My Top 2000 Songs #1115: Bring On The Dancing Horses

October 10, 2025

My Top 2000 Songs #1115: Bring On The Dancing Horses

Of all the most annoying things you can find on record--right up there with the 90s trend of closing a CD with a few minutes of silence followed by a hidden track--one of the most irksome is the dreaded Greatest Hits Album which throws in a new or rare track. Besides undercutting the whole purpose of the compilation--how can this be a greatest hit when nobody's heard it before?--it's a slap in the face to fans who already own the hits and feel compelled to buy the record for the otherwise unavailable song.

Still, it's hard to speak unkindly of Echo & The Bunnymen's 1985 collection Songs To Learn & Sing. First of all, it's impeccably selected: while I like the band a lot, I enjoy them primarily as a singles act, and frankly I could own just this one album by them and feel pretty damn satisfied. (Though I've since come to enjoy them more broadly, including the large body of work that came after their early 80s glory days.) Moreover, the cursed addition of a new track here is tough to criticize because it's so freakin' great. "Bring On The Dancing Horses" is just about the finest song the band had to date, the rare instance of the new contribution outshining most of the radio-tested hits it sits alongside. One of the loveliest examples of 80s British synthpop, as striking today as it was on its release four decades ago.