Sometimes, I suggest a subject and get buried in suggestions, and this week was one of those.

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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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In some ways, it follows on from /Tuesday Ten /639 last week, which was about contradiction. This one features twenty songs, in pairs, that are songs on the same subject but from differing viewpoints. Some are perhaps a little more obtuse in their links than others, but they all work.

Thanks to everyone who came up with a great list of songs. Certain obvious pairings didn’t make it, because one or both songs had been used before: particularly the pairing of Dua Lipa’s New Rules and Olivia Rodrigo’s bad idea, right?, two songs about fucking your ex – one a warning not to do so, the other going “fuck it, it’s fine”…

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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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/The Weather Girls
/It’s Raining Men
/Success

/Drowning Pool
/Bodies
/Sinner

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Sometimes, ideas come from the strangest places. Such as this week, where the idea for this post came about from a suggestion online that the best known songs from both The Weather Girls and Drowning Pool are both songs about the same event, but from different perspectives.

It kinda checks out. The Weather Girls, on the lookout for a man, are overjoyed in their camp disco classic that wherever they are is literally raining men, and they have so much choice to enjoy. Drowning Pool, however, see this as an apocalyptic event, the raining bodies set to cause much physical and emotional damage…

What’s even more concerning? A mash-up exists (also featuring Slayer and The Count) that works surprisingly well..

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/The Troggs
/Love Is All Around
/Cellophane

/Anti-Nowhere League
/I Hate People
/We Are…The League

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Interestingly, this week features a number of songs that have been covered by other artists, usually with greater success. The Troggs are one of those bands, best known for the stomp of Wild Thing, and the saccharine-sweet love-fest of Love Is All Around. The latter song is one of those songs that embodies the hippy-era of the late-60s, and was later covered by Wet Wet Wet, spending fifteen eternal weeks at Number One across the entire summer of 1994.

You couldn’t get much further removed than that love-in, than with Tunbridge Wells punks Anti-Nowhere League. They gained infamy thanks to the mighty, nihilistic Fuck You of So What (later covered by Metallica, of course), but I Hate People is more appropriate today: Animal fucking hates you, you, and especially you, and the world appears to think it’s mutual.

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/Grandmaster Melle Mel
/White Lines (Don’t Do It)

/JJ Cale
/Cocaine
/Troubadour

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Drugs appear a lot in popular music, perhaps unsurprisingly, and there are a great many songs that are particularly direct on the subject. One of the most iconic is early hip-hop track White Lines (Don’t Do It) from 1983, originally credited to Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel, but correctly it’s a Melle Mel track. A seething take-down of drug culture and establishment attitudes – and particularly the hypocrisy in the tacit approval of rich white men taking it, and the condemnation of young black men dealing it – it remains one of the greatest anti-drug tracks ever written.

A very, very different view comes from Tulsa Sound originator JJ Cale, who wrote a song that superficially appears to be a celebration of the drug, but closer examination shows it to be a look at the ways drug users might use it as an excuse for their failings in life. JJ Cale’s track is probably better known by the cover version from Eric Clapton, but I refuse to feature a song by that racist shitbag here (he might have tentatively supported the Palestinians more recently, but he has a history of not-so-great comments on the subject of race), so JJ Cale gets the credit he deserves instead. Clapton, of course, was a heavy drug user for many years, so perhaps knew what he was talking about too – he was sober and drug-free from 1982 onwards.

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/Van Halen
/Jump
/1984

/James
/Sit Down
/Gold Mother

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Songs about inspiration and pushing yourself couldn’t perhaps be more different than these two songs, that were written at either end of the 1980s.

Van Halen’s song was a huge hit, although thanks to the reliance on a keyboard riff, was initially rejected by the other members of the band. Sanity prevailed thanks to a producer on their next album, and quickly David Lee Roth and his bandmates began to see what Eddie Van Halen was aiming at. The song is a big, brash song, the kind of song that suits Roth’s more-is-more vocals so well, and is the kind of song that impels you to get up in the morning.

Tim Booth was instead inspired by his love of author Doris Lessing, and the realisation that in his introversion in his younger years, was not alone. Sit Down is a slightly hippyish, misty-eyed wish for everyone like him to come together and sing and love, the people who’d likely never listen to Van Halen – but like Jump, it remains a radio and cultural fixture that long since outgrew the band.

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/Eurythmics
/Here Comes The Rain Again
/Touch

/Zoë
/Sunshine On A Rainy Day
/Scarlet Red and Blue

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, with the British preoccupation with the weather, that there are a lot of songs about the rain. The obvious choice would have been that Travis song, but I’ve used that before, so I’m digging further into the past, in fact to 1984 and one of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart’s greatest, most melancholic songs. A song that feels like a metaphor for the onset of depression, as if the dark clouds building on the horizon and driving the rain your way are a harbinger of doom.

On Zoë’s one-hit wonder from 1991, she saw the rain very differently. Here the glum weather is used as a metaphor for missing their beloved, who when they return is like the sun parting the clouds and brightening everything. And in the changeable weather we’ve had lately, that blast of sunshine once the rain passes is glorious. This song remains catchy as fuck, too…

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/Bonnie Tyler
/Holding Out For A Hero
/Secret Dreams and Forbidden Fire

/The Stranglers
/No More Heroes
/No More Heroes

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Not for the first time recently, Jim Steinman’s mega-bombast features again this week, this time with Welsh songstress Bonnie Tyler, whose dramatic, powerful voice was a perfect foil for the kitchen-sink production behind her. It is easy to forget that this song was originally written for the film Footloose, but long transcended that – as Tyler howls in the night for a hero to sweep her away from her mundane life.

Bonnie Tyler, incidentally, has recently been very unwell in hospital, and remains in intensive care as I write this.

A few years before, in the earlier days of the punk era, The Stranglers didn’t want more heroes. Hugh Cornwell was adamant on this front, and this bleak song reminds that many “folk heroes” end up with difficult or unpleasant ends, and rather than looking up to others, The Stranglers wanted their fans to become their own heroes, or better versions of themselves. A world away from Tyler and Steinman’s fantasy world…

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/Chesney Hawkes
/The One and Only

/Katatonia
/I Am Nothing
/Tonight’s Decision

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You might not recall the film Buddy’s Song, where a young boy aims to make it as a pop star, with the assistance/hindrance of his father (played by Roger Daltrey). But you will remember the person who played that young man, and one song from it: The One and Only. A song of self-belief and aided by the kind of monster chorus that screams “Hit!” from the first time it was heard, it was a surprise Number One in the UK and reached the Billboard Top Ten in the US, too.

Fun fact, by the way: a young, pre-red hair Saffron (Republica) plays the girl enticed into the backrooms of the cinema by Chesney Hawkes in the video….

Jonas Renske has no such confidence in himself, as his songs over thirty years or more as frontman of Swedish doomsters Katatonia has long proved. And on I Am Nothing, from the album, broadly, where they adopted the clean vocals and sound most are familiar with – it is a song of trying to be as small and as unnoticed as possible, as if he doesn’t want the world to know how awful and disconnected he feels, and it sounds appalling bleak.

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/Chuck Berry
/Roll Over Beethoven

/Falco
/Rock Me Amadeus
/Falco 3

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When rock’n’roll exploded into the world in the 1950s, it was very much a teen-led movement to begin with, as they rejected the music of their parents, which was often still based around classical music or jazz (and in some cases, blues). Chuck Berry was one of the pioneers of rock’n’roll, and certainly one of the biggest successes, and biggest influences to future artists: and on his mighty 1956 single Roll Over Beethoven, he’s already suggesting that rock’n’roll should be taken as seriously as the music that had come before. Seventy years on, the music that was once the upstart has become a key part of culture.

That’s not to say classical music has no influence. In 1984, Amadeus, a film dramatizing and partly-imagining the rivalry between Salieri and Mozart, was a critical and popular smash hit at the cinema. It inspired Vienna-based musician Johann Hölzel, by this point known as Falco, to dream up a wild, dance-pop-proto-hip-hop track – mostly in Austrian German – that celebrates the rock star of his day (Mozart was wildly popular in his lifetime) but also notes his lavish spending and quickly built-up debts.

The song remains the only German-language song to top the Billboard Hot 100, and it was a worldwide hit, but his drug and alcohol use stymied his career, and he died in a car crash in the Dominican Republic aged just 40.

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/Flowered Up
/Weekender

/Kingmaker
/Saturday’s Not What It Used To Be
/To Hell with Humdrum

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Not all rock stars want to party all night and all day, but baggy-era group Flowered Up were absolutely a group that did. Their defining statement remains the thirteen minute Weekender, a song that celebrates a life that is devoted to partying and having a great time, the title being a swipe at those that escape their humdrum working lives to just party at the weekend. In retrospect, the song is something of an unfocussed mess in many ways, but somehow hangs together. Sadly singer and frontman Liam Maher died of a heroin overdose in 2009.

Kingmaker were very much the opposite side of the coin, a snarling, sarcastic band from Kingston-Upon-Hull who were intelligent, sardonic and entirely out of step with the Britpop era that was looming just as they released their best album (Sleepwalking), and got into trouble with radio and their label for the furious, anti-everything Armchair Anarchist.

And strangely enough, frontman Loz Hardy didn’t really want to go out at the weekend, either. His friends have moved on, the music in the venues he goes to isn’t to his taste, and not for the first time, you get the feeling Hardy genuinely hated everyone. In the end, the feeling was somewhat mutual from the music press, and Kingmaker quietly disbanded. A new version of the band reformed in recent years, that does not feature Loz Hardy – he long since left the music business and made it clear he will never return, having apparently moved to China.

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/Indeep
/Last Night a DJ Saved My Life
/Last Night a DJ Saved My Life!

/Sophie Ellis-Bextor
/Murder on the Dancefloor
/Read My Lips

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The appalling, racist backlash to Disco music culminated in the 1979 Disco Demolition Derby at Comiskey Park in Chicago, led by Chicago DJ Steve Dahl. But disco didn’t die: the sounds continued to echo through popular music, and artists continued to release disco tunes, such as New York group Indeep – and just one listen to the song, you can tell that the work of Nile Rodgers and Bernie Edwards looms large. But this song isn’t about going to the disco: it’s about the power of the right song, as the protagonist hears a DJ on the radio playing the right song, at the right time, to empower them to make the right choices about their life.

70s and early 80s disco had something of a revival in the late 1990s, as a new generation discovered it, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, newly into a hugely successful pop career after her early start in indie band theaudience, was approached by Gregg Alexander (who had his own indie pop project in the New Radicals, but had moved into pop songwriting and production). The song he offered her was Murder on the Dancefloor, which once Ellis-Bextor got involved, turned into a sparkling, unstoppable disco homage that celebrates not the radio, but the power of the dancefloor – and the DJs that spin the tunes – to excite, inspire and escape normal life.