We interrupt our scheduled programming for a tribute to Bonnie Tyler, who died on Wednesday. Those of you waiting with bated breath for the Cancel Culture Club postscript... it'll be here next week, I promise. But Bonnie takes priority.
Regular readers of this nonsense will know that I'm a huge fan of the overblown melodramatic glory of Jim Steinman. Nobody has stretched the pure essence of the rock n roll mythos to such wonderfully ludicrous extremes, and in Meat Loaf, Jim found the perfect voice for his theatrical, sturm und drang histrionics.
However, there were times when Meat just wasn't available. Either because he'd knackered his voice from all that bawling... or because he and Jim weren't quite seeing eye to eye. When that happened, Jim tried singing the tunes himself... but most people agreed he wasn't quite up to the job... and that's when he discovered Bonnie Tyler.
Up until then, Welsh chanteuse Gaynor Sullivan had been carving about a pretty decent career singing reasonably average tunes like Lost In France and It's A Heartache. I'm guessing Jim must have heard one of these, because in 1983 he offered her a song written for Meat which looked like it wasn't ever going to get recorded. And the rest is history...
Other Steinman / Tyler collaborations followed - not all of them hits, but all of them amazing.
Losing Bonnie Tyler will be accepted by many people as just another dead star... but for me, after saying goodbye to both Jim and Meat not so long ago, this feels like the end of an era. Still, given the grand mythology of angels and devils, heaven and hell that they all dabbled in... I like to think they'll be re-united and singing with the seraphim as we speak.
We'll close today with another Steinman/Tyler favourite, this one featuring Todd Rundgren on guest vocals...
Welcome to International Noise Awareness Day, a day which seeks to highlight the detrimental effects of living in a noisy place. Now obviously, I like a bit of noise from time to time, but just imagine if every second of every day sounded like a mash-up of these...
Sometimes, you just need a bit of peace and quiet, yeah?
Loud environments don’t just overwhelm the ears. They can raise blood pressure, disturb sleep, and even slow down how well children learn. Many studies warn that constant noise wears down both the body and mind.
Today then is a day to turn the volume down and enjoy something a little gentler on the ears...
Here's another Friday brainteaser / time-waster for you, based on a quiz I compiled at work. It's about words from other languages... words we don't have a direct translation for in English, but we really ought to get one. Because each of these is an excellent word, and would be very useful.
We closed Monday's collection of Superman songs with a track by Cinerama. Comic book fan David Gedge also used the name of the most bizarre Superman foe as the title of his other band's second album: Bizarro by The Wedding Present. Sadly, he never wrote a song about Bizarro... but these guys did...
Klark Kent was an alias for Stewart Copeland of The Police, recording a song that Sting didn't want for the day job. John says, "Stewart Copeland’s debut album Klark Kent was a belter."
Clark Kent works for a newspaper called The Daily Planet. On Saturday we featured a song by the title by Arthur Lee & Love. Here's another one...
Weird coincidence department: all the bands I could find who wrote a song about Lois Lane (along with Sunday's Franz Ferdinand) began with the letter F.
But Lois wasn't Clark's first love though. That title would go to...
And he even had a fling with a mermaid once. Her name? Lori Lemaris. Can you spot a pattern here?
Not everybody with the initials LL loves Superman though. Let's not forget his arch enemy, Lex Luthor, a man who's jealousy of Superman might yet be explained that nobody has ever written a decent pop song in his honour...
That was the best I could come up with, with the wrong spelling... and he's not even a doctor! No wonder he's such a bitter, twisted sociopath...
Luthor isn't Superman's only foe. We mentioned Bizarro earlier, and Braniac earlier in the week. Then there's the Kryptonian supervillain memorably played by Terence Stamp in Superman 2, General Zod...
And here's another pair of posh English lads with an interest in the game...
Remember when you were more easily led Behind the cricket pavilion and the bicycle shed Trembling as your dreams came true You looked right into those blue eyes and knew...
Another Neil, Mr. Hannon of The Divine Comedy joined with Thomas Walsh of Pugwash to pool their musical expertise and love of cricket as The Duckworth Lewis Method. In case you're wondering, they're named after "a mathematical formulation designed to calculate the target score (number of runs needed to win) for the team batting second in a limited overs cricket match interrupted by weather or other circumstances".
I had a clue all set to go for these guys, involving Jack & Vera meeting an Oxford detective... until I realised that if anyone identified them, it'd give the game away immediately.
I'm not sure Tom Petty would have known one end of a cricket bat from the other, but he did write a great song about a batsman sent in at the end of the day...
Most posts on this blog lately feature a load of different, spuriously-linked songs, and gone are the days when I'd write about any one song in detail. But I've been reading Jeff Tweedy's new book, World Within A Song, and I like the way each chapter focuses on just one track. Often he goes off on a ramble and the chapter ends up having very little to do with the track in question, but it still makes for a fascinating read.
So I thought I'd try something similar. A series in which I focus on one song per post (although inevitably, as below, I might end up mentioning others). I'm not sure I'll have anything remotely interesting to say, and I'm certainly no Jeff Tweedy, but I like to set myself little challenges to stop life getting too dull.
I'm starting at complete random with U Got The Look. It was the first Prince single I bought. Although it wasn't just Prince, was it? It was Sheena Easton too. And at that time, I was possibly more familiar with her than I was with Prince himself. I grew up on Radio 2, Tel and Ray Moore in the morning, Diddy David Hamilton and the mighty John Dunn after school. Back in 1980, when Sheena Easton released her debut single off the back of her appearance in Esther Rantzen's Big Time, Radio 2 was the only station I listened to.
Despite her Lanarkshire lass, Esther Rantzen & Radio 2 beginnings, Sheena ended up being a much bigger star on the other side of the pond. After her Bond theme, she pretty much gave up on the UK (or maybe we gave up on her), whereas in the States she had 15 Billboard Top 40 hits, seven of which made the Top 10. Over there, she's one of the best-selling British female vocalists of the 80s, and because she jumped effortlessly between genres, she is the only artist to have a Top 5 hit on each of Billboard's primary singles charts: the rechristened-to-avoid-Dolly-confusion "Morning Train (Nine to Five)" (Pop and Adult Contemporary), "We've Got Tonight" with Kenny Rogers (Country and Adult Contemporary) and "Sugar Walls" (R&B and Dance).
That last one was written specially for her by Prince, but it caused quite a stir when moral rights campaigner Tipper Gore (the American Mary Whitehouse) named and shamed it on her Filthy Fifteen - a list of songs so indecent that I had to go and make a playlist out of them immediately. I'm not suggesting Tipper did the same. She probably used a C60.
But we're not here to talk about Sheena, we're here to talk about U Got The Look. Back when Prince died, 8 years ago now, I cobbled together a list of my Top Ten Prince Songs, and put this at Number 3. I'm not sure I'd stand by that list now - Raspberry Beret would be much higher, for a start. And where was Little Red Corvette? Take Me With You? Kiss!?!
An impossible task. But my point is, I don't think U Got The Look is really up there with the very best Prince had to offer. To use a football analogy (has it come to this?), it's in the Championship, not the Premier League. But it gets extra points from me because it was my first, and we always remember our first, don't we, Prince? (It's hard to write about Prince without every other sentence becoming an innuendo. They just bounce off the tongue...)
Here's what I wrote back in 2016...
I was 15, and I thought Prince must surely be the king of chat-up lines...
Your face is jamming
Your body's heck-a-slamming
If love is good
Let's get to ramming
And they played that on the radio, and nobody batted an eyelid. Because it was Prince.
You know, listening back now, I think this is Prince's answer to Paradise By The Dashboard Light. (Maybe it's just the baseball metaphors.) The only difference being that Prince, unlike Meat 'n' Jim, didn't have to promise the earth to get his end away. Because he was Prince.
I'm not sure I recognise the comments about chat up lines above... they're obviously mine, but I must have been in a particularly bullish mood when I wrote them. The truth is, at the age of 15 I was terrified at the very idea of chatting anyone up, and I certainly wouldn't have used a line like that. But I think the point I was trying to make - very clumsily - is that Prince represented a kind of hyper-masculine sexuality without ever appearing macho or chauvinistic. I can't think of any other male rock star who's walked that tightrope so carefully. I'm not sure 'Men with a capital M' wanted to be him, but women definitely wanted to be with him.
Actually, there's a much better chat up line in U Got The Look than the one I mentioned above...
You got the look (you got the look) You must'a took (you must'a took) A whole hour just to make up your face, baby
Closin' time, ugly lights, everybody's inspected (Everybody's inspected) But you are a natural beauty unaffected (Unaffected) Did I say an hour? My face is red, I stand corrected (I stand corrected)
That's the bit in which Prince realises his chat up line could actually be taken as an insult, and then corrects himself. What a great piece of writing.
Despite the fact that Prince portrayed himself as sexually voracious in his lyrics, he did so with his tongue firmly in his cheek. There's a sense of humour to all these songs that more macho songwriters do not possess. Also, I'm not entirely sure that it wasn't all an act - when the hell did he get time to chat up, seduce and perform in the bedroom? The guy was a complete workaholic. Perhaps the truth is closer to how Bill Callahan imagined it...
Prince alone in the studio
It's two a.m. and all the girls are gone
The girls thought they were going to be able
To have sex with him
They wore their special underwear
Once the tracks were laid down
Prince's back turned around
Raspberry headphones on his head
On his ears
Prince alone in the studio
It's three a.m.
Prince hasn't eaten in eighteen hours
Dinner's burned on the stove
But Prince, he doesn't even know
Prince alone in the studio
It's four a.m.
And he finally gets that guitar track right
And it's better than anything any girl could ever give him
Actually, if you watch the video, that becomes even more likely... because the whole song is just a dream. It starts with Prince falling asleep in his dressing room, and ends with him waking up, looking sad, confused and alone.
I didn't know any of this when I was 15. All I knew was that Prince was cooler than any rock star I'd ever seen in my life. Three and a half decades later, that's still the case.
Sadly, in December 1963, Pat Hare made this song a reality when he shot his girlfriend and a policeman who came to question him. He spent the last 16 years of his life in prison, where he formed the band Sounds Incarcerated.
The interweb tells me than an idiom is "a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words". I'm not sure I agree with that - you often can figure out the meaning of an idiom if you sit and think about it.
"Raining cats and dogs"?
It's belting down; the rain is so heavy it's like small domesticated animals falling out of the sky.
"Sit on the fence"?
There's one field of opinion to the left, one field of opinion to the right - you can't decide which you agree with (or don't want to upset either field owner) so you sit on the fence in-between.
Regardless, having taught English to students of other languages, I will say that the preponderance of idioms in our language is one of many things that makes it so bloody difficult to learn (or to teach, at least).
All this is an introduction to a lazy new feature where I pick a random idiom and see how many songwriters have decided to steal it to make a tune from.
We begin... by going Nowhere Fast. And I guess we have to start with this one, a fine example of why (latter day crimes not withstanding) Morrissey should still be considered the greatest lyricist of his generation.
And when I'm lying in my bed I think about life And I think about death And neither one particularly appeals to me
Girls At Our Best! (exclamation mark theirs) came from Leeds in 1979. They self-financed their debut single on their own Record Records label and it reached #9 in the UK Indie chart. It was later covered by The Wedding Present.
Shoes were an American power pop band from Zion, Illinois. They were one of the first bands to be played on MTV... presumably before anyone started watching it.
I did find a band called Nowhere Fast as well. They released a solitary album in 1982. That's the record cover at the top of this page. You can listen to all of it on the tube of you. I'm guessing they went...
I went to see the new Indiana Jones film at the weekend. It made me sad.
Not because it's a bad film. It's perfectly acceptable popcorn fare that occasionally recaptures the magic of the earlier movies, if only through the sheer force of Harrison Ford's undimmed charisma. I appear to be in a minority of finding Phoebe Waller-Bridges very, very annoying, and the action sequences relied too much on CGI for my liking, but that's the case with all big budget movies these days. More effort went into movies when I was a kid - building the sets, getting the right stunt people, setting off actual fires and explosions... nowadays it's all done on computers and it feels lazy. The suspension of disbelief required by the audience is the same, only different. Somehow I found it easier to accept cardboard sets and smoke bombs than green screen everything... but that's just Old Man Shaking Fist At Sky.
I was ready for all of the above, so it's not that which made me sad. Seeing Indiana Jones as an old man though... well, nostalgia can work two ways, can't it? It can remind you of your youth... or it can force you (once again) to face up to your own mortality. Harrison Ford will be 81 next week, and it's amazing that he's still cracking the whip and doing a fair few action sequences himself. But still...
Someone said to me recently that the worst part about growing old is that (if you're lucky), you have to watch all your heroes grow old and die before you. Despite hanging up the fedora after this final adventure, Harrison appears to be enjoying a bit of a career resurgence at the moment, and long may it continue. But there will come a point when I have to say goodbye to him, as I have so many others. When you're young, you think it'll all go on forever... lately, every day brings a new reminder that this isn't the case.
I'm reminded of a line from one of my favourite albums of last year. This in turn reminds me of Jim Steinman's Objects In The Rearview Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are, but that's more about the power of memory and how it constantly fools you into thinking 1989 was just last week. Instead, James McMurtry sings here that, "There's more in the mirror than there is up ahead," a sentiment I'm finding it hard to come to terms with. He does, however, manage to put a positive spin on the idea...
Now it's all I can do just to get out of bed
There's more in the mirror than there is up ahead
I smile and I nod like I heard what you said every time
So run another rack
Pour another shot
You don't get it back so give it all you got
While you still got a more or less functional body and mind
So sang George Bernard Shaw with his 21st Century Canadian dream-pop band... or perhaps I'm mixing up my sources. The insane pop culture reference library that is my brain is getting a little clogged up with an abundance of trivia... no chance of remembering what I'm having for tea tonight then.
When we’re young, we have all the time in the world… and yet we fritter it away. We don’t realise how valuable it is, because life seems endless. So we do whatever the hell we want and don’t worry about tomorrow. Many’s the pop song that has been written about this subject, but this is the one that best captures that sense of youthful headonism… or it’s the first that springs to mind today, anyway.
I don't recall many nights like the ones Nate Ruess sings about there. A few, I guess, but not as many as most. I spent a large part of my wasted youth chasing the twin fantasies of a radio career and best-selling authordom.
And it's important to remember what Eleanor Roosevelt said, "Today is the oldest you've ever been, and the youngest you'll ever be again."
The only problem with inspirational quotes (and Crazy Eleanor had a box full of them) is that they don't work on the terminally cynical. Still, they obviously made an impression on Jim...
We've gotta' fast, we were born out of time Born out of time and alone And we'll never be as young as we are right now Runnin' away and runnin' for home
Yesterday's post started with James Hetfield from Metallica. Today, because I couldn't find any pictures of Lemmy or the dudes from Megadeth taking a photo, here's Ozzy.
And here are ten LOUD songs... sort of.
10. Joel makes a good impression... but he's not a footballer.
Billy Joel combines with the impressionist Rory Bremner to give the name of a Scottish footballer. And the former Rockpile member (also Scottish) responsible for this 1981 classic...
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