The world’s first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, was issued in the United Kingdom on 01-May 1840, 186 years ago this week. The Royal Mail, however, goes back a whole lot further: Henry VIII created the “Master of the Posts” in 1516, while Charles I made the postal service available to the public in 1635 (and interestingly, the recipient paid for the postage initially), but it was effectively a privately-provided service, and it took until 1660 – and a number of providers, and, of course, a Civil War – before the General Post Office was established.

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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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The number of letters sent in the UK is declining quickly: In 2024 6.6 billion letters were sent, and twenty years before that it was 20 billion letters a year. Obviously the ubiquity of electronic communication is most of the reason for this.

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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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/Elvis Presley
/Return To Sender
/Girls! Girls! Girls!

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Not that it has a lot to do with the film that it features in (Girls! Girls! Girls!), but this song was a big hit – and indeed the Christmas Number One in the UK in 1962 – as Elvis sang a lament about a lady who simply rejects his advances by rejecting the letters that he sends. As anyone who’s moved into a house without any forwarding address for the previous occupants will know, you write a lot of return to sender on post that arrives.

Interestingly, too, the song refers to postal zones, that were introduced in US cities across the first half of the twentieth century, but just months after this song was released they were obsolete, as the familiar ZIP Codes were introduced on 01-Jul 1963…

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/Robert Plant and Alison Krauss
/Please Read The Letter
/Raising Sand

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Originally a Page and Plant song from 1998, this version blows away the original, from a collaboration that surprised many and worked better than anyone could have hoped. Krauss offers a chink of light to the song in her vocals, smoothing the edges of the bitter regret that Plant’s vocals deliver. A song about a letter that may or not ever be read: a letter left on a door that is presumably an apology and admission of guilt, aiming for forgiveness without any expectation that it will ever happen.

I’ve been told a number of times that sometimes, it’s better to write thoughts down, even if you never send them. At least it might offer a bit of closure.

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/Allan Sherman
/Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! (A Letter from Camp)
/My Son, The Nut

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My wife was very surprised to find that I was previously unaware of this song – or at least, if I’d heard it when I was a kid, I’d forgotten about it – as it’s exactly the type of comedy that I’d heard from my dad when I was growing up. Allan Sherman’s song is recounting a young boy at summer camp, and things aren’t going well. The letter recounts the tricks other kids play, the terrible rain, the poison ivy, the wildlife, and everything that might scare the living daylights out of the kids. But things do get better: the rain stops, and suddenly, all is right with the world…

It even made it into the Simpsons as a Bart-led prank when Lisa is a summer camp…

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/The Lottery Winners
/Letter To Myself (feat. Frank Turner)
/Anxiety Replacement Therapy

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Having seen The Lottery Winners live a couple of times supporting Frank Turner, vocalist Thom Rylance is one of those who unapologetically wears his heart on his sleeve. He and his band have worked bloody hard for success – which has culminated in their last two albums going to Number One in the UK, some reward after years of toiling away in obscurity, being finally discovered a decade after they formed.

One of their most notable songs live is the powerful Letter To Myself, as Rylance writes a letter to his twelve-year-old self in Leigh, where he was clearly struggling with self-image, loneliness and a lack of direction. The song becomes a remarkable pick-me-up, telling him to stick to his guns and believe in himself, as things will get better. I’ve sometimes wished I did something similar myself, as there was certainly a few things I should have told myself back then…

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/Shelter
/Letter to a Friend
/Mantra

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A band I’d not thought of for many years is Shelter, the Hare Krishna hardcore band formed by Ray Cappo, the vocalist of the trailblazing Youth of Today. The thoughtful Letter to a Friend comes from their best-known album, 1995’s Mantra, and deals with the way people drift apart. Here, the two friends were tight since school, with the same beliefs and desires, but at some point, one of them moved on, changed their outlook, and left the reactionary, alternative world behind. I’ve certainly seen a number of friends do so, moving on from metal and goth scenes as other things took precedence, like jobs and family – and some of those people move to diametrically opposed political positions, too.

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/Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
/Messages
/Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

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A song instantly recognisable thanks to that synth motif that repeats through the entire song, this early OMD song, like most of their best, sounds like it has barely aged in 46 years, something that couldn’t be said for many of their peers. Messages is a strikingly bleak song, that could be seen in some respects as a counterpoint to Please Read The Letter featured earlier: here the protagonist wants to leave the past behind, and is instead bombarded by letters that they simply burn rather than read.

While the striking opening line remains a brilliant bit of writing, it’s a point later in the song I particularly love: “…memories are uncertain friends / When recalled by messages“.

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/XTC
/Dear God
/Skylarking

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One of the few songs I didn’t hear when I saw the marvellous EXTC show the other month – but that’s perhaps to be expected. Their unexpected breakthrough in the US – picked up by college radio as a standalone single, and swiftly added to the majestic Skylarking to help the album – sees Andy Partridge narrating a letter to a deity as he questions exactly what benefits religion brings, when all he sees is war, suffering, disharmony and poverty, that steadily builds in anger and drama in the delivery.

Needless to say, the success brought the kind of controversy money cannot buy when promoting music, although things went a bit far with death threats and hostage situations that the band were unsurprisingly horrified to see.

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/Saxon
/Princess of the Night
/Denim and Leather

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Amid the, well, denim and leather of Saxon’s mighty early material, there lies a song celebrating the age of steam, and mail. Apparently a tribute to the LMS Princess Royal Class steam locomotives of 1933 that hauled the Royal Scot from London Euston to Glasgow, here Biff Byford references the trains delivering mail from one end of the country to another, which by this point would have been a job for the Travelling Post Office, a service which remarkably is as old as the first passenger railways (which were instructed to carry mail from the very beginning, an amazing piece of foresight), but ended in the 1990s, and while the Royal Mail continued to run trains to specifically carry mail, even those ended in 2024.

There are other pieces about the carriage of mail by railway – W.H. Auden’s legendary Night Mail, later used by Public Service Broadcasting for the track of the same name, and has been used in this series before, which is why it doesn’t feature this week.

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/The Monks
/P.O. Box 3291
/Hamburg Recordings 1967

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The concept of a P.O. Box varies from country to country. In the UK, it’s a method of delivery that allows the recipient to mask their actual address and have mail held centrally by the Royal Mail for collection (or simply to allow a centralised collection point if they are regularly away), and is used by some businesses too. In the US, they are actual, locked boxes in a room that the recipient will have a key to access and collect their mail.

The Monks were not your average band in the late 1960s. Five American GIs stationed in West Germany, bored of their military service and distinctly Anti-Vietnam, they created a proto-punk sound and a striking image: in black habits and wearing cinctures, complete with tonsure haircuts too. Being so far from home, too, must have been difficult for communication, waiting days or weeks for letters to be responded to, and having no idea whether your letter made it through, as this later-period song by the band makes clear.

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/Mansun
/An Open Letter To The Lyrical Trainspotter
/Attack of the Grey Lantern

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One of two songs written as letters on this still-remarkable debut, vaguely concept, album – the other being Stripper Vicar – this track first appeared as one of the B-Sides to Stripper Vicar on the Three EP, and then appeared again as a secret track on the album. An Open Letter To The Lyrical Trainspotter is, as the title suggests, poking fun a bit at obsessive fans who look for meaning in everything – something that Mansun attracted quickly, such was the rich detail in their earlier songs, and frankly the chaotic, sprawling follow-up Six only made that worse.