I’ve loved They Might Be Giants for such a long time, but it’s a peculiar kind of love. They are the loyal, cute and intelligent friend that I forget about from time to time, but when something reminds me of them, I have to seek them out instantly, nervously concerned that they won’t remember me. A quick search reveals that so much has changed in their lives – like a new album that I knew nothing about. I wonder how much they’ll have changed.

Then, of course, it turns out that they do remember me. And even though they’ve got more stories to tell, we easily fall into the same old conversations.

Oh, god, They Might Be Giants are my Cookie.

Anyway, people know the band for a lot of things that the band aren’t. It isn’t their fault, or the band’s, really. The closest they ever got to fame were with two songs that could easily be described as novelty hits, and that’s the sort of peculiar celebrity that can kill an otherwise long-lived group.

In fact, those two songs – “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Istanbul” – though characteristic of the band’s output musically, and a lot of fun, aren’t typical TMBG tracks, though Birdhouse comes close. If all of their output had that same crowd-pleasing infectious appeal, and that was all they had going for them, I would have loved them for the length of the glorious summer of 1990, but I don’t know if they’d still resonate with me as much as they do today.

The reason 1990 was glorious… and then horrible, was that that was the year when I went out with Jessie for two months. It was a strange relationship, in which our personalities seemed to gel as perfectly as is possible for two 18 year olds, but we never quite got the other stuff right – you know, the stuff that is generally easier for randy teenagers to get up to.

There’s a story there. Perhaps not a very interesting one to most. But inevitably I fucked it up. And then she started seeing someone jerky and Alpha male, and my Sixth Form experience broke in two. He used to sit on the school bus next to me – because we were both in the Sixth Form – and say things like:

Him: You got Jessie flowers once, didn’t you?
Me: Hurm. Yeh.
Him: Yeah, she really liked that. She mentioned it.
Me (suddenly attentive): Hm? Yeah?
Him: Oh, yeah. So I bought her some, and it really did the trick. HRR HRR. Thanks for that, mate!
Me: Meep.

That situation, ridiculous as it sounds, pretty much coloured my response to relationships until around my mid-20s. I was still a bit crazy about Jessie for years, and can picture her, though I can’t remember her surname. (I want to say “Spencer” or “Fletcher”, but neither of those can possible be right. Maybe “Simpson”? Hm, no). She is another one of those odd people that I’d actually like to meet on Facebook, but that never seem to surface.

Anyway, the first time Jessie and I really got close to each other – actually, maybe the first night we met, and certainly the first night we kissed – there was a lot of dancing. We were introduced by friends, and doin’ dancin’ at the Sixth Form disco Rugby Club, and danced close all night, though I figured that was just because we both wanted to dance to the same stuff. I mean, we danced with each other, not, y’know, “with” each other.

Anyway, “Birdhouse In Your Soul” was playing a lot back then, and we almost certainly pogoed the hell out of it over the night. After an hour on the dancefloor – which was actually kind of a dance carpet – we went and sat down, and slumped on each other. We were both very sweaty, I remember, and she was flushed red. Thinking about it, she looked kinda blotchy at that point, with the flushing, but after a couple of minutes of slumping, there was kissing, and then there was dating.

We must have been going out around my birthday, because I got a present from her. It was “Flood”, by They Might Be Giants, on vinyl. I’ve still got it, with it’s lovely fold-out yellow sleeve, and listened to it an awful lot – because that’s what you did when you got a new album in your teens.

Dead – They Might Be Giants (“Flood” – 1990)

In retrospect, it sounds like I fell for TMBG because I fell for Jessie, but I don’t think that was the case. Though “Birdhouse…” and “Istanbul” were fairly obvious pleasures, I think what pulled me in to the band was how different they were from everything else I had ever listened to, and how good they were with it. Their lyrics had an irony to them that I’d never heard – possibly only “Lola”  by The Kinks had ever struck me as enjoying such mischevious wordplay.

“Dead”, for example, still gets me, with it’s misleading repeated line that is such an obvious wise-ass feint that when you hear it, you wonder how you’ve never heard it before.

“I returned a bag of groceries accidentally taken off the shelf before the expiration date.”

… sounds so innocuous, until you hear the lyrics around it, and realise that the chaps aren’t singing a daft song about shopping – the song is actually all about death, regret, rebirth and… that stuff.

It’s the trick they keep playing throughout the album, and their career, making songs that are superficially novelty items, but actually have turns of phrase or word-pictures that reverberate through your brain and make you think much deeper thoughts than you’d expect, if you’d only ever bounced up and down to a song about a canary.

I’ve sought out acts that do similar lyrical trickery ever since, and I have to say that the band utterly changed the way young Nick interacted with music. I’d always loved hip-hop, and listened carefully to lyrics, but this was like my proper way in to music. I’d never be cool enough to know what the different styles of music were, or play an instrument, or know which band were cool, but I understood words.

This smart use of language is common throughout the band’s catalogue, accompanied as it is by an abstract intelligence that makes for songs that are almost self-aware. This isn’t so uncommon now, but it was a big deal to a guy in his late teens, for sure.

Number Three – They Might Be Giants (“They Might Be Giants” – 1986)

“Number Three” does some wacky meta-textual fidgetry with the “world of the song”. It isn’t unheard of, even in mainstream songs – listening as an adult, I realised that even Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” does it – but when They Might Be Giants do it, it’s got a bitter-sweet but funny self-criticism to it that appeals to me at a basic level.

“Number Three”, in particular, is also as jaunty as fuck, which one can’t help but bounce to.

I’ve Got A Match – They Might Be Giants (“Lincoln” – 1988)

“Flood” had to last me a few years, until my second or third year of university when a friend – a lovely lass that I think was called Marianne, who for some reason I really mainly remember driving a carload of us to somewhere nice – found out that I liked what I knew of the band so far, and did me a tape.

(Back then, we were all “doing each other tapes” – it’s what youngsters who hadn’t got it together enough to be promiscuous did in the early nineties.)

I’ve since worked out that that tape was made up of tracks from the band’s eponymous first album, and the 1988 album “Lincoln”. Though I knew “Flood” first and best, many of the songs on those two earlier records are what I’ve come to think of as the classic core TMBG songs, and they recur a lot on collections and such.

“I’ve Got A Match” is one of several love songs by the pair. Though that sounds like an odd fit with their peculiar brand of nerd music, their songwriting actually makes for perfect and poignant songs about broken love.

“Which one of us is the one that we can’t trust?
You say I think it’s you, but I don’t agree with that.” 

… is one of those lyrics that didn’t really come home to me until after a couple of bad relationships. If you can relate to it, it’s one of those perfectly phrased lines.

And if it wasn’t for They Might Be Giants jaunty delivery of sharp and quixotic narratives, I probably wouldn’t be listening to bands like Los Campesinos or even the Eels now. I’ve come to love the acts that don’t need to make a big deal about the fact that they are writing the most insightful stuff there is to say about the human condition because it just comes naturally – they don’t need to act sincere, because they are sincere, so there’s no need to dress their heartache up with mood-lighting and po-faced music videos. TMBG can break your heart with a song that has accordion playing on it.

The thing about They Might Be Giants is that because I’m a lousy fan, and because they aren’t either massively popular across the mainstream, or particularly popular with hipsters, new releases by the band always pass me by. Though I continued to l listen to the stuff I had by them, I didn’t really become aware of new material by them until “Malcolm In The Middle” aired for the first time with a theme song – “Boss Of Me” – that was instantly recognisable as the band.

Man, It’s So Loud In Here – They Might Be Giants (“Mink Car” – 2001)

Having said that, I wasn’t so sure about the rest of the album at first, mainly because it was so different from the band’s previous output. However, once the shock of the new wore off, the variety of the songs started to seep in. “Man, It’s So Loud In Here”, a song which has no right to be as catchy a disco track, being by a band that was just visiting the genre for the feck.

Despite the song’s addictively vacuous musical approach, the characteristic They Might Be Giants playfulness is there in the words once again, with a narrative stance that is sardonically evocative of “Big Yellow Taxi”. It’s a song about clubbing that’s also about not being able to keep up with the pace of clubbing, and after a million awful techno versions of already not great eighties pop in the last few years, this sort of post-modern pop seemed and seems particularly timely.

The other thing about the duo is that at a basic level, they love song. From seeing their approach to music, one gets the feeling that even if they weren’t selling – or even making – albums, they’d still be making music. And that’s something else I’ve picked up from them that carries through into my current listening habits. If I hadn’t encountered them, I’d have wondered what the fuck James Kochalka was up to, for starters. A lot of anti-folk would have just utterly confused me. And they were pioneers of giving stuff away for free online, almost before Apple had even thought of it.

In common with Billy Bragg and The Barenaked Ladies – as well as Kochalka – TMBG don’t seem too bothered about imprinting their “brand” on their songs, or to be particularly precious about how they appear, beyond their basic ideologies, which they are passionate about. This is music stripped of the artist’s ego. The second from last time I saw Billy Bragg live, he played a cover version of a song about wetting the bed. The Barenaked Ladies do everything tongue in cheek, and they aren’t above a pop-song medley – specifically they’ve done an album of Christmas songs that was only half serious. And Kochalka would record and release the songs he sings absent-mindedly to himself on the toilet, if allowed.

They Might Be Giants fulfilled this inclusiveness of approach by branching out into family friendly children’s music, the first recorded outing of which was “No!” in 2002.

Bed Bed Bed – They Might Be Giants (“No!” – 2002)

Just as addictive as previous releases from the band, there’s a lot of great stuff on the album, and though it’s slanted towards songs that are literal enough, and have enough repetition, to be sung along with young children, they are also almost viral to most listeners. Or at least, they were to me.

I’ve included this song, though I could have posted many others from the album, because it makes me broody – I can imagine using it as incitement to getting the kids we don’t yet have up to their respective bedtimes.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this – admittedly quite long and rambling – retrospective on my relationship with They Might Be Giants. Tell me what you think in the comments!

They Might Be Giants can be found online at http://theymightbegiants.com/

[edited to add: Though both Rol and Swiss Toni do better - and more uplifting - jobs here and here.]

It’s actually last-last night, now, technically. There, that’s a useless fact that you get for free.

My thoughts on the gig after the jump. If you were at the gig, or know the venue, or have any comments at all, as always they are most welcome!

Support was ably given by the fun – and very beardy – US Rock-Folk artist Otis Gibbs. There’s lots of stuff to listen to and look at at his website: http://otisgibbs.com/.
The sound of his voice and his lovely guitar totally took you somewhere else – albeit, y’know, somewhere a bit earthier and more American – though as Girl One pointed out afterward, there was a formulaic element to his songs, and a repetitious air to each one.

Having said that – and this goes for Billy Bragg too – I don’t think the Guildhall, and that audience, are really the venue or crowd with which such acts excel, and the whole time we were listening to Gibbs, I felt like a smaller, more atmospheric venue, with a crowd eager to sing along, is where the performance would really make the most sense.
The reason folk and other People’s (big “P” mine, but utterly required) music contains that repetition is because it is a music that gains strength through being sung communally.

Whereas the Guildhall is an echo-chamber, and encourages the sort of audience that is more about being seen to be the loudest supporter of an act, or to talk the most loudly in the poorly placed, badly isolated bars, than about sharing in a musical experience.

Which of course is an unfair generalisation about the audience there. Most of them – probably ourselves included – were extremely polite and reserved individuals who just love a good singer-songwriter. Which, you know, has it’s pitfalls at such a gig – or any gig – more about which later – especially when much of Bragg’s catalogue is protest music, and encourages some misbehaviour and dissent.

But the problem with a seated show in a place like the Guildhall is that it only takes a few – literally five or six total arses – to seriously put a crimp in everybody else’s show. From where we were sitting, there was a point early on where in the quieter moments on some of Gibb’s songs, we could very clearly hear a guy talking loudly to his friend in the doorway to the bar area, on the other side of the venue.
Though I say we could clearly hear him – as far as I could tell, his whole vocabularly consisted of the sound “Haw haw” at varying levels of volume.

More of a problem once the gig started was a guy across the way and just back from us, who insisted on playing up his fandom of Mr Bragg to his much quieter friend, by shouting “Billy!” loudly as close onto the somber bit of a slow song as possible, and raucously talking the line that Bragg was about to sing into his friend’s ear.

This didn’t wreck the gig, as it happens. Anyone who has been to the cinema with me may have been surprised to note that I was actually more amused than homicidal about the interruptions – but it bears mentioning.

(When I saw Sigur Ros at the same venue a couple of years back, it was more of an issue. The orchestral swells and ebbs, and surreal serenity of that band, was persistently knocked off-kilter for the audience by a group of guys who clearly thought that this was the kind of band that needed to be reminded of how awesome they were repeatedly mid-song, rather than actually fucking listening to them.)

Charlie Brooker nailed the particular phenomenon in the British populace in his recent bit on the Brand/Ross thing – though this is a slightly different strain. But basically, audiences are trained now to think that their input into the entertainment being presented is somehow as interesting as that of the act that people have paid to see.

Because they are twats.

Which all sounds a bit beyond the point when so much of Bragg’s ideology is about “the people” getting involved. And my cynicism may be getting in the way of fairly representing how I feel about that element of the show, so I should clarify:
There is something lovely – something utterly joyous – about an audience all acting as one, singing along, getting it wrong. Even fucking swaying in place, or moshing at the front – if that’s appropriate to the gig – and expressing their enjoyment of the community of that gig. Without, you know, being selfish dicks about it.

Bragg brings that out of his audience perfectly at many points in the show – though he coasts in a little at the head of it with some noisy crowd-pleasers that he doesn’t sound quite warmed up for.
Though success has allowed him the luxury of keeping his ideology burning hot, while his fan-base has turned old and become middle-class and safe, he keeps himself honest, poking fun at his own position and coming across as genuinely sincere in his love of performing, and of performing these songs in particular.

And he shines in between songs, with winning charm and funny anecdotes.
I’ve been listening to “Ingrid Bergman” half-heartedly for months, and you know, I don’t think I ever realised how utterly brilliant and filthy a song it is. Now I can’t wait for it to come back around on the playlist, and that’s down to Bragg’s explanation of the process behind it, and how very naughty a man Woody Guthrie, who wrote it, was.

He knows exactly what he’s doing, leaving “New England” and “Levi Stubb’s Tears” till the encore. Those are emotional songs for Bragg, and his audience, for any number of different reasons, and everybody is so emotionally exhausted and content once he plays them that trying to get any further songs out of him would seem frankly rude.

There’s nothing about Billy Bragg performances that I don’t enjoy – though for different reasons Girl One and I prickled a little at how absorbed he got talking about politics, if only twice (which is a massive improvement on the first time I saw him). For her, it was just generally the politics of it – not Bragg’s politics, as such, just the enthusiasm of it.

For me, it was that, as a speaker, Bragg is utterly absorbing, and has absolute command of his audience between songs – making me feel enthused about his talk about cynicism being the enemy, and how we should fight it despite the disappointing knocks we’ve had from our recent political history, even though I am an utterly cynical bastard.
But when he gets too into the political content of what he’s saying – and as I said, it only happened twice last night – it can be death at a venue like the Guildhall, with an audience like a Guildhall audience, happy to drop nearly twenty quid on tickets and a tenner on two drinks.
It’s not the sort of stage where a person can be on stage talking for more than a couple of minutes without saying anything funny and not start to look like… well, a person on stage talking without saying anything funny.

I hate that about the venue, actually, and about myself when I’m surrounded by a bustling mass of what I suppose are my peers, kinda.

Because the fact is, I’d actually love to have a few drinks with Billy Bragg and talk to him about how he feels about Tony Blair, what he thinks of the slow and seedy normalising of the BNP in the UK, and what really wins out between his pragmatism and his excitement at the importance of there being a black American president. Which, incidentally, are all things he touched on.

Actually, scratch that. I’d just love to have a few drinks with Billy Bragg. And now I think Girl One would, too.

I could probably take a stab at a few names that might be close to right. I’d be just as likely to make the argument – and even believe it! – that right thinking people shouldn’t be thinking in terms of musical genres “crossing over”; that the whole music thing is by necessity fluid, and as such, genre is by definition a limiting concept that cripples the creative endeavour.

Because frankly, I can be a really pretentious twat, sometimes.

But a more valid, less pompous point of view would be that rap and hip-hop grew out of a bunch of different styles and cultures, right from the start, like funk and soul, and that at the point where pop music and the vinyl revolution in recorded music first started, all of those genre structures were kind of mixed up in each other, with distinctions less defined and precious than they are now – and if you take that view, the point at which guitar rock and rap and everything else started feeding into each other was just a return to primal forms, anyway.

Regardless of all that, here are a few of my favourite moments of musical mind-meld hip-hop genius. These are in order of how much I think they’re awesome, rather than chronological or anything like that, and I’ve missed out other really important stuff, like Pop Will Eat Itself, The Beastie Boys, and the super-great “Walk This Way” by Run DMC and Aerosmith, because they’re either obvious or they deserve a post all of their own.

It’s a long one, this week, so it’s all hidden after the jump – as always, your opinions are welcome in the comments…

3. Clint Eastwood – Gorillaz

You’ll have certainly already heard this – it was a fairly big hit, and not that long ago – and it came at a time that rap and hip-hop were already all the way mainstream, so not really a turning point. However, the whole Gorillaz project was one of musical innovation and a playful confidence with the genres being smashed together, and Albarn et al were operating in an environment that arguably could only have existed post the indie-pop and mainstream hip-hop explosions.

Which is to say that Albarn’s vocal, the oddball-pretty style of Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori, and the swooping, idiosyncratic and intelligent lackadaisical tempo of Del Tha Funkee Homosapien’s singular style could probably only have been brought together to such a great response at the point in time that they were – any earlier, and I think all except the most quirky of audiences might have found them a bit too perplexing.

(Incidentally, this is where I had to choose not to include The Go! Team and such – The Gorillaz are on the borderline, but The Go! Team are most definitely Post-crossover.)

As I said, you’ve heard “Clint Eastwood” before, but this time, listen out specifically for Del’s rapping. I really do love his style, and it’s sad that he was probably always just a little too weird for Will Smith-loving audiences, but not angry enough for the Ice fanbase (that’s Cube and T, not Mr Vanilla) that would have been around when his debut album “I Wish My Brother George Was Here” was released. That, and his apparent inability to get music out on time seems to have kept him on the musical fringe.

2. California Uber Alles – The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy

See, I love Michael Franti’s voice so much that these days, I’ll tend to stick to the stuff where his beautiful vocal creaminess is more apparent – such as the variable but always gem-laden Spearhead albums.

But The Disposable Heroes came first – and as heavy and experimental as they were, even they were a step toward accessibility from the man’s earlier project, The Beatnigs. Combative, creative and angry, the first Disposables album was lumped in with the growing Industrial music scene, but they were always something a little bit better than that label – Franti’s lyrics, for a start, were sharp and insightful, and more politically biting than a lot of the frankly whining worthiness of some of their peers, and his bandmate Rono Tse was frankly mental, and didn’t bother sticking to electronica and electric guitars to produce the music, often bringing DIY hardware into the mix.

My favourite crossover moment on their first album was the inclusion of “Water Pistol Man”, a song that Franti has stuck to through other incarnations, and one that has a beautiful reference to Billy Bragg’s song “The Passion”. But this song is the purest genre smash that they do – an updated, upgraded but otherwise pure cover of the Dead Kennedys song, and as such a mash-up of punk, rap and industrial music all in one.

1. Fallin’ – De La Soul/Teenage Fanclub

1993 was the year that we spent listening and dancing to the “Judgement Night” soundtrack. The album was ground-breaking, in that it was – at least as far as we were concerned – the first time anyone had put together such an ambitious musical project solely for the benefit of a movie soundtrack.

It was also, despite previous isolated forays into the world of the rap/rock crossover, the first time anyone had made a whole album of collaborations between rock/guitar and hip-hop acts.

There are very few dud tracks on the whole soundtrack, and there are some eye-opening moments, such as Mike Patton of Faith No More rapping – screeching and harmonising all in the space of one track with the Boo Yah Tribe, Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill drawling a love song to the ‘erb, and the rampant “Freak Momma” by Mudhoney and novelty soundtrack-whore Sir Mixalot.

However, this track stands out as unique on an album already unusual in it’s approach, because though the formula is there – rap act De La Soul partnered up with guitar band Teenage Fanclub – the acts are as different from the others on the album as the pairing is inspired.

De La Soul have never been like other hip-hop acts, notably distancing themselves from the brag-rap and gangland flirtation of their fellow rappers since the start, and extolling the peaceful virtues of their Daisy Age mantra even through their later more cynical work. And the Teenage Fanclub were floppy-haired indie – I can’t remember much about them, but it’s difficult to imagine them in the axe-brandishing company of the rest of the bands on this album without them being raped to buggery, prison style.

And what they’ve come up with is totally different from the other tracks on the album – obvious because this is the second track on the album after the unapologetically harsh and screechy “Just Another Victim” by Helmet and the House Of Pain.

It’s pretty, and sad, and it flows like a river as the lead vocals lament a mishandled past and a mediocre looking future. It doesn’t sound like the Teenage Fanclub provided the music, in another contrast to the dynamic on the other tracks on the album – instead, it seems that they’ve lent their harmonies to a lift of a Tom Petty track that provides the musical touchstone of the song, and that almost seems to promise that at some point they’ll drift into Buffalo Springfield’s evocative “Something’s Happening Here”. And there isn’t a single rap lyric in this song that doesn’t jump into my mind easily, all these years later.

Hard to imagine, now, but this sounded like nothing else that I’d heard before.

Jesus, we listened to this album, and this track, almost religiously for months, and waited eagerly for the film, until it took so long to come out that we forgot it existed, and just kept on listening to the album.

When it did come out, it was shit.

3: Big Jumps – Emiliana Torrini

I had never heard of Emiliana Torrini before reading This Recording. This is something I have now addressed. I am struck by the variety of her songs, and her ability to carry off all styles convincingly, but this is the perkiest of the songs I have heard, and cheers me greatly.

2: Something Changed – Pulp

I recently rediscovered “Different Class”. This used to be constant listening – how did I manage without it for such a long while?
Jarvis Cocker’s world really is unrelentingly real and cynical. I picked this song because it’s about the most optimistic one on the album. Even that isn’t saying much – the telling line is at the beginning – there is potential for this to be some big yarn that he’s spinning, and as such it is suspect throughout.

1: You Woke Up My Neighbourhood – Billy Bragg

Not, by any stretch, my favourite song by Mr Bragg, but all cheery and up-tempo in your face, and I play it in honour of the REM gig, as two of them are on the song.
Also, we’re seeing him soon, n’all.
Added bonus – How did I not know that this happened? God love you, internet:

Opening Credits
“Yachts” – A Man Called Adam

Waking Up
“Grammercy Park Hotel” – Ben Lee

First Day at School
“Emerald Green” – My Life Story

Falling in Love
“Utsumi & Nanahara – Poison Medicine” – Filharmonia Narodowa (Battle Royale OST)

Fight Song
“Rock Star” – Hole

Breaking Up
“Starting Over” – The Crystal Method

Prom
“What’s Coming Next” – Maplebee

Life is Good
“Panther Dash” – The Go! Team

Mental Breakdown
“Cacaphoney” – Giorgio Moroder (Midnight Express OST)

Driving
“Duvet TV Size” – BoA (Serial Experiment Lain OST)

Flashback
“Backseat Love” – N*E*R*D

Getting Back Together
“The Man (El Hombre De La Pampa Mix by Gotan Project)” – Peace Orchestra

Wedding
“Dream Team” – Spearhead

Paying the Dues
“Jovial Costume” – Alias

The Night Before the War
“Let’s Get It On” - Roni Size & Reprazent

Final Battle
“We All Fall Through The A” - The Kleptones

Moment of Triumph
“Goldfinger” – John Barry

Death Scene
“Suffragette” – PASSAGE

Funeral Song
“Asi Son Mis Dias” – Control Machete

End Credits
“Between The Wars” – Billy Bragg