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Greatest Opening Couplets

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This gem popped in to my head today : Zodiac Mindwarp, from “Prime Mover” – “Well I love TV and I love T-Rex, I can see through your skirt I got X-Ray specs”.

In early 1985, we played at Gossips, in Soho – the next night we played Dingwalls supporting David Johansen, and then on to France. In the gents in Gossips, Mr Mindwarp was right beside me. He had just had it pierced, and was ALL OVER THE PLACE – I was reminded of the great Billy Connolly line in similar circumstances – “I handed him a card, and said ‘This man will help you’. He asked ‘Is he a specialist?’ and I said ‘No, he’s a clarinet player, he’ll teach you how to hold it’”.

Nonetheless, a cracking single, with a great opening couplet.

What’s your favourite opening couplet in a song?

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Comments

  1. Many come to mind, but this was the first – Warren Zevon – Werewolves Of London
    I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand, Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain
    He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fooks, Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein

    • On one work trip to London in the early 90s, my hotel was not far from there, so of course I went to Lee Hoo Fooks. I walked in, just behind a couple who were holding hands. When the chap at the door asked them “table for three?” they were startled. I had a decent bowl of beef chow mein, on my own, and spent the rest of the evening in The French House, which still qualifies as “My London Local”.

  6. I’ve got my favourites, but it’s got to be this, hasn’t it?

    Well, she was just seventeen, and you know what I mean
    And the way she looked was way beyond compare

  7. ‘You get a shiver in the dark
    It’s raining in the park
    But meantime’

    Not the greatest, I grant, but it’s very clever. It’s the opening to Sultans of Swing, an autobiographical song.

    The park in question is Greenwich Park. Meantime. Greenwich Mean Time.

    Nicely done, Mr K.

    • I love when I hear about things like that. Really nice. I heard a similar one about Dire Straits Romeo and Juliet just this morning and I really should have copped it before now. MK’s use of the phrase “There’s A Place For Us ” during the song of course refers back to ‘Somewhere ‘ from West Side Story, itself based on the story of R&J.

      • He’s a massively underrated lyricist. I like the beginning of Your Latest Trick:

        All the late night bargains have been struck
        Between the satin beaus and their belles
        Prehistoric garbage trucks
        Have the city to themselves

        Less so the ghastly 80s production, of course.

        • I agree, he is.

          He can be very affecting, and he likes plays on words. In ‘Why Aye Man’ which he was asked to write for a series of ‘Auf Weidershen, Pet’ there’s a lovely one. Pertaining to a group of Geordie builders fond of after work drink, ‘we’ll keep our spirit levels high’.

          Very good.

          And from an old B side, a song called ‘Badges, Posters, Stickers and T-Shirts’. This is a pre Money For Nothing reported speech piece of work. Apparently a set of quotes heard from young male fans who would turn up backstage after gigs asking for merchandise. Very light stuff and quite funny. A favourite couplet is ‘I’m unemployed, he’s still at school. He gets annoyed cos I’m such a fool’

          You can tell he was an English teacher.

  9. First draft: Son I am 20, I only went with your mother cause she let me

    Later life (with financial thoughts): Son I am 50, I only went with your mother cause she’s thrifty

    • On the 1995 Stripped album, Jagger changes the lyrics of Spider and the Fly in *just* such a fashion.

      “She was shifty, nifty, she looked about fifty… “

  12. I think we did something here about best opening lines recently. My answer then as now was Release by Roddy Frame…

    “Silver shone the rooftops, heard the words” you will”. Realised that in your eyes, the force of love could kill”.

    I also really rate HMHBs Light at the end of the Tunnel…

    She stayed with me until She moved to Notting Hill, she said it was the place she needs to be,
    Where the cocaine is fair trade and frequently displayed Is the Buena Vista Social Club CD.

    Poetry!

  13. Regarding the OP, I have taught my 4 and 6 year old the opening lines to Prime Mover and they delight in singing it on cue. Of course the proper version of the song includes the comical intro beginning “listen wolf-child…” I particularly like “defy the logic of alphabets”. I have to be careful to stop the track before it gets to “I’m Christ in shades, I’m a napalm God, your lipstick flickers round my lightning rod”, in case they happen to sing it in school and I have to deal with the authorities.

    Great track.

  14. Two from Bryan Ferry:

    I’m a stranger in your town
    That’s the place that I belong

    (“Boys and Girls”)

    I put a spell on you
    Because you’re mine

    (I know it’s a cover, but Mr F does the best version, if you ask me)

  16. I like the opening lines of “Halo” by Depeche Mode

    “You wear guilt like shackles on your feet
    Like a halo in reverse”

    Unfortunately the next two lines are not so good.

    • Agree. The next lines are:

      I can feel the discomfort in your seat
      And in your head it’s worse

      My interpretation of that first line is – “you are so messed up, you can’t even sit properly”.

      A very strange lyric.

  17. I think this might have been my choice the last time we were asked.

    From Was (Not Was) – Somewhere In America There’s A Street Named After My Dad

    At night only crickets, no prowlers, no sirens
    No pinky-ring hustlers, no angel-dust Byrons
    No bars on the windows, no sabre-toothed neighbours
    Just good simple folks in a rainbow of flavours.

    • Matty told Hattie about a thing she saw
      Had two big horns and a wooly jaw.

      or..

      Drive west on Sunset to the sea
      Turn that jungle music down
      Just until we’re out of town.

  19. I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving
    England is mine – it owes me a living

    This opens side two of The Smiths eponymous first album – I had actually thought it was track one side one and therefore a more significant declaration.

    • Morrissey: one blast of brilliance after another. Amazing.

      Mine eyes have seen the glory of the sacred wunderkind
      You took me behind a disused railway line
      And said, “I know a place where we can go
      Where we are not known”

      All the streets are crammed with things
      Eager to be held
      I know what hands are for
      And I’d like to help myself

      In a river the color of lead
      Immerse the baby’s head
      Wrap her up in the News Of The World
      Dump her on a doorstep, girl

      Belligerent ghouls
      Run Manchester schools
      Spineless swines
      Cemented minds

      The last night of the fair
      By the big wheel generator
      A boy is stabbed and his money is grabbed
      And the air hangs heavy like a dulling wine

      The death of a disco dancer
      Well, it happens a lot ’round here
      And if you think peace
      Is a common goal
      That goes to show
      How little you know

    • How about
      “When you cycled by, here began all my dreams
      The saddest thing, I’ve ever seen
      And you never knew, how much I really liked you
      Cos I never even told you
      Oh but I meant to…”

      Still affecting after all these years. And on a b-side too.

    • More strong opening lines from the Moz

      Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate
      Will nature make a man of me yet?

      I’d like to drop my trousers to the world
      I am a man of means, of slender means
      Each household appliance
      Is like a new science in my town…

      What she said:
      “How come someone hasn’t noticed that I’m dead
      and decided to bury me? God knows, I’m ready!”

  20. One from this month from Hand Habits

    The greatest songwriter in the universe
    Is accurately describing the gift of the human curse

    Or Edwyn, getting a bonus point as it kicks off the LP

    The sun was a bright bikini yellow
    The sky was a wedgewood blue
    The mood was unspeakably mellow
    ‘Til you came and spoiled the view

    • Good choice. Other possibilities:

      Says Red Molly to James “That’s a fine motorbike
      A girl could feel special on any such like”

      I hand you my ball and chain
      You just hand me that same old refrain

  26. Joe Jackson very efficiently sets the scene and gives us all the back story we need in the opening lines of the wonderful Love At First Light
    “It’s the crack of noon and I sit here watching you sleeping
    I only wish that I could remember your name”

    • I agree that Billy Bragg is an excellent lyricist (St.Swithin’s Day I really like), but when I first heard him sing ‘ I’ve had relations with girls from many nations’, my first thought was ‘Chinny reckon, big nose! Unless it was at an international school for the blind!’ I know that’s horrible, but the thought just popped in there, uninvited.

    • Also Bragg although I’m not sure if great is quite right. It’s certainly sad.
      The Man in the Iron Mask

      “When he drops you off I will not say
      Who was that who so quickly drive away”

  31. One way system – smooth and commendable
    Go by bus – they’re highly dependable

    Unemployment’s rising in the Chigley end of town
    And it’s spreading like pneumonia, doesn’t look like going down

    There was one in the gang who had Scalextric
    And because of that he thought he was better than you

    • My favourite lines in Chatteris is:

      “Car crime’s low, the gun crime’s lower
      The town hall band CD, it’s a grower
      You never hear of folk getting knocked on the bonce
      Although there was a drive-by shouting once”

      I admit to using the drive by shouting line more than once. I do give credit to HMHB though.

      • Funnily enough, I too use the drive by shouting line. And I also give credit to HMHB.

        I was on the tube today and the appearance of the young woman opposite prompted me to say to my son, once we were out of her earshot, “Bad Arm, Shit Tattoo”. As usual, he looked at me with a mixture of incomprehension and mild contempt.

    • Chatteris was my route into HMHB (when it was on a Word CD) so I have a real soft spot for this track.

      For opening couplets Mr Blackwell has written some belters. To name but a few;

      Ground Control to Monty Don
      The testimonial silver’s gone
      (Every Time A Bell Rings)

      Spare me from the drunken heathen
      Gormless bores in Superdry
      (Midnight Mass Murder)

      He came out of the lunch club for the morally impaired
      Got into an SUV to drive the mile home
      (Big Man Up Front)

      I shout all my obscenities from steeples but please don’t label me a madman
      I’m off to see the Bootleg Beatles as the bootleg Mark Chapman
      (When The Evening Sun Goes Down)

      • And of course Petty Sessions…

        I stick me big nose in
        When I go out
        Sealed-off car park
        What’s it all about?
        I like an altercation with a member of staff
        “That was a ten pound note!”

    • Laughing Len is the gift that keeps on giving:

      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
      For trying to change the system from within

      Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
      I ache in the places where I used to play

      Ah we’re drinking and we’re dancing
      and the band is really happening
      and the Johnny Walker wisdom running high

  40. I’ve seen a few of these types of threads over the years, and my go to is always:

    “I love a good bum on a woman, it makes my day
    To me it is palpable proof of God’s existence, a posteriori”

    On Again, On Again by Jake Thackray. Not many songs can fit a Latin pun into the lyrics.

  41. Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout has a way with words:

    Brucie dreams, life’s a highway
    Too many roads bypass my way
    Or they never begin

    (Cars and Girls)

    John Cooper Clarke too – Beasley Street.

    “Far from crazy pavements
    The taste of silver spoons
    A clinical arrangement
    On a dirty afternoon
    Where the fecal germs of Mr Freud
    Are rendered obsolete
    The legal term is “null and void”
    In the case of Beasley Street”

  45. I’m not surprised by the diversity of answers here. It’s the kind of thing that divides opinion, and one lyric which touches the soul of one person can do nothing for another.

    I’m also not surprised just how cold and empty some of these lyrics look when detached from the songs themselves. Rock lyrics are made to be sung and rarely look lyrical in isolation.

    What has surprised me a bit is just how many of these I don’t recognise. I tend to remember tunes not lyrics. I think the only song in the world I know all the way through (for reasons unknown) is Paul Simon’s Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard. And even that I often mix up the Mama and Papa roles in the story. I’m really not one for lyrics.

    Having said that, after a long think the one opening couplet that I think stands out for me is Like A Rolling Stone:

    “Once upon a time you dressed so fine
    Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”

    Trite and meaningless on the page, but they come to glorious life when delivered by the young Dylan in his regal phase.

    Failing that, “Awop-bop-a-loo-mop alop-bam-boom” is pretty unbeatable.

  46. Or if you like your first verse to be widescreen:

    It was a slow day
    And the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road
    There was a bright light
    A shattering of shop windows
    The bomb in the baby carriage
    Was wired to the radio

    • Ah that’s a good one! That song is chock full of fantastic rhymes and one liners. I particularly like “every generation throws a hero up the pop charts” and

      “Staccato signals of constant information
      A loose affiliation of millionaires
      And billionaires and baby” – I get shivers just writing (well, copying and pasting) that down.

      • oh, that whole bit from “It’s a turnaround jump shot” to “Billionaires and babies” is the most joyous tumble of syllables ever assembled and I will happily sing it unprompted to anyone, for any reason, anywhere.

    • Wide-screen and Dylan? How about…

      Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
      Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall
      She sees a bartender in a pool of blood
      Cries out, “my God, they killed them all”

      Then the credits start…
      Here comes the story of Hurricane

      • Or this.

        The festival was over, the boys were all plannin’ for a fall
        The cabaret was quiet except for the drillin’ in the wall
        The curfew had been lifted and the gamblin’ wheel shut down
        Anyone who had any sense had already left town…

        Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

  49. It’s Patti Smith, because it utterly encapsulates in six seconds everything the song goes on to unfurl over six glorious minutes.

    But I also have a massive soft spot for:

    “It was all a dream/I used to read Word Up magazine”

    “Dearly beloved/we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life”

    and

    “Taxi driver/be my shrink for the hour”.

  51. Reading through these, I’m shocked just how many I’ve misheard over the years. I’m word perfect on most of the first lines, but get more than a bit vague halfway through most of the seconds, even the most famous ones.

    From @Arthur Cowslip’s example above:

    “Once upon a time you dressed so fine
    Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”

    The opening line is burnt into my memory, having listened to the Highway 61 album for the best part of 40 years. The second line meanwhile is completely unfamiliar, rings no bells whatsoever. And what’s more, I don’t think it’s ever once occurred to me to wonder what the second line of that song actually is.

    • My personal favourite misheard lyric of my own is a Queen one. The actual lyric (in The Prophet Song) is “God give me the grace to purge this place”, but I much prefer my own misheard version: “God give me the grace to punch his face”. Much better, non? More dynamic and earthy and less arch and wordy.

  53. “When they pulled you out of the oxygen tent
    You asked for the latest party”

    “In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name
    By chance his girlfriend came across a needle and soon she did the same”

    • I was pondering which was my favourite opening couplet from Hejira.
      Probably
      “I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a mandolin
      And I saw the long white dress of love on a storefront mannikin”
      As it should, it sets up the whole song.

      • I mean you really could just pick any couplet from the sublime Song For Sharon, each one could be a movie.

        In fact thinking about it it’s hard to think of a Hejira track that isn’t loaded with absolute zingers

  58. Tip-toes in silence ’round my bed, and quiets the raindrops overhead
    With her everlasting smile, she stills my fever for a while
    Oh, nursie dear, I’m glad you’re here to brush away my pain

  60. Hurry, Tuesday child – Its time to be a-goin’
    Your good news day, child, has come at last
    Hold your chance in your dusty hand: a one-way ticket to a promised land

    In a similar vein –

    Marigolds and tangerines and lots of rusty window screens
    Funny Paper, fountain pen and patchwork things to cover in
    Puppy dogs and potpourri – oh won’t you come and live with me

  64. “On a morning from a Bogart movie
    In a country where they turn back time
    You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
    Contemplating a crime
    She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
    Like a watercolor in the rain…”

    (Al Stewart, of course)

  65. At last the crimson chord cascades
    To shower dry cordials within
    Too late to leap the chocolate gate
    Pale fountains fizzing forth pink gin.

    Bryan Ferry – Bitters End

  68. I rather like this, from my tall chum’s song Wonderful Lie, written for Eddi Reader. Almost cinematic.

    I remember all of this in slow motion
    Every tawdry detail
    Dust caught in the sun in your kitchen

  70. Also, pretty much everything Taylor Goldsmith writes sets some sort of scene, but my favourite is probably;

    With his back against the San Francisco traffic
    On the bridge’s side that faces towards the jail…

  71. Todays listening has served up this from Hamish Hawk – Rest & Veneers

    Crisis after crisis, we’re undressing in tears
    Therapists and dentists suggest rest and veneers

    • Hamish Hawk has form with great openers:

      To write a cathedral, I’ll need a ball-point pen
      It’ll sound like ‘Common People’ sung by Christopher Wren
      (The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973)

  73. I’m drinkin’ water tonight cos I drank all the whiskey this mornin’
    Drank the whiskey this mornin’ cos my baby she ain’t comin home.

    Sarah Shook – Dwight Yoakam

  74. Noel’s Mad dogs…..

    In tropical climes there are certain times of day
    When all the citizens retire
    To tear their clothes off and perspire.
    It’s one of those rules that the greatest fools obey

  76. I never thought it would happen
    With me and the girl from Clapham
    Out on a windy common
    That night I ain’t forgotten
    When she dealt out the rations
    With some or other passions
    I said, “You are a lady”
    “Perhaps,” she said, “I may be”

    Squeeze : Up The Junction

  77. “Oh hello. Give me Missing Persons”.
    They said “What is it that you need?”
    I said “Oh I need her so”.
    They said “You’ve got to stop your pleading”.

  80. Was (Not Was) – Shake Your Head (Let’s Go To Bed)

    You can’t stare into the sun, you can’t pretend to have fun
    (Shake your head)
    You can’t read a robot’s mind, can’t expect vultures to be kind
    (Shake your head)

    Other versions also available.

  81. If the world was gonna end in an hour and a half
    Would you wanna get dirty would you wanna take a bath.

    Everything’s Fine – The Surfing Brides

  82. What, no Ian Dury?

    I come awake
    With a gift for womankind
    You’re still asleep
    But the gift don’t seem to mind – Wake Up and Make Love to Me

    Just ‘cos I ain’t never had no nothing worth having never ever never, ever
    You ain’t got no call not to think I wouldn’t I’m fall into thinking that I ain’t too, clever – Clever Trevor

    Skinny white sailor, the chances were slender, the beauties were brief
    Shall I mourn your decline with some Thunderbird wine and a black handkerchief? – Sweet Gene Vincent

    I could be the driver of an articulated lorry
    I could be a poet I wouldn’t need to worry
    I could be a teacher in a classroom full of scholars
    I could be the sergeant in a squadron full of wallahs – What a Waste

  83. Nick Lowe – Lately I’ve Let Things Slide

    With a growing sense of dread
    And a hammer in my head
    Fully clothed upon the bed
    I wake up to the world that lately, I’ve been living in
    There’s a cut upon my brow
    Must have banged myself somehow
    But I can’t remember now
    And the front door’s open wide
    Lately, I’ve let things slide

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