Teethgraters: The Records Shaun Hand would go to the Ends of the Earth to Never Hear Again

Shaun Hand Week in Outsideleft ends here with an old OL fave, the ritual destruction of someone else's sacred cows. Five records Shaun would go the ends of the earth before hearing again. "FIVE SHIT RECORDS!" Shaun said, and a little miscellanous pet hates. The year is young, despite all of that young year optimism, here's some much needed hate. To rock you, one way or t'other. Over to Shaun...

I’m 40 now, so I’ve mellowed a bit. I’ve long stopped getting worked up over manufactured pop, etc. Also, some songs are so bad that they’re hilarious. Like Terry Scott’s ‘I Like Birds’, which is one of worst records ever made but has the funniest, most unironic “PHWOOOAAARRRRR!!!” halfway through, so I’d happily hear it again.

The same goes for the likes of Nickelback and Sting, who take themselves so seriously that you can’t take them seriously if that makes sense?

That’s why most of these date from my teens and twenties, when I would still foam at the mouth over music I didn’t like. 'Mr Brightside' is an obvious candidate, but I'm sure that's been picked plenty of times before. What does still wind me up is shit music that’s presented as something deep to be taken seriously. Especially when it’s framed as “bringing back the real music”, etc. Much like my first choice:

1. THE STEREOPHONICS – MR WRITER
This fucking nonsense is what I’m talking about. I liked some of the stuff on the first two Stereophonics albums, but this was/is awful. The apex of everything bad about that turn-of-the-millennium acoustic stuff that hid its lack of substance behind “authenticity”. Whining, whingeing, dirgey shit. Possibly my least favourite song of all-time...

2. BLINK 182 – ALL THE SMALL THINGS
Apart from this. When I was at school, it was still the days of lending each other CDs, doing tapes, or leaning in to listen to one of your mate’s headphones. My mate John used to lend and tape me stuff like Green Day and Offspring, and I liked them at the time, but then this next generation of bands like Blink and Sum 41 came along and I hated them all. It’s like the punk-pop balance got too skewed into pop.I like my punk switched-on, intelligent, angry, and with something to say. The Ruts were punk; a bunch of guys with cartoon hair and loads of stickers on their guitars deliberately acting like dorks aren’t. And that guy’s voice… "Say it ain’t sew, I will naht gew…" Musical waterboarding.

3. TOPLOADER – DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT
From a similar school to ‘Mr Writer’—“Hey, look, these guys play their own instruments”, etc. I bought their first single on cassette because I’d read Paul Weller liked them. I wasn’t that sold, but then this was their second or third single and I wasn't having it. As well as despising the song, I couldn’t get with the guy sitting at the front of the stage with his keyboard, or them calling their album Onka’s Big Moka. It all seemed like a bad joke. Even worse (although it’s funny in retrospect), they did that remix a couple of years later with some random American guy interjecting “One, two, three… Here we go!” over the top. I may have mellowed, but if we’ve ever got the radio on in the car and the intro to this comes on, I’ll immediately change station without asking.

4. PAUL MCCARTNEY – FUH YOU
I have and will defend Macca’s solo stuff almost to the death. McCartney II is one of my favourite albums, and if you sift through the frivolous nonsense on Wings albums, there are some brilliant songs.However… His albums in recent years have been harder and harder to like. And this song, which is from an album called Egypt Station that came out in 2018, is him at his worst.

Back in the Sixties and Seventies, McCartney would say in interviews that he wanted to become more of a writer as he got older—a la Gershwin and Cole Porter. And that would have suited his writing strengths perfectly. But then, possibly after Give Me Regards to Broad Street flopped, he developed this embarrassing tendency to cling to the side of trends, which leads to shite like this and that ghastly AI video where he plays his 25-year-old self. It's like a mid-life crisis that started in 1986 and is still going.

It's not all bad. When he’s writing about subjects like his own mortality (‘Women & Wives’, ‘The End of the End’), it’s really powerful. When he’s sniggering about almost swearing and trying to sound like Ed Sheeran, though, it’s a shame because it's such a waste of talent.

5. UNKNOWN BUT HAS THE LINE “THE SWEET SHOP’S RUN OUT OF COUGH DROPS”
About 10-12 years ago, I was like a missionary for Sleaford Mods. I drifted off after Key Markets (when he started trying to sing and it felt like they’d said all they’d got to say, both lyrically and musically), Also, that style then got popular and became something else: annoying kids romanticising grimness and acting out some kind of working-class fantasy whilst also adopting this off-putting superior tone (or maybe I’m just paranoid?).

(editorial interjection to make Shaun's day worse - here it is - as awful or worse than he said it would be)

Anyway, I would have picked a Yard Act track, but then I heard this one with the line “the sweet shop’s ran out of cough drops”, which speaks for itself really, doesn’t it? When it came up on Spotify, it was the first time in years that the fire of hatred for everything a song stood for was reignited. I think it might be by English Teacher, but I couldn’t find it again. And I don’t want to.

MISC. PET HATES
- All of the pop and landfill indie songs on the in-store CD during my disastrous four months of working at Zara in the Bullring, summer 2007 (Kaiser Chiefs, Mika, The Fray, The Feeling, etc.).
- All Ed Sheeran-style bollocks, usually with slurred vocals and loads of tattoos, about "doing shots", "going 'hey-o, hey-o'", and rambling about clubs and DJs and WhatsApp and lending hoodies. 
- When bands rerecord their hits. It was generally done by Sixties acts in the Eighties, but Squeeze and Echo & the Bunnymen have done whole albums of it.
- Good-time 12-bar barroom boogies on 1970s album by rock superstars (usually with Jim Keltner on drums).