Entertainment For Lively Minds
Some song lyrics just don't add up
I was just listening to the excellent CD by Adrian Admondson and the Bad Shepherds, whose (magnificently realised) schtick is to do folk-style arrangements of classic punk and post-punk singles. One of the side effects of this is that many of the lyrics of these songs are thrown into sharper relief. In some cases this simply reveals the lyrical gems hidden under the incoherent shouting/snarling of the originals. In others, I found myself simply paying more attention to the lyrics. As was the case with The Jam's "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight". Now, this being a straight narrative-type song, it's reasonable to expect the narrative to hang together, but I found myself unable to dismiss the following two gaping holes in the "plot" of the song:
1. Hang on, it's midnight, yet he's on his way home to his wife with a takeaway curry, and she'll be putting out the plates and cutlery in anticipation of his return. Now what sort of household is this, where a bloke returns home to his wife after midnight, and they sit down to a nice civilised meal. After midnight? Maybe different if they'd been out together and decided to have a late supper, but this situation sounds a bit unlikely to me.
2. Post-beating, chappie's final conscious thoughts are that they've got his keys and they'll use them to gain entry to his house and do unmentionable deeds to his wife's person. But how would they find his house? Isn't it really, really well known that the one thing you DON'T do is put an address tag on your key ring? And the vast majority of people don't walk around carrying anything that happens to bear their address. No, sorry Mr.Weller, this detail doesn't stack up either.
So what I thought was a really gripping narrative song turns out to be more contrived than an episode of Eastenders. Any more contenders?
- More from Paul Vincent.
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"the wine will be flat and the curry's gone cold"
Sparkling wine? With curry? And why is she opening it before his arrival?
And whoever heard of carting takeaway curries home on the tube anyway.
Or buying plums from vending machines.
Time travel!
One that has often bothered me is 'Up the Junction' from Squeeze:-
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
Me too
Why would you take a pregnant woman to an incubator?
You'd never
...fit a pregnant woman in an incubator!
i love Diff n Till and UTJ
but
She left me when my drinking
Became a proper stinging
eh? Is this some weird slang I am unaware of. The only way it works is if its suggesting that he knocked her about a bit and i so, then I'm glad he's all alone in the kitchen, thecad!
Laboured [sic] with Love
Great lyricist though he is, Difford has form for writing as if English were his second lanuage:
the neighbours she sickens
She sells off her silver and poodles in china
they had retired to roads that were sandy
... and then there's that bottle/hovel/sod all rhyme.
be fair
I'd agree that "my drink became a proper stinging" is a bit whiffy
...but all those examples from Labelled With Love all make perfect sense, and I'd argue are very cleverly worded.
I'm not the first to notice this, but when Chris is on his game he manages to present the most prosaic, kitchen-sinky information with a witty and deft turn of phrase, without getting all airy-fairy poetic.
Which I'd call quite the trick.
One Plus One is One
Badly Drawn Boy.
That just doesn't add up
(gets coat)
See also
"One And One Is One", by Medicine Head.
And in "Naked Eye" by the Who
"One and one don't make two. One and one make one."
Pete's pretty emphatic about it.
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in this town....
Where?
Where?
WHERE?
Aah, but
some towns have more than one jail.
Did the Pistols actually call the Queen a moron or not?
"God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
Potential H-bomb"
All the hoo-ha about the Pistols calling the Queen a moron, but I never thought of it like that - I always thought they were saying that you, the listener, were being made a moron.
So, were the Pistols unfairly derided? OK, we can ignore the bit about them saying she "ain't no human being"...
Sandi Thom
Like Retro Man, I'd like to point out another example of unfair lyrical derision.
Scottish singer-songwriter Sandi Thom had a minor hit a few years back with a song called I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair). She was deluged with criticism, with people mockingly pointing out that punk rockers didn't wear flowers in their hair.
However, a quick listen to the (admittedly awful) song in question, reveals that the title suggests a merging of punk and hippy culture.
Thats song that says
"sometimes the sun goes round the moon"
no it doesn't, love
Smoke on the What-er?
"But some stupid with a flame gun"
some stupid what Ian?
Pedantry alert
it's flare gun, surely?
But your point is a good one, it's always bothered me, as well.
Mind you, I can forgive Purple anything, because the preceding line of the song runs:
Frank Zappa and the Mothers were at the best place around.
oh I'm sure you're right
I've allas heard it as flame, it's stuck with me now
Picture This by Blondie
What was her boyfriend doing in the shower for an hour that made it so fine to watch?
And what on earth was a pocket computer capable of doing in 1978? It must have had the computing power of a spoon and cost thousands of dollars, and yet it was what Debbie recommended to her boyfriend as an aide memoire.
In the song
Ruby Don't Take Your Love To Town, Kenny Rogers vouchsafes the following information:
It wasn't me who started that ol' crazy Asian war.
While that's reassuring to hear, I don't think anyone was seriously accusing Kenny of instigating the Vietnam War, especially as he was only 16 when hostilities began in November 1955.
Elton and Bernie in Don't Let the Sun
There are so many but:
"Don't discard me ... just because you think I mean you harm"
Sounds like a pretty good reason to me.
Grrrr
We had this subject before I do believe, and I'm always glad when it comes up as it gives me an opportunity to express my gnawing hatred for a lyric that angers me every time.
In 'Walking in Memphis', Mark Cohn/ Cher/ some other eejit, sings, "I'm walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale".
That's not walking. It's floating.
Aha but...
"walking with my feet" is, I'll grant you, mildly tautological, but where does it say the 10ft is vertical? He/She could be waiting tables in BB King's Blues Club.
I saw Rufus Thomas do Walking the Dog there once, but that's another story. Actually, no, that's it really. Not much of a HORA, sorry
Another two
Just thought of another two, both pedantry of the highest order. Doubly irritating, as they come from one of the greatest albums of the past decade.
They're both William in The Hazards of Love. At one point he and Margaret sing, 'And we'll lie till the corncrake crows.' Now I don't want to come over all Bill Oddie, but corncrakes don't really crow. They sort of rasp. Obviously, 'And we'll lie till the corncrake rasps,' doesn't create the same vibe.
Later on, William is appealing to Annan Water to let him cross so he can save Margaret from the Rake. He muses, 'Build a boat that I might ford the other side.' Now, you don't ford a river in a boat, do you, William? 'Build a boat that I might row to the other side,' doesn't scan as well, granted, but it is accurate.
I may be wrong but
is it not possible to use 'ford' as a verb? I've always heard that lyric as 'Build a boat (so) that I might ford (to) the other side'.
Rodney the Modney
Just let your inhibitions run wild.
Does this make sense?
Unipedal canines
I’m sure this has been mentioned before in other threads, but it bears repeating here. Much as I love Bruce Springsteen, I’m not sure what he was thinking when he wrote this line in ‘The Wrestler’:
"Have you ever seen a one-legged dog making its way down the street
If you’ve ever seen a one-legged dog then you’ve seen me”
I’d lay good odds that if anyone has ever seen a one-legged dog, it wasn’t ‘making its way’ anywhere.
What if it had
one real leg, and three of those robo-legs. Or 1 robo leg and a set of wheels at the back?
Robodog! Now in cinemas across Europe
This time it´s personal. Barking good.
But that line is strange. Especially considering how much time Springsteen seems to spend on his lyrics.
Someone in the organisation surely must have thought "what?".
The fanclub
Much as a love em, Teenage Fanclub have a few of these.
Only With You from 2005's Man Made (great album btw) has the following gem:
"Vistas that I want to view"
Step away from the thesaurus Raymond!
They need a bloody good map...
along with the thesaurus. They're going places but always seem to need direction and just can't find their way home. You put them on the straight and narrow but then they take the long way round through town and city and end up getting stuck in a cul de sac!
I've posted this before
on a couple of occasions but if Terry (or Jerry) from the Specials want to 'spread manure in my bed of roses' it's fine by me as they will grow better.
Bowie's Quicksand
"Knowledge comes with Death's release".
How does he know this then?
Isn't it a quote
from Thelemic teachings of the kind loved by Crowley?
Or probably summat that Hitler once said
Madness's dictionary difficulty
My all-time favourite example of lyrics that just haven't been thought through comes from Madness's "Cardiac Arrest":
"Think of seven letters
Begin and end in 'C'
Like a big American car
But misspelt with a 'D'"
OK, so obviously the word Suggs is circumventing here is "Cardiac". Seven letters - check. Begins and ends in 'C' - check. Then it all goes titsup: the big American car is obviously "Cadillac", but what does he mean by "misspelt with a 'D'"? The 'D' isn't anything to do with the alleged misspelling, since it appears in both 'Cadillac' and 'Cardiac'. In fact the only letter in 'Cadillac' that doesn't appear in 'Cardiac' is 'L', but "misspelt with an 'L'" wouldn't rhyme with 'C'. So Suggs panicked, and settled for a line that makes no sense whatsoever. Oh well, their schtick WAS the 'nutty' sound...
The King's Return to Sender
"I gave a letter to the postman, he put it in his sack..."
Wouldn't it then get mixed up with the letters he is delivering?
Do they not have post boxes in the States?
Good point
Also: If they´ve had a "lover´s spat" it´s fair enough if she wants some time on her own, but "no such number, no such zone"? Seems a bit harsh to deny the house she lives in (or the whole part of the city) doesn´t exist. She seems a bit of a nutter. Get out while you can, El.
Perhaps he got to the postbox just as the mail was
being picked up. "Just one more for you, mate" etc etc
Acksherly...
...here in the States people do give their out-going post to the postman as much, if not more, than they put it in a postbox.
When I do it, I have to say it makes me feel a bit guilty -- similarly to when I stand there watching the cashiers in supermarkets bag your shopping for you.
Funnily enough when I come home to London and go into Sainsbury's I get (momentarily) huffy when the cashier doesn't put the stuff in the bags. How quickly we get spoiled...
The movement you need
is on your shoulder.
Eh? Come again. And don't give me any existentialist guff Massive. He didn't even mean it when he wrote it.
Talk to your dancing parrot about it
That´s how I see it.
Neil Young's
song Ohio, as performed by CSN&Y, has a line that just doesn't add up for me.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago
What should have been done long ago? The shooting of a bunch of layabout students?
That's taking things just a little too far, isn't it? ;-)