Public Enemy – “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” It’s about love, death, god and the dark things in our life we daren’t confront – the rush of words delivered with riveting understatement. The result was a feverish delving into familial angst, framed by a prism of nightmarish hallucination. “Father Lucifer” was further inspired by visions she had received while taking peyote with a South American shaman. The daughter of a strict baptist preacher, Amos’s daddy issues were a reoccurring theme of her writing. “He says he reckons I’m a watercolour stain/ He says I run and then I run from him and then I run/ He didn’t see me watching from the aeroplane/ He wiped a tear and then he threw away our apple seed.” Thus the portents of the song do not require deep scrutiny, as lust and yearning are blended into one of the most combustible cocktails in mainstream rock. Springsteen was at that time engaged to actress/model Julianne Phillips, though he had already experienced a connection to his future wife Patti Scialfa, recently joined E-Street Band backing singer. It’s the delivery, husky, hokey, all-believing that brings them to life.Īnd he has never written more perfectly couched verse than this tone poem about forbidden desire from 1984’s “Born in the USA”. Written down, Springsteen lyrics can – stops to ensure reinforced steel helmet is strapped on – read like a fever-dream Bud Light commercial. “At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet/ And a freight train running through the/ Middle of my head / Only you can cool my desire.” True, the lyrics spew and coo and, written down, resemble something Robbie Williams might croon on his way back from the tattoo parlour (“And I don’t believe in the existence of angels/ But looking at you I wonder if that’s true”).
But though Cave had worn his heart on his sleeve previously (the “Ship Song” etc) it was on the standout from Boatman’s Call that he finally felt able to stand unadorned before the world. “I don’t believe in an interventionist God/ But I know, darling, that you do/ But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him/ Not to intervene when it came to you.”Ī gooey love song from pop’s very own fire and brimstone preacher man seemed a contradiction in terms. The way Peter’s father is compared to such a vivid childhood memory is a perfect, haunting testimony to the ways we are affected by loss as adults. So you have “Cloudbusting”, about the relationship between psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and his son, Peter, the latter of whom Bush inhabits with disarming tenderness. But he and Barât – and the rest of us – would always have “Can’t Stand Me Now”, a laundry list of petty betrayals that gets you right in the chest.įew artists use surrealism as successfully as Kate Bush – or draw inspiration from such unusual places.
Shortly afterwards, Doherty’s spiralling chemical habit would see him booted out of the group and he would become a national mascot for druggy excess – a sort of Danny Dyer with track marks along his arm. Has a breakup dirge ever stung so bitterly as when The Libertines duo counted the ways in which each had betrayed the other? The great pop bromance of our times came crashing down shortly after Carl Barât and Pete Doherty slung their arms around each others shoulders and delivered this incredible platonic love song. “An end fitting for the start/ You twist and tore our love apart.” “Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. Shortly beforehand he wrote to her his final farewell – a coda to the ballad that had come to define her in the wider world. She died three months before Cohen, in July 2016.
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