18: One Moment More - Mindy Smith

And from a song with no darkness we now come to one of the most haunting, melancholy, tear-inducing pieces you'll ever hear.

We all face death. And the death of others we love, and how we face that, is so utterly different from how we face our own mortality - should it be? I have no idea - but it's excruciatingly hard to adequately express the pain, the loss, but beyond that those bizarre feelings at those times of being somewhere beyond the now and reaching with the one we love into wherever it is they are going, and going only so far on that road with them before leaving them to continue on alone. How can you explain and describe that feeling, and why do we feel the need to express that, even if we don't want to? Most of us end up in tearful disbelief moving through to slow acceptance and eventually closure, but that path is fraught and varied such that there's never anything the same from one person's experience to the next, and sometimes it doesn't complete even in a lifetime.

And yet, and yet, and yet... Mindy Smith - writing here about her mother's passing - captures in words and music the feelings around these times in a way that is so relatable, so accurate and so beyond anything I could ever hope to express myself. Her vocal performance here is such that you can never imagine anyone else singing it - shades of Sarah McLachlan's performance of Angel up at number 39 - and the lyrics are so clear to hear, so concise and so seeping with emotion that you never want anyone else to sing it.

It's not a song you can listen to often. But it expresses something we need to express, and something that I on my own am totally unable to express in anything like the words, the beauty and the sheer accuracy of what Mindy Smith manages in this song.

19: Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes - Edison Lighthouse

What an odd choice for the Top Forty countdown of favourite songs/tunes ever.

A one-hit wonder from 1970, most people probably know it or at least have heard it on some oldies station (or 'BBC Local Radio' as we call it in the UK) and would be vaguely familiar with it. Not atypical of the time by any means, the lyrics basically a light flower-power story about a gentleman feeling a romantic attraction towards a lady who appears to be part of the hippy movement, the tune a breezy late-sixties guitar-based pop number owing a debt to the folk movement of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary as much as to the Beatles or the Stones. And Edison Lighthouse never did anything much again. And that's that, right?

The thing about it is that it's so happy, so infectious and so unstoppably 'up' that it actually transcends its time and place to become something that really will lift you wherever you are. I think some songs take you back to where you were when it was a hit, or when you heard it, and I have plenty of those. But I wasn't around in 1970 and have never had any serious contextual exposure to this song. This is one of those songs that once you stop for a moment and pay it even the slightest bit of attention, it suddenly grows in your mind and you realise actually this is a darn fine piece of music, perfectly weighted, light and airy and - like the Bee Gees at number 31 - there's just nothing dark or low about this song at all.

There's probably plenty of other songs that would grow in my mind were I to give them a lot of attention, but there are plenty that haven't and this is one that really has. Give this song the time of day and see where you end up with it.

20: Moonlight Shadow - Mike Oldfield/Maggie Reilly

I knew this one from Radio One when it was a hit in 1983, and then didn't think about it for ten years, apart from occasional run-outs on Late Night Sou' West. Then around 1993 I purchased a compilation album that happened to contain it, and started to listen to it again, and it was one of those songs that just didn't leave you. Two years after that I started to play the acoustic guitar and that was that, I was a dead duck.

Mike Oldfield is of course a highly talented composer, still probably underrated in terms of how he will be viewed historically. Producing a serious variety of music - Moonlight Shadow is a relatively rare four-minute radio pop single for Oldfield - his work will be listened to a hundred years from now and beyond. And so this pop single he made, with Maggie Reilly on vocals, seems to me to carry a lot of that talent in, condense it down, and get a whole lot out of his four minutes. The lyrics are less of an issue - something to do with the plot of a half-watched TV mystery show as I recall - but they do have one interesting feature which ties this song back a long, long way to a folk music tradition that is centuries old.

Listen to a lot of that old folksy stuff - and I don't particularly like to, to be honest - and you hear the repeating lines as the story progresses. This was before recorded music, so the average folk singer would be performing in front of people, and they wouldn't know the songs. At least to start with. So you have a repeating refrain, either a chorus as we know it today or sometimes just a set of four-line verses where lines two and four would always be the same, so people could learn them and join in, while the singer used lines one and three to progress the narrative (and there usually was a narrative). And here we have the same thing - lines two and four (and six and eight, depending on how you break the song up) have these repeated refrains. Sting does the same in "Fields of Gold". It's a device, and it works, and if it works well - as in those two cases - you don't really know it's happening. But it is, and shows that Moonlight Shadow could have been a folk song from two hundred years ago without too much bother.

Except for the arrangement of course, and Mike Oldfield does do those well. Not one but two electric guitars ("slightly distorted"?) hopping and then screaming solos over the main chord base, with the acoustic still driving along underneath, and you have something put together by a genius that sounds so simple and yet works in so many ways on so many levels.

Oh and for those who never had the original album but know the four-minute version, enjoy the video. There's a whole extra MINUTE that we never knew about.

21: Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen/Jeff Buckley

There's been more study done into this song than probably any other in the Top Forty list. And I won't bore you with it, you can read that elsewhere. It will suffice to say that when you think about which version to share with people, you're unlikely to suggest the original 1984 recording by Leonard Cohen.

Which leads to the question of which version to put here. Obvious answers would be John Cale, Jeff Buckley or Rufus Wainwright, but the thing seems to have been covered by everyone in the history of history, and most of them are disappointing because they miss what would seem to me to be the strongest part of the song - the last verse in Cohen's original. The melody itself is musically simple but strong enough to carry just a vocal and a single instrument (although you can easily add a choir if you want) - and the best part, music-wise, is that wonderful walk-up from (if you're performing in G) D through B7 (so you get the D# note) and up to E for the E-minor. Rufus Wainwright went for B-minor rather than B7 at that point so ends up with two D's then an E. Sounds different and is mildly interesting but frankly he missed a trick without the D#.

But the words, the words, the words. Starting with a simple, relatively jumbled set of Biblical themes (David? Samson? eh?) and even some musical instructions at the beginning (you know the bit I mean, but have you ever heard anything like that in any other song?).. but it grows, and in the final verse used by Cale, Buckley and co we end up with the spiritual ambiguity that sums up so much of the song ("Well maybe there's a God above, but all I ever learned from love...") followed by the acknowledgement that "the hallelujah" is "cold and broken". Sums it up, really, no sense of hope for anything beyond this.

But Cohen himself continues into another verse, the astounding lyrics rising with the fourth, fifth, minor fall and major lift to propell the listener, the singer, and anyone else in the vicinity into a state of semi-rapturous hope despite the hopelessness of the situation.

Well I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya.
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah...

For that reason I offer two versions for your enjoyment. Jeff Buckley's famous cover (above) and yes, the original 1984 Leonard Cohen version - right here:

Short List: Worst Soft Drinks

Taking another quick break from the music list, here's the first of a two-parter on soft drinks. I didn't manage to get a top forty soft drinks, but I did find the "definitely didn't make the list" section was developing into a list of its own. So here are the top ten worst soft drinks in Duncan history.

10. A&W Cream Soda - Put it in your mouth and wait for some kind of flavour to emerge. I'm still waiting.

9. Jarritos Limeade - Had one of these Mexican drinks because it looked appealing and exotic in its tall bottle, and it tasted like rubbishy Co-op own-brand limeade from 1983. Very disappointing.

8. New Coke - I actually don't remember this much but I gather I have to put it in a list such as this to add grvitas and credibility to my arguments.

7. Tizer - They say it's supposed to taste like apples. I only found that out when researching this blog entry. Best feature: the image above says "Original GREAT taste" on the can, as if that is supposed to make me want to buy it.

6. Bundaberg Root Beer - Australian beverage that has the rare distinction of not only being bad, but actually being unrecognizable as root beer in terms of flavour. At a guess I'd suggest "rotting tree bark beer" or "old shoe beer" might be more correct names.

5. Club-Mate - I've never had this German drink but the sheer idea of taking South American Mate and putting it in carbonated water just sounds such a bad idea on so many fronts it had to make the list.

4. Panda Cola - Warm syrupy goodness for those long English summer days. On the upside it make good bicycle chain lubricant.

3. Irn-Bru - "Made from girders in Scotland" - oh really, that explains why it tastes so good then.

2. "Carter's" Root Beer (only available at Asda in the UK) - If you want to put an entire country off Root Beer, offer them this.

1. L&P - Allegedly made from Lemon juice and Paeroa mineral water, this dreadful concoction claims to be "World Famous In New Zealand". Kiwi culture could be much improved if they stopped telling visitors that the great things about New Zealand are stuff like this and the music of Dave Dobbyn.

The list of best soft drinks ever will follow soon... meantime tomorrow we'll be back to the regular music list at number 21 with a song that a lot of people would have in their top ten, or even higher. Not, not Dave Dobbyn.

22: Spring/Allegro (Four Seasons) - Vivaldi

The question here surely is not whether it should be in the Top Forty At Forty, but why it isn't any higher than number 22. The answer to that will be revealed over the coming entries of course, but the fact remains it is one of the strongest pieces of music of the last thousand years, and even at its venerable age it is spritely and fresh to each new generation.

How old is it? 1720 is the current estimate. It was only recently that I wondered why Vivaldi wrote so much string stuff and not piano concertos like Mozart - the answer is that this pre-dates the piano. Seriously - the oldest pianos in existence today date from the same year - 1720 - and they were early prototypes, not considered yet for serious use.

But the main thing is that it sounds amazing. Not that the rest of the Four Seasons doesn't - every part is distinctive and well-known - but Spring is the best, and not just because Nigel Kennedy got hold of it. It is very descriptive - the bird singing represented by the violin solo is the obvious one, but there's plenty of other spring sounds to listen for - but the bit that I really like best is the last minute or so, where it goes to a minor-key lower version of the main theme, followed by a section that ends with a rising violin solo that slowly rises, rises, rises and then arrives, not to quick, not too slow, at the summit of the hill and the piece can finish with the final refrain again. Really beautiful stuff, perfectly judged and weighted, and simple enough for anyone to appreciate.

I have no idea why you'd put a lighthouse with it, but the Landscape people did, so I've linked to that version.

23: The Shaman - Richard Searles

I don't quite know how to describe this one. It's a sort of haunting new-agey type instrumental with a minor-key acoustic guitar structure overlaid with some strings and a few other simple things, really nothing fancy at all. Richard Searles himself is known for producing a kind of medieval music that can probably be best described as 'Elizabethan' or 'Tudor', and indeed the majority of the album that this is from ("Ancient Isles") takes that form. But this different, much more timeless, and it really gets its hooks into you.

I know it from Landscape. The podcasts they produced a few years ago were varied (and contained too much Bach) but I listened to them in the background while working and presumably absorbed them by some sort of musical osmosis. Then one day I found I had the acoustic guitar sequence in my head and thought "what is THAT?". The I thought some more and tried to play the music in my head and went "oh yes, that's the one with the owl noises in it, must be from Landscape". Off I popped to the podcasts and there, second track on podcast six, was this weird guitar-and-strings-and-owl-hoots thing that I then proceeded to listen to over and over, and never got sick of it. I still haven't. Unquestionably one of my favourite instrumental pieces ever.

My only wish is that the boat journey in the video above below actually WENT somewhere, like a secret cave or something where we could really meet the owl.