your saturday song selection

Here's another not-quite-random selection of ten iTunes tunes for your amusement. I say "not quite" because in addition to waiting (as I did last time) for ten I liked to come up in a row (rather than, say, just picking the first ten), instead of the full 7500-song main playlist I used the cherry-picked 254-song playlist that gets synched onto my iPod shuffle for use in the car, which stacked the odds in my favour a bit. Other than that I didn't cheat. But how would you know? You'll just have to trust me.

• Sister Surround by The Soundtrack Of Our Lives. One of the unexpected delights of Glastonbury 2002 was seeing this lot play a rocking mid-afternoon set on the Sunday. You can't beat some retro guitar rock featuring a chubby bearded Swede in a kaftan.
• Mole From The Ministry by The Dukes Of Stratosphear. Cracking Strawberry Fields Forever/I Am The Walrus pastiche from XTC's cod-psychedelic alter egos. They had so much fun doing this that they eventually dispensed with the Dukes pseudonym altogether and just bunged out their next album (in similar vein) as XTC.
• Lump by The Presidents Of The United States Of America. Hey guys, I've got a great idea - you know how the song has this bit about a "boggy marsh" in line one? Yeah? Well, how about we do the video, like, in a swamp? Incidentally line two is "mud flowed up into Lump's pyjamas", and not "mud flowed up into Lump's vagina" as it sort of sounds like.
• Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker) by The Rolling Stones. That's five "Doo"'s, not four, not six; very important. One of the great forgotten Stones singles. Link is to a slightly ragged live version, but the original studio version has some great filthy wah-wah guitar on it.
• United States Of Whatever by Liam Lynch. One of the few novelty/comedy/satirical songs to actually be a) funny and b) a good tune. At barely a minute and a half it doesn't outstay its welcome either.
• Local Boy In The Photograph by the Stereophonics. Some bands do lots of interesting and diverse stuff, others plough a slightly narrower furrow with mixed results. You find with a lot of these that there's a point where they nailed it and that everything else is a slightly pale attempt to recreate that moment. What I'm getting at, in a roundabout sort of way, is that this is the only Stereophonics tune you will ever need.
• Bird Of Cuzco by Nina Nastasia. It's all been a bit ROCK so far, so let's kick back for a moment. This veers perilously close to Lisa Loeb territory and thus to making you want to stick a screwdriver in your ear, but just about pulls it off, mainly by the cunning device of actually having a tune.
• The Funeral by Band Of Horses. Link is to a slightly muddy live version from the Roskilde Festival in 2008 which stomps on the studio version's delicate quiet-loud-quiet-loud dynamic a bit; original is here. Some more top-quality beard action here, too.
  
• Is It Just Me? by The Darkness. Now here's another band you probably only need one or two songs by before it all gets a bit annoying. If you are going to only have one, though, forget I Believe In A Thing Called Love - this is the best Darkness song. Great sledgehammer Status Quo guitar riff, quite a neat lyric, and not too much pantomime falsetto squealing from Justin Hawkins, all the more impressively as this is from their second album which was apparently recorded in a positive avalanche of cocaine. Nice.
• Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. Lyrics schmyrics, sometimes only a ten-minute guitar solo will do. Apparently for the original studio recording George Clinton told guitarist Eddie Hazel to "play like your momma just died".
• Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole by Martha Wainwright. Let's switch off the amps again for a moment and reflect on what we've learnt. Erm....songs with swearing in them are cool? Yes. Yes they are.