Perfect 10: The first songs of summer

No one is entirely sure when summer starts in the Northern Hemisphere. Is it May? Is it June? And if so is it the pinch punch first of the month, or the Summer Solstice of the 20th, 21st or 22nd? As an on-off resident of Australia I can tell you if it weren’t so Down Under in its antipodean aesthetic it’d be June 1, as the barbi lovin’ cobbers kick off all seasons on the first of the relevant quarterly month.

Whatever the date, there’s no season more welcome than the start of summer. Brighter sunnier days, warmer temperatures and more time outdoors are the cue for uplifted moods and a general lust for life. 

It also helps when you have a stellar summer playlist – the kind that draws on golden classics and shiny modern meisterwerks alike to really add a healthy dose of mood-lifting magic we all covet.

From Style Council staple to effervescent Sinatra sparkle, drivetime epics to sweaty bangers, our Perfect 10 playlist of essential summer anthems captures all the fun and frolics you desire when it comes to soundtracking your sunniest months.

The only criteria is they all contain the word “summer” in their titles. Simple, right?

Frank Sinatra – Summer Wind (1965)

Something of das original Deutschland Beach Boy, German composer Hans Bradtke evidently had a penchant for summer songs, in that he wrote the German MOR cuts Du spielst ’ne tolle Rolle (1962), which turned into Nat King Cole’s Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days Of Summer, followed by 1965’s Der Sommerwind, which was reworked as Summer Wind, and made famous by Ol’ Blue Eyes himself. 

Arranged by Nelson Riddle, a Hammond B3 electric organ – played by Artie Kane – suggests the titular breeze, as the theme is the changing of the seasons using the sirocco as a metaphor. For non-europeans that’s the sandy Saharan wind which blows across the Mediterranean affecting Italy and France, though, thankfully, rarely the eastern end of Provence and the Riviera from where I write this. In that respect, it’s a Teutonic tune that evokes a Franco-Italianate sensibility.

Released as the follow-up 45 to Strangers In The Night in 1966,  Sinatra’s brilliance is distilled in this delectable defining performance, the signature song of his Reprise era. His best work combined an irresistible arrogance with a wistful vulnerability – for all that his public persona as Chairman of the Rat pack was often objectionable, his voice on the less swinging sides of his oeuvre communicated a fragile humanity and acknowledgement of the more miserablist undertones of his character.

Frankie was the master of, not just songbook interpretation, but of knowing exactly what his vocal chords could do. And here his famous croon is thick and romantic while evoking a sense of melancholy bluer than the sea the wind cascades across. Turns out, the summer wind can cut both ways.

The Lovin’ Spoonful – Summer In The City (1966)

My parents owned – and still do – Ronco’s “as seen on TV” soundtrack album to the 1974 film Stardust, the sequel to That’ll Be The Day starring David Essex and Adam Faith. Nestled among 40-odd choice cuts from Jefferson Airplane, The Supremes, the Bee Gees, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Wonder was the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer In The City. In fact, they owned the song twice as I also found an LP called Hums Of The Lovin’ Spoonful, though I resisted playing it because – oh, this is such teenage discrimination – I hated how two of the band looked on the cover (even now I’m not sure of their names but one looked a cowboy hatted extra from Bonanza and the other a reject from the Tokyo branch of Madame Tussaud’s.

I am rather partial to this one song though. The North Americans’ only Billboard chart-topper and their second and final UK top ten hit in the summer of ’66, the insistent instrumentation and edgy arrangement demands your attention from the get go: a triumvirate of snappy pullbacks on the musical slingshot, each followed by a bang of drums like a backfiring motor – and then it’s straight into the fast lane, with hard-driving verses that rarely come up for air.

In tautly simmering language, the song laments the city heat, contrasting the sweltering days (“All around, people looking half dead / Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head”) and the respite of cool, intoxicating nights where amorous tomcats are on the prowl. Gritty street sounds (car horns, pneumatic drill) add a cacophony of textures to the jazzy bass-heavy middle (a nod to Gershwin), which lets the track catch its breath before launching back to its urgent denouement. 

Quincy Jones won a Grammy for his 1973 rework, the same year David Bowie was rumoured to have covered the song for what became Pin-Ups. Whatever the version, Summer In The City remains a brilliant folk-rock portrait of urban mood swings in a prelude of pent-up anticipation.

Sly & The Family Stone – Hot Fun In The Summertime (1969)

And now for something from the recently departed. Few acts communicated the kind of musical versatility of Sly And The Family Stone. With Stone at the helm as the chief songwriter and musical maestro, the creative Californians could alter their approach from song to song without losing any of their funk-soul credentials. All this while being the first major American rock/pop act to boast a racially integrated, mixed-gender lineup.

A trailer for their first Greatest Hits album, Hot Fun In The Summertime was a string-sweetened light funk 45 issued just prior to the band’s era-defining performance at Woodstock; a celebration of the fun and games to be had during the warmer months.

There is a sublimely mesmerising vibe that you don’t hear every day: the way the rhythm seems to enhance the bittersweet ‘barbecue’ time that the nostalgic, romantic lyrics imply; the atypical use of strings in a Sly song, featuring violins played in an intoxicating upper register. 

Then there’s those transformative trade offs on the vocals (step forward Larry Graham, Freddie and Rose Stone) and the euphoric notes that Sly hits on the “Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi there!” refrain.

Covered in the nineties by both Manhattan Transfer ft. Chaka Khan (not bad) and The Beach Boys (not good), stand up and dance like a star because music rarely gets as vibrant and vivacious as this. 

Isley Brothers – Summer Breeze (1972)

Catchier than a Venus fly-trap and a much bigger hit in Blighty than their homeland, Ohio’s Isley Brothers covered Seal & Croft’s 1972 folk hit Summer Breeze on their 11th album 3 + 3 in ’73, eventually becoming a top 20 UK hit the following year, just prior to their Harvest For The World rejuvenation, which opens the LP.

With a career spanning over seven decades, the group has enjoyed one of the longest and most diverse careers in the pantheon of pop. And here the formidable family unit turned a slightly twee ditty into a dreamy funk-soul slow jam.

Summer Breeze was a perfect blend of veteran craftsmanship and radio-friendly harmonies – while burbling under the surface was the soul of the song, rooted in jazzy chord progressions and a supine funky haziness just waiting to burst into the foreground. That’s what the Isley Brothers’ remake does for the ears here, bringing out a plusher pop-R&B potential that had always been there, waiting to be discovered. 

The guitar solo at the end is pretty marvellous too, and there is an argument that the track helped usher in the so-called yacht-rock era. Also, am I the only one who thinks the recording must be an influence on Childish Gambino’s Feels Like Summer? One thing is certain though: Summer Breeze was the first song I heard that mentions jasmine, a musical mood enhancer that was later explored in Always Crashing In The Same Car (Bowie) and Miracles (Pet Shop Boys). 

Donna Summer – Summer Fever (1976)

Summer from Summer? It’s inconceivable that we wouldn’t feature a track from the much missed queen of disco.

As punk blazed an angry trail in Blighty, Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s magnificent Munich machine crafted Four Seasons Of Love, a concept album exploring the peak and demise of a love affair through, yep, you’ve guessed it: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Helpfully, we covered the LP’s two singles Spring Affair and Winter Melody already. That leaves two dance suites to go.

A whopping eight and a bit minutes long (there’s a shorter edit in the studio here), Summer Fever solidified Donna’s reputation as one of the most adventurous artists in pop. Brilliant, sassy and stunning, listening to this in the 2020s feels like you’re floating. The electronic sonic tapestry is funky, dreamy, and super groovy as Donna’s breathy soprano vocals, thumping drums and bass, shimmering strings, and an awesome flair for imagination fuse spectacularly on a scorching hot dance ditty that ranks among the best ’70s Summer songs

The next time she returned, it would be with the song that defined an entire era, I Feel Love. 

Kate Bush – Delius (Song Of Summer) (1980)

You can’t beat a bit of Bush in the balmy months. This deep cut from Never For Ever (it segues seamlessly from the album’s most memorable single, Babooshka) was written by Kate Bush as a tribute to the Bradford-born composer Frederick Delius, itself inspired Song Of Summer, Ken Russell’s film for the BBC’s Omnibus series, which the child prodigy had watched when she was ten years old. 

At a fraction under three minutes, the homage conveys the pantheistic pentameters of Delius’s footprint with parsimony and depth. Built around a sparse, spectral Roland rhythm track animated by discordant fragments of sound (such as her brother Paddy Bush’s shimmering sitar), its strident offbeat quirkiness is embellished by snatches of laconic lyrics, dominated by the Bushes and backing vocalists warbling Delius’s name in disjointed syllable-stretching stylee, not to mention its outrageous rhyming of “syphilis” with “genius”.

The taciturn tune is something of an anomaly of Bush’s early career, albeit one which sets a precedent for subsequent impressionistic works such as Hounds Of Love’s Watching You Without Me (to which its drum pattern bears similitude) or the entirety of Aerial’s A Sky Of Honey. Simple and very sweet. 

Fun Boy Three – Summertime (1982)

Terry Hall, Neville Staple and Lynval Golding exited ska combo The Specials in 1981 to pursue defiantly non-commercial avenues in the Fun Boy Three, injecting an African-based influence into the new pop vocabulary in tandem with their female collaborators Bananarama, though noticeably later than the paranoid polyrhythms of Talking Heads and the Burundi Beat of Adam & The Ants.

That makes this holding measure – a standalone single between the trio’s two albums – all the more surprising, especially as it’s a percussive reupholstering of a Gershwin jazz standard from the 1930s.

But as was the case with 1981’s It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It this ain’t no conventional cover, even though both reworks arguably offered the first flowering of Hall’s hitherto-secret penchant for lushly melodic classic pop. 

There’s a feeling of claustrophobia as FB3’s imaginative use of offbeat exotic instruments – with the emphasis on lumbering tribal percussion – is heightened by a pervasively dark and doomy vibe where sombre strings and melancholic vocals are punctuated by a blast of jazzy trumpet ’n trombone that’s one part Louis Armstrong and two parts Lester Bowie. 

Although no relation to Annie, the ever-restless Hall left the band in 1983 to form yet another trio, the Colour Field, though occasional purple patches would continue right up to his untimely death in 2022. Does anybody know any jokes? 

The Style Council – Long Hot Summer (1983)

In a career that’s lasted six decades and yielded 30 studio albums and upwards of 80 singles under a variety of brand names and as a solo artist, Paul Weller has excelled in all aspects of the songwriter’s art.

The Style Council certainly rode the zeitgeist of musical movements, and immediately established themselves as a much more adventurous outfit than the angry, jagged Jam. Signalling that new international aesthetic, in June 1983 the Woking wonder and cohort Mick Talbot was at the Grande Armée Studios in Paris (soon to be Eurythmics’ favourite overseas studio), recording Long Hot Summer, the third Style Council single and lead track of the Frenchophiles’ first EP, À Paris. 

A happy coincidence, the British summer heat wave of 1983 turned out to be one of the hottest on record. And when released that August, the ballad gave the collective the biggest hit of their seven year stretch. 

Lush, layered, and very chilled, Long Hot Summer sounds like the kind of studio creation that’s been been tinkered with on the mixing desk for days, propelled by one of the greatest, deepest synth bass lines this side of Heaven 17.

Musically it is as much early ’80s Britfunk as it is ersatz American soul, so much so that it wouldn’t sound out of place next to contemporaneous hits by Cameo or Luther Vandross. It’s that jazzy new wave fusion of R&B and conditioned soul that would come to be integral to the burgeoning genre hideously hindsight-labelled sophisti-pop. Along with that throbbing bass line, Weller’s vocal comes across as something that might’ve flown straight off the grooves of What’s Going On. Low and semi-spoken in places, floaty and falsetto in others, it runs the range of what makes chillwave chillwave.

The notorious homoerotic video was a talking point too, having been filmed on the River Cam in Cambridge, where Tom Baker would soon be seen archiving his punt in The Five Doctors.

Like The Jam, The Style Council didn’t have the longest of careers, but they helped the continuation of Weller’s so-called Modfather influence, and a belated but sterling solo career just a few years early to the Britpop party. Oh gawd, another meaningless hyperbolic term then.

Don Henley – The Boys Of Summer (1984)

Don Henley may not be the planet’s most easy-going person, but he has a way with words, especially for a drummer. Take the line “Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.” Is there a better way to show how the idealism of the swinging ’60s gave way to the greed and materialism of the 1980s? 

The Eagles’ founder’s days of barely legal jailbait lolling around his Cali mansion on cocaine and quaaludes were waay behind him, by a couple of years or more – hell, he wasn’t even on probation anymore! – so Henley was free to speed around LA brooding over lost love and getting older.

With music provided by the Heartbreakers axeman Mike Campbell, The Boys Of Summer – basically an elegiac slab of percolating pop swimming in warm synths and a reverberating circular guitar riff – is a touching sepia-tinged tale of a yuppie yearning for his summer love, though with one of the first lines out of Henley’s mouth being “the summer’s out of reach” in many ways it’s actually a congenitally anti-summer song. 

I was 15 when The Boys Of Summer came out: much too young to feel nostalgic for summers past or relationships gone sour – and too British to get the Deadhead reference – but it still moved me, as did the dusty monochromatic video by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, which helped the song cruise to No. 12 in the UK (his best solo placing there), which was the same crisply cold February ’85 week that saw Dead Or Alive’s You Spin Me Round reach pole position after a record-breaking 17 weeks on chart.

Whatever the time of year, the whole thing’s utterly gorgeous, innit? I think much of its success stems from its surface-level summertime sadness, a spare self-absorbed little cry baby we can all relate to. Because, aye, Don is all wistful, wallowing in the what-could’ve-beens and all that, but at the same time he’s a pampered millionaire rawk star, so we know it worked out alright (apart from the odd minor scandal that was definitely bugger all to do with him, my lawyers have asked me to point out). Never look back, walk tall and fine, right? 

Belle And Sebastian – I Know Where The Summer Goes (1998, 2005) 

Aye, summer is a lorra fun, but good gosh it be rather melancholy, too. Proudly bookish Glasgow gang Belle & Sebastian are often tagged as most beloved indie act since The Smiths for good reason, winning over legions of hyper-sensitive bedwetters with meisterwerks like this slightly swoonsome offering from their 1998 EP, This Is Just A Modern Rock Song.  

While your awkward nascent embraces may have been soundtracked by something far more modern, I Know Where The Summer Goes is a great wedge of Scot pop, albeit one channeling Nico era Velvet Underground. Get ready for one blissful head trip as you imagine yourself in the middle of this twee but tasty tune.

As if its odd little Proustian sensory rushes working overtime  weren’t enough (“the smell of hot desk”), just get two minutes into the song, when angelically voiced Stuart Murdoch summons up a glancing blow with “flowering cherries rain on kids like you” – and all the music stops for just long enough to stall your heart.

Lana Del Rey – Summertime Sadness (2012, 2013)

The journey to this stardom of the gal christened Elizabeth Woolridge Grant has been a long, steady climb. Having recorded a clutch of small time or no time releases under various names, including Lizzy Grant and May Jailer, the singer rebirthed herself as Lana Del Rey and envisioned a Southern California dream world constructed out of sad girls and bad boys, manufactured melancholy, and genuine glamour, and then she came to embody this fantasy.

At first, her stylised noir-pop garnered sceptical sneers and accusations of being an inauthentic concoction (that’s the very definition of pop, sweeties!), but her long-playing debut proper, 2012’s Born To Die, proved she was way tougher than her soft exterior suggested. 

The original balladeering Summertime Sadness was classic LDR in that lilting downbeat trip-hop meets melancholic movie soundtrack kind of way. Yet Born To Die’s fifth 45 was unexpectedly given a Eurodance makeover by French DJ Cedric Gervais, who went all out with a euphoric bells and whistles house production that contrasts the melancholy aesthetic of the subject matter. Indeed, the final result gave Lana her biggest ever solo singles success in the UK by metamorphosing the lachrymose original into a certified stomper that feels quintessentially epochal, much like the other cuts on this listicle. Happy summer y’all.

Steve Pafford

BONUS BEATS…

The Lotus Eaters – The First Picture Of You (1983)

Of course, I can’t go without a little something extra: the one who partly inspired the title of said listicle, which only mentions summer in the chorus if not its official title.

In the Greek mythology of my maternal homeland, the Lotus Eaters were, as Book IX of Homer’s epic Odyssey will tell you, inhabitants of a small island whose distinctive practice was to get “blissed out” via consumption of the mysterious fruit of the lotus plant. In other words, indulging in a narcotic escapism in a maritime setting offering little in the way of other prospects. 

Is it any coincidence that the band that nabbed the name hailed from the so-called Socialist Republic of Liverpool? Originally a five-piece combo formed in 1982, by the time of the LE’s debut, the Merseyside of my paternal grandfather’s birth (the port town of Seaforth, trivia fans) was a wilfully contrarian yet proud place. They weren’t New Romantic, but they were unashamedly romantic. 

Released as the Scousers’ debut 45 in June 1983, The First Picture Of You was a gorgeously crafted slice of gentle guitar pop that gave them chart success before they’d even played a gig. 

Written by Peter Coyle (vocals), Jeremy Kelly (guitar) and Ged Quinn (keyboards) and helmed by Siouxsie and Police producer Nigel Gray, it’s the latter connection that I think is the most pertinent here. The Eaters’ sensitive cinematic soundscape was contemplative yet relaxed and embodied finesse, class, intimacy, eloquence, and a wistful melancholy as it caressed the ears with choral accompaniment, haunting piano and twinkling guitar arpeggios.

This sweet smelling gem became such a pop perennial I bet you think it did better than the No. 15 position it achieved that August, kept at bay by a whole host of seasonal singles like Club Tropicana and the aforementioned Long Hot Summer. Despite its bruised delivery, the poetic sunshine of The First Picture Of You seemed to be the perfect accompaniment to those balmy summer days; a sublime evocation of innocence and yearned-for experience that seemed to offer an escape into the pure joy of post-adolescent promise. 

They don’t make summers like they used to.