I’ve had a lot of fun with this mini-series of posts of exclamations and wordless vocals – the suggestions and the types of songs that use them have perhaps resulted in some of the most eclectic /Tuesday Ten posts I’ve ever done.

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They have also resulted in rediscoveries of old favourites, of a few new songs to me, and given me yet more ideas for potential future /Tuesday Tens. Thanks, as ever, to everyone who has suggested the large number of songs for potential use, once again, this week. On with the music!

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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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/Counting Crows
/Mr Jones
/August and Everything After

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The glorious debut single from Counting Crows dates as far back as the end of 1993 (!) – which takes me back to my teens, when I was fifteen and not especially happy. I was never a popular kid at school – I had my group of friends, probably a bit geeky, and sometimes happier with my own company. So hearing this song was like a bolt from the blue, as it was a song about negotiating loneliness and unhappiness and I recognised that immediately. It’s also, on the surface, a joyous-sounding song – just check those “sha-la-la-las” that pepper the song – but as Adam Duritz and his friend Mr Jones (in reality Marty Jones of The Himalayans) consider their own lives as struggling musicians, watching the chances of their hopes and dreams perhaps whittling away in the big city, the song drops away to plaintive vocals as Duritz perhaps realises he doesn’t have many more chances left.

It took me a long time to find my place, probably well after Uni, really, and songs like this helped me to understand that everything doesn’t come quite as easily as you might have initially hoped. Either way, this song remains one close to my heart.

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/Elton John
/Crocodile Rock
/Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player

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Elton John’s tribute to the early days of rock’n’roll is an enduring, joyous song, that as this mighty version from Madison Square Garden confirms, is a song big on audience participation too. The song borrows – or at least nods to – a host of songs that the young Elton John loved and danced to before he became a star himself, a sweet doffing of the cap to what helped mould him into the megastar that he eventually became, and like a number of the other songs here, is made by the lovely post-chorus made up entirely of “la la la”…

It also, of course, features in the marvellous Rocketman biopic that unlike some others released around a similar time, is open about Elton John’s sexuality and indeed reportedly caused some issues with the studio funding it…

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/Swans
/Like A Drug (Sha La La)
/Children of God

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Probably the darkest and most forbidding song this week comes from Swans, and one of the key tracks on their remarkable album Children of God, the point where the band began exploring new textures after the bludgeoning force of their early releases. The rhythm is still punishing, lurching forward like some gigantic monster, but there are actual melodies here, amid the biblical fury and Michael Gira’s examination of the concept of devotion (both religious and otherwise). Like A Drug (Sha La La) appears to coldly compare religious ecstasy to the highs of sex and addiction, and the result is a thrilling track that is one of the highlights on what is one of the very best Swans albums – even if the “Sha La La” backing here sounds fucking demonic.

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/Death In Vegas
/Dirge
/The Contino Sessions

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The second Death In Vegas album was rapturously received at the time – especially as it was a significant shift in sound from the grimy club-bound Big Beat of the first album. It was none less dark, mind – Richard Fearless was never exactly soundtracking the fun of nights out – and by bringing in a host of guest vocalists to apparently voice their terrors, the album was a surprise success, selling six figures and nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. The opening track is an almost shoegazy dirge, the shuffling rhythm powered forward by chiming guitars, down-and-dirty basslines and, most importantly, Dot Allison of One Dove singing the looped “la la la” refrain that are the only words sung in the song.

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/The Orb
/A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld
/The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld

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The first single from The Orb got them immediately into trouble, thanks to the unlicensed sample from Minnie Ripperton’s Loving You, even though it only appears relatively fleetingly amid a nineteen minute. Indeed, the offending sample – including the iconic “lalalala” – was removed after the first week, and replaced with a soundalike. This wasn’t the last time they got into trouble for a sample, as Rickie Lee Jones wasn’t especially happy with the recontextualised vocal samples on Little Fluffy Clouds either, although that’s perhaps understandable, as she sounds stoned out of her mind.

Anyway, A Huge Ever Growing… was one of the first notable ambient releases in the rave era, washes of sound completely devoid of beats that phase in-and-out of the speakers, allowing the listener to tune out and relax, presumably after a heavy night – or weekend – of raving somewhere. But what made The Orb so good at it were the jarring samples and the random voices, that never quite allowed you to relax, as you never quite knew what else was coming – perhaps key to the group’s sly sense of humour.

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/The Wiseguys
/Ooh La La
/The Antidote

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One of the many dance artists in the mid-90s that ended up part of the Big Beat movement – so big, big drums, tons of samples and a lighter tone to much of the songs, with an anthemic element to the best songs that made clubbing of the time an absolute hoot. Ooh La La was one of those songs that crossed over, at least in part thanks to use in a legendary Budweiser advert and true to the time, was created from no less than ten samples – most notably from Lalo Schifrin and Ramsey Lewis – to create the kind irresistible dancefloor monster that most artists can only nail the once. It’s all about the titular sample, though.

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/Rabbit Junk
/Beating Track
/ReFRAME

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A track from probably the greatest industrial-punk album released is perhaps not what you might expect to see in this /Tuesday Ten. But then, J.P. Anderson was never quite like his peers, with a melodic style that tempered the edge of even the heaviest Rabbit Junk songs. Beating Track arrives like a fast-moving avalanche, the thundering drums and sheets of guitars pinning the listener to the wall from the first seconds, and never letting go. But the twin vocals, shared between J.P. and Sum Grrrl add some light to the shade of the song, and the throwaway “la la la-la” that pops up in the verses has no business fitting it, but work it does. Rabbit Junk never got better than REFrame, a smorgasbord of ideas where everything thrown at the wall sticks.

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/Mansun
/Wide Open Space
/Attack of the Grey Lantern

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Interestingly, I nearly used Dark Mavis from the same album to close out /Tuesday Ten /588, but just in the nick of time I realised this was an even better suggestion. On an album full of songs that are a whole lot darker than they first appear – Mansun were not part of the loud and laddish end of Britpop, that’s for sure – Wide Open Space stands out for the huge hooks, good enough for a smash hit dance remix and the bleakness of the song. A song seemingly about the effects of depression and loneliness, the whole song has a distance to it thanks to Paul Draper’s evocative lyrics, and as the song surges into that chorus, the melodic “la la la-la-la” behind him sounds like the world mocking him.

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/Jennifer Warnes
/Joan of Arc
/Famous Blue Raincoat: The Songs of Leonard Cohen

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Jennifer Warnes is perhaps best known as a singer who had considerable success with songs in films – most notably Up Where We Belong with Joe Cocker (from An Officer and A Gentleman), and (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life with Bill Medley (from Dirty Dancing) – but her career goes well back into the 1960s US folk scene, and spent many years collaborating with Leonard Cohen, both as a backing singer and working on vocal arrangements.

That longstanding collaboration saw her release an album of her own in 1987 that was a collection of Cohen songs sung by Warnes – remarkably including two songs that were to be released by Cohen the following year on I’m Your Man. It was my introduction to Cohen’s songs (when I was nine!), and I remain rather fond of the album, and I’m well aware certain other Cohen fans I know (most notably my mother-in-law!) really don’t like it at all.

The centrepiece of the album sees Cohen himself join Warnes for a mighty take on Joan of Arc (against which, the Cohen original feels rather slight). The twin vocals perhaps suit the song better – Warnes taking the verses from the point of view of Joan of Arc, Cohen from the fire that will consume her – and the chorus (and lengthy coda) are nothing more than “la-la-la…”, probably containing more of the phrase in this one song than the rest of this list put together, and sound absolutely gorgeous.

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/Simple Minds
/Don’t You (Forget About Me)
/The Breakfast Club OST

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Another band that benefitted enormously from featuring in a film was Simple Minds – although, they initially took a bit of convincing – and Don’t You (Forget About Me) featuring in The Breakfast Club turned out to be the point where they “broke America” and became a stadium-straddling behemoth. Some change from their art-punk early days…

The song itself has become one of those iconic eighties songs, a slick, ultra-catchy pop-song that has everything – the big “Hey Hey Hey HEY!” that opens it, the mighty chorus, the middle-eight that just soars, and of course the ad-libbed “la la la…” that closes out the last minute or so of the song – the latter being a happy accident that the band all realised was absolute gold-dust. It will, as long as I live, remain one of my abiding memories of pretty much every 80s night at Whitby, as the entire room comes together to bellow out the words, lost in a moment of fucking joy.