Sometimes, I ask for submissions on a subject that I think will have loads of easy-to-use suggestions, and the reality is rather different: and so, it gets shelved for a while until the right time to use it comes up. This subject was one of those.

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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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I asked about songs in the kitchen nearly three years ago, and looking at it again recently, it didn’t get any easier to pick the songs. Unlike last week, I wasn’t so bothered about euphemisms, but I did want songs that were actually related to the kitchen – for example, Copper Kettle by Joan Baez, which was suggested, might have worked by the title, but is actually about illicit distilling…

Still, I got there in the end, and thanks to everyone that suggested songs.

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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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/Björk
/Hyperballad
/Post

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One of Björk’s greatest, most intriguing songs only has a passing mention of cutlery, but there’s something beguiling about the imagery in this song. The idea of waking up in the morning, and either literally or metaphorically discarding small items of your day-to-day life (like cutlery), as a way of cleansing the mind and soul that you can continue to love the good things, is a remarkable thing. To this Debut-loving listener (still my favourite Björk album after all these years), Post was a shock. The chaotic, organic clatter of Debut replaced with (mostly!) delicate, lighter-than-air electronics was partly-surprising shift, but one that suited her otherworldly voice, and over time, I’ve grown to love it too. This song also has another wildly inventive Michel Gondry video, too.

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/Soundgarden
/Spoonman
/Superunknown

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Originally one of a number of throwaway titles created by Jeff Ament for songs by the band Citizen Dick in grunge-era film Singles, Chris Cornell then created an initial version of the riff that is aired in the film. The song was developed to become the thundering lead single to mega-selling album Superunknown in early 1994, and taking on the original inspiration for the name, featured Seattle street performer Artis the Spoonman (who, now at the age of 77, is still a hell of a performer).

Maybe it’s just us, but over the years we seem to have accumulated about twice as many spoons as knives and forks. There’s only two of us in the house, and we have probably twenty in our cutlery draw…

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/Half Man Half Biscuit
/Joy Division Oven Gloves
/Achtung Bono

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A song that was suggested a couple of times for this week (and a few times on other suggestion threads too), from a band regularly suggested when the subjects get… a bit more down to earth? JDOG is a perennial favourite among fans of the band, as far as I can tell, and I’ve long had the opinion that it is a sneering take on the depths some artists – or other people that handle their merchandising – will go to sell something to their fans. I mean, I’m sure Ian Curtis would have been absolutely thrilled at the idea that Nigel Blackwell comes up with here. Then again, we very nearly bought a teatowel at an Arab Strap gig that proclaimed “It was the biggest cock you’d ever seen” (the opening line from Packs of Three)…

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/I LIKE TRAINS
/Stainless Steel
/Progress Reform

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The taut, seething epic at the heart of the I LIKE TRAINS debut release is, unlike most of their early material, not as yet identified as being about an actual event. Instead, it slowly unfolds as a domestic dispute, a person confronting a partner about their infidelities before apparently ensuring that they will never sleep in their shared bed again. It’s inferred, but never confirmed, that the kitchen knives are used.

According to the National Centre for Domestic Violence, 1 in 5 adults experience domestic abuse in their lifetimes – needless to say, women are considerably more likely to endure it than men. As well, the kitchen is generally a potentially dangerous place – apparently more than 67,000 children in the UK are injured in the kitchen each year, while gas cookers are potentially lethal, and electric appliances (like kettles) are easy to near wet surfaces. The list goes on…

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/Deftones
/Knife Prty
/White Pony

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One of the most striking songs in the Deftones catalogue picks up the relatively common thread in their songs of danger and sex. Amid a fog of buzzing guitars and staccato drumming, Chino seems to use the metaphor of a knife as the link between the love and violence implied in relationships, the yin and yang of happiness and darkness. But then, too, it was also inspired by something concocted on tour, that of the titular knife party. And as much as I love my friends, there’s no fucking way I’d trust any of them after a few drinks with a bunch of knives. Certainly not the good, sharp ones we have in our kitchen to prepare cooking…

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/Pulp
/Dishes
/This Is Hardcore

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After the era-defining success of Different Class, Jarvis Cocker and Pulp had finally got the success that they’d been striving for, and This Is Hardcore was a very different beast, a darker, seedier album that suggested that the fame they’d obtained wasn’t as great as they’d hoped. But amid the suffocating gloom of the album come some moments of domestic mundanity. Like the relatively minimal Dishes, where Jarvis paints of picture of domesticity, getting the washing up done before anything else more exciting can happen with his life. We can relate: one of the first things we did when buying this house was to get a dishwasher, precisely so we didn’t have to spend ages washing up every single day.

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/Musical Youth
/Pass The Dutchie
/The Youth of Today

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A relatively rare reggae appearance in this series (I always preferred dub over reggae, personally) brings us a notable 1982 hit from two Birmingham-based friends, whose Jamaican immigrant fathers (and musicians in their own right) set up the band for them. Basically a censored, radio-friendly reworking of Pass the Kouchie – swapping the cannabis references for a patois term for a cooking pot – it celebrates the Carribean immigrant community’s love of cooking food for family and friends, and of course, bass-heavy, floor-shaking music. We have amassed various larger cooking pots, and unless we’re in the depths of winter, we rarely use them…

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/Bobby Gregg & Friends
/Potato Peeler

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Domestic life sometimes feels like an eternal hunt for the right kitchen equipment. Be that the right cutlery, the right plates, the right appliances… but until you need to use one, the various small kitchen utensils don’t seem particularly important. So we seem to have an ever-expanding set of utensils and useful gadgets in our kitchen, some of which we will only use once in a while: but when we do, they are indispensable.

Anyway, Potato Peeler, by fifties/sixties-bandleader Bobby Gregg (and drummer on some of Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel’s most iconic songs), is best known for the first known use of pinch harmonics in popular music.

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/Electric Six
/Table and Chairs
/Zodiac

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I was rather surprised when I heard this song: as I wasn’t expecting a sweet love song from Dick Valentine about settling down and making a home. In this swooning track, he’s determined to make things work in their newly married life, even going to the lengths of making some of the furniture. That’s something we didn’t do (we paid a professional to build the shelving we wanted in various rooms, including the kitchen). Indeed, our kitchen hasn’t had a great deal done to it yet – the feature wall was painted a rich, pepper red, and a new fridge/freezer and oven bought, but otherwise it’s functionally ok for now, until we have the means to make substantial changes, but that’s down the list for now…

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/“Weird Al” Yankovic
/Spatula City
/UHF – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and Other Stuff

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The truly bizarre “Weird Al” vehicle UHF is full of odd moments and strange ideas, and somehow – although I must admit it’s been some time since I saw it – it all works, just about. But, did you ever need this many spatulas? Or, indeed, an entire box store devoted to them? Actually, now I think about it, it might have been just the ticket to get the one we actually needed. Also, I was rather surprised to find that the term was first recorded in use in the 1520s – rather further back than I might have imagined…