My last radio post, about suicidal callers ringing up the phone-in from telephone boxes reminded me of a much happier use we found for the humble phone-box during my early days of radio: The Phantom Phone-box.
This was a quiz we used to play on the Saturday morning show. We'd drive round the area during the week and find a phone-box that wasn't too vandalised and didn't smell too much of wee, and we'd write down its phone number. Then we'd give cryptic clues out to its location early on in the show (Cryptic clues on a Saturday morning? That'll never catch on!). Sometime near the end of the show, we'd call the phone-box up live on air and if you answered it and said "the phrase that pays", we'd send you a prize.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes nobody would answer it. Sometimes a completely random passerby would answer it and not have a clue who we were. Sometimes a bunch of kids would answer it and scream obscenities until they were swiftly cut off. It was hardly revolutionary, but it seemed to go down pretty well.
Thinking back on that now... well, you wouldn't be able to play that game on the radio anymore, would you? Where did all the phone boxes go? They were on every street corner in our youth. Sam's generation won't even know what they were.
41. Primitive Radio Gods - Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand
Here's a song I discovered during my early days trawling the music blogosphere, and promptly fell in love with it. I've never really investigated this band in the way I should, although I did manage to track down a copy of the album this came from, 1996's Rocket. 1996... that'd be about the time we were doing The Phantom Phone Box (or maybe a little before that). 22 years ago, folks... back when phone boxes were still a thing.
Apparently, Primitive Radio Gods are still in the go though, even if phone boxes aren't. According to iffypedia, they released their 6th album in 2016.
Mondegreens. Misheard lyrics. You'll find them all over the internet, but here are ten GENUINE ones from my past. I honestly thought these were the actual lyrics... until finally, often many years later, I discovered the truth.
Possibly the earliest mondegreen I ever encountered... or at least, the earliest one I can remember. She just can't get enough chicken, love. I still hear that today...
This is one of the ones you'll see a lot on websites that discuss mondegreens. Most of the other examples they quote sound preposterous to me, apart from Bohemain Rhapsody's famous "Beelzebub had a devil for a sideboard". But this... this was exactly what I thought Madonna was singing in 1986. Apparently, a lot of people also thought the opening line to this song was the racially offensive, "Last night I dreamt of some dago". Poor old Madonna. Enunciate, luv.
Young girl with eyes like the desert
I'm having a hard time accepting Madonna will be 60 this year. Bad enough that Kylie just turned 50.
I've been planning this particular Top Ten for a while now and whenever I heard a song from my youth with a lyric I just couldn't explain, I had to go and check out the real thing. I swear I always thought Andy Bell was asking for Martin Scorcese's number in this song. I have no idea why.
What religion or reason
Could drive a man to forsake his lover
Now I've read the real lyric, I can't even hear the Martin Scorcese bit anymore. It's gone.
Enough what, Michael? Stamps? Airmail stickers? Postal Orders? (Do they even have Postal Orders anymore? Probably not. Another archaic item from our past.)
For many, many years it always baffled me how The Bloke Out Of Boston (do you know his name?) could possibly see his own backside if he was walking away. Was he looking over his shoulder into a mirror? Wasn't he looking where he was going? Accident waiting to happen, right there...
You might wonder why Meat was such a big fan of Our Cilla... I certainly did. Then again, BOOH was written by Jim Steinman, who is officially BARKING MAD, so why shouldn't he throw in a reference to Cilla? Maybe he was after a blind date...
I'm gonna hit the highway like a battering ram,
On a Silver Black Phantom Bike
When I found out the real lyrics, I was just as confused? Is that a Black Phantom bike that's painted silver? Or is it Silver-Black? What the hell is Silver-Black, Jim? Is that even a colour?
1. Elvis Costello - The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes
These may not be as amusing as some of the ones above, but they speak to how I spent a large part of my late teens and early twenties: headphones on, sat beside the stereo, listening to Elvis Costello albums and trying to write down the lyrics. There were never any lyric sheets in Elvis's records and the way he spat and twisted and punned his way through the language was endlessly fascinating... but also a little frustrating when I just couldn't work out what he was singing. Even now, almost 30 years later, I can still remember the time I spent puzzling over this one song in particular...
"Our love got fractured into echo and suede"
Our love got fractured in the echo and sway
"But since you got in my pumps, you just suspend my sentence"
Ever since you got me punctured this has been my sentence
Fortunately, the greatest lyrical couplet this song has to offer was clear as a bell...
Oh, I said, "I'm so happy I could die"
She said, "Drop dead" then left with another guy...
Your turn! There must be a misheard lyric or two in your back catalogue. Do share.
One thing I quickly learnt when I was working as a "producer" (answering phones) on the late night phone in was that people love to commit suicide live on air. I suppose there's a couple of basic reasons for this...
1) It's a cry for help. You want someone to stop you and help you but the only way you can think of getting that help is to do it on as public a platform as possible. I suppose the modern day equivalent would be writing a facebook post to tell everyone you've just taken an overdose... but of course, we didn't have facebook back then.
2) It's a cry for attention. You don't want anyone to stop you but you do want people to know what you've done. And maybe give a big old F-U to the world in the process. Like those people who throw themselves off motorway bridges, regardless of the consequences to others.
From the point of view of a phone-in show, suicides are a pain in the arse... but they also make riveting radio. Nobody's turning off the go to bed while that call's on.
I think it's fair to say that neither of the presenters I worked with during my time on the phone-in wanted to exploit someone in their darkest hour; they always genuinely wanted to help. We wouldn't automatically put someone on air if they called up claiming to have taken an overdose. The first thing I had to do was try to get them to take help. Work out where they were, if it was a genuine threat or just a wind-up, get a number we could pass on to the police, that sort of thing. If they wouldn't give that information to me, I would try to get them to call Samaritans. There were all kinds of rules: moral, ethical, legal. But ultimately, every situation was different. And a lot of people wouldn't call up and say they wanted to kill themselves, they'd only reveal that fact when they'd got on air. It was a minefield.
On many occasions, we did get people help. I lost count of the times I had to call 999 (the quickest way of getting through to the police back then... we never had a direct line, despite the frequency of this occurrence) and go through the motions of passing on someone's number, often while the presenter kept them talking. Or the times an on-air conversation would end when the police came knocking at the caller's front door... or pulled up outside their phone box.
Suicides always made the switchboards go wild. After we'd had one on, you could guarantee callers for the rest of the show. A lot would be offering help, advice and support. Telling their own stories of times that they'd felt a similar way and how they'd managed to turn their lives around. But we'd also get a few... less sympathetic... reactions too. At the time (budding writer that I was), I kept a notebook and I dug it out and found my Top 3 reactions to such a call. They're virtually word-for-word the things people said to me at the time...
1. "I'd like to complain. People do not want to hear this sort of thing on the radio. They want gardening tips, stuff like that. Cut this bloke off now or I'm writing to Offcom."
2. "This bloke you've got on now... he doesn't know anything. I lost a leg in the war. He's got it easy! Tell him to stop moaning. He doesn't know how good he's got it."
3. "Give him my number. One good night with me and he'd forget all his problems..."
Heartless bastards, right? Then again... after a while, I became rather inured to these kinds of callers myself. They stopped being stressful, they became just another niggle of the job. You develop a morbid sense of humour, like ambulance drivers or A&E doctors, I guess. It's a way of coping. At the time, I was really into Julian Cope, and so it didn't take long before I gave these callers a nickname. They were Peggies. "Another bloody Peggy on line 2 - I'll call the police." It wasn't that I didn't have sympathy for their situations, but at the end of the day, if things are really that bad... seek professional help. Don't call a bloody radio phone-in. You don't call a plumber if you've got an ingrowing toenail, do you?
40. Indeep - Last Night A DJ Saved My Life
A song that has been claimed and repurposed by dance culture over the last couple of decades, but I still have a certain fondness for the original, particularly the clunky rap towards the end...
We all know what Dave Grohl did after the sad death of Kurt Cobain and the end of Nirvana. Bassist Krist Novoselic was slightly less successful in maintaining a career in the music industry. His own post-Nirvana band Sweet 75 lasted one album, but it does give us an image to open this week's entry in the Hot 100...
Onto your suggestions for #75, the most popular of which was this...
A fine tune, but is it a 74 song or a 75 song? What a dilemma. It's definitely a year song. I'm not saying I won't use it next week if I get desperate... but it's not my obvious winner this week.
As well as suggesting this, Martin also offered the following. I'm not sure if any of them are in his record collection, or whether he's just resorting to google. If he does own them all, well...much respect.
Joe Nichols - Sunny & 75 (Martin told me not to youtube it. I did. I think I liked it more than he does. But then, I love cheese. Joe Nichols does seem a bit smug in the video though... but I guess I would too if I was him.)
Aaron Lewis - 75 ("Better", says Martin, "if you like that kind of thing". Aaron Lewis is the lead singer of metal band Staind, but this track is acoustic country if anything. Whisper it, but I think I enjoyed Joe Nichols more.)
Brenda and Eddie were still going steady in the summer of '75...
...and to be honest, this would have been in serious contention most other weeks. But lyrics will always be trumped by titles, if the title song is good enough. That's not to say this week's winner is better than Scenes From An Italian Restaurant, since clearly few songs are. But the selection process is very complex in this feature. I can't even begin to explain the hierarchy of it all.
Sticking with lyrics, The Swede had another T-Rex suggestion this week (Mr. Bolan is doing very well out of this feature)…
If I'm honest though, I'm not sure I get Stereolab. They're one of those bands I own music by because people in the know keep telling me I should dig them.
This, on the other hand, I love. One of the bands that rode the coat-tails of the Arctic Monkeys (they were both from Sheffield) but failed to make it out of their shadow. I still have great affection for the music they recorded before they packed it all in though.
So then... do I award week 74 to The Connells? Or do you (or I) have a better suggestion? Answers on the back of a stuck-down envelope, please...
