This is another of those /Tuesday Tens where the original inspiration for asking about this subject is likely lost to time. But, just to make sure we know what we’re talking about:

“A living thing may be an object, and is distinguished from non-living things by the designation of the latter as inanimate objects. Inanimate objects generally lack the capacity or desire to undertake actions, although humans in some cultures may tend to attribute such characteristics to non-living things.”

[Source]

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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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There were an enormous number of suggestions for this one, too, and while not all quite fitted what I was looking for, there was still a lot of choice for the final ten. Thanks to everyone that got involved.

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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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/Suzanne Vega
/Marlene on the Wall
/Suzanne Vega

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As sure as death and taxes, the likelihood is that a Suzanne Vega concert will begin with her beloved first single from 1985, and so it appropriately opens this week’s /Tuesday Ten, too. A song about love and the limitations of love in the frame of a doomed relationship, the Marlene of the title is of course Marlene Dietrich, in the form of a poster on the wall that silently observes everything that happens within the apartment. Vega imagines what Dietrich might say about what she (or the poster!) sees, and the result is a beguiling, instantly memorable song that I first heard as a child (my dad was a fan of Suzanne Vega from the start), and began a lifelong love of her work. I finally got to see her live back in 2015, and the lovely take on this song from a previous Union Chapel show was recorded for posterity.

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/R.E.M.
/The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite
/Automatic For The People

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One of two songs on Automatic for the People that helps to lift the gloom somewhat (the other being the joyous Andy Kaufman tribute of Man on the Moon – and one of R.E.M.’s greatest songs), and what the song is about is in part a mystery to even other members of the band. But there are pointers: the sidewinder of the title is one of two things – the American Sidewinder Rattlesnake, but more pertinently a telephone cord (the curly version of which is known in some places as a sidewinder), and for much of this song, Michael Stipe is trying not to have to answer the phone. Amazingly, too, I’m told that my wife’s late great-uncle was involved in inventing and developing the telephone coiled-cord (or curly-cord).

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/Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
/Red Frame/White Light
/Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

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Also on the subject of phones, but the telephone box: something that is disappearing fast as communications use changes. OMD celebrated their use of a local phone box to arrange their band activities in their early days on the Wirral, but nowadays, such arrangements would be made by email, more than likely, with phone calls generally being vanishingly rare. In 2023, BT reported that there were approximately 20,000 phone boxes that remained in working order (down from over five times that at their peak, and just 3,000 of those are the classic “red” examples), and thousands of those decommissioned have found new uses, many as community information points or as homes for emergency defibrillators. The phone box originally appeared in 1924, the first of which were designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, and part of the reason for their disappearance is thanks to mobiles: recent statistics suggest that over 96% of people in the UK have a mobile phone, and coverage has improved to the point that phone boxes are simply obsolete.

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/Tom Waits
/The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)
/Small Change

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From Tom Waits’ seventies material comes one of his most fascinating, and clever songs. A song from the point of view of a fading, clearly drunk performer at his piano, whose mistakes are put down to anything but him. The piano, the carpet, the telephone, the balcony, there’s a whole lot of things in that venue that are to blame, as long as you don’t blame the whiskey-soaked singer who keeps forgetting the words. Waits’ delivery in this is amazing, too, as he slurs and stutters the lines and melodies, making his piano sound as drunk as he purports to be…

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/Manuskript
/Plastic Fangs
/Devil’s Advocate

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Listening back to Manuskript, it’s easy to forget just how many great songs they had, and thus easy also to see why they were such a good festival band, able to stuff their sets with nothing but bangers. One such old favourite is the sneering cynicism of Plastic Fangs, which appears to be having fun with sending up the Goth tropes of a man getting dressed up, presumably at Whitby (where especially at October/November Whitby, you don’t half see a lot of plastic fangs being worn). But it also has darker undertones, where the protagonist feels somewhat…predatory? Something, too, we’ve discovered about some of the people we knew in “the scene” over the years, sadly.

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/Alice In Chains
/Angry Chair
/Dirt

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Listening to Alice In Chains was never a particularly relaxing pursuit, even by the standards of their grunge peers: on many of their songs, you were dragged down into the pits of hell and despair – and more particularly that of a heroin addict – with Layne Staley, who would sadly succumb to his addictions at the age of just 34. Amid the songs penned by Staley, Angry Chair is among the darkest and bleakest, as he faced up to the abuse he suffered as a child (being sent to the “timeout chair” of the title, among other things), but also the horrors of trying to get clean. What makes this song all the more remarkable, though, is that changeup into the soaring, melodic chorus, that feels like pulling the curtains open and letting the sun in for a fleeting moment.

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/Marilyn Monroe
/Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend

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A song that didn’t make it into /Tuesday Ten /579 (I used Shirley Bassey instead – there were quite a few iconic songs about diamonds), so it instead features here. One of the highlights of the glorious Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a star vehicle for both Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Monroe’s character Lorelei Lee is obsessed with getting a man who can supply her needs – including diamonds – and this iconic part of the film spells it out clearly. A much-referenced scene – particularly by Madonna in the video for Material Girl, where she appears to be wearing a whole lot of diamonds – it remains a classic to this day.

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/Depeche Mode
/New Dress
/Black Celebration

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When she was alive, Princess Diana was everywhere in the press. Probably the first Royal to truly understand the power of the press, that worked both ways and various events did mean repeated savaging by the press, although her untimely death meant an awful lot of revisionism quickly followed.

Not everyone appreciated it, though, as Martin Gore fully understood. New Dress comments on world events, disaster and famine, before we are distracted yet again by coverage of whatever Diana was choosing to wear that day. Not a lot has been learned since – it still happens with inconsequential reporting on Royals, when I’d rather our news sources were holding politicians to account.

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/Little Richard
/Rubber Duckie

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I had to do a double-take when I saw this suggested, but yes, Little Richard appeared on Sesame Street in 1994 to do his take on Rubber Duckie, in his own inimitable style. It features a muppetised Owl on Sax, a rubber duck on the piano, and Little Richard’s piano stool in a fur-linked bath. I probably shouldn’t ask too many questions. Rubber Ducks are a thing among a number of my friends, too: my late friend Jez had a giant collection of them (indeed our last Christmas gift to her was one we found locally, as I recall), and another friend keeps a small bag of tiny, tiny ducks that often end up spreading across festivals as she gives them out…

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/Godley & Creme
/I Pity Inanimate Objects
/Freeze Frame

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Perhaps better known these days as legendary music video producers – they were involved with a great many iconic 1980s music videos – duo Godley & Creme’s career goes back a long way, having known each other since the late 1950s, work in early sixties bands before joining 10cc, then striking out as a duo in the late-seventies. From their 1979 album Freeze Frame, I Pity Inanimate Objects is an intriguing studio experiment: early use of a Harmonizer shifts the pitch of the originally-recorded monotone vocals into weird, unsettling places, while the lyrics muse on what inanimate objects might, and could, think…