If music be the food of love, as someone once suggested, play it loud. Love songs don’t always have to be ballads – sometimes they can also be down and dirty floorfillers.
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, and also to celebrate the power of a banging tune, we’ve dug out the vinyl and the tape deck, put the needle to the groove, hit play and record, and made a mini C60 love compilation for the indie disco…
The Smiths – There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
Well, durr. Johnny’s ever-sublime guitar, those soaring strings… and for Morrissey, the purest expression of absolute, desperate, almost certainly unrequited, love: “To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine.”
The Stone Roses – She Bangs the Drums
Three minutes and 43 seconds of pure joy: clattering rhythms, euphoric guitars, and the dizzy rush of finding someone so incredibly cool they’re going to change your life for ever. Plus, it correctly recognises that female drummers are in fact, wicked.
The Las – There She Goes
Yes, we know what you’re going to say: it’s (whisper it) not about love at all, but something altogether more sordid. Well guess what? We don’t care. It’s still completely beautiful, and actually, if you want to get into it, you might suggest that what Lee Mavers was actually trying to capture was the all-consuming addiction and euphoria of falling in love.
The Cure – Just Like Heaven
Robert Smith has described this song as the Cure’s best ever pop song. And he’s right. Love as a glorious headlong dive into something wonderful. You’re just like a dream.
The Libertines – Can’t Stand Me Now
Not exactly a traditional love song, granted. This starkly honest account of the Libertines’ break up is on the one hand everything the title suggests… but on the other is a plea for reconciliation, and in Pete and Carl’s call-and-response delivery holds a beauty and a power and a defiance that declares love really can overcome hate. “I know you lie, all you do is make me cry… I’m still in love with you”.
The Wannadies – You and Me Song
Not much explanation needed here. “We watch TV until we fall asleep, not very exciting – but it’s you and me, and we’ll always be together.” Lovely stuff. And impossible not to dance to that chorus.
Arctic Monkeys – I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor
Romance as seen through the eyes of kids in their late teens looking for easy action on frenetic Friday nights – which, as Shakespeare would have identified had he lived to see Sheffield in the early 2000s, is the purest form of romance there is. “There ain’t no love, no Montagues or Capulets,” spits Alex Turner. “Just banging tunes and DJ sets… and dirty dancefloors, and dreams of naughtiness.”
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