In the wake of the Rage Against the Machine Christmas No. 1 campaign, copy-cat campaigns have been bobbing up and down destined never to achieve the same success.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day for the “Ultravox Vienna for No.1″ campaign. When you delve a bit deeper on that one, you discover it’s just a self promoting campaign originating from Ultravox themselves on their comeback tour. I suppose just getting to No. 2 still rankles with them, but it’s not something that fires my imagination, in other words It Means Nothing To Me! As pointed out in Comment #1, I didn’t delve deep enough into the Vienna campaign and got the wrong end of the stick. http://ultravox.org.uk is the band’s official website, but it is run by fans not the band and the fans’ Vienna campaign pre-dated the RATM phenomenon by six months.

However the campaign to catapult Half Man Half Biscuit into the charts for the first time in the band’s long and admirable career gets my support because…

1. It makes me laugh. In the spirit of band’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics, the campaign’s target chart position is No. 6.
2. It’s one of my favourite HMHB songs: Joy Division Oven Gloves
3. Behind the humour, there is a genuine reason for supporting the campaign, namely to raise awareness about the axe looming over the BBC 6 Music radio station, possibly the only radio station that consistently plays the music I want to hear.

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In my spotlight this week is a song about weather and intimacy. It’s a song where my soul gets bared a wee bit, so if you’re squeamish or lacking the voyeuristic tendency most of us have, you’d best look away now. It’s complex in its simplicity or maybe it’s simple in it’s complexity, but we thought it would rain all day.

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On Sundays I like to pick one of my songs and write a little bit of background about it. It feels like a month of Sundays since the last one – the Sunday Spotlight took a break over Christmas and New Year. It returns this week with a song I wrote in 2004: Everybody Has Their Part To Play.

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This week the spotlight is one of the more introspective songs from my Edinburgh student days (like Don’t Fall Again). Back in 1986 I was living at 10 Brougham Place, Tollcross – I was a student of Computer Science & Electronics and shared a flat with two medical students and an arts student. This healthy cross-faculty mix was certainly a factor in the four of us getting on so well over those 2-3 years. But I was definitely the geek of the group and often struggled to keep up with some of the more philosophical discussions that took place.

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That's me in the middle, c.1989

Speak My Mind was my way of expressing the frustration I felt at not being able to adequately express myself. The theme of the Irish paradox, wounded land and magical paradise, comes from the discussions I had with “closest friend” Linda (the arts student). At the time she was adamant that she wouldn’t visit Ireland because of “the Troubles”. I was relieved when these views mellowed some years later and she was happy to come on holiday through Ulster and Connacht.

This is a slight departure on my usual Sunday Spotlight as, this week, I feature another songwriter’s song. In The City is the work of my good friend Nigel Coleman, a singer-songwriter from Co. Tipperary. From the moment I first heard this song, I loved the atmosphere and images it conjured up in my head. I tagged it on at the end of my recording time during the day I spent at Shay’s Studio in 2005 – a quickie cover to see what it might sound like. You can listen to this interpretation below alongside Nigel’s own recording which appeared on his Highway to the Sky EP in 2004.

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WMD are back in the news again, like a synthpop band (War-mongering Manoeuvres in the Dark?) from the Cold War days reforming for a comeback tour and a new album for the twenty-first century. Under the spotlight this week is a song that takes a lot of the language of the current Gulf War and reclaims it in the language of love. Like swords into ploughshares – killing words into loving words.

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