/Tuesday Ten /600 arrives 6,714 days (or 18 years, 4 months and 17 days) since I posted /Tuesday Ten /001. In that time, I’ve lived in Sheffield, North London and now South East Kent, and I’ve attended 688 days of gigs and/or festivals and seen 1,961 live sets.
/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.
/Subject /Hundreds, Dates, Years
/Playlists 
/Spotify / 
/YouTube
/Related /Tuesday Ten/Hundreds /Tuesday Ten/Index
/Assistance /Suggestions/334 /Used Prior/68 /Unique Songs/228 /People Suggesting/144
/Details /Tracks this week/12 /Tracks on Spotify Playlist/12 /Duration/53:15
Those 600 /Tuesday Tens have contained 6,534 entries (as various posts have had more then ten entries, for various reasons), 2,411 unique artists and 192 /Tracks of the Month. The seemingly ever-popular suggestion threads started back in 2015, but really kicked into gear a couple of years later, and frankly I’ve had more suggestions for future posts than I know what to do with. There have been 227 suggestion threads, and 188 of them have been used for /Tuesday Tens so far (I fully intend to use as many of them remaining as possible in time). They’ve included 28,730 unique suggestions, with songs from no less than 6,339 unique artists, and 18,649 unique tracks – all from 1,042 unique contributors.
Thanks to everyone that reads, suggests songs, comments, and even the number of you that have suggested future subjects or contributed to them in some way. This series will not continue for ever, but I’ve still got plans for a little while yet.
Anyway, what about this week? I’m returning to the third-largest suggestion thread, that was posted in March 2019: and thanks to the giant size of the thread (334 suggested), it took a while to work out what to do with it. As the next milestone began to loom at /Tuesday Ten /600 – and I started planning future posts a bit more – I realised that looking at the Dates and Years suggestion thread might be fruitful, and so it proved. So: this week, it’s twelve songs, one for each month, a specific date mentioned or referred to in each song, and something else that happened that day in history.
It turned out that dates in song seem to cluster in certain months, meaning slim pickings in some of the months.
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).
/Front 242
/Circling Overland
/Front by Front
A rare re-use of a song, but I’m claiming good reason for an exception as it was only featured on /Tuesday Ten /242, which was a reader takeover celebrating the band. And, that it’s one of my favourite 242 songs of all, and was perhaps surprisingly entirely absent from recent tours – indeed the ever-useful setlist.fm tells me it was only ever played sporadically over the past fifteen years or so.
This stomping, militaristic track was in 1988 a nightmarish vision of the future, where war is conducted by unmanned drones dropping their payload remotely without apparent risk to the attacking force, and references a date of “1-1-2029” (i.e. New Year’s Day 2029) where this could happen. The reality was that Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles were already in their early stages by 1988, and the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s was the first to see widespread use.
01-January is of course New Year’s Day in the Gregorian Calendar, and so the first day of the new year for much of the world (but by no means everywhere). Of the various things that have happened on that day, one is particularly relevant to my chosen career: Michael Harrison made the first commercial mobile phone call in the UK on 00:01 on 01-January 1985, calling his father Sir Ernest Harrison, the Chairman of Vodafone. That said, the UK was far from the forefront – other countries had introduced networks earlier.
/David Bowie
/Valentine’s Day
/The Next Day
One of the singles from the Bowie’s last active period before his death in 2016 was one of his darkest. A song that comments obliquely on the endemic gun violence among American youth – taking it from the view of unrequited love or obsession that swiftly turns sour with violent results – it is perhaps no accident that he chose this day, seeing as the Northern Illinois University Shooting happened on 14-Feb 2008, killing six and injuring 21 more. Sadly exactly ten years later, another happened in Florida at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, that killed seventeen and injured eighteen more.
14-February is of course Valentine’s Day in much of the world. Back on 14-February 1990, the spacecraft Voyager 1 took what became known as the Pale Blue Dot photograph, showing the insignificance of Earth when seen from 6 billion kilometers / 3.7 billion miles away. Remarkably, thirty-five years on, Voyager 1 is still going, having long left the solar system (it left the heliopause in 2012!) and now more than four times further away from Earth than it was in 1990.
/Lankum
/The New York Trader
/False Lankum
Away from the night terrors of much of this album – the seismic power of Go Dig My Grave being one of the great live experiences of our time, I can tell you – there are other trips into traditional folk tales that take other routes. One of those is The New York Trader, which adapts and builds upon an old folk song, telling the tale of a cursed voyage across the Atlantic. The Captain apparently deliberately brings few enough provisions to starve his crew mid-voyage, before he confesses in guilt at his murderous past, and the crew avenge those victims and themselves by throwing the captain overboard and completing their voyage. It’s a rollicking good listen.
The voyage begins on 04-March, and on that day in 1837, the city of Chicago was incorporated, a move that swiftly resulted in the world’s fastest-growing city for a few decades. It became the city where skyscrapers were first built, it remains the central hub of the US railway network (for both passengers and freight), and a fascinating, thriving city to visit (I’ve made it over there five times, and have loved every minute there).
/Talk Talk
/April 5th
/The Colour of Spring
The late Mark Hollis never seemed to want to be a pop star. His introspective, dark pop songs gave him great success in the early 1980s, but by the time of the release of The Colour of Spring in 1986, many of the songs were stripped back, spidery creations that explored texture and emotion, with great expanses of space in the mix. The only exception was the band’s last big hit, the eternal Life’s What You Make It, which in retrospect felt like a warning to take your chances while you can, before the reality of life comes crashing down.
April 5th follows that dramatic song on the album, and it couldn’t be more different. A piano, Hollis’s voice, and sketches of percussion and gentle notes from an organ, as Hollis celebrates the end of a long winter, as the world around him blooms into a bright-lit spring. Hollis disbanded Talk Talk in 1991, after pretty much laying the ground for post-rock on the band’s last couple of albums, and mostly retreated into a private, family life – releasing music became an occasional, almost hobbyist thing – dying aged 64 in February 2019.
Fifty one years ago, on 05-April 1974, Stephen King’s first book Carrie was released, beginning a career that has continued to this day, with over sixty novels, countless short stories and a good number of film adaptations, too.
/Revolting Cocks
/38
/Big Sexy Land
A perhaps unexpected subject for the opening track of ReVco’s most celebrated album, but then, two of the members of the band at the time (Luc Van Acker and Richard 23) were both Belgian, and the event would still have been fresh in the memory. Interestingly, the 38 in the title refers to the number who died, but nowadays it is recorded that 39 died.
The Heysel Stadium Disaster happened at the 1985 European Cup Final, at the Heysel Stadium in the north-west of Brussels. Liverpool fans rushed the opposing Juventus fans, and amid the chaos, a wall collapsed that killed 39 and injured hundreds more. It resulted in English teams being banned from Europe for the next five years, and pretty much completed the image of English football fans for everyone else for evermore.
The thing is, it was just another example of a crumbling football stadium. An antiquated stand at Bradford City’s Valley Parade ground had gone up in flames just weeks before, killing 56, and four years later, in April 1989, the Hillsborough Disaster killed 97 in a fatal crowd crush, exacerbated by poor Police crowd control and official attitudes to the average football fan. It took a great many deaths to force change, and within a few years the Taylor Report forced all-seater stadiums and a wave of change, that greatly improved safety and comfort within stadiums. Even if, to some, these changes affected atmospheres at the grounds for the worse – but what price a football fan’s life?
Elsewhere, on 29-May 1913, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris, and the radically different sound to his work, not to mention the avant-garde nature of the staging of the ballet, caused an instant sensation, and is often seen as the point where modernism in music begins it’s inexorable march forward.
/Morphine
/French Fries w/ Pepper
/Like Swimming
This song from the jazzy rock trio Morphine pays tribute to the past, at least in point: Mark Sandman was never one for giving away too much detail, instead making the listener work for what his songs meant – indeed he was intensely guarded about his personal life and while he was alive, barely even referenced how old he was. French Fries w/ Pepper names four different dates in the song (06-Jun-66, 07-Jul-77, 08-Aug-88 and 09-Sep-99), one of which projects into his future and was a date he didn’t reach, dying onstage on 03-Jul 1999 in Italy from a heart attack.
This wasn’t the only song by the band that references specific dates, either: the seething Radar on Yes has the line “If I am guilty, so are you. It was March 4, 1982.“…
Also on 06-June, in 1975 a Referendum was held in Britain to confirm whether the country would remain part of the European Economic Community. 67% voted in favour of remaining, a stark contrast to the Brexit vote of 2016.
/Dubstar
/St. Swithin’s Day
/Disgraceful
St. Swithin’s Day is marked on 15-Jul each year in British folklore, if it rains on this day, it’s believed it will rain for 40 days, and if not, fair weather will follow for the period. Interestingly, this year, it did rain on that day (at least down here), and the weather has been changeable to say the least since.
Billy Bragg‘s original version of this song was released in 1984, but I’ve gone for the lovelorn sadness of the Dubstar cover that was released over a decade later, where the narrator wistfully looks back on a past relationship that didn’t survive the passage of time, and where declarations of eternal love were made, once upon-a-time, on St. Swithin’s Day. The extraordinary Dubstar show in London about twelve years ago saw an emotionally ragged take on this song, that was as brilliant as the first day I heard their take on the song.
On 15-Jul 1834, the Spanish Inquisition was disbanded, as changing priorities in Government had rendered it effectively obsolete. Active for over 350 years, I have to say I thought it was brought to a close some time before that!
/NOFX
/August 8th
/Heavy Petting Zoo
Unfortunately I was unable to find a song that references my own birthday, so instead I went for the nearest option, which was NOFX referencing the day before. But, hilariously, it turns out that it should have been titled August 9th after all, as Fat Mike got his dates wrong. Apparently this summery, characteristically short song is a tribute to Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia, who died on 09-Aug 1995…
Also on 08-Aug, in 1908, the Wright Brothers demonstrated powered flight to a previously sceptical French public, having already pioneered controlled, powered flight in the US in previous years. Louis Blériot, who was in attendance that day, was to become the first person to cross the English Channel by way of powered flight the following year, flying from Les Baraques near Calais to a point above the cliffs, just north of Dover Castle, and a memorial marks the spot.
/Foetus
/I’ll Meet You in Poland, Baby
/Hole
A song that feels like it’s been suggested a whole lot more than it actually has been over the years (I’ve got it recorded in my database five times), so I’m using it at last. Probably JG Thirlwell’s best-known song from his lengthy, chaotic catalogue that goes under a whole lot of names, it is a martial-industrial stomp that pokes fun at Hitler and Stalin’s Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the subsequent joint-invasion of Poland on 01-September 1939, that started World War II. The pact didn’t last long, with Germany invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, triggering the fighting in the Soviet Union territory that would continue until well into 1944. What makes the song grimly entertaining is the way the Thirlwell imagines the conversations between the two leaders as if they were a bickering married couple, and the thundering drums behind them sounds like a theatre of war is ongoing in your speakers.
Still on a military note, also on 01-September, the SR-71 Blackbird military plane sets the still-standing record for flying from New York to London in 1974, taking just 1hr 55minutes at a an average speed of 1,436 mph / 2,310 km/h.
/Public Service Broadcasting
/Sputnik
/The Race for Space
The starting gun of the space race, and the beginning of the space age, happened unexpectedly (at least, to the United States and much of the western world) on 04-October 1957, as the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, the first satellite, into space. Launched from what is now Baikonur Cosmodrome, the comparatively tiny Sputnik 1 (the main sphere was less than a metre across) continued to orbit the earth for a few weeks before the batteries depleted, and it fell to earth.
It is, when you think about it, an astonishing trajectory that this small satellite triggered. Less than twelve years later, there were men on the moon, and astonishing feat of technological advancement that was at least in part pushed forward by national pride and interest, as the USA and Soviet Union both threw everything at the target of the moon. I covered more about the Space Race on /Tuesday Ten /376, posted the week of the 50th Anniversary of the first moon landings.
Also happening on 04-October was an event that, had it not happened, would have made this very post rather different: Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian Calendar on 04-October 1582.
/Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine
/Born On The 5th Of November
/Straw Donkey… The Singles
A song recorded and appended to the end of their (excellent) singles compilation Straw Donkey, at the time of release this album felt like a full stop on the band’s career, but surprisingly they did continue for a few more years before disbanding (and then reuniting some years later for occasional shows, before calling it quits for good).
One of their big, brash ballads – nothing Carter USM ever did was subtle, it has to be said – it has the feel of a song that is memorialising an old friend, one who has either died or is no longer part of their life, and it’s clear that 05-November has some deep connection. It’s a quite lovely song, too.
05-Nov is of course associated in the UK with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which resulted in Guy Fawkes and twelve others being arrested and mostly executed for treason in attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament and to kill King James I as well, with Fawkes perhaps being best-known for the simple reason that he was in charge of the explosives (no less than thirty-six barrels of gunpowder were discovered).
/Jimmy Eat World
/12.23.95
/Clarity
Most fans of the band have long maintained that Clarity is Jimmy Eat World’s greatest album (I personally prefer the roaring power of Bleed American, myself), but there’s no doubt that this was their critical breakthrough. Apparently the title of the song refers to little more than it being the day that the song was written (or began to be written), but a look around the internet suggests a bunch of other fan theories, too, none of which have been confirmed! Either way, this song is a mellowed out song, little more than a plucked guitar and drum machine accompanying the vocals.
By the time of 23-Dec, many of us are well into our Christmas break, or at least preparing for it (it often depends on when Christmas falls in the week). Other notable events on this day included the passing into law of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, which “enabled women to join the professions and professional bodies, to sit on juries and be awarded degrees.” Women had begun to be given the opportunity to vote and to stand as MPs the previous year.