Ten Late Night Classics to Soundtrack Your Next Lonely Taxi Ride Home

The finest words you could ever hope to hear alone at three in the morning are as follows:

"This is…Mellow Magic."

It is, perhaps, the pause between the lexical couplets that gives the phrase such memorial potency. There's a gap, a chasm, a divide, between them. You have a second's respite from the future. You could, if you were so inclined, describe the above phrase as pure Pavlovian poetry, eliciting within us the sensation of being there, in a taxi, alone, watching the rain fall mutely onto the never-ending tarmac sprawl that will eventually end at our house or someone else's.

This isn't an aux-chord friendly situation; it sort of demands you submit yourself to the wiles of late night radio. As tempting as it is to ask for LBC or TalkSport, to slip into the garbled voices only picking out a "Brexit" here and a "Guardiola" there, what you actually want is the musical equivalent of eating macaroni cheese in the bath—and that means requesting either Magic or Smooth.

These are the stations that are explicitly geared towards lulling their audience into soft-eyed sleep, nostalgia factories that tug at the heartstrings, escorting each and everyone of us into a past that's both real and imagined. What follows are the ten finest easy listening classics that are the perfect accompaniment to those late, late night taxi journeys. The tracks you're likely to hear as Friday bleeds into Saturday, and the city becomes the outskirts; as vivid memories begin to falter and fade, and you realise that you've managed to leave your debit card on the counter at Ferfect Fried Chicken. Again.

Christopher Cross' woozy yacht rock classic always makes me think of two things: the Rotherhithe Tunnel and the cloying smell of illness. There is something about the production—all vaseline smears and turquoise waves lapping on a black sanded beach—that fills my nose with the rich tang of bedsores, sweat, and bodily ooze. Which makes it an enjoyable companion on those long drives where all you have for company is the radio and your limitless regrets.

A bold statement that rings clear with undoubtable truth: "Move Closer" is one of the most strangely sensual songs ever recorded. It is, just like Beyonce, drunk on love—it teems and totters about, stumbling ever so slightly, unsure of its wants and needs, with desire catching at the corners of its own mouth like the foamy residue of a perfectly poured pint of Taddy lager. As you sit in the back of a Toyota Prius wondering where exactly it is that it all goes wrong weekend after weekend, preparing yourself for the dry mouth and bruised heart that tomorrow morning has to offer, console yourself with the thought that right now, right this instant, there are millions of people around the world fucking each other's brains out.

If, by some kind of voodoo, some sexual happenstance, this track follows "Move Closer" you might as well ask the driver to politely pull over so you can remove your own gentials. As a warning, the offal now slipping out of where your nether regions were minutes ago might mean you'll be forking out a cleaning charge for the next taxi you grab.

Loneliness doesn't discriminate. You can be rich and lonely, destitute and lonely, white and lonely, black and lonely, lonely on Concorde, lonely in a minicab. You can be lonely in Shanghai, Mumbai, or Warrington; Newcastle, Santa Monica, or Naples; a sandstorm, the rainforest, or outside an unopened train station. Robin Gibb understood that; let him soothe you into a half-sleep that'll only be interrupted by the gentle and hushed voice of the driver asking you, politely but firmly, to please wake up, please.

There are songs, and then there are songs. There are songs, and then there are melodies fashioned by silkworms tap dancing on star-beams. There are songs, and then there are expressions of attraction bestowed with such largesse you can practically feel warmth of another face pressed against yours, even if you're slumped companionless in the back of a Prius belching sweet nothings at the back of the driver's head. This duet between the KWEEN Barbra Streisand, and Aslan the Lion AKA Barry Gibb, articulates the sort of tryst nobody has ever actually experienced, but everyone has dreamed of. ( Angus Harrison )

I've always admired how the Alessi Brothers managed to make seagulls sound elegant on this song. Seagulls are not elegant—they are litter-eating thugs. Seabirds are mostly muscular white monsters with orange claws and vacant black eyes. The flap around with chips hanging limply from their beaks, their white feathers smell of curry sauce and petrol, and the only noise they make is the violent squawk that pings between buildings as they stumble back to the nest after a night prowling the streets. They are filthy products of their urban environments. Just like you in your Uber then mate. Get it? ( Angus Harrison )

You live so far away from your friends now. They all live so close to one another that you'll never drag them to your part of town. You told yourself that you'd show some restraint, that you'd stay in most Friday nights with some pearl barley and poems by a dead Scottish poet, and you told yourself that you'd be happy with this. You tried the staying in and the pearl barley and the poems and by nine thirty that evening you began thinking about how you'll be dead soon. So you've made the journey after work for the pints and the conviviality and you've missed the train again and you're paying for another late night taxi, and you know, you just know, that in twelve hours time you'll be pinging a series of texts to the friends you've just left behind. I'll be around, you tell them, if anyone's about.

I've never really understood why we're meant to think Mick Hucknall is the devil incarnate. No one's ever sat me down and drilled it into me, and as such I've developed a kind of fondness for the man, in the same way that you might feel affectionate towards a critically panned movie. Mick Hucknall is my Sex Lives of the Potato Men, which is oddly apt given his reputation for shagging. ""Holding Back the Years" is up there with "Sunrise" and "Fairground" in the Manc moaner's back catalogue but the latter two songs are too happy too instilled with joy, too karaoke-friendly to make sense in the small cabin of pine-freshener-and-doner-meat reeking metal you're hurtling down a motorway in right now. This is pure unadulterated miserablism at its self-indulgent finest. And fuck it, if you can't indulge in that kind of mindless introspection here, where can you?

So there you are, with a lopsided sardonic grin plastered on a face that's begun to slip from its skeletal hinges, a brain blackened by the voluminous quantities of Guinness you've tanned, a phone full of messages it'll pain you to read in a few hours time, telling the driver to put whatever he wants on. You don't care, man. You don't care. Whatever you want. The driver nods, and hits the scan button. He alights on this. By pure coincidence the radio is beaming the voice of God directly into the back of an E reg Ford Fiesta 1.6 TDCi Titanium Econetic 5-Door. It feels like the finest honey known to man is being poured directly into your ears, coating your internal organs in a sweet, sticky glaze. For a few minutes you cannot imagine anything better than this: a journey in the dark, with a stranger you'll never see again, listening to Smokey Robinson, the voice of God. Then the song ends, an advert for Endsleigh Insurance hovers into view, and you're crawling through an industrial estate at the break of day. The moment passes, never to return. God is dead.

When the world ends, when it combusts and convulses, and the mountains fall into the oceans, and each of us chokes to death on the fumes of the apocalypse, it'll be this that's playing. Prepare for your own death by asking the driver to turn this one up, up again, just a bit more please, yeah and again, bit more if that's alright. By the end of the song you'll both have bleeding ears and beating hearts, and when the end times run out of time you'll be ready.

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