Every Picture Tells A Story

That may be the case but it's not just pictures that tell stories. Today's five are what I've decided to call "story songs" (you can see the Herculean levels of creative effort that go on around here). Some would argue that any song with lyrics tells a story. There's one very simple counter to that: I give you No Limits by 2 Unlimted. OK, I'm being slightly facetious there but there are simply some songs that tell more of a story than others.

Everything I've chosen for today's five struck me as a perfectly formed window into a world the first time I heard them. They are impossible to treat as just background music. The lyrics draw you into the world being described and when you get to the end you feel as if you've just finished something literary. This doesn't mean the lyrics have to be florid or the words used somehow more advanced than the average song, far from it. To me these songs are all the work of people who've dedicated themselves to their craft and have treated the lyrics they write as an instrument of equal importance to any other in the band.

Arab Strap: The First Big Weekend



It would be easy to choose Arab Strap songs for all five today's as their music was essentially vignettes of love/hate, life and hedonism set to music. The First Big Weekend stands out among these for it's simple description of precisely that. Going by the football score mentioned it's the first big weekend in the summer of 1996 and I seem to recall it being a messy one in our part of the world too. Everyone's had a weekend like this and they are the best - the drudgery of Monday to Friday is forgotten about and time becomes irrelevant. You sleep when you're tired, drink when you want to and probably don't eat that much. Good times.

New Order: Love Vigilantes



New Order lyrics seem to fall into at least two distinct groups: wilfully elliptical or neatly clipped narratives. For me, Love Vigilantes is the best example of the latter. Three verses, a perfect chorus and a closing twist that predates The Sixth Sense by at least ten years - not bad for a song barely four minutes long.

The Streets: Dry Your Eyes



Like Arab Strap there are a multitude of Streets' songs that could be used here. Songs about breaking up are hardly new or innovative, hell, entire albums have been inspired by them. What makes Dry Your Eyes so special is the intricacy and detail of the lyrics - at points it's like reading actors' directions in a script. This all goes in the last verse though when the reality of the situation hits home and Mike Skinner almost descends into incoherent swearing.

Underworld: Ring Road



Karl Hyde seems often to write lyrics in the style of a loved up James Joyce (take Pearl's Girl for example - sounds fantastic but you're a liar if you say you've got the first notion what he's on about). However Ring Road is a fairly straightforward account of the England Hyde sees on a summer's day as it becomes the subject of the song. He's in there himself, "scratching all these things, inking it out."

Velvet Underground: Lady Godiva's Operation



Like many teenage boys I went through a phase of reading nothing but horror stories. Again like many teenagers, I discovered the Velvet Underground and music was never really the same again. Lady Godiva's Operation was the perfect union of these two teenage kicks - never before had I heard something so downright terrifying and I'm not sure I have since.