You've got to admire a song that rhymes 'exploring' and 'subtle whoring' though.

"4am in the morning, carried away by a moonlight shadow"

As opposed to 4am in the afternoon?

Whether one can be carried away by a shadow is a separate matter. It seems unlikely.

"It's been a long time since I rock and rolled" - Well Robert, strictly speaking the 24 hours since you were last on stage does not constitute a great length of time.

...has come! First the parallel universe thread and now this one! :-D

but the excremental Summer of '69 has the lines...

Me and some guys from school
Had a Band and we tried real hard
Jimmy quit and Jody got married

The thing that has always bugged me is how hard did they actually try? He says straight out that Jimmy quit and Jody got married. That leads me to believe that nine year old Bryan and his cronies did not try very hard.

...and I, regrettably, don't recall by whom (though will gladly extol the individual if he/she were to come forward on this occasion) - that one of the finest examples of lyrical buffoonery on the accuracy front has to be in Thin Lizzy's 'Jailbreak':

'Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak / Somewhere in this town...'

Er, that'd be at the jail, wouldn't it...?

No you're not etc.

Bruce said....

I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396
Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor

Apparently this is all compete bollocks, car, engine and performance enhancements are all incompatible. Sounds good though.

What has always bugged me about Bob's "Hurricane" is the miscarriage of justice...

"The DA said he was the one who did the deed
And the all White jury agreed"

Even so Hurricane Carter went down, even after the DA's confession. Hard.

in the same way I do the Beach Boys with their Little Deuce Coupe shutting people down. I have no idea what goes on under the bonnet so take t as gospel

Just a little Deuce Coupe with a flathead mill
But she'll walk a Thunderbird like it's standin' still
She's ported and relieved and she's stroked and bored
She'll do a hundred and forty in the top end floored

She's got a competition clutch with four on the floor
And she purrs like a kitten till the lake pipes roar
And if that ain't enough to make you flip your lid
There's one more thing, I've got the pink slip, Daddy

She's my little Deuce Coupe
You don't know what I've got

--- got that right

I've got myself a cryin', talkin', sleepin', walkin', livin' doll..

In 2005, Melua was criticised by writer and scientist Simon Singh for inaccurate lyrics referring to the size of the observable universe ("We are 12 billion light-years from the edge. That's a guess — no-one can ever say it's true"). Melua and Singh met, and Melua re-recorded a tongue-in-cheek version of the song that had been written by Singh: "We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe; that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars/and with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you".

that not everyone in Texas is a millionaire.

"Yellow man in Timbuktu..."

Errrrrr........

"Jungle Rock" by Hank Mizzell
A fox, a rabbit and a camel are amongst the animals mentioned in this song, What were they doing in the jungle?

Caesar's palace, morning glory, silly human race.
On a sailing ship to nowhere, leaving any place.
If the summer change to winter, yours is no disgrace.

Tchoh! What baloney! Everyone knows you have to have autumn after summer and before winter.

"Einstein can't be classed as witless.
He claimed atoms were the littlest."

Actually, Ian, Einstein's theories made it quite clear that there must be lots of things that are littler than an atom.

Not such a clever barstard then, eh?

I've fallen in love for the first time,
This time I know it's for real.

Erm... Freddie, old chap, it's either the first time or it's not. And if it is, then how do you know that it's for real? With no previous experience to compare it to I'd say that your judgement is a tad rash.

"I don't even dare to ask your age / It's enough to know you're here backstage". Lemmy old chap, sorry to sound contrarian but you could quite easily ask her how old she is. It's easy. You simply open your mouth and say "How old are you?" The fact that you haven't done so is not a question of daring, more a case of your being a greasy rock pervert and not being bothered.

... I listened to a tune called Tantrik Ass Rape by Skullflower.

I have to say that that title makes no sense at all: the word Tantrik suggests consent whereas Ass Rape suggests the very opposite. Skullflower really need to be given a dictionary.

The ditty itself can be found here. It's perfectly SFW, as it's an instrumental.

but if he asks her age and finds out she's underage he would feel bad about it. Don't ask, don't tell is Motorhead's policy

"Moonglum, friend without a reason
Moonglum, friend without a cause
Embarrassed by a show of love
But would stand by the man of the feeble blood"

I contend that this suppressed love is both a reason and a cause.

"Einstein was not a handsome fellow
Nobody ever called him Al
He had a long moustache to pull on
It was yellow
I don't believe he ever had a girl"

Einstein had an intimate relationship (and a daughter!) with Mileva Marić. They married in 1903. In 1914, Einstein moved to Berlin, while his wife remained in Zurich - they divorced on 14 February 1919 (the old romantic !). He then married Elsa Löwenthal (née Einstein) on 2 June 1919, after having had a relationship with her since 1912. She was his first cousin maternally and his second cousin paternally.

He also had affairs with upwards of 7 other women during his second marraige.

"Planet earth is blue and there's nothing I can do "

Not even sing, I suppose.

"A spaceman came traveling on his ship from afar
'twas light years of time since his mission did start", sings Chris De Burgh in this mawkish Christmas 'favourite'. Regrettably, a light year is a unit not of time, but of distance (the latter concept already covered by the use of 'from afar'.)

In I shall be released, Bob Dylan has "my light come shining in from the West unto the East". Seeing as the sun rises in the East on this planet, obviously he is writing from the point of view of someone incarcerated on an alien planet. Venus perhaps.

In a similar vein, I didnt realise for decades that Queen's '39 is not about miners in the gold rush as I thought but colony ships setting off for space. Good old Brian.

my finest hour - the one I spent watching you shower."

As has been often pointed out - no-one showers for an hour. I suspect that Ms Debbie Blondie was alluding to an accumulation of seperate occassions which in total came to an hour of slightly pervy shower watching.

To be honest, you'd think he'd notice after a while...

Charlene “I’ve never been to me” :
"I've been to Nice/and the isle of Greece/where I sipped champagne on a yacht..." (isle?)

To be fair, I think the lovely Charlene actually sings "the isles of Greece", unlike that Gallagher boy going slowly down the hall faster than a cannonball.

Of course, if Einstein was wrong, then all bets are off...

Although they did make amends;

but I bet Ted Nugent's love isn't really like a tire iron.

I love when this thread comes around, because I can trot out my favourite:

She's a killer queen,
Gunpowder gelatine
Dynamite with a laser beam
Guaranteed to blow your mind.

I've never understood what gelatine would contribute to the blowing of someone's mind. The most drastic thing I've seen gelatine do was prevent vegetarians from eating Haribos.

...better look out for Wile E. Coyote then

...a paean to gender reassignment. I speak, of course, of Alvin Lee's 'Love Like A Man':

You rolypoly
All over town
But you come on back to me
When things are down
Love like a man
Love all you can

Your satisfaction
Is growing less
If you come on back to me
Use my address and let you
Love like a man
Love all you can

You are the woman
You can't deny
You look so good to me, girl
You make me high

I'll tell you something
I think you know
When you flash those eyes at me
ALL SYSTEMS GO AND LET YOU
Love like a man
Love all you can

first tried reefer in September.

Surrounded no doubt by pushers and junkies, his avoiding horse for an entire nine months is frankly a bit far fetched.

I suspect he was doing horse much earlier, and that Prince used poetic licence in order to achieve a nice rhyme with 'moon'.

Coming out of New York City
With a frog in her hand
I did don`t you know "

Now - it's not that this is impossible, I just don't believe Mr Bolan on this ocassion.

Even if it was true - how could I know until he told me (unless I was there, which I wasn't) ?

a rolls royce was good for his voice. He's a born liar that one

My my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender
Oh yeah, and I have met my destiny in quite a similar way
The history book on the shelf
Is always repeating itself

Did they expect a different ending each time they read the book?

"Coast to coast, LA to Chicago ..."

Um.

Kris tells us he was "busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train". Clearly not busted completely flat then, as he had a train fare. Anyway, happily Bobbie thumbs a diesel down who takes them all the way to New Orleans. Now, Baton Rouge to New Orleans is about 80 miles, maybe an hour and a half's drive. Reasonable journey, yes, but it's hardly transcontinental, is it Kris? Does it really justify a whole verse to itself, you slacker? You could cycle it easily in a morning, or walk it in a couple of days. Get a grip man.

As you might expect Bobbie gets fed up of him and he "lets her slip away"....I mean, given he is now so gutted he would trade all his tomorrows for a single yesterday" he might have made a bit more effort. Frankly she sounds pretty flaky too, mind, as she's searching for a home and he hopes she finds it (NB not "one") which suggests she can't actually remember where she lives. Which is maybe why she hung around for so long with an obvious underachieving stoner who calls a harmonica a "harpoon" FFS.

'Eight Days A Week'?
'A Hard Day's Night'?

Einstein disproved...bang up to date!

Midnight at the oasis
Send your camel to bed
Shadows paintin' our faces
Traces of romance in our heads

Maria Muldaur clearly has a strict bedtime regimen where pack animals are obliged to turn in at the stroke of midnight. I wonder how big a bed she actually has and whether the camels are expected to hump the thing from oasis to oasis.

Knees up Mother Brown
Knees up Mother Brown
Under the table you must go
Ee-aye, Ee-aye, Ee-aye-oh
If I catch you bending
I'll saw your legs right off
Knees up, knees up
Never get the breeze up
Knees up Mother Brown

Dancing's off then...forever!

Be specific. If you're talking about something with next-to-no residual fermentable sugar than the said kisses won't necessarily be particularly sweet. If, however, the writer refers to a dessert wine then, yes, he has a point. Arguably the sweetest and stickiest is the German eiswein, made with frost-blasted botyrised raisins and which tastes like maple syrup. "Kisses sweeter than eiswein" almost works in the song if you say it quickly.

Cardiac Arrest: "like a big American car, but misspelt with a 'd'"

Maybe I'm going for the obvious one, but that's "misspelt with an 'r' and no 'l's"

But maybe there's a big American car, that I don't know about, called a 'CarXiac' where 'X' is any letter which is not 'd'.

Ace of Base have always confused me:

"She wakes up late in the morning light
And the day has just begun"

What time is the alarm-clock usually set for if crack of dawn is waking up late? What does this girl do? It can't be night work because next we are told that she decides to bunk off work and go to the beach to get a tan and pick up a boy. Just like that! We don't even know if she's phoned her boss!

And then they sing "All that she wants is another baby" Another? Where are any previous babies? This is getting more worrying by the moment.

So, in short, we have a girl who works odd hours, bunks off work, picks up casual sex on the beach, doesn't practice safe sex and is rather careless with her children.

I don't like it, I don't like it all...

Dotes
And dozydotes
And liddlamseetyvie
A kiddleetyvietoo
Wooden chew

Don't do it when you wanna come." Yeah, right Holly that may well work for you old son.

...is the one thing that money can't buy' sang the Beatles in She's Leaving Home.

So why did they write a song saying that 'Money can't buy me love'? That's two things.

But the suggestion that there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas is not correct - have Bob and Midge never seen Kilimanjaro?

"oh he reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys
Said I've got no further use for these"

Well quite, as that particular model didn't require keys to start it.

I have not taken Mr Thompson's output at face value ever since.

"It was made in ’59/ in a factory by the Tyne”

I thought it was "...in a factory of the time"

And would the car have had "Morris on the door"? Morris on the back and maybe the front, perhaps, but not on the door.

Verse one couldn't be clearer

Clap your hands
Now you're looking really good
Now you've got the hang of it
We're gonna do it one more time

They then proceed to do it several more times.

"If you're going to San Francisco,
you're going to meet some gentle people there."

If not inaccurate - a very sweeping statement. I went there in 1998 and some swine tried to break into my hire car.

'Knock Three Times'

Hey girl whatcha doin down there
Dancing alone every nite while I live right above you
I can hear your music playin'
I can feel your body swayin'
One floor below me you don't even know me
I love you

Oh my darlin
Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me
Twice on the pipe if the answer is no
Oh my sweetness
Means you'll meet me in the hallway
Twice on the pipe means you ain't gonna show

He's never met her, so how is she going to get his message? In any event, she has clearly not appeared at all to date, so the probability exists that she will remain ignorant of his interest, let alone his instructions to bang all over the house (!). And how can he feel her body swaying through a floor?

I am very fond of Violet Hill - Coldplay's emotionally bruised Blakean protest song. I particularly like the line "Bury me in armour when I'm dead and hit the ground my nerves are poles that unfroze." Pete Doherty might talk a good game about Albion but you just don't get that same quality of imagery from Babyshambles.

That being said I do think that Chris Martin rather lets himself down with: "Priests clutched onto bibles hollowed out to fit their rifles."

Either these are very long bibles or tiny, tiny guns. Even if the firearms in question are sniper rifles that can be disassembled and stored in a suitcase, the average-size bible would still be hard pressed to accommodate one.

"I've got me a car, its as big as a whale"

Really? Is that a Blue Whale, A Black one, or some other variant? Please be clearer about your comparisons.

We are later informed:
"I've got me a Chrysler, it seats about 20"

So its a fairly small whale then. Also, I wasn't aware of Chrysler making a 20 Seat Vehicle. Unless its a huge limousine of some sort, possibly specially coach built (a 10 seat Chrysler limo, cut in half with another one welded in the middle - imagine the strain on the propshaft)

They're staring at all the pretty women.

One says: "she's looking at you"
The other says "uh, I don't think so, she's looking at me"

They're talking about the same person!

the rain fell right down", one of my favourite tracks from Love "She Comes In Colours, but that line always grates.

Yes Arthur, it does rain a lot over here but don't you mean London Town maybe, and if you did London's not really a Town you know...

"Indeed, automotive enthusiasts have debated whether 1969 Chevrolet models could be ordered, customized, or built to the exact specifications given in the song of a 396-cubic-inch Chevrolet big-block engine with fuel injection and Hurst Performance transmission.[13]"

Wikipedia

(apologies for lyrical errors in this one but I am currently 987 miles away from my music:)

"This morning at 4:50
I took her rather nifty
Down to an incubator
Where thirty minutes later
She gave birth to a daughter
Within a year a walker"

So iis Squeeze's Up the Junction' all about time travel?

I've always wondered at the lines 'This is the story of Johnny Rotten. It's better to burn out than it is to rust'

...would seem to fit the fate of Sid better than it does the butter promoting, jungle loving old fraud Lydon.

one that's always bugged me from The Jam.....

"I was alone
no-one was there
I was alone
no-one was there"

Well, Mr Weller sir, if you were alone, then it goes without saying that no-one was there because that's what alone means.

Still a great song though.

Thank you for those items that you sent me
The monkey and the plywood violin
I practiced every night now I'm ready
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

1. Take major cities in the USA and Germany with a monkey and a cheap violin?
2. What was he practicing with the monkey?

In 1981, Bucks Fizz showed Europe's pop audience that you can be decisive about fancying someone, even playfully disrobe her - and get the girl. Nice and wholesome, no harm done. A winner!

In 1982, Bardo tackles the same issues but takes down a darker avenue of regret and bitterness :

"If you read my letters or my telegrams
You'd have got around to asking me just who I am
'Cause you know I'm gonna get ya
I'm gonna get ya, I'm gonna get ya"

And then...

"you could have turned around and hit me and I wouldn't have cared"

And then (worst of all)

"I could have tooken one step further"

An illiterate, dribbling rant from a violent, dangerous and masochistic stalker.

Still came 2nd though!

"You're Once, Twice, Three times a Lady" as sung by the Commodores - how did that happen? Did her parents name her 'Ladyladylady', was it some strange aristocratic entitlement, or did she have repeated gender reassignment surgery?

There's the love songs where the relationship is seemingly responsible for human respiration and without it, breathing would cease:

Jordin Sparks’ No Air
'If you ain't here I just can't breathe
There's no air, no air'

Toni Braxton Breathe Again
'If I never feel you in my arms again
If I never feel your tender kiss again
If I never hear I love you now and then
Will I never make love to you once again
Please understand if love ends
Then I promise you, I promise you
That, that I shall never breathe again
Breathe again
Breathe again
That I shall never breathe again
Breathe again'

That’s an awful lot of not breathing. She would probably pass out but would nevertheless go on breathing, it being more of an automatic function than a lifestyle choice.

Then there's Michael Bolton's 'I Said I Loved You...But I Lied':

'Said I loved you but I lied
'Cause this is more than love I feel inside
Said I loved you but I was wrong
'Cause love could never ever feel so strong
Said I loved you but I lied'

What's 'more than love'? Love must be pretty weak and sappy to him (also applies to his songs). Anyway, if he lied, that means he doesn't love her at all then?!

If you see a fire and wish to extinguish it then gasoline's probably not your best bet.

"Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids/In fact it’s cold as hell" (Isn't hell always imagined to be a fiery place)

"And there’s no one there to raise them if you did" (wouldnt he be there? How else would they get there. Why couldn't he raise them?)

"And all this science I don’t understand" (Surely all Astronauts must be educated in Physics to degree level at least?)

"It’s just my job five days a week" (If he is travelling from the Earth to Mars, I imagine this will take longer than 5 days. What would he do in his rocket on his 2 days off? Would he stop the rocket, mid-flight?)

Scientists - including Jack Schmitt - joined in group 4' if I remember rightly.

"I believe in yesterday".

Um. OK then.

Just very very unlikely to come to pass.

'I wanna wanna be a male model.
I wanna wanna be a male model.'

Thankyou for attending the audition, Mr Sharkey.

Next!

haven't posted this:

"We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control"

Clearly Mr Waters you do require some education, as you obviously don't understand the concept of the double negative. Suggesting in particular that there is a requirement for thought control in schools is a deeply worrying concept.

Or are you perhaps attempting to parody how you believe the "working class" speak, in which case the implication of your lyrics is that education is only for the elite in society? Your subsequent treatment of the children who sang backing vocals suggests this might be the case

You watch your friends

(why ? are they beautiful too ?)

No, no, it's because :

Everybody wants to take your baby home

(Only the case if all your male friends are heterosexual, and all your female friends are gay)

tying up my white tie, brushing off my tails.
I'm duding up my shirt front,
putting in shirt studs, polishing my nails.

Ah. No mention of trousers then? (c. Willie Rushton)

Jennifer Rush sings

"The whispers in the morning
of lovers sleeping tight
are rolling by like thunder now
as I look in your eyes"

So, Jennifer, let me get this exactly right:

It's morning, you and your bloke as asleep, but you're whispering. You're whispering in your sleep, apparently. Quite loudly. So loudly, in fact, that it sounds as loud as thunder (though I suppose it could be distant thunder but you don't actually say so, do you?). And your eyes are open.

I think someone took too many "Imagery In Song Writing" evening classes...

Champagne Supernova

"Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball".

Now I've never witnessed a cannonball in full flow but, I would bet it's just a tad quicker than a leisurely strool down the hall!

"Isn't it ironic?"

No, Alanis, it bloody isn't.

"She was a Day Tripper/One way ticket yeah!"

If you went on a "Day Trip", wouldn't it be more sensible to get a return ticket?

Tramp?

Is she a Special Brew-sipping bag lady with a scabby dog on a piece of string, or a woman of loose morals. Which is it?

Nothing in the lyrics to Frank's famous song seems to provide a clear answer to this:

She gets too hungry, for dinner at eight
She loves the theater, but doesn't come late
She'd never bother, with people she'd hate
That's why the lady is a tramp

etc

Really, this thread should be called "Pedantry About Factually Inaccurate Lyrics", rather than "Factually Inaccurate Lyrical Pedantry". The latter means that the pedantry itself is factually inaccurate, rather than the lyrics.

No wait, come back...

"Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats"

That's from Future Legend, the opening track on Diamond Dogs

Even allowing for poetic license, that's a bit over the top, isn't it?

If the fleas really were the size of rats, then you'd only get 4 or 5 of them per cat, which is hard to believe. Especially when a real cat can play host to 100s of fleas.

Come on Mr. Bowie, if you're going to make wild zoological references in your songs, try and make them more accurate in terms of scale in future!

You're all familiar with the 'classic' Seasons in the Sun. Specifically the lyric

... and every time that I was down you would always come around
and get my feet back on the ground.

Maybe it's just me but if someone helps you 'put your feet back on the ground' well to me that impies you're up, not down. Am I wrong ?

"With the stitches still mending beneath a heart-shaped tattoo". So sings Dylan in Changing Of The Guards from Street Legal.

Stitches? I don't know where Bob gets his ink done, but if he needs a surgical suture afterwards, perhaps he needs to find a more gentle and/or compassionate tattoo artist!

... on a hillside desolate
Bicycle tyre surely?

“The eagle pecks my eye, the worm he licks my bones” sings John Lennon in Yer Blues from the Beatles’ so-called White Album.

The common earthworm or Lumbricus terrestris has a rudimentary mouthpiece and sucks its food in with a muscular pharynx. More importantly, it has no tongue and so can't actually lick anything.

Mr Lennon may have known all about lounging around in bed for weeks on end with his weird Japanese girlfriend, but it seems his knowledge of worms (or Oligochaetology to use the correct term) was sadly lacking.