By a quirk of fate, I wrote a /Tuesday Ten on positivity eleven years ago today, and a late change of plan over the weekend as to what subject I was going to write about meant that I settled on pessimism, without realising the significance of it.

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But really, songs about pessimism seems appropriate right now. The outlook for the wider world is pretty shit, politics everywhere is fucking appalling, and while we’ve got a few nice things to look forward to, life is generally a bit of a slog right now.

So this playlist probably won’t help much to lift the mood: ten songs that are generally pessimistic in nature, and there might be some songs that you know well here. There might even be a couple of discoveries for you.

Thanks, as ever, to everyone who suggested songs when I asked about this relatively recently.

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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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/Inspiral Carpets
/This Is How It Feels
/Life

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The first Inspirals single to chart, in 1990, is a song basically devoid of any hope or optimism whatsoever. A song from a bleak northern town (Oldham), released as Thatcher’s period as PM came to an end, in some ways sums up how shit things had got in the North at the time, as industry was extinguished, and funding got ever sparser for anything as everything possible was privatised. The song itself, though, with Clint Boon’s signature organ sound seeping through the gaps, is a tale of a family torn apart by an affair and then the suicide of the lover, and the utter hopelessness that results in being able to change nothing.

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/Rome Burns
/War of the Pygmies
/Non Specific Ghost Stories

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“Nothing good is gonna come from this”

The chorus from this old favourite by Rome Burns pretty much sums up the view of a pessimist as they look at the latest “plan” from their ever optimistic colleague, and this driving goth rock track drips with the cynicism of the one who has been there before, knows it is going to fail, and is now resigned to sitting back and watching the show as other fail.

Interestingly – and I doubt they are connected – but just a year or two before the release of this song, one of the many elements of the Second Congo War was Effacer le tableau, where appalling human rights violations against tribes of Central African foragers (or “African pygmy people”, as they prefer not to be known) was undertaken, with estimated deaths of over 60,000, and at least 100,000 more were displaced. Jean-Pierre Bemba, a rebel leader and later a politician, was arrested for crimes against humanity as a result of this massacre, and exonerated on appeal.

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/theaudience
/A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed
/theaudience

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When I look back, theaudience were a strange proposition. A band formed by Billy Reeves, variously a guitarist and songwriter – among other bands, he later formed “socialist R&B” band Thee Faction – radio broadcaster and avid Brentford FC fan, and he recruited the-then seventeen-year-old Sophie Ellis-Bextor as vocalist. The music press leapt on them quickly, and it was pretty obvious from first single I Got The Wherewithal that Ellis-Bextor (daughter of actress and TV presenter Janet Ellis) was a star-in-waiting.

This single, though, was their breakthrough hit, and there’s a feeling as I look back now, that it is something of a dig at the music industry. All those hopes and dreams, you get signed, this might be the best that it ever gets: before the press tear you down again. We all know it happens every fucking time, and yet there’s a never-ending queue of bands who want that moment in the song. Sophie Ellis-Bextor, of course, rode the wave and became a successful pop-star in her own right…

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/Black Box Recorder
/Child Psychology
/England Made Me

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A band that could only have existed after the positive balloon of Britpop and “Cool Britannia” began to deflate, they were formed by Luke Haines (The Auteurs) and John Moore (Jesus & Mary Chain), with Sarah Nixey on deadpan vocals that only made the darkness and distain for the modern world all the more obvious. They weren’t the only band unimpressed by the sweeping change that was Tony Blair coming to power was – even if it did give a bit of optimism to a country that really fucking needed it at the time – but this album was absolutely full of despair.

Remarkably, the band decided that Child Psychology – a song about parents who fuck up a child’s future by not paying attention to their neurodivergent nature, and has the chorus hook of “Life is unfair / Kill yourself or get over it” – was the lead single, which despite a striking video, swiftly got banned by MTV and various radio stations, not helped by it being released in the US just after Columbine…

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/Mansun
/Negative
/Six

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One of the more accessible songs from the chaotic prog-epic that was Six is one of the many songs with lyrics by Paul Draper that see little of a positive future. Negative references being bullied, dealing with depression, toying with psuedo-religions to find answers, and that’s just in the first verse. Everything is in a minor key, and the song lurches forward with a world of self-loathing, as the protagonist tries to be invisible in a world that cares not a jot about him. This was released around the time of my lowest ebb in London at Uni, and perhaps it’s not surprising that I loved this band so much at the time – it all felt very familiar indeed.

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/Del Amitri
/Nothing Ever Happens
/Waking Hours

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A first appearance in this series for longstanding Glasgow band Del Amitri, who formed in 1980 and aside from a period of hiatus between 2002 and 2013, have continued to release music and tour to the present day. Nothing Ever Happens was their biggest hit, a bleak vision of a late-eighties Britain where most things are closed, there’s little opportunity and a distinct apathy at modern life. As someone who had moved to the north just a year or two before this, I can concur – there was little to do, and nothing really felt like it might get any better (those of you old enough may recall that a particularly bitter recession happened in subsequent years, too). In many ways it rather feels like we’ve come back around to a similar period right now.

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/Nirvana
/Negative Creep
/Bleach

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One of the heaviest, harshest songs written by Kurt Cobain arrives like a hammer in the middle of Bleach. Cobain wrote the song about himself, dealing with his relentless negativity and social awkwardness, and at points it feels like it is self-parody, a way of dealing with it by almost laughing at how difficult he saw himself. The fuzzy nastiness of the mix makes the song hit all the harder, not to mention the way that Cobain absolutely shreds his throat, such is the ferocity of the vocal performance. Other bands have tried covering this, but few have done it any justice aside from Tarrie B and her old band Tura Satana.

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/Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine
/My Defeatist Attitude
/Worry Bomb

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By the time of Worry Bomb, fashions had moved on somewhat – Britpop had now become the hot musical topic of the day – and there was the feeling that Carter’s time in the spotlight had passed. But Carter USM continued, now as a three-piece with a live drummer (which at the time felt a bit like heresy – in my mind, Carter USM were always Jim Bob and Fruitbat). A sign of the changes was perhaps on the downbeat My Defeatist Attitude, a song that has Jim Bob almost mumbling the lyrics about continual failure and how things never quite work out right.

The band continued for a while, before reforming for final live shows that went on for a few years. I was at the last show at Brixton in November 2014, which as this footage of Sheriff Fatman shows, was a hell of a send-off.

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/The Presidents of the United States of America
/We Are Not Going to Make It
/The Presidents of the United States of America

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The band with the ridiculously long name (apparently deliberately long to annoy radio presenters) closed their debut album – that had the much-loved earworms singles Lump and Peaches as well – with this marvellous bit of self-deprecation. Like most of their songs, it is bare-bones punk rock that does little other than batter out a rhythm, but the lyrics tear into their own “lack of talent”, “lack of good songs”, and the fact that there are “millions of better bands”. Sure, there may be many more technically proficient bands than the POTUSA, but few of their peers had a supernatural ability with hooks like these guys did.

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/Spray
/We’ll Look Back On This And Laugh
/Ambiguous Poems About Death

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Apparently one-time Peel Festive Fifty toppers in their previous incarnation as The Cuban Boys, nowadays this duo are a synthpop duo much-loved by a number of my friends – and I must confess that I’ve never really heard them before. So I was kinda expecting an upbeat synthpop song with a title like this, and reader, let me tell you, I was rather surprised to find that it is actually a bleak, chilly song that really is staring the end of the world in the face. Particularly the chorus hook, which adds to the title with “if we live, which we won’t“. An important bit of context to note is that this song was released in 2021, at the height of the COVID lockdowns, which perhaps helps to explain it.

That said, while the worst of that era has perhaps receded into the rearview mirror, the full horrors of what has unfolded since in the world perhaps make it difficult to laugh at any of it. Then again, at least we’re still here…right?