Entertainment For Lively Minds
Beadles About!
Posted by Archie Valparaiso on 7 January 2011 - 11:51am.
I suppose it had to happen. Elton John is starting to speak the way he sings.
How to Speak Eltish 101: (1) Take a bog-standard middle-class Middlesex accent. (2) Replace every "t" with a "d". (3) Sit back in your Alexei Sayle fat-bastard suit and led id all hang oud.
"English people thought the American pressing was bedder; American people thought the Briddish pressing was bedder. It was a kind of inverded snobbery. [...] An explosion that starded with The Beadles, with the kind of experimentation that they put on reckid, that George Mardin helped them with."
From about 1:15 here (whack the volume up to 11, though; the sound's very poor):
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I understand he
Does a lot of work for ... (what's that word again?)
"Grade albums"...
...but not "experimendation". I'm so confused.
Unpredicdabillady...
is the mark of the true ardist.
I have no sound on my work compuder
so I hear all the above commends in an Arnie Schwarzenneger voice in my head
So drue, Archie
SOOO drue.
I don't
geddit.
Whadda you guys tawkin about?
I heard him say
the word duty as 'doody' on the Simon Mayo show. Does he not realise he's a figure of fun?
It's fucking irridading
Windon does id as well
Ed Miliband...
...has adopted several of Tony Blair's strange vowels ('National Health Servuss', for example), and he's starting to drop his final 't's like him too.
It's odd. Brother David doesn't talk like that.
Elton's OK
and I thought that was the most interesting show in the Spectacle series by far.
I heard Geoffrey Boycott on the radio today. Now there's a ridiculous speaking voice.
It was the first "Spectacle" I'd seen
I enjoyed it in bits. Elvis seemed very uncomfortable at the beginning, but gradually eased his way into it. I could have done with less Elt in the comfy chair and more at the piano, demonstrating the stuff he was happy to acknowledge that he'd lifted from Leon Russell, Laura Nyro, etc.
As for Elton's OK-ness, I rate him extremely highly as a musician and composer - probably second only to Macca as England's greatest melody merchant - but rather lowly as a celeb (cf. all the don't-you-know-who-I-ammery, etc.) He's often applauded for not taking himself too seriously, but I can think of few famous people who respond worse to not being taken seriously by others (cf. suing Marina Hyde for libel and ending up looking even more ridiculous than the piece he objected to had painted him).
Just to qualify my previous post
It was great to hear two English blokes of a certain age (Declan and Reg) reminisce for a solid hour about record buying and the UK 60s music scene.
Elton's Long John Baldry memories alone made it the best show in the series for me. Far better than listening to luvvies like Smokey Robinson prattling on endlessly about "the biz", for example.
As for Elton's music, that's a different matter. I haven't enjoyed one of his albums since Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in 1975. That's a long time between drinks, but I still think he's good value and I like to hear him interviewed.
And there's really nothing about his speaking voice worthy of ridicule as far as I can hear.
"It is impossible
for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him."
G B Shaw, Preface to Pygmalion
The other side of the Atlantic
An equivalent is Madonna being mocked in the US for speaking British by pronouncing 'wader' with a T.
"Somebody is leaving the herd and not conforming! Let's point at them for being different." The herd pulls together and feels better about itself.
here he is
two accents ago, when he was still from Pinner. 'Ullo, I'm 'ere for the Morcum'n'Wise show
His accent is variable
The Americanised accent is terrible, I agree, but the real Elton voice still makes the occasional appearance. When he appeared on Danny Baker's show a year or so ago, he reverted to his Pinner voice, probably because he was relaxed and talking about where he grew up and the records he would buy.
If you asked Elton for his opinions after watching this
He'd probably say that he does sound like right did.
Around 29 secs. Splidding hairs.
Blair's vowels
I thought at first it was faux-Kiwi. Then I realised it's from his Scottish background (same place the kiwis get theirs).
I do hate mid-Atlantic accents though - other offenders: Catherine Z Jones, Ringo Starr ... so many.
Just to clarify
I have no problem at all with hybrid accents that are genuine, now matter how odd and downright extravagant (hi, Eamonn!) they may sometimes sound. Ringo's accent, for example, has been a natural development that has occurred over the course of many years' immersion in American English, as has David Frost's and, more recently, Catherine Zeta Jones's. If you listen to them speaking, their vowels have opened up (moving away from the flat English "rock band" towards the drawlier-sounding "rahk bairnd"), and their general intonation has changed.
The Elton John example here just seemed to me to be farcically forced and artificial, because it's limited to only one feature (and a misunderstood one at that, since American intervocalic alveolar flapping (!) isn't as simple as straight swapping with "d"). Rather than the result of any natural process, it smacks of being just an overly self-conscious Englishman trying too hard to please an American studio audience by, er, meeding them half way.
Put it this way: do you really think he talks like that at Watford board meetings?
Or put it this way,
you think he was trying to be understood?!?
Perhaps you're right
You know, what with Americans being so notoriously unable to comprehend anything from beyond their own borders.
You walked right into that one, eh, MAM? Happy New Year, anyway. Genuinely. (Or winely, even.)
A victim of the world tour gap-year generation finds voice:
One of the first thing I got pissed off with when my then-girlfriend finished beetling in and out of planes "doing" the world's biggest gap-year traps was the way all her new pals spoke with some sort of weird, ubiquitous, infuriatingly global English accent.
This included the 't' as 'd' (is this limited to British rock stars living in the States? I hear it as a public school social-climbdown sort of inflection) but the most annoying thing was Australian Question Intonation? Where it's impossible to make a statement?
I could go on but won't - raw nerve...
Shouldn't that show be called "Spectacles"?
Next week, Timbuk3!