(That's the only song on this list - I think - which is an actual TV theme tune reworked into a song. Although actually it's two... the first 50 seconds are the theme from Taxi.)
1. Affleck catches a theatre award.
Ben Affleck catches a Tony in his net.
Tony Bennett - The Good Life
Twelve sitcom songs... and I'll be back with a few more later in the week.
Considering that a Libertine is defined as "a person, especially a man, who freely indulges in sensual pleasures without regard to moral principles", it's surprising that I could only find three bands who have chosen that as their name. Still, only three to choose from means George should have more time to feed the chickens this week...
THE
LIBERTINES #1
Cincinnati indie band who released their debut single back in 1984. Bassist Randy Cheek left in 1989 to join the Ass Ponies. The band petered out after that but got back together in the early noughties, by which time they were calling themselves The US Libertines or "The Non-Crack Libertines".
THE LIBERTINES #2
Brummie band who released one single in 1986, not a bad one either. Their drummer went on to join The Wonder Stuff.
THE LIBERTINES #3
You can hear the A&R man making his pitch back in the late 90s: "Imagine Oasis - but from London!" Or, as Pete Doherty once put it: "Oasis is the sound of a council estate singing its heart out, and the Libertines is the sound of someone just put in the rubbish chute at the back of the estate, trying to work out what day it was". As a result, it was difficult for me to drum up much enthusiasm for Doherty, Barât et al. I may have done them a disservice, but it was also hard to see beyond all the drug abuse and infighting that appeared to get in the way of the music. Maybe they've mellowed with age - I hope so. Still, credit where it's due: Oasis never wrote anything as self-aware as this...
Which Libertines make you want to freely indulge in sensual pleasures without regard to moral principle... and which Libertines belong in the rubbish chute?
Another curse of growing older is nostalgia for things long past. Wondering whatever happened to the good old days. (Clue: they may not have been as good as we remember, but that's nostalgia for you.) Here's ten songs focussing on that age old question, Whatever Happened To...
Van The Man wonders where all his old contemporaries went... although we all know what happened to the guy in line 2. Obviously Van didn't see that one coming when he wrote this back in 2002...
Whatever happened to PJ Proby? Wonder can you fix it Jim Where the hell do you think is Scott Walker? My memory's getting so dim
Don't have no frame of reference no more Not even Screaming Lord Sutch Without him now there's no Raving Loony Party Nowadays I guess there's not much
At least he changed the lyric slightly when he re-recorded the song as a duet with PJ Proby himself in 2015.
While the Buzzcocks might be wondering whatever happened to TV sex (erm: there's more of it?), The Statler Brothers are sick of all the smut they see on their cinema screens...
Everybody knows when you go to the show You can't take the kids along You've gotta read the paper and know the code Of G, PG and are and X You gotta know what the movie's about Before you even go Tex Ritter's gone and Disney's dead The screen is filled with sex.
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott? Ridin' the range alone Whatever happened to Gene and Tex And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott? His horse, plain as can be Whatever happened to Randolph Scott? Has happened to the best of me.
Something all true music lovers have no doubt asked themselves at one time or another...
I fell in love with the sweet sensation I gave my heart to a simple chord I gave my soul to a new religion Whatever happened to you? Whatever happened to our rock 'n roll?
Loudon Wainwright writing a song about love gone rotten? You don't say...
We used to be in love but now we are in hate You used to say I came too early But it was you who came too late Boy meets girl and they give it a whirl And the very next thing you know She thinks he's nuts and he hates her guts Then the bad blood starts to flow
Pete and Carl wonder where it all went wrong for their band... adapting the title of the British sitcom Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? along the way.
Ironically, the Libertines best song is their most self-referential.
Hired to dance behind Bob Dylan at the 1998 Grammy Awards, performance artist Michael Portnoy hijacked the show by ripping off his shirt and revealing the "two word poem" Soy Bomb while dancing alongside a bemused Dylan. (Was Dylan bemused or was he pissed off? Hard to tell, because he has a pissed off expression on his face most of the time. Seriously: when was the last time you saw Bob Dylan smile?)
When asked to explain himself, Portnoy later said: "Soy... represents dense nutritional life. Bomb is, obviously, an explosive destructive force. So, soy bomb is what I think art should be: dense, transformational, explosive life". He went on to explain that the incident was a "spontaneous explosion of the self to re-invigorate the current music scene".
Tosser.
Still, he inspired E to write a nice song, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.
Ah, Huey, that is the million dollar question, isn't it?
Hey, I know it's a modern world And everybody's living for today But you and I were gonna be the exception Remember what you said, "let 'em all drop dead!" Now all your friends are telling you that they Have all been through this many times beforeI don't want to sound like an old love song I only want to know: where did our love go?
When former childstar Corey Haim heard this 2004 hit by Irish indie band The Thrills, he responded: "For eight and a half years, I was just watching movies, and just staying in bed and just eating food and just, you know, being just miserable," but now, he insisted, "I'm clean, sober, humble and happy". Sadly, he died of pneumonia just six years later, aged only 38.
1. The Stranglers - No More Heroes
What else was going to be Number One?
Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky? He got an ice pick That made his ears burn
Whatever happened to Dear old Lenin? The great Elmyra And Sancho Panza?
Whatever happened to the heroes? Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to All of the heroes? All the Shakespearoes? They watched their Rome burn!
Special mentions to Question Mark & The Mysterians, Slash, The Parenthetical Girls and !!! (which is a contender for worst band name ever: how do you even pronounce that?).
Ranking Roger loved his Full Stops from the very first Beat single, of which this was double-A side with their more-played version of Tears of a Clown. The final full stop comes right at the end of the song though...
In legal documents and religious texts, punctuation is all-important. Thea proves that here...
‘Cause you see, I’ve got this theory that it’s only punctuation That separates the list from you to me And you can have your little war of full stops and meritings But the real power’s in parentheses
The ghetto boys are catcalling me As I pull my keys from my pocket I wonder if this method of courtship Has ever been effective Has any girl in history said Sure, you seem so nice, let's get it on Still, I always shock them when I answer Hi my name's Amanda And I'm not gonna live my life on one side of an ampersand
Wonder what Neil Gaiman makes of that philosophy? (Let's not ask him, his answers tend to go on for years without end, like his stories.)
So the Oxford Comma, if you don't know, is the optional comma you may sometimes use before the 'and' at the end of a list. Used properly, it can avoid confusion and comedy...
Vampire Weekend though, they don't give an f-bomb about it. Philistines.
1. Dan Baird - I Love You, Period
Top single from the former Georgia Satellite in which Dan's affair with his English teacher is curtailed by bad punctuation...
That's the problem with English teachers.They let pedantry get in the way of romance.
Even though we only had three TV channels when I was a kid (four once I turned ten... although it took our TV a while to pick up C4), I did watch a hell of a lot of television. It seems strange now that the whole family would sit round and watch whatever was on, from duff quiz shows to Are You Being Served and 'Allo 'Allo (which we only watched because my dad used to work with Gordon Kaye, before he became famous).
Anyway, here are a bunch of songs named after the shows I watched when I was a lad. Some of these songs are much better than the shows that inspired them... others never could be.
I've avoided TV theme songs that also became chart hits - so you won't find Dennis Waterman's I Could Be So Good For You, Hey Hey We're The Monkees or Al Jarreau's Moonlighting, no matter how good they were. (Leo Sayer's Moonlighting would have made #11, in case you were wondering.)
So there comes a point in every middle-aged music blogger's life when he has to tackle the music wot da kidz are listening to these days. Though it's impossible not to be aware of Ed Sheeran, or this, his debut hit, I have to confess I included it here only because I loved The A Team as a kid. And you may find this impossible to believe... but this is actually the first time I've sat down and listened to the song in its entirety.
Having done so, while I don't think I'll be rushing out to buy the album, I was pleasantly surprised. One of my biggest complaints about modern pop music - or at least that which makes the increasingly irrelevant singles chart - is that it's not actually about anything. As regular readers of this blog will no doubt have guessed, I like lyrics. I like lyrics that tell stories or paint pictures or surprise me or make me laugh or think. Engaging lyrics will even drive me to buy records by artists whose musical stylings might otherwise leave me cold (step forward Eminem, Scroobius Pip, et. al.). And while Sheeran is hardly Jarvis Cocker, he has at least crafted a hit record that's about something and he uses words in an interesting and creative way.
Still, this would have been even better if Hannibal, Face, B.A. and Murdoch had dashed in to save Sheeran's tragic homeless junkie at the last minute. Just saying.
Taken from The Verve's somewhat lacklustre comeback album, Forth, I've no idea why this track is named after Peter Falk's scruffy detective.
Just one more thing... I heard rumours the other day of plans for a Columbo movie starring Mark Ruffalo (perfect casting). I hope he still has the cigar. (But you know he won't have.)
Every other week, the music press crowns a new band as the latest "saviours of indie". Palma Violets were given this accolade a year or so ago, and since then I've heard very little from them.
I've no idea why they chose to name this record after our famous local TV show (LOTSW was filmed, for many - many - years in the neighbouring village of Holmfirth). Lyrically there are no clues... actually, lyrically there's very little going on at all. The only line that seems remotely connectable is this:
Well, I'm loving the high road I'll never ride alone again!
...which might, at a push, be a reference to the infamous racing bathtubs episode. But probably isn't.
C.A.T.S. Eyes was the rather duff sequel to The Gentle Touch in which Jill Gascoigne teamed up with Rosalyn Landor and Leslie Ash as a cut price British answer to Charlie's Angels. This delicate song by the Guillemots is almost good enough to make me forget it.
Although the TV show was called Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? this is close enough for one of Columbo's cigars in my book. A song about a band splitting up just as they're on the verge of something great, which is what was happening to The Libertines as they released it... and also leads us neatly onto our next number...
Pretty cast iron way of getting your record played on Top of the Pops... although the Rezillos promptly fell out after this cheeky gambit and failed to capitalise on their TOTP experience.
Forgotten Britpop classic from the late 90s that owes more than a little to the aforementioned Ash. This was their towering achievement, a perfect two minute blast of power-pop.
Scooby Doo was my favourite Hanna-Barbera cartoon as a kid. Until they brought in Scrappy, naturally...
I was never really a fan of It's A Knockout,as it was known in the UK, even as a little kid I thought it was all very silly. I much prefer Peter Gabriel's song in which he uses the ridiculous TV show as a metaphor for political idiocy. It's a wonderful pop record, with amusing lyrics, Kate Bush purring French backing vocals, an infectious whistling refrain and lyrics the BBC had to censor. ("Whistling tunes, we piss on the goons in the jungle" became "Whistling tunes we're kissing baboons in the jungle" for the single mix.)
1. The Divine Comedy - Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World
I used to love this show when I was a kid.
“Mysteries from the files of Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001 and
inventor of the communications satellite. Now living in retreat in Sri
Lanka after a lifetime of science, space and writing, he ponders the
riddles of this and other worlds”.
It was here I first found my love of UFOs, sea monsters, stone circles and, of course, the infamous Bigfoot film. I bought the series on DVD a few years ago and enjoyed it just as much on repeat viewing... although perhaps for slightly different reasons. There's one bit with an "eminent scientist" of the day, in the back of a taxi, giving his views on crop circles or the Loch Ness Monster or Egyptian reincarnation or somesuch... and frankly, it is the most astounding thing I have ever seen in my life. You would not believe the hairpiece he's wearing... I'm amazed ACC didn't want to investigate that.
Anyway, Neil Hannon was obviously a fan too, as demonstrated by this choice cut from his Victory For The Comic Muse album...
Do you remember that old T.V. show: Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World? Well, if ITV make a new series They ought to come take a look at my girl
I don't understand her She doesn't make any sense to me I don't understand her It's like she's speaking in Swahili.
Which songs remind you of your childhood TV addictions?
It's true that I have got a head full Of voices saying the first thing that's in their heart And I go to throw a ball with my best intention And it gets caught up and carried away In completely the opposite direction
Of course, the Elvis Costello version is better, but I made that a Number One already. So here's the wonderful Amanda Palmer with her slightly less wonderful hubby on vocals. It shouldn't work... and yet, it kinda does.
Download this, free & legal, along with Amanda's version of Lana Del Rey's Video Games, and more... by clicking here.
1. Elbow - The Birds
Like much of Guy Garvey's songwriting, there's a drama here that's really quite sinister...
The birds are the keepers of our secret As they saw us where we lay In the deepest grass of springtime In a reckless guilty haze
OK, those were my favourite songs that share a title with Hitchcock films. Do you have a Rear Window, North By North West or To Catch A Thief in your record collection?
