100 Greatest songs of the 00’s #29 Bent – Always

Released: 2000

You can visit Britain as much as you want, but you can’t really claim to get Britain unless you understand the relationship many of it’s citizens have with London, the capital of England. It’s a push-pull/love-hate thing that has levels of nuance far too complex to even begin to sum up here, but in terms of the performing arts or art in general, the long held perception is that for success it’s a bullet that must at some point be chewed on.

The digitisation of music was meant to change all that and – to an extent – emancipate artists from the need for pilgrimage. But of course that never quite happened, so when performers come along who openly refuse the status quo, it’s a breath of air fresher that you’ll get anywhere near the Thames.

Bent are Nail Tolliday and Simon Mills, a duo who met in Nottingham in the 1990’s and spent the majority of their time in the understated East Midlands city which is also home to Sleaford Mods. A teenage hip-hop aesthete, Mills had become obsessed with it’s samplealdelic core and the pair’s debut album Programmed to Love was a richly layered bricolage of live instruments and obscure cut ups.

With their music drawing comparisons to Lemon Jelly and more specifically Air if Sexy Boy had been sung by Maid Marian, Always wrapped itself around a stanza borrowed from Norrie Paramor and His Orchestra’s version of a Bobby Vinton weepy. Like a dream realised about somewhere you’d never travelled to, it was gorgeous yet without purpose, beautiful and warm despite never really going anywhere. And anchored in that juxtaposition were parallels with the millions of stay-at-homers right across this sceptered isle.