by Tom Townshend

Best Songs Of The Year - 2008

Tom casts an eye over the best bits of the year gone by...

2008 began, as most years do, with the hits of the recent past still weighing heavy on the airwaves. Predominantly these were the sharp, innovative sounds of ultra-modern R&B, since they perfectly reflected the bright, affluent future we were headed for... Oh dear.

When the country falls apart, there's only one thing to do: distract ourselves from impending doom with shiny, happy pop music until our world leaders stick a few things on ebay to pay for the global financial crisis that none of us quite understands. (How does a bank run out of money? Can't they just print more?)

While it may have been sorely needed, pop didn't arrive in 2008 with a fanfare. Having been banished for so long by the indie hordes, it needed to creep back into our lives somewhat surreptitiously.

As it turns out, those sleek hip hop-ish hits by the likes of Rihanna, Chris Brown and Timbaland were but a Trojan horse for pop. We thought we were listening to tracks that were urban and 'cool' while all along, proper songs brandishing massive choruses were ready to storm out from behind the beats, and attack the nation's ear turrets - our defences having already been weakened by the advance guard of Girls Aloud and the Sugababes (the pop everyone was allowed to like during the indie-era because the people who made it were far nicer to look at than the singer from The Enemy.)

Once the drawbridge was down (we'll abandon the metaphor shortly, we promise) pop snuck in via any means it could. Robyn's Be Mine - as good as anything Prince could've come up with back when he didn't think sex was dirty - followed the 'dance crossover' smash of Every Heartbeat before anyone could realise what was happening.

And Robyn's Danish cousins Alphabeat may have looked like Hoxton scenesters but close your eyes and listen to Fascination or Boyfriend and it could be the return of S Club 7 at their perkiest. Rejoice, proper songs are back!

The press called it 'wonky pop' - because adding an adjective takes the curse off anything you might still, adolescently, be unsure of (freak folk, new metal, er, free jazz?) But what was misshapen about Sam Sparro? As slick and slinky as Seal before he got all boring, Black & Gold might've made him a one-hit-wonder, but what a hit.

Also bringing their own smarts to the game of pop was the lovely Santogold who should've been a huge star this year but wasn't, probably due to some conspiracy we'll concoct for a later article. L.E.S. Artistes sounded like The Selector produced by Berlin-era Bowie, while Turn Out The Lights was the perfect soundtrack to balmy summer nights (if we'd had any).

Similarly denied a deserved hit (though it can only be a matter of time) were schoolgirls Poppy & The Jezebels who bravely discarded the naive punka of their NME-touted debut E.P. for the glorious, optimistic rush of UFO. Only Sweden's Those Dancing Days bettered it, with instant classic Hitten - a song as crushworthy as the band themselves.

Another mystifying omission from the top of the charts was New Zealand's Ladyhawke. If her record label can't get Number One hits out of the perfectly formed power pop of Back of the Van, Dusk Till Dawn, Paris Is Burning and My Delirium then she really has grounds to sue for incompetence.

Fingers crossed they'll all fare better with the inevitable re-release. Although it's strangely comforting to know that music companies still employ the kind of clueless simpletons who turned down The Beatles because: "guitar groups are on the way out".

And as if that weren't enough pure melody, sing-a-long choruses and irresistible hooks, The Saturdays managed to infiltrate the girl groups' fiercely guarded common room with two undeniably good singles in the shape of If This Is Love and Up (also helped, no doubt, by the Sugababes leaving the door wide open while they disastrously covered the Boots advert)

Britain's rekindled love of pop even allowed Beyonce's sister Solange to finally get her chart-feet wet (after years of jumping up and down in the background in a futile attempt to attract our attention). I Decided was a rollicking Motown pastiche that owed most of its success to a remix makeover by The Freemasons (the Gok Wan of pop).

While most US hip hop got ever more stupid (how much more can you say about money and genitals?), England's Estelle did manage a refreshingly breezy Number One hit with American Boy. Although we wonder how many people remember it was her single and not that of her more famous guest rapper, since we recently overheard a tramp telling a bus queue that his favourite song was by "Kane (sic) West. It's got some girl on it as well but I don't know who she is."

We can't pretend the lads with the skinny jeans and gimpy hair didn't produce at least something of merit in 2008. While it was a fairly barren creative year for the indie types, we enjoyed Bloc Party's descent into musical madness with Flux and Mercury both sounding like Adam & the Ants shouting for help from the bottom of a well.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds came back to full power with Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, the best song about a Biblical character raised from the dead since that one Lisa Scott Lee did, a few years back. Ida Maria's I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked was almost as good a song as it was a title, and we surprised ourselves completely by thinking This Is An Emergency by The Pigeon Detectives was a life-affirmingly triumphant burst of classic British guitar pop from a band who normally cause us to be a little bit sick in our mouths.

Music is funny that way.

Despite all the fuss about Duffy at the start of the year, it's the underdog Adele we find ourselves thinking more fondly of, if only for her chocolate-meltingly scrumptious cover of Bob Dylan's Make You Feel My Love, a song we'd like played at either our wedding or our funeral (whichever comes first).

But we end what turned out to be a pretty unpleasant and stinky year as we began: thinking far too much about Cliff Richard and listening to Take That more times that is probably healthy for a person of our age and gender. Where will it all end?

The views in this column are those of the author alone and not of MSN/Microsoft

Best Songs Of The Year - 2008

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