The Daily Planet

The Ting Tings, ‘That’s Not My Name’

As the 1969 Top 20 hobbles to a thrilling conclusion, we’re hop-skip-jumping all the way to the present and a record that Junior went loopy for when it appeared on one of those new-fangled MTV channels last week. We’re even a bit slow off the mark here, as it’s been toppled from an unlikely chart summit by hit machine Rihanna, but it’s still the breakthrough smash of the year – a grand departure from its achingly hip, limited 2007 run.

You’ve heard the comparisons – Blondie (yes, the cool-eyed Katie White is indeed blonde and, in a slightly darkened room, stunning), ‘Mickey’ (the star-jumping rhythm and lairy rap-song straight off Toni Basil’s much mis-(or not)-construed 1982 chartbuster), The Knack’s ‘My Sharona’ (that rhythm again, really, also massaged for Girls Aloud’s ‘No Good Advice’) – but, like the best pop puffery, ‘That’s Not My Name’ blends influences to form a monster that stomps, jerks, twitters and rocks in its own nation-enslaving way.

We’re mad for it right now, pure victims of hype if you see things through those spectacles. Sometimes there’s no hype without fire. As the record builds to its multi-layered, full-rocking coda, Junior’s reaction is a spinning, leaping, head-shaking frug from dining room to living room – pop star in infancy.

And while we’re sojourning in 2008, here are some of her other recent pop moments:

– “She’s got hair like me” to Diana Ross gamely keeping it all together in the ‘Chain Reaction’ video
– “Black and gold, black and gold, black and gold – that’s your favourite, Daddy” (not sure who’s feeding her these lies)
– Sticking her hand in the washing machine for the nth time one day, she’s told to leave it alone before defiantly reaching in again and pulling out the new Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan album

For Junior, music is everywhere.

Lightspeed Champion, ‘Galaxy Of The Lost’

This month, or for as long as I can muster the will, we’ll be reappraising the records that didn’t make the 2007 Top 20 either because a) I didn’t deem them up to scratch at the time, b) I forgot about them, c) I hadn’t actually heard them or d) I was plain wrong. Messing up the categories straight away, Lightspeed Champion gets the first shout because I didn’t listen to this properly until mid-December.

Dev Hynes comes hot from Test Icicles – the charmingly named nu-rave, shouty-punk, whatever-label-you-can-rustle-up outfit who never quite made it big. He’s taken a long, hard look at himself, declared himself happy with the outlandish hair and threads but changed tack completely for the music. Ticking personal boxes for me, he now sounds as if he’s transmitting direct from Postcard records in the early ‘80s, with some first-album Prefab Sprout chucked in for winning measure. It’s fiddly, beguiling, inventive, sensitive pop… about drinking gin and throwing up.

Now Junior thought this was pretty special and waltzed around with the smallest of the many toy babies filling up our living room. I could tell from her beam that she was delighted Dad had finally seen sense and given Dev his props; she promised to take a more integral role on Jukebox Junior’s steering committee in future, to avoid similar mishaps. As for Lightspeed Champion’s future, he’s our hot tip for 2008. Watch him plummet.

Stevie Wonder, ‘Happy Birthday’

A short postscript. Played this last Tuesday for Junior’s half-birthday, but shelved any review. Today, of course, it’s Martin Luther King Day, the result of Stevie’s schmaltzy yet warming musical campaign. Was the day inaugurated purely on the strength of this song’s message? Or is that apocryphal?

I remember Junior kicking her legs along to this, still buoyed by the superlative Scritti Politti tune. She wasn’t rolling over from back to front – because she did that for The First Time this morning – but she was happy. Her mother just rolled her eyes. My record selection can be a touch literal.

A worthwhile song, then, but one that accelerated Stevie’s wholehearted embrace of gloopy sentiment. It means most to me as a play-out to a sweet episode of Northern Exposure, no stranger itself to the gloop.

Laura Nyro, ‘Wedding Bell Blues’/Kelis, ‘Milkshake’

I thought we could compare ’60s girl and ’00s girl, and I could have palpitations about how Junior was going to turn out. If you know Nyro’s song, it’s likely to be from a cover version. The Fifth Dimension, or something. A somewhat desperate lyric now I think about it, but the yearning for the wedding day is nicely old-fashioned. Kelis, of course, is dispensing with formalities.

‘Wedding Bell Blues’ swings by at skipping pace, and Junior can’t help but sing along. This involves a brief hum every couple of bars but it’s more than, say, Shaun Ryder can manage. For ‘Milkshake’, we’re occupied with dad’s patented Leg Seesaw. This is more of a challenge for the old man now that missy has passed six months and weighs in at over 17 and a half pounds. One should never disclose a lady’s statistics, naturally, but we’re proud of the little baby rice guzzler.

Kelis has never again hit the peaks of her first album, but this song is nagging enough to be impossible to ignore. I hadn’t heard any Laura Nyro records at all until a couple of years back. Always assumed that she was a bit Uncut/Mojo po-faced and dull. Taking the plunge, I found her records brimming with blue-eyed pop soul. Go get some.

Did Bill ever marry the girl in the song? It all sounds dashed uncertain, and I’m not sure he’s a chap you can hang your hat on. Come the 20s, I’m going to be the scourge of Bills everywhere.

Scritti Politti, ‘The Word Girl’

You can call them Double G & the Traitorous Three (plus two). This is a timely indulgence, because I found out on Sunday that Green Gartside played his first gig in 20 plus years the previous night, in a pub in Brixton and under that assumed name. I reckon Junior’s mum would’ve let me go, if I’d known. Drat. On the upside, there will be more gigs and a new album to boot. It’s only been six years since the last record, so he’s clearly on turbo thrust now.

This is the first record I played today, on Junior’s half-birthday. A typically Scritti meditation on the meaning of words and their “abuse”, and the warmest dubby sound. Now, I’m never going to find fault in any of their work, and Junior seems no different. She windmills her arms, smiles and blows an appreciative raspberry. There’s no more reliable indicator of baby satisfaction. She seems comfortable in her six months, and in the breezy lovers’ rock flow.

I bought the Cupid & Psyche 85 album with the five pounds a lady gave me when I foiled the theft of her handbag. I was a 13-year-old vigilante warrior. I bought it on cassette, the cassette got chewed up; I replaced the cassette, this also got chewed up. Exasperated, I swapped this for the LP. And a couple of years back, I bought it on CD. That’s dedication.

The Jam, ‘Going Underground’

As a kid, I thought this was the start of some kind of Jules Verne adventure. Weller was standing proudly on the lip of a pit, a yawning chasm leading underground to the centre of the earth. A brass band was playing, the boys’ brigade was there, adding up to a fitting send-off for the brave mod explorer. I was a lad brimming with insight.

Jam lyrics continued to cause me problems. The reams of gibberish I must’ve sung along to ‘A Town Called Malice’, the dodgy copy I’d recorded off the Top 40. My mum had her own take on it, because she told me she didn’t like me playing the nasty record, but I had the last laugh when I secretly bought the 7”. In fact, I stuck it on a tape she asked me to make for her a year or two later. That’s a last, last laugh.

Junior dances to ‘Going Underground’, and laughs and points at her dad standing by the stereo again. She’s heard bad things about DJs somewhere. Might’ve overheard me slagging off Chris Moyles. Without pictures, she’s unperturbed by Bruce Foxton’s haircut and seems happy with the whole experience. She’s now braced to discover the Style Council.

Talking Heads, ‘Once In A Lifetime’

At some stage, scrabbling around for a theme, we were going to do Jukebox Junior’s Top 10 Greatest Singles Of All Time but, what with ‘Young Americans’ already gone and now this, I’m throwing them away cheaply. This would be Number Four. Probably.

Also, I should’ve done this on a day that Junior was wearing oversized clothes with huge shoulders – not an uncommon occurrence – and not when she’s in her just-right denim dress. All in all, I’ve made a right pig’s ear of it. Junior’s not quasi-autistic like her dad, fortunately, so she couldn’t give two hoots about the circumstances. She’s right there with David Byrne’s nervy, scratchy paranoid funk twitches, even clapping at “there is water at the bottom of the ocean”. She finds the sublime in the ridiculous.

This is so far ahead of its time, I’m surprised it wasn’t drowned as a witch. Music caught up 10 years later when rock bands found dance elements to their music and Paul Oakenfold got rich. Talking Heads never needed help.

Spice Girls, ‘Wannabe’

Slam your body down and zig-a-zig-ahh. Euan, Paddy, OP and I did some impromptu street theatre on the Edinburgh Fringe the best part of 10 years ago, trying to show how the Spice Girls’ orders could be carried out. We decided that you couldn’t really slam your own body down, assuming that you had to land with said body horizontal to the floor for full slamming effect. You couldn’t get the full force behind you; it would be mere falling.

I didn’t ask Junior to replicate the slam but, like many little girls before her, she found the Spices’ song and message beguiling – although the fact that she was managing to do the zig-a-zig move as demonstrated in the video was more down to maternal manipulation than free will. 

So, whatever happened to the Spice Girls? One minute it was world domination with infectious tunes and sketchy empowerment poses, the next it was, well, we know what it was. Eye-wateringly bad solo careers, babies with silly names (Junior’s a very sensible name) and desperately misguided attempts to bed George Michael.

In our very first entry we mused on who would win a fight out of the Spice Girls and Girls Aloud. It’s time for you to decide. These are the bouts:

Mel B vs Sarah
Mel C vs Nicola
Baby vs Kimberley
Geri vs Nadine
Posh vs Cheryl

Prince & The Revolution, ‘Kiss’

There are riches to be had here. Dad dusts off the comedy falsetto, Mum provides kisses at the appropriate points in the song, and Junior refuses to sit on her mother’s lap because she just can’t, she just can’t, she just can’t control her feet. Prince gives us a record of impossible groove and eternal sunshine.

Junior smiles throughout the perfectly pint-sized track. It’s her introduction to Prince, untainted by exposure to the dross that he’s spent most of the last 15 years churning out to an underwhelmed world. Where did it all go wrong for the purple doyen of bad-assed Funkadelia? Batman, that’s where.

Many people out there love the Tom Jones version of ‘Kiss’. Stop it. I don’t care if it’s through the protective gloves of ironic detachment. Stop it. What could possibly be good about the wire-wool-headed Welsh plasterer smothering this gem with his soulless bellow? Now the orange car alarm has gone and got himself a knighthood. What on earth for? Oversized knicker-fielding? All those ’60s Number Ones he had were rubbish too, unless you’re a pissed-up student rugby player.

Right. Stay tuned for another entry later this afternoon. It’s interactive.

Prefab Sprout, ‘The King Of Rock ‘N’ Roll’

Junior first heard this in Cyprus, an unexpected treat on an otherwise bewildering Greek music channel. She was three months old and learning how to laugh. Dad singing along to the chorus, bouncing her up and down was particularly amusing. I don’t know whether her fits of giggles were directed at her father’s ability to hold a note, or whether she was ridiculing the lyrical pearls “hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque”. Either way, she shouldn’t be jumping to conclusions.

Dad has a cold, so the singing this morning was cracked and the high notes were just that little bit beyond his grasp. Junior found some faint hilarity in this, but lightning didn’t strike twice. Paddy McAloon’s gifts for gentle ribbing and pop catchiness were no match for a growing girl’s hunger pangs.

Perhaps it’s a shame that Prefab Sprout will linger in the memory of most for this track alone. Yes, there’s a quirkiness to many of their songs, but it’s most obvious here and it muddies the more thoughtful message beneath. Rock ‘n’ roll posturing, its bombast is being pricked, with no little affection.

Affection runs through McAloon’s work, but his words could be caustic. Nonetheless, as the albums have become less frequent and he has quietly slipped into his 40s, the tone has softened. It makes Prefab Sprout more suited to Radio 2 these days, although there are flickers of beauty that reach beyond pigeonholing. So, they were never kings of rock ‘n’ roll, but you may as well be remembered for something.