Tim Walker: Pity the Tories don't listen to the lyrics

Tales From The Water Cooler

As a 15-year-old at private school in the Home Counties, I had a fleeting teenage crush on the Manic Street Preachers LP Everything Must Go. I was an avid reader of NME and Select, and would listen to The Evening Session on Radio One while I was doing my prep. Thus I soon learned that the Manics were Welsh and working-class, and that my then-favourite song, "A Design For Life", was a socialist anthem. They probably despised me and everything I represented. I was like David Cameron discovering that his favourite Jam song, "The Eton Rifles", was not, in fact, an ode to his illustrious alma mater's cadet corps.

If you're a successful band, you can't choose your audience. This week, Primal Scream issued a grandiose statement expressing "total disgust" at the use of their sex-'n'-drugs singalong "Rocks" after Theresa May's conference speech. Rather embarrassingly, the song in question turned out to have been a similar but different sex-'n'-drugs singalong, by the Dandy Warhols, who also complained.

I understand their objections, and I sympathise. But then, the Conservatives plainly don't choose their playlists based on lyrics or politicised sleeve notes; Cameron himself left the stage to "You Get What You Give" by the New Radicals, which contains lines that advocate the trashing of rich bankers' mansions. No; they choose them because they have catchy riffs that can get even a Tory delegate's toe tapping. Which is a compliment, when you think about it. And anyway, the alternative is too awful to contemplate: that the Tories should play only tracks by Tory-voting musicians. I mean, there's only so much Phil Collins I can take.