Six Things, Volume 86

Love Songs | Museums | Gun | Birds on Ships | Books | Kerning

Nov 16, 2024

Six Things is two years old.

To celebrate, I’m giving away books. Specifically, I have three to give away to the lucky/skilful winners of the below competition. Winners can have their choice of Taking Flight, Into The Tangled Bank, or Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? The books will of course be signed in the usual manner and, if you like, dedicated.

To enter, you need to:

– be a Six Things subscriber

– email your own Six Things to me

– tell me which of the books you’d like in the event that you win

That’s all! It’s simplicity itself.

Entries close at 23.59 (UK time) on Sunday 24th November 2024.

Here’s the small print:

– your Six Things can be as short or long as you like. I usually go for a bit of variety, but you might want to write six 1,500-word essays on your favourite 19th-century Italian operas, or present six photographs of different shades of vermilion. Bear in mind, though, that those are probably less likely to meet with the approval of the judge.

The winner will be no more and no less than the entry I like the most.

Right, enough of that. On with the things.

Thing 1 – Love Songs

This is outstanding. The Pudding (most recently featured in Six Things Volume 82 with their excellent feature on the best game you’ve never heard of) has responded to rumblings. The rumblings concern the perception that the love song, as an art form, is dying. This is the kind of thing that lesser mortals, myself included, might file under ‘oh the boomers are moaning again’, before getting on with more important things – for example, seeing if my reactions have got any quicker in the last five months – but the people at The Pudding are made of different stuff. Give them a subject and they will dissect it, analyse it, then put it back together again and present it to their adoring public in a way that satisfies both visual learners and those who like a bit of meat on the bone of their infographics.

In this case, the process involved examining the subject matter of over 5,000 Top 10 songs from the last 65 years of chart history, assessing whether each one could be classified as a ‘love song’ – and, crucially, what kind of love the song entailed – and putting the results together with visuals that at times look like an online colour-blindness test, albeit with the added benefit of having buttons to click so you can listen to some of said songs, as well as being fully searchable so you can work out exactly which songwriter has been the most love-obsessed in the last 13/20ths of a century.

Now, I’m not saying I go the extra mile – if anything, it’s more like a furlong – but of the artists clocking up 25 or more Top 10 hits, here are the top three in each (statistically significant) category. You will of course draw your own conclusions – everyone always does.

Non-love

Lil Wayne 56%

The Beatles 55.88%

Elton John 55.56%

Serenade

Justin Bieber 34.62%

Stevie Wonder 33.33%

Elvis Presley 32%

Heartache

Mariah Carey 35.71%

Taylor Swift 27.91%

Elvis Presley 24%

Pursuit

Janet Jackson 22.22%

Taylor Swift 16.28%

Lil Wayne 16%

It’s Complicated

Rihanna 21.88%

Drake 18.56%

Elvis Presley 16%

Thing 2 – Museums

At the age of eight I was a museum curator.

This isn’t as toe-curlingly precocious as it reads. Or at least not quite. Because it wasn’t, as you might have guessed, an actual museum – more a small cabinet at the top of the stairs in which, at the encouragement of my mother, I placed a series of Interesting Things I’d Found. A pheasant’s feather. A small, chunky green bottle. A stone of distinctive shape.

It was born of curiosity (hers) and boredom (mine) – the idea being that I would learn the art of curiosity, and that this would not exactly cure me of boredom (which, for a child, is simultaneously a terrible and vitally important thing) but at least take the edge off it. It worked, for a bit.

I was, though, a poor curator. Early intentions were to write detailed descriptions for everything in the museum, but soon enough ‘rusty horseshoe I found in the ditch at the bottom of the lane (September 1973)’ and ‘egg of blackbird (Turdus merula)’ gave way to ‘conker’ or ‘bit of old pot’, and before long I stopped altogether. The museum persisted – a faintly sad collection of curios of uncertain provenance and obscure interest – partly because I couldn’t be bothered to throw it all away and partly because it represented a particular stage of childhood, and nostalgia is powerful.

Fifty years later I retain both a keen sense of curiosity and a fondness for museums, collections and Interesting Things People Have Found.

All this is really by way of introduction to some cool museums I’d like to visit.

The Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection

The Museum of Portable Sound

The Pasta Museum

The Museum of Brands (I have no excuse for not having visited this one, because it’s in London)

Jadis – Cabinet of curiosities, repository of the pre-digital, and mad scientist prop house

Thing 3 – Gun

We’ve lost some nonagenarian titans of the arts recently: Quincy Jones, Roy Haynes, Lou Donaldson, to name but three in the field of music.

And the death of Timothy West is terribly sad news for, well, anyone who’s watched or listened to anything in the last fifty years. Even if you think you never saw him in anything, you definitely did.

He also wrote this, This Gun I Have In My Right Hand is Loaded, a masterful parody and object lesson in how not to write radio drama. Thanks to radio comedy production doyen Ed Morrish for reminding me of its existence.

“Whisky, eh? That's a strange drink for an attractive auburn-haired girl of twenty nine.”

Having posted that, Ed quickly followed up with another gem of the genre, Lucy’s Complex Dilemma by John Finnemore, of this parish (and when I link to the words ‘of this parish’, I do it instead of saying ‘you should definitely subscribe to John’s Substack’, which I am also saying here with words just to drive the point home).

Thing 4 – Birds on Ships

Migration is exhausting and dangerous. You wouldn’t blame a bird for occasionally hitching a lift.

Thing 5 – Books

The funny thing about the annual National Book Tokens' Hidden Books Game – in which all you have to do is find the hidden titles of 20 books – is that it’s the most effective book-title-forgetting prompt I have ever come across. Normally, if someone were to ask me to name 20 famous books, I’d reel them off without hesitation, but a mere ten seconds on that page flushes my mind of such things with a speed and efficiency mindfulness apps can only dream of. Five minutes of blank staring later, the gears grind and my brain blurts out random phrases masquerading as book titles – “Beeman With Guitar! The Man In The Brown Jacket Sits At A Desk! Panda Bowl!”

Then it’s back to blankness (potentially decent name for an album, if anyone wants to nick it).

Anyway, have fun!