Following on from Insects last week, I turn my attention to another part of animal kingdom this time around, and use up another older suggestion thread (from five years ago) in the process.

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As is always the way, I might not use suggestion threads immediately, but every single suggestion is recorded. There have now been 224 suggestion threads, with over 28,000 unique suggestions, and 184 of them have been posted as a /Tuesday Ten. So there’s still more to go, and I’ve long since committed to using them all at some point or another. Some are just waiting for an appropriate date or time to post them, others will be slotted in as I go along. Either way, thanks to everyone – and there are an awful lot of you that offer suggestions – who takes the time to get involved.

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Before we moved to the Kent coast, I’d never really lived by the sea before (living in a suburb of a conurbation that partially looked onto an inlet of the Thames estuary didn’t really count), and living in the mostly fresher air, and being able to swim in the sea relatively regularly, has been life-changing. It also gives us a very different vista. Within minutes of leaving my house I can either be in the countryside, or on the beach, and the big skies give us spectacular sunrises, too.

But, I’ve already written about being beside the sea in this series – /Tuesday Ten /203 did that, back in 2014. So this time around, I’m looking at songs that reference some of the creatures that live under the sea. Both the large and the small, the well-known and the lesser-known, hopefully, but some interesting creatures all the same – and even some new musical discoveries, too.

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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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/Morphine
/Sharks
/Yes

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I barely need an excuse to feature the after-dark, jazz-rock grooves of Morphine and the mighty baritone of the late Mark Sandman, and the stop-start, partly spoken-word power of Sharks was the perfect suggestion this week.

Especially as last month saw the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Jaws, the original Hollywood blockbuster and a film that probably didn’t do a great deal of good to the image of sharks. Jaws of course features a Great White Shark as the mostly unseen monster of the film, and these giant fish – recorded up to nearly six metres in length, and very much at the top of the food chain in the cooler seas that they inhabit – are responsible for more recorded, unprovoked attacks on humans than any other shark.

But not all sharks are predators: The Greenland shark, that lives at the bottom of remote northern oceans, is known to have a lifespan of between 250 and 500 years, and the toxicity of its meat to humans meant that Icelanders buried it in gravel under rocks for months to produce Hákarl, genuinely the foulest thing I have ever put in my mouth.

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/Gojira
/Flying Whales
/From Mars to Sirius

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French progressive-metal band Gojira became worldwide superstars overnight thanks to their extraordinary performance in the Olympics opening ceremony last year, performing Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça Ira) with opera singer Marina Viotti, but for those who listen to metal, Gojira have been a big deal for some time. Their dense, technical metal came to prominence on their brilliant third album, From Mars to Sirius, which brought their interest in environmental issues to the fore: particularly on the epic album centrepiece Flying Whales.

The song celebrates the whale, a family of waterborne mammals that include the largest animals on earth to have existed (the Blue Whale): and thanks to being hunted by humans for centuries, many species nearly vanished, but a moratorium on hunting these majestic mammals has resulted in some species rebounding. Many species besides the Blue Whale are of great size, have had great influence on literature and culture, and are totemic animals in many ways. I’ve only ever had the fortune to see a Minke Whale in the wild (off the coast of Iceland), and one day I’ll make it somewhere I can see more.

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/Beth Orton & Terry Callier
/Dolphins
/Best Bit

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A cover of a song by American folk-singer Fred Neil – an artist who retreated from public view and performance to fully commit to Dolphin conservation. Dolphins, originally from 1966, is perhaps an early sign of that interest, and this later version of (thirty years or so later), by Beth Orton and Terry Callier, is a lovely, gentle song that muses on the intelligence of dolphins and what they might do.

Their intelligence is well documented, with a variety of hunting strategies developed independently by different pods of dolphins, they co-operate, scheme and even grieve: the largest of the dolphins, the Orca (or Killer Whale) being a particularly efficient, intelligent and vicious predator, recently noted for a spate of yacht attacks that were apparently targeted. Douglas Adams, too, had things to say dolphin intelligence in the Hitchhiker’s Guide…

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/Shriekback
/Coelocanth
/Oil and Gold

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Used in Michael Mann’s exceptional film Manhunter – the film that first introduced a certain Hannibal Lecter – in the tiger scene, this song closes the second-side of the album that Nemesis, probably the band’s best-known song, opens. The song couldn’t be more different to the spiky, new wave wordiness of Nemesis, either: ominous pan-pipes provide a dramatic, unsettling instrumental.

The Coelacanth is a remarkable fish: “discovered” in 1839, or more to the point first scientifically documented and named in 1839, they were thought to have been extinct tens of millions of years ago, and indeed they have recorded as fossils from over 400 million years ago: perhaps a sign that they evolved a body type and way of surviving that worked, and broadly stayed that way…

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/Legend of the Seagullmen
/Rise of the Giant Squid
/Legend of the Seagullmen

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A release that was perhaps tongue-in-cheek as a side-project, featuring (among others) Danny Carey of Tool and Brett Hinds of Mastodon, was apparently themed around the idea of a “nautical spaghetti western” and mentions a good number of sea creatures. One it builds a song around is an encounter with Architeuthis dux, the Giant Squid. An animal that has long been known about, and despite the great size (females have a body around 5m long, with the feeding tenacles twice that), it took until 2004 before scientists managed to film a live Giant Squid in the ocean. They have giant eyes – around 27cm in diameter – around the size of a human head, and all of these elements have helped build an image of a terrifying sea monster, which likely inspired the legend of the Kraken from the seafarers who first saw the squid (and have previous with tall tales of the sea, of course)…

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/Mastodon
/Seabeast
/Leviathan

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The only known predator of the Giant Squid is the largest toothed predator, the Sperm Whale. This giant whale is around 16m long (not far off the size of an articulated bus), has the largest brain of any animal on earth, and can make sounds louder than any other animal (recorded as loud as 236 decibels – a concert would usually be around 115dB), not to mention being able to dive over 2km below sea level.

Such a whale is the enemy of Ahab in Moby-Dick, of course, and most of their masterpiece Leviathan was inspired by the book and it’s themes. Naturally, I’ve long since used the obvious candidate Blood and Thunder, so here’s another single from the album, Seabeast.

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/The Decemberists
/Mariner’s Revenge Song
/Picaresque

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A great whale provides the location for the fascinating modern sea shanty that is Mariner’s Revenge Song. We begin with two men having apparently been swallowed by a whale (echoes of Jonah in the Christian and Hebrew Bibles, and James Bartley, an American mariner reputedly swallowed by a whale), and one man recounts his miserable life that saw his father abandon his family, and subsequent events leave them penniless and homeless. Years later, he resolves to find his errant father and get revenge, leaving for sea and meeting a sea captain who looks suspiciously similar to his father. We end the story back in the belly of the whale, as our narrator finally sees revenge delivered as his father dies alongside him…

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/The B-52s
/Rock Lobster
/The B-52s

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One of a number of notable bands from Athens, Georgia (R.E.M. and Neutral Milk Hotel being two more), The B-52s from the off were a weirder, stranger band than their peers, fuelling their dance rock and early new wave styles with a kitschy, retro-50s and 60s influence and a distinctly fucking surreal approach to songcraft.

Rock Lobster was their debut single, amazingly, and it gets weird pretty quickly. Fred Schneider is apparently at a beach party while tripping his nuts off, as he lists the various sea creatures that have joined the fun on the beach – with Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson providing sound effects that only add to the sense that the band are on a different planet to the rest of us.

Lobsters are often large decapod crustaceans, with large front claws, and recent research has suggested that age may not slow down lobsters at all, thanks to their unusual makeup.

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/Faith No More
/The Crab Song
/Introduce Yourself

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There isn’t a lot in this song about crabs, as it happens – Chuck Mosley wants revenge on his ex-partner’s boyfriend in particularly nasty ways – but it does give me an opportunity to talk about crabs.

Crabs are another form of decapod crustacean, with over 7,000 known species appearing in all the world’s oceans, many freshwater locations and on land, with the front pair of legs usually as a pair of claws (which in some cases can be very large – male Fiddler crabs have one claw noticeably larger than the other, for example). They have long been an important source of food for human settlements – particularly coastal ones – and so have been well-studied and known to science for a long time. Crabs vary enormously in size, too: the Japanese spider crab has a leg-span of nearly four metres, while the Coconut crab is the largest terrestrial crab, at nearly one metre across and weighing up to 4kg, and the smallest? The Pea crab, which as the name suggests is no bigger than a pea.

Hopefully many of my friends will already be aware of it, but if you happen to be in Margate, Kent – go to the Crab Museum – read more about their unusual approach in this interview from last year.

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/Mr Scruff
/Shrimp!
/Trouser Jazz

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Finally, under the sea with Mr Scruff, as we go on an unexpectedly upbeat, retro-electro-funk journey to explore shrimp (or, as the single release has it, Shrimp!). Shrimp are mostly small crustaceans that can swim and have an elongated body – and as is often the way with animal descriptions, can refer to either a very large group of animals or be more specific (and both will technically be correct). Thousands and thousands of species inhabit both the sea and freshwater, and the tails of many species are human food (and an enormously important industry, too, worth billions of dollars).

Some of the most fascinating shrimp are predatory monsters of the sea (at least to smaller denizens). Such as the pistol shrimp, which has one claw nearly as big as it’s own body, and snaps so fast when attacking prey that it creates a cavitation bubble to stun the prey, which it can then catch and eat. Then there is the mantis shrimp, which some species can grow up to 30-40cm long, that have also evolved the capability of attacking similarly fast, but they either have a spear-like claw or a club-like claw (spearers or smashers). The eyes of the mantis shrimp are even more amazing: compound eyes that are reckoned to be the most complex in the animal kingdom, and can see an extraordinary spectrum of light (far, far more than humans can see).

Equally amazingly, we can thank one scientist – Raymond B. Manning – for much of the knowledge of mantis shrimp, his tireless work and collection over the second half of the 20th Century identifying most of the known species…

Mr Scruff – long signed, according to his album covers, to, er, Ninja Tuna – has long has an affinity with the sea in his jazzy, electronic pieces, and indeed no less than five of his songs were suggested for this week…