“What the world needs now,” wrote Hal David and Burt Bacharach, “is love sweet love. It’s the only thing there’s just too little of.” Too right, lads. But there’s more. They went on: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. No, not just for some but for everyone.” And so, to that end, I thought of a few tunes that were about love and then I made a little list. Not only that, for once I actually bothered to go to the very little trouble of allowing you to click on the songs’ names and listen to them.
Hate has really got us nowhere. Almost all the politics in recent years has been about hate, with the last four governments and most of the tabloid newspapers, and we’ve been told that our friends are our enemies, especially if they don’t look like us, or don’t talk our language. We have been told that everyone who claims benefits is a scrounger, even though most people who claim benefits have no choice. We have been told that public sector workers, like nurses and doctors, are the lowest of the low and instead we should worship entrepreneurs like ‘Sir Richard Branson, Mike Ashley and Tim Martin. But when we needed heroes, they weren’t multi-billionaires like Branson or the likes of Ashley and Martin whose wealth can only be measured in the many hundreds of millions. Everything we told was wrong.
I have always believed that if you are an absolute bastard all your life, then one day you will find an even bigger bastard. For Branson, Ashley, Martin and particularly Boris Johnson, that even bigger bastard was Covid-19. It might not kill them, but it might kill their businesses and in the case of Johnson his lousy government.
For all my schadenfreude, I believe in a thing called love. Without it, we are nothing. “But here in my heart, I give you the best of my love” wrote Don Henley, Glenn Frey and J D Souther. And here are some songs of love.
- The Best of My Love by the Eagles.
- Love Is The Answer by Todd Rundgren.
- Love Yourself by Sufjan Stevens.
- Love and Mercy by Brian Wilson.
- All You Need Is Love by the Beatles.
- We Will Always Love You by the Avalanches (Feat Blood Orange).
- Love Makes The World Go Round by Carole King.
- This Guy’s In Love With You by Herb Alpert.
- Love Has The Power by Toto.
- Love The One You’re With by Stephen Stills.
