I think I would have been about 7 when I was first taught in primary school about the existence of Denmark.   My memories of that week are that it wasn’t all that different from any other - playing with Lego and running around pretending to be Vikings was pretty standard behaviour.  We may have all wanted to be Liverpool penalty expert Jan Molby when we played football at lunchtime instead of Aberdeen cup final king Eric Black, but that didn’t last long.  There was the sandwich day though which, like some sort of apple to my youthful Eve, taught me the meaning of shame.

We learned that apart from all that raping, pillaging, and claiming the most ludicrously inhospitable of countries for their empire, Britain Denmark also make these fancy open-topped sandwiches, and we each had to bring to class whatever ingredients our parents could cobble together to make our smorgasbord.  I think our teacher, knowing that to most of the class a sandwich probably meant white pan loaf and jam, may have gone into town to find some more suitable Danish ingredients, like regional meats and cheeses we would have struggled to identify even as food. 

I may have started my construction project with good intentions, maybe some bread, some butter and a layer of ham, but something pinged in the back of my head, and like a time lapse movie of the construction of that there Swiss Re Gherkin, my sandwich began to stretch inexorably towards the classroom ceiling.  I have very little recollection of what I was putting in there, but it was certainly nothing from my satchel.  Beetroot was definitely involved.  I know Primula was being used as concrete.  Using my poorly developed aesthetic skills I folded some salami into quarters and pinned it to the sandwich with cocktail sticks for decorative purposes.  This wasn’t enough though to keep the thing from looking a bit Leaning Tower, so applying unsound architectural theory I took another slice of bread and pinned it to the top, thereby closing my open sandwich.

By this time most of the class had gathered round, partly out of fascination, partly because I had stolen their food.  They were just in time to see my sandwich collapse all over the table, and me, in a fit of childlike petulance, smash it to pieces with a couple of forks, spraying food all over the class like a mincing machine, until the teacher dragged me away, crying.

It was years later before I learned that the key to a good sandwich is not in the number of fillings.  It is in the bread.

Yo La Tengo’s brilliantly-titled new album has half-learned this lesson.  In between two fat slices of gloriously inflated guitar epic (wholemeal, thick crust, full of seeds) are songs of so many styles that you would think the sandwich would come crashing down.  Given the choice, I may not have wanted some of the sweeter or grislier layers in the middle, but even after picking those out, I’m still left with a pretty fine and filling sandwich.

Download mp3s from the matador website here and here