Wolf Eyes – Stabbed in the Face
By Easter 2004, I’d been in a relationship with my partner, Maria, for four months and I was just realising how deeply in love I was. We had become inseparable. A magazine sent me to the ATP festival at Pontins in Camber Sands to interview “the Beastie Boys of noise”, Wolf Eyes. The interview fell to pieces when the band, in a state of great psychic refreshment, all wearing Manowar T-shirts, refused to stop watching a Manowar DVD and signalled they would only answer questions if they related to Manowar.
The rest of the day was exemplary – one of the best ever – walking on the beach, visiting record shops, watching the most incredible music curated by Sonic Youth. When Maria and I got back to our B&B room that evening, I fired up the CD player, which contained a pre-release copy of the new Wolf Eyes album, Burned Mind, containing the single Stabbed in the Face. But now its howling feedback and tinnitus machine noise sounded like a celebratory, ecstatic, love-filled symphony. People might think we’re being juvenile by saying Stabbed in the Face is our song, but it is the soundtrack of an incredibly joyous, optimistic time. We don’t listen to it that often now, though; our 14-year-old son says it upsets the dog. John Doran
Sharpe and Numan – Change Your Mind
For years, I associated this track with big nights out. Its swooning synths and sing-along chorus made it the perfect contender for the lights-on moment on many occasions: epic, yet soft enough to sway around to with frazzled friends. But it took on new meaning when I heard it in the background of an Instagram video featuring someone I had just started seeing. In those early days of shy phone calls and infrequent in-person hangouts, I watched that short, blurry clip over and over again, yearning like a teenager, as the melody etched itself into my brain. The song quickly became something that reminded me of said person rather than just parties and, later, something we would dance to together as well.
That’s in spite of the fact that Change Your Mind is more of a breakup song, with a dejected Gary Numan pining over some unrequited lover, urging them to change their mind – sometimes aggressively so. But the woozy and sparkly production, paired with all the memories attached to it, makes all those bitter sentiments feel irrelevant. The fact that the 12in version stretches over a luxurious eight and a half minutes makes it the ideal soundtrack for overindulging the soppiest of feelings, whether it’s missing late nights with friends or fancying someone. Safi Bugel
Amy Winehouse – Stronger Than Me
If your man caught you listening to Stronger Than Me, he would surely think that you hate him: “Don’t you know you supposed to be the man? / Not pale in comparison to who you think I am.” The song is a modern-day equivalent of the scene in Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae where frenzied women tear Pentheus limb from limb, an act called the sparagmos. It not only concerns a partner who disappoints during sex, but his physical and emotional weakness as compared to Winehouse. It is emasculating, mocking and of its time: “Feel like a lady and you my ladyboy.”
Yet I have always found its frankness more romantic than spurning. I don’t get the sense that Winehouse isn’t in love with the man in question, only that she is willing to show him what his weaknesses are and appeal to his bodily instincts. She knows that endless talk can kill romance and affection, especially when you’re being fed bullshit, and that sometimes wordlessly stepping up to take on a caring or leadership role can help meet your partner’s needs. It is all somewhat illogical, reductive about gender roles and dismissive, but, at times, I’ve listened to this song to channel my bluntest assessments of how to get back on track. Sometimes, that is just to be held and “gripped” without words, rather than be fed with the same old “tired script”. Jason Okundaye
Einstürzende Neubauten – Youme & Meyou
Compared with the flying sparks and screaming of Einstürzende Neubauten’s early work, Youme & Meyou – with Blixa Bargeld crooning over melodic pulses made by rhythms tapped out on plastic pipes – is far from abrasive, yet it still had the power to teach me something about love. I first fell for Neubauten in part because they wrote romantic songs to places, rather than just people, but in this I missed some of their depth.
I heard the lines “out there’s always a construction site / A Starbucks and yet another Guggenheim” and took this as being a song about the blandness of the globalisation of the urban environment in the early 21st century. It was only when my partner told me it made her think of us that I spotted what the title actually is, a dialogue between a me and a you in a relationship, and I realised that I had been an idiot. In odd ways, it started to cement us together. You might not have Bargeld pegged as an agony uncle, but this is a song filled with wonderful lines about feeding love to make it endure, mutual understanding and realism – as he sings it, “if the future isn’t bright at least it’s colourful”. Luke Turner
Leona Lewis – My Hands
When you’ve been single for 34 years, most traditional love songs have lost their lustre. Songs about heartbreak are now where I find hope for the romantic love that my life has lacked. When I first heard Leona Lewis’s desperately sad My Hands in 2010, I was just so moved by it. The song is about trying to rebuild your life after a breakup, but your body physically rejects every step forward. When Lewis’s voice almost breaks as she sings “ready for a new day without you”, it evokes the acute desperation of a person pushed to the brink of disintegration.
The despair that washes over this song can only come from a place of a fully realised, intimate and deep romance. It made me stop and imagine how it would feel to love – and be loved – so deeply that you “don’t wanna start again” because your body aches just to feel the touch of your ex’s hand. I hope to one day know what that devastation feels like because it can only mean that I have truly been in love. If it’s weird to find that romantic, well then, my heart just won’t let me be normal. Jeffrey Ingold
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Middle America
I couldn’t really tell you what Middle America is about. Malkmus’s lyrics to this gentle guitar ditty are typically opaque; all he’s said is that it’s not a commentary on the flyover states. To me, it sounds like love – more specifically, the sort of love I’d like to find.
Having spent the past decade meaningfully single, I find it hard to relate to explicitly romantic songs: they’re too generic to be moving, too singular to be relatable, or too histrionic to be aspirational. Elliptical as it is, Middle America always evokes how I would like to feel in a relationship. There is something about Malkmus’s delivery that suggests he’s picking up a conversation that had no obvious start and never really ends – it just roams, as talk does with a partner.
Malkmus’s narrator wonders aloud about time passing and “how to simplify”, the kind of problems you’d bring to a romantic relationship. In my reverie he engages with mine, offering gentle encouragement (“do your major duty”) or calling me on my bullshit: “When you get down to it, you wanted to.” He asks, “do you think you’ve got the nerve?” and sympathises without being a performative ally: “Men are scum, I won’t deny.” And he’s steadfast in his commitment and care without promising for ever or reaching for once-in-a-lifetime love: “I will not disappear.”
Often, when I press play on Middle America, my shoulders drop and I take a proper breath for the first time in hours, day-to-day stresses suddenly surmountable. Between the lines of Middle America, I can glimpse some “unnamed star” and dare to hope it’s not so far away. Elle Hunt
Public Image Ltd – This Is Not a Love Song (album version)
Of course it’s not romantic. Just read the title! John Lydon wasn’t lying when he told us – repeatedly, over towering, brass-powered chords – that this was not a love song. Instead, it was a sneering, sarcastic attack on 80s capitalism, music industry greed and all of those who had accused the former Sex Pistol of selling out.
It was also – two decades after its 1983 release – one of the staples of my DJ bag, a dead-cert whenever I played it at indie club nights across the country in the early 2000s. PiL’s biggest hit was cool enough to gain approval from the hipsters, yet also guaranteed to fill the dancefloor. I was delighted when the girl in the blue dress came up to the DJ booth during my set at Pigs in Leeds and requested it. She had caught my eye the previous week; now it turned out she had great taste, too. Of course I’d play it for her. I turned back to the decks and realised – to my horror – that I’d taken it out of my bag to listen to that same morning … and forgotten to put it back. Nightmare!
Luckily, I had a chance to make amends. At the end of the night, promoter Ash handed me a bottle of champagne (OK, probably cheap sparkling wine) and told me to award it to the best dancer. Well, she was a great dancer, but really I just wanted an excuse to talk to her.
I stumbled across the dancefloor, desperately looking for her, but to no avail. Realising I maybe looked slightly obsessive, I admitted defeat and gave it to someone else. She must have gone home, I thought. Then she reappeared in the queue for the cloakroom. Her eyes matched her dress and she had a cute Manchester accent. I was smitten. Despite not having the record she wanted, and despite having just given some other girl a free bottle of fizz, she seemed happy to see me. Twenty-two years and two kids later, we both still love that record and the way it became part of our lore. It might not be a love song, but it was definitely the start of a love story. Tim Jonze
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Enola Gay
I met my first ever girlfriend when we both worked at Asda. I was part-time on Saturdays and sometimes after school, and she was full-time and already far more worldly. She introduced me to all sorts, including Iggy Pop albums, but because I was too young for pubs, most of our dates consisted of aimless walks arm in arm around Leeds suburbs.
One place that did let us in was Primo’s, a Saturday electronic night in Leeds city centre. One night, we somehow ended up snogging while draped across the long velvety seats that ran alongside the dancefloor, until a chuckling bouncer gently lifted me up. Our prematurely halted encounter played out to the sound of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s Enola Gay, a synth-pop classic. Despite seemingly loved-up lines such as “this kiss you give, it’s never ever going to fade away”, it’s about the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, killing up tens of thousands of people. I’m not sure I knew that then, but the song’s haunting, melancholy synth riff also spoke to my fears that ours would be a fleeting romance. She dumped me a few months later, but if I ever hear Enola Gay playing anywhere, it instantly takes me back. Dave Simpson
He Is Legend – The Seduction
I’m sure there are many people out there who find certain heavy rock songs romantic, but I personally am more of the harps and harmonies persuasion. It’s not that I don’t like heavy music as a rule, I just don’t find it very conducive to candlelit dinners and the laying of capes over puddles, you know? Call me crazy but I don’t want to cuddle while guitars chug and a man roars incoherently at me, despite what my last relationship might suggest.
While at university, I had the sweetest, loveliest boyfriend you could possibly imagine, a kind and generous man who had a powerful affection for the kind of technical metal I would rather put my head in a meat grinder than listen to. One day, he played me this song – which is not that heavy, and not that technical, and unlikely to be classified as truly metal by the heads. But with its banging hooks, relentless punk beat and drawling insouciance, it provided this shared musical ground to dance on together. Sure, it’s a skewed retelling of Romeo and Juliet but, aside from that, it’s essentially a man yelling at me while guitars chug. But whenever my boyfriend would put it on, I knew he was saying: “Hey, here’s that song we both like and I’ve put it on so we can enjoy it together.” And what could be more romantic than that? Kate Solomon