Tom Dunne: My bloody Valentines - six songs that show the dark side of love
Leonard Cohen, Amy Winehouse and Ryan Adams have doled out some of Tom Dunne's Bloody Valentines.
The devil has the best tunes. Best of luck to The Osmonds et al, but it’s Robert Johnson – the man who sold his soul to the devil – and all those influenced by him since (Dylan, The Stones, Led Zeppelin) who make the pulse race.
It is the same in Love. As we faced into another Valentine’s Day earlier, and radio assaulted us with either maudlin assertions of undying love or sickly-sweet contemplations of puppy love, be in no doubt: it’s the people with a bit of the devil about them who write the best love songs.
Bad mistakes and painful regret are the lingua franca here. We all love a bad boy, or girl, and it seems when it comes to writing great songs about the affairs of the heart, those who have dished the pain seem best equipped to make observations on the fall out.
There is no justice here. They wreak havoc with their affections and lack of fidelity, then have the bad grace to write songs about it, in which they arrear to be the victim. But handsome is as handsome does. Pay the royalty, sing the chorus, and get over it.
Some anti-Valentine’s Day songs from the very best.
A couple meet in a hotel room, signing in as ‘Mr and Mrs Untrue’, where she sings “what sweet memories we’ve made, without a single ‘I love you’.” Complete with a walk of shame, a room number, and then the inevitable “then I’m all alone to face me going home.” The drama, the tension, the regret.
Asked about his life once, Leonard famously replied, “The women have been very kind.” If you’ve seen Nick Bloomfield’s 2019 documentary, Leonard Cohen and Marian Ihlen: The Love Affair of a Lifetime, you’ll have some idea just what he meant.
Yet he writes this from the perspective of a scorned husband. Honestly, the cheek! But so too the observation: “You treated my woman to a flake of your life, and when she came home, she was nobody’s wife.”
There is an earthiness to a lot of the songs written in the 1950s and early ’60s, an honesty, a refreshing lack of embroidery. This, from the pen of a man who wrote hits for Patsy Cline, is brutally frank. “If you don’t like the peaches, walk past the tree,” he sings. There is no ambiguity, no happy ever after. Because, as the man sings, “that hat don’t fit my head.” Wow!
You can’t help but suspect that Amy tapped into a lot of that raw truthfulness mentioned above when writing. She brought a similar eye for uncomfortable detail in the songs she wrote about her own love life. “I told you I was trouble,” she says here, “you know that I’m no good.”
As my father-in-law used to say about George Best’s girlfriends complaining about his drinking and infidelities: “They did know he was George Best, didn’t they?” Amy lays out her cards.
Best thing he ever wrote, from the still incredibly brilliant, Heartbreaker album. “Come pick up, take me out, f**k me up, steal my records, screw all my friends… and then do it again,” he sings. You can feel his helplessness, her total power over him. We can have the art versus the artist debate some other day.
It is one of the greatest vocals of all time, from one of the greatest vocalists, and that helps, but it’s the air of inevitability in the lyric, that I knew I could never keep you and that one day I would lose you that lifts it above all others. It helps too that it is a masterclass in song-writing, in repetition without boredom, in starting with the chorus and then repeating it, from Willie Nelson, the well-known genius. But again, that voice!
You won’t be able to listen to these songs without asking “Why do fools fall in love?” And I’ll break it to you gently, you won’t be the first, or last, but that is the nature of the affair. The heart is a lonely hunter and all that.
If these are too much for the day that’s in it, Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and The Smiths’ ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’ remain imperious.
