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Friday 14 February 2020

You Can Never Get Enough


I'm sure this song has been the subject of Friday posts on music blogs a thousand times before but it helps me nail three things with one mp3 today- a Friday, and not just any old Friday but the Friday I finish work for a week and a song that has love in the title and is about love too, so perfect for Valentine's Day.

Friday I'm In Love

From 1992, which at the time seemed like late- period Cure given they had over a decade behind them at that point, bouncing in the jangliest guitars and a catchy- as- flu lyric this is Robert Smith at his poppiest, a naive and deliberately up record.

To give some Yang to The Cure's Yin, this is a song by My Bloody Valentine in 1988, a song that's less poppy and direct, more trippy, more sensual and slightly bewildering too.

Cigarette In Your Bed

Acoustic guitar as an uneven rhythm, detuned electric guitars coming in like storm clouds passing through and Belinda's half asleep voice making vague threats against a lover/ ex.

'Falling down
I like to watch you
Crawl around

Arms untied
Scratching your eyes out
With a smile

Strange stare
Strangled by the blade left
In your heart

I glide by
Slip a cigarette
In your bed'


The whole thing gathers speed at the end with some 'de- de- de- de- de- de- de- der' cooing over thumping drums, feedback and bent strings. This still sounds like little else and goes further out there than most of their contemporaries travelled.

Cigarette In Your Bed was one of the B-sides of the You Made Me Realise e.p. from 1988 and on the budget price Creation Records sampler Doing It For The Kids (also 1988), a compilation I still treasure. You Made Me Realise is a record that contains the astonishing guitars and dynamics of the title track, with its malevolent instrumental section, and has at least two other MBV classics- Slow, a song with stunning guitars and drums and Kevin Shields singing about oral sex and Drive It All over Me, a woozy, hammering Belinda Butcher/ Colm O'Ciosoig co- write.

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