Back from what felt like a blink-and-you-miss-it Infest, and coverage of that will follow later this week. In the meantime, I prepared this mostly in the week before Infest to ensure it would be posted today.

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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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Desire is a strange thing. It can be difficult to predict, difficult to control and can result in a range of emotions and outcomes, and in song, it does the same thing, as this week’s ten songs confirm. And not all desire is sexual, either…

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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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/The Killers
/Mr Brightside
/Hot Fuss

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Mr Brightside has had a remarkable, seemingly eternal life. It has been certified at sales+streams* of 10 million in the US, another six million in the UK, and a few million more across Europe and Australia, it has been a presence in the UK singles charts for most of the past twenty years, and last year reached the accolade of best-selling UK single never to reach Number One. It’s a guaranteed floor-filler at any indie/pop club, and crowds still don’t seem even remotely bored it live yet, either. (*100 streams = 1 sale, and in the UK, it has sold over one million physical copies and over 500 million streams)

Not bad for a song that had to be released twice in the UK to gain any traction, and Hot Fuss had relatively lukewarm reviews when it was released. It had a bunch of great songs, sure, but the other half kinda sucked – and this is far from the best song on the album (All These Things That I’ve Done, Jenny Was A Friend of Mine, Midnight Show, for starters… Oh, and Somebody Told Me, too.). But then, maybe they struck a nerve with this song. Mr Brightside is about that seething jealousy of seeing your object of desire going home with someone else, and your mind being tormented with images of what they are doing, when they should have been doing it with you. We’ve all been there, right?

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/ACTORS
/Object of Desire

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A song that was in the top ten of /Countdown /2024 /Tracks last year, for me it might be the best ACTORS song yet. A song with a grimy, after-dark feel that drips with the raw desire of a post-club tryst that may or may not have been a good idea, the song and the video that accompanies it is entirely a lascivious come-on that is hard to resist. The video certainly enhances and reinforces the subject: the band dressed in leather and chains, suggesting that they are about to go, or have been, to a club where desires are fulfilled.

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/I LIKE TRAINS
/Desire Is A Mess
/KOMPROMAT

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I make no apologies to returning to my album of the year for 2020 – and frankly one of my favourite albums of recent years. Eight years on from their previous album, this revealed a band that evolved into a electronic-drenched, post-punk/post-rock band who were absolutely furious at the world that they were seeing. The album documents a still-ongoing era of post-truth, of leaders that distort, that lie, and plainly and simply are more interested in enriching themselves and their peers than any advancement for everyone else.

Desire Is A Mess is the breathless second track on the album, that appears to compare sexual desire with the relentless desire for power and remaking a nation by sheer power of will, as if that will give them more satisfaction than any sexual act will ever do.

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/Manic Street Preachers
/She Is Suffering
/The Holy Bible

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Picking singles from The Holy Bible must have been an interesting discussion to hear at the time. With an album so virulently anti-commercial – the seething opener Yes uses the word “C**t” in the second line, and elsewhere there are songs dealing with the appalling nature of humans (and mostly men), anorexia, white America, the holocaust… a pop album this is not. But somehow, they managed three singles including a double A-side, and the last of three is She Is Suffering. As an excellent blog notes about the song, this is a song about the removal of desire from your life. The idea that in some religious texts, desire is suffering and so to be saved, you need to rid it. In many ways, this is a song that couldn’t have been written by anyone other than Richey Edwards: the concept of sex and desire being a distraction to the better things to enjoy in life.

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/Barry Adamson
/Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Pelvis (feat. Jarvis Cocker)
/Oedipus Schmoedipus

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Borrowing the instantly recognisable beat from Sly & The Family Stone’s Dance to the Music, and interpolating samples from the Apollo 11 mission, Adamson creates a groovy, irresistible platform for Jarvis Cocker to slither into. His half-spoken, half-panted delivery takes things up a notch from the previous years’ smash of Different Class (this was released in 1996), and perhaps, in retrospect, is the signpost of what was to come on This is Hardcore. Cocker comments and perhaps exaggerates the “benefits” of his new-found stardom, as he suddenly finds that every hanger-on wants to fuck him: “Come on girls, save me from my own hand…”

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/Suzanne Vega
/99.9F°
/99.9F°

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Not the first time I’ve featured a song from this sometimes underrated Suzanne Vega album recently. Like many of the songs on this album, it crackles with desire and sexual energy, and here she use body temperature as a gauge for sexual desire. The song sweeps between industrialised electronics and near-spoken word verses, before moving into the gentle melodic chorus as if she is trying to soothe the searing heat before it runs out of control.

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/FFS
/Johnny Delusional
/FFS

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I’ve mentioned the joyous, chaotic coming-together of Sparks and Franz Ferdinand before on this site (although, amazingly, this is the first entry in the /Tuesday Ten series), and here they are again with one of the best singles from the album. As with many of the other songs the collaboration produced, it is a sharp, striking character sketch, this time of a man who seemingly is incapable of understanding the word “no”, and is utterly inept in acting upon his desires in a way that might actually produce a positive result – in other words coming across as an insufferable creep to anyone other than himself.

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/PJ Harvey
/Is This Desire?
/Is This Desire?

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Is This Desire? felt like a permanent step away from the seething rock – and blues – of Harvey’s earlier material, and so it proved. The closing title track, though, is perhaps a bridge between the deep, swampy blues of To Bring You My Love and what followed, as a tale unwinds of two apparent lovers simmering with desire somewhere alone and undisturbed. The song sees whatever is between them unconsummated, but also questioning what it is between them

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/Einstürzende Neubauten
/Sehnsucht – Zitternd
/Halber Mensch

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Interestingly, this was one of two songs titled Sehnsucht suggested (the other being the thumping opener to Rammstein’s second album). One of the shortest songs on the debut Neubauten album Kollaps, and then completely re-recorded on the mighty Halber Mensch (and I’m using the latter version here), it manages to still feature most of the Neubauten hallmarks of the era and not turn into unlistenable noise. A storm of metallic percussion, trembling guitars and Blixa’s howls, it is a song that describes the idea of desire (or longing, depending on the context of how you translate the word sehnsucht) as one of chaotic, energetic emotions. Desire is often not at all rational, it just…happens.

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/Elvis Costello and the Attractions
/I Want You
/Blood & Chocolate

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We close this week with the darkest side of desire: that of obsession. One of Elvis Costello’s greatest, most lauded songs is also one of his darkest: as he inhabits the mind of someone obsessing over what their partner has done – either right now or in the past, the things they did with others but not with them, but seemingly, no matter what it was, he still wants that person anyway. The feeling is one of deep discomfort, frankly, listening to it again: this isn’t a healthy relationship, it’s a psychological study in the making.