#34: WITH A THONG IN MY YARD: lyrical mash-ups

Admittedly you’d have to be a lisping cockney vocalist to render ‘With a Song in my Heart', as 'With a thong in My Yard' but it’s possible.  Think Max Bygraves and you're half-way there. Lyrics mis-sung, mistaken or mis-heard are common.

Driving down the M4 recently, en route for Bristol, I was already bored by the time I reached Slough: possibly ‘the slough of despond’ is not a coincidence. I ferreted amongst the CDs in the door pocket, wishing there was some kind of braille-like system to identify them by touch, so that I wouldn’t have to take my eyes off the road, having already taken one hand off the wheel. Just don’t sneeze. What emerged from this lucky dip was an Ella Fitzgerald album, from which I’d taken some of the music for my mother’s humanist funeral; it had been terribly effective, and wreathed the ‘congregation’ in smiles as much as it lodged indigestible lumps in throats. Most importantly it was her music.

My first impulse was to put it back and find something else. Then I realised this was an outdated reflex from the teenage years when rebellion against the parents necessitated rebellion against their culture and everything they liked – and which monopolised the airwaves and the record player. Hurricane Elvis was storming across America and heading this way. Even the angry brigade, Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde and Billy Fury, were creating enough local turbulence to spearhead the revolution. So Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, our parents’ icons, were swept away. A whole generation rejected the previous generation’s classics: only later did some of them discover that these syrupy lurve-song lyrics were often brilliantly constructed and set to sumptuous melodies, that were actually timeless, if they weren’t viewed through a prism of rock’s beat or Dylan’s poetry and imagery.

But I played the CD, as much to recall its previous outing as anything. And part-way through ‘With a Song in my Heart’ I had a light-bulb moment:

“At the sound of your voice, 

heaven opens its portals to me”  

  

I was transported back to when I was 10, in 1956 Oakwood, sitting at the table in the Morning Room (other times of day are available) listening to Two-way Family Favourites on the ‘portable’ radio (soon to be cut down to size by the arrival of the transistor). My mother was preparing a roast Sunday lunch, and I was trying to guess what BFPO meant (British Forces Posted Overseas) and why we still seemed to be occupying Germany so long after the war when we’d just beaten them; because half the requests seemed to be coming from Münster or Mönchengladbach. Also, it was one of the only programmes ever playing pop music then.

Did I hear that right?  “Heaven opens its portholes to me”.  This was confusing, even shocking. Portholes? How were you supposed to get through them? No wonder Heaven was reputed to be such a difficult destination. I did not want to earn the scorn of my family, who had already nearly reduced me to tears by laughing uncontrollably when, I’d replied to my mother’s enquiry about how hungry I was, “I’m absolutely ravishing”. So I took the problem to school because there was quite a lot of God-related material and activity there, in those days.  And at the end of one homily on miracles or something, the teacher asked “any questions?” (I seem to remember it was the parable of the burning bush which always seemed to me to be the least miraculous miracle, given the ambient temperatures in the region, heat of the sun, bits of glass or quartz etc).

I put my hand up and said “Is it true that Heaven is really like some kind of enormous cruise-ship which you can only get into through the port-holes?” As Frankie Howerd would have said, “a titter passed round the room”, which was stilled by the teacher’s stormy look. “David, I think we will go and discuss this with the Headmistress”. As the Head was slightly more religious than the Pope, I feared for my life, but she was a crossword fan, and had an excellent vocabulary, and it was soon cleared up. Meanwhile my friends had been enormously impressed with my nerves of steel in pulling such a stunt. Nowadays this simply wouldn’t happen because the majority of people are far more familiar with web portals than portholes.

While in a religious mood, I’m now recalling that my friend MD, perhaps emboldened by my example, subsequently asked the teacher why God was called Harold (God being more of a job description than a proper name). The teacher was wary…”Where did you get that idea?”.  He replied “From the Lord’s Prayer:  Our Father, who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name”.  He was curtly corrected. I later learned that this was quite a common mistake/joke, and so he probably plagiarised it, the devious little jerk.

In 1966 Dylan produced the double album ‘Blonde on Blonde’. It was at the height of his creativity and coincidentally, his use of hallucinogenics. It was full of intense imagery, sometimes opaque, and therefore the meaning of every phrase was not always self-evidently clear. And so to encounter in ‘Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ the line ‘Where? How? Sighs my Arabian Drums’ was not especially problematic, though it was ungrammatical, because of the ‘s’ on ‘sighs’. It was also incorrect: I later discovered that the real lyric reads: “Warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums” –phonetically identical, but also ungrammatical and opaque. Do our ears deceive us? Sometimes, but more often it’s our brains imposing our own templates of experience on individual sounds. Or something like that.

When my employers were about to introduce an idiotic restructuring which made  re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic look like a brilliant idea, my Head of School tried to sweep me up with her enthusiasm: “Change is good, David”, she said with a kind of religious gleam. Although I was being cast in the role of some kind of Luddite in the face of our own industrial revolution, I risked saying, “No, Margaret, change is not good,  per se, change for the better is good, and change for the worse is not good. Change for its own sake is more likely to be bad than good. When I first came here, before you, we were organised in Schools.  That can’t have been a good idea, because we then became Faculties, which eventually gave way to calling us Departments and then Schools again. Which change of name was the good one, and how many person-hours were devoted to implement

this ridiculous roundabout? Not to mention the stationery."

A certain wariness crept into her dealings with me after that. She was required to sell such changes to the rest of us, somehow summoning up a kind of missionary zeal that belied her intelligence; I used to feel rather sorry for her, having to implement the more lunatic schemes of her superiors despite being privately aware of our Emperors’

lack of clothes. And the concepts they were flogging - and 

the vocabulary – were invariably drawn from the business

world, quite inappropriate to academic life, and already

past their sell-by date by the time they reached us.

Agreed? Well, 'let's run it up the flagpole and see

who salutes'...for example.

 

In the week of his 80th birthday, some paintings by Peter Swan, RWA.

                  SEE IT!

A friend of a friend said:"I don't believe in karma, but I do think that what goes around comes around".  Hmm. Maybe this would help her understand:

   
                            Shimon Peres



The Jews' greatest contribution to history is dissatisfaction! We're a nation born to be discontented. Whatever exists we believe can be changed for the better.

You know who is against democracy in the Middle East? The husbands. They got used to their way of life. Now, the traditional way of life must change. Everybody must change. If you don't give equal rights to women, you can't progress.