Regret is a funny human condition, isn’t it? The concept that you can obsess over past mistakes, when you can do little or nothing other than acknowledge what happened, apologise and move on.

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I try and live my life by not doing regret: I can’t change what happened, so learn and move on. But it isn’t always that simple. There are certainly a few things I wish I’d done differently, but the chips fell as they did, and I’ve made it this far even doing so.

I was at Damnation Festival in Manchester over the weekend, and the chatter at the festival and on the festival social media discussion was of quite a few people who will likely be regretting a few things in the aftermath. Pretty much my only regret was missing a few bands that in hindsight I should have gone to see, but with 48 bands over three stages and two days, I’d have had to be cloned to manage to see them all. I saw 30 of them, which isn’t so bad…

This week, then, here are ten songs about differing levels of regret. Of war, of love, of substances, of death, and likely a bit more besides. Thanks to everyone who joined in suggesting songs earlier this year.

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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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/Butthole Surfers
/Sweat Loaf
/Locust Abortion Technician

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“Daddy?
Yes, son.
What does regret mean?
Well son, the funny thing about regret is that it’s better to regret
Something you have done than to regret something that you haven’t done
And by the way, If you see your mom this weekend, will you be sure and tell her…
SATAN SATAN SATAN!!!!”

Perhaps better known as the opening sample on Orbital’s Satan, here’s the original. It is still as batshit insane as it ever was – the ‘Surfers were never exactly a normal, accessible band, and going on the sheer amount of drugs consumed at the time, I’m amazed they are still around to tell any tales – but frankly this is a great excuse to include this band.

Sadly the book Let’s Go to Hell: Scattered Memories Of The Butthole Surfers is now not far off impossible to get (unless you want to pay crazy money for it), so instead read the shorter version in the still-brilliant Our Band Could Be Your Life, or watch the new documentary about the band, Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt.

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/Ladytron
/Ghosts
/Velocifero

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Velocifero was always going to be a comedown after the perfection of Witching Hour, but it had it’s moments, most notably on the single Ghosts. A galloping rhythm provides a dark backdrop to the cold vocals, where Helen Marnie tries and entirely fails to offer apologies to another party, perhaps a sense of regret at least trying to push them into the realms of admitting that they were wrong. But the chorus reveals that they don’t want to apologise whatsoever, and perhaps that regret is actually that they didn’t get away sooner.

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/Morphine
/I Had My Chance
/Yes

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One of my great musical regrets is that I never got to see Morphine in the 1990s before Mark Sandman died, and despite multiple visits to the UK, I’ve still not seen Vapors of Morphine (and I’ll miss them again later this month as I’m seeing Cabaret Voltaire in Brighton – making sure I don’t miss that, mind). I Had My Chance is very much, it seems, about a missed paramour: the narrator had their opportunity, and in not taking it, they’ve spent the rest of their life taking every opportunity that they have, as they know what it’s like to miss out.

I try not to do this: otherwise you spend your entire life looking backwards, rueing those missed chances, rather than looking forward and making a better life.

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/Stan Rogers
/Barrett’s Privateers
/Fogarty’s Cove

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The late Stan Rogers wrote a song that became an unofficial anthem of the Royal Canadian Navy, and much of Atlantic Canada, set in the 1770s. The song tells the story of a ship-full of Privateers raiding in the Caribbean, who make a disastrous choice of ship to raid and everyone dies except the narrator – who returns years later having lost both his legs. The entire song is punctuated with the call of “How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!” – presumably the Sherbrooke on the Nova Scotian coast, rather than the one far inland in Quebec – as the narrator clearly regrets the whole damned thing.

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/Assemblage 23
/Disappoint
/Failure

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A still-remarkable song that has lost none of its power, twenty-four years on from release. Tom Shear has long been known for his lyrics that discuss mental health and generally dealing with the difficulties of the world around us, and while he’s been doing so since he first began releasing music, Disappoint was the point that cemented just how brilliant a lyricist he is. It is a deeply, deeply personal song, as he tries to make sense of his father’s suicide: and the song drips with regret and anger at what happened, and how he was powerless to stop it. At least according to the lyrics, Shear is grappling with the fact that his father never talked about his own troubles, meaning that what happened came out of the blue, and perhaps that helps explain why Shear is so open about his own experiences, making sure no-one close to him has to go through similar again.

Thankfully my father is still with us, even if it has been a close-run thing on a couple of occasions, and this song continues to hit like an anvil every time I hear it: hearing live again for the first time in a decade the other week, I’m not ashamed to admit there was a lump in my throat and a tear on my cheek, even as I sang along.

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/New Order
/Regret
/Republic

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Apparently Peter Hook has suggested this was “the last great New Order song”, and maybe, just maybe, he might be right. That plaintive riff that opens the song, the propulsive rhythm, and that heartbreaking chorus. This is a song that’s unusually direct for a New Order song, with Bernard Sumner often at least partly disguising the meaning of his songs, but here, there’s no doubt. This is less a song about regret, but instead an acceptance of regret. His life choices brought him to a point where he just has to grin and bear it, and while they could have made better choices, would it actually have ended up any better?

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/Cher
/If I Could Turn Back Time
/Heart of Stone

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While Cher had been a star since the sixties, by the mid-80s she had moved toward to acting – indeed getting a Best Actress Oscar for her incendiary performance in Moonstruck along the way – and while her 1987 self-titled musical comeback did OK, it was Heart of Stone, and particularly the powerhouse single If I Could Turn Back Time that really reminded the wider world of her musical talents. A skyscraping rock track that, the story goes, Cher initially rejected before the writer Dianne Warren almost forced her to record it, is one long admission of regret, musing about how they could have atoned for their mistakes. The results were worth it, as it became Cher’s biggest hit in years and laid the stage for the rest of her career. The striking video, with Cher not wearing a great deal and straddling a cannon on the USS Missouri, cheered on by the crew, didn’t hurt, either.

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/Philip Jeays
/Only This High
/October

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Like a number of artists this week, much of Philip Jeays’ greatest work is steeped in regret, as he recounts parts of his rich life and reflects on where he’s got to. Only This High comes from his first album proper, October, released in 1999, and even then, there’s a lot of bleak reflection. Here, against a sparse, gentle musical backing, Jeays looks at the innocence of youth, the hopes and dreams that we have for the future, and how he perhaps didn’t follow up some of the opportunities that he had at the time. The sweeping, swooning song is one of a regret at how life never quite works out as you planned, and having not heard it in a while, it was lovely to be swept away by it once again.

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/That Handsome Devil
/Buyer’s Remorse
/The Heart Goes to Heaven, The Head Goes to Hell

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The swampy, dark bluesy-rock (although frankly that’s selling this band short, based on what I’ve heard) of this track is kinda fascinating. Spiralling organ chords surround the vocals as they switch between mundane family life and what they could have in the pages of magazines or adverts on TV, selling them some mythical escape or just a better life. It’s a relatable feeling, sometimes – we always end up talking about our next holiday after we’ve finished the last one, just to give us something to look forward to other than five-days-a-week at work for eternity.

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/Arab Strap
/I Would Have Liked Me A Lot Last Night
/Philophobia

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We finish this week with the Glasgow duo Arab Strap, who’ve long been experts in documenting the minutiae of doubt and regret. Back on Philophobia – an album titled after the fear of falling in love, and documenting the lows and even more lows of self-destruction and the effect on everyone else – the album saves the most devastating track for near the end, as Aidan Moffat reflects on a mighty night out, where everyone was bombed out of their minds, had a great time and were the best versions of themselves. At least, until the cold light of the next day, where realisation kicks in that you are actually a bit of a twat when you’re off your face, and those nagging details of what you did start to hit home. Did I really do that? What the fuck did I do?

Happily for me, at least, there was none of that this weekend. I’m older, and broadly I know my limits. It was still a fun weekend, though.