This week there was a huge temptation to fill two lists with comedy records and overwrought metal tunes. I am easily provoked into overexcitability, but after 40 minutes of so of uninterrupted novelty – oh it's the sound of washing up! A weedy motorbike! Some stuff stolen from a detuned radio! – even I had to start thinking about a little more structure, a few more rules. Namely, does a sound effect made on an otherwise fairly ordinary instrument count? I wanted to say no, but again and again my will was broken by irresistible examples.
So, your first track on your first album needs to set the scene for your whole shtick: no one has ever pulled of that trick quite like Black Sabbath. It opens with rainfall and distant thunder breaking, a bell tolling accusingly. Then a power chord hits, matching the key and tempo of the bell, and suddenly you have a new favourite band. NWA recreated a whole courtroom, with judges, witnesses, suitably buffoonish, racist law-enforcement officials and synthesised sirens for Fuck Tha Police. There's even a chase sequence.
Battling voices are raised and glasses clink aggressively in the Specials' Nite Klub, part of a pre-acid house world in which parasites could creep and where "the girls are slags and the beer tastes just like piss". The rifle fire that tears through the middle of the brilliant Colombian song No Tiene Billete is part of what its nominator describes as the "mindless but inevitable violence that erupts in a society where people have nothing". Meanwhile, some of Paper Planes' sound effects – in particular the heavy gunshot noise – were deemed so hideously dangerous that MTV actually censored them.
Gershwin's An American in Paris, written in 1928, is a riotous blur of imagery: car horns honk furiously as the music swells and sways to create finger-wagging authority figures and bemused, if not terrified, pedestrians. Twenty-eight years later, Charles Mingus attempted to get his band to play what he described as "the sounds of a big city on a foggy day", using only their usual instruments. It's a remarkably beautiful piece. Putney's own Four Tet is similarly entranced by the emotional pull and push of instrumental sounds and textures, and his wonderful 2003 record Slow Jam is suitably garlanded with squeaks, shudders and sighs.
Squeaks, shudders and sighs are also on Lady Saw's mind. She wants a man "fi mek mi bed go so/ Uh-ee-uh-ee-uh" – her self-made creaking spring noises really are quite something although, sadly, her neighbours are complaining already.
The Heart of Saturday Night is so perfect for the topic that it's almost irrelevant that it's among my favourite songs ever written. "Is it the crack of the pool balls?" Waits asks. "Neon buzzing, telephone's ringing, it's your second cousin." The cars beep and pull away outside and you're sitting safely at the bar, the "magic of the melancholy tear in your eye". The sound effects are more than just part of the fabric, the real and imagined noises have actually become the song. Brilliant.
This week's playlist
1 Black Sabbath Black Sabbath
2 Fuck Tha Police NWA
3 Nite Klub The Specials
4 No Tiene Billete Fruko y Sus Tesos
5 Paper Planes M.I.A
6 An American in Paris George Gerwshin
7 A Foggy Day Charles Mingus
8 Slow Jam Four Tet
9 Bed Noise Lady Saw
10 The Heart of Saturday Night Tom Waits
Next week: songs with great opening lines.
