Are they out to get you? Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. This week is a grab-bag of ten songs dripping with paranoia and nervousness, about what may or may not happen, and what is real and what is imagined.

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Being a difficult subject, perhaps, the number of suggestions was lower than usual, but frankly the quality was very high indeed, meaning that it was difficult to settle on a final ten.

As always, thanks 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 above).

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/Black Sabbath
/Paranoid
/Paranoid

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We begin with one of the greatest riffs ever put down: not bad for a song that was all but an afterthought, cobbled together in a matter of hours to add another track to an otherwise completed album. The entire band are locked in for this sub-three minute track, helping set the blueprint for quite a bit of rock that followed: you could play faster, and keep the track shorter, without losing any impact.

Ozzy’s vocals rumble on about a troubled soul who’s seemingly unable to enjoy anything or be happy, worrying about everything and paranoid that the worst is yet to come. Somehow, Ozzy got through everything, making it to the emotional final show in Birmingham last summer, dying aged 76 just weeks later, and Paranoid was, naturally, the final song of all.

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/Apoptygma Berzerk
/Paranoia
/Welcome To Earth

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An album that was very much of it’s time, but thanks to the sparkling production, in some ways doesn’t feel like it has aged a day: and for club-bound industrial/futurepoppers, this album contains no less than six stone-cold bangers that would all ignite the dancefloor (and in some cases, still can).

One of those songs is the eight-minute Paranoia, a song that ebbs and flows between driving verses, the soaring chorus and almost experimental interludes, but somehow it works gloriously. I’ve long seen it as Stephan Groth’s observations on a someone else’s mental collapse, and the hope that one day, they will return from their fractured mental state and see it all for what it was (the titular paranoia).

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/Nirvana
/Territorial Pissings
/Nevermind

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The scorching, furious opener to the second side of Nevermind is Kurt Cobain opening both barrels on establishment America, inspired by his despair at the treatment of Native Americans and women by successive Governments of his homeland, and such is it’s power, there’s a number of thrilling live performances of it recorded online for posterity – including their legendary appearance on the Jonathan Ross Show that I’ve featured on the YouTube playlist. They were introduced as playing Lithium, but decided instead to do this and trash their equipment at the end…

The most striking, and appropriate, line from the song is “Just because you’re paranoid / don’t mean they’re not after you”, which appears to have questions over the origin, as much of these sayings do. Often attributed to Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, or to Henry Kissinger, I suspect it goes a bit further back than that.

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/Harvey Danger
/Flagpole Sitta
/Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?

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Something of a riposte to the Alternative Boom of the nineties – which, of course, became a hit on MTV too, as these things did – was the debut single from Harvey Danger (and, frankly, the only song by them that most people will know). That said, it is an outstanding song, with a choppy anger to it that supercharges everything, particularly the snippy lyrics that tear into the idea of authenticity – complete with the “paranoia paranoia / everybody’s coming to get me” line that has this funny habit of sticking in your head, and perhaps directly references the Nirvana song above…

As for that strange title? Sean Nelson explained all with Stereogum in 2017 for the twentieth anniversary of it – also, that means this song is thirty years old next year. Sheesh.

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/Clawfinger
/Out to Get Me
/A Whole Lot of Nothing

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I saw Clawfinger on the tour for this album, on the celebrated first (large-scale) Rammstein show at Brixton Academy, and while the then-new material perhaps wasn’t quite up to the levels of the first two albums, it certainly had worthwhile moments. Such as this punkier-edged track, where Zak Tell leans into a general sense of paranoia where everyone is out to get him and fuck up his life. Quite who it is isn’t fully clear, but either way, he’s probably better out of their clutches. The video, filmed on a beach with some giant CGI creatures added later, is a bit of throwaway fun, too.

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/James
/Out To Get You
/Laid

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A song I’d perhaps forgotten about – other than some of their majestic singles, I’ve not listened to James in a while. Here, Tim Booth feels very small amid a cavernous mix that is more blank space than instrumentation, as he laments the loss of contact with someone, and fears that others will take them away from him – perhaps giving advice that he’s bad news, or that they should stay well away. It is, to these ears, the distinct paranoia that comes when you realise you’ve made a dreadful mistake, and others are going to find solutions and cut you out before you make it any worse.

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/Garbage
/I Think I’m Paranoid
/Version 2.0

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A long-time fan-favourite – and thus pretty much an ever-present track live, and I one I hope to hear again next month – and one of their greatest songs, it is one of a great many Shirley Manson lyrics that teeter between crushing self-doubt and a need for love and attention. Here, the push-pull is around the paranoia that the person that is providing that much-craved love is actually a manipulative bully, perhaps, but that self-doubt keeps pulling them back regardless.

Like a number of Garbage songs that uses elements of another song (all fully credited, unlike some), this one uses parts of Amen Corner’s Bend Me, Shape Me to build the chorus around.

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/Cyanotic
/(Paranoid) Disbelief
/Transhuman 2.0

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“Paranoia is a malfunction of the ability to reason. I can reason therefore I am not paranoid…”

So goes the sample as this stellar remix of Suspension of Disbelief takes flight: like many early Cyanotic songs, Sean Payne’s mental state is the focus of the song as he self-medicates and examines his own self and the interactions with others. Here, the onus is on the other party to improve themselves as they burn the world down around them, as he chooses to retreat from conflict as it only leads to more fires to put out. But then, the question comes: what if it really is me that’s the problem after all…?

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/Rockwell
/Somebody’s Watching Me
/Somebody’s Watching Me

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Talking about getting a leg-up to kickstart your career: Rockwell is the son of Motown CEO Berry Gordy, and his one massive hit had (uncredited, but obvious when you hear them) backing vocals from Michael Jackson. It is a song absolutely dripping with paranoia: Rockwell’s protagonist is spending his life looking over his shoulder, concerned that even behind closed doors at home, he’s being tracked and followed. The video makes the issues even clearer, as Rockwell stumbles around a world where he’s never left alone…or is he? Still a cracking song, too.

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/ABBA
/The Visitors
/The Visitors

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Just a few years before, the title track of the last ABBA album for forty years described a well-founded paranoia amid the depths of the Cold War. In the Soviet Union (and indeed in many other states behind the Iron Curtain, not least East Germany), rights were severely curtailed, with surveillance and free speech crackdowns common to protect the Soviet Union above all else. The song itself, like many later ABBA songs, is a world away from their astonishing, catchy pop music they are best known for, instead a jumpy, darker electropop song that is unsure of what the future holds.

Of course, state-snooping isn’t exactly going away, either, with the US recently confirming that any VISA (and potentially ESTA) applicants have to make their social media accounts public so that they can review it. That’s a no, thanks…