Introducing C's guest post yesterday, we had David MacCallum, a one-time Invisible Man. Today, C sent me a lovely photo of Pauline Murray, without her Invisible Girls. And here they are reunited...
You know that it would be untrue. You know that I would be a liar. If I were to say to you... I can't remember the answers to this week's Saturday Snapshots. Although, I did have to puzzle over some of them myself this week: I blame to post-viral lethargy. Or maybe they were particularly fiendish.
Mathematics proves impossible when your head is full of gunge, so I can't work out a winner this week, though everyone had a good go. Thanks for playing as always.
10. Pork from the top of the world leads you into a talent competition.
8. Climbing beanstalks after 10 leads to a sad, horny godson.
After 10 is 11, so that would make him Jack 11. If you're going to tell me it's pronounced Lee-ven, I'm going to say: it's a visual pun, not an auditory one.
4. Sweet on your tongue, a dancing football chant.
At football matches they (apparently) shout "Oggy Oggy Oggy". This is one of the many reasons I do not attend football matches.
The extra clue I gave involved a line from Smokey Robinson's I Second That Emotion, in which Smokey sings "A taste of honey is worse than none at all".
Solipsistic gangsters would say "I Am The Mob" since they would believe that only the self exists and thereby not believe in any other gangsters. Which then begs the question why they would need to be gangsters in the first place, and that is today's homework.
Anyway, if they couldn't wake up, they may be catatonic.
Ah, Cerys, were we ever that young?
This Is The End, Beautiful Friend... at least until next Saturday.
This week, ten songs that'll get you home in a hurry.
Special mentions to the band Death Cab For Cutie (named after a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band song) and Rick Springfield & Randy Crawford's Taxi Dancing, which was another contender for my Bickering Couples Top Ten.
Sorry, Joe le Taxi fans, I was 15 in 1987... and even then, I was too old for 14 year old Vanessa Paradis.
The theme from Taxi: simple as that. Jazzy but cool. If you're of a certain age... even if you didn't watch the sitcom that gave us Danny DeVito, Andy Kaufman and Christopher Lloyd (not to mention Judd Hirsch, Marilu Henner and Tony 'Who's The Boss?' Danza)... this will likely bring back warm and fuzzy memories. I was ever-so slightly too young for it myself - Cheers was more my era - but it still makes me feel good.
Sweden's answer to the Magnetic Fields (via Jonathan Richman) isn't too fussy who he picks up in his cab...
They might be psycho-killers, But tonight, I really don't care...
Still in Scandinavia, check out Jens' Norwegian equivalent Sondre Lerche, with his Airport Taxi Reception. Taxi songs are big in Europe. You're still not getting Vanessa Paradis.
Like a lot of struggling songwriters, Tim Buckley moonlighted as a taxi driver, which was probably the inspiration for this song about picking up a crazy Viet Nam vet on a scary night in L.A.
The final track on Zevon's penultimate album, many saw it as him preparing to shake hands with the reaper following his diagnosis with terminal cancer. By all accounts, the song was written well before that though... which makes the whole taxi-death metaphor eerily prescient.
I was staying at the Marriott With Jesus and John Wayne I was waiting for a chariot They were waiting for a train The sky was full of carrion "I'll take the mazuma" Said Jesus to Marion "That's the 3:10 to Yuma My ride's here..."
6. Prince - Lady Cab Driver
8 minutes of funky jam from the 1999 album; here, Prince gets taken for a ride by the eponymous lady and then she joins him in the back seat. You can guess the rest... but who the hell's driving the cab?
5. Bruce Springsteen - City Of Night
Another one you won't find on youtube, this is an outtake from the Darkness On The Edge Of Town sessions, finally released a few years back on The Promise collection. It begins with Bruce hailing a cab but then heads downtown into a deeper meditation on how we survive the darkness...
Another epic story song from the Raymond Carver of popular music. Here Harry is a taxi driver who picks up an old flame on a rainy night. After she initially pretends not to recognise him, they eventually get to talking about old times and the space in between.
You see, she was gonna be an actress, And I was gonna learn to fly. She took off to find the footlights, And I took off to find the sky.
When the ride's over, the guilty woman overtips her former lover and he pockets the change without further comment. But as with many Harry Chapin songs, this one has a sting in its tail. It seems both of them achieved their ambitions in life... metaphorically, at least.
It starts and ends as a conversation in a taxi cab, and sandwiched in between is some of Paul Simon's finest witty wordplay. Although it's ultimately a song about very little (the Seinfeld of pop songs), Gumboots has always been one of my favourite tracks from Graceland.
I was walking down the street When I thought I heard this voice say "Say, ain't we walking down the same street Together on the very same day?" I said, "hey senorita That's astute," I said "Why don't we get together and call ourselves an institute now?"
Of course, the words are pure Paul Simon, but the tune is based largely around a melody by South African musicians Lulu Masilela and Jonhjon Mkhalali. It appeared on an unlabelled cassette compilation called Accordion Jive Vol. III which somebody gave Simon in the early 80s. It took him a while to hunt down the music's origins, but when he did, Graceland was born. Of course, there's controversy over how much credit (or money) those original artists received, but popular music as a medium has been ripping off its own roots for decades: Paul Simon didn't invent that practice. Elvis, Lennon & McCartney, the Stones, Led Zep... it's been going on for years. (And still is, as Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith can attest.)
Graceland is 30 years old this year. Just to make you feel ancient again.
I've liked a lot of what the Arctic Monkeys did next, but that debut album is close to perfection. It was written by a bunch of chancers who had no idea how big they'd become... and as soon as they became that big, they'd never write anything like it again.
Red Light... is Alex Turner's stream-of-consciousness ramble about trying to get a taxi home with his mates on a Saturday night in Sheffield. It's full of the kind of everyday lyrical minutiae only people who aren't pop stars can write, while also managing to reference both the Stones and Springsteen during a drunken altercation at the taxi stand. Brilliant.
1. Joni Mitchell - Big Yellow Taxi
"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot..." has to be one of the greatest opening lines ever (I must try to remember it when I do Volume 2 of My Top Ten Opening Lines). Alliteration doesn't always work in lyrics, but here it provides Joni's pop opus with the prerequisite punch.
This ecological protest song was written after Joni visited Hawaii and opened her hotel curtains to see acres of parking lots, but what's most interesting is that the eponymous taxi may not even be a taxi at all... it might be slang for the big yellow police cars in her native Toronto. Which gives us a slightly different way of interpreting what might be happening when said taxi takes away her old man...
The song's been covered by a number of people, including Bob Dylan, Amy Grant and the Counting Crows... who annoyingly destroy the big yellow taxi line by changing the lyrics to say "took my girl away" which neither rhymes nor scans like the original and annoys me every time I hear it. Janet Jackson also used the hook for her hit 'Got 'Til It's Gone'.
Big Yellow Taxi is also the second best song in the history of pop to feature a slamming screen door. But I'll hold onto that for my Top Ten Screen Door Songs...
Why Ben Gibbard's alt-indie-occasionally emo band from Washington DC decided to name themselves after a bizarre Elvis spoof by Neil Innes and Viv Stanshall's psych-comedy 60s band from that London is anybody's guess. The title itself seems strangely apt - tragic beauty filtered through an everyday lens being Gibbard's lyrical stock in trade. But then you listen to the actual song... which couldn't sound more different to the band DCFC if it was played solely on a Hawaiian nose-flute.
If you imagine Jeff's dad as the blueprint for a bunch of heartfelt indie romanticists led by Warrington's angelically voiced James Walsh, it sounds like a pretty good fit. Starsailor the song, however, is possibly the weirdest thing Buckley Sr. ever recorded. It's pretty far out there - certainly further out there than anything the Starsailor lads themselves have turned their minds to.
When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon. Don't turn on the lights, you can read their address by the moon. And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night: We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right, We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.
Alternatively, don't turn on the lights because Andrew Eldritch is one scary melon farmer.
The band named after this song were little to get excited about, but as much as I like to rib good old Sir Thumbs Aloft, this is still one of his finest post-Beatles moments.
If you don't believe me, ask Alan Partridge. (That clip sadly not available on youtube.)
I'd sit alone and watch your light My only friend through teenage nights And everything I had to know I heard it on my radio
This song could pretty much be the story of my youth... and probably explains why I'm sat here at all hours of the night, after a long day at work, writing this blog now.
I'm guessing Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta must have had a very similar adolescence...(!)
If only Thom's band could record a record as joyously upbeat as the one that gave them their name... but I guess, if they did, they wouldn't be Radiohead.
There was a time when you could reliably predict an appearance by either Morrissey, Bruce, Jarvis or Billy on this blog at least once a week. You might soon add Fagen & Becker to that list.
Drink scotch whiskey all night long And die behind the wheel They got a name for the winners in the world I want a name when I lose They call Alabama 'The Crimson Tide' Call me 'Deacon Blues'!
Only a band with real Dignity could do justice to a name like that!
Steely Dan, of course, were named after one of William Burroughs' dildos. One day, I'll compile a list of bands named after dodgy sexual euphemisms... step forward 10cc and The Lovin' Spoonful. (Or did I blow my load with those two?)
It's not that long since I last featured this early Bowie classic, in my Top Ten Songs About Becoming A Parent. (Coincidentally, it made Number 2 in that list also.) The Brighton boys who took this name for their band never quite lived up to its potential... but that was a pretty tall order, so good on them for giving it a go.
1. The Smiths - Shakespeare's Sister
Another of Mozzer's playfully exuberant suicide anthems, with a cheeky nose-thumb to Billy Bragg thrown in...
I thought that if you had
An acoustic guitar
Then it meant that you were
A Protest Singer
Oh, I can smile about it now
But at the time it was terrible!
All of which led to some inspired pop-goth wonderment from a former Bananarama and Mrs. Dave Stewart way back in the Dawn of Time that was the early 90s. Of course, they misspelled Shakespear, but Big Willy was never too fussy over spelling anyway.
There are probably more bands named after Smiths or Morrissey lyrics than any other songwriter. See also Gene (Jeane), Panic! At the Disco, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Girl In A Coma, The Ordinary Boys (shudder!)...
All those song titles gave birth to stars. There's another Ten somewhere about bands named after lyrics (not titles) but we'll save those for another day. In the meantime, which one makes you want to change your name?
The way you arch your back and comb your hair The way you only come when no-one else is there The way you look like you might know a secret There's not a lot I can do, it's peculiarly you
Top youtube comment for this song: "This song is like seeing a beautiful woman in a way". So that's what Swiss Toni's doing these days.
Scrumptious. See also the Japan version, which you may prefer... if you're CLINICALLY INSANE. (No offense. There's nothing wrong with the Japan version. As an 80s artifact. But c'mon - it's hardly Marvin Gaye.)
About time we had a burst of Frank philosophy round here...
When I get up each morning, there's nothing to breathe but air And when I look in the mirror, there's nothing to comb but hair And when I sit down to breakfast, there’s nothing to eat but food Life is so peculiar but you can't stay home and brood
Don’t make them laugh, or they will LAUGH at you… Don’t piss them off, or they will piss on you… Don’t make them crack !! Or they will crack…you.... in 2 2 2 2……
So, those were the most peculiar songs I could find. Do you have a favourite peculiarity?
