This week is – or is it? – about contradictions in song.

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Often these songs are about love, but politics and other issues do make it in too.

Thanks, as ever, to everyone who takes time to suggest 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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/Meat Loaf
/I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)
/Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell

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Amazingly, this is the first appearance for Meat Loaf in the series (how I don’t know).

Despite his massive success with the Bat Out of Hell trilogy of albums, and a slew of acting roles (most notably as Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show), it always felt that Meat Loaf had long periods away from the limelight. Indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Out_of_Hell_II:_Back_into_Hell was Meat Loaf’s first album in seven years, and the first time he’d worked with Jim Steinman in some time, too: but the work to get there was vindicated when I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) became a worldwide smash, selling millions as a single, number one in twenty-eight countries and a permanent fixture on radio and TV for months and months.

The Michael Bay-directed video – where the twelve-minute album version was cut down to (just!) eight minutes – probably also helped the success, as Meat Loaf played an amalgam of the Beast and the Phantom, but the typically Steinman, More-Is-More production also helped, as this gigantic song went full-bore in every way.

As for the contradictions? Everything he promises his lover (whose vocals are provided by then-little known singer Lorraine Crosby, who got no royalties for her performance, and was then replaced in the video by model Dana Patrick), he contradicts by saying “he won’t do that”…

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/Soft Cell
/Say Hello, Wave Goodbye
/Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret

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The dramatic closing song to Soft Cell’s legendary 1981 debut album is like a cabaret kiss-off, the closing song before they bring the house down. Dave Ball created a concoction of synths that burble along, while Marc Almond imbues his vocals with emotion and drama that belies lived experience with the subject. And that subject is heartbreak and loneliness, as they kick an unreliable, incompatible lover to the kerb, but not before the titular hook, a complete contradiction but we know what it means: say hello one last time before you fuck off.

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/Fugazi
/Shut The Door
/Repeater

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Fugazi were a band that were resolutely straight-edge – as per Ian Mackaye’s previous band Minor Threat, who popularised the term Straight Edge on their titular song – and it wasn’t unusual to see them make references to vices that might kill you. The terse roar of Shut The Door is one such song, where Mackaye obliquely references the contradiction of injecting your system with something that can kill you (in this case, heroin), for moments of pleasure. Perhaps for some, the risk is part of the high/buzz, but for others, there are lines to be drawn.

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/Alice In Chains
/Love Hate Love
/Facelift

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The opposite side of that Fugazi song, perhaps? Either way, the relatively short life of Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley was dominated by his struggles with heroin use (indeed he died from a speedball overdose in April 2002), and a large number of the songs that he wrote referenced the difficulties of his life. Love, Hate, Love is the brooding centrepiece of the album, a near-seven minute track where Staley accepts his life choices have made relationships unreliable and unpredictable, and that love and hate become the two states, with little inbetween. It is one of a few contenders for Staley’s greatest vocal performance, too.

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/Katy Perry
/Hot N Cold
/One of the Boys

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One of the many ubiquitous pop songs from the Max Martin hit factory over the past thirty years, and one of three monster hits written for Perry. And like every Max Martin hit, you’ll already be humming the chorus as soon as you read this. Hot N Cold is song bemoaning a lover that is all-too-often changing their point of view, being great with everything one moment, then being negative the next, and always contradicting themselves. The video, too – like many pop videos of the 2000s – is a hoot, as Perry has fun referencing a bunch of other videos and throwing down some great dance routines…

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/Placebo
/I Know
/Placebo

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A good number of the songs this week are the results of relationship breakdown, and this early Placebo song is another. Brian Molko wrote the song after everything crashed down on him in NYC, and the bitter, ever-changing anger of someone wronged shimmer through this song like an oppressive heat haze. He’s wrong, he’s right, even the amusing line about loving the band, but not the singer…

The upcoming Placebo Re:Created – out this Friday, in fact – should be an intriguing listen, as the band return to their oldest songs after three decades, and we return to songs that are like old friends, such is the length of time that we’ve grown up with them (I first saw Placebo live in late-1995).

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/Kittie
/Spit
/Spit

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Canadian Nu-Metal band Kittie went through a pretty torrid time as a band of young women in a male-dominated scene, and everything that happened and was written about them at the time has aged very badly indeed. Their rampaging debut album was at least in part fuelled by that sexism, even if too many men missed the message at the time.

The recent return of the band – including some re-recorded, new versions of some songs from Spit, the title track was of course included – has seemingly gained them a new, younger audience as well as some of the people from the first time around. Not least Poppy, who has experienced similar sexist attitudes and supercharged it even further. This mighty track, particularly, though, still resonates: a ripping clapback at male members of their local scene who all thought they would “suck”. Instead, they spat back in 143 seconds of grinding metal fury.

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/The Wildhearts
/Red Light – Green Light
/Red Light – Green Light

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The recent news that Ginger is battling Mantle Cell Lymphoma doesn’t appear to have slowed him down, going on their continuing touring and, by all accounts, pouring everything into their shows at the moment.

Ginger has of course had various other projects over the years, but keeps coming back to the Wildhearts (I think they are currently on their third reformation period?), perhaps wise bearing in mind how much love most British rock fans seem to have for the band.

1996 single Red Light – Green Light addresses that commitment to rock: as Ginger prevaricates between the contradiction of a normal life, and the rock’n’roll life, as if he knows that the latter is unsustainable (and doing both is never realistic). But clearly, it won over in the end, as it is what he knows and is best at. The “official video” for this is spectacularly cheap, too: a lightbulb that switches between red and green, and that’s that!

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/Erasure
/Love To Hate You
/Chorus

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Watching the chronological re-runs of Top of the Pops episodes across the 1980s and 1990s has reminded just how much of a fixture of the upper end of the pop charts Erasure were for so long. The combination of Andy Bell and Vince Clarke provided a remarkable sequence of excellent pop songs, often referring to the issues of gay men and their lives – some feat to be accepted into mainstream pop at the time of Section 28 and rampant homophobia – and the striking Love To Hate You was a hit in 1991. This is, once again, a song about a collapsing relationship, where the protagonist seems to despise the other as much as they love them, but can’t quite let go.

Incidentally, is that Leadenhall Market that they filmed the gig part of the video in?

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/A Perfect Circle
/The Contrarian
/Eat The Elephant

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Maynard James Keenan – the vocalist of Tool and A Perfect Circle – has long been a contrarian and a contradiction, uninterested in sticking to rock norms. Tool’s songs were always mired in detail and musical prowess, Keenan’s lyrics often requiring a lot of thought and listening to reveal meaning (and some seriously obtuse), while A Perfect Circle was more open and unguarded. This track, one of the best from the uneven Eat The Elephant, takes a pop at politicians who will say and promise anything to get votes, even if they utterly contradict what they’ve said before, or what they apparently believe in…