Tonight marks one of the most prestigious award shows in Britain – the Ivor Novellos. There’s a heck of lot of award shows in Britain, but alongside the Mercury Award, the Ivor Novellos are one of our favourites. We like what they stand for – their top award celebrates the best in music and lyric, the latter category being one that is often overlooked in the industry. Earlier this year we read an interview with Simon Cowell in which he admitted he’d only recently started listening to lyrics when he watched a performance. By our count, that means for ten years or so Britain’s most popular talent shows have been presided over by a man who focused only on pretty voices and bouncy dance moves. Worryingly, this explains a great deal.

But here at the Folkroom we love lyrics. They are every bit as important as any other of the building bricks of a song. We love Bob Dylan, but even we’ll admit he’d have got nowhere relying on pretty guitars and a voice better suited to a Hollywood movie serial killer. In celebration of the awards, and of the role lyrics have in music – both ours, and everyone else’s, we’ve gathered some of our favourite lyrics of all time together below. Just the lyrics, mind. No opinion, no analysis. Good poetry can speak for itself.

‘And power stations shiver and they weep / They bleed into the fields and kill the wheat / A sea of clouds is billowing in heat / Oh harvest comes and babies born with teeth / And skin is peeling off of us in sheets / I think I see the future when I sleep’ – Emmy the Great, Dinosaur Sex

‘She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe / “I thought you’d never say hello,” she said / “You look like the silent type.”‘ – Bob Dylan, Tangled Up In Blue

‘A friend of mine grows his very own brambles / They twist all around him ’til he can’t move / Beautiful, quivering, chivalrous shambles / What is my friend trying to prove?’ – Guy Garvey of Elbow, Some Riots

‘A picture postcard, a folded stub / A program of the play / File away the photographs of your holiday / And your mementos will turn to dust / But that’s the price you pay / For ev’ry year is a souvenir / That slowly fades away’ – Billy Joel, Souvenir

‘Well I used to be sort of blind / Now I can sort of see’ – Bill Callahan, Rococo Zephyr

‘Lost in fog and love and faithless fear / I’ve had kisses that make Judas seem sincere’ – Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, Citrus

‘Everything dies, baby that’s a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday comes back’ – Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City

‘He took of all their clothes for them / He put a cloth on their lips / Quiet hand, quiet kiss on the mouth / And in my best behaviour / I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid’ – Sufjan Stevens, John Wayne Gacy Jr.

‘Someday my baby, when I am a man / And others have taught me the best that they can / They’ll sell me a suit / They’ll cut off my hair / And send me to work in tall buildings’ – John Hartford, In Tall Buildings

‘If I know only one thing, it’s that everything that I see / Of the world outside is so inconceivable often I barely can speak’ – Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues

There are hundreds of lyrics, and lyricists, that hold somewhere in them the strange magic power of reducing a grown man to tears, be they of sadness or laughter. Those were a few of them. Feel free to share your favourites with us – we always love to hear new music.