Welcome to the first installment of a new category here on Flaming Pablum. It's a relatively meaningless and ultimatley trivial idea I'd been kicking around in m'head for the past couple of weeks, and because the rest of the fam-damily are all a-nappin' at the moment (you have no idea how rare this is), I thought I'd carpe the proverbial diem and bring the vision to fruition, as they say. The Pablum Playlist is, simply put, a category exclusively devoted to songs that I think are virtually flawless, if not entirely perfect. You may beg to differ, of course, but balls to you, as this is my weblog. They don't have to be by one of my oft-touted favorite bands or representative of an entire album, they are solely great goddamn songs that stand alone on the strength of their own unstoppable greatness. These are songs that manage to, without fail, lift me out of the grey, squalid predicament of the moment and take me somewhere else. There are loads of these songs. For the moment, we'll start with just one.... 
TITLE: "Never Take Me Alive"
ARTIST: Spear of Destiny
ALBUM: Outland
RELEASE DATE: 1987
In the spring of 1987, I was a disagreeable college student with a stubborn Anglophilic streak a kilometer wide. As such, I was prone to thumbing my grubby little fingers through the import bins in any one of several long-since-vanished record shops in downtown Manhattan. While I'd never been an especially big fan of the radio, I'd taken to tuning into a Long Island station called WDRE, who were gamely prone to playing cool, relatively adventurous music (they called it "modern rock") as opposed to the crapola like Mr. Mister, Night Ranger and the Outfield you were other-wise force fed around the dial. WDRE also made it a point to play b-sides, unreleased tracks and import selections. One such tune that they'd put into regular rotation right around the time I'd gotten home from my freshman year at Denison University, was this single from the fourth album by Spear of Destiny.
While I'd never heard of the band at the time, something about the lead singer's plaintive wail was hugely familiar. After a little sniffing around, I soon learned that SoD lead singer, Kirk Brandon, was formerly the lead singer of Theatre of Hate, a Cold War-obsessed Gothabilly (for lack of a better term) band whose debut album, Westworld (produced by the Clash's Mick Jones), I'd picked up a few years ealier. Once that bit of factual minutia was gleaned, it all fit into place. Where Theatre of Hate carved its niche in stomping, portentuous doom-mongering, Spear of Destiny specialized in similarly windswept atmosphere, but paired it down to a slightly less bombastic approach.
"Never Take Me Alive" is a slow-building, confessional yarn that finds our Kirk calling his mother (!!) to tell her that he's going on the lam because he killed someone (his reasons for doing so are fairly vague; evidently the victim was trying to "stop" him, failing to realize that Kirk would "go the whole way"). In any case, over spartan, Western-tinged guitars, slow-building keyboards and a marching, funereal beat, Kirk assures Mrs. Brandon that her tow-headed, spikily bequiffed son shan't be taken alive any time soon (what a badass!) It all starts to wander dangerousy towards soppy meladrama until the final refrain (at exactly 2:30 in the song, for those of you playing along at home), when Kirk scrapes a pick down the neck of his guitar and the sonic vista busts wide open into full on, sun-bleached Ennio Morricone apocalypse, rife with pounding drums, Spaghetti Western choral exhortations, and Kirk braying the chorus as his skinny British hide is dragged towards the noose.
It's awesome.
I was twenty when I first heard this song, and it's been a fave ever since. I was fortunate enough to go on a month-long bicycle trip in Europe shortly after procuring the "Never Take Me Alive" single, and the song was the first selection on a pair of mixtapes I'd painstakingly agonized over just prior to the trip. I can vividly recall peddling uphill in a thick July sweat outside of some little Bavarian suburb on the outskirts of Munich, breathlessly belting out "Never Take Me Alive" to spur myself on. It's a song dipped in mawkish histrionics, but its glorious, over-the-top'ness is part of its appeal. When I finally shuffle off the mortal coil, I want this song played as mourners shoot flaming arrows from the shore into my corpse-carrying canoe and drink as my smoldering vessel floats Valhalla-wards. Cheers.
TRIVIAL FOOTNOTE: Kirk Brandon's arguable badassedness took a bit of blemishing several years later, however, when none other than Boy George unsolicitedly outed him as a former lover in his tell-all autobiography.
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