Back when John Peel was still with us he played a song called ’88 Lines About 44 Women’. I only heard it maybe twice, and never caught the name of the band. Later, when it became easy to find things out, I discovered they were called The Nails. I’ve recently been rediscovering that very fine song, which I like as much as ever; and I’m pleased to find that there are couple of different versions of it.

(According to the Wikipedia article on the band, Jello Biafra was their roadie, which was a strange and surprising discovery.)

It reminded me that I have a fondness for list songs, which as you can see from the link, is a sufficiently real genre, or class, that it has its own entry.

So I made a Spotify playlist of some I like. Click that link if you have Spotify, or this one if you don’t. Unfortunately it won’t show the contents of the list — there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do that. It will just prompt you to sign up.

There’s a song on there by The Beautiful South which, if I remember correctly, was intended to mock the use of women’s names in songs. I wonder what they’d think of ’88 Lines About 44 Women’.