Keeping it real ... Chris Difford. Photograph: Samir Hussein/Getty
Think about your favourite things to do. Do they include listening to someone droning on and on about their relationships? Or moaning about yet another existential crisis? Or detailing their endless self-destructive exploits? Or expounding their half-baked theories on whatever fashionable cause has fleetingly caught their attention? Thought not. Then consider the things that most of us spend most of our time thinking about: work; children, if you have them; sex; sport, perhaps; food; telly, of course; buying things. Some of them are vitally important subjects, some merely substantial diversions, and yet none of them - sex aside - are the traditional bedfellows of popular music.
Why should this be the case? Does the idea of singing about Coronation Street transgress some fundamental rock and roll law? Does writing a song about the joy of physical exercise simply go against the grain in a world where a quizzically raised eyebrow or a regularly oiled drinking elbow is exertion enough - or does everyone still remember Mick Jagger running around the studio to the noxious Let's Work and think better of it?
The lexicon of pop sneers at routine: the central cogs of our lives are simply tedious and dull, aren't they? Instead, it wants us to buy into the delusion that we're above all that. The best pop songs succeed triumphantly in pulling off this trick, but often all that second-hand swagger and philosophising seems a bit try-hard, a bit hollow and deflating.
While listening to Chris Difford's excellent new record, on the other hand, I was struck by how heartening - and unusual - it is to hear someone singing about the experiences and worries that conspire to make up a real, recognisable life, without any attempt to glamorise or drape it all in shabby chic: owing your missus a large sum of money; getting fat; being a less than perfect father; missing your dead mother. Hardly staples of the genre, but welcome additions.
Difford proves that the art of communication is not all about bellowing big, bold clichés to a bar, or theatre, or stadium full of people, or emphasising your elevated status; it can also be achieved by transforming the routine and regular, re-shaping the everyday, into something quietly spectacular and transcendent.
I'd like more of this. What are the greatest examples of songs that stray far from the path of rock and roll orthodoxy, the songs unafraid to tackle the mundane and yet still make a gently, oddly affirming noise?
