The prompt:

Share a song you love that has parentheses (in the title).

It's been a while since I wrote a Crucial Track entry, but when I saw John Philpin's post with this bracket-based prompt, how could I not write about one of my favourite Clash songs?

The strange thing about the title is, given the parenthetical structure, we should call it 'In Hammersmith Palais' for short — you can always drop the parenthetical, right? — but in fact everyone always calls it 'White Man' for short.

It famously tells the story of Joe Strummer going to a Reggae show at the eponymous venue, and realising he was the only white person there. And about punks and other groups and how they did or might behave. The near-closing couplet seems worryingly relevant again at the moment:

If Adolf Hitler flew in today
They'd send a limousine anyway

Also I don't know how this will appear either on Crucial Tracks itself or on my blog, but what the hell is the image that's appearing alongside the track where I've selected it? Very strange. I've screengrabbed it and added it to the post, but I've no idea where it'll appear.

Anyway, one of my all time favourite songs, with or with the brackets/parentheses.

Share a song that perfectly soundtracks your commute.

If I hadn't already listed 'Sit Down' as a Crucial Track, it would be perfect, because most days my 'commute' involves going into a room in my house and sitting down at my desk.

Still, we can stay with James: 'Come Home' is just as appropriate.

Damn, I haven't added a Crucial Track since June? What's been happening?

Today's prompt is:

A song from the 1970s that you like or means something to you.

Well, I mean. If the golden age of music is 14, as the old saying has it, then we're talking about 1978. Let's go straight to the top, then, with The Clash, and 'Clash City Rockers', indeed. Can't go far wrong with that.

What does it mean to me? I first became aware of it by hearing friends who already had it, singing it. Brendan, I think. And the first time I heard it might have been at a gig by the band he was in with Friendy, The Varicose Veins, doing a version of it.

I certainly didn't buy it when it came out (14, remember), but a couple of years later, at one of the Glasgow record shops. Possibly Listen Records on Renfield Street, but it might have been the Virgin Megastore, down the bottom of that street — or rather its continuation, Union Street — on the corner with Argyle Street. I think it probably was, because they had a lot of space and kept a lot of browsable back catalogue.

Great song, great B-side in 'Jail Guitar Doors'. I once saw Primal Scream at the Reading Festival invite Mick Jones on stage and do a version of that.

'Rock rock, Clash City Rockers!'

Share a song that makes time feel like it's standing still.

I’m not sure this exactly fits the bill, but a chat at work today led me to play James’s Gold Mother for the first time in a while, and ‘How Was it for You?’ had me waving my arms in the air like I just didn’t care, or like I was back at the Brixton Academy in 1990 or so.

I don't know whether I can honestly say this the song 'feels like home' to me, but I do recall once, long ago, arriving in Edinburgh from London, and walking up the Bridges with Transformer playing, and thinking it felt like coming home.

'Walk on the Wild Side' is the second track from Transformer to feature on Crucial Tracks, I note, but that's not surprising. I'd consider it a 'crucial album'.

Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new?

Not sure this is a thing I've ever done in the musical kind of sense, but I guess somebody might say, 'Tell me a song you love,' or something. I could answer with 'Sit Down' by James, for sure.

I saw them live a ton of times in the late eighties/early nineties. They're probably the band I've seen most, along with The Pogues and The Fall. Including on my 25th birthday, headlining the Reading Festival. Actually The Pogues were on that day, too. Or so my memory says, even if the Reading histories don't.

An interesting thing about 'Sit Down' is that they released it as a single and it didn't do much. I saw the video a load of times on the old ITV Chart Show on Saturday mornings back when I lived in Walthamstow.

But like a year or so later they didn't just rerelease it; they rerecorded it, with reordered verses, and a more upbeat performance. Here's the original video on YouTube.

The new version, of course, became a huge hit.

I don't know if this song always makes me feel better, exactly, but I love it to bits and want it played at my funeral. So there's that.

As far as representing my current mood goes, I'm actually just hungry. But Springsteen's 'Hungry Heart' is always a good choice. The story goes he wrote it for The Ramones, or at least was going to offer it to them. But he decided to keep it, and of course put it on The River.

That album — and most of his gigs since — wouldn't have been the same without it. But I'd still love to have heard The Ramones do it.

Madness: At the heart of the ska revival of the eighties. I’d have gone to see them in Glasgow, on the Two-Tone tour, with The Specials and The Selecter, if it hadn’t been at an over-18s-only venue. I was 16.

It’s interesting that, although I could give you various answers to the ’first single’ question, I don’t actually know what the first album I bought was.

Still, it’s bound to have been a Beatles one. So let’s go with the Red Album, and ‘Ticket to Ride’.