The Ringo song is often placed so psychologically inappropriately that bits of your brain try to fold back in on themselves.

The comedy joke song that ruins albums of otherwise unimpeachable joyousness - or the Ringo, as I like to refer to it - is often placed at a moment so psychologically inappropriate that horrified bits of your brain try to fold back in on themselves, and cause tumours in later life. One thrillingly ruinous case in point is on Blur's Parklife album. After four years it is still a feast, ending in the stellar milky junket of This is a Low, the lullaby Damon wrote while feverish and alone in hospital. The song is so beloved that Blur still end all their concerts with it, playing to a swaying cradle of cigarette lighters. Unfortunately, should you try to recreate this kind of comforting foetal regression in your own home, you will notice that the last warm ebbs of This is a Low run into Lot 105. That's the 73-second long slice of ITV steam-organ cheese that one imagines a hyper-real, zombiefied Danny La Rue playing, ever more manically, until he explodes in a shower of long-dead light entertainment remains.

Tricky's cover of Public Enemy's Black Steel on Maxinquaye is placed with similar atmos-busting evil. As one of the prima rumpy albums of the Nineties, Maxinquaye is all sticky liquid and heavy lids. Nothing moves suddenly; all is slow seduction and delicately insistent weight. Until, that is, track three, where Black Steel thrashes and clangs to life, shouts noisily about being conscripted into the army and generally acts like a parent bursting into a teenager's bedroom and shouting "Oh no - you don't do that in a Christian house!"

Chocolate Cake, from Crowded House's Woodface, is an almost unique Ringo in that it's the first track on the album: a horrid piano-thump with "wacky" lyrics about Andrew Lloyd Webber's trousers falling down when he meets the Queen. The tragedy of it coming first is that it makes one rather jumpy while listening to the rest of the album - you rather expect Four Seasons In One Day or Weather With You suddenly to turn into Size Of A Cow and go plinky-plonk all the way down into hell.

This is the real, human cost of the Ringo: one is always nervy when approaching a new album, fearing the first jolly/thrashy chords of doom. The irony is that these niggling, spare flaps of flesh, these third thumbs and useless nipples, are what keep bands going. Modern recording techniques mean that bands split into two camps within the confines of the studio. The rhythm section plays to a click-track, and consequently finishes its labours on an album within a day, leaving them to get resentful, bored and drunk; while the lead singer and guitarist spend weeks over-dubbing, multi-tracking and getting into prog rock.

In order to spend any time together, "jamming" has to occur. While jamming, bands start to enjoy themselves, and suddenly remember why they joined a band in the first place. They grin at each other while they play. The lead singer starts to make up nonsense lyrics to amuse his bandmates. When they start laughing, he - drunk with power - sings to them in a funny voice. "Alan," he'll shout to the snoozing engineer, "press Record! We're on one!" Like empty vessels commandeered by satan, they play on into the dawn. They lovingly cut it down to just the nine minutes on the master tape: Bob's Smacky Cat Mix has to be on the final album, "It's the best fun we've had in three years!"

It brought the band back together again. It is their love-child. It is Maxwell's Silver Hammer. It is why I went out yesterday and bought a CD player with a remote.