| Nick Drake – At The Chime Of A City Clock Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Q Magazine summed up Nick this way, and must have been thinking of this song when they wrote it. "Evocative of Fustian parlours and attic rooms, of quiet days in cathedral towns while life is being lived elsewhere." | |
| The Beatles – Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Pablo Fanque - born William Darby, in Norwich, in 1796 — was one of the most celebrated and successful British circus proprietors of the Victorian age. The son of a butler who was probably a freed slave, Fanque was orphaned while still a child and was apprenticed to William Batty, the owner of a travelling show. In time the boy picked up numerous acrobatic skills and also trained with the renowned circus owner Andrew Ducrow. By the mid-1830s, he was acknowledged as a first-rate equestrian, acrobat, tightrope walker and trainer of show horses, and billed in the press as ‘the loftiest jumper in England.’ In 1841 Fanque left Batty’s show and opened his own with just two horses. He performed mostly in the north of England and gradually developed a full-fledged circus including clowns and acrobatic acts. By the late 1840s the Fanque circus was one of the best known in the country, but the proprietor’s private life was tinged with tragedy. His wife, Susannah, died in 1848 as the result of a freak accident at a show; part of the wooden structure of the seating collapsed and she was struck on the head by several heavy planks. Fanque continued to run his Circus Royal after his wife’s death and eventually included the couple’s children in the circus. He seems to have encountered relatively little racism in the course of his career, the chaplain of the Showman’s Guild remarking: ‘In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world there is no colour line, for, although Pablo Fanque was of African extraction, he speedily made his way to the top of his profession. The camaraderie of the Ring has but one test, ability.’ Pablo Fanque died in Stockport in 1871. |
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| Kirsty MacColl – Terry Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Hmmm, well, I certainly don;t think Kirsty means us to think Terry is any sort of ideal guy. In the video that was shot for this song, she starts off with a geeky guy (played by Ade Edmondson, incidentally) and dumps him for Terry, who's shown as a lunkheaded, preening, be-quiffed rocker who's pretty much in love with his own reflection. At the end of the video, she's with Terry in a pub where he's performing with his band; the old boyfriend blows Terry off stage with a blinding guitar solo and they get back together. It's a good video, and funny, as befits Kirsty. It was uploaded to Youtube a while ago. |
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| Dire Straits – Tunnel Of Love Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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@ majordomo1 ... 'One-armed bandit' is a British term for a slot machine. So he's talking about getting a big pile of coins and feeding the machine, and feeding it, hoping for a win. |
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| Rickie Lee Jones – On Saturday Afternoons In 1963 Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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More than simply a song about childhood, this beautiful and heart-felt lyric surely comments on something most of us recognise - the way in which time seems to speed ever faster as one grows older. Weeks and years rush by for adults, caught in their repetitive cycles, in a way that's simply not true for children. Jones is reminding us of how fresh the world once seemed, and how a child's inquisitive spirit makes everything seem fresh and new and memorable - in a sense more real. One of my own strongest memories of childhood is spending a hot, windless afternoon in a field near my house. Lying down and watching at ground level as insects went about their lives, and being drawn into that miniature world for a while in a way that made time seem to stop. There was certainly something magical about it, and even now it seems more 'real' in some sense than much of what has happened to me today. That seems to me to be what Jones is saying here - and she also describes that ways in which we can actively seek to capture moments like that: "So hold on to your special friend/Here, you'll need something to keep her in/Now you stay inside this foolish grin". In closing, I'll note how badly dating a song in its title or lyrics can date it, or make it seem irrelevant to later generations. How easy is it now to empathize with Gary Moore's Parisienne Walkways - Paris in 1949 - or Frankie Valli's Oh What A Night ("Late December back in '63/What a very special time for me?" Luckily for me, I was born in April 1963, so Jones's song has a special sort of resonance for me, but it would be a shame to think it might go unnoticed by those born much more recently. |
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