Song of the day: Elbow

By Graeme Whitfield on Nov 12, 08 12:11 PM

After yesterday's 40-year-old song of the day, I thought I'd go for something a bit more up to date today.

One Day Like This by Elbow is one of two tunes in the running to be my favourite song of the year so far. It's based around a beautiful string riff (if you can have such a thing), has some lovely lyrics and builds up to a repeated chant of "throw those curtains wide, one day like this a year would see me right".

All in all, it's one of those life affirming songs that are great to play loud on sunny days, and it really got into my head as I walked into work today.

Elbow are a band who haven't really been on my radar that much over the years, but I might have to catch up. Grounds for Divorce (with its cracking opening line "I've been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce") is a belting tune, and One Day Like This is even better. I'll lay fair odds on it being used as the background for a montage of clips from the Olympics at the end of the year.

In the post-Oasis era, when so many bands don't really care about their lyrics and are happy to chug out unadventurous slop, I think we should cherish groups like Elbow who take risks and occassionally turn out something quite beautiful.

They also seem like pretty nice fellas too. Just about everyone who's won the Mercury Music Prize has got up and made an arse of themselves in their acceptance speech but they said how pleased they were and then dedicated it to a friend who'd recently died and described him as "one of the greatest men that ever lived".

Bless.