This week’s post has been written from our remote cottages in the East Hampshire countryside, where we’re staying for the week with friends.

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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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We’ve long taken the view that the close friends group that we’ve made are in many ways family. We look out for each other, we have good times and bad times, and have lots of amusing memories to fall back on. And this week, while eleven of us are staying together, we at least in part work as a team, mostly cooking together and pooling resources to do so.

Teamwork encompasses much more than that, though: it is something that is required in your working life (mostly), in sports (mostly) and in other walks of life too – thanks to a great set of suggestions, I was able to cast the net pretty widely to include teamwork and collaboration in a variety of ways.

Thanks, as ever, to everyone that gets involved and suggests songs: another way of teamwork, I guess.

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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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/Thee Faction
/What the Movement’s Done for You, Baby
/Singing Down the Government, or The War of Position and How We’re Winning It

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They might have collapsed into acrimony like pretty much any hard-left collective – just look at the all-too-predictable chaos that has engulfed Your Party before they’d even really got started recently – but Thee Faction were an electrifying, inspiring band for the period they were active. Needless to say, there were a lot of songs about Union Membership, Socialism and the work of a collective – but I’ve used a number of them, to had to dig a bit deeper, and What the Movement’s Done for You, Baby has exactly the kind of searing R&B power that I loved about them. A song about remembering the sacrifices of those who worked to improve the lot of the worker: a whole lot of strikes and lost wages were endured just to ensure holiday pay, better wages, maternity pay and much more became the standard, rather than an aspiration. It’s worth remembering what was fought for, as rights regress.

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/Front 242
/Red Team
/Official Version

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An unexpected addition to the last few 242 tours – in a new, much more powerful form in my opinion – was this obscure album track from Official Version. A Red Team is a group that simulates an adversary for training purposes, most usually in military or technological spheres, and so this concept fits in well with the militaristic, cold-war era image that 242 perpetuated at the time. The song glowers with implied threat, emulating the unexpected arrival of a red team. The new live version that was introduced around 2022 – I saw it in Chicago then, and on all of the last shows in London and Brussels – brings the vocals to the fore, allowing Jean-Luc De Meyer another star turn, but it also felt like it shifted the meaning a bit, perhaps celebrating the power of the Left Wing and making it explicitly anti-fascist.

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/Eurythmics & Aretha Franklin
/Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves
/Be Yourself Tonight

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It’s incredible to think that this song was originally intended for Eurythmics to work with Tina Turner on it – it was only Turner’s unavailability that meant they approached The Queen of Soul, and that happy accident, and the brilliance of the end result, means I couldn’t imagine the song with anyone else singing it. A modern feminist anthem from a time when such a subject wasn’t exactly a mainsteam idea in music, and Annie Lennox gives it both barrels to keep up with the powerhouse vocals of Franklin, as they call for women to stand up and continue to fight for equality and their rights. In an era where, in too many countries, women’s rights appear to be regressing again thanks to appalling right-wing, “Christian” Nationalist Governments, this song feels ever so pertinent once again forty years on from release.

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/Manowar
/Warriors Of The World United
/Warriors of the World

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Manowar are a band that are unashamedly, truly and utterly metal. They are sometimes a bit po-faced, but their longevity – they formed in 1980 – and their songs celebrating their extensive fanbase, not to mention their commitment to loud (very, very loud) performance and “death to false metal” suggests they get something right. Needless to say, a few songs of theirs were suggested for this post, but it could only really have been the mighty blunt force of Warriors Of The World United that I featured. A simple premise to the song, really: Eric Adams delivers an epic vocal that depicts the band and their fans on the same side of a battle for supremacy and keeping the flame of metal alive.

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/Apoptygma Berzerk
/In This Together
/You and Me Against the World

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In the annals of bands that made a change of style that was poorly received, Apop’s switch to guitar-led goth-pop was one of the most peculiar. Then again, the first single from the new era was, frankly, a skyscraping pop song, and had it not been from the same band that released beloved electro-industrial albums like 7 and Welcome to Earth, it might have been a smash hit. In This Together was a song about holding on to your beloved through the thick and thin, and facing life’s trials as a team. My wife and I have done that for over twenty years: there’s been highs and lows, but we face them together and we’ll get there.

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/Consolidated
/This Is A Collective
/The Myth of Rock

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From their beginnings in the late 1980s, Consolidated were a step away from their peers. Defiantly left-wing, anti-fascist, anti-racist, pro-gun control and pro-choice, their strident politics and willingness to make their points clear in song didn’t work with everyone (as the interludes on Play More Music and other albums, that came from people in the crowd taking the mic at their shows and offering their opinions, showed clearly).

Back on their debut album, though, This Is A Collective was one of a few songs on the album to set out their stall from the off. It encouraged their listeners to work with others to question power structures and policies, to make things better for everyone. Sadly, thirty-five years since it was released, things seem so much darker than they were even then, and the song is more relevant than ever.

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/Sham 69
/If The Kids Are United

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The Surrey-based punks Sham 69 were a band that brought in football terrace chant stylings to punk, and sadly ended up with racist thugs attending their gigs and causing all kinds of issues: despite the fact that the band were explicitly left-wing and populist. Legendary single If The Kids Are United encompasses all of this: a song that calls for the “kids” that are following them to understand and befriend their fellow fans, no matter their background or race. A laudable suggestion and one that only partially happened in the punk scene as it splintered into different factions. Nearly fifty years on from this song, it is often notable that alternative shows, at least in the UK, are still very much not particularly racially mixed, even if they are mostly left-leaning (with some notable exceptions).

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/Lorde
/Team
/Pure Heroine

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When Lorde first appeared, Royals was an intriguing single, criticising the “bling” lifestyle of pop stars, that appeared to live on a different planet to their fans. The lush soundscapes of Team takes it a step further, a gently seething takedown of privileged youth that have no concept of what others struggle with, because they simply don’t care: instead ensuring that their “team” always win, and always do better than you. Partly because they have the advantage in the first place, but also because when you have money, it’s much much easier to get even more.

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/Janelle Monáe
/Only Have Eyes 42
/The Age of Pleasure

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It was clear when The Age of Pleasure was released, that Janelle Monáe had been enjoying a hell of a time over the previous few years, COVID or not. The Age of Pleasure was unequivocally human, in a way her previous albums had not always been, and the hints on Dirty Computer about her preferences were made overt here. The gentle, summertime reggae base of Only Have Eyes 42 certainly suggests a form of teamwork, but one that involves three people and a bed, and apparently a lot of joy.

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/FFS
/Collaborations Don’t Work
/FFS

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As I’ve noted before, the joyous collaboration between Franz Ferdinand and Sparks had no real business working as well as it did, and in the snarky, near-seven minute track Collaborations Don’t Work, both bands had fun addressing exactly this. Alex Kapranos and Russell Mael get to trade verses over the fact that they should each do songs themselves, before detailing geniuses that didn’t need assistance from others, and then going into the pitfalls of collaboration: cheating with the other’s partners, deferring to the other, screwing your chances of a holiday… Hilariously, though, the unlikeliness of this collaboration was exactly the reason it was truly brilliant. Probably best, though, that this remained a one-off album: this kind of genius only happens once.