This one kinda picks up where we left off two weeks ago – but with a bit of a different angle.

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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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Like /Tuesday Ten /636 about rumours, this one is also about secondhand comments, but in the case of this week, it’s about what He Said and/or She Said. What the other says in a conversation or altercation, and a case of twisting the words and potentially putting words in the other’s mouth(s).

So this isn’t an especially positive or happy post, sadly. But there was a great set of suggestions, and reducing it to just ten songs was much harder than I thought it might be. Thanks to everyone who suggested songs and got my brain working overtime.

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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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/CHVRCHES
/He Said She Said
/Screen Violence

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The fourth album from CHVRCHES dropped in 2021, with a distinctly darker, angrier sound inspired by the personal experiences of the band, particular Lauren Mayberry’s as she received abusive messages and even death threats by being an “outspoken” woman fronting a band that was unafraid to call out such behaviour. The scorching lead single He Said She Said rather set the stall out, as Mayberry sketches out a gaslighting, threatening partner from a woman’s perspective, and the mental anguish and constant threat of escalation feels as exhausting as it must feel to the victims.

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/Delilah Bon
/I Don’t Listen To You

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Equally furious – if not more so – is the first song by Delilah Bon that I heard: a two-minute rager that reminds that men should not be trying to control every element of a woman’s life. Be that – as the song opens with – “So he told me to change my top right / He said it was too revealing” to treating other women as property, or continually making decisions about women’s right to choose, or simply being sexist cunts.

Not for the first time do I have to say this, just a bit louder: their body, their choice. It’s not hard.

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/PJ Harvey
/Sheela-Na-Gig
/Dry

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Also angry – although PJ Harvey has long played that element of the song down, interestingly – is one of PJ Harvey’s greatest and most recognisable early songs, that uses the Sheela na gig architectural grotesque as a starting point for a song about the things men might say about women within a relationship. The Sheela na gig has exaggerated features – particularly an exaggerated vulva, and are generally found over doors or windows of religious buildings to keep evil spirits away.

In this song, though, Harvey’s protagonist describes her own exaggerated body, to find their partner offering (unwanted and) unwelcome opinions on their body and their actions, as if daring to be womanly and desirable is actually unattractive…

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/Republica
/Ready to Go
/Republica

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The rip-roaring single that saw Republica go from the latest indie-rock chancers to being known across the world, and at sporting events forever more, Ready to Go remains an irresistible banger. Here, the “He said” comes from a partner unwilling to engage and do much, instead staying indoors and hiding from responsibility, while Saffron is shouting from the rooftops that they are ready and willing to take on the world.

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/Pearl Jam
/Alive
/Ten

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The breakthrough single for grunge band Pearl Jam – and to a point something of a millstone around their neck for many years – but like many of their earlier songs in particular, it has a dark, complex heart that is much more than just the popular refrain of “I’m still alive“. The whole song is a partially fictionalised take on what vocalist Eddie Vedder had to deal with as a teenager: that he learned from his mother that the man he thought was his father was only actually his step-father, his biological father having died at some point previously. The seemingly casual way that the mother delivers the devastating news leaves the son questioning whether still being alive is a blessing or a curse.

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/The God Machine
/She Said
/Scenes from the Second Storey

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A rare chance to feature The God Machine – one of those bands that were framed by tragedy, and were active for all-too-short a time (I talk more about their difficult and short existence on /Tuesday Ten /546).

She Said is something of an outlier on the sprawling, 78 minute debut album Scenes from the Second Storey, in barrelling through at a much faster tempo than most of the tracks around it, as the protagonist faces the wrath of a disillusioned partner, sick of being let down and being burdened with the mental effort of keeping things going: and the only responses are protestations rather than any attempt to make amends or admit they were wrong.

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/Sunshot
/She Says
/Caughtintheactofenjoyingourselves

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Interestingly this long-obscure band have been featured in this series before (on one of the earliest reader takeovers, /216 /Unsung), and of their former members, Toby Bricheno has since written the theme for the Jeremy Kyle show (his brother Tim Bricheno has been in All About Eve, The Mission and The Sisters of Mercy at various points).

But Sunshot were a million miles from daytime TV: their sound was a thundering, bass-heavy, shoegaze-adjacent sound that perhaps owes more to Curve than anyone else. For me, their best song was this overdrive of a song, that roars out of the speakers like a bulldozer, with Maria Brannigan’s vocals floating on top as she seemingly spins a tale of a woman failing to take control of her life.

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/Underworld
/Confusion The Waitress
/second toughest in the infants

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Almost every line on Confusion the Waitress begins “she said”, a collection of observations of someone, or many people: Karl Hyde is known to scribble down snippets of conversation he overhears, interesting phrases and words, and reassemble them into streams of consciousness, and here it feels like Hyde has pulled together an imagined set of interactions with partner(s) or people he interacts with: there are exclamations of frustration, of inspiration, of exaggeration, of instruction. In some respects, everyday life through the eyes of others…

Second Toughest In The Infants, by the way, turned thirty this spring, and it remains one of the greatest electronic albums of the era, a fearless exploration of electronic realms that – somehow – never gets bogged down in one idea. And there’s a whole lot of it to get through, too…

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/Suede
/He’s Dead
/Sci-Fi Lullabies

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Like many early Suede B-Sides, it beggars belief that this song was tossed away initially into obscurity – although like many of those songs, it was a regularly played live track (as the YouTube link I’ve included shows), and was later included on the extraordinary Sci-Fi Lullabies B-sides collection – as I’ve noted before, an album easily the equal of all of their first three albums, and perhaps even better.

A sweeping, dramatic song dominated by some of Bernard Butler’s greatest guitar work, and a line that pretty much describes Suede’s early outlook and lyrical themes (“He said I had the luck of a son / With all the love and poison of London“), it is a dark, grimy world that they are peering into here, the darkness and squalor of those trying to get by in a city that doesn’t want them.

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/Cubanate
/9:59
/Interference

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One of the sometimes overlooked tracks from the fourth Cubanate album, where Marc and Phil leaned heavily into breakbeats and world-consuming levels of bass, 9:59 appears to be a story of an encounter, with Marc’s vocals over a stop-start, backmasked synth pattern that, when we get to the reality of the troubled soul that the protagonist has met, explodes into a ripping drum’n’bass vortex. “She said” echoes across the chorus as her proclamations are revealed, and suddenly, perhaps, you want to back away…