My Top Favourite 350 songs of all time. #350

The least interesting countdown in pop begins with this.

I loved Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. I think this is my favourite song of theirs. It's deceptively twee. Miserable in a funny way, anthemic in an unanthemic way and containing more musical ideas in two and a half minutes than the entire career of the Courteeners without being anything less than compelling throughout.

It wants to be Robert Wyatt, 10cc, the Beach Boys and early Pink Floyd at the same time and pulls it off. In anyone else's hands the use of picnicking as a metaphor for sex would be a disaster but with Euros Childs it somehow works. They're a far cleverer band than I think they ever got credit for, perhaps they were too subtle for the mainstream tastes, but as an antidote to the vastly unimaginative shite that made up the majority of Britpop* they worked wonders.

*Some otherwise well-informed people actually talk about Britpop now as though it was some sort of counter-cultural movement that united the island in an unstoppable momentum through Euro 96 and towards the rejection of the Thatcher project. Which, when you actually sit down and listen to Fine Time by Cast, is overstating it just a fucking notch.