best first lines
Posted by Huw Williams on 13 May 2008 - 11:03pm.
I'm sorry if I've missed it, as I haven't been through all the recent entries, but I can't believe that this month's best/worst opening lines didn't include (in the best!) "Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street" from Joe Jackson's It's Different for Girls. The whole jealous/angry/nerdy view of relationships in 9 words.
P.S. for all you techie people, why are my posts always dated 1/1/1970?
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Dates
Actually the date is right. Forget the question.
A mildly techie person responds
1/1/70 is a date familiar to proper geeks: UNIX time is stored in units of seconds since that date, apparently.
My favourite opening lines are from Ed Kuepper's cruelly honest Everything I've Got Belongs To You: "I've designs on you that come from dirty books/I would lie to you if that is what it took."
Pedant Alert
Great opening line but it's from Is She Really Going Out With Him?
True, but.....
True, but good opening lines from Different for Girls too....
"What the hell is wrong with you tonight?
I cant seem to say or do the right thing"
I can't believe...
that I got that wrong. What a tit.
Best opening lines from the best pop song ever
You never close your eyes any more when I kiss your lips/And there's no tenderness like before in your fingertips/You're trying hard not to show it/But baby, baby I know it...
And, with that, the scene is set for the slow death of a love affair. Suspicion and paranoia packaged up in one of the most paradoxically uplifting songs of all time. Proof positive that human beings don't just desire the opposite sex, the same sex or indeed sex itself: they desire desire.
Genius
Best openers ever. Top spot.
Will you love me tomorrow
"Will you love me tomorrow" is another that always nails me.
"Tonight you're mine completely
You give you love so sweetly
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes
But will you love me tomorrow?"
So succinct, so true, heartbreaking.
slow death of a love affair
Similar theme, nowhere near as famous but I think equally brilliant: Letting Go by Squeeze (a superb lyric by Chris Difford,)
She plaits her hair, I bite my nails
We balance love on the scales
I wind the clock and go to bed
Our love is hanging on a thread
She gets undressed, I undress too
The draft is cold in my bedroom
We cuddle up and say goodnight
It's all the love there is tonight.
I can't be brave enough
She cannot say what we're feeling
Day after day
We're going through the motions
We find it hard to let each other go
She boils the eggs, I make the tea
Outside the sun shines on the street
We're at that point where love has gone
The fuse is lit, it won't be long
I take a walk, she cleans the house
This is the end, I'm in no doubt
But neither one of us can show
The slightest sign of letting go
More Difford...........
"You've left my ring by the soap.... now is that love?"
He's good isn't he?
Agreed
My personal all-time favourite is:
"I never thought it would happen / with me and the girl from Clapham"... intriguing, charming... sucked me in the first time I heard, and I love it just as much today.
Lit - Miserable
You make me come
You make me comeplete
You make me comepletely miserable
Conspicuous by his absence
"Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate/Will nature make a man of me yet?"
"Trudging slowly over wet sand/Back to the place where your clothes were stolen."
Sorry but compared to the above, no-one on the Word list and CERTAINLY not the dubious 1970s "Walking with Gorillas" come close.
Furthermore
'I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar'
'The rain falls hard on a humdrum town
This town has dragged you down'
'Belligerent ghouls
Run Manchester schools/Spineless swines
Cemented minds'
and.....................
I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour,
but Heaven know's I'm miserable now.......".
Not convinced
I like Mozzer's lyrics in a "Why, what a clever bit of prose that is" kind of way, but generally they've never touched me in the way that some of the others mentioned in this thread have, apart from I Know It's Over, which I do find moving.
I'd agree
there's a real (almost emotional) punch to the Righteous Brothers and Ronettes opening lines there; you don't need to have been in a bedsit in the 80's feeling miserable to 'get' them.
The scene is immediately set in both of them, and Bang, you know where you're at with the song.
On the other hand, 'Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate...' you know where you're at (on a fucking desolate hillside with no ride home) but no idea why!
Sorry to be a pedant (again)
But you mean The Shirelles.
i ALWAYS get those
two mixed up...thanks Lucas!
Well
sometimes Moz's words are just purely direct and emotional as in I Know It's Over and How Soon Is Now (surely moving also) whereas other times they are clever and witty which tempers the misery/awkwardness such that it becomes black comedy. Plus it's an original and unique style, and that archness is a refreshing change from the norm, and effective. So I would say his words are right up there too. Just my opinion etc.
Two of my favourites
'When you wish upon a star/That turns into a plane'
'Bring your own lampshade/Somewhere there's a party'
Both by the Replacements.
Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving,
But how can they know it's time for them to go?
Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming.
I have no thought of time.
For who knows where the time goes?
Written before she even had a recording contract. Brilliant.
The Final Cut
I've always liked "Through the fish-eyed lens of tear stained eyes....." from the title track of Pink Floyd's The Final Cut.
Also from The Final Cut but not an opening line ...
"... after the service as you're walking slowly to the car, and the silver in her hair shines in the cold November air ... you hear the tolling bell, and touch the silk in your lapel... and as the teardrops rise to meet the comfort of the band, you take her frail old hand ..."
"Well she was just seventeen,
you know what I mean"
Says it all really.
Beans
Distant cousins,
There's a limited supply,
And we're down to the dozens,
Oh my oh my.
Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train...
Ahhh...like the opening line of a great novel.
That's what I like about the South.
History, remembrance, atmosphere, melancholy, spirit. Genius.
I'm handcuffed to a fence in Mississippi.
My girlfriend blows a boozy good-bye kiss.
I see flying squirrels and nightmares of stigmata.
Then awakening to find my Trans-Am gone.
Still, I'm feeling pretty good about the future.
Yeah, everything is peaches but the cream.
I'm handcuffed to a fence in Mississippi,
where things is always better than they seem.
Things is always better than they seem.
I see the guitar that my cousin played in prison,
floating with the TV in the swimming pool.
I'm calling for the owner of the motel,
then noticing the bloodstain on the door.
I'm reaching for the shoes under the bushes,
just in time to hear the sirens sing.
I'm handcuffed to a fence in Mississippi,
where things is always better than they seem.
Things is always better than they seem.
You know freedom's just a stupid superstition,
'cause life's a highway that you travel blind.
It's true that having fun's a terminal addiction.
What good is happiness, when it's just a state of mind?
For in the prison of perpetual emotion,
we're all shackled to the millstone of our dreams.
Me, I'm handcuffed to a fence in Mississippi,
where things is always better than they seem.
Things are always better than they seem.
Jim White
I think I've posted this on another thread, but…
'If every word I said could make you laugh, I'd talk forever'. One of the Beach Boys' best lines and NOT written by Brian Wilson.
The Jack Rubies
Also posted on another thread but from Be with you:
'To be hung, drawn and quartered would be uncomfortable and awkward, but a fate I would endure to be with you'
Biblical quotations
I like this one
God said to Abraham kill me a son
Abe said Man you must be putting me on
God said no Abe said what
God said Abe you can do what you want but
Next time you see me comin you´d better run
Well Abe said where you want this killing done
God said out on Highway 61
May I humbly add
Black Out the windows, it's party time..
Martin Eden - Twilight Singers
Best First Lines
Enough of yer '80's tat, Mancunian miserablism or arch irony (yawn...); there is only one possible B.F.L., one that summed up the end of an era like no other - 'Once there was a way, to get back homeward...' evokes the same emotions, in those with a soul and a brain, as Jenny Agutter running down the platform in 'The Railway Children'.
My Favourite Springsteen Verse
In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected
and steppin' out over the line
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young
'Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run
God
"I don't believe in an interventionist God..." Discuss. Nick Cave, Into your Arms. I want it played at my funeral.
Funeral music
I was going to do that lyric but on the same theme you could have:
Dress sexy at my funeral my dear wife
For the first time in your life
teenage angst
Hows about:
I was a teenage werewolf
Braces on my fangs
The Cramps. Oh and the previous one is by Smog
Always thought Costello's
Always thought Costello's 'Don't start me talking, I could talk all night' opening line to Oliver's Army was very clever and ear-grabbing.
How about 'IIIIIIIIII was boooooooooorrrrrrn by the river' by Sam Cooke? You know the song is going to be very important with that kind of opening.
Of course Morrissey and Beatles as mentioned above deserve mention.