Denial can take many forms. It can be public denials, it can be denials to friends and lovers, it can be denial to yourself.

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Thus, there was a good choice of songs for this week, and I decided to try and find as many different ways of denial as possible. Thanks, as ever, 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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/Michael Jackson
/Billie Jean
/Thriller

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Michael Jackson spent a whole lot of his career having to deny things. Having to deny allegations about his unusual lifestyle, his appearance and his sexuality, not to mention allegations around misconduct and abuse that dogged him for the remainder of his career and after his death. In musical terms, though, he was genuinely a trailblazer, and in his earlier solo work in particular, began to break down the barriers between R&B/soul and rock music, and swiftly became a megastar thanks to breaking what had begun to appear like a colour bar on MTV in the early 80s – and Billie Jean was the key point where things began to change.

Incredibly, though, it wasn’t the lead single. That was the insipid duet with Paul McCartney, The Girl Is Mine. It was the second single, in January 1983, and when the iconic video was released two months later (could you imagine doing that now?!?), Thriller started selling a lot more, and by the time of the Motown 25 performance in May – the one that introduced the Moonwalk for the first time – it began selling a million copies a week. The song itself a stark, paranoid song, as the protagonist vehemently denies being the father of an obsessive fan’s child – something inspired by accusations to his brothers in the Jackson 5, and later himself. Probably Jackson’s finest song, it’s power is only supercharged by that incredible video.

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/Depeche Mode
/It’s No Good
/Ultra

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Talk about life after death. Dave Gahan literally returned from the dead (he was clinically dead for two minutes after an overdose in 1996) with the band’s comeback album Ultra in 1997, and the mood was sombre and dark even by their standards, unsurprisingly. The second single It’s No Good finally let a bit of light in, though, particularly in the video where the band play as lounge singers in a succession of seedy looking clubs, and Dave Gahan’s gold lame suit is something else.

Lyrically the song is a bit darker, though, as Martin Gore’s lyrics puncture the male ego, a delusional man who still thinks their ex might want them back, despite all the signs to the contrary. Amazingly, the band have continued to this day, nowadays a core duo following the death of Andy Fletcher.

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/Pet Shop Boys
/In Denial (feat. Kylie Minogue)
/Nightlife

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Thanks to her ubiquity in the UK pop landscape, it’s easy to forget that Kylie Minogue had a period where things weren’t going so well. Her indie reinvention in the late-90s didn’t quite work out, despite the quality of the songs (partly thanks to unfortunate timing), and for a few years she was unsigned, before tearing back with probably the best pop songs of her career in the early 2000s. But then, the Pet Shop Boys had form with helping to resurrect the careers of others – What Have I Done To Deserve This, aside from being an astonishing pop song, single-handedly brought back Dusty Springfield into the limelight and gave her career a second life.

In Denial comes from Nightlife, the album written while they were creating the musical Closer to Heaven with Jonathan Harvey, and the song is an intriguing duet between a daughter and a closeted father, who eventually begins to deal with the denial of what he is.

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/Ruby
/Queen of Denial
/Short-Staffed At The Gene Pool

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Lesley Rankine’s post-Silverfish rebirth as Ruby was quite the sensation in the mid-90s. One of the very first digitally-recorded albums (my interview with her from a few years back, on /Talk Show Host /074, talks about this and much more) it was somewhere between trip-hop, industrial and folk and sounded like nothing else: but as with too many artists of the time, got caught up in the implosion of Creation Records in 1999 and it meant that the three-year-old follow-up was finally released in 2001, with barely any promotion whatsoever. It remains a shame to this day, as Short-Staffed At The Gene Pool takes things in very different directions. Queen of Denial has a jazzy, light-touch drum’n’bass backing, as Rankine’s protagonist mutters about closing out the world and doing their own thing, in denial of what’s changing around them.

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/Doechii
/Denial Is A River
/Alligator Bites Never Heal

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Quite aside from the old joke that makes up the title, Doechii is dealing with issues on this song that she may or may not be ready to accept. The song is built around the conceit of Doechii talking to a psychologist: as she talks about past bad relationship choices, her TikTok success and subsequent issues, the song is an absolute hoot as Doechii is perhaps exaggerating some of the extremes discussed here for comic effect. Or is she? Is this just denial that things have got out of control a bit since her unexpected, viral success?

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/Misery Loves Co.
/Deny Everything
/Not Like Them

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Misery Loves Co. blasted onto the metal scene in the mid-nineties, their 1995 debut a mix of pulverising industrial metal anthems and more reserved, brooding tracks: and their follow-up Not Like Them was more of the latter than the former (that said, it’s hard to be as intense as the first album was). Deny Everything is the bleak centrepiece of Not Like Them, a doomy, gothic metal dirge that is a denial that things can get any worse, that things are just fine wallowing in shit – and the song gains in fury as the denials get more and more forthright. Amazingly, MLC would get darker on their third album…

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/Sevendust
/Denial
/Home

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Sevendust were one of the unsung bands of the Nu-Metal era, and with an African-American singer in Lajon Witherspoon, perhaps that worked against them in a mostly White scene – which is a shame, as his powerhouse vocals are the most striking thing about the band. Denial was in many ways their breakthrough song, the lead single from their excellent second album Home, that sees Witherspoon seething at someone whose consistent denial and inability to accept that they are wrong has left them alone and isolated, as no-one will trust them anymore.

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/John Waite
/Missing You
/No Brakes

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One of those songs that pretty much everyone of a certain age will recognise – it was an absolutely monstrous hit in 1984 – but I was perhaps a little surprised to find that John Waite is British, was previously the frontman of rock band The Babys, and is still an active musician to this day. But then, sometimes, to sustain a career, you just need that one big hit to keep the royalties rolling in – and this is one of those, with a few million sales at the time, and hundreds of millions of streams since.

The song? It’s a big soft-rock power ballad that’s all about that powerhouse of a chorus, as Waite laments his ex-partner, before denying he’s missing them after all in that chorus, and the delivery suggests he’s lying to himself.

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/Sleigh Bells
/Crucible
/Jessica Rabbit

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Only the second time I’ve ever featured NYC duo Sleigh Bells, and this time I’ve picked up on the suggestion for this chaotic (everything including the kitchen sink appears to have been thrown at the mix for this) song that appears to be dealing with the mental fog that often results from severe depression. The protagonist is getting better, honest, they keep telling themselves, despite being barely able to function, as they will be able to deal with worse tomorrow. I kinda know the feeling – after all, when you are in the depths of depression, it’s difficult to know if it will ever end. But when it does? It’s like the skies clearing and letting the sun back in.

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/Radiohead
/House of Cards
/In Rainbows

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Like many songs this week, this Radiohead song is about denying the realities of a relationship that is right in front of them. But amid the spaced-out reverb and gentle guitars that make up most of the music, Thom Yorke is wracked with indecision. The lyrics give most of the picture, and they suggest some kind of tryst, where they can have plausible deniability around some kind of illicit relationship, and they can forget about the rest of their respective worlds tumbling down for as long as it lasts. But at least one part of this – “throw your keys in the bowl” – suggests a non-monogamous relationship, and the denial here is around the impact that this particular tryst will have on others, too…