• Tom Tom Club – Genius of Love
• Mariah Carey – Fantasy

• The Beatles – Ticket To Ride
• Happy Mondays – Lazyitis

“Where could we connect the post-secondary-modern intellect of this northern drug aficionado with the bank clerk stiffness of Thomas Steams Eliot?

Eliot not only uses voices, but segues from quote to quote, from stolen scene to stolen scene … Each theft explodes the mood of the stolen-from piece and enriches the base with all of it.

And Shaun photograph-me-with-the-kind-of-topless-glamour-models-who-give-porn-a bad-name Ryder? He could do that. Oh, he could do that.

‘Lazyitis’ begins as a memory of maternal satire. The elegant Mrs Ryder would regularly tell her son he had lazyitis. It’s a northern thing. Adding ‘itis’ to the chosen adjective. Perfect text for a song. But Ryder starts to weave in the attachments, the enrichments.

For starters he puts his mum’s loving put-down into the form of that favourite children’s physical rhyme – you know, the one where your mum and dad tickle each toe in turn until the final little piggy goes whee whee whee all the way home. Well, the first toe has lazyitis, and you can figure out the rest …

Then, since it’s a mother and son reunion … Sly Stone’s great musings on family relationships, the story of the good brother and the ‘bad’ brother, actually opens the song …

Suddenly, you’re into a Beatles tune, and while talking about an ache that makes him ache qualifies for a coupla stars, the fact that this whole section bit is a direct melodic reference to The Beatles’ early pop period is stunning. Combining Beatles purity with some seeming syphilis or cold turkey stuff. Yoking of opposites, weird and extremely successful in literary terms …

[The Mondays’ film-makers, the Bailey Brothers, were working on a movie] called ‘The Revenge of the One-Armed Boxer’ and the Baileys wanted to use an elderly gentleman they had come across in a northern cabaret club for the part of the boxer’s trainer. That was Karl Denver …

David Essex … now the centre and end of the song were wrapped in the trite but immortal ‘We’re Going To Make You A Star’ …

Is this our W.B. Yeats, is this our T.S. Eliot? You bet your fucking life it is” — Tony Wilson

• Kool and the Gang- Summer Madness
• DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince – Summertime

Rare pleasure …

• Rare Pleasure – Let Me Down Easy
• David Morales – Needin U