Its sex scene, between the characters Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, is often singled out as one of the “worst of all time”. Hallelujah’s brilliance is that its meaning isn’t clear cut: is it about spiritual healing, biblical lust, regret and loneliness – or, as Jeff Buckley once put it, was it just a good old “hallelujah to the orgasm”? Well, in his 2009 comic-book adaptation Watchmen, Snyder decided to take that idea and run with it, sneaking my favourite song in with some of the worst rutting seen on screen. But no one has besmirched its legacy quite like Zack Snyder. Pop culture had already tried to ruin it for me, from Shrek to The OC scene in which Marissa dies to The X Factor’s Alexandra Burke. I wish Hollywood would just leave Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah alone. SH The song used as the soundtrack for a horrific sex scene … Unless it’s Where Me Keys Where Me Phone by Mr Zip, because I’ve already bagsied that for mine. The moral here is that you should never pick a novelty song for your funeral. Tubthumping by sodding Chumbawamba makes me sad. And whenever I hear it, it makes me really sad. It’s played everywhere, all the time, as a joke, and people always go “Weeeeeeeey” when they hear it. It’s the sort of song that boneheaded Take Me Out contestants will mime to in lieu of having an actual skill. It’s the sort of song that gets played during adverts. But now – now that it is always and for ever inextricably tethered to the memory of my dead mother – it has become legitimately unbearable. And so, two weeks after that, the saddest hour of my entire life concluded with Tubthumping by Chumbawamba. But Dad was adamant, so Tubthumping it was. So, for the third, my dad picked Tubthumping by Chumbawamba. And not long after that, the funeral celebrant told us that we actually needed to pick three songs. Once, during a session at the mobile chemo unit, my mum told me which two songs she wanted played at her funeral. Photograph: Hayley Madden/Rex/Shutterstock JS The song inexplicably played at my mum’s funeral … In the course of a month, I listened to that song upwards of 300 times. “Uh-huh,” I would hum as I tried to pull the gusset of another pair of knickers from the coat hanger they were entrapped upon. But the more you hear Atomic, the more you realise how few lyrics it has. My hair was cropped and peroxide because Debbie Harry’s was I had a poster of her on my wall, and nothing else. One year I was displaced to lingerie, where my days were spent disentangling knots of thongs and trying to advise men on their partner’s bra size as they would grope the air with both hands and say: “She’s about this big.” This was the year they launched Debenhams Radio: a 30-minute tape that would get played on a loop. I scored a job at Debenhams and went off to university, but would come back in the summer. When they knocked down the old concrete shopping parade in Brighton and replaced it with a mall, it felt like an embodiment of 1998’s hope: out with the bleak, in with the dazzling. HJP The song my employer played to death … But Flack’s version is now only listened to in times of fortitude, when I know it won’t leave me on the floor in a pool of emotions, the variations of which I’m not always sure of. I love it so much that I could never banish it entirely, and a workaround is to listen to other great recordings: Johnny Cash’s typically husky take (slightly too much reverb, but nothing is perfect) or Gordon Lightfoot’s zigzagging rearrangement. This makes it difficult for me now to hear Flack’s stunning version, which in my opinion is also one of the greatest songs of all time. It is quite natural for people to have a certain song perennially tied to their first love, but a track attached to a relationship runs the risk of being ruined if that love ends less than amicably. And that is, of course, Roberta Flack’s 1972 one (though recorded in 1969). In particular, the version most of us love best. I can’t quite remember the first time ever I heard it, but it remains indelibly linked to a certain person in my mind. The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was written by Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger, who went on to marry him (well you would, wouldn’t you?).
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