The Empire State Building in New York. Photograph: Paul Owen
Thank you for the enormous amount of suggestions for songs about sweet foods. I'd never realised just how many of them there are, nor how many of pop's biggest names seem to suffer from a sweet tooth.
I decided to narrow the bigger names down to one, and purely out of personal preference went for Sally Cinnamon by the Stone Roses, and those lyrics about a girl who "tastes of cherryade." I could easily have chosen Led Zeppelin (Custard Pie), the Beatles (Savoy Truffle, on the White Album), REM (Me In Honey), Jonathan Richman (Ice Cream Man) and obviously the Rolling Stones (Brown Sugar, although the song isn't actually about brown sugar) etc. etc. There were a slew of nominations for The Jesus And Mary Chain's Just Like Honey but I opted for their Some Candy Talking because the lyrics are more intriguing.
There was a bunch of stuff that could have made it in on another day, or in another mood: Kelis (Milkshake), Jerry Lee Lewis (Milkshake Mademoiselle), the Archies (Sugar Sugar), the Searchers (either Sweets For My Sweet or Sugar And Spice), Maps (Liquid Sugar), Marcy Playground (Sex and Candy), World Of Twist (Sweets) etc. etc. It was good to discover Bo Carter's Banana In Your Fruit Basket and Grandadbob's Killed By Sweets and be reminded of Shanks and Bigfoot's glorious Sweet Like Chocolate.
One song which had a surprising number of recommendations was Sugar High by Frasier Chorus. I'd totally forgotten about this band, who I saw in the late Eighties when they did a wonderfully "gentle" version of Anarchy In The UK. Alas, I couldn't find Sugar High or even the lyrics anywhere on the web. I do actually still own their Sue album but all my vinyl - along with my old turntable - has been in storage for an age. So I couldn't hear it again to write about it, unfortunately.
I've enjoyed handling RR. Next week you're all back in the trusty hands of the "guru", Dorian Lynskey. You need to bombard him with suggestions for songs about buildings: houses, pubs, churches, hotels, hospitals, tower blocks and the like. We've previously had Tower of Song (Leonard Cohen), House of the Rising Sun (the Animals), Our House (Madness), Gin House Blues (Nina Simone), Burning Down the House (Talking Heads), There's a Ghost in My House (R Dean Taylor) , House on the Hill (Kevin Coyne) and The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song (Jeffrey Lewis). Since I'm reverting to RR reader mode I might as well start things off with one of my own, Empire State Human by the Human League, for me their finest moment.
As per usual there's the Readers recommend archive, A-Z and overspill blog, and the deadline is midday on Monday.
