Shamelessly piggy-backing on @Mousey ‘s pronunciation thread, what are the lines that always make you think, ‘Excuse me? Is that really what you meant to say?’
For me it’s always AC/DC’s Let there be Rock (video link in comments), where Bon declares:
‘One night in a club called the Shakin’ Hand
There was a 42 decibel rockin’ band’
Google 40 decibels and you will find it described as the sound of a quiet office, or the hum of a fridge. Certainly nothing that would make you have to shout to be heard above it, ‘And the music was good and the music was loud’.
“Two hundred degrees, that’s why they call me Mr Fahrenheit!”
You mean not quite hot enough to boil water, Freddie?
Not necessarily incorrect, just over-promising a bit.
I dread to think how he’s going to make a ‘supersonic man out of you’. Which part do you have to blow into, to make that happen?
I think Freddie has established himself as a bit of an embellisher by this point in the song, given that he’s almost certainly not a rocket ship on its way to Mars, an out-of-control satellite, a tiger-like shooting star, a racing car which resembles Lady Godiva, or a sexy, reloadable atom bomb.
Yeah, so this makes the tepid water claim all the more strange, dontcha think? He could have said “my nuts can melt lead” or similar, but no, what we get is the ability to make a poor cup of tea. For shame, Freddie.
I’m technically not actually a rocket ship on my way to Mars
Neither am I a satellite
I make lukewarm tea
While we’re at it; neither shooting stars nor tigers defy the laws of gravity.
Metaphor, innit? (sniffs loudly…)
Isn’t a metaphor a shooting star anyway?
No it’s an allergy
Isn’t that the pug in Rupert the Bear?
No, it’s the name of Pink Floyd’s flying pig…
Wasn’t that the green stuff you find in ponds?
Well, no: it’s a Glaswegian coffee-roasting business…
Was that the 1974 British Leyland car with a square steering wheel?
I thought it was a palindrome
Isn’t that a friend in Italy’s capital?
It’s actually the airport from which the Pole to Pole Hitmaker takes off on his travels.
While we’re at it; neither shooting stars nor tigers defy the laws of gravity.
It’s just occurred to me that Brian May, with his degree in astrophysics and his love of stripey wild mammals, would have known this and could have tipped Freddie off before he made this obvious gaffe. But no.
One would hope that if a racing car passed by like Lady Godiva it certainly wouldn’t have the top down.
Instead of “1,2,3,4!” as the count in for Vertigo Bonó apparently yells out in Spanish, “Some, two, three, fourteen!” Or so they say, I for one never knew any different.
Bono is noted for providing unclear or unexpected instructions. Play the blues, Edge!
Early morning, April 4…
Not so much misinformation as a lack of information.
In Jailbreak, Phil Lynott sings “tonight there’s going to be a jailbreak somewhere in this town”
Given that said town seems to be home to several low-security correctional facilities, he omits to mention its name so his fans can steer well clear of the place.
My bet would be Gaolchester.
Clearly a town with two jails and the need for ambiguity.
Not exactly a hit song but there is a song by Ashley Hutchings’ Rainbow Chasers about early photography (alas I don’t know what it’s called) in which there is a mention of using a sodium light to illuminate the subject.
Unfortunately sodium is highly reactive and has to be kept under oil so it doesn’t react with water in the air.
Victorian flash photography would use magnesium powder.
Pre- LED-era streetlights generally used Sodium Lamps and gave a not-very-pleasant yellow tint to everything. Not at all suitable for photography.
I wish I could remember what the song was I’m sure it referred to taking photos with the flash of white light which would have been magnesium powder and not sodium.
I used yellow filters for black and white photography as this would darken the sky and make clouds stand out more. Colour print film would have a yellow cast and this could be dialled out in the printing process.
Second track on the Reptile House ep by TSOM – “Lights” features ‘sodium haze’ – which Eldritch rhymes with fades – clearly terrible enunciation, if not pronunciation.
The obvious miscarriage of justice in Dylan’s “Hurricane” comes to mind. The DA said he was the one who did the deed. Nevertheless Ruben Carter went down for it
Up the Junction by Squeeze – these lyrics always annoy me…….
‘This morning at four fifty
I took her rather nifty
Down to an incubator
Where thirty minutes later
She gave birth to a daughter
Within a year a walker
She looked just like her mother
If there could be another’
I can only assume that Glen and Chris were capable of Time Travel
Not to mention that you don’t give birth in an incubator.
Looks OK to me. Where does the time travel part come in?
Details, details…… Just accept it as a mighty fine bit of verse.
Starts in present tense but then moves to a year later. Never bothered me though, nor the incubator reference, because it’s just a brilliant song
This talk of mixed-up timelines reminds me of this bit of utter nonsense from Frank Zappa:
«My python boot is too tight. I couldn’t get it off last night. A week went by and now it’s July. I finally got it off and my girlfriend cried “You got stink-foot!”».
How could it be a week later (in July) that he finally got it off, when it was only last night that his boot was very much stuck on?
Well, that’s one interpretation. Mine has always been that it’s expressing how proud he is of his daughter and his hope that she’s going to be exceptional. Which elevates the lyric to greatness because he (presumably) won’t be a part of her life.
I think the use of ‘this’ in the context of the song is the same as used in telling an anecdote e.g. ‘this guy said to me……’.
It is a genuinely poignant song, but the “incubator” line betrays the fact he did not (at that time) now about how maternity wards work.
I think bassinet would have taxed even Chris Diffords lyrical skills.
Is the bassinet not a member of the woodwind section?
I thought it was a member of the weasel family, scurrying about the forest floor letting out deep notes of regret.
Visual evidence, please
Could you not just do it yourself and spare the rest of us?
I could, of course – but where’s the fun in that?
When my son was born he had jaundice and was placed in one of those plastic box things which looks like an incubator maybe he was thinking of those. Although of course you don’t give birth in one.
Of course he could have said.
“This morning at four fifty
I took her rather nifty
Down to a maternity
And waited an eternity”
But that’s even more tortuous.
If bassinet was pronounced the French way then he could have said he’d been listening to Jules Massenet.
@daff My own best effort to correct this aberration has been an ongoing struggle. I managed not to accost Glen Tilbrook with efforts when he was watching football at the next table in the pub across the road ahead of his wonderful performance at the Seamus Ennis Centre about 10 years ago.
Anyway, first I would start with”one morning at 4.50, I took her rather nifty”, thereby taking care of the timeslip element. It gets trickier after that. I’ve settled at “we went down to maternity, where after an eternity”, then continuing as written originally with “she gave birth to a daughter etc”. I think it’s an improvement. Please don’t start a thread on this topic of re-writing poor lyrical choices by artists because most of mine are somewhat cruder than the above.
The Beach Boys sing on Cottonfields “It was down in Louisiana
Just about a mile from Texarkana”. A quick look at the map shows that it’s at least 25 miles as the crow flies.
In 1997, Primal Scream asserted the following egalitarian ideal:
Sister Rosa, Malcolm X, and Dr king
Showed we got power, showed the changes we could bring
To change society, you have got to change the law
Their bodies may be gone but their spirits still live on
Rosa was still very much alive at the time, so why nobody associated with the band bothered to check before they killed her off is odd.
Vanessa Williams ‘Save the Best for Last’ has always bugged me. ‘Sometimes the snow comes down in June’ …. true, ‘Sometimes the Sun goes round the moon’ … not as far as i know
If you are on the moon- it seems that it does, ‘erm.
bit more obscure ‘Diminished Clothes’ by Britpop nearly weres Salad has the line ‘like something from Fred Fellini’ … now I love this band but surely with the quirky lyrics they have in their songs putting Fed … short for Federico would have not been out of place and has the same number of syllables tis a banging tune all the same
I saw Salad support someone (Elastica, perhaps?) at the T&C/Forum. There’s something of the PJ Harvey Trio about Diminished Clothes, a great song to jump around to in a sweaty moshpit.
“…very stylish all round…”
All those noisy gigs in sweaty dives. A long-haired, ginger, beer-swilling beanpole dressed in sweat-soaked band t-shirts, flailing around. Remind me again, why was I single?
Sorry, Mr F – it was a Pavlovian response to “Salad”:
Gregory: Do you know anything about Italians?
Steve: Excellent seafood in the northwest. Some of their regional pasta dishes are good, too. Good with salads, very stylish all round…
From the song “Happy!”
“Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof”
If I was a room I’d want a ceiling, at least. I wouldn’t be happy about it.
I suppose they’re implying that if you clap along and are happy you’ll lift the roof off.
Oh I see. I genuinely thought he was talking about a room being particularly happy when it doesn’t have a roof. Like it’s free of restrictions or something.
Of course others may see it differently.
“I believe that this is a positive mass song and the message is that a room without a roof will allow to see the blue sky or the stars and that’s all anyone need to feel free and happy, (if it isn’t cold and it isn’t raining).”
Reminds me of the Les Dawson joke:
I was sat at the bottom of the garden a week ago, smoking a reflective cheroot, thinking about this and that – mostly that, and I just happened to glance at the night sky and I marvelled at the millions of stars glistening like pieces of quicksilver thrown carelessly onto black velvet. In awe I watched the waxen moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an amber chariot towards the void of infinite space wherein the tethered bolts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever in their orbital majesty; and as I looked at all this, I thought, ‘I must put a roof on this lavatory.
I could hear his voice there. Wonderful.
Where is that confounded Moose?
Took me a moment there to mentally run through the 1971 Keef classic before I realised what you meant
Doubt Keef would be very happy to enter rooms without roofies
As an aside, Offspring the Younger has been helping me to redecorate his bedroom. We’ve been listening to Spotify while we work. Modern hip-hop producers, having plundered the ’60s and ’70s for breakbeats, are now in the 1980s. I’ve heard more Hall & Oates and Phil Collins in the last three days than during the last three decades.
Which brings me to… American Pie. What the jiggins is it about?
It’s about when Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens died, isn’t it? Bit of a shock at the time I’m sure. Remembering every aspect of his life on that day, perhaps?
The first verse is. The remaining 8 and a half minutes seems to be squeezing random pips from a rhyming dictionary.
I think the book of love refers to the sing by the Monotones.
I seem to recall the Jester was Dylan.
Helter Skelter, Beatles?
Eight Miles High, The Byrds
Sergeants, Pepper?
Possibly a potted history of music?
Yes. If only there was some giant shared information resource we could turn to to verify this.
Which got me thinking back in the seventies to find out the lyrics of a song you’d heard on the radio you had to buy one of those magazines that printed the lyrics or purchase the sheet music. That is if you could be bothered.
Some albums of course came with lyrics printed on the inside sleeve which you could read along when playing the album.
Until I’d looked it just to check I’d no idea what the lyrics to American Pie were. It was the same when I started to put subtitles on the television when old episodes of TOTP were on, imagine my surprise when I found some songs had lyrics I’d never been aware of.
John Prine does a nice monologue on the live version of ‘That’s The Way That The World Goes ‘Round’ (‘Irish Pipedream’ live album) about mis-hearing the words of a Fats Domino song as ‘Don’t forget your Grumblybeads’. Then he got a magazine with the lyrics and he found out it was ‘Don’t forget your promise to me’ He preferred the mis-heard version. This as a prelude to a story about a young woman asking him to sing his song about a ‘Happy Enchilada’…
Mighty version of Lake Marie on that album by the way – very intense.
It’s about pie…isn’t it??
As long as it wasn’t Mom’s Apple Pie
Don was asked what it means and he said “It means I never have to work again, that’s what it means”.
And, given the number of times it came up on the Offspring’s Spotify playlist over the weekend, Don must be 0.0001p richer. He can thank me later.
Well, there was this one time in Band Camp…
Exactly how many bicycles in Beijing?
I don’t accept that there’s any connection between the amount of holes in Blackburn Lancashire and the amount of space available in the Albert Hall.
The very definition of Fake News, that one.
It’s very clever I think. Equating the number of holes to the number of seats in the Albert Hall and how pointless it is to know exactly how many there are.
I thought it was to do with the empty space in the RAH being filled by the empty void in all the holes combined.
That would need about a million holes
Or only one Batagaika crater , admittedly it’s in Russia and not Blackburn Lancashire. Surely it would just take one hole with a void equal to the empty space of the RAH to fill it.
Big potholes
In the song “Jiggery Pokery” by the Duckworth-Lewis Method, Neil Hannon assumes the persona of Mike Gatting facing Shane Warne’s famous “Ball of the Century”:
‘Twas the first test of The Ashes series 1993
Australia had only managed 289 and we
Felt all was going to plan, that first innings at Old Trafford
Then Merv Hughes and his handlebar moustache dismissed poor Athers.
I took the crease to great applause and focused on me dinner
I knew that I had little cause to fear their young leg spinner
He loosened up his shoulders and with no run up at all
He rolled his right arm over and he let go of the ball.
It was…
Jiggery pokery, trickery chokery, how did he open me up?
Robbery! Muggery! Aussie skull duggery, out for a buggering duck.
That last bit is not correct.
Mike Gatting was not out for a duck when he was bowled by Warne at Old Trafford.
He had scored 4 runs.
but he’s very correct that Gatt would not have allowed a cheese roll past him
Indeed so, Mr pj.
The burly ex-Middlesex captain was and is a renowned trencherman.
No doubt already mentioned ‘Yellow man in Timbuktu’ the Spice Girls Spice Up Your Life … I’m not saying the isn’t one but there aren’t many.
Given the number of “yellow men” now in Africa implementing China’s imperialism by stealth Belt and Road initiative, Posh, Ginger et al were sadly very prescient
Ooh, liddlebiddapolitics there #benelton
It is quite scary really. They’ll own half the fucking place in 50 years.
I knew there was one I needed to share and it’s only just occurred to me.
It’s “I write the songs”.
Where to begin…well for a start it’s not written by Barry Manilow, it’s written by Bruce Johnston out of Captain & Tennille. So when Bazza sings it, we are already being given false information.
But wait! According to the internet, turns out the song is actually about God writing the songs and the singer is singing from the perspective of God, reflecting that He is behind every song. How does he do this? Through the medium of song, of course. Another notch on His songwriting bedpost.
Right…so the singer of “I Write the Songs”is not the writer of the songs.
So then why does Sinatra change the words to “I Sing the Songs” ? If all of the above is true, then he could have just sung it like Bazza. He can’t be singing from the perspective of God because God hasn’t sung a song in his entire eternal life. He just leaves it to us.
Ol’ Sunken Eyes wanted to take full credit for the singing of the songs, making him an equal partner of God, seemingly. I’m not sure St Peter would have been too impressed by that – but knowing Frank, he probably slipped him a few bob.
Bruce Johnston out of Beach Boys, please. The Captain ( out of & Tenille) was also out of Beach Boys, mind, if in a backing musician style.) Johnstown’s other pension plan paycheck is Disney Girls.
You’re welcome.
If anyone is wondering who Bruce Johnston is, he’s the only one of the adults on the cover of Sunflower that looks as though they would be able to accurately tell you what day of the week it was.
Roger Whittaker’s “Durham Town (The Leavin’)” features the line “on the banks of the River Tyne”. Durham is of course on the River Wear, around 20 miles south of the River Tyne.
In the song’s earlier verses, RW makes it clear its narrator was visiting Newcastle for the first time and was so smitten with the River Tyne that he sat down and immediately resolved to move to the city from his existing home in Durham
Boyband bounders Westlife produced a song of dubious quality called Drive (For All Time). The lyrics assert the following:
If a million miles were between us
I’d want you to know
If I had to drive all day take that flight
Across this ocean I’m coming home tonight.
Nobody on Earth can be more than 12,430 miles away, so calm down, lads.
Hardly a hit, but XTC’s ‘Living Through Another Cuba’ puts the Cuban missile crisis in 1961.
The world isn’t biscuit shaped.
It’s also not a great big onion.
Babies weren’t born at a 1960’s dance either.
“Here comes love, it’s like honey, you can’t buy it, with money” – New Order, Crystal
You can buy honey with cash. I’ve seen people do it.
Also a shout out to Barney’s heroically flat note when he first sings ‘…to the core’ which is then copy-pasted onto the other choruses.
If we’re going to focus on Barney’s “singing”, we’re going to be here for a very long time!
In the early days it wasn’t a problem, because most of the instruments were out of tune as well. In fact, I don’t think it really matters here, either, despite me bringing it up. It gives the song a human element.
Also his improv-esque lyrics. Particularly Thieves Like Us which I maintain should have remained an instrumental.
“Love is found in the east and west, but when love is at home it’s the best.”
“And it cuts your life like a broken knife.”
Seems shit when written down but works for me in the song. One of their best isn’t it?
Was this still when they wrote lyrics by committee, or when they shut Barney in his room until he had written something? Either way, they should share the blame equally.