Following on from Red last week, we now move onto White.

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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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There was a lot of suggestions for this one (some time back, actually), and it turned out that a lot of songs about the colour white are actually…about drugs in some way or another. But there are a good number that aren’t, and this week’s ten are a mix of the two, including a couple of songs I’ve wanted to include for a long, long time, and was just waiting for the right subject to include them.

As always, thanks to everyone who 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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/Rosetta Stone
/Adrenaline
/An Eye For The Main Chance

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A good number of goth/industrial songs mention the “white light”, not least the ripping power of Enough by Gravity Kills – but I’d used that before, so it gave me the opportunity to feature a stone-cold Goth classic that instead mentions the “white line”… If you’ve ever been to a Goth club in your life, you will know this song: a dancefloor-bound, bass-led turbocharged monster of a track that ticks every fucking box that you’d ever want of such a track. Sure, it’s likely about getting binned on speed in the clubs (which, of course, mostly comes in a whiteish powder), but it makes the whole idea sound fantastic: and frankly, nails the adrenaline rush that you get. Ahem.

Incidentally, there was a group of us in the beer garden of the Little Angel in Whitby once. I want to say it was me, potentially Daisy, Tim Synister, Gadge, Joel and the much-missed Jez, and over the course of an afternoon and a steady succession of booze, we tried to identify the bands that were unequivocally “Goth”. Any suggestion that they weren’t from anyone, and they were off the list. After about four hours, Rosetta Stone stood alone as the only, truly Goth band. Make of that what you will.

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/The Velvet Underground
/White Light/White Heat
/White Light/White Heat

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Twenty-five years or so before Rosetta Stone, though, The Velvet Underground were among the first bands to talk openly about drug use in their songs, and the wild chaos of White Light/White Heat is a song that tries to describe the feeling and mental state as you intravenously inject amphetamines. A strangely bluesy, (relatively) slow-paced song when considering the subject, it is perhaps most important for the feel of it and the weird feel of the track, as if nothing is quite functioning as it should: particularly in the coda, where everything seems to fall apart of it’s own accord.

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/Pixies
/Into The White
/Here Comes Your Man EP

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Pixies were one of those bands whose B-sides were often as good as the singles and album tracks, and Into the White – a song that was tossed away as the B-side to Here Comes Your Man is one such track. One of the Kim Deal-led songs of the era, it seems to use the concept of white – and, perhaps, the blinding white of infinity – as a blank canvas that you can project your own meaning onto. Is it death, is it the eternity of space, is it drugs? Who fucking knows, but it is a fantastic, lesser-known Pixies track.

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/The Clash
/White Riot
/The Clash

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There are songs that aren’t using white as a metaphor for drugs this week, honest. Here’s one, where Joe Strummer seethes at the passiveness of the white working class in London. He wants them to rise up and fight back, fight for their rights against the police and Government in the same way that the black working class of the time were already doing (and did begin to improve their status, albeit at a slow pace and the racism of the Met never really went away as it should have done). The song is a sub-two minute call to arms that still sounds incendiary to this day.

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/Morphine
/Honey White
/Yes

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Somehow, and I don’t know how, I’ve never had the opportunity to feature probably Morphine’s best-known song in this series before now. Honey White is one of the few uptempo, “rock” tracks the band did, dominated by two things: Dana Colley’s saxophone(s), and Mark Sandman’s deep, emotive baritone vocals. It is also a song full of metaphor, mostly barely disguised ones about heroin use in the song, which spirals and coils like a snake constricting, as the abuse of the drug begins to take over the character Mark Sandman is singing about.

The tragic, early death of Sandman (of a heart attack, while onstage with Morphine) was later covered in the documentary film Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman Story, a fitting tribute to a unique musician.

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/Collide
/White Rabbit
/Chasing The Ghost

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Californian duo Collide have long been fascinating artists, and one of the things that makes them so is their long history of reinterpreting the songs of others – there is a litany of covers in their back catalogue, with two cover albums as well as a scattering of other tracks on earlier albums and remix albums. White Rabbit was the first of their covers that I heard, where they completely reimagine the Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane classic into an industrial/darkwave form, to spectacular effect.

The White Rabbit they are chasing, of course, is Lewis Carroll’s creation from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, and the song takes various elements of the story to create a headspinning, wild ride that neatly sums up the late sixties, in many years. Collide’s version keeps the melody, but goes harder and groovier, resulting in a much-loved take that holds up well over twenty-five years since release.

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/Live
/White, Discussion
/Throwing Copper

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Live were one of those bands in the early 1990s who benefitted enormously from so-called “Alternative Rock” gatecrashing the mainstream. While they’d already made waves prior to this point, their 1994 album Throwing Copper was a huge hit, selling millions and the singles from it were fixtures on MTV for years afterward. In many of their songs, Ed Kowalczyk was a vocalist who used his songs as a bloodletting, unleashing every moment of anger and rage in his life in the songs: but White, Discussion was another thing entirely.

A furious diatribe against (mostly white) activism that is light-touch and concentrates on talking about the problems face rather than actually doing something, and thus achieves nothing, it ruffled quite a few feathers at the time, perhaps because it was so on the nose.

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/Katy Perry
/Never Worn White
/Smile

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In many ways, this overwrought ballad from Katy Perry – about her making the choice to marry, it seems, after not making the leap previously – is rather irrelevant to my point, as the title is the important bit. I’ve barely worn white in decades. Not even suit shirts, where I’ve long worn black or darker colours as, plainly and simply, I don’t like wearing white shirts. None of my one-hundred-plus band T-shirts are white, either: again, they are black, various shades of grey or a handful of other darker colours.

White just ain’t my colour…

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/One Dove
/White Love (Radio Mix)
/Morning Dove White

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Another song I’ve always wanted to include but have never found the subject to do so, until now. One Dove are one of great forgotten acts of the early 1990s, a Scottish trio led by vocalist Dot Allison that released a sublime album of mellowed-out electronics that took from ambient, dub, blues and laid-back techno. Label interference scuppered the album – and forced changes to the songs to make it more “commercial”, and as a result neutering some of the songs, much to the disgust of the band who disbanded without ever releasing a second album.

White Love – probably their best known single – features three times on the album, in the ten minute Guitar Paradise Mix, the piano-based reprise, and then the four-minute single version, that sheds the guitars and prog persuasions of the longer version for a laser-focused track. A song seemingly celebrating the purity of love, it has long mystified me how this wasn’t a bigger hit (this didn’t even appear on Top of the Pops, while Breakdown did).

Ian Carmichael from the band has since added various videos and TV appearances to a playlist on YouTube, but sadly the album never got the kind of reissue that it deserved, one that might have gained it more popular attention, even in hindsight.

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/Mogwai
/White Noise
/Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

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Merriam-Webster define white noise as:
: a heterogeneous mixture of sound waves extending over a wide frequency range
compare pink noise
: a constant background noise
especially : one that drowns out other sounds
: meaningless or distracting commotion, hubbub, or chatter

Mogwai are past masters at playing music that can drown out everything else, as anyone who has experienced the band live can attest: but here, White Noise is one of their more restrained tracks, a relatively gentle swell of guitars and piano that roll through five minutes: no aural hurricanes here, but by the time of this album, the band had mostly tired of simply deafening everyone in all matter of different ways.

I’m one of those people that struggles to work without music in the background, using it like a white noise where I can concentrate on the work in hand without distraction. Especially useful when you’re working with large datasets and a lot of detail, as I often am…