Nite Songs

  "You're just a bastard kid and you got no name/'Cos you're living with me, we're one and the same"  - Johnny Thunders  - You Can't Put Your Arms Round A Memory This is probably something I should've set right a while ago to be honest. Although I've written columns on both the New York Dolls' 21st century reincarnation and Walter Lure's saga of carrying on the Heartbreakers' name in the 1990s via the Waldos , I've yet to really cover Johnny Thunders himself in Garbage Days Revisited (whenever I've referenced the guy in the past, you'll notice I've linked to the Waldos article as Rent Party  was essentially the great missing second Heartbreakers' album and several of the songs have Johnny T's DNA all over them even if he'd sadly passed on a couple of years before. The issue was, as with quite a few bands and artists I've covered on here who were big enough to have cult followings but still had enough of ...

Well, here we go, into the Top 20. Given that the quality of the albums involved really is getting incredibly dismal now, we'll just be doing five albums a day from now until the end of the week. Call it an intervention for the sake of both our and your sanity. Anyway, let's get this over with shall we?... PREVIOUSLY IN THIS COLUMN:   Intro  •  Part 1 (50-41)  •  Part 2 (40-31)  • Part 3 (30-21) *** 20. NEW YORK DOLLS - "Dancing Backwards In High Heels" (2011) It shouldn't have ended like this. As we've discussed in  their Garbage Days Revisited column , when the New York Dolls returned after a three decade absence with the storming  One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This , it wasn't just a timely reminder of everything that made them such a great and influential band back in the '70s, it saw them bringing their sound up to date without sounding corny and actually equalling those classic tunes. Had they just left it at that, their legacy ...

  "You're gettin' a little impatient/Smokin' like a mental patient"  - New York Dolls  - Fishnets And Cigarettes The New York Dolls need no introduction here of course, their story is pretty much legendary. However, similar to our recent column on their spiritual descendents Hanoi Rocks , the album we're here to talk about today is one from the 21st century incarnation of the group after they reformed in the early noughties. It could have been an absolute disaster but turned out to be a triumph and thoroughly deserves its inclusion in this column. I think my first encounter with the Dolls was on a punk compilation during my student years which included Personality Crisis on it and feck me, what a song. I mean, c'mon, has there been any lyrics about the whole mess of conflicting emotions and impulses that every teenager/early twentysomething encounters than "And you're a prima ballerina on a spring afternoon/Then ya change on into the wolfman howl...