Over the first weekend of July, the United States marked it’s Semiquincentennial – or 250th Anniversary since Independence. The celebrations of such have been rather muted, it seems, and perhaps with good reason with the current Administration, as it doesn’t really feel that the ideals that the USA is supposed to represent are being reflected right now.

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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 colours of the US flag – red, white and blue – are a colour combination that is used by a lot of other countries too, not least my own home country. World Population Review suggests there are 45 nation flags with red white and blue as the base. Which is nearly a quarter of the world’s nation states.

So this week begins a trilogy: /Tuesday Tens on the subject of red, white and blue. And it’s unlikely there will be much of a mention of specific countries, or indeed one of my favourite film trilogies either.

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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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/Peter Gabriel
/Red Rain
/So

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The thundering, oppressive opener to Peter Gabriel’s greatest album from 1986 is a song made from surprisingly few parts. Added to the basslines from Tony Levin and drumming from Jerry Marotta (who apparently recorded eight different takes to use), Stewart Copeland added the hi-hats, and aside from the synths, that’s about it.

Well, aside from Peter Gabriel, whose dramatic, powerful vocals are said to have been inspired by apocalyptic dreams of downpours of red liquids, and bearing in mind it was written in the mid-1980s, invokes the nightmarish scenarios of the time of nuclear apocalypse, acid rain and the AIDS epidemic. It still sounds astonishing even now, forty years on from when I first heard it, and the fact that So doesn’t sink under the weight of this track is testament to just how brilliant and visionary an album it is.

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/Chappell Roan
/Red Wine Supernova
/The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess

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Not the only song this week whose title plays on another song (this one is a playful take on Champagne Supernova, of course), it is a fun and raunchy song about the fizz of desire and attraction to a new partner that makes you want to do silly and outrageous things – and hopefully be exhausted and potentially hungover the next morning. The red wine here is likely a metaphor for dutch courage – and the early verses at least betray that tiny bit of nerves over how things will go – but later on, all nerves are forgotten as the song culminates in a glorious double-entendre (“I heard you like magic / I’ve got a wand and a rabbit“)…

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/KANGA
/Going Red
/KANGA

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The storming second track on KANGA’s still-exceptional debut album (ten years old this year, and my album of the year that year) is, like a number of her songs of that era, about the destructive nature of desire. Amid the electronic stomp of the rhythm, Kanga’s vocals swirl across the mix as they seem to detail a club hookup that spirals out control – the red being the loss of control and fierce desire – before the regret sets in later in the night, and a fight-or-flight nature bubbles to the surface…

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/The Beautiful South
/Old Red Eyes Is Back
/0898 Beautiful South

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Rather obviously riffing on the Sinatra album title, the dark humour of Paul Heaton and The Beautiful South takes this song in a very different direction to Ol’ Blue Eyes. A song about the bleak outcomes of alcoholism – something Paul Heaton had fought himself a few times over the years – it is self-deprecating and pretty vicious in the takedown of the alcoholic who won’t listen, won’t change and will likely kill himself.

My grandfather was an alcoholic – not that I knew it at the time when a child, but looking back, the half-bottle of Bells and a bottle of Lemonade finished off every evening should have been a clue. I’ve resolved a long time ago that I will not become what he was, a bitter, violent and unwell man. I drink, yes, but I know when to stop and never, ever drink if I’m driving that day.

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/Apoptygma Berzerk
/Deep Red
/7

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Apop’s breakthrough album 7 was thirty years old (!!!) a couple of months ago, a much-loved, much imitated darkwave-synthpop smash that had grandiose ideas and pulled most of them off (even if the notoriously litigious Carl Orff estate neutered the mighty Love Never Dies (Part 1) by forcing the removal of the dramatic samples). Deep Red is one of the shorter, most direct tracks on the album, a thundering electro-industrial monster that has a nasty edge. Perhaps inspired by the Dario Argento film of the same name, it is one of a number of songs in the wider genre that edges into the blurred lines between sex and violence, and the song has a snarl absent from many of Apop’s better known songs, that’s for sure.

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/Garbage
/Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go)
/beautifulgarbage

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I’ve followed Garbage since I first heard Vow back in 1995, and while not everything of theirs has landed with me since, they remain a fascinating, fiercely independent band that do what they want to do. The poppier, dance-remix-friendly beautifulgarbage was perhaps their first mistep, where the album was, to put it mildly, a bit hit and miss. Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go) was one of the hits, but very nearly didn’t happen as it was completed and added to the album at the last minute (and later saw a club hit from the Roger Sanchez remix).

It is a mighty sugar rush of a track, apparently celebrating the character JT LeRoy wrote about in the book The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things and particularly the idea that a trans person can be beautiful and sexually attractive as much as anyone else, and this character is capped off by the cherry red lipstick.

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/Agent Provocateur
/Red Tape
/Where the Wild Things Are

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Something of a forgotten supergroup of sorts – featuring Danny Saber (an LA DJ, producer and synth player) and the late Matthew Ashman of Bow Wow Wow (who died before they completed their only album), among others – they were very much of the mid-90s era, taking in electronics, snarling rock and a hit of industrial, too. Their best track was the ripping force of Red Tape, a song that hints at BDSM-power struggles amid the rumbling beats and squalls of guitars: and very much is not referring to the political term, where theoretical “red tape” ties up businesses in bureaucracy and stops them making more money.

I’d rather forgotten about the existence of this song until I was reminded of it in the suggestion thread: once upon a time, I owned this single on CD, although I suspect it long since vanished into the ether.

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/Minor Threat
/Seeing Red
/First Two 7″s

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A song from probably the most consequential hardcore release of all: Ian MacKaye and Minor Threat basically set the blueprint for US Hardcore in particular, and their first songs all had an awful lot to say in a very short timescale. Seeing Red is a minute of fury from MacKaye as he observes those outside of his lifestyle laughing and sneering at those that don’t conform to the norms of time. He’s seeing red as he wants to stand up and fight, but apparently decides to just simmer with anger instead, as he knows he has the high ground.

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/Sugababes
/Red Dress
/Taller in More Ways

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The early 2000s was a hell of an era for British Girl Groups, with Girls Aloud, Sugababes and Atomic Kitten all vying for chart hits (among others!). But while Girls Aloud managed to keep their lineup intact, the others had frequent changes – the Sugababes were always a three-piece, but had six different members over time and four different lineups. Red Dress came from their fourth album, and their third lineup (Keisha Buchanan, Amelle Berrabah and Heidi Range, being the first song since Mutya Buena departed), and is a simmering takedown on the male gaze and society expectations. The song itself is a smouldering, sharp-edged song – sampling Northern Soul, and unmistakably the chaotic, more-is-more production by Xenomania – that reminds that they don’t need to wear that spectacular dress and show skin just to be attractive – they can get their man on their own terms.

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/Arnocorps
/Red Sonja
/The Fantastic EP

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Finally this week, we turn to The Greatest Band of All Time (as they call themselves), the band fighting back against “Austroploitation” of the Austrian Folk Tales of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yes, that’s their schtick, and they are enormous fun, particularly live – unfortunately we’re going to miss this tour as we have a 50th birthday party to attend (indeed there were two at opposite ends of the country that had the option of the same night as the London gig…).

This swords-and-sorcery nonsense of a film (sorry, folk tale) sees Arnie up against Brigitte Nielsen, in a film set in the same universe as the Conan films: Sonja being red-haired, hence the name, and the Arnocorps take on it is a rare song in their canon that celebrates a female character as the lead.
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