As is often the way, small plans become bigger things, and this mini-series of posts about non-lexical vocables and exclamations in music turned out to be a fun trip into a bunch of songs I either didn’t know, or had not heard in some time. The original suggestion threads provided nearly 600 songs to choose from, and a good number managed to feature in multiple threads of this mini-series. Pretty much all of them are earworms, too.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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Anyway – thanks to everyone who continues to get involved, and inspire new ideas and new posts for this series. Every single submission is checked and considered, so keep ’em coming.

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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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/Simon & Garfunkel
/Mrs Robinson
/Bookends

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My route to this song was not from the original – I came to this song thanks to The Lemonheads, and their dramatic cover that was a surprise hit in 1992. Apparently the cover was hated by Evan Dando – and indeed Paul Simon – and was only done as a commission to help promote a 25th anniversary release of The Graduate

The original was only part-written by the time it was used in The Graduate, so the iconic “do do do do…” fill-in was used to make up for the fact that there were no lyrics (yet!) for a good proportion of the song, and naturally there’s a whole lot less of it in the final version of the song that ended up on Bookends…

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/The Beatles
/Here Comes The Sun
/Abbey Road

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Probably the best George Harrison-penned song for the Beatles – and remarkably, with over 1.6 billion streams on Spotify, the most streamed Beatles song on there by a factor of two – is a bright, happy song from a period where The Beatles were disintegrating under the weight of their success. Reputedly written by Harrison while he had bunked away from yet another Apple Corps business meeting, it’s a song that often comes into my head as we escape the clutches of winter, and things get that bit warmer and more positive. Like a good number of the songs this week, best of luck getting it out of your head…

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/Mahna Mahna and The Two Snowths
/Mah Na Mah Na

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Talking of earworms… let’s turns to The Muppets, who adapted a swinging song from a Swedish soft-core film into one of the most iconic nonsense songs of all. Originally introduced on the Ed Sullivan Show, it features orange Muppet Mahna Mahna who scats and mumbles the eponymous title, before his pink backing singers The Snowths sing the “do do do-do do-do…” bit that everyone knows so well. So popular that pretty much every rebirth of the Muppets has it return again and again, the joyous version from Muppets Tonight with Sandra Bullock – from one of the greatest, most ridiculous episodes of the Muppets ever, where they have fun riffing on the-then huge hit film Speed.

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/Third Eye Blind
/Semi-Charmed Life
/Third Eye Blind

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Third Eye Blind are a US alt-rock band that kinda passed me by aside from this one song, but their backstory is fascinating – frontperson Stephen Jenkins was originally in a multiracial hip-hop duo, before forming this band with the late Jason Slater (who left fairly quickly and popped up later as part of industrial rock band Snake River Conspiracy). Success took some time to come – the band were formed in 1993, and after a lot of work, a good number of bandmembers, and countless other setbacks, their debut was finally released in 1997, and thanks to Semi-Charmed Life (a song that had originally been written some years before), began to sell steadily.

Listening back, it sounds very much of it’s time: although not too many songs are dealing with the after-effects of crystal meth addiction and sexual contact with your partner. But it’s also about redemption, as the protagonist pulls themselve out of a whole, and the joyous, catchy chorus (do-do-do do-do-do…) always brings a smile when I hear it.

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/DNA feat. Suzanne Vega
/Tom’s Diner

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I was introduced to Suzanne Vega’s modern take on folk music in the eighties as a child – my dad was a fan from the start, so I know each of the first five albums at least by heart, and seeing her live at the Union Chapel some years ago was absolutely magical. Tom’s Diner is a particularly remarkable song, opening her second album Solitude Standing and in it’s original form, is nothing but Vega’s voice as she tells the tale of a few minutes in the eponymous diner while having coffee, and observing the people around her (the song was written in 1981, and work around the details mentioned – mainly the death of the actor, which turned out to be William Holden, apparently nailed down 16-Nov 1981 as the date it is set).

The song is set in Tom’s Restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at 112th and Broadway, a location made even more famous later on Seinfeld as the outdoor location of Monk’s Café in the show. My love of the song meant that we visited to have a drink while we were in NYC in summer 2024, exploring the Upper West Side on our last morning before heading home.

The original only has the “do-do-do-do” as the closing refrain, but the song was transformed into an initially unauthorised remix in 1990 that turned out to be a massive hit in the UK, looping that element across the entire song and putting a Soul II Soul-sampled beat pattern underneath. Unusually, rather than suing, Vega and her label did a deal to be fully credited and it arguably gained her a bigger audience than she might have otherwise expected…

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/The Police
/De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da
/Zenyatta Mondatta

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The Police were a band I’ve long been aware of – and of course I know all the singles that have seeped into popular culture – but I perhaps have never dug particularly deep into the songs themselves. Perhaps I should have done – this single in particular is a fascinating one. Musically it is very much the signature style of the band – a reggae-inflected post-punk sound that resulted in a unique style that no-one else ever managed to replicate. But the lyrics are the more important bit here: how people use simple words and phrasing to catch the attention without people paying any closer attention to the meaning. Sting was quoted as saying “I was trying to say something which was really quite difficult – that people like politicians, like myself even, use words to manipulate people, and that you should be very careful.“. Wise words as we listen now, in a time of tyrants and leaders that will blandly tell you black is white – and some people will blindly believe them.

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/The Cure
/Let’s Go To Bed
/Standing On A Beach

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Hearing this song in 1982 – in the aftermath of the unremitting bleakness of Pornography – must have been quite a shock. A portent, perhaps, of what was to come – more upbeat songs that kept the beating heart of the band’s sound, but with a breezier feel that made them perhaps accessible to a great many more potential listeners. In fact, it’s less goth rock and more new wave, with the synth hook giving at least a base for the “do do do do” melody that threads through the entire song. It is, too, a great single, and one that helps remind that Robert Smith was long keen on confounding his listeners by doing something new, and perhaps challenging: and helps explain the extraordinary longevity of this band.

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/Frank Sinatra
/Strangers In The Night
/Strangers In The Night

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Despite his ubiquity, this album from his late-1960s renaissance is the only one of his to pass the million sales mark. Adapted from an instrumental score that was used in the film A Man Could Get Killed, it apparently took a number of re-writes to reach the effortless perfection of a song celebrating love at first sight that’s so smooth and elegant in delivery. Even the seemingly improvised “doodie-doobie-doo-doo” that Ol’ Blue Eyes sings over the outro is just lovely, a singer in as much love with his work as the lovers depicted in the song.

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/Kiss
/I Was Made For Lovin’ You
/Dynasty

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The reputation of Kiss was of a hard-rocking band that wore cool makeup (and inspired legions of followers, but also legions of bands that aped their style over the years), but 1979 single I Was Made For Lovin’ You sees the band apparently deciding to cash in on the Disco-era to write a song in the style. Stories have circulated that the base of the song was written in literally minutes after an informal bet as to whether they could do so, and it’s certainly not a complicated song, but it is certainly calculated for maximum effect (even those “do do do do” elements that open the song). I must confess that I was never particularly a Kiss fan, and this song was never one I liked at all…

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/Dugga Doo
/Dugga Doo

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At least the recent series of Doctor Who has meant I could avoid Baby Shark as something of a novelty entry this week. Aside from the chaotic ending which it didn’t seem to stick, the second series involving Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor was enormous fun, with mostly great stories and an arc that kept casual viewers like me guessing for some time. Episode six in the series was “The Interstellar Song Contest”, a fun spin on Eurovision (and broadcast the same night) that took it across the Universe, and even went to the trouble of creating at least parts of a number of songs. What was clearly the most popular was Dugga Doo, something of a nonsense song sung by a trumpet-nosed, orange and black furry alien (apparently from Grimbald in the year 2925), and it was no less catchy than most of the other songs featured this week…