The first couple of weeks of January are usually a drag. There’s little going on, most people are saving their money for more interesting times later in the year, and the weather, at least in the northern hemisphere, is usually pretty grim.

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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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So what better time to look at the subject of boredom? Where the ten artists this week are either lamenting their utter boredom, or looking for ways to escape the boredom.

Thanks, as always, to the many people who suggested songs for this one, as it was a strong selection (and I could easily have picked ten more).

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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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/Deftones
/Bored
/Adrenaline

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The Deftones’ debut album Adrenaline turned thirty in October just gone, a remarkable milestone for a band that have continued to evolve over their entire time active as a band, and more recently getting a lot of respect for how they transcended their supposed Nu-Metal origins, with their overt influences from shoegaze and goth in particular: but this album was a hardcore album through-and-through.

Going back to their earliest material, though, reminds that they were an abrasive, difficult band to start with – Terry Date’s bone-dry production and seemingly deliberate attempts to blur Chino Moreno’s vocals into the mix making it hard work to love on the first few listens.

Bored was the opening track on the album, and manages to sound both ominous and distinterested at the same time: Moreno’s typically oblique lyrics appear to suggest a distinterest in a relationship that isn’t going anywhere, while Stephen Carpenter’s chugging, incessant riffs add a threatening sound to the track, a tension that never fully resolves (and indeed doesn’t on the album for a good few tracks into it).

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/Buzzcocks
/Boredom
/Spiral Scratch

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A song from one of the most important singles ever released – one of the first punk singles, but more importantly, one of the first independently released singles, proving to legions of others that you could, indeed, do it yourself.

Boredom is kinda a call to arms: a band determined to pull themselves out of a funk and to make something what was in front of them, rather than waiting for others to do it for them. It was also a pointer to the mindset of Howard Devoto, who had already tired of the band and swiftly formed post-punk pioneers Magazine, and is the archetype of an artist that never stayed still.

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/Nine Inch Nails
/Every Day Is Exactly The Same
/With Teeth

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With Teeth was the big NIN comeback, six years on from The Fragile, and a newly sober Trent Reznor entering a new era. Personally I think Year Zero that followed it is a vastly better album, but With Teeth has its moments still. Every Day Is Exactly The Same is a deeply reflective song, full of sadness as Reznor reflects on a period when his addictions clouded his love of life and his loved ones wondered whether he’d make it through, and those addictions just made each day follow the same pattern.

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/Iggy Pop
/I’m Bored
/New Values

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Iggy Pop turns 79 in April, and as I write this, he is still touring, still broadcasting, and even still making new music, with an energy that shames people half his age (anyone who’s seen his manic live shows will attest – and if you haven’t, listen to the legendary Henry Rollins skit about trying to keep up with him).

Back in 1979, Iggy released his third solo album (and the first without Bowie’s involvement), and on I’m Bored in particular, he leans into New Wave with a stark rhythm pattern that fizzes with pensive energy, as if Iggy is tired of being tied down with the boredom of making music and would much rather just be unleashing hell onstage. Indeed, rather than the video for the song, watch any live performance of it…

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/Depeche Mode
/Something to Do
/Some Great Reward

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Funnily enough, this is another track where the live version (in this case from 101) is better than the studio version. A song that makes clear nods to German music of the time (DAF and Die Krupps in particular, and I’ve seen suggestions that it cribs from the latter’s Goldfinger, which I can hear in the pulsating rhythm), Martin Gore here is trying to alleviate a quiet, dull day, by suggesting sex and wearing each other’s clothes…

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/Green Day
/Longview
/Dookie

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Green Day waited a while for success. The origins of the band came about when they were teenagers, and they’d already been a going concern (only taking the Green Day name in 1989) for seven years by the time Dookie exploded into the mainstream.

Longview is all about the delivery. Billie Joe Armstrong spits out his disgust at his nothing life, blankly watching the TV for background noise, lounging on the sofa because there’s nothing else to do, and the kicker being that masturbation isn’t even fun any more. The song comes to life in the explosive, out-of-nowhere chorus, as he unleashes all that frustration and boredom at once. No wonder it sold so many – a great many teenagers were, at the time, clearly feeling the same way.

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/XTC
/Day In Day Out
/Drums And Wires

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XTC were a band who were very much a product of place: coming from the town of Swindon, best known as a railway town on the way to the west and Wales, and the butt of jokes about dull towns, and a great many of their songs were about escape and doing better, or about the terrible people that inhabited such towns.

Which makes the bass-heavy rumble of Day In Day Out stand out. While the single from the same album Making Plans for Nigel was about parents setting out a life for their son, Day In Day Out looks at the drudgery of the day job, clock-watching and hoping that Friday comes really fucking soon.

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/New Model Army
/Smalltown England
/Vengeance

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Did you grow up in a small(er) town, perhaps in the North? Did you stand out as different to the “normal” people who conformed, and sneered at those that weren’t? This early song by New Model Army will probably resonate, then, as they kick back at conformity and the boredom that results of being the same as everyone else. Listening to it, too, I can’t help but think that Where’s Me Jumper? cribbed pretty much everything from this…

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/Stereophonics
/More Life In A Tramp’s VestMore Life In A Tramp’s Vest
/Word Gets Around

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Like most of the best songs on the Stereophonics debut album, Kelly Jones’ inspirations and lyrics came from his life in the Valleys of South Wales, in an era where the region was suffering from mass job losses as the coal mining industry closed down and a fair amount of other industry went with it. Thus, a number of the songs had bleak subjects, but what made them so enjoyable was how Jones injected some dark humour into his observations, bringing them vividly to life.

And, thus, More Life In A Tramp’s Vest fizzes with the frustration of being stuck, in this case, of Aberdare market in South Wales, as much of the rest of the town shuts down and kills off footfall ever more: the town peaked at a population of nearly 54,000 in 1911, and by 2011 was just under 30,000.

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/Blood Red Shoes
/It’s Getting Boring By The Sea
/Box of Secrets

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Blood Red Shoes are a duo from Brighton, and the energetic, garage rock of this song burns with the desire of people that are done with the town that they live in, and want to go and explore somewhere else.

We’ve been down by the sea for nearly five years, and while sometimes I still miss the buzz of London – and that, yes, sometimes it can be a bit quiet down here – now we’ve bought a house and are fully settled, I’m certainly not remotely bored of our new home.

And weirdly enough, this week’s /Tuesday Ten was anything but boring to write.