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Love Child

29/4/2016

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How about a brief series looking at some very strange lyrics from a golden period of 'big song' lyrics – between about 1965 and 1975.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love all these songs – always have done, always will – but as each year passes, each time I hear them my mind goes rounder and rounder as I wonder how on earth the songwriters came up with those lyrics to that tune, in that way in that time.



Number 2: Love Child - The Supremes (1968)
 
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.



Ah, the sixties. Free love. The sexual revolution. This makes sense to me. My dad describes his pre 1960 courtship of my mother as going to the Streatham Locarno every Friday night until someone agreed to dance and of then marrying them so he could get his leg over. The old charmer. But by the time he'd dumped us in a Clapham slum, and left us for a more glamorous sexy life around the world, the sixties were in full swing.

Venus was in furs. Shiny, shiny shiny, boots of leather. Where was I? Ah, yes, parties full of easy girls in mini-skirts mashing the potato to Booker T and the Green Onions, or something. Everyone was getting some, even Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl (if she'd only shed her dowdy feathers anyway).

But not in Motown. Not on Diana's watch. Or Berry Gordy's watch. Or,um, whatever - look whoever said artists had to be consistent between their own lives and their art? Not me. But sex outside marriage gets a right good kicking here – in the summer of love.

I guess in its own way, Beyonce's 'you should have put a ring on it' is close in sentiment, but I can't think of any other song, saying this. Not then, not now, not ever. Love Child is of course a much nicer term than the one they really mean and presumably couldn't actually say at that time. Plus it's mighty hard to rhyme much with bastard.

This love we're contemplating
is worth the pain of waiting

We'll only end up hating the child we may be creating.
Don't think I don't need you
Don't think I don't want to please you
No child of mine will be bearing
the name of shame I've been wearing.


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Hey There Georgy Girl...

28/4/2016

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How about a brief series looking at the lyrics of a few songs from the golden period of 'big song' lyrics – between about 1965 and 1975. 


Now, don't get me wrong, I love all these songs – always have done, always will – but as each year passes, each time I hear them my mind goes rounder and rounder as I wonder how on earth the songwriters came up with those lyrics, to that tune, in that way, in that time.

Plus just check out the clip, it's fantastic...


Number 1: Georgy Girl.

I love Lynn Redgrave. Fact. I love the film. Fact. But then I also love the film The Knack and Ray Brooks (aka, to all intents and purposes, my dad) chasing Rita Tushingham down the street whilst she screams rape in a faux Rita Tushinghamy manner. But even I can see that scene hasn't stood the test of time very well.

And, increasingly, that's how I feel about the lyrics to Georgy Girl. Which to be honest I never paid any attention to for years. It's a happy song isn't it? Ting a linging along. I certainly remember my nan and mum singing it when I was young. They went something like “Hey there Georgy girl, da di da di da di da....” whistled even. It was happiness in the kitchen. But god knows why. Ok, yes I get it - it's about re-invention, confidence, embracing the new – the times they were a-changing. But, even so:


Why do all the boys just pass you by?

Could it be you just don't try, or is it the clothes you wear?



Blimey, try that now and you'd be plastered all over Twitter for fat-shaming or something. And that's the tidied up version for the single, even in 1968 the men in charge presumably doubted the lyrics to the opening of the film so much they thought they'd best tone them down:


Look at the boyfriends you don't get
never had a real one yet
just look at the clothes you wear.



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Indifferent Voices - Where's the Ouzo?

26/4/2016

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The drinking, yes the drinking. The drinking is very different to the drinking in my country. You English drink a lot. All the time. In the week you are going out after work and drinking. And one thing I notice. When you sit down in a restaurant, always someone is jumping up and down wanting to order some drinks, to keep you going, during you read the menu. What is that? You cannot wait?
 
You drink a lot and you drink so quickly. You drink wine like it is water. In Greece we do not do this. In Greece, say it is a sunny day. Yes, in Greece it is always a sunny day, and so we sit in the sun and it is nice, and we are relaxing and we are talking and we are happy and so, sometimes, only sometimes, we say shall we have a drink, and sometimes we do. We have one drink. Because it is sunny and we are happy.
 
In England, it is different. In England, sometimes it is a sunny day, so people sit outside and they drink and they drink and they drink. And then they are happy.
 
(Eleni Gianopolos – derivatives trader)
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The Rain Before it Falls

14/4/2016

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The Rain Before it Falls is a quiet book written by Jonathan Coe and published in 2007, the year we moved to Shropshire, where it has hardly stopped raining since.  Coe muses rather nicely on the timelessness of Shropshire generally and the Shropshire hills in particular.

Of the Long Mynd one of his character says:


Places like this are important to me – to all of us – because they exist outside the normal timespan. You can stand on the backbone of the Long Mynd and not know if you are in the 1940s, the 2000s, the tenth or eleventh century....It is all immaterial, all irrelevant...You cannot put a price on the sense of freedom and timelessness that is granted you there.

Later, another character thinks:

These Shropshire lanes. Mud everywhere. Burnt umber hedgerows, dishevelled, wind-battered. Ploughed fields rolling on either side. Grey sky, looks as if it knows no other colour. This place feels ancient. Half a century behind the rest of the world. Feels like nothing has changed since I was here, nothing.



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