Top 6 - The Magnetic Fields

The Top 6 is usually a feature about poets but once in a while there's no reason why it can't include something else and so, to mark the release of Realism, and their forthcoming visit to England, let's do the mighty Magnetic Fields.

It was quite a day, sometime perhaps in 2004 it might have been, when my friend lent me a disc with some songs on it. I'd turned down several offers before. I'd listened to The Flaming Lips and thought that was amusing enough. Luckily I gave this next one a chance and I'm glad I did. It kept me interested enough to keep listening until it unleashed Papa Was a Rodeo and gave me one of those rare spine-tingling moments. Such a gorgeous arrangement and yet such dark, unromantic words. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at And now it's fifty-five years later,/We've had the romance of the century. I knew this was something special and from that moment on, I've collected everything else by them and I've all but ended my interest in pop music by finding my all-time favourite group.

The Book of Love is not far behind as a masterclass of understated lyricism, so proper and apparently stilted but full of passionate depth and understanding. This balance between playful irony and expression of love has never been done better.

The great L.D. Beghtol guests on 69 Love Songs to great effect, with a lighter voice than Stephin's, on All My Little Words. Not for all the tea in China,/Not if I could sing like a bird,/Not for all North Carolina,/Not for all my little words.

One April Day is Stephin alone rather than The Magnetic Fields but needs to be in here, sublimely minimal and somehow Chinese perhaps, but pared down to a perfect simplicity that says it only once, so you need to play it three times to get the usual effect of a repetitive pop song.

I Don't Really Love You Anymore is a joyous outpouring of being 'over it', while still remembering every dress you ever wore. He's just the bad comedian/Your new boyfriend's better than who would have, for her (or him) moved to Ecuador and chopped wood to keep (them) warm. The trademark sound of cello and banjo was never better than here and I did once go into a music shop to be shown a few banjos in the hope I might be able to play such a song. Later, I was told that a definition of a gentleman is one who can play the banjo but doesn't. I still can't and, to be fair, I don't suppose many people think I am.

I do wish that when they came to London in 2008 on such a torrential day in August (was it), that they had played All the Umbrellas in London. They didn't but perhaps they hadn't seen how much it was raining. Their instruments had gone somewhere else and their flight from Dublin had been delayed. We were lucky they got there at all, with borrowed instruments, but it was fantastic and, I've been heard to say, I wouldn't have swapped all the other pop concerts I've seen for that one.

I'm not expecting this year's Barbican concert to be as good, second time around, as that in the Cadogan Hall. And I think it's perfectly understandable that no subsequent album is going to be as good as 69 Love Songs. One is just grateful. I once made a Magnetic Fields Top 30 in which number 30 seemed to me to compare very well with whatever would be number 30 in a list of Tamla Motown or The Beatles, or anybody else you care to mention.

But that's what being a fan is like. Not everything they ever did is perfect but nobody seems to hold that against Shakespeare.