Band of Gold - Freda Payne (1970)

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 – and this is one of my all-time favourites - 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 3: Band of Gold – Freda Payne


If, like most people, you only listen to lyrics with half an ear, you'll know what this song is about – after all it's a late pop classic from the Holland, Dozier, Holland team – who had already given us such as You Keep Me Hanging On, Stop in the Name of Love, Where did our Love Go and many, many more.

Plainly it's just some poor woman looking back on a broken marriage – doubtless after the feckless husband has done the do with someone else - “thin, pretty, big tits, your basic nightmare.” Oh Freda – get over him, he ain't worth it girl.

And so you move back to the rather catchy chorus that demands to be sung lustily and loud, particularly with the pleasing way it wraps the repetition of 'band of gold' around what's left of the dreams she holds. But actually that's not what the song's about at all and it feels darker and weirder every time I hear it.

But that night on our honeymoon,
We stayed in separate rooms.

(huh??)

and now the camera moves to that moment,

I wait in the darkness of my lonely room
filled with sadness, filled with gloom

so now we're with her on her wedding night. Or is there more to it than that? Is it that we're with her now, in a perpetual present, where she's always lying there, waiting in readiness, like a supine Miss Havisham?

Hoping soon
That you'll walk back through that door
And love me like you tried before.

That's the killer for me. Not love me like you did before. Love me like you tried before. Like he's Jon Ruskin whose marriage to Effie Gray was annulled due to non-consummation – allegedly because Ruskin was so disgusted at the sight of her pubic hair.

Or like the 'climactic' scene in On Chesil Beach where disastrous honeymoon sex means the end of a marriage before it's even properly begun. But here the timing's even worse, given that the problem's happened prior to the wedding , which goes ahead anyway.

Blimey...