Sunday, 15 October 2017

The Neverending Top Ten #5: Ratrap (sic)


Sam has taken to writing words on the bathroom wall with his stick-on road bath toys. It started with his own name, then worked through the names of his friends at nursery, then on to the names of his favourite characters from Disney's Cars, Paw Patrol and Transformers: Rescue Bots. This has been going on for a while now and while we do have to help him with the spelling, it's still pretty impressive for a 3/4 year old.

Imagine my joy when one night I came home from working late to find he'd chosen to write a song title on the bathroom wall, one of the ones we'd been listening to in the car earlier that weekend...

(Yes, fellow pedants, I know there's a 't' missing, but I blame his mother for that.)

5. The Boomtown Rats - Rat Trap

Many people will tell you that this is Bob Geldof's finest moment, and they'd probably be right. Many of those same people might even tell you that they're not Bruce Springsteen fans... which is ironic, since Rat Trap is possibly the greatest Springsteen tribute song ever written. I mean, come on: this is Born To Run, the Dublin version. Right down to the sax intro that wants to be Clarence so very, very badly. Watch the video though and tell me if, for even one second, you really believe Bob Geldof knows how to play the saxophone...
Billy don't like it living here in this town
He says: traps have been sprung long before he was born
He says: hope bites the dust behind all the closed doors
And pus and grime ooze from its scab-crusted sores



9 comments:

  1. Nice! Although for a moment, when I saw the post title in my RSS reader of choice, I thought you were going to be posting this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m64UgTJ1DM

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    1. Funnily / scarily enough, I have a post planned about that very tune...

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    2. Yeeeeaaaah, rat fans!

      (I promise I won't do that again)

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  2. When he puts up I Don't Like Mondays it is time to worry!

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    1. Yes. Maybe I'll save that till he's a teenager...

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  3. You have a child genius on your hands! I'm pretty sure DD was just messing around with toys boats and ducks at that age. Wonder when the first rude word will pop up on the tiles - by accident of course.

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  4. Ah....The Boomtown Rats.

    Early stuff was enjoyable in a pub-rock/post punk sort of way. Later stuff was tolerable as they serached out other musical genres. Rat Trap was ublistenable....I Don't Like Mondats was unbearable. Both have date badly

    JC

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    Replies
    1. I will take "ublistenable" to mean "uberlistenable". ;-)

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