This week on the show, Gordon and I are listening to songs that come straight in. No faffing about – no chord loops, drum patterns, secondary hooks, or scene-setting of any sort – just straight to the vocal. In putting the playlist together, I applied my usual rules:
Joe’s BBC 5 Live playlisting rules:
- 1960s to present, UK and US pop
- Mix of decade, gender, genre, heritage, tempo, key
- At least one contemporary pop song
- Mix of big hits and less obvious songs
- Only big hits in the quiz
Of course, I had some ideas in advance of my favourite no-intro songs. But on researching the subject a little more, there were a lot that I’d never really thought about – some of which are on this week’s show.
The Beatles were masters of the no-intro song. Of the 188 original songs they released during their active years 1962-70 (213 including cover versions), an astonishing 25 had no intro – 13% of the songs they wrote.
Beatles songs with no intro
[superfans let me know if I missed any!]
All My Loving, Another Girl, Can’t Buy Me Love, Cry Baby Cry, Eleanor Rigby, From Me To You, Girl, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, Hello Goodbye, Help!, Hey Jude, If I Fell, I’m A Loser, It Won’t Be Long, I Will, Julia, The Long And Winding Road, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, No Reply, Nowhere Man, Paperback Writer, Penny Lane, P.S. I Love You, Yellow Submarine, You’re Going To Lose That Girl
It’s always nice when I get a personal favourite song that happens to suit the theme. This time, that song is Elvis Costello’s “Accidents Will Happen” (1979). It’s just such a satisfying melody, underscored with great chord changes. We’re in D, and it descends in half-bars (“I just don’t know where to begin…”), with an Em-A ii-V “two-five” turnaround at the end of each phrase. Each verse is 9 bars – he tacks on an extra bar for the final phrase “without a chaperone”, resolving to the D in the final 2 beats. Then we have the arresting parallel minor modulation – the Dm chord that hits exactly on the word “Accidents” in the chorus. I love the way he’s so in charge of the song form; in addition to that 9-bar verse cleverness, there’s the 5-bar instrumental setup before the bridge | Bb/D | Bb | G | D | D |, which then takes us to a bridge that gets its simple point across in a simple 4-bar couplet “It’s the damage that we do we never know / It’s the words that we don’t say that scare me so”, getting us back to that wonderful verse melody without wasting time. The video is allegedly the first animated pop video – can anyone confirm this?
Sounds like Oasis?
This week Oasis announced their comeback tour, which made national news in the UK, along with reports of off-the-scale ticket touting almost immediately. So our “soundslike” section really had to mention Noel Gallagher’s [alleged] penchant for borrowing melodic fragments.
On the show we will listen to some of these with ‘key compensation’ – shifting the pitch of the earlier recording so it plays back in the same key as the earlier one. I often do this because some people find it distracting if the songs are in different keys; digitally compensating for this aspect of listener phenomenology enables us to hear melodic similarities (and dissimilarities) more clearly.
There was, of course, a lot of talk about this when these songs came out in the mid 90s, but there wasn’t much of an Internet back then, so I’ve put together a playlist of Oasis songs, followed by the song that was alleged to have influenced them. Some of these similarities resulted in credit sharing or publishing settlements; others simply attracted Internet gossip. Is this homage or plagiarism? You be the judge.
Listen to the full show on BBC Sounds or on the YouTube playlist: joebennett.work/BBCradio.
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