Top Ten Escape Songs

I've been thinking a lot about escape recently. For obvious reasons. So here's my top ten songs about getting the hell out of Dodge while you still have time...

10. Rupert Holmes - Escape (The Pina Colada Song)

Let's start with the obvious, as usual, and the only one that actually mentions the word 'escape' in its title. Much mocked, but this is a classic slice of 70s story-song cheese with that wonderful wink of a twist in the tale. Two cheating spouses find love... with each other. I believe that's known as irony, but I could be wrong.

(From 'Escape...The Best Of'.)

9. Pulp - The Boss

I'm gonna leave town
I'm gonna catch a train
I'm going somewhere where I can start again...

After 7 long years down a dead end road I'm gonna get off here
I'm gonna let it go,
Let it go.

7 long years, Jarvis? Try 23, mate.

(Demo track taken from 'His 'N' Hers (Deluxe Edition)'.)

8. Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak

I'm not sure there's a whole lot of metaphor to Lizzy's jailbreak. But if you feel like you've spent half your life trapped in a situation... say, just for example, a job... that feels like a prison sentence... then this track is pretty damned apt.

(From 'Greatest Hits'.)

7. Billy Joel - Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)

Billy Joel drops some profound nuggets that ring more than a little true...

Ah but working too hard can give you
A heart attack, ack, ack, ack, ack, ack

You should never argue with a crazy mi mi mi mi mi mind
You ought-a know by now

Good luck movin' up cause I'm movin' out

(From 'The Stranger'.)

6. Noah & The Whale - Tonight's The Kind Of Night

Noah & The Whale were my Glastonbury-on-TV highlight. Having said that, I did miss Paul Simon, Morrissey and The Wombles.

There's a boy with his head
Pressed up to the window
Of a bus heading out of town
In his breath on the glass
He draws with his finger
A map of the roads they go down
Circles of street lights
Are the only signal
That there's people out there in the black
He waves goodbye, to the town he grew up in
He knows that he'll never come back

They say you can't ever go home again.

Sometimes when you leave a place, you've no desire to ever go back.

(From 'Last Night on Earth'.)

5. Frank Turner - This Town Ain't Big Enough For The One Of Me

God, how did I survive before I discovered Frank Turner?

This town is growing old with me, so I'm making a move.
Everybody round here's been out with everybody else,
Which makes talking to girls hazardous to my health.
They've been in this gene pool so long they've got wrinkled toes;
I don't want all her exes to be people I know.
There's millions more fish in the sea, so I'm making a move.

I'm bored of this town, bored of this scene, bored of these people, yeah.

(From 'Love Ire and Song'.)


4. The Animals - We Gotta Get Out Of This Place

Shame on you if you didn't see this one coming.

(From 'The Complete Animals'.)

3. Boomtown Rats - Rat Trap

There's a huge Springsteen link to the top three... and we start with Bob Geldof doing his very best Boss impression, making Dublin sound like New Jersey...

Billy don't like it living here in this town
He says the traps have been sprung long before he was born
He says "hope bites the dust behind all the closed doors
And puss and grime ooze from its scab crusted sores
There's screaming and crying in the high rise blocks"
It's a rat trap, Billy, but you're already caught...

It's only 8 o'clock, but you're already bored
You don't know what it is, but there's got to be more
You'd better find a way out, hey, kick down the door
It's a rat trap and you've been caught

(From 'A Tonic For The Troops'.)

2. Meat Loaf - Bat Out Of Hell

What do you get when you turn the ideology and romanticism of Springsteen up to eleven?

Jim Steinman.

A demented genius who lives in some crazy Wagnerian netherworld where fanatical teenage emotions live forever, heaven and hell have both broken loose and everything's louder than everything else. Nothing succeeds like excess.

If you're looking to make an escape, I can suggest no better mode of transport than a silver Black Phantom bike.

(From 'Bat Out Of Hell'.)

1. Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run / Thunder Road

One of the greatest albums ever made, and it's essentially an ode to liberation. Each side opens with a quintessential escape song: how could I ever choose between them?

Oh-oh, baby this town rips the bones from your back

It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap

We gotta get out while we're young

`Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

It's town full of losers

And I'm pulling out of here to win!

(From 'Born To Run'.)

So... they were my favourites... which of your favourites escaped me?

30 Songs - Day 9

Day 09 - A Song You Can Dance To

As has been made abundantly clear, I'm not the biggest fan of dance music. I primarily appreciate music in my head and my heart, rather than my feet. Of course, that's not to say I don't feel an itching in my toes at the sound of a well-curated indie disco, or even a soulful chunk of floorfilling Northern or wedding party Dexys. The last time I properly crashed the dancefloor though, it was to get down to This Charming Man and Born To Run, hardly your first thought when it comes to songs that put a beat in your feet.

"I'm a lover, not a dancer," as Jim Steinman put it - and I did almost choose his gloriously overblown Dance In My Pants for Day 9... but then I took a moment to think back to the school discos of my youth. Whenever I do that, two artists stick in my mind. The first is Whitney Houston, whose smiling, wailing, triumphant I Wanna Dance With Somebody almost made a pop-kid of me. The second, much less surprising, is the Housemartins. Yes, I well remember watching everyone slow dance to Caravan Of Love, but I was generally hugging the wall by the time that came on. You'd be far more likely to catch me on my toes to this, a happy hour or so earlier in the night...

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