I conclude this run of posts on three colours with, of course, blue.

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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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Blue is often a colour associated with cold and sadness, and it is perhaps true that this week’s /Tuesday Ten has a downbeat, more subdued nature for the most part. But also, there are some uplifting moments, and a real variety of music once again.

Thanks, as ever, if you submit suggestions or just read the posts. There are just thirty to go in this series now before it ends next March (and I have almost all of the subjects now).

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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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/Johann Strauss II
/An der schönen blauen Donau

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Probably one of the most recognisable pieces of music anywhere, and one of the traditional encore pieces at the Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker in the Musikverein in Vienna, as befits its status as the unofficial national anthem of Austria. “The Waltz King”, as Johann Strauss II was known, naturally wrote a number of waltzes but none are on the level of this: a gorgeous, emotional piece of music that on New Year’s Day usually sets me up, ready to take on whatever the year is going to bring. In particular the most recent concert this year, where Yannick Nézet-Séguin as guest conductor seemed to be having more fun than everyone else, and brought a vitality to this year’s concert that I’d never seen before.

The Danube is one of Europe’s great rivers: flowing for nearly 3,000km, it begins in South-Western Germany before flowing through – or marking the border thereof – Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine before ending in the Black Sea. It goes through four national capitals, and has been a vitally important communications route for millenia.

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/Longpigs
/Blue Skies
/Mobile Home

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Sheffield band Longpigs – featuring one-time Cabaret Voltaire member Dee Boyle, and future minor superstar Richard Hawley – made quite the splash with their debut The Sun Is Often Out, and after a disastrous period trying to break America, their second album limped out in 1999 to a general shrug of the shoulders. Which was a crying shame, as the album was a bruised, dark and introspective album that had some real beauty to it – at least partly anchored by Crispin Hunt’s intense vocal delivery. Single Blue Skies saw Hunt trying to find some positivity in the summer sunshine as the world appears to fall apart around him.

Crispin Hunt never really seemed to be comfortable being a frontman, and like a good number of his peers (discussed back on /Tuesday Ten /488), became a pop songwriter for others (with some success, too).

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/Geneva
/Into the Blue
/Further

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Another of the fringe bands in the later years of Britpop – and another who deserved far more attention than they got – were Scottish band Geneva, who were fronted by Andrew Montgomery and whose extraordinary vocals made the band instantly recognisable. While many of their songs were more restrained and introspective, early single Into The Blue had a striking energy to it that gave itself a chance to build up a head of steam before bursting into a fantastic, melodic chorus: amid a bleak, dark tale of escaping your demons, or at least thinking “fuck it all” and leaving it all behind (“I could just disappear… into the blue“).

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/Electric Light Orchestra
/Mr. Blue Sky
/Out of the Blue

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This is a song that has been suggested twelve times (for seven different subjects) over the years, and so, as I begin the countdown to the end of this series with thirty /Tuesday Ten left, it is time to ensure I use up some of those oft-suggested songs.

Mr. Blue Sky is one of those songs that entered the popular consciousness and never really left. It crashes out of the speakers in the first seconds, with Jeff Lynne celebrating the arrival of a sunny day (it was written in the Swiss Alps, and the inspiration came when the clouds cleared after days of gloomy weathe), and admonishing the weather to not bring him down with the gloom again.

The video is worth watching, not least for the visual of the most hirsute band you will ever see, while this is one of at least six ELO songs with blue in the title, a nod perhaps to Lynne’s beloved hometown football team of Birmingham City?

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/Virgin Prunes
/Baby Turns Blue
/…If I Die, I Die

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Just five years separate the ELO song above and what is probably the best-known song by Dublin (post-)punks Virgin Prunes, but sonically they sound lifetimes apart. A song supercharged by disgust at the death of a friend from a heroin overdose – who was found having turned blue by the time of discovery, and the reaction from other people locally that refuse to see the drug addict in their midst as someone they should care about. A sharp, iconic song that despite the dark content, became something of an instant goth dancefloor filler in any club you’d attend.

Vocalist Gavin Friday, of course, has since become a noted solo, multi-disciplinary, artist in his own right, having recently toured again for the first time in many years (not to mention releasing his first album of new material in around fifteen years).

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/A Perfect Circle
/Blue
/Thirteenth Step

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After the striking immediateness and power of Mer de Noms – and such a change to hear Maynard James Keenan’s very different vocals and lyrical approach to his work in Tool – the second APC album took rather more work to get into. But certain songs endured, and for some reason, this song’s weary, resigned beauty stuck with me, and became a song that was something of a salve in a difficult time in the months after release.

Songs like this are frankly weird psychologically: you append your own meaning to them quickly, without really ever paying attention to what the song is actually about: which here, is approaching a similar subject to Baby Turns Blue, but here the death of someone close – even though it happens right in front of the protagonist – inspires total and utter denial, as if what’s happening isn’t real at all.

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/The Birthday Massacre
/Blue
/Violet

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Probably the first song I ever heard by The Birthday Massacre remains one of their darkest and heaviest. A grinding, rolling track that is dominated by two things: a meaty guitar riff and Chibi’s sweet vocals, which alternate to give a somewhat bi-polar, chaotic feel. It is rather obviously a song about psychological breakdown – some comments suggest it is based upon the plot of classic Japanese Anime Perfect Blue (something the band have perhaps wisely never confirmed). Either way, the song has the cold feel that the video neatly mirrors, with everything in shades of cold blue, not to mention those creepy fucking dolls…

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/Eiffel 65
/ Blue (Da Ba Dee)
/Europop

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There were, unsurprisingly, a few suggestions for this millennial dance-pop smash. A song built around a piano hook and nonsensical lyrical hooks that got into your brain from the first play and never let go – if you tell me you’re reading this and don’t have the chorus in your head immediately, you’re lying – it is also most likely the most blue song here. The lyrics are about a person whose headstate and every possession is blue – as is his girlfriend, apparently – and the word “blue” is said at least thirty times, with “da ba dee da ba di” repeated even more than that. Even the video is entirely blue.

Anyway, now I’ve got it in my head, you can too.

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/Cocteau Twins
/Blue Bell Knoll
/Blue Bell Knoll

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Even in their later years, the Cocteau Twins were an enigmatic group that while they fitted somewhere in the lineage of dreampop and shoegaze, stood apart thanks to their hazy, often (deliberately) unfocussed sound and, of course, Elizabeth Fraser’s unique vocals that were often barely decipherable and part of an alien sound to their music. Such is the baroque power of Blue Bell Knoll, release in 1988.

I’ve always associated – from my childhood down here – bluebells with Kent, and each Spring down in South-East Kent, we will usually make a visit to either Farthing Common on the Kent Downs, or a woodland further afield, to see the beautiful carpets of these delicate spring flowers.

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/CHVRCHES
/Clearest Blue
/Every Open Eye

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It quickly became clear – particularly when seeing the band live on this tour – that Clearest Blue was an almighty banger: but it is one of those tracks that makes you wait for the ecstatic payoff. Before that drop, Lauren Mayberry is turning herself inside out as she tries to wrestle some form of agency in a relationship that is walking a tightrope, and the beats and synths build like one’s heartrate increasing as you near something that you have to do.

Then, it suddenly explodes into life, decision made, and it sounds fucking euphoric as it turns into a club-destroying track. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it quickly became their live closer, and a decade on, it still is: how do you possibly top perfection like this?