A little bit ago I opened a section called “Head start”, where I feature great opening tracks from albums. There, I stated, which is true, that the first track on the album is probably the most important, as it can often determine whether you go on to listen to the rest of that album, or not. However, similarly important is the closing track. An album which you have enjoyed every bit of, but which closes with a bad, weak or disappointing track can really colour your whole memory of the album. You want it to be good opening and good closing (preferably good all the way through, of course), and in essence you want to be humming, whistling or trying to sing to yourself the last track as you put the CD away, switch off the media player or whatever.
And so we come to the companion slot for “Head start”, which I've thought a little about titles for and decided finally on “Happy endings”, as that's what I want to experience on finishing an album. This, then, is the first edition of that section, and will feature, as did “Head start”, five tracks which I feel help those albums close really well.
First up we have the closer from Marillion's stunning 1983 debut “Script for a jester's tear”, which is so good I literally could not move for minutes after having first heard it. One of the most powerful anti-war songs ever written, it's “Forgotten sons”.
A totally fantastic album, The The's “Infected” builds up to the powerful closer, the unutterably brilliant “The mercy beat”, which just leaves you wanting more. Perhaps
too good a closing track?
(P.S. Don't worry about the weird Mexican stuff at the beginning of the video: it starts about a minute in. Not sure why it's there, but there you go...)
Probably one of the most emotional songs closing an album I've ever heard, the mesmerising ending to the Divine Comedy's “Casanova”, this is “The dogs and the horses”.
Peter Gabriel's first four albums are all called “Peter Gabriel”, so they're identified by year. This is his third, 1980, which yielded the hit single “Games without frontiers”, and closes on the powerful political indictment of South African Apartheid, the story of activist Steven Biko, and this is simply called “Biko”.
From one of the best David Bowie albums ever, the closing track to “The rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, the semi-acoustic, introspective cautionary tale, “Rock and roll suicide”.