The other day Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken” came on the car radio. What a lovely song! Rick W’s exquisite baroque piano, Cat’s warm vocal, his and Alun Davies’ beautifully recorded acoustic guitars. But then –
SHOCK HORROR! THE THIRD VERSE!
Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God’s recreation of the new day
“God’s recreation”. No Cat, it’s not God’s pastime, (ie “recreation” with a short e) it’s God’s “re-creation” ie he’s doing it again.
Bugs me every time. I wonder if anyone ever told him? Does he sing it that way in concert (sorry, can’t be bothered to do the YT search)
I can forgive him because it’s such a nice song.
No such forgiveness however for our Rod’s execrable “You’re In My Heart”
My love for you is immeasurable
My respect for you immense
You’re ageless, timeless, lace and fineness
You’re beauty and elegance
Rhyming “immense” with “elegance”. Nah
“You’re scarf it was apricot”
Never sounded right to me
Doesn’t look right either
That line is a complete mistake. Could have been about something other than the subject’s clothing. In which case there are plenty of words that rhyme properly with yacht and gavotte to end a line with.
“Your scent it was bergamot” for instance
Or “you really love yourself a lot”.
“You’re horny like an ocelot”
OK, 2nd language and all that but “Take on me”?
See also scandi neighbours with
“Ring ring, why don’t you give me a phone?”
Eh? It’s “call” isn’t it?
The happiest sound of them all.
Not sure if it’s quite what you had in mind but Cheap Trick’s song ‘I want you to want me’ has always slightly bugged me because, unless I’m going deaf, the line ‘ Didn’t I, didn’t I, didn’t I see you cryin’?’ (and it’s slight variation) is sung as ‘didn’t I’ half the time and ‘diddle I’ the other half.
In “Rebel Music (3 o’Clock Roadblock)”, Bob Marley sings:
And “Hey, Mr. Cop! Ain’t got no – (hey) hey! (hey, Mr Cop) –
(What ya sayin’ down there?) – (hey) hey! (hey, Mr Cop) –
Ain’t got no birth certificate on me now.”
For some reason, he’s gives us a VERY strange pronunciation of “certificate”. It sounds more like “surfer-ticket”.
“Ain’t got no birth surfer-ticket on me now.”
Bizarre.
Did the OP intend us to stray into examples of mondegreens?
Or just poor artistic choices?
Maybe a separate thread where people post them and you have to name the song, although I suspect a lot of them would be too easy to guess.
I’d start with ‘cheese scones’ and ‘the devil for a sideboard’ as they came to mind.
I’m an an antichrist, I am an anarchist.
That’s on purpose, though, and brilliant to boot.
Agreed. Surely no one tells an anarchist how to pronounce anarchist??
Probably not…but then, was he? Was he really?
A true anarchist, once in a position where rules no longer apply, would rebel against that and start imposing some rules. Which they then could, in turn, rebel against. It would be very tiring though…
Just the other day, I saw a sticker on a lamp post for the Anarchist Federation so I suppose they must have some sort of structure and rules already. Even getting stickers printed and distributed must take organising, and someone in charge of it. That’s the person who will get fed up quickly enough when they realise they’re doing all the work and will then join the Greens, then the Liberals and finally end up reading the Telegraph and fuming about woke.
That’s Rachel Reeves
Glen Matlock says the forced rhyme still bugs him a bit.
Jon Lydon admits it was on purpose and could find no other way to lever the words in.
Was he an anarchist? A contrarian certainly, but not a Destroy everything anarchist
Was Lydon an anarchist? Of course not…
All I’m seeing here is no-one disputing his credentials as antichrist. I always thought it was Sid Vicious who rode upon the white horse..
Ooh errr…
Well, he was difinitely on one type of horse. More of the brown type.
I saw a bloke wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the legend ‘Anarchists Unite’ last week. I didn’t bother explaining the contradiction to him.
Shouldn’t it be Anarchists Untie?
I knew a fair few anarchists in Dublin and subsequently London back in the 80s and 90s. While some of them occasionally took part in riots and violent protests – I had a friend who emailed me footage of himself pissing on an armoured car at an anti-capitalism protest in Italy. He’s a social worker now like me, in fact he lectures. I used to mind his squat on the wrong side of Ballymun for a while (I was from the other side). It was a bit scary but I used to drink his homebrew and enjoy the peace. I remember him telling me that, if a pre-fame Chumbawumba wanted to stay there when they played in Ireland but not to let the Animal Liberation Front stay there as they were wanted by Gardai for burning out some fur shops. I tracked him down in North London a few years later by going from squat to squat until, having given up, I bumped into him on the deserted platform of a nearby tube station. He told me that kind of thing happened every time he took acid.
He introduced me to a world I’d never seen of very organised anarchist communities in London with their supportive network, cafés in squats. Here was where I first encountered vegans and their oneupmanship. There seemed to be a lot of illegal substances and home made cider going around. In truth, rather like the ones I’d met in Dublin, I’d have regarded them all as hippies in spirit if they didn’t call themselves anarchists.
My brother dabbled in anarchism for a while in Ireland and still adheres to their values. Back then he was also a Minister of the Eucharist dishing out communion every Sunday proudly wearing an anarchist badge on his lapel. He would tell anyone who’d listen that he made a point of this because a previous Pope had said that all anarchists should be excommunicated.
This doesn’t really address the question about the Pistols but I imagine the “true” anarchists would regard them as shallow posers in thrall to Capitalism.
Interesting post!
And I think your final sentence sums up the Pistols…
Minding an anarchist’s squat conjures up an image I’d like to unsee, especially one who pisses on armoured cars.
I have heard it so often that I sort of accept it now, but the pronunciation of ‘Ulysses’ in Cream’s ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’ is all wrong. Still a great track though.
Slightly off topic, but what really annoys me is the phrasing in the Killer’s ‘Human’….
Are we human
Or are we dancer?
Eh..?
For what it’s worth @nigelT I have a had a theory about this since I first heard it as it certainly niggles. Key to this is the knowledge that the
Killers are from Las Vegas (AFAIK). I could well imagine that in the bitchy teenage life of Las Vegas youths, it may well be an in joke that the dancer class are somehow less than human. See the wretched Showgirls film as exhibit A m’lud.
I remember the those metal muthas Gillan! having a minor hit with Stevie’s Living in the City. They duly performed the song on TOTP and it’s let down by one word.
Nothing wrong with the music and most of the vocal is as phew rock n roll grunt grunt as it gets – but when we get to the chorus, he sings “Just enough, just enough for the citeee” like some kinda limey dufus. A cool American dude would sing it “cit-ehhy”.
Up to that point he’s singing like Robert Plant but by using that pronunciation of city, he immediately sounds like a timid accountant from Surbiton.
Slightly off topic as this is about a lazy lyric, specifically “Good Technology” by Red Guitars. It is a great song, with lyrics that go: “We’ve got photographs of men on the moon / We’ve got water that is good for us / We’ve got coffee that’s instantaneous / We’ve got buildings that are very tall / We’ve got cigarettes that are low in tar / We’ve got policemen who can tell us who we are / We can reproduce a work of art/ We’ve got missiles can tear the world apart /Good, good, good, good, good, good technology.”
And then: “We’ve got trains that run underground / Aeroplanes that fly very fast…” What? “Aeroplanes that fly very fast?” How crap is that line? Surely that should be “Aeroplanes that break the speed of sound”. The earlier line about tall buildings just scrapes in, although “We’ve got buildings that reach the sky” or something like that would have been better. But “Aeroplanes that fly very fast”? Plain lazy.
Here is the track:
The Byrds – The Bells of Rhymney, beautiful song and they handle the relatively easy Welsh place names ok, but pronounce Rhymney as “Rimney”, people from that area like me know it should be more like “Rumney”
A song written, in fact, by Pete Seeger. Using lines from Welsh poet Idris Davies’ “Gwalia Deserta” from 1938, inspired by a coal-mining disaster and the failure of the 1926 General Strike.
I seem to recall that Seeger’s original also pronounced the name like ‘rimmney’, so the blame really lies with him. Idris Davies probably pronounced the name correctly back in 1938. Seeger first saw the poem in print, in a book by Dylan Thomas. Almost certainly he never heard it spoken.
At a concert some time back, McGuinn explained that when The Byrds recorded the song, they thought it was “Rimney”…but he dropped in there years later only to be told by a local, “Well, Roger, we used to pronounce it Rumney, but we’ve had so many tourists calling it Rimney that we’ve just given up and gone with the flow.”
PS Steve Harley’s pronunciations in “Make Me Smile” had me scratching my head in my younger days.
Nice story from McGuinn but pure BS I am sure
Bruce incorrectly pronounces “Mrs. McGrath” phonetically as written. It really ‘grates’. I am not familiar with other versions so maybe it’s been handed down that way…
In “Dang Me” Roger Miller pronounces “syrup” as “surple” to make this bit rhyme… Roses are red and violets are purple
Sugar is sweet and so is maple syrup
“Maple Syrple” is not a term that’s only used in that song.
It seems to have been in colloquial use before, in parts of the USA. Certainly I’d heard it’s use before I heard it in the song. Possibly from American TV or in a movie.
The rhyme in the song is quite deliberate. There’s no other reason (apart from the song’s dark humour) to deviate from the generally-accepted “Violets are Blue”.
Arlo Guthrie Motorcycle song.
“I don’t want a pickle
Just want to ride on my motorsickle.”
Which always makes me think of a motorised harvesting tool.
… a Vincent MotorSICLE
A slap and a tickle…
I am confuse @sewer-robot
Sorry Hubes – it’s from Reasons To Be Cheerful part 3..
Ah I’d never delved into the lyrics that closely but I still think it needs a K after the c.
Ah yes, dunno what happened there..
Dury’s lyrics are always worth delving into.
In Rush’s “Red Barchetta”, the ch is pronounced with a soft sound, as in church. It’s pronounced as if the word were Spanish, but it’s not, it’s Italian, and as such should have a hard ch sound, as in chianti.
It’s got me wondering whether that really is how you pronounce Syrinx.
Again, Bjork’s English is way better than my Icelandic, but her playing music through a ‘jettoblaster’ always amuses me on There’s More to Life Than This.
Jamay, jamay, jamay……
Byron’s greatest moment: “Song for Europe”
I think you mean “jamais, jamais, jamais”. French for “never, never, never”. But it is one of his greatest songs.
Or “jammy, jammy, jammy…”
If he sang “Jamais, jamais, jamais”, in French, I’d have said so.
…a man after midnight.
Totally off topic, but it’s been bugging me for 24 hours since I saw Almodovar’s film The Room Next Door last night and this feels as good a place as any to get it off my chest. Julianne Moore can normally do no wrong as far as I’m concerned, but, Julianne and Pedro – Lytton Strachey is NOT PRONOUNCED ‘STRAKEY’…..
I’ve always liked the Elvis Costello song Brilliant Mistake, but in the lyric ‘She said that she was working for the ABC News/It was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use’, he clearly pronounces it ‘alphrabet’, which is just odd.
Se also “spectaclar” in Indoor Fireworks.
In Kate Bush’s version of ‘My Lagan Love’ she pronounces the name of the river as ‘Lay-gan’ when any fule know the first syllable rhymes with ‘bag’, and the second syllable isn’t completely spoken i.e. ‘lag’n.
Everybody! Everybody! @garyt is dissing Madame Kate!
He can expect a knock on the door any time now.
That bloke from The Style Council once chewing gummed a lyric which sort of went
..”between those who have and those who have not/And dangle jobs like the donkey’s carr-ott.”
Yuch.
Which bit of the donkey??
Mangling by neverending wailing: “There must be an angel” by Eurythmics is near impossible to listen to without wincing. Bliss becomes “blee-hee-eeee-heez”, and her heart goes “Booo-hooo-oooohoo-ooo-hooom” (I’d see a specialist about that), and there’s some other word that I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be.
God I hate that song…everything about it is awful!
Absolutely. Can forgive Annie most things, but that is beyond the pale. And of course, it got to No.1. Fuck you, The British Public, fuck you!
Gosh. I was about to talk about Siouxsie for this thread and then I thought that I must have posted before about this (not that this usually stops me). Anyway – I was right and it was 9 years ago!
Americans and the letter R. This too has been discussed, but many singers from the US cannot manage to “purnounce” that letter. Suzanna Hoffs is a “pime” example.
Or am I only “deaming”?