening chord less than sixty times before the song starts proper – and Richard III is all about the intro too, the building guitars before the song explodes into life with Gaz Coombes’ absolutely euphoric “Woo!”. I detest the ubiquitous Alright, but as I look back with a bit of hindsight, they still do have some great songs otherwise, and this is one of them.

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/PJ Harvey
/Long Snake Moan
/To Bring You My Love

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PJ Harvey shed her raw, lo-fi rock of the first couple of albums almost entirely for the southern gothic grandeur of To Bring You My Love, where she dug into murder ballads, bluesy darkness and sensual violence. The latter is personified in the swampy, heavy groove of Long Snake Moan, a tale of desire and sexual dominance that makes PJ Harvey sound about ten feet tall (it’s long been one of my favourite PJ Harvey songs, and indeed was covered by long-lost Welsh band Liberty 37 to spectacular effect a few years later). There is only one “Woo!” in the song, as it happens, screamed out with full force in the coda.

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/DMX
/X Gon’ Give It To Ya
/Cradle 2 the Grave OST

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There’s a whole lot of exclamations in this great slice of post-millennial hip-hop – and it’s probably the song that most remember the late DMX (Earl Simmons) for, especially as it gained new life thanks to prominent use in Deadpool. But the aggressive bounce to this track, and DMX’s scenery-chewing rapping, like he’s the big bad guy our hero has to get past to save the day, is tempered by his posse providing the exclamation and emphasis at the end of every line, and the occasional “Woo!” that bursts out of the speakers feels a bit like the wrong guy turned up to deliver them…

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/Whitney Houston
/I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)
/Whitney

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Whitney Houston was perhaps always destined to be a star: her mother was gospel/soul singer Cissy Houston, her cousin Dionne Warwick, and she was only nineteen when she signed her first major label deal. This song was the lead single to her second album, and to put it mildly it was a smash hit: records show that it has sold over 11 million copies, making it one of the biggest selling singles ever, and something of a confirmation of the faith put in Whitney Houston as she moved in a more pop direction than the balladry of her debut. Listening back, it’s oh-so-eighties pop-soul, full of all of the familiar musical elements of the time, but what takes it to another level is Whitney Houston’s extraordinary voice, that is filled with energy and longing – this is, after all, a song about trying to find that partner to spend their life with, and to fill them with joy. Like a few other songs here this week, it’s that “Woo!” that allows lift-off for this extraordinary song.

Sadly Houston’s personal life was turbulent to say the least – ill-fated relationships (not least with multiple domestic violence accusations against Bobby Brown), legal issues, reported eating disorders and drug and alcohol abuse – and she died in a Beverly Hills hotel room aged just 48, perhaps with the extraordinary potential of her musical and vocal talent never fully realised. Even so, she remains to this day one of the biggest selling solo female artists in history.

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/Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock
/It Takes Two
/It Takes Two

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A cut that has a legitimate case for being one of the most important – and greatest – hip-hop singles of all, it was one of the many tracks to sample the Amen Break (thanks to use in jungle and drum’n’bass too, the original drum cut has been sampled thousands of times), but more notable here is the “Yeah! Woo!” sample, otherwise known as the Think Break, that appears at regular intervals, which comes from Think (About It) by Lyn Collins (and written by James Brown, with his band The J.B.s featuring here too – and the drum break in that track has been much sampled too!). Either way, this track is an absolute banger, nearly forty years on since release.

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/Warren Zevon
/Werewolves of London
/Excitable Boy

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It could be argued as to whether this is a “woo” or “awoo”, but it is such a weird, fun song that I’m willing to give it a pass and say it counts – particularly as it is the only song this week that is making the sound of a creature to get that “woo”. From Zevon’s best-known 1978 album, this song tells the tale of Zevon seeing werewolves in various situations in London, not least in Chinese restaurants and cocktail bars. Apparently inspired originally by the 1935 film of a similar title, it has a marvellously shlocky video that mostly features Zevon and his band, but occasionally cuts to a well-dressed werewolf, out on the town.

Incidentally, Zevon was recently announced as inductee into the Rock’n’roll Hall of Fame for 2025.

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/Dire Straits
/Walk of Life
/Brothers In Arms

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Mark Knopfler has comfortably receded into a quiet solo career these days, but back in the mid-80s, Dire Straits were one of the biggest-selling bands around, an enormous concert draw, and unlikely trailblazers – Brothers In Arms was an early release on CD, as part of Knopfler’s drive for better sound quality that also included early use of digital recording techniques, and the first to sell one million copies in that format (it eventually sold over thirty million).

Amid the modernity, Walk of Life is something of a throwback to the rock’n’roll that influenced Knopfler in the first place, a joyous four-minute romp through the life of a busker playing old hits to make a few coins, and when “Woo” is used, they sound genuinely enthusiastic, a singer comfortable in his own sound and loving what he’s doing.

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/The Rolling Stones
/Sympathy for The Devil
/Beggars Banquet

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One of the best-known songs in the rock canon, perhaps – and probably one of the most famous about the Devil, too. It was written by Mick Jagger, mostly, as a song from the point of view of the Devil, and details his apparent responsibility for a variety of events and/or atrocities across the ages, but the twist comes later, as the Devil reminds the listener that they – as part of humanity – are complicit in every event mentioned. The Devil, of course, is just a convenient scapegoat.

It takes a while for the iconic “whoo-hoo” to appear, but then it appears at the end of every line across the second half of the lengthy song, at least on the album version (the live video version, it’s a bit different but they are still there).