Tag Archives: music

Grandpa’s Paradise – A Coolio Parody

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As I walk through the alley at the back of DFS
I have a puff on my pipe, and start to feel depressed,
Cause I’ve been wearing big diapers for so long
That even my doc-tor thinks that my ass is a scone.

But I just ate a croissant… and now I feel intertia.
Me be speeding to my bunk, get my under-wear off,
Cause I gotta watch what I’m wearin’, and how I’m walkin’
Or me and my boners might just wilt like stalks.

I really hate to trip, but my knee just locked,
Is it broke – cause I think I just fell right into folk?
Fool, call emergen-cee, my brittle bonies gonna stee-rike.
Doin’ pees in the night, though I can’t really stand right.

Been spendin’ most my life livin’ in a house that’s modified
Been spendin’ most my life livin’ in a house that’s modified
Keep spendin’ most my life livin’ in a house that’s modified
Keep spendin’ most my life livin’ in a house that’s modified

Look at the cost of livin’ they got me facin’
I can barely raise my knife, butter’s nine-ninety-five,
So I gotta be down with the cou-pons,
Too much television watchin’ so I’m on pile cream.
I’m a constipated fool with honey on my mind
Got my pen in my hand cause I’m signin’ with Sky,
I’m a choked-up grandpa, Lemsippin’ harder,
And my Hovis is brown to not inflame my canker;
Fool, death ain’t nothin’ but a wet floor away
I’m livin’ life do or die, what can I say?
I’m 86 now, but will I live to see 87?
I think that I’m gonna move to Devon.

Tell me why are we so blind to see?
It’s that War-time case of French VD.

Been spendin’ most their lives shoppin’ in the Aldi’s canned goods aisle
Been spendin’ most their lives shoppin’ in the Aldi’s canned goods aisle
Keep spendin’ most their lives shoppin’ in the Aldi’s canned goods aisle
Keep spendin’ most their lives shoppin’ in the Aldi’s canned goods aisle

First I have a toffee, then a lemon sour,
Lick a little sherbert, that’s really killed an hour.
My head is really done in, I miss my dear wife’s cookin’,
When ah’m alone in the kitchen, a pasta I be nukin’.

They say I gotta learn, but the grandkids get all preachy
But I can’t understand it… how’d I work my TV?
They’re little c***s, but they don’ know,
They’re out the will: my fun-e-ral will be funny as fuck, fool!

Been spendin’ most his life eatin’ petrol station Ginster pies
Been spendin’ most his life eatin’ petrol station Ginster pies

Keep spendin’ most his life livin’ in the Grandpa’s paradise
Keep spendin’ most his life livin’ in the Grandpa’s paradise

Tell me why are we so blind to see?
It’s our cat-a-racts, and pleurisy,
Tell me why are we so blind to see?
It’s our cat-a-racts, and pleurisy.

Old Ladies Have a Song for Everything

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My gran, born in the 1920s, had a song for everything. There wasn’t a question you could ask or a line of conversation you could open up that wouldn’t trigger some long-entrenched musical memory and spur her on to do a bit of loosely-related warbling.

‘Cup of tea, gran?’

(starts warbling) ‘Oh, a tea in the morning, a tea in the evening, a tea around suppertime…’

‘You need me to take you to the shops, gran?’

(starts warbling) ‘Oh, and when we start shopping, we all start bopping, it’s off to the shops we go…’

‘You got the tests back from your anal scan yet, gran?’

(starts wabbling) ‘Ohhh, first you had a look, and then you took a snap, oh, you captured me deep inside…’

I think at least part of the reason for this habit was that singers in her day tended to sing about a greater range of life experiences, which gave music a sort of blanket relevance to daily life. Let’s face it, most songs these days are about shagging. And money. And how money can best help us with our shagging. But back then? Anything went. They wrote songs about the maddest and most inconsequential of shit.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, live from The Apollo Theatre in London, I urge you to turn your radios up as loud as they can go for the smooth, sensational stylings of Jimmy Foster and his Underwater Stockinged Turtle Band, performing their latest hit song, “The Blue Umbrella is My Favourite One, But I Guess the Yellow One is Sort of Alright, Too”.

Singers back in the 30s and 40s seemed to get their inspiration from the most banal of places. They would wake up, see a fallen cornflake half-crushed into the kitchen floor, rush to their phone, call up one of their band-mates and say, ‘Dave: get the guitar pronto, I’ve got a belter on my hands here!’

‘I mean it, Dave, this one has potential to be bigger than “Tuesday is Haircut Day, But Only Once I’ve Been to the Butcher’s”.’

Part of my gran’s habit was an age thing, of course. I’ve noticed similar behaviour in my mother in recent years, especially when she’s talking to her grandkids. She’ll start singing some old-timey song about biscuits, and they’ll just stare up at her in timid, slightly bemused silence until she stops, and then carry on blathering away as if it never happened, like the aural oddity was nothing more than a waitress dropping plates in a restaurant, or the cat farting.

Maybe they think their gran is sometimes possessed by the spirit of a deceased musical nutcase, but if they do their faces never show it. Kids are cool that way.

It’s all got me to wondering… What songs that are only tangentially related to the reality around me will I be singing to my grandkids in years to come (if luck should spare me long enough for that to happen)? I dread to think, given the amount of awful pop and dance music, and good but explicit rock and rap music to which I’ve been exposed in my life.

‘Grandpa, is there a time limit on us playing this virtual reality game?’

(starts warbling) ‘No, no, no, no, no, no – no, no, no, no – no, no THERE’S NO LIMIT!’

‘Grandpa, I don’t understand this riddle.’

(starts warbling) ‘Here is something you can’t understand (makes fist into a microphone). HOW I COULD JUST KILL A MAN!’

‘Grandpa, will you come through to the living room for a moment, please?’

(starts warbling) ‘FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!’

But, here’s the thing: I’ve already started riffing out songs to the young uns. Not my grandchildren, either. My own infant children of 3 and 5. The disease has kicked in a generation early for me. And here’s the other thing: none of the songs I sing to them – spurred on by the things they say or the questions they ask – are actually real songs. I make them all up.

‘Dad, can I have some toast?’

(starts rocking out) ‘Woooahooo, toast, toast, the way it feels, the way it feels when it’s in my mouth, I said TOAST, woooahooo, crunchy sometimes but buttery too, oooooooh hooo hooo, you gotta get that ratio RIGHT, girl!’

Only the other day I went off into a big number about the importance of putting your dishes in the sink, and my eldest son, Jack, said to me, very earnestly: ‘Who sings that one, dad? That’s a good one.’

He looked visibly impressed when I revealed that lying behind the surprise smash-hit of the season was his own father’s noble artistic vision.

I’ve got a theory: because my sister and I identified quite early in our lives this tendency in our elders to free associate the minutiae of life with music, it’s quite possible that I have internalised the jokes we used to make about it so completely that they’ve been written into my subconscious as code, and now the joke has become the reality.

But here’s another, rather more unsettling theory: If I’ve been making up all of these songs for my kids, then maybe my gran was doing the same. Maybe none of those songs about sugar, or bacon, or shirts, or daffodils actually existed, and she was just fucking mental?

Like I am.

I’m scared to look back at Frank Sinatra’s or Sidney Divine’s discography in case there’s a Kaiser Soze moment, and I discover that all of the old crooners’ songs were actually about money and shagging, and not biscuits and cups of tea like I was led to believe?

The truth is out there, people.

I think I know a song about that.

(starts warbling the theme tune for the X-Files)

Doo-Wop: Ned Flanders on Crack

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I’ve been listening to a lot of Doo-Wop recently. It’s a style of music that had its hey-day back in the 50s and 60s, so it has the power to transport you, mind and soul, to a bygone time and place. It makes me feel nostalgic, which is an odd thing, because I wasn’t born until 1980. And I was born in Central Scotland. Not exactly a Doo-Woppy time or place. It may well be that circa 1982 it was common for large numbers of drunk, angry Scotsmen to burst into west-coast chip shops shouting, ‘I’m gonnae do you, Wop!’ into the terrified faces of the Italian owners, but I don’t think that strictly qualifies as Doo-Woppy.

I think the strange effect the music has on me must be attributable to growing up with Danson, Selleck and Guttenburg crooning Goodnight Sweetheart over a sleeping baby, and Marty McFly gate-crashing his parents’ high school dance; Doo-Wop’s place in 80s pop-culture has tricked my brain into believing that I was around in those Danny Zuko-flavoured days of big combs, big collars and concealed switch-blades (whereas the world I actually grew up in was a greed-centric, shell-suited hell-hole over-flowing with concrete fly-overs and Kylie Minogue). Doo-Wop offers the ear a soothing, homely, innocent sound, a far cry from the overtly sexual lyrics and aggressive, thumping beats of some of today’s more raucous and risqué music (to which we’re pretty much already inured and de-sensitised, the dead-eyed, pervy monsters that we are).

Doo-Wop music was predominantly recorded by black men in an era where opportunities for black men in America weren’t exactly thick on the ground. The singers, most of whom hailed from rough neighbourhoods, learned their craft in church, and perfected it on the street. Doo-Wop was a prized commodity, beloved of the newly created class of teenagers everywhere, and a good Doo-Wop group could secure a ticket to stardom, or at least a short break from being bent and pulverised by the grinding, crushing gears of the – then incontrovertibly – institutionally racist US state. Italians from equally rough neighbourhoods got in on the Doo-Wop act, too, symbolically uniting the two communities in song and poverty, a note of solidarity that wasn’t quite powerful enough to transcend either culture’s tribalism when societal tensions occasionally spilled over into hatred and violence (see the Newark race riots, among many, many others).

Doo-wop groups usually had names redolent of superheroes (The Marvels), birds ( The Nightingales) or middle-class housing estates (The Clovers), sometimes all three at once. They invariably wore their hair slicked or brushed back, wore sharp suits, and harmonised sweet sounding ballads about love and romance, everything about them sanitised to the point where a young white girl might be able to take them home to meet their mother (if only their mother wasn’t so deeply racist).

Teens loved the zippy, happy, fun little ditties of Doo Wop, which undoubtedly means that parents and grandparents everywhere hated it, especially the more racist ones, who must’ve abhorred the underlying seditious message promoted by the music that young black men could serve as a focus and an outlet for teenage love and romance.

Still, Doo-Wop, though it sprang from the church and the street corner, feels like a white person’s idea of what black music should sound like. I say this whilst conceding that it’s almost certainly pretentious, patronising or even quasi-racist to assume that all black music must possess deep meaning, or be steeped in culture or history, in order to be considered worthy. Lest we forget we live in a world where James Blunt exists.

The Blues, or some raw, disjointed precursor of it, came from West Africa along with its dispossessed people, became infused with field hollers and slave songs, and evolved – in step with the rising misfortunes and bittersweet victories of the American black man – into a haunting, elegiac evocation of a people’s history; a way of telling stories – beautiful, mournful and wisened – about a long, unresolved legacy of loss, shame, servitude, sadness, death and reconciliation, even when the songs, on the surface of it, were about losing your house and your wumin and your dog. If doo-wop was a shiny plaster positioned over an amputation, then the Blues was the blood and pain and sorrow underneath.

When rap came along it ripped off the Band-Aid and threw it away; prodded at the wound, dug into it, showed it to the world and didn’t let the world look away; it clobbered people over the head with the amputated limb itself. In its early days at least, rap gave voice to the voiceless, and a shape and a face to the anger of the urban underclass; to the targeted, marginalised, dispossessed and murdered black-and-brown skinned kids of the ghetto. Like anything and everything else these days, rap – mainstream western rap at least –  has lost its way as a form of furious poetic protest, and a musical record of a way of life, and become a polluted, diluted, commercialised and sexualised shadow of its former self.

Most of the music in my car, no matter the country or ethnicity or history from which it sprang, is at least 15 years old, much of it 40 or 50 years old. There’s Elton John, Billy Joel, Metallica, various crooners of old, Lionel Ritchie, Oasis, Phosphorescent, Dr Hook, Doo-Wop, and the peerless Sam Cooke. Age has got a lot to do with this; the widespread human habit of preferring thoughts, sounds, and associations from your own heyday (first- and second-hand). But it’s also because music these days feels insipid, banal, and de-fanged; packaged and sold with all the care and creative desire of a factory churning out breakfast cereal.

When I listen to Doo-Wop I think of an America of wide-brimmed hats, bikes with bells and baskets, immaculately-kept town squares and coiffured ladies in flowing pastel dresses, an idealised America that – if it ever really existed outside of TV and movies – harboured terrible secrets just beyond the periphery of its white picket fences. In many ways Doo-Wop was a dream that masked a nightmare.

But what a dream. Even at its most anodyne I’d still take Doo-wop over almost any of today’s crotch-jiggling, join-the-dots, air-brushed pop stars. Even lyrics like ‘Din-diddly-doo-wah-doo’ and ‘shh-boom shh-boom’ – Ned Flanders on crack – hold infinitely more meaning than a bunch of songs about self-regard, preening, and fucking.

Young or old, black, brown or white, most new songs in the mainstream these days are about the same thing: money.

From bold to old: What your radio station says about you

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I sometimes listen to Radio 4 and think, ‘How did I get here?’ Did I graduate through Radios 1 – 3, work my way up through the channels? And where do I go next? Is this the end of the radio road for me?

If at first glance there appears to be an incremental, chrono-evolutionary progression through the BBC’s public service channels, then Radio 5 kind of fucks that up.

Ah, the well-known ages of man: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle-age, old age and, erm… sport. Never-the-less, there’s a path of sorts to be followed between the first four BBC stations; a loose road-map that traces a route from the fast roads of youth, winding up through the mountains of middle-age, and finally down into the valley of death.

Radio 1, with its achingly hip beats and love of ‘banging’ tracks (or whatever youth lingo they’re using these days that’s clearly being transmitted on too high a frequency for my ancient ears to detect), is your first stop: the radio-wave that signals you’re coming-of-age. Radio 1 bombards you with every trendy musical sub-genre, from Peruvian Seal Techno, to Robert Redford’s Reverse Reggae, to Andalusian Anne-Frank Funk. The station’s shows are presented by 13-year-old DJs with floppy, flicky hair, fake tans and regional accents so dense and packed they form linguistic black-holes from which no sense or consequence can ever escape.

From there you move on to Radio 2, where the tunes are still edgy – but only if you’re 47. You listen to phone-ins about how annoying it is to listen to phone-ins about phone-ins, and you’re so annoyed you decide to phone-in, but then you have to hang up because the station has almost breached its contractual obligation to play a Manfred Mann song every seven minutes; the producers placate you by offering to have you on the next morning when their phone-in topic is ‘Men Making a Stand When They’re Banned by Manfred Mann: Mann’s Inhumanity to Man’.

Next stop, Radio 3, the station for those who still like music, but can’t be bothered with lyrics any more – the sort of people who own a Charles & Camilla commemorative fountain pen they bought after seeing an advert on the back cover of the Radio Times; the sort of people who then use that fountain pen to keep a hand-written journal of their crushingly dull lives, preserving their trip to the supermarket for posterity in an ornate hand as they listen to a piece of classical music that once appeared in the film Gladiator, which might be Mozart or something, but they aren’t really sure, because they don’t really like classical music, but they sure as shit like people KNOWING that they listen to classical music.

Finally, it’s time to say ‘Fuck the music’ altogether and embrace Radio 4. No music for you anymore, sonny Jim, unless it’s the theme tune from The Archers, or 30 seconds of a song chosen by some Hungarian nuclear physicist you’ve never heard of on Desert Island Discs. From hereon out you’ll be listening to interviews with reverends about the history of raffles of Pre-Raphaelite drafts in the Raffles hotel by Russian riff-raff, or Simon Callow reading the shipping forecast, or afternoon plays about laconic, lah-dee-dah English detectives investigating the theft of bejeweled ostrich eggs in 19th century Chile; and, of course, twelve-part documentaries about the man who invented crepe paper.

OK, let’s address the thoroughly middle-aged elephant in the room here. I’ve always liked Radio 4. In fact, as a young man, in full mockery of the supposed linear progression through the BBC channels I outlined at the beginning of this piece of writing, I jumped straight to Radio 4, hopping over the horror of Radio 1 in one single, grateful bound. I’ve long, and indeed always, considered Radio 1 to be ‘noise’, even when I was in its consumer demographic. All of the songs they’ve ever played sound to me like somebody taking a home-made aerosol flame-thrower to a noisily loading ZX Spectrum as a man shouts ‘WRECK IT, FOOL, CHECK IT’ over and over into a megaphone. I think a little part of me has always been 44; it just took me a long time to notice because I spent most of my teens and 20s either drunk or stoned (or both).

Radio 4 just seems to fit me. It’s comfortable: like a fluffy slipper o’er the toes; an antique pipe between the teeth (I’ve never smoked a pipe, but I like the idea of it), or a lazy fondle of your sudsy, soap-slicked cock in a warm morning shower.

But sometimes… just sometimes, Radio 4 and I have a little ideological disagreement or class-based skirmish. Something happens to remind me that I’m not some middle-aged, middle-class, Home Counties cabbage-grower from Berkshire, but the son of a woman from Maryhill who spent her formative years shiteing outside; a man who took all of the trappings of his parents’ rags-to-nicer-rags, working-to-middle-class success story, soaked them in vodka, rolled them in Rizla and set them alight.

Here’s a case-study for you.

Now, I’ll always listen to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour if it’s on when I’m driving. It’s entertaining, and makes me feel like a proper feminist who cares about the issues and that. Sometimes its features are gentle, sometimes whimsical, sometimes worthy, often serious. And sometimes, just sometimes, they can whiten the hair and curdle the blood, so agonisingly brutal and terrifying are the topics they tackle.

Last week I was listening to it as the latter scenario unfolded. It was all I could do not to smash myself into a truck and be granted death’s instant mercy, such was the almost incomprehensible unspeakableness of it all. A guest had been invited on to the show to discuss the kind of harrowing, life-or-death, high-stakes suburban hell hitherto only contended with by the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Something dark. Something you dread. Something you hope and pray will never happen to you. Yes, I think you know what I’m talking about here.

That’s right…

The nightmare of poor cumin management.

Take a second to imagine the horror. You open the kitchen cupboard one day to find not one, not two, not three, but SEVEN tubs of cumin. SEVEN? Lord Jesus, how could I have been so careless? you ask yourself. What have I become? WHO IS THIS MONSTER I SEE REFLECTED IN THIS GLASS (FREE-TRADE OF COURSE) JAR OF ETHICALLY-SOURCED BASMATI RICE? SEVEN tubs of cumin? What next? TWELVE carafes of ALMOND MILK? I THINK I SHOULD JUST FUCKING KILL MYSELF NOW BEFORE I INVADE AUSTRIA!

The guest was a drawling, well-to-do woman called Deborah Robertson, who was on to promote her new book about de-cluttering your home. Isn’t that just ‘tidying up’, I hear you ask? No, you fool. It’s a lot more complex than that. For starters, Deborah’s method is a kinder, gentler, ‘less absolutist’ one, whatever the blustering fuck that means.

Many years ago, you see, Deborah’s house started to become so full of stuff that she didn’t know what to do with it all. Naturally, she read all of the books about it (books about tidying PLURAL?), but she just couldn’t get it (or she just couldn’t afford a cleaner, more than likely – but that’ll be the first thing she gets if the book sells well).

During Deborah’s short segment I learned about ‘Swedish death-cleaning’ (sounds like one of Radio 1’s musical sub-genres), the 10 De-cluttering Commandments, the hell of surplus cumin (sorry to keep opening that wound), and the necessity of always taking things you don’t need anymore to the charity shop. What a whirlwind; what a whistle-stop education in what you must agree is a vital life-science.

“What am I going to do? I’ve got too much stuff? The Africans who walk fifty miles to a well each morning to get the water they need to survive don’t know they’re born, they really don’t.”

“I’ll tell you what steps you can take to help remove the clutter of unnecessary items from your house: buy my wholly unnecessary bloody book, that’s what you can do. I’ll even throw in my new one: ‘Why it’s Always a Good Idea to Wipe Your Arse After a Shit’.”

I’m sure the book will be on every member of the ‘ladies who lunch’ and the chattering classes’ Christmas lists this year, and thereafter available in charity shops the country over come January the 2nd.

You depressed me, Woman’s Hour, so much so that I switched channels in disgust, and found myself listening to Radio 1 for longer than a second. Thwump-thwump-fizzle-fizzle-chizzle-thwappa-fizzle-chizzle, went the music. Thwump-thwump-fizzle-fizzle-chizzle-thwappa-fizzle-chiz…CLICK went my finger.

Fzzt.

I drove the rest of the way home in silence.

What frequency is Radio 5 on?

PS: ‘incremental, chrono-evolutionary‘ – I’ve no idea if this weird hybrid word I invented earlier in the article is apt, or if it even makes any kind of sense at all, but by Christ it sounds impressive, right? And that’s the main thing.