I'Ve Been Flushed From The Bathroom of Your Heart

Colin Bowles has played lead air guitar in bands such as Led Zeppelin,
Nirvana, AC/DC and Red Hot Chili Peppers. He has been married five times,
to Heidi Klum, Kate Beckinsale, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer and Scarlett
Johansson. His interpretation of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, performed in the
shower when he was just eighteen years old, remains a classic of rock music
history. He has since become a legend in his own mind and these days divides
his time between London, Berlin, New York and being treated for delusional
fantasies at the outpatient department of Adelaide’s historic Home for People
Who Think They’re Eric Clapton.
FLUSHED-Text.indd i 5/9/08 11:38:09 AM

This page intentionally left blank
FLUSHED-Text.indd ii 5/9/08 11:38:10 AM

I’ve been flushed
from the bathroom
of your heart
FLUSHED-Text.indd iii 5/9/08 11:38:10 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd iv 5/9/08 11:38:10 AM

I’ve been flushed
from the bathroom
of your heart
COLIN BOWLES
ES
THE
100
WORST
SONGS
EVER
FLUSHED-Text.indd v 5/9/08 11:38:10 AM

First published in 2008
Copyright © Colin Bowles 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be
photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational
institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited
(CAL) under the Act.
Arena Books, an imprint of

Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Bowles, Colin.
I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart : the 100 worst songs ever / Colin Bowles.
ISBN 978 1 74175 634 0 (pbk.)
Popular music—Analysis, appreciation—Humor.
781.64
Text design by Nada Backovic Designs

Images: istockphoto/Donald Erickson; istockphoto/Milos Luzanin
Set in 12/14 pt Esperanto by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in Australia by Ligare Pty Ltd, Sydney
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FLUSHED-Text.indd vi 5/9/08 11:38:20 AM

Music to my ears . . .
Music is part of our nature. Babies in the womb hear music, and mothers
use lullabies to soothe their infants and put them to sleep. Birds use calls
and whistles to communicate, and humpback whales sing sonatas to stay in
touch with each other. Music is a way of relating to each other, to the world,
and to ourselves.
When we were toddlers, music was used to teach us the alphabet and
rudimentary mathematics—remember Sesame Street? Music is used to ease
stress in adults—that’s why they pipe music into aircraft during take-offs and
landings and why they play muzak in elevators. (If they want to reduce stress,
why the fuck do they play Kenny G?)
At the other end of life, music is used to help people grieve. Co-
operative Funeralcare organised the funerals of eighty thousand Britons
last year, and almost half the music played was contemporary. ‘My Way’, of
course, was the most popular choice, followed by ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’
(which will feature prominently later), as well as more idiosyncratic choices
such as ‘The Birdy Song’ and AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’. Other choices
included The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ (the ideal cremation song—at least I
always thought so), Queen’s ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, and the Village
People’s ‘YMCA’ (don’t ask). Other odd choices include Wham!’s ‘Wake Me
Up Before You Go-Go’, which strikes me as creepy, and ‘She’ll Be Coming
’Round The Mountain’.
Music is powerful because it conjures emotion. At funerals it effortlessly
evokes memories of the person we mourn; lovers will often adopt a piece
of music as ‘theirs’, which is why some people get misty-eyed on hearing a
FLUSHED-Text.indd 1 5/9/08 11:38:20 AM

certain piece of music—‘he always played “Smack My Bitch Up” just for me,’
she said, weeping—because it evokes nostalgia for another time.
Music bypasses intellect and mainlines for the gut.
Which is why bad music can provoke such outrage and unreasonable
displays of anger. Always has done. At its debut in 1913, for example, Igor
Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), caused a riot in the
streets of Paris.
So in choosing the one hundred worst songs ever—well, in the last fifty
years to be more accurate—I know I’m playing with fire. Some of the songs
here have also featured on lists elsewhere of the best one hundred songs.
Say something mean about a song someone else likes and you don’t just
confront their opinions, you mess with their emotions. After reading this,
some people may say mean things about me. Fair enough. I shall be saying
mean things about other people.
What are the criteria for a ‘bad’ song anyway? There aren’t any, really.
On the face of it, it’s all subjective. What evokes euphoria in one person may
induce nausea and vomiting in another. The argument over musical worth is
encapsulated in the McCartney/Lennon polar axis: is a musician’s net worth
the sum of his earnest commitment to revolution and profundity or is it okay,
even preferable, just to entertain with ‘Silly Love Songs’?
Then there’s the ABBA Principle: those guys never wrote anything
deeper than ‘The Winner Takes It All’ but they were good songwriters. They
never aimed higher than good pop but never fell short. They were pop music’s
Mozart.
The only thing I could be sure of when I’d finished this list is that not a
single soul would agree with me completely. After all, Billy Ray Cyrus, whose
‘Achy Breaky Heart’ is almost universally derided, sold fourteen million copies

worldwide in a hundred different languages, yet not once have I ever met a single
person willing to admit that they own a copy. Clearly, something is going on.
There is perhaps an element of the emperor’s new clothes in musical
tastes. We think something is good because we’re told it is good, and when
something is fashionable we think it has value when in fact it’s just . . . fashion.
Some music dates and some doesn’t. Why do we find that Color Me Badd or
MC Hammer CD in our rack? We only thought it was good back then because
everyone else had one.
Bad is in the nature of the music industry. Artists fulfil contractual
obligations by clearing out their bottom drawer of songs they wrote in fifth
grade, while record companies think of their customers as a contemptible
rabble who’ll buy anything if it’s packaged right and has a familiar brand
name.
Music executives are motivated by money, not music. Consequently,
the car is driven while looking in the rear-vision mirror. Something original
becomes a hit despite our best efforts to ignore it? Great! Let’s order a hundred
more just like it! We don’t know if it’s good—hell, we didn’t even know it was
good in the first place! Low-budget project earned back ten times what it cost?
Let’s increase the budget by a hundred times and it’ll earn back ten times a
hundred the profit! Right? Right?
And so Mystikal says ‘thanks very much, put another few zeros on the
end of that cheque’.
In such a system—and by that I mean because we’re human—there are
very few songs that are universally loved and admired, and remain that way:
‘Yesterday’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, ‘When Doves Cry’ and ‘What’s Going On?’
spring to mind as examples of classic songs that have stood time’s ultimate
test. Choosing the worst songs is much harder; it’s like making a list of all

those people Adolf Hitler didn’t like very much. However, there are some—
like ‘Honey’ and ‘MMMBop’—that just about pick themselves.
The list does not distinguish between musical form—for every Metallica
there are ten Manowars, for every Michael Franti there are a dozen Jibbs and
Soulja Boy. There is good and bad Black Eyed Peas, as there is good and bad Bob
Dylan. There is Marvin Gaye and then there’s just plain gay, and plenty of it.
It depends, too, on which generation you belong to as to how much
real pain and angst any particular song may have caused you. You may, for
instance, be fortunate enough to be too young to remember The Archies or
the Bay City Rollers or the Macarena, but if you’re from Generation Y you’ll
have memories of your adolescence being at least partially ruined by ‘Who
Let The Dogs Out’.
Compiling this list casts industry backslappers like the Grammy Awards
in an unfavourable light. It is sobering to learn that Bob Dylan never won a
Grammy before 1998, that Lionel Richie won honours over Prince and Bruce
Springsteen, and that Milli Vanilli were deemed the best new artists of 1989.
It’s also curious how often some of the best songwriters find their way onto
the list. McCartney, for instance, wrote both ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Mull of Kintyre’;
Bernie Taupin wrote ‘Candle in the Wind’ but also penned ‘We Built This City
(On Rock And Roll)’. But in his defence, as Taupin himself later pointed out,
Tom Cruise starred in both Cocktail and Rain Man.
I have attempted not to lean too heavily on country and western music,
though this is of course difficult when it has spawned such classic songs as ‘I
Went to Bed at Two with a Ten and Woke Up at Ten with a Two’ and ‘You’re
the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly’. I’ve also tried to keep novelty songs and boy
bands to an essential minimum. I didn’t want to populate the entire list with
Westlife and the Teletubbies.

The unexpected thing that comes from all this is an insight into the
mind of so-called creative people. Should it surprise us how many of them
are truly and seriously messed up? Is it a precondition of being an artist, or
is it a consequence of money and fame? I’ll let you decide. The only thing
that is certain is that great artists don’t think like record executives, and that
bad ones become record company executives. (Sit down, Fred, you’ll get your
turn.)
I have not listed the songs from worst to least worst; that would have
been redundant. Instead I’ve placed them in chronological order, because a
list of the one hundred worst songs in living memory is also a social history of
western culture. It has to be. Music matters to everyone; it reflects our values
and tensions. If it is, then, a signpost, where is our culture headed?

The sixties
All this and Vietnam too
‘We don’t like their sound, and guitar

music is on the way out.’
Dec c a Rec o rd i ng C ompany rejecting The B eatles, 1962

Walk Like a Man
(The Four Seasons)
So why did he sing it like a girl?
The Four Seasons’ ‘Walk Like a Man’ was produced under extraordinary
circumstances—it was recorded in a burning building. According to guitarist
Vinnie Bell, their producer, Bob Crewe, had locked the door to the studio,
which was his standard practice when they were recording.
After a couple of run-throughs, Frankie Valli and the boys smelt smoke
and heard someone pounding on the studio door. Crewe refused to unlock
it, even though plaster was starting to fall from the ceiling. He wanted to do
another take.
Water from the fire hoses started to leak into the studio and the Four
Seasons thought they’d reached the autumn of their lives. Electrocution,
individually or en masse, became a real possibility. The session ended only
when firemen axed open the studio door, knocking Crewe to the floor as they
rushed in.
Perhaps that’s why Frankie sang the song like his pants were on fire.
Perhaps they were. Whatever the truth, ‘Walk Like a Man’ was the third US
number one hit for the band.
For others, like me, Frankie’s teenage-girl-on-a-rollercoaster wail just
makes me wish the firemen were on strike that day.

The Sounds of
Silence
(Simon & Garfunkel)
The most pretentious lyric in musical history
‘The main thing about playing the guitar was that I was able to sit by myself
and play and dream. And I was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the
bathroom, because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber.
I’d turn on the faucet so that water would run—I like that sound, it’s very
soothing to me—and I’d play. In the dark.’ (Paul Simon, Playboy 1984)
Okay, so Paul Simon’s a genius. We didn’t say he was mentally healthy.
Is this the man who wrote ‘American Tune’ and ‘Boy in the Bubble’?
What is he doing on this list? Because this song is the musical equivalent of
having a finger waved in your face. Still, there are plenty who’d disagree with
me. It propelled him and his sixty-eight-octave-range mate Art Garfunkel to
superstardom.
Listening to ‘The Sounds of Silence’ is like being lectured on morals and the
meaning of life by a teenager. It’s everything that is pompous and pretentious
about sixties folk-rock. It’s Britney Spears trying to write a Dylan song.
‘Hear my words that I might teach you’? My reaction is always the same: a

two-word salute ending in ‘off’. Some songs make me angry, some songs make
me indignant. But this is one of those musical rarities, a song that makes me
angry and indignant.
Hear my words, Paul: take this song and shove it.
Simon has said that he wrote the song in response to Kennedy’s
assassination in 1963. It appeared on the first album that he and Garfunkel
recorded together, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, which tanked, selling only about
two thousand copies.
So he and Garfunkel split up, with Simon touring folk clubs in England
while Art practised shattering crystal with his C sharp. But their record company
had a plan. Columbia Records producers Tom Wilson (who produced Dylan’s
foray into electric rock) and Bob Johnson saw the folk-rock movement gaining
popularity, so they added electric instruments to Simon’s acoustic track and re-
released it, unknown to Paul and Art. It became a massive hit and so Simon and
Garfunkel re-formed.
An album called Sounds of Silence was hastily recorded and released in
early 1966 to capitalise on their success. ‘I Am a Rock’ and a song about
various common garden herbs ensured the duo’s fame.
‘The Sounds of Silence’ was used in the film The Graduate and played
during the opening credits and the closing footage in Bobby. Despite its
enormous popularity, it was voted the forty-second worst song ever by Blender
magazine.
Personally I prefer the real sound of silence to listening to it even one
more time.
10

Queenie Wahine’s
Papaya
(Elvis Presley)
Parker, Paramount Pictures and Presley Piss on

the Paying Public
When Elvis sang ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show
in 1956, his hip swinging raised eyebrows everywhere. He was sex on legs.
He was white but his soul was black, and Elvis the Pelvis was on his way to
becoming a household name.
But the man who gave us ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and
‘Hound Dog’ was also responsible for some of the greatest musical travesties
ever perpetrated on the paying public.
There were in fact three Elvises: there was the fifties rocker; there was the
star of a bunch of cheap sixties production-line movies like Clambake and Kid
Galahad; and later, when he succumbed to gluttony and pill-popping, there was
Michelin Man Meets Maggoted from Memphis. By the end not only could he
not gyrate his pelvis, he couldn’t see it. Elvis the Pelvis had become Eli the Belly,
a giant muffin in sequined flares.
Movie-star Elvis offered up only ‘Return To Sender’ from Girls! Girls!
11

Girls! and ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ from Blue Hawaii as worthwhile pop-
rock. The good was far, far outweighed by the bad, like ‘He’s Your Uncle, Not
Your Dad’ from Speedway, ‘Petunia, the Gardener’s Daughter’ from Frankie and
Johnny and, of course, the execrable ‘Queenie Wahine’s Papaya’ from Paradise,
Hawaiian Style.
The first lines, all about ‘She sells’ and ‘seashells’, alert us to the fact that
this is not ‘Hound Dog’.
Then it’s ‘Queenie Wahine’s papaya rates higher than pineapple, pumpkin or
poy’.
Could it get any worse? Was there ever a moment when he was singing
this tongue teaser set to music that he thought wistfully about Buddy Holly
and wished he’d been on the plane instead?
Possibly not. Knowing Elvis, his only regret about all this pickled salad and
pink popcorn was that he was not eating it while he sang it.
12

Tell Laura I Love Her
(Ray Peterson)
She’s only hot when she’s cold
In the late fifties and early sixties, teenage death songs were as popular as a
cheerleader in a men’s prison shower stall. Teen tragedy songs generally detail
one half of a love match meeting an untimely end. Fast cars and motorcycles
feature prominently, as they do in real life, but unlike the real thing, the end
somehow gets romanticised. Note for aspiring lyricists: hard to tell anyone
anything when you’re coughing blood.
Perhaps the archetypal teenage death song is ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’,
by Ray Peterson. In this one, a love-struck teenager named Tommy enters a
stock car race so he can buy a wedding ring for his girl, Laura, with the prize
money. He fails to consider two things: 1) if he can’t afford a ring, he probably
can’t afford a mortgage, a bouncinette or a lawnmower; and 2) he knows
nothing about cars. Consequently, he rolls it and it bursts into flames. As
he’s pulled from the wreckage with skin peeling off and coughing carbon, he
whispers ‘Tell Laura I love her’ and expires.
There was lots of this stuff around back then, or its variants, like
motorbikes (the Shangri-Las’ near-hysterical but curiously erotic ‘Leader of
the Pack’) or even sharks (the unintentionally hilarious ‘The Water Was Red’).
The latter example featured a boy—Johnny Cymbal—walking along the sand
13

with his girl. They go in for a quick dip and he sees her lose some of her most
fetching features to a white pointer.
Johnny then dives into the water with his knife, cuts off the shark’s fin and
returns to the beach with it to show his girl how much he loves her. Unfortunately
she has, by this stage, bled to death and fails to appreciate the gift.
‘Teen Angel’ is another personal favourite. If your car stalls on a rail
track and the 12.15 express is heading on through, running back for your
boyfriend’s class ring means that, well, you probably aren’t a massive loss to
the gene pool.
I’m also a big fan—for the wrong reasons, probably—of Dickey Lee’s
‘Laurie’, about a boy meeting a girl at a dance and then finding out later she
was dead the whole time. In the last verse, the sweater he loans her turns up
on her grave, neatly folded.
Yes, but did he get a second date?
Some songs attempted to parody the formula, such as ‘(All I Have Left
Is) My Johnny’s Hubcap’, but none more successfully than Jimmy Cross’s
hilarious ‘I Want My Baby Back’. In the song he assumes the voice of a teenager
knocked unconscious in a car wreck—crashing his car into the Leader of the
Pack no less—and when he wakes up he says: ‘I could see my baby over there,
And over there, And waaaaaaaaay over there.’
He misses her a great deal, which leads to the song’s refrain: ‘I want my
baby back’. In fact he wants her back so badly that after about three months he
returns to the cemetery. The song ends with the sound of digging, then ‘Hot
dang, pay dirt!’ followed by the sound of a coffin lid creaking open, and the
chorus ‘I got my baby back’.
Hot dang. She may be cold but she’s still hot!
The song was banned by the BBC.
14

The Laughing
Gnome
(David Bowie)
We can’t be heroes all the time
Not all bad songs are written by bad songwriters, and not all bad songs are
sung by bad musicians. Before the Thin White Duke began his career as Ziggy
Stardust, before he gave us ‘Heroes’ and ‘China Girl’ and ‘Queen Bitch’, David
Bowie laid a brick. It was called ‘The Laughing Gnome’ and it is truly one of
the most embarrassing moments in rock history.
In 1967, young David was desperately trying to find a commercial
breakthrough and was prepared, as many before him, to abandon all his
musical standards to get it. ‘The Laughing Gnome’ was the result. It consisted
of the singer meeting the creature of the title and having a conversation, with
the gnome’s high-pitched voice (provided by Bowie and studio engineer Gus
Dudgeon) delivering a number of puns on the word ‘gnome’:
‘Haven’t you got a gnome to go to? No, we’re gnomads . . .’
And so on.
The song was appalling, even in a moment in history when Donovan
and The Archies were dumping nightsoil on the public by the vatload.
15

Bowie had to wait two more years for his big break, when his space-
age ballad ‘Space Oddity’ reached the top five of the UK singles chart. He
soon re-emerged as his flamboyant, androgynous alter-ego Ziggy Stardust,
spearheaded by the hit single ‘Starman’.
Ironically, though, Bowie’s gnome song would be a hit when reissued in
1973, and made it to number six in the UK charts, much to the amusement of
the music press and Bowie’s rival, Marc Bolan.
Bowie’s career has been characterised by musical innovation, personal
reinvention and striking visual presentation. He has sold an estimated 136
million albums, and ranks among the ten best-selling acts in UK pop history.
In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him thirty-ninth on their list of the 100 Greatest
Artists of All Time.
Which just goes to show: even the best of us have a gnome in our closet
somewhere.
16

Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds
(William Shatner)
Beam me up, Scottie
Before you get indignant on me, the version I refer to here is not the one by
the Fab Four but the cover by Cap’n Kirk of Star Trek fame, the redoubtable
William Shatner.
He released his first album back in 1968, The Transformed Man, on which
he performed dramatic readings from the works of William Shakespeare
interspersed with even more dramatic readings of the lyrics of songs such as
‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’.
His interpretation of ‘Lucy’ is considered by many to be the worst
musical rendition of all time, regularly winning ‘worst ever song’ radio station
competitions. It was done at warp factor nine with enough intensity to make
a Klingon cry. Shatner truly took a Beatles song where it had never gone
before.
A 2003 Music Choice poll voted it as the worst Beatles cover, beating
off stiff competition from a pair of pink pig puppets as well as musical heavy-
weights like Bananarama and P.M. Dawn.
17

George Clooney chose Shatner’s ‘Lucy’ as one of the Desert Island Discs
he would bring along if marooned—as an incentive to leave the island. He
said, ‘If you listen to this song, you will hollow out your own leg and make a
canoe out of it to escape.’
But Shatner is nothing if not indefatigable. In June 2005, he performed
his own rendition of ‘My Way’ at the presentation of George Lucas’s AFI
Life Achievement Award, backed by a chorus line of dancers in Imperial
Stormtrooper costumes who picked him up at the end and carried him
offstage.
Shatner is not the only Trekkie to record music. Leonard Nimoy’s versions
of ‘If I Had a Hammer’ and the children’s song ‘The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins’
are widely considered to be camp classics.
In 1997, MCA Records released a single-CD compilation of Shatner and
Nimoy’s collected music output, under the title Spaced Out.
They should have called it Star Dreck.
18

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
(The Beatles)
‘Paul’s granny shit’—John Lennon
‘You can’t have The Beatles in a worst songs list.’

Hell you can’t. Don’t forget that one half of the Lennon/McCartney
songwriting team went on to write ‘Mull of Kintyre’ and perform duets with
Michael Jackson (more of this later).
‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ was a ska track recorded at a point during the
White Album sessions when the producers had to sweep the studios for sharp
objects to stop the Fab Four from slaughtering each other.
The lyrics would embarrass a dyslexic chimpanzee. They tell the story of
a couple named Desmond and Molly (the character of Desmond is a reference
to ska and reggae legend Desmond Dekker). The verses are punctuated by
shouts and yells in the background, possibly John trying to get out of the
studio when the song was being recorded.
When the verses are repeated, the names are switched around in certain
places. McCartney described the switch as ‘a slip of the tongue’, but decided to
keep them in, he said, because it gave the song an interesting and unexpected
twist. The real truth may be that none of the other Beatles could be prevailed
upon to do another take. Least of all Lennon.
The first time the line ‘Molly lets the children lend a hand’ is sung, it is
19

possible to hear two of the Beatles in the background singing ‘arm’ and then
‘leg’ instead of ‘hand’. The second time it’s sung, you can hear ‘foot’. Almost as
if they were deliberately trying to sabotage McCartney’s lyric.
As if.
McCartney spent a great deal of time recording and overdubbing it. It’s
said that John, George and Ringo got frustrated with him. Lennon particularly
hated the song, and, as he did with a lot of McCartney’s later material, thought
it was trite and meaningless. According to sound engineer Geoff Emerick in
his memoirs Here, There and Everywhere, John called it ‘Paul’s granny shit’.
After around sixty takes, Paul continued trying to record this as a ballad.
On the fourth night, John was in the mixing room listening while taking
a cocktail of alcohol and drugs—hard to imagine rock stars behaving like
that, I know—and was basically maggotted. Stoned and frustrated beyond
endurance, he burst into the recording room, pushed Paul aside and proceeded
to play the piano track at twice the volume and twice the speed. The fast and
happy recording on the landmark White Album is the result.
The song’s title supposedly comes from a reggae band called Jimmy Scott
and his Obla Di Obla Da Band. McCartney explained it this way: ‘A fella who
used to hang around the clubs used to say in a Jamaican accent, “Ob-la-di,
ob-la-da, life goes on,” and he got annoyed when I did a song of it, ’cause he
wanted a cut. I said, “Come on, Jimmy, it’s just an expression.”’
An edited cover was performed by the Australian comedy duo the Scared
Weird Little Guys with the words completely replaced with morse code.
This is the version I strongly prefer.
20

Honey
(Bobby Goldsboro)
‘See the tree how big it’s groan’
There are some songs that are just a little bit irritating, and some songs that are
stupid, but every now and then there’s a song that makes you want to grab a
chainsaw and a shotgun and go visit the guy who wrote it.
‘Honey’, sung by Bobby Goldsboro in 1968, and still revisited by some
easy listening radio stations (Stop Press: this is not Easy Listening, this is
Stomach-Churning, Brain-Rotting, Agonising Listening, fellas), is one such
song.
This piece of maudlin dreck was written by a subhuman life form called
Bobby Russell. Russell was a Nashville songwriter who was briefly married to
actress/singer Vicki Lawrence and wrote her 1973 hit ‘The Night the Lights
Went Out in Georgia’. He also wrote ‘Little Green Apples’ for O.C. Smith, in
which he was able to successfully rhyme apples with Indianapolis. That alone
should have assured him fame far beyond his years and creative gifts.
‘Honey’ appeared for the first time on Bobby Goldsboro’s tenth album,
released in 1968. The song’s protagonist mourns his dead lover, beginning
with him looking at a tree in their garden, remembering ‘it was just a twig’
on the day that they planted it together, then reflecting on their relationship
before turning to the day ‘the angels came’. Maybe it could have worked if
21

God had given the idea to, say, Eric Clapton. As it was, the notion for the
song came to Bobby Russell. It was like giving a pump-action shotgun to a
toddler.
In one verse Russell rhymes ‘what the heck’ with ‘hugged my neck’. He mocks
his dead ex for crying at the Late Show. And then there’s her death. Even
in 1968, before the women’s liberation movement, what kind of insensitive
prick wouldn’t be at his wife’s bedside when she died? Or maybe, reading
between the ham-fisted lines of the song, it was suicide: ‘Oh God, I can’t stand
living any more with a man who writes lines like “Friend it hasn’t been too long,
it wasn’t big”.’
Goldsboro’s delivery is cloying, and the whole syrupy mess went on
to spend five weeks at the top of the US Billboard pop singles chart, making
it one of the biggest hits of the year. ‘Honey’ also reached number two in
the UK.
He followed this up with the equally grievous ‘Watching Scotty Grow’,
which thankfully vanished without a trace.
In April 2006, CNN named ‘Honey’ the worst song of all time. They were
being kind.
22

Yummy Yummy
Yummy
(The Ohio Express)
Love in your tummy? How about a

hand grenade instead?
The Ohio Express was a bubblegum garage band made up of studio musicians
working out of New York—essentially as a front for producers Jerry Kasenetz
and Jeffrey Katz’s Super K Productions. The lead singer was the hideous Joey
Levine, who as co-writer (with one Arthur Resnick) must bear much of the
shame and hopefully horrific punishment one day in hell for writing this
dross for monetary gain.
Ohio Express became the ultimate bubblegum band. Their biggest hit,
‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’, was crappy, crappy, crappy beyond belief. What should
they care? It sold ten million copies, as did their next big hit, ‘Chewy, Chewy’.
During their heyday in the late sixties, the group released several albums
and a shitload—I use the term advisedly—of singles for Buddah Records,
including ‘Sweeter Than Sugar’, ‘Mercy’ and ‘Down at Lulu’s’. Kasenetz,
Katz and Levine kept sticking together hit after hit for the Express ‘as its
membership constantly mutated’—their words not mine.
23

They were pioneers in their way—the B-side of ‘Sweeter Than Sugar’
was called ‘Bitter Lemon’ and was simply the A-side recorded backwards.
It is a frightening fact, but I regret to inform you that the Ohio Express
are still performing, even today. (This is like discovering that Joseph Stalin is
still alive.)
From their website: ‘Three decades later the Ohio Express remains
dazzling with their truly good time happy music. The lyrics sound just as fresh
and the arrangements are as much fun as they were then when the Ohio
Express topped the charts.’
And . . .
‘. . . the Ohio Express has a huge fan base in Europe as well as the United
States and tour all over the globe.’
And . . .
‘On special occasions original Doug Grassel will also join the group.’
I don’t know. To me it sounded like a threat.
If you’re not a Baby Boomer, it’s almost impossible to conceive of how
bad they were back then. To think they are still dedicated to being just as bad
now is truly a frightening thought.
24

Two Little Boys
(Rolf Harris)
No, Michael, we don’t think it’s a

good idea you cover it
‘Two Little Boys’ was written by Theodore Morse and Edward Madden in
1902. It was originally recorded by British music hall legend Harry Lauder.
The song is thought to have been inspired by the fiction of Victorian
children’s writer E.H. Ewing, whose book Jackanapes was the story of its
eponymous hero and his friend Tom, who, having ridden wooden horses
together as little boys, find themselves riding real ones on a Napoleonic
battlefield. There Jackanapes rides to the rescue of the wounded and
dismounted Tom. Tom tells our hero to save himself.
‘Leave you?’ he shouts indignantly. ‘To save my skin? No, Tom, not even
to save my soul.’
And then he gets shot and dies.
Let that be a lesson to you: Fuck Tom.
‘Two Little Boys’ was revived in 1969 by Rolf Harris, the Australian
singer/TV personality/painter who moved to Britain in the mid-fifties and had
a huge hit with the novelty song ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ in 1963. He’s
now become a sort of national treasure in the UK.
25

In the late sixties Harris made a return visit to his native Australia and
stayed briefly with folk musician Ted Egan. Egan sang him the song, and
Harris recorded it on tape. On his return to the UK he persuaded his television
producer to let him sing it on his BBC variety show. But then he discovered
he’d lost the tape and had to ring Egan, twelve thousand miles away, and
ask him to sing the song over the phone to remind him of the words. He then
played it at a concert and the audience went ape (for reasons unfathomable
to me), and so he recorded it as a single.
And the rest, as they say, is hysterical. It became the biggest-selling single
of 1969. On Desert Island Discs, then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
chose it as her favourite song of all time. It touched her to the bottom of her
heart.
Personally I was affected elsewhere, around the heart of my bottom, really.
Harris later went on to record another hit single with ‘Stairway to Heaven’,
the signature anthem from rock supergroup Led Zeppelin. He accompanied
himself using a wobble board. More of that later.
You have to hand it to the man. You just can’t tie him down.
26

Ruby, Don’t Take
Your Love
to Town
(Kenny Rogers & The First Edition)
A toe-tapper about sluts tormenting paraplegics
This song was written by Mel Tillis. He based it on a real couple who lived near
his family home in Florida. The man had been wounded in Germany in World
War II and sent to an infirmary in England where he met and later married the
nurse who took care of him. The couple moved to the man’s home in Florida,
but his recovery was not complete and he was continually hospitalised for his
wounds. His wife started seeing another man while he lay in bed with drips in
him. I’m not making this up.
Tillis changed the war to Vietnam, as he wrote it in the 1960s. It’s a catchy
number about a paralysed man who sits home every night while his slutty wife,
Ruby, puts on her strawberry lipstick and crotchless knickers and heads out for
her date with Billy Joe or Bubba or whatever guy she can find sitting alone in his
bib and baseball cap in Sudsuckers. Our victim reaches for the Mid-West Solution
To Every Problem but can’t reach the gun cabinet from the wheelchair.
27

In real life, the man Tillis was writing about actually could reach it—he
shot his wife dead and then killed himself.
This appalling song was originally recorded by Johnny Darrell, whose
version was a country hit in 1967. It was also recorded by Waylon Jennings
and Roger Miller, but it was best suited to Kenny Rogers’ growly-bear voice;
Rogers’ band, The First Edition, had just had their first success with ‘Just
Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)’. ‘Ruby’ was a
runaway hit for him in 1969 and by the end of 1970 had sold over a million
copies. Go figure.
This song and ‘Lucille’ typify everything that sucks about American
country and western music. It turns guilt, co-dependence and emotional
manipulation into high virtue, and Everywoman into Jezebel.
Perhaps ‘Ruby’ was popular because the Vietnam War was raging at the
time. Who knows? But you picked a fine time to sing this, Kenny.
28

Sugar, Sugar
(The Archies)
Diabetes set to music
In the late sixties ‘Sugar, Sugar’ was a number one hit single, released on
an album called Everything’s Archie, supposedly by fictional characters The
Archies, who performed on the Saturday-morning cartoon show, The Archie
Show. The group itself was never seen except as cartoon characters.
They were actually a group of studio musicians brought together to help
make the cartoon. Ron Dante’s lead vocals were accompanied by those of
Toni Wine—or is that Whine?—who sang the falsetto ‘I’m gonna make your
life so sweet’ on ‘Sugar, Sugar’ and will have to account for this on Judgment
Day. Andy Kim and Ellie Greenwich are the other two defendants—or band
members, whatever.
The man responsible for bringing them together was a promoter and
producer by the name of Don Kirshner, who also created The Monkees. He
claimed he wanted to do the same thing with cartoon characters because
they were much easier to work with than real people.
Come on, Peter Tork wasn’t that bad. He was just drawn that way.
‘Sugar, Sugar’ was co-written by Jeff Barry. To be fair, he and Ellie
Greenwich also wrote, among other songs, ‘Chapel of Love’, the brilliant
‘River Deep, Mountain High’, and ‘Then He Kissed Me’ with Phil Spector.
29

The song was the number one single in 1969, outselling songs by The
Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and David Bowie.
Archies members went on to bigger and better things. Dante produced
‘Mandy’ for Barry Manilow, Toni Wine wrote ‘Candida’ for the dreadful Tony
Orlando, and Andy Kim finally recorded his own version of ‘Sugar, Sugar’ in
1980 under the name Baron Longfellow.
In 2006, ‘Sugar, Sugar’ was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall
of Fame, as Kim is originally from Quebec.
But then so is Celine Dion.
30

THE WORST COUNTRY AND WESTERN
SONG TITLES
THE RUNNERS UP
40 ‘I Hate Every Bone in Your Body Except Mine’ Jimmy Velvit
39 ‘I Still Miss You, Baby, But My Aim’s Gettin’ Better’

The Cordwood Draggers
38 ‘I Went Back to My Fourth Wife for the Third Time and Gave
Her a Second Chance to Make a First Class Fool Out of Me’
Reverend Bill C. Wirtz
37 ‘She Got the Ring and I Got the Finger’ The Ridge Riders
36 ‘There Ain’t Enough Whiskey in Tennessee to Drink the Ugly

Offa You’ Yankee Jack
35 ‘I Been Roped and Thrown by Jesus in the Holy Ghost Corral’

Bobby Bare
34 ‘I Don’t Know Whether to Kill Myself or Go Bowling’

Thom Sharp
31

33 ‘Swing Wide Your Gate of Love’ Hank Thompson
32 ‘I Would Have Wrote You a Letter, But I Couldn’t Spell Yuck!’

Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
31 ‘Did I Shave My Legs for This?’ Deana Carter
30 ‘Billy Broke My Heart at Walgreens and I Cried All the Way to

Sears’ Ruby Wright
29 ‘My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, And I Don’t Love Jesus’

Jimmy Buffett
28 ‘You Can’t Have Your Kate and Edith Too’ The Statler Brothers
27 ‘You Done Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat’
John Denver
26 ‘If You’re Gonna Do Me Wrong, Do It Right’ Vern Gosdin
25 ‘Welcome to Dumpsville, Population You’ Ace Troubleshooter
32

24 ‘Hog Sloppin’ Time in the Hollow’ Chuck Mayfield
23 ‘If I Had Shot the Bitch When I Met Her, I’d Be Out By Now’
Jimmy Velvit
22 ‘If I Had It To Do All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You’ Dan
Hicks & His Hot Licks
21 ‘It’s Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night that Chew Your Ass Out All
Day Long’ Cherry Bombs
33

The early
seventies
Dawn of a new earache
‘I did a lot of wrong things, but I don’t

think I’m a bad person.’
I k e Tu r ne r, who b i g amously married Tina Turner and, as her
au t o b i o g r ap hy re v ealed , violently abused her, poured hot cof f ee on her
fac e, b u r ne d he r li p s wi t h cigarettes and made her perf orm w hile sick
and p reg nant . H e sp ent $11 million on cocaine and w as married at least
thirteen times.

Chirpy Chirpy
Cheep Cheep
(Middle of the Road)
Never a gun when you need one
Those belonging to Generations X and Y are lucky for many reasons: ATMs,
computers, mobile phones, vibrating condoms—and they never had to listen
to this fucking song.
It was sung by a Scottish quartet called Middle of the Road, who gave
even MOR a bad name. The song starts off with the victim claiming that she
heard one of her parents singing ‘Ooh-wee, chirpy chirpy, cheep cheep’. The next
morning said victim claims that her primary caregiver has disappeared.
To the nutfarm, presumably. The rest of the song is an enquiry as to the
whereabouts of both parents, to the endless repetition of bird noises. To
call this song annoying is like saying that Jack the Ripper had issues around
women.
Even the band members hated it. Drummer Ken Andrew said: ‘We
were as disgusted with the thought of recording it as most people were
at the thought of buying it. But at the end of the day, we liked it.’ I guess
the money might have had something to do with that.
36

Inexplicably, others liked it too. Aided by the patronage of the BBC’s Tony
Blackburn—may he rot in hell—it became a massive hit. It reached number
one in the UK for five interminable weeks in June 1971.
Unlikely story: when lead singer Sally Carr attended the Isle of Wight
Song Festival in 1985, she was recognised by a lady who was actually thrilled
to have the chance to tell her how the song saved her life. Apparently she
was very ill in hospital at the time of the song’s release, and had slipped into
a coma. Her family played ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ incessantly at her
bedside. She claimed that it was hearing this that brought her round—that
or her brain burst back into life so that she could regain consciousness and
turn off the tape player.
PS: Sally Carr apparently brought the subtlety and deftness which graced
much of her singing to other uses after the band broke up, gaining a certificate
in bricklaying.
But there is some bad news, and I’d rather you heard this first from a
friend. The band have re-formed. Apparently they’ve performed more live
concerts since 1991 than they ever did in the seventies. They make regular
appearances on TV in Germany.
See them next on the Eurovision Song Contest. Singing ‘Franky Franky
Furter Furter’ for Germany. And winning.
37

Sylvia’s Mother
(Dr Hook and the Medicine Show)
Mrs Abria makes the right call
There was the hippie, there was the guitarist with the cowboy hat and the eye
patch; it was like a Village People theme band singing Barry Manilow covers.
They were responsible for ‘A Little Bit More’, which sounded like a love song
written by a porn-addicted virgin for his sister. It was ear-achingly, tooth-
rottingly bad.
Yet somehow, surprisingly, ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ was worse.
Surprisingly, because it was written by the excellent Shel Silverstein.
Silverstein was a poet, cartoonist, screenwriter and children’s author who
also wrote and composed a lot of Dr Hook’s better songs, including ‘On the
Cover of Rolling Stone’ and that great seventies anthem, ‘Don’t Give A Dose to
the One You Love Most’ (‘. . . Give her some marmalade, give her some toast!’). He
also wrote ‘Boy Named Sue’ for Johnny Cash and ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’
for Marianne Faithfull.
So what went wrong here? Apparently ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ was intended as
a parody of all those teenage heartbreak love songs, but somewhere along the
line me and a few million others missed the satire. Instead, SM became just
another bad example of the genre.
Perhaps it’s Dennis Locorriere’s weepy voice. When you’re responsible
38

for ‘When You’re In Love With a Beautiful Woman’ how is it possible for
anyone to know when you’re taking the piss? The lines become very blurred.
Whenever I hear SM on the radio I want to tear the speakers out with my
teeth.
It’s a song about a guy ringing up his girlfriend to try and persuade her
to come back to him, and her mother picks up the phone instead. Her mother
tells him, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off because she’s marrying someone
else.
That phone call was a long time ago now. Sylvia is probably not only
a mother herself now, but perhaps a grandmother as well. Her and the fella
from Galveston way have probably had thirty-five very happy years together.
I doubt if Mrs Abria is still with us. But if she is, I think Sylv should go round
there with a big bunch of flowers and say thanks. I think she made a good
call.
Bon Jovi covered ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ on their 2003 live album/DVD. Go
figure; all that hair and not one ounce of shame.
39

The Candy Man
(Sammy Davis Jr)
Roald Dahl must be turning in his grave
Aubrey Woods—who played Bill the candy store owner—first performed this
stupid and irritating song in the 1971 movie Willie Wonka and the Chocolate
Factory. Co-writer Anthony Newley was so appalled at Woods’ performance
that he asked producers Stan Margulies and David Wolper to let him perform
the role if they could reshoot the scene, but his offer was turned down.
As the movie wrapped up production, record executive Mike Curb
recorded an instrumental backing for the song with Sammy Davis Jr in mind.
The former member of the Rat Pack didn’t like the song at first—always trust
your first impression—but decided to do it anyway.
The result: inexplicably, it became the biggest hit of Davis’s eight-decade
career.
It’s a song about someone who makes chocolate, for God’s sake. What
the hell is so good about it? I would rather be strapped to a rack and forced to
listen to Kenny G.
Well, maybe that’s going too far.
And I like Sammy Davis Jr. He did poignant songs about sad old drunks
and being true to yourself. So what is so good about a song about making
confectionery? I don’t get it. And Sammy’s not around to tell me any more.
40

Timothy
(The Buoys)
The best song ever written about people

eating each other
Who, in their right mind, writes a song about cannibalism? The answer, of
course, is the same guy who writes a song about piña coladas.
Back in 1971, before he made a rum-based cocktail famous, Rupert
Holmes was just twenty years old and trying to make a go of things in the
music world, finding work wherever he could arranging music, playing as a
session musician, even writing shampoo commercials.
He had a friend who was a sound engineer at Scepter Records and knew
some guys from Pennsylvania with a bubblegum band called The Buoys. They
persuaded Scepter to sign them to a one-single deal but Holmes knew they
wouldn’t promote it. The only way to get them noticed, he decided, was to
deliberately pen a song that the radio stations would ban.
On his website Rupert explains how he was working on an arrangement
for Andy Kim (you remember him: ‘Sugar . . . irritating riff—honey, honey—
another irritating riff’) of the song ‘Sixteen Tons’. He was humming it to
himself ‘. . . a coal man’s made out of muscle and blood, skin and bones . . .’
while watching a cooking show on television. It somehow occurred to this
remarkable young man that it sounded like a recipe.
41

So he wrote a song about three coal miners, trapped down a mine shaft,
who start looking round for a snack while they wait to be rescued. The Buoys
recorded it to a bubblegum arrangement and sang it like it was a catchy CCR
number. Holmes played piano on the track.
Here’s a snatch of the lyrics:
‘My stomach was full, full as it could be, and nobody ever got around to finding
Timothy, Timothy . . .’
Yep, if you like piña coladas, you’ll just love ‘Timothy’.
As Holmes predicted, radio stations did ban it, thus saving it from obscurity
and pushing it to seventeen on the Billboard charts. But in truth, it was really a
song about a young guy hungry for success more than human flesh.
Rupert has since said that if he saved an entire orphanage from a fire
and carried the last child out on his shoulders, the first news crews on the
scene would rush up to him and say, ‘Aren’t you the guy who wrote “The Piña
Colada Song”?’
While that song, penned eight years later, made him wealthy and famous,
he described it to New Yorker magazine in 2003 as ‘the success that ruined his
career’, drawing attention from his more serious and heartfelt musical works.
Rupert has written several Broadway plays, written songs that have been
performed by Barbra Streisand, Judy Collins and Britney Spears, created a
television show called Remember WENN and written a novel called Where The
Truth Lies. His works have won Tonys and Emmys. Despite all this, he whines,
he’s best known for ‘The Piña Colada Song’ (or ‘Escape’ as it was actually called).
Instead of bleating about the price of fame, Rupert might do well to remember
that if people didn’t remember him for that song, they might instead remember
him as the nutbag who wrote the only pop song ever about cannibalism.
And The Buoys? They were never heard of again. Perhaps Rupert ate
them.
42

Me and You
and a Dog
Named Boo
(Lobo)
A man called wolf sings a turkey about a dog
This is about two hippies and a dog taking a cross-country road trip in an old
car that runs poorly. And they say that nuthin’ never comes from nuthin’! The
protagonists of this drivel get mired in the Georgia clay and are later caught
stealing eggs from a farmer and made to work to pay it off. The farmer’s name
is McDonald. This is the integrity of thought that went into this one.
They end up living in Los Angeles, but the old car makes them want to
hit the road again. Yes, for God’s sake, go! Do anything but sing about it.
Its creator was Roland Kent LaVoie, a native of Tallahassee, Florida, who
scored several soft rock hits in the seventies. He says that after he wrote ‘Me
and You and a Dog Named Boo’ he sensed the song’s hit potential, which
makes him almost supernaturally prescient in my humble opinion. LaVoie
adopted the name ‘Lobo’, which means ‘Wolf ’ in Spanish.
I have always been intrigued with this song. What if the dog had been
43

named Spot, or Spike, or Fluffykins? What rhymes? Lucky for him it was called
Boo.
He followed this up with an album, Of A Simple Man, which contained
much better songs and his biggest chart hit, ‘I’d Love You to Want Me’, as well
as another top ten hit, ‘Don’t Expect Me to Be Your Friend’.
By the end of the seventies, though, Lobo’s star was on the wane, as were
those of the hippies he had written about—and Boo’s, I assume, as there are
seven doggie years to one of ours. The Wolf faded into obscurity.
However, his popularity in Asia, of all places, is having a resurgence and
he has started touring there. Singing, presumably, ‘Me and You and a Dog
Named Woo’.
44

Puppy Love
(Donny Osmond)
Little Donny does his business everywhere
‘Puppy Love’ was written by Paul Anka in 1960 for Annette Funicello, for
whom he had a similarly junior canine affection. Annette was one of the
original Mouseketeers and perhaps she helped him raise his banner high,
high, high. Twelve years later this drivel was revived by Donny Osmond, who
took it to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and top of the UK singles
chart for five weeks in the endless summer of 1972.
Donny was a pop idol in his mid-teens and all washed up by the time
he was twenty-five. Perhaps he regrets the song now. ‘Puppy Love’ is not a
song a man can feel comfortable singing when he’s shaving on a more or less
regular basis. Any self-respecting teenager shouldn’t feel comfortable about
it either, but we’ll come to that.
Donny was one of nine little Osmonds, born to George, a Mormon
sergeant major, and his wife Olive in Ogden, Utah. Four of the older brothers
formed a quartet called The Osmonds and appeared on the Andy Williams
Show in the early sixties. They were Utah’s answer to the Von Trapp Family
but were—if that is humanly possible—even more impossibly cute.
When he was four, Donny joined them and became their frontman, or
front toddler, which involved dressing as a miniature version of Elvis and
45

smiling a lot, a feat for which he was sublimely equipped as he possessed
teeth with the radiance of an atomic explosion.
Donny quickly became the most adorable singing dwarf on planet
Earth.
Forty-five years later, the memories are a little harder to cope with.
He recently cried on a TV chat show when asked if he was angry about his
father’s role in pushing him in front of the cameras at such a young and
impressionable age. He said he wished he’d stayed in Utah.
The song made him a teen superstar: he and David Cassidy were the
biggest ‘cover boy’ popstars of the early seventies. Prepubescent girls chased
him into restaurants and passed out in his presence, although he claims
proudly that, being a good Mormon boy. he never slept with any of them, nor
drank nor even smoked. Well then, Donny, what the fuck was the point?
He claims that Jesus Christ and Elton John are his heroes.
Over to you on that one, Elton.
He has now settled into semi-famous obscurity, appearing as a ‘where
are they now?’ item on TV chat shows, and hosting a website that sells Donny
sandals. To protect the feet, presumably, in case one steps into any puppy
love.
He still performs THAT song occasionally. ‘I have a country version, a
sexy version and a cheesy nightclub version,’ he told Britain’s Daily Mail last
year. ‘I am trying to infuse it with maturity.’
You may well ask how one infuses a song about prepubescent infatuation
with maturity. I have no answer for you. ‘I will never escape that song,’ he
claimed recently, brushing away a tear. ‘I will always be Mr Puppy Love.’
That’s life, Donny. You fuck one donkey . . .
46

I Am Woman
(Helen Reddy)
The song that burned a thousand bras
‘I Am Woman’ is regarded as one of the most culturally significant songs

of the seventies, the anthem for the worldwide women’s movement that
changed the face of sexual politics in the twentieth century. For some it
represents a hymn to female emancipation; others despise it as a song
about man-hating.
It was performed by Melbourne singer/songwriter Helen Reddy, who’d
already scored her first US top forty hit with a cover of ‘I Don’t Know How to
Love Him’ in 1971.
Reddy has claimed that the song was divinely inspired. She remembers
lying in bed one night and the words ‘I am strong, I am invincible, I am
woman’ kept going over and over in her head. ‘I had been chosen to get a
message across.’ The next day she wrote the lyric and handed it to guitarist
Ray Burton to put it to music.
Burton was twenty-six at the time and playing in Los Angeles with
Aussie rock band The Executives. He has a different recollection of the song’s
genesis. He told Sunday Magazine that he spoke to Reddy after she attended a
series of regular women’s meetings at which, he says, they would ‘sit around
and whinge about their boyfriends’.
47

‘I said, “If you’re so serious about the whole thing, why don’t you jot
down some lyrics and I’ll make it a song?” And that’s pretty much what
happened.’
Burton says Reddy scribbled down some lyrics on a piece of paper and he
went home and wrote the whole song in three hours. He rewrote some of the
words, and used a melody he’d already been toying with.
‘It’s not one of my better songs. I had commerciality in mind because I
knew the women’s lib thing was going on. I figured it was a way to make a
few bucks.’
Reddy, however, insists Burton didn’t change a word of hers. Whatever
the truth is, the song almost vanished without trace on initial release. More
than a year later, however, it was chosen to run behind the opening credits
of the film Stand Up and Be Counted, a lightweight Hollywood women’s lib
comedy starring Jacqueline Bisset and Loretta Swit.
On the strength of this, Capitol decided to release the song as a single.
But it was too short, so Reddy was asked to write an additional verse and
chorus. The extra verse inserted the song’s only reference to males (‘Until I
make my brother understand’).
It was the year that Gloria Steinem launched Ms in the US and Cleo first
appeared in Australia. The song was perfect for the zeitgeist. It reached number
one on 9 December 1972, the week Reddy gave birth to her son Jordan.
‘I Am Woman’ earned Reddy a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal
Performance, and at the awards ceremony she famously concluded her
acceptance speech by thanking God ‘because She makes everything
possible’.
The song was the launching pad for Reddy’s stellar career. She has sold
more than fifteen million albums and ten million singles worldwide, including
48

‘Delta Dawn’, ‘Ruby Red Dress’, ‘Angie Baby’ and ‘Ain’t No Way to Treat a
Lady’.
Success brought with it unimagined wealth and financed a gaudy lifestyle
of mansions, limousines, jewellery and speedboats. In her tell-all Hollywood
book, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, Julia Phillips claimed that
by the time Reddy and her husband completed their acrimonious divorce in
1982 they’d blown forty million bucks.
Meanwhile Burton, expelled from the US because of work permit
problems, watched the song’s meteoric rise from a distance. For a time he
says he lived on unemployment benefits. He took legal action against Reddy
in 1998 to recover a portion of songwriter royalties that he claims she’d
withheld from him. The matter was settled out of court, and Reddy disputes
all Burton’s claims.
Ray Burton is still around, working mainly in jingles and movie scores.
He still sounds a little bitter when it comes to roaring women, though. ‘Hey
everyone has a cross to bear and it could be worse right?’ he told Songfacts. ‘At
least I have a giant hit song under my belt. I get ribbed about it all the time by
some of the guys I know but not all of them. The fact is I DO believe in equality
for all. I wouldn’t mind my own little dose of equality though . . . Helen refuses
to mention me in any of her interviews on TV, on radio, and claims that she
wrote the songs.’
For once, anyway, seems a woman came out on top.
Ironically this song would also find its way onto my Top 100 Songs list—
the Tex Perkins version, recorded for the 2007 No Man’s Woman compilation
where he sounds like a constipated Tom Waite after mainlining acid. Huge.
49

Little Willie
(The Sweet)
Is it someone’s name or a condition?
This is a song about someone called Little Willie, who’s a good dancer but
refuses to go home when requested. That’s about it, folks. That’s as deep
as it gets, although he does perform something called a star shoe shimmy
shuffle down. I’ve never seen this personally, though I would like to, given
said opportunity.
In the early seventies, The Sweet had secured a management deal with
a newly formed, and unknown, songwriting team consisting of Nicky Chinn
and Mike Chapman. Of course, they became very well known later, after they
inflicted ‘Some Girls’ on us.
The Sweet’s first album appearance was on a ‘Music For Pleasure’
album—they had one side and a bunch of one-hit wonders called The Pipkins
had the other. The album was named after The Pipkins’ only hit, ‘Gimme Dat
Ding’. (The lyrics would have made Paul Simon bilious with envy: ‘gimme dat
gimme dat gimme gimme gimme dat’ and so on.)
The Sweet touched similar musical highs with Chinn/Chapman tunes
such as ‘Chop Chop’ and ‘Tom Tom Turnaround’.
It was the sort of stuff that would be too puerile for The Wiggles.
Chinn and Chapman hindered the band’s chance of rock respectability
50

by bringing in session musicians, as had been done with The Monkees, even
though the members of Sweet were competent musically.
However, the band scored huge hits in 1972, with ‘Little Willie’ and ‘Wig
Wam Bam’—which from memory perpetuates racial stereotypes of native
American Indians—and both peaked at number four on the UK charts. The
band also capitalised on the glam explosion, rivalling Gary Glitter, T.Rex,
Queen and Slade for outrageous costumes.
But soon afterwards the relationship between Sweet and Chinn/
Chapman soured. The band members had grown tired of the artistic control
the songwriters exerted over them and the bubblegum image they were asked
to present. As a result, their B-sides got heavier with each release. But the
dichotomy of bubblegum A-sides and heavy rock B-sides only confused their
teenage fan following. Indeed, The Sweet’s live performances consisted of
B-sides—they played at one of our school dances and they weren’t too bad—
and various medleys of rock’n’roll classics. They rarely pulled out their Little
Willie in public.
The group finally decided to record without Chinn and Chapman
and dropped their glam image in favour of a more conventional hard rock
appearance. They concentrated on proving their musical talents with self-
written, hard rock/pop album tracks.
And so they disappeared.
51

Alone Again
(Naturally)
(Gilbert O’Sullivan)
You shoulda jumped
This particular song starts with the singer telling of his plans to commit
suicide after being left at the altar subsequent to the death of both his parents.
It’s truly music to slash your wrists by—even Charles Aznavour would have
baulked at this one. O’Sullivan has said that the song is not autobiographical,
as he was only eleven when his own father died, and didn’t like him very
much anyway. Even so, he managed to capture the urge to self-harm really
well.
Is this a good thing? I ask myself.
Born Raymond Edward O’Sullivan, he adopted the stage name Gilbert
O’Sullivan in an attempt to get rich and get out of Swindon, both under-
standable ambitions.
His eye-catching visual image comprised a pudding basin haircut, cloth
cap and short trousers.
Was it his eccentricity that helped propel this song to number three in
the UK and number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US? I would
52

like to think so, but I’d probably be wrong. Like many a horrible ditty before
it, it earned him three Grammy nominations. He followed it up with another
deeply introspective work, ‘Get Down’, which was a plea to his dog to get
down off the furniture.
At least he didn’t call it Boo.
53

Ben
(Michael Jackson)
Ode to a rodent
This is a love song from a boy to a rat. It was recorded by Michael Jackson when
he was about the age of the boy he had pyjama parties with at Neverland. So I
don’t think it is an understatement to say that for these two reasons this song
creeps most people out.
Don Black and Walter Scharf wrote it for the 1972 movie of the same
name, sequel to a movie called Willard, which was about a pet rat that turns
evil and recruits other rats to attack humans. It’s rumoured the song was
originally written for Donny Osmond, who was specialising in small animals
at the time (see ‘Puppy Love’), but he was unavailable.
Don Black has written lyrics for many movie songs, including ‘Diamonds
Are Forever’ and ‘Born Free’. At his 2007 induction into the Songwriters Hall
of Fame, he commented on the making of ‘Ben’: ‘I said, “You can’t write about
a rat.” I mean, I’m not going to use words like “cheese”. I thought the best
thing to do is write about friendship.’
It was Michael Jackson’s first number one hit as a solo artist, back in the days
when he still had black skin and a nose. The song was used in a 1991 episode of
The Simpsons, where Jackson guest stars as an overweight, white mental patient.
Truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction.
54

Tie a Yellow Ribbon
Round the
Ole Oak Tree
(Dawn featuring Tony Orlando)
. . . and hang me with it.
Remember Tony Orlando? He looked like the missing sixth member of the
Village People. The other members of Dawn were Telma Hopkins and Joyce
Vincent Wilson, and together the band scored a string of hits, including
1970’s ‘Knock Three Times’, about a man falling in love with his beautiful
downstairs neighbour, who he has never met but claims to be in love with. He
asks her to knock on the ceiling three times if she wants to meet him, twice
on the radiator pipe if she doesn’t. It has been called the ultimate stalker’s
song.
A yellow ribbon as a token of remembrance came from the nineteenth
century when women wore a yellow ribbon in their hair to show their devotion
to a husband or sweetheart serving in the US Cavalry. Yellow is the official
colour of Cavalry insignia, and the song ‘She Wore a Yellow Ribbon’, which
later inspired the John Wayne movie of the same name, refers to this.
55

The song just does not seem to die. After its initial release in 1973, it
had a fresh wave of popularity in 1981 in the wake of the Iranian hostage
crisis. More recently, in 2006, a viral video circulated featuring the Asylum
Street Spankers performing a parody, ‘Stick Magnetic Ribbons on Your SUV’,
mocking the yellow ribbon car magnets that showed support for American
soldiers in Iraq.
56

Do You Wanna
Touch Me?
(Oh Yeah)
(Gary Glitter)
A queasy uneasy feeling
It’s not that this number by Gary Glitter was such a bad song. It was just pop
music. No, what makes ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me?’ so impossible to listen to
now is what came later.
‘Do you wanna touch me there? Where? There! Yeah! Oh!’
Yeah well, Gary, that’s all very well, as long as a woman’s past the age of
consent. When you’re sixty and she’s ten, the song starts to sound just that
bit tacky. Where, Gary? There! Every single line! Yeah!
Glitter—real name Paul Francis Gadd—was huge in the seventies with
a string of glam rock hits including ‘Rock and Roll (Parts 1 and 2)’, ‘I’m the
Leader of the Gang (I Am)’ and ‘Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again’. He challenged
Sweet, Slade and T.Rex in the pop charts and has had twenty-five hit singles
that have spent a total of 179 weeks in the UK Top 100.
At the height of his fame he owned thirty glitter suits and fifty pairs
57

of trademark silver platform boots. He’s still considered one of the most
influential British musicians of his generation, his theatrical performance
style becoming known as ‘panto pop’.
At time of writing he is in jail in Vietnam for child sexual abuse.
In November 1997, Glitter was arrested after child pornography images
were discovered on the hard drive of a personal computer he’d taken to a
PC World shop in Bristol for repairs. He was convicted for downloading four
thousand images of child pornography and was afterwards listed as a sex
offender. His segment in Spiceworld: The Movie was cut and he served two
months in jail.
So he took his act on the road. He attempted to move to Cuba in 2000
but was thwarted after the Cuban Consulate in London was tipped off with
his picture and real name. From there he skipped to Cambodia and finally
Vietnam. He was arrested there in 2005 and charged with raping a minor.
(During interrogations by police, Glitter said he allowed an eleven-year-old
girl to sleep in his bed after she claimed she was afraid of ghosts, attorney Le
Thanh Kinh told Associated Press.)
A charge of rape was dropped for, according to Glitter’s lawyer, ‘lack of
evidence’. After having received compensatory payments from Glitter, the
families of two girls, aged ten and eleven, appealed to the courts for clemency
for him. Glitter was instead tried on charges of committing obscene acts,
found guilty and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.
However, Glitter it seems is not bad, just drawn that way. In May 2006,
he gave his first interview in more than eight years to the BBC. He said, ‘To
my knowledge I have not had sex with anyone under 18’ and that ‘I know the
line to cross’. He claimed he was ‘not a paedophile’ and said, ‘I felt after I left
prison in England that maybe there was a slim chance I could put my life back
58

on track and have a career, but after some time, the people that surrounded
me, lawyers and managers, said: “We don’t think so, the media have already
made such a big deal about this.”’
He called the press ‘the worst enemy in the world’.
See? It all makes sense. All you people out there read in the papers about
a man already convicted of possessing child pornography and automatically
assume that because he was sleeping with children in his bed he was also
having sex with them.
They would never let him touch them there. Where? There!
Yeah?
Oh.
59

THE WORST COUNTRY AND WESTERN
SONG TITLES
AND THE WINNERS ARE …
20 ‘You’re Out Doing What I’m Here Doing Without’ Gene Watson
19 ‘Walk Out Backwards Slowly So I’ll Think You’re Walking In’

Bill Anderson
18 ‘How Can a Whiskey Six Years Old Whip a Man That’s Thirty-
Two?’ Norma Jean
17 ‘My Wife Ran Off With My Best Friend and I Sure Do Miss
Him’ Phil Earhart
16 ‘One Day When You Swing That Skillet, My Face Ain’t Gonna
Be There’ Richard Hardwick
15 ‘How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?’ Dan Hicks
14 ‘She Broke My Heart, I Broke Her Jaw’ Rick Stanley and

Lookout Mountain
60

13 ‘Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed’ Kinky
Friedman
12 ‘You’re the Hangnail in My Life, and I Can’t Bite You Off’

Hoyt Axton
11 ‘I’ve Got Tears in My Ears From Lying on My Back in Bed While

I Cry Over You’ Homer & Jethro
10 ‘You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly’ Loretta Lynn
9 ‘Her Eyes Say Yes But the Restraining Order Says No’
Hit the Lights
8 ‘I’m at Home Getting Hammered (While She’s Out Getting

Nailed)’ Banjo & Sullivan
7 ‘Get off the table, Mabel, the Two Dollars is for the Beer’
Bull Moose Jackson
6 ‘Jesus Loves Me But He Can’t Stand You’ Austin Lounge Lizards
5 ‘I Went to Bed at Two with a Ten and Woke Up at Ten with a

Two’ Willie Nelson
61

4 ‘I’m Messed Up in Mexico, Livin’ on Refried Dreams’
Tim McGraw
3 ‘The Last Word in Lonesome is Me’ Roger Miller
2 ‘If My Nose Was Running Money, I’d Blow It All On You’ Mike
Snider
1 ‘I’ve Been Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart’

Johnny Cash
62

The mid
seventies
Rock bottom
‘There are more love songs than anything

else. If songs could make you do
something, we’d all love one another.’
Frank Z appa

(You’re) Having
My Baby
(Paul Anka)
The case for early termination
Paul Anka recorded his first single, ‘I Confess’, at the tender age of fourteen.
In 1957 he went to the Big Apple, where he auditioned for Don Costa at the
ABC network, singing a verse he’d written to a former babysitter. The song,
‘Diana’, brought Anka instant stardom, rocketed to number one on the charts
and became one of the best-selling 45s in history.
From that point on, his fate, and ours, was sealed. He followed up with
‘Lonely Boy’ and ‘Put Your Head On My Shoulder’ and by the time he was
seventeen he was one of the biggest teen idols of the time. He went on to
write the theme for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Tom Jones’ biggest
hit, ‘She’s a Lady’, and the English lyrics for Frank Sinatra’s signature song,
‘My Way’.
If it was just these few minor transgressions, we could have forgiven him.
But in 1974, when he should have been sitting on a yacht in the south of
France sipping cocktails and having would-be starlets put their head in his lap,
he instead teamed up with Odia Coates to record ‘(You’re) Having My Baby’.
64

It’s about a guy who knocks up his girlfriend and uses this as an
opportunity to write a love song to himself. It stayed at number one for
three weeks, so someone must have liked it. Women everywhere gasped in
appreciation as Paul told his lover, presumably while she was dealing with
water retention, stretch marks, and then birthing pains—that some women
liken to being tortured by the Gestapo—that he really enjoys what his baby is
doing to her body. Words drip like melted honey from this man’s lips. If he’d
whispered these lyrics to his own wife in the labour ward she would probably
have inserted one of his platinum records where the sun don’t shine.
‘What a lovely way of sayin’ how much you love me.’ No, Paul, it’s a child,
with a soul and a destiny of its own, not ego gratification.
But why waste my breath?
This is the man who wrote ‘Puppy Love’.
65

Horse With
No Name
(America)
Songwriter with no intelligence
If you gave one of those guys who wear bicycle helmets on buses a guitar and
asked them to write a song, chances are they’d come up with something like
America’s ‘Horse With No Name’. Actually, there’s a very good chance they
would come up with something better . . .
So we brought the culprit in for questioning. Here’s a transcript.
‘Dewey? Dewey Bunnell. That’s your name? Really? Okay, okay. Let me
put it to you this way. You’re in a desert. Then how come there’s so much
stuff? Apparently in this particular desert there’s all this life to look at. Funny,
because you know, usually that’s what deserts have a critical shortage of, on
account of the fact that they are, well, you know, deserts. You say there were
rocks and things. What things, bucko? Biros? 7/8 spanners? Kentucky Fried
Chicken outlets?
‘There was sand—okay I got that, it’s a desert, gotta be sand, that
figures. It’s the hills and rings that have got me confused. Rings? What are
rings doing in a desert? What kind of rings? Like wedding rings? Bull rings?
66

Burger rings? I don’t want to be obtuse, but two lines in and I’m confused
already.
‘Now this bit here, when you talk about the heat being hot, now this
sounds existentialist to me. Are you one of them damned existentialists,
Dewey? Is that what you are? Because if you are, I want you to fess up right
now. Okay. So if the heat was hot, I guess that explains why the ground was
dry. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Got that, I think. That, and it’s a desert, yes? Okay. I’m
good now. But with this kind of lyrical complexity I want to make sure I have
everything sorted in my mind before we move on to the air, which according
to you, Dewey, was full of, you know, sound. What kind of sound? Like it’s
a desert, right? So what sound? Pneumatic drills? Car alarms? This is like
translating Shakespeare.
‘Wait, I think I see the problem we’re having here. You came to the desert
because you felt that it would become easier to remember your own name.
Are you having some sort of episode, Dewey? Do you have any, you know,
conditions that we should be aware of? Just asking.
‘Sure, it’s a desert, you’re right, how could there be no one for to give you
no pain in a desert? Is English your first language, by the way?
‘Okay, so now the riverbeds are talking to you. Well, I told you to bring a
hat. You realise there were people who thought Neil Young wrote this? Neil
Young should sue your ass off for giving him a bad name. Well, I guess at least
you gave someone a name. The horse you were with for nine days and you
still couldn’t think of anything to call it. Does that sound to you like someone
with a creative gift?
‘Yeah okay, I suppose you could say the ocean is like a desert with
everything living below the surface, just like in the ocean. I’ll pay that one.
Hold on to that thought while I go and get a doctor. By the way, just one more
67

thing while we’re getting the electrodes ready, you were in the desert nine
days and you had nothing else to do. Why didn’t you take five minutes and
give the fucking horse a name?
‘Okay, bite down on the rubber ring, Dewey. I promise you’ll feel much
better afterwards. There’ll be no one to give you no pain, I promise.
‘Okay Schwartz, fry him.’
68

Having Fun with
Elvis on Stage
(Elvis Presley)
The worst and most cynical record in the entire

history of music
Does it qualify as a hit record if it sold a lot of copies and was pressed onto
vinyl but didn’t actually contain any songs? Colonel Tom Parker obviously
thought so.
He wanted something else to flog at concerts besides the usual T-shirts,
programs and other junk. Presley’s contract with RCA Victor was watertight,
giving them the rights to all his music, but the Colonel found a loophole—
there was nothing to stop him from selling an album of Elvis simply talking.
So he cobbled together thirty-seven soulless minutes of between-song patter
from a number of Presley’s live performances, and the results were packaged
on Parker’s own label, Box Car Records, as Having Fun with Elvis on Stage.
Only it’s not fun. There are moments when the King talks about his early
career which are fascinating and even moving, though somewhat exaggerated,
but most of it consists of unfunny jokes, and asides to his band or audience
that, taken out of context, are simply bewildering.
69

Many of these monologues are taken from Elvis’s forlorn public spectacles
of 1974, when his career was at its nadir. Exhausted from constant touring,
he once rambled for almost half an hour to a Las Vegas audience about his
divorce, about drugs, and about his liver biopsy—and finished it all off by
yelling ‘fuck you’ at a heckler.
The rambling soliloquies on this record are not quite that bad, but they’re
certainly not ‘fun’, and they might have even been Shakespearian in their
tragic depiction of a man shambling through the dregs of his once-mighty
career, if they’d been assembled in a coherent way.
Instead, it’s like listening to your grandfather, pissed out of his mind on
home brew, mumbling at long-dead mates from the war. At other times Elvis
seems to be doing a bad impersonation of himself.
It’s possible that the Colonel let his fifteen-year-old nephew, high on
weed and French existentialist poets, put together this album as a favour. It’s
been described as the worst album of his career—of anyone’s career—and
since it had competition from all those B-movie soundtracks this gives you
some idea. Allmusic.com called it ‘an auto wreck that somehow ploughed
into a carnival freak show’.
The freak show was later repackaged and marketed by RCA as a legitimate
concert album, with the only warning for the buyer being the words ‘A Talking
Album Only’ on the cover.
Elvis was apparently incensed at the move and thought it massively
embarrassing, which it was. It was deleted sometime in 1975 and has not
been reissued on digital. There is however a bootleg CD version circulating, as
well as a bogus sequel, proving something that Parker already knew when he
originally put together this piece of dreck: Elvis fans really will buy anything.
70

Seasons in
the Sun
(Terry Jacks)
Too much sun is bad for you
For many Baby Boomers everywhere, Terry Jacks’ paean to misery and regret,
‘Seasons in the Sun’, remains an unsurpassed dog turd on the sole of the
seventies. How did this song ever get to the top of the Billboard 100 for three
whole insufferable weeks?
Perhaps it was because of its perceived cachet of Continental cool. The
lyrics, written by pop poet Rod McKuen, are a translation from the French ‘Le
Moribond’ (‘The Dying Man’) by Jacques Brel.
Brel was a hip crooner from the cabarets of Paris who had about him
the air of nouvelle vague that led him to sometimes be compared to Dylan.
His world-weary melodramatics were an inspiration for artists like a post-
Laughing Gnome David Bowie and the mahogany-voiced Leonard Cohen.
Jacks claims to have discovered the song on an old Kingston Trio album
and brought it along to a Beach Boys session he was producing. The Boys
cut a demo but wouldn’t release it. God only knows why. So Jacks recorded it
himself.
71

The master sat on a shelf in Jacks’ basement for over a year until a
newspaper delivery boy heard Jacks playing it and asked if he could bring
some friends by to listen to it. Their enthusiasm convinced Jacks to release it
while still thinking it would go sink into the sunset.
Instead it became the largest-selling single in Canadian history and sold
over six million copies worldwide.
For many it is the all-time stinker single, a dying man singing turgid
farewells to his ‘trusted friend’, his ‘papa’ and ‘Michelle, his little one’, reminding
each of them what fun they’d all had. Jacks rewrote part of the lyrics to
‘lighten them up’—not that hard—and cloud the issue over the reason for the
narrator’s bad end. Is it suicide to escape drug addiction or cancer? References
to a cheating wife were also removed.
The record made Jacks an overnight star, which is about as long as his
celebrity lasted.
But the song itself has refused to die. It’s been covered by Bad Religion,
Too Much Joy, Black Box Recorder, Pearls Before Swine, Alcazar, and Me First
and the Gimme Gimmes. Almost predictably it was Westlife’s fourth single.
Blink-182 have intentionally mangled it in their live shows. The Brooklyn
francophiles Les Sans Culottes give the song a psychedelic lounge spin that
goes frantic at the finish.
Most curiously of all, Nirvana’s boxed set, With the Lights Out, along with
its rarities and B-sides and previously unreleased material, contains a ghostly
rendition of the song, which, fittingly, comes right at the end. Kurt Cobain
claimed that the Terry Jacks song was the first 45 he ever bought.
Not long after recording the song, he blew his brains out with a shotgun.
Are these two facts somehow related? We will never know.
72

Feelings
(Morris Albert)
All together now: woah, woah, woah . . .
Jesus Christ.
Words fail me.
The notes beside my computer here definitively state that Barry Manilow
has never recorded or performed this song. This astonishes me. The song is
about as Manilow as it gets, and you must know enough of me by now to
recognise this is not a compliment.
The song is a party-killer of elephantine proportion, a funereal dirge about
the singer’s inability to forget his feelings of love, which I believe is a reasonable
subject for a song, if deftly handled. In this song, emotion is as deftly handled as
a nightclub bouncer attempting brain surgery with garden shears.
The man responsible for this crime against humanity was born Maurício
Alberto Kaisermann in São Paulo, Brazil. In the early seventies, many Brazilian
musicians were using anglicised names to try to break into the US market, so
when he released his first album, which featured ‘Feelings’ as the title track,
he used the stage name Morris Albert.
‘Feelings’ sold over three hundred thousand copies internationally. But it
was the endless covers by other artists that really brought the song worldwide
fame, or notoriety, depending on your sensibilities.
73

Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Sarah
Vaughan, Johnny Mathis and Ray Conniff all battered us into submission
with endless refrains of ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, FEEEEEEEEELINGS!!!!!’ until those
of us who had somehow managed to retain control of our choking reflex were
staggering blindly for the on/off switch on the radio. My favourite version of
the song was the mouse on Sesame Street who expressed his opposition to cats
in ‘Felines’.
Interesting footnote: in 1988 the French songwriter Louis ‘Loulou’
Gasté sued Morris Albert for copyright infringement, claiming that ‘Feelings’
plagiarised the melody of his 1957 French café tune ‘Pour Toi’. Gasté won the
lawsuit and was awarded a settlement of half a million dollars. What staggers
me is that someone actually sued over ownership of a song like this. It’s like
claiming Hitler’s Final Solution as your own original idea.
The song frequently appears on lists of ‘the worst songs ever’ and
was included on The Offspring’s 1998 album Americana, substituting lyrics
about hate for the original ones about love. In a Doonesbury cartoon strip,
two characters play recordings of ‘Feelings’ at top volume in a successful
attempt to drive out the drug dealers living next door.
Most recently the song made headlines in 1999 when an Indonesian
army leader sang it at a formal dinner to describe his position on the unrest
in East Timor.
And that’s all I have to say about this particular song. I hope I haven’t
hurt anyone’s feelings doing it.
74

Anything by
The
Bay City Rollers
Why the Loch Ness monster won’t come out of

the water
The Bay City Rollers were a Scottish pop band of the 1970s. They were pure
McBubblegum, tartan gimmicky outfits combined with music so bland it
made elevator music sound like Metallica. But for a few mad moments in
history they were compared to The Beatles. (Sigh.)
The group, formed in Edinburgh in 1967, allegedly chose their name
by throwing a dart at a map of the United States. The dart landed in the
middle of Arkansas, but since ‘Arkansas Rollers’ might lead to problems with
pronunciation—especially in a place like Scotland—they tried again and this
time the dart landed near the community of Bay City, Michigan. (I still think
the dart should have landed on Whisky Dick Mountain in Washington state.
Or even better, on the town of Beaver Head in Idaho. Perfect!)
Beginning with ‘Remember (Sha La La)’ in 1973, the Rollers’ popularity
75

exploded, and they released a string of very successful hits on the British
charts. Following in succession were ‘Shang-A-Lang’, ‘Summerlove Sensation’
and ‘All of Me Loves All of You’.
A cover of the Four Seasons’ ‘Bye Bye Baby’ stayed at number one in the
UK for six weeks in the spring of 1975 and became the biggest seller of the
year. The Rollers were the musical phenomenon of the age. Legions of BCR
fans flocked to their concerts in the distinctive Roller uniform of ankle-length
tartan trousers, and tartan scarves. This means that somewhere out there are
countless numbers of mature, intelligent women who have to this point led
otherwise decent and worthwhile lives who have a dirty secret they are not
telling their husbands and children—Rollermania.
However, there were dissenting voices. UK radio DJ Johnnie Walker made
somewhat derogatory remarks, calling the band ‘musical garbage’, which
caused some controversy at the time and ultimately led to his departure from
BBC Radio 1.
The years have not been kind. Since the band’s quick rise to and rapid
descent from fame, the members have endured numerous and varied struggles
regarding disputed royalty payments, substance abuse and personal legal
problems.
Good.
76

Metal Machine
Music
(Lou Reed)
What, no bonus track??
This was the release that raised an interesting question: just because
something is unlistenable, does that necessarily make it bad?
Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, an album consisting entirely of guitar
feedback played at different speeds, probably took this question one step
too far, to the point where the sounds on it perhaps technically no longer
qualified as music.
It is said that Reed knocked it off in more-or-less real time—he just
leaned a couple of de-tuned guitars against a couple of amps, ran the resulting
racket through a battery of effects pedals, ran it through a four-track, split it
into separate channels and cut it off 64:04 minutes later. Or, if you believe
other sources, including Reed himself, he immersed himself in the project for
months.
In its original form, each track occupied one side of an LP
record and lasted exactly 16:01 minutes. The timing on the fourth side
∞
read ‘16:01 or ’, as the last groove on the LP was a continuous loop.
77

It was foisted on a much more innocent time back in 1975. Rolling Stone
called it ‘the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator’ or ‘like spending a
night in a bus terminal in Hagerstown, Maryland’. Popular comedy website
Cracked.com draws similarities between listening to MMM and ‘getting ear-
fucked by a toaster’. Critic Billy Altman said it was ‘a two-disc set consisting
of nothing more than ear-wrecking electronic sludge, guaranteed to clear any
room of humans in record time’.
Despite the intensive criticism (or perhaps because of it), MMM sold one
hundred thousand copies in the US.
These days it’s generally considered to be either a joke, a deliberate act
of provocation, or a grudging fulfilment of a contractual obligation. Reed
himself said, ‘I decided to make a piece of music that didn’t have lyrics and
didn’t have a steady beat and concentrated on feedback and guitar not being
in any particular key—playing with the speeds. I was serious about it . . . I
was also really, really stoned.’
Talking to Pitchfork magazine in 2007, Reed also said that he really loved it.
In the album’s liner notes he claims to have invented heavy metal and
asserted that MMM is the ultimate conclusion of that genre. But for me, the
real clue to MMM’s genesis perhaps lies in the touchingly naive lament in
the liner notes: ‘I’d harbored hope that the intelligence that once inhabited
novels would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong.’
So was it purity of vision, or disdain, or self-contempt as big as
Switzerland, to make a record that in any lesser mortal would have signed
the death warrant on their career? Make no mistake, this was perceived by
many as Reed going out of his way to antagonise and alienate anyone foolish
enough to love him. It was the musical equivalent of showing up at your own
wedding with a lap dancer. Rolling Stone called it ‘commercial genocide’.
78

Here’s just one possibility: feeling that he’d sold out his musical ideals
since leaving The Velvet Underground for the adulation of a rabble of beer-
swilling morons, and sickened by the gaysploitation success of Transformer
and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, he grabbed his new fans by the collar and thrust
their eager shining faces into Berlin, a grim shit-puddle of domestic violence,
drugs and booze. He seemed surprised when it bombed.
So what to do next? It’s not hard to imagine Reed—physically and
mentally exhausted, drug-fucked and disillusioned, and with his record label
demanding new product and demanding it now—walking into the RCA
building in Gramercy Park and taking revenge on his record label, the world
and himself.
Reed hinted of such a Machiavellian plan to legendary rock critic Lester
Bangs: ‘I’ll stick [it] on RCA when the rock’n’roll shit gets taken care of. Now
most people can take maybe five minutes of it . . .’
Was he serious? Lou also claimed at the time—and with a straight face—
that he wove in very brief passages from Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Eroica’
into the feedback, that he’d been working on the piece for six years, that he
brought his years of classical training to bear when composing it. Yeah right,
Lou. Anything you say. Here, let me help you tie that tourniquet.
These days it has become something of a prestige album among the
anoraked professional bargain-bin sorters that inhabit the outer reaches of
the musical universe. Metal Machine Music is a kind of musical Satanic Verses:
music intellectuals want to own a copy but no one actually wants to play it.
Still, the question remains. If a piece of music is just a perverse and clever
way of saying Fuck the Lot of You, then does it make it bad? There will be as
many different answers as there are people in the world. Maybe Lou should
write a song about it. Just, please, this time, Lou—no feedback.
79

Run Joey Run
(David Geddes)
Eighteen with a bullet
This manipulative drivel by David Geddes is about the consequences of a girl

with a father who’s either mentally deranged or a Christian fundamentalist—
the terms are interchangeable—doing the wild thing with a boy called Joey.
When he finds out they have ‘been together’, he goes after him with a gun.
The hook to the song is ‘Run, Joey, run, ’cause Dad’s after you with a gun’. The
song ends with both the girl and Dad finding Joey at the same time, with
monumentally predictable results. Dad shoots just as she runs into Joey’s
arms.
‘Daddy please don’t, we’re gonna get married . . . aaahhh . . . ahhhh . . .
ahhhh . . . ahhhhh.’
Or should that be eeeeh, eeeeh, eeeeh? You know, because that way it
rhymes, like the rest of the song.
The song sounds like Neil Diamond having a psychotic episode with the
London Philharmonic Orchestra—no, not good. With ‘Disco Duck’, Rick Dees
intended to be hilarious. When you’re unintentionally hilarious, like David,
you start to become a bit of a worry.
His real name was David Cole Idema—an oedema in my dictionary is a
painful swelling in the body, sometimes life-threatening—and under his real
80

name was the drummer/vocalist for the cult band The Fredric (also known as
Rock Garden). He attended the University of Michigan, where he obviously
learned nothing.
This song reached number eighteen on the US Billboard charts in 1975.
Now it’s the song they play in Hell—over and over and over again.
81

I Write the Songs
(Barry Manilow)
Schlock horror
‘I Write the Songs’ was written by Bruce Johnston, a member of The Beach
Boys, in 1975. He wrote it about Brian Wilson, who wrote most of the Beach
Boys’ songs. Wilson had drug problems and struggled with his mental health,
but was brilliant when writing and recording. But he refused to tour, which
was why Johnston got the gig with the band.
Teen heartthrob David Cassidy released the first version. Then Clive
Davis, who ran Barry Manilow’s record label, heard Cassidy’s version and
thought his boy coulda been a contender and had him record it as well.
Manilow was initially reluctant, rightfully concerned that his listeners
would think he was singing about himself, and that he would come off as a
giant egomaniac. Clive, like all men through history with dollar signs in their
eyes, told him it wouldn’t be a problem.
‘Besides,’ Davis added, ‘you DO write songs!’
So Manilow decided to record it, and it reached number one on the
Billboard Hot 100 in early 1976. It went on to win a Grammy for Song of the
Year. Until then The Beach Boys, despite their legendary status, had never
won one. Johnston, a ring-in for Wilson, became the first.
It became Manilow’s signature tune, but his initial fears proved justified,
82

for many people did think he was a giant egomaniac. ‘Whenever I heard the
song in public,’ Manilow writes on the liner notes for a compilation album,
‘I felt the need to run to everyone who was listening and say, “You know, I’m
really not singing about myself!”’
The claim does appear especially ludicrous when he’s responsible
for a monumental deluge of sugary ballads so teeth-achingly bad—read
‘Copacabana’, or ‘I Can’t Smile Without You’—that councillors in the Sydney
suburb of Rockdale recently announced plans to play Manilow’s music
through outdoor speakers from nine till midnight every night in order to
disperse gangs of antisocial teenagers from their streets. But then apparently
the residents complained. They preferred vandalism to Mandy.
Manilow once did a parody duet titled ‘I Wreck the Songs’ with Rosie
O’Donnell on her TV show. At least the man’s got a sense of humour.
I think I like him better as a satirist.
83

THE 10 WORST BAND NAMES
10 Toad the Wet Sprocket

‘We were together longer than we ever thought we’d be,’ said Toad the Wet
Sprocket singer Glen Phillips almost apologetically when the band gave up
in 1998. The California four-piece defied the odds for twelve years. They were
formed in 1986 at San Marcos High School just outside of Santa Barbara when
singer/songwriter Phillips was only fourteen. He got the name from the Eric
Idle monologue ‘Rock Notes’ on Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album
from 1980. The band’s first public appearance was at an open-microphone
talent contest in September 1986.
They lost.
9 Insane Clown Posse

Don’t be deceived. The name isn’t half as stupid as they are. They even have
cult devotees called Juggalos and Juggalettes. The two members of the band,
Violent J (Joseph Bruce) and Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler), want to be black
but can’t be because they’re white, so they wear facepaint to cover it up. They
claim that a ‘dark carnival’ visited them one night, prophesied an impending
apocalypse, and made them its messengers. Listen to their music and you’ll
vote for an apocalypse every single time.
More like a novelty act than a rap group, ICP uses music as a backdrop
84

for violent and nihilistic lyrics that are supposed to be funny and aren’t. ‘I
could go back to school and get my diploma, I’d much rather bang your head on the
wall until you get a coma.’ Yeah, where’s Armageddon when you need it?
Rival Eminem, with whom they’ve had a long-running feud, evokes
darkness but articulates his demons—repellent though they are—with some
skill. ICP, by contrast, brag about killing cats and stuffing them in mailboxes.
During the 20 August 1999 episode of The Howard Stern Show, ICP clashed
with fellow guest Sharon Osbourne. She referred to them as ‘has-beens’
and Violent J told her that she can ‘buff his pickle’. Thankfully for Ozzy, she
declined.
Aside from ‘Santa’s a Fat Bitch’, radio won’t touch them. Like Vanilla Ice
or the Spice Girls, ICP are all about in-your-face exhibitionism over musical
ability. Their 2002 album The Wraith: Shangri-La was panned as ‘The Worst
Album of All Time’ by Blender magazine. They themselves have been voted the
worst band of any genre of music in various magazine polls, including Spin
and Blender. In 2006, to prove he’d lost none of his lyrical prowess, Shaggy
released his first solo album. It was called Fuck the Fuck Off.
They are also professional wrestlers.
8 Anal Cunt
Anal Cunt is a band from Arlington, Massachusetts, often referred to by
their initials AC (written as AxCx), surprisingly enough. Their songs mostly
embrace homophobia, misogyny, anti-semitism, racism, insensitivity to rape
victims and misanthropy. Their songs have included hits such as ‘You Were
Pregnant So I Kicked You in the Stomach’ and ‘Women: Nature’s Punching
Bag’.
85

The name Anal Cunt came from founder Seth Putnam’s attempt ‘to get
the most offensive, stupid, dumb, etc, name possible’. You’d probably think
he succeeded. A common misconception is that the band is named after the
song ‘Anal Cunt’ by GG Allin (we’ll be seeing him later), but in fact Allin’s
song was written years after the band had started. However, they did later
in their career pay homage to GG by recording a version of ‘I’ll Slice Your
Fucking Throat (If You Fuck With Me)’, which was nice of them.
Anal Cunt first performed live in 1988 at Putnam’s mother’s house in
front of his mother, his two little brothers and his grandmother, as well as
some of his mother’s friends.
Subsequent AC shows were more lively, and consisted of Putnam going
into the crowd and punching people not only through drunkenness but to
disguise the fact that the drummer didn’t know their songs very well.
In October 2004, Putnam went into a coma for a month after overdosing
on crack, heroin, alcohol and sleeping pills. Doctors thought that if he
survived he would suffer permanent serious brain damage, but his mother
demurred, saying no one would notice. In the first comeback show, Putnam
had to remain seated in a chair, still suffering the effects of paralysis.
The typical Anal Cunt song, as you’d expect, is short and loud with
extremely distorted guitars played randomly up and down the neck, near-
incomprehensible screaming and blast beat drumming.
Are they taking grindcore punk to its logical conclusion? Are they
avant-garde humourists trying to make the point that political correctness
is barren and stultifying? Or are they simply whacked-out dirtbags trying to
get attention in the same way that a neglected three-year-old plays handball
with its own shit? You decide.
86

7 Roger Whittaker
6 The Butthole Surfers

Not only a terrible band name but terrible album titles as well: Hairway
to Steven, piouhgd, Psychic . . . Powerless . . . Another Man’s Sac, Rembrandt
Pussyhorse. Their lyrics have trampled this same unbridled path.
In the eighties they played music for the disaffected and the seriously
weird. The centre of the band has always been vocalist Gibby Haynes who has
been known to sing through a bullhorn, which adds a certain je ne sais quoi
to his surreal, acid-fuelled lyrics. ‘Cherub’ was called by one critic ‘a study in
atmospheric feedback and psychotic ranting’, another album used the theme
from Perry Mason, and in yet another Gibby got very intense about seeing an
X-ray of a girl passing gas.
But with a name like Butthole Surfers, I guess he would.
5 Def Leppard
Lead singer Joe Elliott thought of the name Deaf Leopard while he was in
school (presumably while failing something). He got the idea to alter the
spelling from Led Zeppelin. Give the man credit for realising that ‘lead’ was
spelled wrong.
Their first concert was in a room in a spoon factory in Sheffield, England.
Only six people went to it. If only things had stayed that way!
Joe Elliott now lives in Ireland; the tax laws are much more favourable
for entertainers there. Plus no one there can spell, either.
87

4 Mott the Hoople
Originally called Silence, they were renamed Mott the Hoople by their
manager after a novel of the same name about a circus freak. David Bowie, a
friend of the band, then convinced them that rock theatre was the only way
for them to get rich and famous. So they became a glam band—but neither
guitarist Mick Ralphs nor vocalist/keyboardist/lead songwriter Ian Hunter
were by nature all that glamorous.
Hunter was just competent as a keyboard player, and Ralphs was
eclipsed in the seventies by scores of more gifted musicians, both technically
and artistically. In the end they wrote derivative lyrics set to derivative music
with a derivative image. ‘All the Young Dudes’ even sounded just like Bowie.
Maybe we would have liked the name better if they were a really good
band.
3 Hoobastank
Doug Robb, the band’s vocalist, said when asked about the band’s name:
‘It’s really cool, it’s one of those old high school inside-joke words that didn’t
really mean anything.’
Actually no, Doug. It’s not cool. It’s stoopid. If you’re going to name
your band after a school in-joke, why not pick one that doesn’t sound like a
playground name for shitting your pants?
Chris Hesse, another band member, had a more coherent answer for the
Orlando Florida Guide: ‘Doug’s brother is the vice president of BMW Motorcycles
and lives in Germany. And there’s this street out by his house that is called
Hooba Street or something like that, and before Doug could pronounce the
88

name he called it Hoobastank, and it was kind of a cute thing and his brother
still teases him about it to this day. When we were looking for band names
it’s almost impossible to find a band name that hasn’t been taken. Anything
remotely normal has been taken already. I don’t remember how it came up
but someone said it and we were like yeah.’
So there: an insight into the creative mind of a genius. You heard it first
on this station.
2 30 Odd Foot of Grunts

Two possibilities: it comes from a phrase heard by Russell Crowe during post-
production on the movie Virtuosity—dubbing was required for a fight scene
and since time is measured by length of film in the movie industry, Crowe
was asked to provide the ‘30-odd foot of grunt’. Or, as Melbourne’s Herald Sun
reported, it’s the combined height of the band members (literally 30-odd feet)
and grunt refers to the ‘grunt’ in the band’s music.
Whatever, it seems likely that Crowe came up with the name and the rest
of the band members agreed, frightened that if they didn’t go along he might
throw a telephone at them, or order a nearby Roman legion to attack them.
This was the band that Crowe played lead vocals for since their formation
in 1992 until he left to pursue a solo career in 2005. The band did not find
either critical or popular success. Their only claim to fame, other than Russ’s
movie star status, is the Frenzal Rhomb song ‘Russell Crowe’s Band’, in which
they’re described as ‘a fucking pile of shit’.
89

AND THE WINNER IS . . .
1 Shorty Shitstain
I’m cheating a bit because he’s not really a band, he’s a member of a group
called Brooklyn Zu. The Zu are possibly the most pretentious rap outfit in
history; they claim on their website to be not just a rap group ‘but a deep
history of culture knowledge wisdom and understanding of the way of life’.
This wisdom comes through in their songs (‘I drop science like girls be dropping
babies’).
Shorty is something of an enigma: all that’s known about him is he
hails from the same family as two other Zu members, 12 O’Clock and The
Zoo Keeper. I’ve seen photographs of the band but cannot see anyone who is
either shorter than average height or has telltale faeces stains on them.
But when they perform, he’s the one that gets down and dirty.
90

The late
seventies
If you’ve never been to
me, you probably weren’t
there
‘I’d sometimes wake up with bumps

on my head, blood on my shirt and
something green coming out of my penis.’
Iggy Pop

I’ve Never Been to Me
(Charlene Duncan)
Never been there? Take my advice and stay away
There are few songs that make you want to remove your own ears with a
cheese grater, but this is one of them.
It was recorded in 1976 by Charlene Duncan. The songstress was born
Charlene Oliver in Hollywood in 1949. She grew up with a deep love of music.
However, she changed her mind about that and decided to record ‘I’ve Never
Been to Me’ instead.
The song was originally written, by Ron Miller, from a male point of
view (‘I’ve been to China . . . and Asia Minor . . .’ Brilliant!) but he rewrote it for
Charlene. The female version is sung to a housewife who wishes she could
trade her everyday life for the exciting, fantastic life led by the singer. In
response, the singer tells her some of the highlights of her life, but the tone is
bittersweet and she says she wishes someone had told her what she’s telling
the listener. She claims to have learned what’s really important in life, but
now it’s too late.
Charlene originally recorded ‘I’ve Never Been to Me’ in 1976; in 1977 it
reached number 97 on the US Hot 100 singles chart, and all would have been
well. But in 1982, a disc jockey named Scott Shannon, then at WRBQ in Tampa,
Florida, started playing the second version of the song, which has an expanded
92

bridge, over which the singer makes an impassioned speech about the nature
of love and truth. It’s as nauseating and trite as listening to George Bush talk
about democracy, but audience reaction was impressive, and the song was
hurriedly reissued by Charlene’s record label.
Charlene had meanwhile Been to Me and decided she didn’t like it, so she
moved to England instead and, displaying her obvious affinity for saccharine,
was working in a sweetshop in Ilford, Essex. She was rushed back to the States
on the Concorde for a promotional tour and the song was ruthlessly foisted
once again on an unsuspecting public, like a slops bucket on a mosh pit. It
quickly reached number three in the US, and number one in the UK.
The song has been described as ‘post-disco hangover’, referring to its
appeal to listeners who, in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, regretted
leading hedonistic lives during the disco era. Though after hearing the song,
expiring of any disease still seems to me an infinitely preferable option.
The melody itself is inoffensive and Charlene knows how to carry a
tune. It’s the lyrics that have many rushing for the bathroom. For the first
two verses she sings about her wild and freewheeling lifestyle as a singer,
in lurid detail (how she’s been variously disrobed by ruling monarchs and
seen things which, she claims, a woman ain’t supposed to see, while leaving
open to further discussion what those things might be). The story’s presented
as a warning to the bored housewife, that even though she’s ‘a discontented
mother and a regimented wife’ she should be grateful for whatever crap life is
prepared to dish out provided she has a husband and children. The general
thrust is that, in the end, being bored and unfulfilled is infinitely better than
a dissolute life that ends in loneliness.
They both sound equally undesirable to me, but perhaps I’m missing
something.
93

In interviews Charlene claimed the song appealed to her because she
herself was a battered wife. At the risk of being politically incorrect, I maintain
that her husband may have cited extenuating circumstances—‘For God’s sake
will you stop singing that song! Whack!’
What are the things that a woman ain’t supposed to see? Having played
football all my life, there are a few things I’ve seen in the men’s changerooms
that I would rather not have seen, but these blokes’ wives and girlfriends
must see them on a semi-regular basis so I contend that women aren’t that
delicate. The only other things I saw that maybe a woman might not want to
view took place with a sheep, some whipped cream and a dozen variety party
balloons in a shed in Kalgoorlie, and if she was referring to that, it’s probably
no surprise that she became a born-again Christian. Charlene was signed to
Motown Records, but ‘I’ve Never Been to Me’ has blessedly been her only
hit, save for a late 1982 duet with Stevie Wonder. But he’s blind; maybe he
thought he was singing with Kiki Dee. The song, ‘Used to Be’, charted but
failed to make the top forty.
‘I’ve Never Been to Me’, though, has proved remarkably endurable. It
was featured in the opening to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
(1994), when it was mimed onstage by two female impersonators at the
Imperial Hotel in Sydney’s Erskineville. The melody, set to different words,
is—remarkably—often used as a wedding song in Japan; the chorus line ‘never
been to me’ is replaced with ‘my love is true’. Apparently it works in Japanese.
Personally, I’ve never been to me either. But I spoke to someone who
has and they reckon it’s overrated.
94

Disco Duck
(Rick Dees & His Cast of Idiots)
The curse of the novelty song
We could probably fill all one hundred places with novelty songs like this,
but ‘Disco Duck’ stands out as the blueprint for banality, the iridescence of
irritation.
Combining a disco beat with a Donald Duck voice, the song is about a
man at a party who’s overcome with the urge to dance in a duck-like manner,
and is soon emulated by the rest of the crowd.
It makes me nostalgic for Rupert Holmes.
Dees recorded this while working at WMPS-AM in Memphis, Tennessee,
but he was expressly forbidden by station management from playing the song
on-air. Even AM stations have certain standards.
He was later fired on the spot simply for talking about the song on-air
one morning. But Rick had the last laugh. ‘Disco Duck’ went on to sell over
two million copies and reached number one on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song
even made a cameo appearance in Saturday Night Fever, in a scene at a dance
club in which some pensioners are learning to dance disco-style. The song
was not included on the soundtrack album; otherwise Rick would have got a
Grammy as well.
Rick—full name Rigdon Osmond Dees III—did very nicely without it.
95

He established a syndicated radio show called Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 and
was named Billboard’s ‘Number One Radio Personality in America’ for eleven
consecutive years. He was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1999. Not
bad for a duck.
This annoying bit of fluff ranks right up there with other novelty songs
that have turned listening to any AM radio station into a minefield for the
ears. Others include ‘The Birdy Song’ by The Tweets—a version of Werner
Thomas’s Swiss accordion oom-pah song, a maddening tune which prompted
displays of appalling dancing throughout the 1980s and has been voted
the most annoying song of all time. The list also includes the Teletubbies,
Vengaboys and Joe Dolce’s ‘Shaddapa You Face’.
A curse on all their houses.
96

Drop Kick Me, Jesus
(Through the
Goalposts of Life)
(Bobby Bare)
Christ tries for a Coleman Medal
The song has been described as the world’s only Christian football waltz, but
as anyone who has ever tried to dance to this little ditty will tell you, it’s oh
so much more than that. While not as well known as some of the other songs
on this list, it earns its place as one of the worst songs ever recorded through
genuine merit, not novelty factor alone.
It was recorded in 1976 by a country and western singer with the
unlikely name of Bobby Bare—and yes, that is his real name. BB was no one-
hit wonder. Although his name will not be instantly recognisable if you don’t
wear a Stetson and drive a pick-up, he boasted a fine pedigree before he got
around to recording this turkey.
His first record sold nearly a million copies way back in 1962. It was
called ‘Shame on Me’, a title that was to prove weirdly prophetic in light of
later events. The following year he won a Grammy.
97

It’s true that by 1976 the initial flush of success had faded a little and it
was clear that BB was not to become the second Elvis Presley, but there’s still
no excuse for what he did next. He’d recorded a respectable string of C&W
hits, including a couple of numbers penned by Kris Kristofferson, but there
was fair warning of the depths to which he would later stoop when in 1972 he
recorded a cover of the Dr Hook horror ‘Sylvia’s Mother’.
But there’s only so much country and western you can sing and record
before synapses start to short out in the brain. He prepared for his destiny
when he recorded a song with his five-year-old son—you guessed it, Bobby
Bare Junior—called ‘Daddy What If ’. It reached second spot on the US country
charts. As you would expect.
If the question was ‘Daddy what if you wrote a song exhorting a
Palestinian Jew who died two thousand years ago to kick you through the
middle of two imaginary philosophical goalposts, would someone pay you
to record it, and could you sell it in the United States?’, the answer to both
questions, of course, is ‘yes’ and ‘yes’.
For sheer imaginative scope, the premise is breathtaking. But does it
work as a song? Speaking for those of us still living and in the possession of
ears, you’d have to say ‘no’.
In the song Bobby also makes a poignant request for all his long-dead
ancestors to be placed in offensive positions in the metaphysical football
team he’s planning to assemble. ‘I’ve got the will, Lord if you’ve got the toe.’ The
song is all that you would expect from a fusion of the very best of American
country music and mid-west Bible Belt fundamental Christianity. You will not
be shocked to learn that it received a Grammy nomination, as many of the
very worst songs do.
98

Mull of Kintyre
(Wings)
You left The Beatles for bagpipes??
In Gaelic, a ‘mull’ is used to describe something bare or dull. Which just about
sums up this song: bare of true artistic merit and creative innovation, and
dull to the point of tedium.
In fact, when you ask people to name their worst songs, this one, by
Wings, comes up surprisingly often.
Sure, any post-Beatle group was bound to attract antipathy. And Paul
disgusted many people when he put his wife in the band. Linda couldn’t sing
and her musical ability was limited. As Norman Gunston once famously asked
her when the band visited Australia: ‘Were you actually playing keyboards last
night at the concert or were you just, you know, sitting behind a roll-top desk?’
But ‘Mull of Kintyre’, McCartney’s ode to the Scottish coastal region he
had made his home during the seventies, became one of the biggest-selling UK
singles of all time. In fact, all twenty-three singles credited to Wings reached
the US Top 40. Yet Wings was treated with contempt in some quarters, derided
as ‘the band The Beatles could have been’. McCartney became as despised as
he was popular. Why?
Paul’s silly love songs may have been vacuous, flaccid, trivial and
forgettable, but they weren’t devoid of merit. They were also unpretentious.
99

McCartney never pretended to be something he wasn’t. Was Paul just hated
for not being John?
John may have been the one who produced the more worthwhile music,
but he could also be a self-important bore. He would proclaim himself a
staunch ally to the feminist movement, then barely let Yoko complete an
intelligible sentence—assuming she’s ever been capable of forming one—in
interviews. He positioned himself as the spokesman for the politically correct
avant-garde, reaching for rock’s equivalent of religious art. Paul just wants to
write pop music and make a lot of money.
So is that so bad? The average punter in the pub preferred mindless
hummalong fluff to anything John imagined, though they’ll all probably avow
John as the better musician. People may admire Lennon’s social conscience
but they can remember the words to ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’.
One critic even suggested that McCartney set out to make mediocre
music knowing that John would bleed from the ears when he saw his pop
mega-banalities easily outselling Lennon’s angst-as-chord-progression.
Could anyone be so perverse? I doubt it. Paul was just doing what comes
naturally. And is there anything wrong with that?
Paul was Paul, and John was John. They were flipsides of the musical
coin. If Paul had never made music with John, perhaps the critics wouldn’t
have ever found him so irritating.
Maybe.
. . . And if he could have avoided duets with black musicians.
. . . And if he could have avoided the temptation to marry angry one-
legged women . . . And if . . . if . . . he could have avoided putting bagpipes on
a pop record.
100

You Light Up
My Life
(Debbie Boone)
The musical equivalent of being keelhauled
It is one of the best-selling singles of all time. Agreed. Yet there is a line in the
song where Debbie Boone wails, ‘You give me hope to carry on.’
At this point, she took all mine away.
Deb’s pedigree, unlike La Whitney’s, is not that flash. Her father, Pat
Boone, made a career out of taking the rhythm and blues out of rhythm and
blues. He made Fats Domino sound thin and Little Richard sound straight.
He then spent much of the eighties as the mouthpiece of heartland
evangelism and later became an apologist for Bush’s war in Iraq. But the
worst thing he did, in my opinion, was father Debbie Boone.
‘You Light Up My Life’ started out as a movie of the same name, written
and directed by Joseph Brooks, about a girl trying to make it in show business.
The lead role was played by Didi Conn, who played Frenchy in Grease the next
year. Brooks needed a title song so he wrote this about halfway through the
shoot, and it was sung by a jingle singer named Kasey Cisyk and lipsynched
in the movie by Conn.
101

For over a year, Brooks had no takers for the film. Finally a studio bought
the rights and Brooks decided to re-record the song but approached Debbie
Boone instead of Cisyk to sing it.
When it was released as a single it became the runaway hit of 1977. It
was number one for a staggering ten weeks in the US.
Boone’s only previous singing experience was in a gospel quartet, and
like her father she was a God-botherer of the first rank. When asked in an
interview who she was singing about in the song, her answer was ‘God’.
Joseph Brooks took exception to that remark because that was not who he
was writing about. He never asked Boone to record another song.
This was Boone’s only hit. She was nominated for an Oscar the next year
for the song ‘When You’re Loved’ from The Magic of Lassie. She didn’t win and
consequently never lit up our lives again.
But for this little black duck, once was more than enough.
102

Sometimes When
We Touch
(Dan Hill)
He was to emo what Iggy is to punk
This seems to be a song about a man with a small penis trying to get a woman
to fall in love with his softer, feminine side. Some critics have expressed
amazement that it has taken Death Cab for Cutie so long to cover it. If this is
what it means for a man to get in touch with his feelings, then we can hold
Dan Hill personally responsible for the backlash from Anal Cunt (see earlier)
and DMX.
Basically, Dan has trouble touching his girlfriend because he finds the
emotions initiated by this procedure too scary. It makes him want to hold her
until he achieves cardiac arrest or until they both start weeping uncontrollably,
whichever comes first. Or until he stops being frightened. He initially sees
himself as a reticent boxer restricted by age constraints, but in the next verse
it becomes clear that his introversion does not preclude feelings of violence,
vagrancy, intense co-dependency and incest.
The song featured on Dan’s 1977 album Longer Fuse, but after listening
to it I developed a much shorter one, particularly when Dan reaches that final
103

lyric: ‘till the fear in me subsiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iii-iiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-des.’
At this point I confess to fantasising about all the different ways Dan
might diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiii-iiiiiiiiiiiiiie.
Dan hails from Toronto in Canada—another one of the bastards! Is there
some sort of trend here?—and his only other major hit outside Canada was a
duet ‘Can’t We Try’, with Vonda Shepard of Ally McBeal fame.
I’m sure Dan’s not a psychopath, or a serial killer who likes writing songs
to lone hitchhikers. So why does he try to sound like one?
104

Black Betty
(Ram Jam)
Bad song, stupid lyrics, terrible guitar solo,

hit single
Maybe I’m all alone here. So will somebody tell me, please: what is good
about this song?
Possibly an alumnus from the Bob Dylan Wiggle Wiggle School of Really
Stupid Lyrics (see later), it also has possibly the worst guitar solo of all time.
Ram a lam? Or Ram a lamb? Is this really about people doing things with
sheep?
Apparently not. Some sources claim the song is derived from an
eighteenth-century marching song about a flintlock musket with a black-
painted stock, the ‘bam-ba-lam’ lyric referring to the sound of the gunfire. The
rifle was superseded by its ‘child’, a rifle with an unpainted walnut stock.
In his book, The Land Where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax interviewed
a former inmate of a Texas penal farm named Doc ‘Big Head’ Reese, who
told him that Black Betty was a term used by prisoners to refer to the Black
Maria—the penitentiary transfer wagon.
The reference in the original song to a ‘hammer’ refers to the hoes used
by prisoners to break up the ground in the cottonfields. (In this case, be it duly
105

noted, the hoes are agricultural implements, and not the women who appear
in rap videos.)
The song was adapted by legendary black blues guitarist Huddie
‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter. In his version, Leadbelly characterised the Black Betty
as a woman with a child. He first recorded it commercially in New York in
1939 for the Musicraft label as part of a medley with two other work songs:
‘Looky Looky Yonder’ and ‘Yellow Woman’s Doorbells’.
In 1977, Ram Jam re-recorded the song. It became an instant hit with
listeners—I know, beats me too—reaching the top twenty in the US and the
top ten in Australia. It was their only hit.
Ironically, the lyrics became the cause of a boycott by civil rights groups
NAACP and Congress of Racial Equality, who claimed it insulted black women.
Well, they were probably right, but that was not the fault of any member of
Ram Jam, but Leadbelly himself.
Then, in 2004, Aussie indie band Spiderbait resurrected it yet again and
reached number one.
Okay. Bam a lam. Enough already. In the interests of racial harmony and
aural hygiene can we let this musical monstrosity die?
106

Some Girls
(Racey)
Lay your crap on me
Clive Wilson and Phil Fursdon were friends from the same school in Somerset
and had a mutual interest in music. But they decided to forget about music
and formed Racey instead.
Originally they called themselves Alive ’n’ Kickin, a cruel irony, as many
people soon wished they weren’t. They started off playing covers of The
Eagles and Steely Dan, and their first gigs were performed at a gay nightclub
in Copenhagen, the Jomfruberet, where the clientele weren’t really bothered
whether girls did or didn’t.
Back in England they were discovered by music producer Mickey Most,
who put them on the fast track to infamy. Their own songs were crap, so Most
had them record a song originally intended for Blondie.
Blondie went on to become part of the post-punk revolution. Racey
didn’t. Instead they made an entire generation of post-punk nightclub goers
want to pierce their own eardrums with knitting needles.
‘Some Girls’ shot to number one in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
And why not? With lyrics like ‘Now that I know you socially, obviously I’ll fall
heavily’, people will queue up in wind and rain. It’s almost poetry.
Racey went on to record other hits, such as ‘Lay Your Love on Me’ and
107

‘Baby It’s You’. Their album Smash and Grab went on to sell five million copies
worldwide and became one of Australia’s best-selling albums of all time.
Now the bad news: they are still performing. But there are two of them
now, one featuring Wilson and Fursdon, the other featuring former lead
singer Gower. Racey have, in fact, mutated and reproduced.
It’s enough to give you nightmares.
108

Torn Between
Two Lovers
(Mary MacGregor)
The end of a promising career in advertising
This was a hit for a singer called Mary MacGregor in 1978. To her credit, Mary
insists she never liked the song much. But hell, we all have to make a living.
‘There are just some songs I like, and some I don’t, and this is one of
them,’ she told Superseventies.com. ‘I didn’t like “Torn” mostly because it
was boring to sing . . . Peter thought it was a real statement, and he wanted
it to happen. He wanted a woman to sing it, and he wanted that woman to
be me.’
The Peter she’s referring to is Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary
fame. Impressed with her double-octave range, he’d invited her to join him
on a national tour as a back-up vocalist. She sang on Yarrow’s Love Songs
album and this led to her first solo endeavour, the fateful ‘Torn Between Two
Lovers’.
‘I recorded the song in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, while standing in
a bathroom. It was a room that was actually part of the studio, just sort of
built-in there. They had a boom stand with a microphone on the end of it.
109

The boom was in the studio, and the mike kind of stuck in through the door,
hanging over the mirror. It was a tiny little room, but I finally worked things
around so I didn’t have to stare at myself singing. It’s a great place. You get a
lot of natural echo in bathrooms.’
Mary was trembling when she recorded her big song, and not from the
studio air conditioning. At the time she’d been happily married for five years,
and just the thought of being unfaithful to her husband, Don, was traumatic.
But then came stardom, and the hopes, pressures, fears and disappointments
that come with it. In May 1978 she filed for divorce, citing ‘irreconcilable
differences’. Her next release—a flop—was called ‘Memories’.
MacGregor admitted in Fred Bronson’s The Billboard Book of Number
One Hits that she hated her own chart-topper, chiefly because she had little
sympathy for the song’s narrator, a woman who confesses to her husband
that she’s having an affair but pleads with him to stay with her and accept the
situation anyway. Still, some people have found the words and its sentiments
very useful as a purgative.
Mary said the song led to the breakup of her marriage—she became torn
not between two lovers, but between her husband and her career. The song
put her in the spotlight—briefly—but ruined her career singing advertising
jingles. ‘I never thought about being a success until “Torn”. I was trying to
make a career out of doing commercials.’ She found she was too well known
to return to being an anonymous singer for a bank or a car dealership, but not
well known enough to get bookings.
Mary ended up torn between two careers. And, like she said, she didn’t
even like the damned song.
110

Do Ya Think
I’m Sexy
(Rod Stewart)
Not really, Rod. Do you?
When Rod first appeared on the scene no one thought he was sexy to look at.
Rod’s unique talent and appeal rested with that voice; he sounded like he’d
accidentally swallowed gravel after a night chain-smoking cigarettes and had
tried to wash it all down with bleach and oven cleaner. The result was God-
given for soulful blues and folk ballads, like ‘Reason to Believe’ and ‘Mandolin
Wind’, as well as rocking numbers like ‘Maggie May’.
‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ gained him many new fans but completely
alienated most of his old ones, who would rather have jumped head first into
their own vomit than listen to disco.
Most of the music for this song was written by drummer Carmine Appice,
who’d only recently joined Stewart’s band. Appice told Rolling Stone: ‘We were
in the studio and at the time “Miss You” by the Stones was a big hit. Rod was
always a guy that used to listen to what was going on around him. He was
always looking at the charts and listening. He was a big fan of The Rolling
Stones, so when they came out with “Miss You”—disco was really big at the
111

time—he wanted to do some kind of disco-y song, something like “Miss You”,
nothing like Gloria Gaynor. With the band, he would always tell us, “I want a
song like this” or “I want a song like that”, so I went home and I came up with
a bunch of chords and a melody.’
Stewart has always claimed this song was not about him, as it is sung in
the third person. But he used the title as the name of his 1978 tour, he wore
tight spandex and gyrated on stage, and when he sang the title line, hordes of
women would scream back, ‘Yes!’
‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ is to those of us who once loved him the epitome
of Stewart’s egotism and the nadir of his career. Once passionate and self-
deprecating by turns, he became a posturing purveyor of cheap tease, as
authentic and sexy as a silicone boob job and a feather boa.
But why would Rockin’ Rod care? The song won him yet another number
one spot in the UK and the US charts. It paid for a Hollywood lifestyle that
included a mansion in Los Angeles and more blondes than an ugly Scottish
git has a right to imagine in his wildest dreams.
As for the song itself, the distinctive riff was apparently lifted straight
off an instrumental song called ‘Taj Mahal’ by Brazilian musician Jorge Ben.
When Ben filed suit, Stewart agreed to donate his royalties from the song to
UNICEF.
112

10 WAYS FOR A MUSICIAN TO DIE YOUNG
1 Death by masturbation
Jim Morrison, the Lizard King, is widely rumoured to have suffered his fatal
heart attack while choking the lizard in a Paris bathtub in 1971. He had, it was
said, died by his own hand. It was a great story, but it wasn’t true.
Officially he died of a heart attack, though no autopsy was performed.
And few people really believe that. In 2007 Sam Bernett, who in the early
seventies ran a Paris nightclub called The Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, has described
in a book called The End how he found Morrison dead of a heroin overdose
in one of the nightclub toilets. But that was not the End, just the Beginning.
Some of Morrison’s associates then drove his body back to his flat and dumped
him in the tub. I suppose we’ll never really know for sure.
While on the subject of Doors, when INXS frontman Michael Hutchence
was found hanged in 1997 on the door of his room at the Ritz-Carlton in
Sydney, the coroner gave the cause of death as suicide. But friends and
family, including wife Paula Yates, believed he was a victim of auto-erotic
asphyxiation, the practice of heightening sexual pleasure by applied self-
suffocation. His partner at the time, Bob Geldof’s ex-missus Paula Yates,
initially disputed the rumours about Hutchence’s death—‘he was not having
113

a wank on a door’—but then changed her mind; it seems he was having a
wank on a door, after all, but instead of coming, he went. Just a bit of fun and
rock lost one of its all-time great frontmen.
2 Eaten by fellow band member

The second most unusual way to die goes to Norwegian satanic black-metal
band Mayhem’s frontman, the aptly-named Dead, who blew his own head
off with a shotgun. It was rumoured his lead guitarist, Euronymous, cooked
up Dead’s brain fragments in a stew with ham, vegetables and paprika—as
you do—then chowed down. He later denied this, and we can’t ask him
to be sure, because he was murdered a couple of years later by a one-man
band called Count Grishnackh.
3 Death by drowning
This was the death of preference of Rolling Stones guitarist Lewis Brian
Hopkin Jones, better known as Brian Jones. The founder of one of rock’s
supergroups, by 1969 he was taking too many hallucinogens even for the
liking of such notable drug fiends as Mick and Keef, and he was told he was
surplus to requirements. Baby, you’re out of time, in fact. A month later he
was found floating face down in his swimming pool.
The 2005 British biopic Stoned painted his death as murder. There was
some thought given to exhumation, which fuelled speculation in some
quarters as to whether he might still look better than Keith Richards, even
after thirty-eight years of being dead. Ironically, his most lasting musical
legacy may be having the Brian Jonestown Massacre named after him.
114

4 Set alight in desert by road manager
Gram Parsons, one-time member of The Byrds, even invented a new way to
expire. Initially, he just overdosed on heroin at the Joshua Tree Inn in Las
Vegas. His body was flown back to California for a private funeral, and then
it all got a little bizarre. Gram had apparently once commented to his road
manager, Phil Kaufman, that he wanted to be cremated in the Joshua Tree
Desert, so Phil and a friend borrowed a broken-down hearse, stole the body
from LAX airport and set it alight in the desert in a bungled attempt at open-
air cremation. It was an inspired move. Considered burned-out before the
pyre stunt, his two solo albums, GP and Grievous Angel, commercial failures at
the time, soon became country rock classics. Gram’s remains—and I use the
word advisedly—were finally laid to a well-earned rest somewhere near New
Orleans.
5 Death by suicide
A favourite.
Take Ian Curtis, for example, the tortured voice of England’s ironically
named Joy Division. He suffered from grand mal epilepsy but hated the
side effects of his medication, so he often didn’t take it. By 1978 he was
even having seizures onstage and two years later he attempted suicide,
only to be dragged from his hospital bed the next night for a gig. He could
only manage two songs before collapsing again. The crowd rioted and
Curtis suffered a nervous breakdown. Legend has it that on the eve of
the band’s first American tour, he unwisely watched a rerun of Werner
Herzog’s Stroszek and hung himself in the kitchen. A month later ‘Love
115

Will Tear Us Apart’ was released and became the band’s biggest-ever UK
hit. Actually it was death, not love, that tore them apart. Without Curtis,
Joy Division, never a happy bunch to start with, got really miserable and
split.
Kurt Cobain is probably the most famous music suicide of recent years.
Grunge’s greatest icon was worth less than a million when he put a shotgun
in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Projected earnings from that point on are
likely to level out at around one hundred million dollars. Cobain once wrote
in his personal diaries that he detested the ‘rape of his personal thoughts’.
Courtney Love sold his diaries for a reported four million dollars.
6 Death by drug overdose

Overdosing on drugs and leaving behind a high-earning corpse has become
almost a rock standard, like the riff from ‘Smoke on the Water’ or wrecking
hotel rooms.
Jimi Hendrix was one of the early rock celebrities to choose this route.
The left-handed guitar genius choked on his own vomit after a barbiturates
overdose. His recording career lasted less than four years, but the man who
once played the guitar with his teeth is now number five on Forbes magazine’s
list of top-earning dead celebrities.
The other celebrated OD is gravel-voiced Janis Joplin, who was still
working on her solo debut, Pearl, when she overdosed in Hollywood’s Landmark
Hotel at twenty-eight. In her will she left just two and a half thousand dollars
behind for friends ‘to have a ball’. Four months later, Pearl topped the charts
for nine weeks, and Joplin’s music has since been remastered on numerous
greatest hits sets. Even her anti-consumerism song ‘Mercedes Benz’ was
116

licensed to the German car manufacturer in 1995 for a commercial. Janis
would have died laughing.
Alice in Chains lead singer Layne Staley locked himself away in his
apartment and did drugs for five years, turning a bad habit into a lifetime
hobby. He was only found two weeks after his death when his accountant
noticed he hadn’t spent any money for a while.
Eighties punk legend GG Allin (more of him later) built his musical career
on dumping on his audience, sometimes literally. He once famously tried to
have sex with a dead cat on stage, and expressed extreme disappointment
when tested negative for AIDS. He promised his fans that he would commit
suicide onstage but instead he just overdosed at home, the big tease. He was
buried in a jockstrap embroidered with the phrase EAT ME.
7 Death in a plane crash

By far the most popular method of demise for performing musicians. It was
certainly the death of choice for most of Lynyrd Skynyrd, who had their bad
air day in 1977 when their chartered plane ran out of gas and crashed into a
wooded swamp in Gillsburg, Mississippi. Frontman Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist
Steve Gaines and vocalist Cassie Gaines were all killed, and most of the rest of
the bandmembers seriously injured. Drummer Artimus Pyle ran nearly a mile
with broken ribs to get help from a nearby farmhouse, but the farmer freaked
at the sight of the bloodied drummer and shot him. Really not his day.
Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and ‘The Big Bopper’ (real name Jay Perry
Richardson) met a similar end in 1959 when Holly chartered a plane for
himself and two bandmates. Guitarist Tommy Allsup lost a coin flip to Valens
for the one remaining seat on the plane, and Holly’s bass player, future
117

country star Waylon Jennings, graciously gave up his seat to the Bopper, who
was running a fever. This meant Jennings would have to take the bus. Holly
said to Jennings, ‘I hope your old bus freezes up’, to which Jennings famously
responded in a joking way: ‘Well, I hope your plane crashes.’ Which it did,
shortly after take-off. Waylon was haunted by this the rest of his life.
Otis Redding and his band, the Bar-Kays, also died in a plane crash.
Redding had not yet finished recording his mammoth hit ‘(Sittin’ On) The
Dock of the Bay’ at the time. The whistling you hear on the recording was
actually a placeholder for a third verse Redding hadn’t yet written, and, as
fate would have it, never would.
Folk music legend Jim Croce became famous two weeks after his death
with the phenomenal success of his third album, I Got A Name. He’d just
played a gig at Northwestern State University in Louisiana and planned to
overnight nearby, but changed his plans at the last minute and climbed into
a small twin-engined plane that hit a tree shortly after take-off. He did it the
hard way for the very last time.
Other victims of air crashes have been Randy Rhoads—Ozzy Osbourne’s
guitarist—whose coked-out pilot tried to buzz the tour bus in which Oz was
sleeping and hit a nearby house instead; Rick Nelson, who was on a nostalgia
tour of the American south at the time, trying to revive his career; Texas
bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan; and the commercially popular if critically
derided John Denver, who did not leave on a jet plane but in an experimental
single-engine aircraft he’d bought just a few days earlier.
The most recent name on the honour roll is R&B princess Aaliyah,
who hired a private plane to ferry her and her crew back to Florida from a
video shoot in the Bahamas in 2001. MTV reported that baggage handlers
complained her entourage had too much luggage, but nothing was done
118

about it and the plane took off well over weight capacity and crashed shortly
afterwards. Autopsy reports apparently revealed that the pilot had traces of
alcohol and cocaine in his system. He had been fired by another air charter
company four hours before the fatal flight.
8 Death by shooting
Another very popular method. Soul legend Marvin Gaye managed to get
shot by his father. Marvin, what’s going on? Ten thousand people attended
his funeral, which featured a song from Stevie Wonder and a reading from
Smokey Robinson.
Selena, the twenty-four-year-old Spanish-language superstar, topped
even that. Obviously Marv wasn’t that popular with dad, but Selena was
shot by the president of her fan club, Yolanda Saldivar. Saldivar also managed
Selena’s boutiques and Selena intended to fire her for embezzling funds. The
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to let you go’ speech obviously did not go well. In 1997,
fifty thousand fans attended the improbably named Selena Vive! (Selena
Lives!) tribute in Houston, Texas, featuring Gloria Estefan and Paulina Rubio.
Ten years after her death Selena still managed the highest-rated Spanish-
language show in US television history.
The most famous shooting of them all was ex-Beatle John Lennon who
was murdered by a stalker, Mark Chapman, in 1980. Chapman later claimed
that he was trying ‘to steal his [Lennon’s] fame’. Mark who? Not that death
stopped Lennon. His estate earned twenty-two million dollars in 2005 alone.
Imagine! There’s also an airport named after him: the John Lennon Airport in
Liverpool, UK (slogan: ‘Above us only sky’).
Shootings are to gangsta rappers what heroin ODs are to rock musicians;
119

Tupac Shakur was just twenty-five when he was murdered in a drive-by. Like
Che Guevara, death only served to immortalise him; he became a T-shirt
and poster icon, and one of the biggest earners in music. In 2003 his estate
brought in twelve million dollars. The Notorious B.I.G. succumbed to another
drive-by not long afterwards—you don’t think these two dastardly acts are
connected, do you, Holmes?—and his aptly named Life After Death album
entered the charts at number one and went on to sell more than ten million
copies. Bang-bang, you’re rich.
The least salubrious shooting death is that of Terry Kath, a founding
member of the soft rock group Chicago. Around five in the evening of
23 January 1978, after a party at a roadie’s house in LA, Kath, a keen gun
enthusiast, picked up an automatic 9mm pistol, put the gun to his temple and
pulled the trigger, his famous last words being ‘Don’t worry, it’s not loaded’.
But it was. One bullet remained in the chamber and killed him instantly. The
circumstances surrounding his death earned him the distinction of being one
of the first celebrities to earn a Darwin Award, a dubious honour awarded to
people who ‘do a service to humanity by removing themselves from the gene
pool’.
Finally, there’s Pantera guitarist Darrell ‘Dimebag’ Abbott who was the
first musician murdered onstage, shot repeatedly by a deranged gunman,
Nathan Gale, in Columbus, Ohio.
9 Death by sandwich
Elvis was the undisputed Burger King of Rock’n’Roll, but from his 1973 divorce
until his death four years later, his drug-taking as well as his diet reached
epic proportions. His personal physician, Dr George Nichopoulos, wrote ten
120

thousand prescriptions in 1977 alone. In his final years, Elvis was paranoid
and clinically depressed, fired revolvers into walls, handed out diamond
watches to strangers, and once in 1976 used his private jet to fly to Denver to
buy a sandwich that consisted of a hollowed buttered loaf, filled with peanut
butter, jelly and a pound of fried bacon. It was meant to feed eight: Elvis ate
it all himself.
He is worth as much dead as alive: Graceland alone draws six hundred
thousand pilgrims a year; there are thirty-five thousand professional
impersonators as well as several organised religions, including the First
Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine. The Elvis industry is worth a
conservative forty-five million dollars a year.
That’s why Elvis lives on.
10 Death by irony
Beach Boy Brian Wilson wrote all those songs about surfin’ safaris even
though he was terrified of the water. It was brother Dennis, the one they
didn’t want in the group, who was the surfer. It perfectly encapsulates the
Beach Boys story—pure gloss on an elliptical truth.
Sons to a violent and domineering father, Murry, the lives of the Wilson
boys were nothing like the fun-in-the-sun personas their fans dreamed
for them. Brian became a drug-addled recluse, tormented by psychiatric
problems. And Dennis was a chronic alcoholic reduced in his final year to
bunking at friends’ houses or sleeping in cheap hotels, having squandered his
fortune on good times and fair-weather friends.
Rangy, wild and charming, Dennis never gave up the fast chicks and
fast cars The Beach Boys sang about: he’d seen off four marriages; he’d been
121

banned from an upcoming tour because of his drinking; he’d once befriended
Charles Manson and lodged him and his entire ‘family’ at his Beverly Hills
mansion; and the year before his death he’d married Shawn Love, allegedly
the illegitimate child of fellow Beach Boy Mike Love, which led to restraining
orders to keep the two men from killing each other.
The afternoon of his death he’d been diving in bone-chilling water off
a boat slip in Marina Del Ray, in just a pair of cut-off jeans and face mask,
searching for personal belongings that had fallen or been tossed over the side
in the years his yacht had been docked there. He had been drinking heavily
and, possibly also suffering from hypothermia, he never resurfaced, and
drowned just feet from the marina.
Perhaps fittingly, the only Beach Boy who loved the water was buried at
sea, his family still feuding during and after the funeral.
122

The early
eighties
Yes, I really really want to
hurt you
‘Me.’
Ki ss b ass p lay e r Gene S immons’ reply w hen asked w hat he looks
f or in a w oman

Longer
(Dan Fogelberg)
Yes, Dan, on this evidence you can play for the

girls’ netball team
‘Longer’ came from a time when certain hippies were accused of spending far
too many weekends getting in touch with their feminine side. Dan Fogelberg
came to epitomise this New Age folk movement, which was not always a
good thing. When the parents of two teenagers who’d killed themselves after
listening to Judas Priest brought a lawsuit against their recording company,
comedian Denis Leary claimed he was about to sue Fogelberg and James
Taylor for turning him soft in the seventies.
‘Longer’ is one of those songs that gave rise to such jokes. It is like
drowning in a vat of chocolate and strawberry syrup while listening to Dan
Hill recite Hallmark cards. It makes Barry Manilow sound like Dr Dre.
For instance: when you start singing about being truer than a tree, it’s
time to check the old jockstrap, see if there’s anything in there. And how does
a tree grow true? It grows up. It grows out. It can grow over your neighbour’s
fence and drop leaves in his gutters. But how, exactly, does it grow true?
And how can you love someone deeper than a ‘forest primeval’? Excuse
my ignorance but I would have thought a primeval forest was full of
124

tarantulas and brontosauruses and flesh-eating giant birds. How can you
love someone—or ‘someone love’ if you follow Dan’s tortured syntax—
deeper than a prehistoric self-sustaining ecological system? One is carbon-
based and the other relates to subjective human experience.
Wait a minute. What’s this line here? Hold the phone . . . did he really
write about flying through the seasons of the year with love on his wings?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Look, I’m as romantic as the next guy but we don’t have wings, Dan,
because you’re not a goose. Well, allegedly. You’re a bloke. You’ve got balls.
Hopefully.
Dan, have you heard of the word ‘discernment’? It means we all think
really dumb things sometimes but we don’t say them, and we certainly don’t
record them in a sound studio and give them to people to listen to. This song
is tantamount to social suicide.
Dan was capable of writing good songs on occasion. Admittedly, this
does not include the slightly edgy one about the horse (‘Run for the Roses’
always reminds me of the first porno flick I saw in Sweden, involving a stallion
and a large bucket of lubricant). He was capable of writing much better lyrics,
such as this, from ‘Ghosts’: ‘Death is there to keep us honest, and constantly remind
us we are free.’
It’s really hard to say what was going through Dan’s mind when he wrote
‘Longer’. It was, of course, phenomenally successful and people played it a lot
at weddings to prove they were truer than trees and deeper than forests. And
good luck to them.
Sadly Dan died of prostate cancer while this book was being written. He
was just fifty-four.
The irony of it was that in the end Dan didn’t have that long at all.
125

Physical
(Olivia Newton-John)
Miss Clean talks dirty
There is a scene at the end of Grease where the wholesome and virginal Sandy
is transformed into a cat-suited vamp; sweet Olivia tries to pretend that she
wants sex for the first time, even while she’s still smiling like she’s making
a toothpaste commercial. I remember the look of utter disbelief on John
Travolta’s face.
This song is just like that.
It is about sex, but when Olivia figured this out she became concerned
about her image and had doubts about releasing it.
Olivia is lovely, sweet and possibly the nicest person in the Australian
music industry. She can sing stultifying dreck like ‘Have You Ever Been
Mellow?’ with the cloying sincerity of a Jehovah’s Witness trying to save your
soul for God. But for a moment in the eighties it seems she was possessed by
Satan and recorded one of that decade’s more blatantly sexual songs, and
then tried to deflect attention from the lyrics with a giggly film clip featuring
Olivia, dressed in a tight leotard, working out in a gym with several muscular
young men who, despite her best efforts, continue to ignore her. The purpose
of the video was to make people think the song was about exercise rather
than sex. This was further emphasised by the twist comedy ending of the
126

video, when the men who had been oblivious to Newton-John’s advances are
ultimately revealed to be gay.
I always suspected Travolta was wasting his time with Sandy. This video
confirmed all my suspicions.
Nevertheless, the song rose to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in
the US and stayed there for ten weeks, despite Olivia’s attempts to sanitise
it; but they caught on fast enough in the Bible Belt, where it was banned on
some radio stations, including Donny Osmond’s hometown of Salt Lake City,
Utah. (Didn’t they realise that ‘Puppy Love’ could be construed as suggestive
in some quarters? Just check the net, fellas.) The song’s veiled sexual content
got it banned in South Africa as well. This all just added to the song’s
popularity.
And me? Sorry, but I still think she’s a virgin.
127

Music from
‘The Elder’
(Kiss)
Not really a kiss, more a raspberry
Kiss were the comet in the firmament of early heavy metal. Through shrewd
merchandising and the creation of a carefully maintained if bizarre image,
they have outlasted their imitators.
Through the highs and lows of a thirty-year career they’ve always been
entertaining. Paul Stanley, the lead singer, has cast himself as a sensitive
poet with songs like ‘Rock Hard’ and ‘Love Gun’. And what about those
unforgettable lyrics from ‘C’mon and Love Me’—‘She’s a dancer, I’m a romancer,
I’m a Capricorn, and she’s a Cancer.’ Like Pablo Neruda, with face paint and a
cucumber down his shorts.
Drummer Peter Criss could sing lines like ‘I’m a hooligan, won’t go to
school again’ without flinching, and then there was guitarist Ace Frehley, who
could—well, he could certainly hold his liquor.
Then there was bass player Gene ‘Ooh baby, wanna put my log in your
fireplace’ Simmons, he with the tongue like a lizard and the morals of a tomcat
with a packet of Viagra emptied into his milk. They cultivated the image of the
128

ultimate rock stars, two hours of playing music and twenty-two hours of sex,
drugs and Satan-worshipping.
Who cares if it was all bullshit? Maybe Gene’s really a grandfather who
rides his mower round his backyard every Saturday morning. Maybe Paul
likes drinking chamomile tea and train-spotting. They kept us entertained.
But rock’n’roll is a hard mistress. The boys reached their peak and their nadir
at the same time with the 1979 release of ‘I Was Made for Loving You’. It was
a massive commercial hit worldwide but proved to be a double-edged sword.
The bad boys of heavy metal became user-friendly and lost many of their
hardcore fans.
Aiming to re-establish themselves as credible artists, Kiss reunited with
producer Bob Ezrin, who’d just had a huge success with Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
He suggested they try a concept album. So in 1981 they made Music from ‘The
Elder’, based on a poem that Gene Simmons wrote. As Paul Stanley told Hit
Parader in February 1982: ‘We’ve done a lot of fuck me suck me songs and we
thought we might like to go a slightly different route.’ It was intended to be
the soundtrack to a movie that was never released, and instead became an
album that was never purchased.
Album sales were so poor that the group did not embark on a supporting
tour for the first time in their eight-year history, opting instead to make a
handful of promotional appearances. These were four men who would paint
their faces to look like stars and cats and wear platform shoes that were taller
than they were in order to get attention. And they didn’t want to sing songs
from this album in public because it was too embarrassing.
Frustrated by the band’s new direction and Bob Ezrin’s production, Ace
Frehley left the band. It’s said that when Ace got his promotional copy, he
smashed it on the furniture and walked out.
129

Ebony and Ivory
(Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder)
Makes you want to take up racism
After The Beatles imploded, George went to the mystical East and got fitted
out for a robe, John moved to New York and went drinking every night with
Harry Nilsson, Ringo moved to California and hoovered three-quarters of
South America with Keith Moon, and Paul wrote deep and meaningful and
insightful songs about racial harmony based on the stunning realisation that
a piano has both black and white keys.
Paul, what about Asians? What about native American Indians? What
about . . . oh, never mind.
‘Ebony and Ivory’ was a 1982 number-one single in both the US and UK
charts for Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. In it, McCartney and Wonder
want the black and white races to get along as peacefully as the white and
black keys on a piano—which, as has been pointed out, seems highly unlikely,
since the white keys didn’t enslave the black keys for hundreds of years and
make them pick cotton.
The lyrics have long been thought to have been written by McCartney
alone, but in a biography of McCartney, Many Years From Now, written by Barry
Miles, it was revealed how Wonder contributed to the majority of the rhymes.
McCartney claims in the book that Wonder was unsure just how successful
130

a tune with such a racial message would be if it was known that it had an
African-American writer, and so asked McCartney to take credit.
This song has being parodied in many US television shows, such as The
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Everybody Hates Chris. Its anguished idealism also
inspired a Saturday Night Live duet between Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo:
‘I am dark and you are light, you are blind as a bat and I have sight.’
The original was named the worst duet in history by listeners to BBC 6
Music.
They obviously hadn’t listened closely to ‘The Girl is Mine’. But we’ll get
to that.
131

Do You Really Want
to Hurt Me?
(Culture Club)
Boy will be Boy
Lead singer Boy George wrote the lyrics to this song about his relationship with
Culture Club drummer Jon Moss, a six-year affair that was kept carefully hidden
from the public. The band came up with the soft reggae beat and put the song
together when they found they had some spare studio time during a recording
session for the Peter Powell show on BBC Radio 1. At first, Boy George didn’t
want this released as a single because it was too personal. But then they were
invited onto Top of the Pops when Shakin’ Stevens fell ill, and the song took off. It
reached number one not only in the UK but in twenty-two other countries.
The group had a number of other hit singles, including ‘Karma Chameleon’
and ‘Church of the Poisoned Mind’, but George’s drug use begun to spiral
out of control at the height of his fame and led to the group’s disbanding in
1986, soon after keyboardist Michael Rudetski was found dead of a heroin
overdose in George’s home. Boy George’s struggles with addiction have been
well documented in the media, but in recent years he has reinvented himself
as a club DJ and fashion designer.
132

George has been unable to keep out of the public eye for long, usually
for the wrong reasons. In 2006, he was sentenced to community service
sweeping streets in New York after he admitted wasting police time by falsely
reporting a burglary at his Manhattan apartment. Officers who responded to
the call instead found cocaine there.
Boy oh boy. Do you really want to be that dumb?
133

The Girl Is Mine
(Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney)
This doggone song is crap
This is a song about two men arguing over a woman, and which of them she
loves the most. It’s blindingly obvious that the doggone girl is mindfucking
the pair of them, and that both of these wimps are going to get hung out to
dry. Okay, in life, it happens. It might even make a good song one day. This
isn’t it.
It also seems to this little black duck that it’s a song written about love
and about women by someone who knows so little of the subject he might
as well be peering at it from Alpha Centauri through the wrong end of a
telescope.
The song was composed by the inimitable Whacko Jacko and released
as the first single from the best-selling 1982 album Thriller. The song itself is
appalling and then gets worse, leading to a spoken debate at the end with
Jackson speaking the now famous line: ‘Paul, I think I told you—I’m a lover, not
a fighter.’
Jackson released this as the first single from the album, apparently afraid
that an edgy song like ‘Billie Jean’ or ‘Beat It’ wouldn’t give the album a chance.
Maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong. There were some reasonable songs
on Thriller. This wasn’t one of them.
134

At the time it was merely a bad song. As we came to know more of
Michael—living in an amusement park with chimps and the Elephant Man’s
skeleton, cross-generational pyjama parties, the skin-whitening, the baby-
dangling, the crotch-grabbing, the kiddie-cuddling—‘The Girl Is Mine’ starts
to sound just a tad disturbing. And Paul agreed to be the other half of this
rank duet. Had all sense of discernment been bled out by Desmond and Molly?
Now I think I understand why The Beatles split up.
135

Total Eclipse
of the Heart
(Bonnie Tyler)
Total eclipse of the art
Jim Steinman, power balladeer extraordinaire, tells a story of when he was in

school, being called into the principal’s office and being asked to explain why
he had only achieved 8 percent for mathematics and 14 percent for English.
‘Well,’ Jim replied, ‘I guess it just shows that I have a lot more talent for
English than I do for math.’
Love him or hate him, it’s hard not to like the guy. Well, I think so anyway.
It’s also true that a lot of people do hate him, even though he’s written a lot
of runaway hits and made an awful lot of money in the process. I guess two
out of three ain’t bad.
‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ was both written and produced by Steinman,
and was originally performed by Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler in 1983.
It is probably Steinman’s most successful commercial composition ever,
going to number one everywhere in the known world, if you believe Bonnie
Tyler’s Greatest Hits sleeve notes. The song made Beethoven look like a jingle
writer, weighing in at six minutes and fifty-seven seconds in length. The
136

humble little version you hear on the radio is heavily edited, with cannons,
Mormon choir, eighty-three-piece mariachi band, and the combined bands of
the Coldstream and Grenadier Guards all edited out.
In the song, Tyler complains that she’s tired of listening to the sound of
her tears. It made me wonder what tears sound like. Plop? Perhaps. You got
me with that one, Jim.
The remarkable gothic video that accompanies this humble effort was
directed by Russell Mulcahy and storyboarded by Steinman himself, who drew
his inspiration from the film Future World. It was shot at Holloway Sanatorium
in Surrey. Bonnie is dressed like a soap opera actress, or Joan Collins, whichever
comes first, and the clip is populated with burning candles, teenage boys with
football stadium lights instead of eyes, doves, a trio of dancing ninjas, and a
rugby scrum. It’s like a Busby Berkeley production where everyone is high on
crack-cocaine—and ends with an angel (yet another near-naked teenage boy
with giant wings growing out of his back) wrapping his arms around a crying
Tyler. There, there, it’s all over now. Go and collect your royalty cheque.
Experimental Norwegian rockers Hurra Torpedo did a cover version
on the Norwegian TV show Lille Lordag (‘Little Saturday’) in 1995 with
their buttocks exposed, singing this song while destroying cookers, fridges
and other whitegoods. Personally I didn’t know there was any other way to
sing it.
‘Once upon a time I was falling in love, now I’m only falling apart.’
What is there not to like? He really did have more of a talent for English
than he did for math.
137

Illegal Alien
(Genesis)
Let’s show we have a social conscience by taking

the piss out of Mexican immigrants
In the eighties, many rock bands discovered their social conscience. Sting
discovered rainforests, Bryan Adams discovered whales, and Bob Geldof
organised the Feed the World concert for Ethiopia.
So what happened here? Did Phil Collins say: ‘I’ve got an idea, fellas. No
one has done illegal Hispanic immigrant workers in the United States yet.
Let’s do them a favour and draw attention to their plight by depicting them
as freeloading degenerates!’ ‘Yes!’ say Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, the
other members of Genesis. ‘What a great idea!’
Okay, well you tell me, then. How else could this have happened?
‘Illegal Alien’ was a single from Genesis’ self-titled 1983 release. The
music video featured Phil in a toupee and sombrero putting on a fake
Viva Zapata accent and drinking tequila. The second stanza of the bridge,
in which the immigrant offers sexual favours from his sister in exchange
for admittance across the border, was edited from the radio version, as
well as from the video. Apparently some people were offended by it.
Imagine that.
138

It’s over a quarter of a century since Phil and the boys recorded this
turkey, and in all that time the song has rarely been heard on US radio stations
because it’s thought to be so offensive. Sure, the lyrics are not meant to be
taken seriously. But how would you feel if, as an oppressed minority and a
good Catholic, some wealthy British rock star thinks it is amusing to suggest,
in song, that you would sell your sister for a green card?
Arriba, arriba!
If Phil harboured any dreams of being knighted by the Queen, they
disappeared with the sombrero.
I wonder if they recorded a Spanish-language version?
139

Wake Me Up Before
You Go-Go
(Wham!)
Because I don’t want to be late for court
This was George Michael’s first ever hit, when he was part of the British glam
pop duo Wham!. Michael, who was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou—this
may give you a clue why he changed his name—had palled up with Andrew
Ridgeley at high school.
Michael says he drew inspiration for ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’
from a scribbled note to that effect left for him by Ridgeley at a hotel. It was a
change of pace for the duo, part of a makeover that included wider smiles, more
colourful clothing and a more positive disposition. They’d spent the previous
year singing songs about unemployment, young marriage and battles of will
between parents and their children. They were earnest, they were honest and
it got them absolutely nowhere. They decided instead to try and appeal to the
buying public’s lowest common denominator, and they hit the jackpot.
The music video that accompanied the song was filmed at the Carling
Academy Brixton in London. It was essentially the duo performing the song
to a teenage audience. Michael and Ridgeley, plus backing singers Pepsi and
140

Shirlie, wore Katharine Hamnett T-shirt designs saying ‘CHOOSE LIFE’ and
‘GO-GO’ that became the hot fashion items of 1984.
If you weren’t around then—aren’t you glad?
The song went to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, and Michael
followed it up with a solo single, ‘Careless Whispers’. It became one of the
most played songs of the decade.
In the video clip Michael kisses his female lead, and publicists fed
the press the story that afterwards she had fainted dead away on the spot.
(Later events proved this to be unlikely when he was caught in a classic ‘you
show me yours and I’ll show you mine’ police sting in a Los Angeles public
bathroom.)
Wham! had three more UK number one singles and split at their height
in 1986. Michael went on to enjoy massive global success with his unique
brand of soul-influenced pop. He has since sold over eighty-five million
records worldwide. Ridgeley was creative in other ways: instead of going into
a downward cycle of drugs and alcohol after his career in music ended, he
hooked up with a former Bananarama singer and went surfing and golfing in
Cornwall.
‘Wake Me Up Before You etc etc’ is a ‘Laughing Gnome’ kind of song: it
proves the theory that even great musicians have to crap sometimes. It was a
case of art for art’s sake and money for God’s sake. George Michael could write
chirpy-chirpy cheep-cheep when he had to—he just knew when to stop.
141

We Built This City
(Starship)
Grace gets a little too slick
If you didn’t have more than a smattering of English and only a passing
knowledge of rock history, perhaps this song might not bother you. Yet it
consistently finds itself on ‘worst ever’ lists. This song inspires venomous
outpourings of bile and derision, and has done ever since it became a runaway
stinker in 1985.
Blender magazine called it ‘the truly horrible sound of a band taking the
corporate dollar while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar’. And
this is probably the nub of why this song is so universally despised: it’s not
that it’s so bad, not for a ringtone anyway; but the lyrics stink to high heaven
of hypocrisy and are sung not by some johnny-come-lately bubblegum band
but by a revered bunch of rockers who are seen as sell-outs.
Get the picture?
The 1985 Starship were the mutation of once-mighty psychedelic rock
music overlords Jefferson Airplane. Indeed, the lyrics of ‘We Built This City’
appear to glorify Airplane within San Francisco’s sixties rock scene. But by
the eighties former leader Grace Slick, the sole surviving member of the
original band, had handed artistic control to singer Mickey Thomas. The
song was supposed to be an anthem to rock rebellion, yet sounded like it
142

had been written in a laboratory by a team of record company moguls with
demographic charts and Moog synthesisers.
Even Slick herself seemed embarrassed by it. ‘This is not me,’ she once
famously said about it.
It was actually the first song Elton John’s songwriting partner Bernie
Taupin wrote without the Sequined One. The lyrics were supposed to be a cry
of rebellion against a corporation trying to ban rock’n’roll in an imaginary
future; in fact they were written on demand for a music corporation trying to
make money from one of the sixties’ great rock’n’roll bands by taking all the
rock’n’roll out of them.
‘Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names,’ the lyric runs, a tad
ironically, as the band itself had changed its name three times.
Then there’s that moronic chorus: it starts ‘Marconi plays the mamba’.
As has been pointed out, the mamba is a deadly black snake. How can a
long-dead inventor play a black snake? Perhaps Marconi is a metaphor for
the radio, and perhaps mamba is meant to be mambo, the South American
dance. But it still doesn’t make sense.
But those synthesisers sound good, don’t they, Grace?
Criticism of the song came hard to Mickey Thomas. ‘It kind of hurts my
feelings,’ he said. ‘I’m really proud of that song. For me it was a response to
lost innocence. It was about rock music growing up and losing its idealism.’
Mickey is never going to get it, and that’s why the song is so derided.
Rock music is all about not growing up, Mickey. That’s the point.
(Sigh.)
143

THE 10 WORST SCANDALS IN MUSIC
HISTORY
1 Girl You Know It’s Faked

Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus looked good. They sounded good, too, if you like
bubblegum Europop trash. But the real horror of it was: it wasn’t even their
Europop bubblegum trash.
They had rippling pectorals, lots of hair, and one had a German accent and
the other one had a French accent. If only they could sing. Suspicions about
Milli Vanilli were first raised when they were performing their big hit ‘Girl You
Know It’s True’ at a Connecticut theme park, and the tape playing their vocals
failed. Few people in the audience seemed to mind but questions were raised.
They were dropped by their record label, stripped of their Grammy and sued for
fraud. Not too long after this, their German producer, Frank Farian, admitted
the vocals on the record did not belong to Morvan and Pilatus. In 1998 Pilatus
was found dead in a hotel room in Frankfurt, from a drug overdose. Sad.
2 Some girls do—with other girls

Are they? Aren’t they? A lot of music fans—men mostly—were disappointed
to discover that doe-eyed Russian teenage duo t.A.T.u. were not, as it turned
out, gusset-nuzzlers. The pseudo-sapphism, apparently, was all for show, and
the steamy lesbian make-out session seen on The Tonight Show—largely cut
144

by censors, unfortunately—and the all-female fantasy staged at the 2003
MTV Movie Awards was just that—staged. A cheap publicity stunt. How can
these people mess with us this way?
Madonna, never to be upstaged—not ever ever ever—got in on the act
at the same awards by kissing both Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
Playing with fire there. She was lucky one of them didn’t want to take her to
Las Vegas and marry her for a while.
3 I don’t believe you can urinate on underage

girls
‘I Believe I Can Fly’ was a huge hit for the R&B superstar R. Kelly and briefly
won him a lot of fans. But RK had an eccentric edge. In the spring edition of
Hip Hop Soul magazine he compared himself to Marvin Gaye, Muhammad
Ali and Martin Luther King. Then in 2002 a twenty-seven-minute XXX-rated
video surfaced, allegedly showing him giving golden showers to girls not
old enough to own an umbrella. Charged with twenty-one counts of child
pornography, Kelly insisted someone else was taking the piss. Was it someone
else’s lemonade gun?
The Chicago Tribune reported that the video allegedly features Kelly with
the then fourteen-year-old niece of Sparkle, one of the singer’s former artists
and protégés. His former lover then identified him as the man on the tape
and claimed that he took a duffel bag of home-made kiddie porn with him
everywhere he went. She also claimed that she and Kelly had had a three-way
with the girl, who was still underage at the time.
Although Kelly, the girl and the girl’s mother all denied involvement,
no less than eleven prosecution witnesses identified them in court. One even
145

claimed to recognise the distinctive wood panelling of Kelly’s home by the
knots in the wood. Kelly was acquitted on all counts.
In an industry where image often means more than substance it is
interesting to note that in the six years the case was in public view Kelly
released five albums, a greatest-hits collection and completed several concert
tours.
But industry analysts think his last court appearances could signal the
end of his career. Why? Because he showed up in court with his hair braided,
and hair braiding just isn’t cool with the kids any more.
4 Chuck’s ding-a-ling
One of rock’n’roll’s earliest scandals saw the legendary Chuck Berry sentenced
to three years’ jail in 1961 for transporting a fourteen-year-old prostitute across
state lines for ‘immoral purposes’, in contravention of the Mann Act. Whether
it was Chuck’s ding-a-ling or the colour of his skin that got him in trouble is
still debatable. Jack Johnson, the first black American heavyweight boxing
champion, had also run foul of this controversial law: the prostitute that Jack
allegedly tried to smuggle across state lines was his white girlfriend. For his part
Chuck spent twenty months in prison with no particular place to go. Was Chuck
the victim of legalised racism? In the good old US of A you never can tell.
5 The end of the beginning

On 1 March 1968, during a Doors concert in Miami, the Lizard King screamed
‘There are no rules!’ and showed the crowd the Morrison Johnson. Back in the
sixties, rock stars couldn’t do that sort of thing. (Thank God those days are
146

behind us or Iggy Pop would be forced to sing onstage instead), and a Rally for
Decency attracted thirty thousand people. As Mae West once famously said,
a lotta issue over a little bit of tissue. But Jim was arrested and convicted for
public indecency, and when it was all over, he skulked off to Paris, got fat, got
in the bath and died.
6 Well shucks we can screw our underage cousins

where I come from
The first underage sex scandal—and as this brief history can attest, there
have been more than a few—involving popular musicians hit the headlines
in 1958 when it was revealed that rocker Jerry Lee Lewis had married his
thirteen-year-old first cousin once removed. Well shoot, it wasn’t like it was
his sister or anything. Still, he was booed off the stage in the UK in 1958,
and quickly went from performing ten-thousand-dollar-a-night concerts to
playing in cheap beer joints. History has judged him less harshly. These days
inside the industry it’s regarded as a foible rather than a sex crime: Jimmy
Page’s lengthy affair with a fourteen-year-old groupie was chronicled in the
1985 Zep bio Hammer of the Gods. As the Beastie Boys sang in ‘The New Style’:
‘If I played guitar I’d be Jimmy Page, The girlies I like are underage.’
7 Is that a fish in your vagina, or are you just

pleased to see me?
The Zeps were the quintessential heavy metal rock band. They characterised
rock excess. One legend that grew around them was a curious episode where a
dead fish was stuffed into a female fan’s vagina.
147

The band had checked into Seattle’s Edgewater Inn, a unique estab-
lishment on Puget Sound from which guests could fish from the windows
of their rooms. In Hammer of the Gods, Stephen Davis describes how Richard
Cole, their road manager, and drummer John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham were catching
mudsharks when they were interrupted by some persistent groupies. One of
them, a seventeen-year-old redhead named Jackie, told them she really liked
being tied up. To oblige her they ordered rope from room service, even though
it wasn’t on the menu. Jackie stripped and the Zeps tied her to the bed, at
which point Cole introduced the nose of one of their catch to the girl’s private
parts.
‘We caught a lot of big sharks, at least two dozen, stuck coat hangers
through the gills and left ’em in the closet . . . But the true shark story was that
it wasn’t even a shark. It was a red snapper and the chick happened to be a
redheaded broad with a ginger pussy. Bonzo was in the room, but I did it. And
she loved it. It was like, “Let’s see how your red snapper likes this red snapper!”
That was it. It was the nose of the fish, and that girl must have come 20 times.
But it was nothing malicious or harmful, no way! No one was ever hurt.’
Except maybe the snapper.
Other stories that sprang up around the Zeps involved groupies
getting it on with octopi and Great Danes. That really is a whole lotta
love.
8 Till the hangover do us part

Marriage is a tough gig, and sometimes you just have to stick at it and try and
work through the problems. Britney Spears and her high school sweetheart
Jason Alexander certainly gave it their best shot, but sometimes there are just
148

irreconcilable differences. Brits gave Jason the best fifty-five hours of her life
but finally it was time to move on.
They’d been married at 5.30 in the morning after partying all night on
New Year’s Eve 2004. On 3 January, Britney filed for an annulment, citing the
fact that she ‘lacked understanding of her actions’. (Surely, then, she’d have
to annul her whole life?)
Jason, a twenty-two-year-old student at Southeastern Louisiana
University, signed the papers, he later claimed, under pressure from Britney’s
family—and a British tabloid alleged he was paid more than half a million
dollars before he complied.
This was not a mere mad moment. TV meltdowns, panty-free partying
with Paris, a haircut that looked like she did it in her bathroom mirror with a
chainsaw, and spells in and out of rehab were soon to come. Another student
successfully graduates from the Whitney Houston School of Song.
9 Jesus Juice
Michael Jackson was, even in his Thriller heyday, a deeply disturbing man.
On video he gyrated and moonwalked and grabbed at his own crotch; let out
in public he whispered into microphones like a five-year-old at awards night
accepting a diploma from the principal for School’s Shyest Little Boy.
At forty-six, the King of Pop appeared in a documentary with the BBC’s
Martin Bashir holding hands with a thirteen-year-old cancer survivor,
claiming he was misunderstood. A year later, the same boy accused
Jackson of showing him pornography and fondling his genitals during
sleepovers at the Neverland Ranch. He also alleged that Jackson plied him
and his brother with Jesus Juice—white wine laced with antihistamines
149

they drank from a soda can. It was the second time in a decade Jacko
had been cited for child molestation. The trial turned into a media circus,
with guest appearances by celebrity witnesses like Jay Leno and Macaulay
Culkin, and Jackson once turning up at court in his pyjamas, which some
thought appropriate. Although he was acquitted of all ten charges in June
2005, his image had suffered long-term abuse. He sold up and moved to
Bahrain.
10 Ange, we’re only sleeping

No, Angie did not find the Thin White Duke humping Jumping Jack Flash.
Though we can dream of David Bowie in full glam rock glitter and platform
boots getting Mick Jagger to eat a Mars bar out of him the same way Mick was
rumoured to have worked, rested and played with Marianne Faithfull, it just
didn’t happen that way.
Apparently they were naked in the same bed but they weren’t doing
anything. Perhaps they’d had a hard night and crashed, or perhaps the girls
had already got up and gone home.
For these and other salaciously vague titbits, Angie had a ten-year gag
order placed on her after she divorced Ziggy Stardust in 1978. When it expired,
she trashed him and their marriage in her autobiography. Apparently Bowie
is bisexual. Wow, no kidding!
150

The late
eighties
Don’t worry, be crappy
‘Passing the vodka bottle. And playing

the guitar.’
Ke i t h Ri chard s, o n being asked about his f itness regime

Sussudio
(Phil Collins)
No jacket, or thought, required
This was the first track on Phil Collins’ third album, No Jacket Required, released
back in 1985.
Appearing on VH1’s Storytellers, Collins said that ‘Sussudio’ was an
imaginary girl’s name and was meant to symbolise any girl. It’s about having
a crush on someone when you’re young.
Apparently, the genius behind this recording was accidental. Like all the
songs on the album, it was recorded in Collins’ living room. He claims he’d set
up his drum-machine pad and had worked out some chords and started to sing
into the microphone. The word that just dripped like honey from his lips was
‘sus-sussudio’.
So, there you have insight into the way a master storyteller and
songwriter works. It’s intricate, I know, and difficult to follow at times, but
genius doesn’t come easily. It’s about a schoolboy crush, a drum machine
and the first doggerel that comes out of your mouth.
I wonder if this was what it was like for Lennon, Cobain and Dylan?
Despite reaching number one on the charts and its continuing popularity
on adult contemporary stations, ‘Sussudio’ was ranked number twenty-four
on VH1’s ‘40 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever’.
152

Critics lambasted Collins for the song’s similarity to Prince’s hit ‘1999’.
Collins defended himself by saying that his original version sounded even
more similar.
You’ll be glad to know that Sussudio! is the title for a new musical based
on the songs of Phil Collins, and is also the name of an Italian Phil Collins
tribute band. ‘I’m sure there are twenty-year-olds all over the world with the
name Sussudio,’ he said once, ‘so I apologise for that.’
It’s good that he’s sorry. But after all these years, he’s not nearly sorry
enough.
153

Dancing in the
Street
(David Bowie & Mick Jagger)
Jumpin Jack Flash lays a brick
It was a good song before Bowie and Jagger ruined it for us. They might as
well have turned it into a tampon jingle for all the good feelings some of us
have left about the original, which was first recorded in 1964 by Martha and
the Vandellas and became one of Motown’s signature songs.
Originally produced as an innocent dance single, it was later adopted as
a civil rights anthem during riots in urban USA. Some radio stations took the
song off their playlists when black advocates such as H. Rap Brown played it
while organising demonstrations.
Then came Live Aid.
It was almost as if Mick got on the phone to David and said: Look, what
do you reckon we can do before the public finally turns on us? Bowie says,
well, if we do a duet of one of rock’s greatest songs, ham it up in front of the
cameras, sing it like we’re a pair of pissed Japanese businessmen at a karaoke
night—that ought to do it! All right, Jagger says, you’re on. Five quid and
Jerry Hall says we can get away with it.
154

The original plan was to perform a track together live, with Bowie
performing at Wembley Stadium and Jagger at the JFK Stadium, until someone
realised that the satellite link-up would cause a half-second delay that would
make this impossible. As it was, it might have sounded a whole lot better.
At the time Bowie was recording his contributions for the Absolute
Beginners soundtrack at Abbey Road Studios, so Jagger flew in from New York.
A rough mix was finished in just four hours, and the pair went straight out to
London Docklands to film the accompanying music video with director David
Mallet.
In the 4 October 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, Mick described it this way:
‘We banged it out in just two takes. It was an interesting exercise in how you
can do something without worrying too much.’
And it showed. It was aired to much acclaim at Live Aid. The thin twins
mugged furiously as if they were teenagers at a fourteenth birthday party,
pissed on spiked rockmelon punch. But the public will forgive anything if it’s
for a good cause, and when it was released as a single it topped the UK charts
for four weeks, and reached number seven in the US. To be fair, all profits
went to Live Aid. But once the post-Geldof rush wore off, there was a critical
reappraisal. Starvation had not gone away and we were still stuck with Ja-
Bo. The popular rock music discussion blog Rock Town Hall named this video
‘Rock Crime of the Century’.
By contrast, on 12 April 2006, it was announced that Martha and the
Vandellas’ version of ‘Dancing in the Street’ would be one of just fifty sound
recordings preserved for eternity by the Library of Congress.
155

Don’t Worry,
Be Happy
(Bobby McFerrin)
A fridge magnet set to music
Don’t you just hate it when people tell you to cheer up when you’re miserable?
It makes me want to punch them in the face. And this song is just like that;
I find it astonishing that Bobby McFerrin is still alive and well and walking
around even today without a bodyguard and largely unmolested.
And there’s no music. The backing to McFerrin’s bizarre vocals is all finger
clicking and humming, like he’s doing a duet with Elmo on Sesame Street.
And what sort of sage, worldly advice does McFerrin offer? Well, try this:
if your landlord is threatening you with eviction, because you have not paid
the rent in months, you chuckle at him and shout: ‘Don’t wuhhhhh—rry, be
yappy!’ in a joke Trenchtown accent. Sure, Bobby. That’ll fix things.
But you can fool all of the people all of the time. In 1988, it was the first
a cappella song to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, though
possibly and hopefully the last. The following year it won Best Song of the
Year at the 1989 Grammys. (To put this in perspective, Milli Vanilli won Best
New Artists at the same awards.)
156

The song’s title is taken from a famous quote by Meher Baba, an Indian
guru, which was printed on inspirational cards and posters in the sixties.
McFerrin was originally going to name the song ‘Why So Mopey, Dopey’ and
then came across one of these sayings and was, well . . . inspired. Is that the
word?
There were rumours that McFerrin attempted suicide after writing this
song, and they’re not true. But even today, some people think he’s dead. This
is all just wishful thinking.
The novelty toy Big Mouth Billy Bass has this song as part of his repertoire,
and does a far better job. He sounds like a fish singing, at least, and not Al
Jolson trying to impersonate Bob Marley.
157

Hangin’ Tough
(New Kids On The Block)
Low on talent, high on really stoopid hats
The eighties will probably best be remembered for Madonna, Milli Vanilli and
boy bands—and New Kids On The Block were the very embodiment of all that
was bad about boy bands.
The bedrock of their audience was hormonal pre-teens—girls mainly,
but who knew?—and this 1988 effort was the nadir of a career that only ever
featured low points. Somehow NKOTB looking ‘tough’ rang a little hollow—
both singly and collectively they made Kylie Minogue look like The Incredible
Hulk. They gave the impression of four-year-olds dressed like gangsta rappers
for the preschool Christmas costume party. Look at me, Mum!
When they growled ‘Don’t cross our path or you’re gonna get stomped!’, gay
guys everywhere with one leg and no arms shook in their boot. Say, weren’t
you the guys who were begging your girlfriend not to go a few months ago in
voices that sounded like Martin Short sucking helium?
They’d been assembled like Lego in 1984 by music producer Maurice
Starr, in the way the Spice Girls were custom-made a decade later by Heart
Management. Auditions were held in Boston, and over five hundred teenage
boys were auditioned, among them fifteen-year-old Donnie Wahlberg. He
became the founding member and helped to recruit others—his younger
158

brother Mark, his best friend Danny Wood, and two former classmates,
brothers Jonathan and Jordan Knight.
To his eternal credit, Mark quickly became disillusioned with the band
and became an actor instead. He was eventually replaced by twelve-year-old
Joey McIntyre. The band were originally and mystifyingly called Nynuk, but
when Columbia Records signed them up they insisted, quite understandably,
on a name change.
Their self-titled debut album was released in 1986, almost exclusively
written and produced by Starr. It was bubblegum pop eighties style, and it
flopped, initially.
They went back to the recording studio. But their next single, the ballad
‘Please Don’t Go Girl’, also flopped and Columbia were planning to drop the
new kids back onto the block.
Then some fool in a Florida radio station began playing the song and
it soon became the most requested song on their playlist. Consequently,
Columbia started to promote it, and it finally reached number ten on the
Billboard Hot 100. From that point on, we were all doomed.
When ‘I’ll Be Loving You (Forever)’ reached number one, they decided
to vend it like Beckham, and more than 140 products were licensed with
New Kids On The Block trademarks. I have to tell you that at one point in
mankind’s history you could buy lunchboxes, pillowcases, T-shirts or dolls in
the likeness of this fabulous five. There was even a Saturday morning cartoon.
This, folks, is western culture. This is why we first ventured out of caves to
take on woolly mammoths.
But as a cynical exercise in marketing, it worked like a dream. The group
went on to sell over seventy million albums worldwide, paving the way for
even more terrible acts like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC.
159

For a year or two they were better known and better paid than even
Madonna and Michael Jackson. But by 1991 we’d all overdosed on teen pop.
(How did we ever get a taste for it in the first place, you ask. I have no answer
for you.)
Derided outside their fan base, i.e. by those to whom tampons were
no longer a novelty and zits were a fading memory, the boys split from their
producer, changed their name to NKOTB and attempted a comeback in 1994.
You can fight public opinion but you can’t fight time. Eventually they realised
they just weren’t the new kids on the block any more. They looked like the old
ones leaning out of the apartment windows yelling at fourteen-year-olds to
turn the volume down, goddammit.
Jonathan Knight went off to sell real estate, while brother Jordan cashed
in on the teen pop revival of the late nineties. Joey McIntyre became a regular
on the TV show Boston Public, and Donnie followed his brother’s footsteps into
acting, appearing in Sixth Sense, Band of Brothers and the Saw movies.
Danny Wood, however, prefers to stay out of the spotlight. It’s a good
attitude to have, and we can only wish his colleagues and associates had
thought the same back in 1984. But the damage is done now. Still, we survived
the boy bands, even if we thought we wouldn’t.
In the end, I guess, you just have to hang tough.
160

Kokomo
(The Beach Boys)
A cocktail made from shit and syrup
When this song was released, The Beach Boys’ best days were long behind
them. But they had been one of the most popular bands of the long-ago
sixties, and songs like ‘Surfin’ USA’ and ‘Little Deuce Coup’ had a fun-in-the-
sun theme, which is why they were asked by producer Terry Melcher to record
a song for the Tom Cruise vehicle Cocktail.
Brian Wilson is the creative force behind The Beach Boys, and mad as
a two-bob watch, but he writes great songs, so it seems almost redundant to
point out that he had nothing to do with this drivel. In fact, Melcher wrote
this with the help of John Phillips (formerly of The Mamas and the Papas),
Beach Boy Mike Love, and Scott McKenzie, who had a hit in 1967 with ‘San
Francisco’. Instead of flowers in your hair, this time you got a drink in your
hand with an umbrella in it.
The Beach Boys are best known for their vocal harmonies, which were
sensational, but session musicians often played the actual instruments on
their albums, which is why they weren’t renowned for their live concerts.
By the time ‘Kokomo’ hooked around, nothing had changed: Jim Keltner
was asked to play drums and Ry Cooder was hired for the guitar work. He’s
161

probably had tougher days at the office than playing this gloop. The other
session musicians were not even credited.
‘By and by we’ll defy a little bit of gravity.’
This line mystifies me. Does this mean he promises not to develop a beer
gut and her breasts won’t droop? Or are they planning to levitate?
And why Kokomo? That’s easier to explain. Kokomo is a small resort
owned by Sandals Royal Caribbean in Montego Bay, and was supposed to
represent any tropical island that people think of when they think of a paradise
escape. But it was Mike Love who added the line ‘Aruba, Jamaica, oooh I wanna
take ya’, which I think proves why Brian Wilson was so highly regarded.
The song, nursery rhyme, call it what you will, was released in July
1988, but was understandably ignored until Cocktail was released a few
months later. Then it really took off, unfortunately for those of us who like to
occasionally listen to the radio. It gave the Boys their first number one since
‘Good Vibrations’ eighteen years before. The Cocktail soundtrack did well too,
even though this and Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ were on the
album.
Since then, many resorts, restaurants and bars have capitalised on the
Kokomo cachet, particularly in Florida. Why would you want to name your
establishment after a really bad song? Beats me. What’s next? The Achy
Breaky Brekky Bar?
‘Kokomo’ has appeared on several ‘worst song’ lists, including VH1’s ‘40
Most Awesomely Bad No. 1 Songs’. I have to admit, every time I hear it, I
always feel like a strong drink and a nice lie down on a beach chair.
162

THE 10 WORST BANDS IN ROCK HISTORY
1 Iron Butterfly
Legend has it that this LA acid-rock sixties band had smoked so much
dope during the 1968 recording sessions for ‘In the Garden of Eden’ that
keyboardist/singer Doug Ingle could only mumble the title. Many music fans
thought ‘In-a-Gadda-da-Vida’ was a mystical Sanskrit saying, instead of a singer
off his face on drugs. The unexpurgated seventeen-minute version of the song
includes, as a special treat, a two-and-a-half-minute drum solo. The album it
was taken from was the first LP ever to be certified platinum. I bet these boys
don’t remember any of it.
2 Rick Wakeman
Mick Jagger allegedly nicknamed him Rock Wankman. Rick was the self-
styled keyboard player for Yes, possibly one of the most pompous and
self-important bands in history. He wore a cape and spent much of the
seventies producing solo theme records, like The Myths and Legends of King
Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which sounded inexcusably bad even
when you were seventeen and stoned out of your mind. Take my word for it.
For reasons that he never made clear to anyone, he once performed it on ice.
He had long hair and liked to play two synthesisers at once. If he’d been born
in the eighties he would be working for Microsoft.
163

3 Skinny Puppy
It is said that Canada’s worst musical crimes are Bryan Adams and Celine
Dion, but this is not true. This eighties band played the sort of industrial
anti-music that would make you want to rip your ear drums out with pliers.
Two of the band members were called Kevin; they first sampled their own
genius by changing their names to cEvin and Nivek. This is all you need to
know about them. That, and that cEvin once pretended to slice open his
stomach on stage with broken glass. If they were Rammstein they would have
done it for real. Still, if an audience is forced to listen to songs like ‘Dogshit’
there have to be some compensations. Their lead singer Dwayne—dWain,
Enyawd . . . ?—completed the cliché by dying of a heroin overdose.
4 Crash Test Dummies

This is another MFC band—More Fucking Canadians. What is it with
Canadians? This band claimed that lead vocalist Brad Roberts’ voice was so
deep it could be heard by whales. As if being shot by a Japanese with a harpoon
wasn’t bad enough. Their best known song was ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’.
This is also probably their most meaningful lyric. In 2001, they released I Don’t
Care That You Don’t Mind. We didn’t care. Did they mind? Well to be honest—I
don’t really care.
5 La Toya Jackson
I have a confession to make. Until Michael replaced his nose with two airholes
and a wart, I thought La Toya was Michael dressed as a woman. I really could
164

not tell the difference. Did she sing? I don’t remember. I saw his/her cleavage
once in a photograph and it left me feeling profoundly disturbed for weeks.
What if it was Michael? Mister Jackson, what did you do to these kids?
6 Air Supply
Air Supply were so bad I always wanted to cut their supply off. They made
The Wiggles sound like Judas Priest. The band was built around two love-
sick puppies called Russell, and peddled the kind of soft rock the lovelorn
listen to as they’re picking the petals off daisies. Very plain-looking blokes
who couldn’t dress themselves and became the most commercially successful
Australian group in history.
7 Kenny G
There can be few more hated men in music than Kenny Gorelick. He single-
handedly turned the saxophone into the most feared instrument of torture
since the rack. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of
Washington with a degree in accounting—and it sounds like it. He has since
sold more than forty-five million albums of elevator-friendly instrumental
slop. This is how music sounds after it’s been bleached and processed until
all soul and meaning is gone. He once made the Guinness Book of World
Records for holding an E-flat note for an agonising forty-five minutes. My
guess is that he then released it as an album. It conclusively proves that no
sax is better than bad sax.
165

8 Donovan
In these days of gangsta rap and lyrics like ‘gunna pop a cap in yo ass motherfucker
yo doan gimme dat sugar on my big sorry-ass dick’, it can easily be forgotten what
children of the sixties had to put up with. Donovan, for instance. This pube-
headed, dreary flower-power minstrel penned moony nonsense that appealed
to sixties hippies so out of it on hash that he once compared his influence
to that of Hitler. He played la-la-land lullabies like ‘Jennifer Juniper’ and
‘Barabajagal’ and sang about mermaids and electrical bananas while dressed
in a white robe surrounded by flowers and billowing incense, and declared
a messiah-like intention to lead America to a softer, quieter time. Well, not
if Suge Knight can help it. These days Donovan would be lucky to make two
bucks busking in a pedestrian underpass. Back then he was a legend.
9 Emerson, Lake & Palmer

They shunned blues-based rock for pompously reinterpreted classical works
to become one of the seventies supergroups, headlining concerts round the
world. Shows included a massive Persian carpet, a grand piano spinning
end-over-end, a rotating percussion platform, and a Hammond organ being
thrown around on stage to create feedback (it was the same organ every time,
called the L100, and it was repaired overnight for the next show).
Their live shows were peppered with interminable solo spots, including a
twenty-minute—twenty minutes!—drum workout by Carl Palmer that ended
with him ringing a cowbell between his teeth.
They had a live album called Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never
Ends, and with a twenty-minute drum solo it must have seemed that way.
166

These are the sort of lyrics you could have looked forward to:
‘Every day a little sadder, A little madder, Someone get me a ladder.’
Can lyrics get any badder? I don’t think so.
LITTLE KNOWN FACT: Jimi Hendrix, tired of his band and wanting to
try something different, expressed an interest in playing with the group. The
British press heard about it and speculated that they would then be known as
HELP, or Hendrix, Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Hendrix died shortly thereafter, desperate to find a way out of his
predicament.
10 The Shaggs
One critic called it ‘the worst music ever recorded by human beings’. (He
obviously hadn’t heard Metal Machine Music.) True, this all-girl band was, quite
possibly, one of the worst bands in the history of the entire world. But that
doesn’t make them bad human beings—quite the opposite—and because of
that there is something . . . magnificent . . . about them.
The band actually started before they were born. Their grandmother had
gone to a palm reader who had predicted that her granddaughters would form
a popular music group. So when they reached their teens, their father, Austin,
withdrew the sisters from school, bought them instruments, and arranged for
them to receive music and vocal lessons.
It didn’t work.
As Dot, who sang and played lead guitar, later said of him, without rancour:
‘He was something of a disciplinarian. He directed. We obeyed. Or did our best.’
He organised gigs for them, and then a recording session. The girls—
Dorothy, Betty and Helen Wiggin—were reluctant but their father was firm.
167

‘I want to get them while they’re hot,’ he told the sound engineer. The band’s
only studio album, Philosophy of the World, was released in 1969. The songs’
subjects (parents, a cat named Foot-Foot, Halloween) and lyrics (‘I’m so happy
when you’re near, I’m so sad when you’re away’) were simple enough. The playing
was something else.
One critic wrote: ‘There’s an innocence to these songs and their
performances that’s both charming and unsettling. Hacked-at drumbeats,
whacked-around chords, songs that seem to have little or no meter to
them . . . being played on out-of-tune, pawn-shop-quality guitars all
converge, creating dissonance and beauty, chaos and tranquillity, causing
any listener coming to this music to rearrange any pre-existing notions about
the relationships between talent, originality, and ability. There is no album
you might own that sounds remotely like this one.’
It’s kind of what Lou Reed was aiming for and missed.
The Shaggs disbanded in 1975 after the death of their father, but the
legend lived on. Frank Zappa called them ‘better than the Beatles’. In 1996,
Rolling Stone named the album one of the 100 ‘most influential alternative
releases of all time’.
The Wiggin sisters meanwhile got on with their lives; they got married,
had children, got divorced, taught school, the usual things. They don’t spend
much time dreaming about what might have been. ‘Let’s face it,’ one of them
is reported as saying, ‘as we got going we would’ve gotten better, and it seems
as though people don’t want it better.’
She has a very good point.
168

The early
nineties
The curse of the
boy bands
‘I like to behave in an extremely normal,

wholesome manner for the most part
in my daily life. Even if mentally I’m
consumed with sick visions of violence,
terror, sex and death.’
C ourtney L ove

Ice Ice Baby
(Vanilla Ice)
The Pat Boone of rap
This 1990 song by Vanilla Ice is about the singer’s outstanding skills as a
music DJ, and a gunfight in which he took part on Beachfront Avenue in
Miami, where the singer is forced to reach for his ‘nine’—his 9mm pistol. The
album it was taken from—To the Extreme—was phenomenally successful and
went on to sell over eleven million copies.
It also won its performer ‘Worst New Star’ at the 1991 Golden Raspberry
Awards. But more of that later.
The enormous popularity did not arrive without a downside. ‘Ice Ice
Baby’ used an extremely distinctive piano and bass hook riff from the 1982
Queen and David Bowie collaboration ‘Under Pressure’ without permission,
without acknowledging credit and without paying royalties. In fact, as the
lyrics are so utterly inane, you could argue that what was stolen was actually
the only good thing about the song.
But Vanilla claimed he owed no royalties, saying that ‘Theirs goes, Ding
ding ding dingy ding-ding. Ours goes, Ding ding ding ding dingy ding-ding.’
What a difference a ding makes.
Others did not agree. A suit was threatened and the case was settled out
of court for an undisclosed sum.
170

Members of the black Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity were similarly miffed.
They alleged that their fraternity’s chant ‘Ice ice baby, too cold, too cold’ was
also used without credit or permission. In his biography, Vanilla said that
he flipped his stage name in front of the chant and thought, hey, that’s cool!
However, he later denied knowing anything about them.
Which is not so cool.
Vanilla’s real name was Rob Van Winkle, which may explain a lot about
this guy’s attitude. When ‘Ice Ice Baby’ became a mega-hit, someone in
Rob’s corner decided to cash in on his sudden fame and unwisely released an
autobiography that chronicled an early life in the ghetto, attending a tough
and mainly black high school in Florida and living a teenage life of crime and
mayhem. But there were minor inconsistencies with the truth; for instance,
the real Rob had never been stabbed, and the real Winkle was a nice white
boy who went to a nice whiteboy high school in Texas. Seemed the only
hardship he’d endured as a youth was his mother threatening not to cook his
tea at night.
Still, he made squazillions from ‘Ice Ice Baby’. It was the first rap song to
reach number one on the pop charts, a fact which made real rap singers reach
for their nines. Motherfucker!
Then there was the story that Suge Knight, the CEO and founder of
Death Row Records, had dangled him by the ankles over a hotel balcony until
he agreed to sign over royalties from the track. This did nothing to bolster his
flagging reputation while doing everything for Suge’s.
The backlash against Rob turned him into a pariah in the hip-hop world.
His fall from grace reached terminal velocity very quickly.
Did he not see that coming?
171

From a Distance
(Bette Midler)
The best place to hear this song
God apparently is not dead. But like a bystander at a drive-by shooting, He

just doesn’t want to get involved.
This song starts off promisingly enough, with a lyric about how the earth
looks to someone watching from space. Gastric reflux only really sets in when
it becomes apparent that the watcher is actually the Supreme Deity.
Personally I don’t hate it that much, but an awful lot of other people
aren’t quite as sanguine. The Bette Midler recording ranked thirty-seven on
VH1’s list of the ‘50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever’ and number fourteen
on Blender magazine’s list.
It was written by singer/songwriter Julie Gold in the winter of 1985. She
was working as a secretary in New York to pay the rent when her parents
shipped her a thirtieth birthday present: the piano she’d played as a child
back home in Philadelphia. Gold ‘hugged it and polished it’. The next day, she
sat down and wrote ‘From a Distance’ in about two hours.
Gold’s friend, Christine Lavin, introduced the song to Nanci Griffith,
who recorded it in 1987, making it Gold’s first recorded song. Midler did
not record her version until 1990. The song’s popularity coincided with
the first Gulf War, and it became the most requested song on Saudi Band
172

Radio and received a ‘Minute Man Award’ from the US Army for inspiring
the troops.
Midler’s version earned a Gold Grammy for Song Of The Year. Then Cliff
Richard recorded it. Of course he did. It had God in it.
It was also recorded by Judy Collins, Jewel, The Byrds, Simon Nicol (of
Fairport Convention) and many others. It was performed at the start of the
1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. Nanci Griffith’s 1987 version was even beamed
as a ‘wake-up call’ to astronauts aboard the space shuttle. Up there in space,
where no one can hear you scream.
Gold said in an interview that she only wanted to write a song about
the difference between the way things seem and the way things are, that a
potentially harmonious world filled with hope and peace is only perceivable
when one stands back and looks at things ‘from a distance’. Another
interpretation is that because God is watching us ‘from a distance’ he cannot
see, or respond to, hunger or need.
She says that everyone can interpret it a different way. ‘Even a bowl of
fruit might look like a litter of puppies to someone.’
Depends whether they’re looking at it from a distance or close up, I
suppose.
Julie hit her high note first time out. She still writes and records but has
never had a song as big as her first. She sometimes compares songwriting
to childbirth and perhaps she’s right. When the first one out turns out to be
a Nobel Prize winner, you look back later and think—maybe I should have
stopped right there . . .
173

Wiggle Wiggle
(Bob Dylan)
Don’t think twice—or even once
His real name is Robert Zimmerman. He adopted the name Dylan as tribute
to the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, not, as has been suggested, the rabbit
in the children’s show The Magic Roundabout, whose utterances are far more
coherent.
His Bobness has always been a complex character. Some have unkindly
labelled him a poser of the worst kind. He used to tell journalists he was an
orphan and had been travelling with a carnival since he was thirteen. When
his parents once attended a concert in the early sixties they were surprised to
read an interview the next day: ‘I don’t know my parents . . . I’ve lost contact
with them for years.’
The man who David Bowie described as having ‘a voice like sand and
glue’ has sold fifty-seven million records—a lot of records. But less than the
Carpenters. And like The Rolling Stones he has never had a number one.
This is no never mind, of course. Dylan is a living legend, the voice of a
generation, and one of the most important American musicians in history,
but you know—been there, done that. So what happened on this one?
Did he get tired of being brilliant? Did he start to suspect that he could
write anything he wanted and Rolling Stone would think it was important
174

commentary on human relationships? Did he wake up one morning and
think: I’ve got an idea, why don’t I record a whole bunch of really crappy
songs that sound like nursery rhymes and see if the schmos out there in the
real world will still buy it? After all, I’m Bob Dylan, right? I can get away with
anything. Give me a dictionary and a blindfold. Let’s see what happens.
What happened was ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ from 1990’s Under the Red Sky:
‘Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling
hoop.’
Well, that is profound. The rest of the song is very much like it; I have
to admit that personally, I’ve never seen a ton of lead wiggle, but then I may
have lived a sheltered life. But it does rhyme with ‘dead’. Is that the point?
I have wiggled, as Bob sings later, until it comes, and that was quite okay,
but I have never wiggled until I vomited fire. Perhaps I should get out more.
The album was dedicated to Gabby Goo Goo, which was his nickname
for his then four-year-old daughter. So it may have been written for her. Or
perhaps, as is more likely, the album was written by her.
It was greeted with a disappointed silence. Dylan has since blamed the
underwhelming critical reception on the fact that there were too many people
working on the album, and that anyway he was very disillusioned with the
recording industry at the time. Anything but admit that even his Bobness can
sometimes write absolute tat.
175

Wind Beneath
My Wings
(Bette Midler)
Hell is not a place, it’s a song
Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar, you hereby stand accused of writing one of the
cheesiest, most irritating songs in history. How do you plead? Oh, you admit
it then?
All right, are there mitigating circumstances? Look, I don’t care if the
Divine Miss M recorded it, and that you got Record of the Year and Song of
the Year at the Grammys in 1990. That is like going on trial for murder and
boasting about your criminal record to the jury.
Yes, I know it was from the soundtrack to Beaches. Yes, it also has not
escaped the court’s attention that Sheena Easton, Perry Como, Willie Nelson,
Roger Whittaker and Nana Mouskouri all recorded versions of it. Look, are
you trying to make things worse for yourselves?
Were you aware that, apart from providing almost every wedding for
the last seventeen years with the longest four minutes of most people’s lives,
that this song has now achieved the near-impossible and injected a difficult
moment into the majority of most funeral services? Don’t grin at me like
176

that, you pair of bastards! Have you no remorse for what you’ve done? No
conscience?
Well this court intends to show you no mercy. You may find it cold there
in the shadows, boys. You are hereby convicted of mawkishness in the first
degree. When you expire you are sentenced to go to that particular part of hell
reserved for Tony Orlando and Dawn and anyone who has ever been involved
in telemarketing. Oh, and Paris Hilton’s publicist.
177

Shiny Happy People
(R.E.M.)
Rapid bowel movement
R.E.M. took their name from rapid eye movement, the reflex flickering of the
eyes that shows when a person is dreaming.
Imaginative name, and it’s an impulse that has generally been reflected
in their music. Not the worst band in the world by any means. So what
frequency were you on when you recorded this stinker, boys?
The lyrics could have been written by a chimpanzee with a typewriter—
‘Throw your love around, take it into town, put it in the ground, where the flowers
grow’—and it featured back-up vocalist Kate Pierson sounding as if she’d just
taken some bad E.
The song featured on the band’s 1991 album Out of Time and was released
as a single in the same year. It peaked at number ten on the Billboard Hot
100, to date the last R.E.M. single to reach the top 10 on the chart, which
demonstrates just what a shameful exercise it was for a band like this.
Despite its commercial success, it was excluded from the band’s 2003
‘Best Of’ album. It was reported that this was a deliberate decision by the
band’s vocalist and leader, Michael Stipe.
It may even have started out as a good idea. The title refers to a piece
of Chinese government propaganda, ‘shiny happy people holding hands’, and
178

was written in response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. But on the
long and winding road from Michael’s brain to the MTV channel, a trenchant
political statement somehow turned into a lollipop jingle.
Critics just hated it. In 2005, Q magazine placed ‘Shiny Happy People’ in
a list of ‘Ten Terrible Records by Great Artists’. It won number one position on
AOL Music’s list of the ‘111 Wussiest Songs of All Time’.
The song also appeared in Michael Moore’s anti-war film Fahrenheit 9/11
over footage of George Bush senior visiting the Saudi royal family, the first
and only time the song achieved the perfect sense of irony that Michael Stipe
was probably aiming for when he wrote the song.
R.E.M. have written and recorded a lot of good songs. This just wasn’t
one of them.
179

I Wanna Sex
You Up
(Color me Badd)
They sang about sex but they couldn’t keep it up
Color Me Badd were a bunch of Oklahoma wannabes gyrating like they’d

just graduated from pole dancing school with a C minus, and sounding like
they’d just had phone sex with Jessica Rabbit. If you wanna be sexed up by
a Venetian choirboy sweating like a Turkish sailor in a burlesque revue bar
who’s been educated at the Barry White School for Wayward Girls, this is the
band for you.
Did you truly want to do it until you wake up (whatever the hell that
means—are they promising to violate you in your sleep?) or score with a guy
who’ll put a hole in your waterbed so you can do it till you drown? If you did,
then CMB must have swept into your life like a zephyr through a Macedonian
cheese factory in high summer.
‘. . . you and I both know tricks are for kids, so get the Dom Perignon outta the
fridge.’
Inspired stuff. They rhymed kids with fridge! And Dom Perignon? Isn’t he
the Frenchman who invented corkscrews? If your fantasy is anal sex on a tiger
180

print waterbed with mirrors on the ceiling and Enrique Iglesias with asthma
slapping your rump with a wooden spoon, then you probably have a Color
Me Badd CD somewhere at the back of your closet.
And of course, of course, do I have to tell you, but the song contained
the immortal line ‘I want to make love to you all night . . .’ Girls, you just know
when a guy says ‘all night’ he means half an hour, tops. These guys weren’t
just badd. They were deludedd.
The members of Color Me Badd, in case the police ever ask you, were
Bryan Abramss, Mark Calderonn, Kevin Thorntonn and Sam Watterss.
Their debut album, released in September 1991, sold over six million
copies worldwide. That’s a lot of girls who wanna do it till they wake up.
Awards and adulation followed. But CMB didn’t have to be coloured
badd: they really were already utter crapp. Three albums later they’d done it,
and they’d drowned.
Sam Watters went on to find success as a record producer with Jessica
Simpson, Celine Dion, Anastacia and Natasha Bedingfield. He married former
American Idol contestant Tamyra Gray in 2006.
Kevin Thornton has just released a new solo album fusing hip-hop with
gospel. If only God rhymed with fridge! Mark Calderon works for an insurance
company in Ohio.
Bryan Abrams has appeared in a VH1 reality show entitled Mission
Manband. He also plans to perform a song with the Insane Clown Posse on
Psychopathics From Outer Space Part 3.
I present this fact to you without comment.
Final word of advice: should you ever ask a girl if she wants to do it with
you till she drowns, and she knees you in the groin, don’t blame me. Blame
Samm, Kevinn, Markk and Bryann.
181

Achy Breaky
Heart
(Billy Ray Cyrus)
A mullet put to music
In every list of worst songs there’s bound to be differences of opinion. It’s a

subjective thing. There’s going to be debate, raised voices, shots fired. But
one song always finds itself on everyone’s worst song list, and that song is
Billy Ray Cyrus’s ‘Achy Breaky Heart’.
This is the song that made the mullet fashionable, reason enough to
have the writer publicly quartered and flogged. It was trite, it was inane, it
was massive in the trailer park communities across the US.
In fairness to Don Von Tress, the man who wrote this appalling drivel—if
such a man deserves fairness—the original lyrics were ‘Achin’ Breakin’ Heart’
but were changed to ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ by Billy himself in a moment of rare
inspiration, if I may so characterise it. It came about when a friend of Billy
Ray’s split up with his wife. Cyrus went to see him to make sure he was okay.
When he asked him how he was feeling his friend said ‘My heart’s all achy,
breaky’. It is from poignant true-life moments that true classics are written.
Unfortunately this wasn’t one of those times.
In the song Billy complains that if his pericardium should overhear
182

anyone saying that his girlfriend has left him, it might actually spontaneously
detonate—a fate that would have been welcomed in certain quarters and was
surely not undeserved. It also contains the immortal line, ‘Myself already knows
that I’m okay’.
As for me—well myself already knows this is the worst song I’m ever
heard.
As his debut single and signature song, it made him famous. Or
notorious, depending on your point of view and your philosophical position
on boot scooting. After this song’s release Von Tress toured with Cyrus
for seven years, either for the joy of it or because his own personal safety
depended on it. ABH—not to be confused with GBH, though the confusion is
understandable—was nominated for ‘Record of the Year’ in the 1993 Grammy
Awards, but in a rare moment of good taste and good judgment, it lost.
‘Weird Al’ Yankovic parodied the song, as you might expect, singing that
he would rather be tied to a chair and kicked down a set of stairs than listen
to ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ one more time, a sentiment shared by anyone without
recourse to a studded shirt and bad hair.
The worst thing about the song is the hook, which can eat its way
into your brain like mad cow disease. It spreads like a computer virus—a
single exposure via the blaring radio of a passing pick-up and an otherwise
normal human being can find themselves singing about potentially explosive
cardiovascular systems for the rest of the day. It is the country and western
equivalent of rendition.
At least the haircut never caught on. Oh, wait a minute . . .
Billy Ray never had another hit, but he’s still on the road recording and
performing, though without the trademark mullet. He can afford to sit back and
enjoy the ride. He’s made his mark on the world. From there the only way is up.
183

I Will Always
Love You
(Whitney Houston)
The hairdryer’s greatest hit
I have to be honest. I don’t think the song’s that bad. But there’s an awful lot
of people who don’t agree.
It was written by Dolly Parton, who performed it as a poignant and
bittersweet expression of resignation in the face of romantic loss, in her
original recording way back in the seventies. She then re-recorded it in 1982
for the soundtrack of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It reached number one
on the US country charts, making it the first song by the same artist to ever
reach number one twice.
Whitney Houston’s version, however, is neither poignant nor bittersweet.
It’s as understated as Germany invading France; all the tenderness leached
out of it by her vocals, which are akin to standing six inches from the edge of
a subway platform as an express train goes through.
The song was taken from her 1992 soundtrack album The Bodyguard, which
is itself one of the best-selling albums of all time. ‘I Will Always Love You’ is also
the best-selling single ever by a female artist, with over ten million copies sold.
184

Houston, a former model, has a fine pedigree. Her mother, Cissy, her first
cousin (Dionne Warwick) and godmother (Aretha Franklin) are all notable
figures in the music industry. But Whitney has eclipsed them all. Her raw
talent, powerful coloratura soprano and expansive range earned her the
nickname ‘The Voice’. The Bodyguard launched a stellar career; she is the only
artist to have a record seven consecutive Billboard Hot 100 number one hit
singles, and she holds the Guinness World Record for the Most Awarded
Female Artist ever.
From there, unfortunately, the only way was down.
At the height of her career she married former R&B singer Bobby Brown.
Many in the industry thought that the New Edition singer, with his history of
marital problems and drug and alcohol arrests, might be a bad influence on
Houston. They were right.
In the late nineties, she started showing up late for rehearsals and photo
shoots, and cancelled concerts and talk-show appearances for no apparent
reason. There were constant rumours of drug abuse and domestic violence
that soured her public image, and after her highly successful 1998 album My
Love Is Your Love, sales of her albums declined sharply.
She became a staple of tabloid scandal sheets instead.
A shockingly thin Whitney appeared at the Michael Jackson Thirtieth
Anniversary Show in 2001, fuelling rampant speculation of drug use, anorexia
and bulimia. In 2002, her father and one-time manager, John Houston, sued
her for one hundred million dollars. Both of them appeared on television and
traded insults. But he died the following year and the case was dismissed.
She has recently undergone two rehab programs. After the second one
in 2006, she divorced Bobby Brown. It appeared that she would not always
love him. At least not without a bodyguard present.
185

Recently, she’s been making her way back into the public eye looking
considerably healthier. But she has disappeared from the charts that she once
dominated.
But whatever happens, she will be remembered best for ‘I Will Always
Love You’. It made number one on VH1’s ‘100 Greatest Love Songs’, while
also appearing regularly on lists of songs that people despise the most. I think
this is what is called polarising public opinion.
Strangely, when the song is about a couple breaking up for good, people
often use it for weddings.
And in 2002 the Iraqi government held a referendum asking whether
Saddam Hussein should remain as president. Saddam used the song in
campaign advertising.
And look what happened to him.
186

Fuck Wit Dre Day
(Dr Dre)
A sorry case of the emperor’s new clothes
Dr Dre is the stage name of André Romell Young, who hails from the notorious
burg of Compton in Los Angeles. He pioneered the use of hardcore profanity
and gritty depictions of crime and street violence that later became known as
gangsta rap.
He was a member of the rap group N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude), whose
music celebrated the hedonistic, amoral aspects of gang life. They were signed
to Ruthless Records, owned by fellow bandmember Eric Lynn Wright, better
known by the stage name Eazy-E. Wright was a former Compton Crip gang
member who had allegedly used the profits from drug dealing to start a music
label.
Disputes led to N.W.A.’s breakup in the summer of 1991, at the height of its
popularity. Young thought that Wright and his business partner, Jerry Heller,
were stealing money from the group. Young’s mountainous bodyguard, Suge
Knight, somehow arranged to have Wright release Young from his contract.
He helmed a new label using Dr Dre as his flagship artist and called it Death
Row Records.
In the spring of 1992, Young began a collaboration with Calvin Broadus
Jr, better known as Snoop Doggy Dogg, a young rapper introduced to him
187

by his stepbrother, Warren G, in 1992. Young released his debut album The
Chronic through Death Row Records.
To this point, rap had been primarily party music, like The Beastie Boys,
or politically charged, like Public Enemy, with the music consisting almost
entirely of samples and breakbeats. Young ushered in a new style of rap, both
in terms of musical style and lyrical content, called West Coast G-funk, a style
of rap music characterised as synthesiser-based with slow, heavy beats. It was
set to dominate US rap charts from 1991 to 1994.
The Chronic became a cultural phenomenon, selling eleven million copies
to date, and is widely considered to be one of rap’s all-time classic albums.
On one of the tracks, ‘Fuck Wit Dre Day’, he and his protégé Snoop voice their
ongoing enmity to Wright by rapping about sexually assaulting him. For
example: ‘It’s time for the doctor to check your ass’, and a memorable couplet
where Young claims that his penis can fit between Wright’s two front teeth,
which critics have suggested is possibly the least impressive brag about dick
size in rap history.
Broadus then serves notice that his testicles are resting on Wright’s
tonsils, which would give him the longest scrotum in human history. Is this a
good thing? I ask myself.
Broadus’s own career soon overtook Young’s. His first solo album,
Doggystyle, debuted at number one and sold more than five million copies,
and he soon became the face of Death Row Records, now the most infamous
label in the industry.
In 1994, Wright was admitted into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los
Angeles with what he believed to be bronchitis. It was instead discovered that
he was suffering from AIDS in its advanced stage, and he died just ten days
later, aged thirty-one.
188

Young meanwhile went on to oversee the careers of some of the biggest
stars in rap music, including Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Eminem and 50 Cent. It
soon became virtually impossible to hear mainstream hip-hop that wasn’t
influenced in some way by Young.
When he raps about thugs, there’s no question he knows what he’s
talking about. In 1992, for instance, he broke the jaw of record producer
Damian Thomas, which led to him being put under house arrest and required
to wear a tracking device.
Snoop was no stranger to violence either. In 1993, he was charged with
homicide in the shooting death of a gangbanger. After a well-publicised trial
he was found not guilty.
Just as well. Even when you’ve got the largest scrotum in human history,
you can’t afford a long stretch.
189

All For Love
(Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart & Sting)
Three mea culpas
Three fallen rock idols get together under a tattered battle standard featuring a
large dollar sign to sing a greasy love ballad that would have been more appro-
priate for a movie called The Three Mouseketeers. How can we ever forgive them?
Bryan, isn’t it time to ask for absolution before it’s too late?
Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.
Yes, my son. Talk freely.
My name is Bryan Adams.
In that case you must flagellate yourself with an iron-studded whip for the
entire period of Lent while fasting and wearing a camel hair jockstrap and . . .
I haven’t finished. There’s more.
(Sigh.)
I agreed to write a theme song for a movie. It was called Robin Hood,
Prince of Thieves.
I remember it. It had Alan Rickman. He was very funny, and very dark.
But the clip for the movie showed some anorexic male model playing a piano
in the middle of a forest backed by a band that didn’t appear to have any
power source for their electric guitars. It was terrible music, cloying, overly
sentimental, derivative, clichéd . . .
190

I wrote it, Father.
Jesus Christ! . . . Now look what you made me do! Anything else?
That wasn’t the only movie theme I wrote.
Oh, my God. Damn! No . . . Christ . . .
I made so much money I decided to share. That’s a good thing, isn’t it,
Father, sharing? So I got two of my rock star mates, Sting and Rod Stewart. I
thought, you know, three good-looking blond guys singing together, it would
be a good thing . . .
Rod Stewart? Good looking? He’s not blond, either.
Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. And I thought up these great
lyrics: ‘If there’s someone that you know, then just let your feelings show.’ Father?
Father, are you still there?
I had a serial rapist and murderer in here this morning. He thought he
was a really bad person. I’d like him to meet you; it will give him some sense
of perspective. Go on.
Well, I thought it was, you know, the best movie song since The Sound of
Music. An epic. And it was, like, clever.
Clever?
You know, the Three Musketeers’ catch-cry, ‘One for all, and all for one.’
Only I changed ‘all’ to ‘love’. Get it?
Brilliant.
Yes, I thought so. But people have been really down on me and the
boys for making it. They’ve been telling me I’ve prostituted myself for money.
What’s my penance, Father?
Just a moment, my son. (Calling off.) Bishop Flaherty, what should I give
three good-looking blond boys for prostituting themselves?
(Voice off.) Well, Father, between you and me, the going rate is a can of
Coke and a Mars Bar.
191

Pumps and a Bump
(Hammer)
U can’t afford this
When Stanley Burrell became a global pop-rap superstar in 1990, he did

what anyone would do—he bought seventeen luxury cars, including a
Lamborghini, a stretch limousine and a DeLorean, as well as thoroughbred
racehorses and two helicopters; then he built a home in Fremont, California,
with an indoor theatre, two swimming pools, tennis courts, basketball courts,
a bowling alley, a baseball diamond, waterfalls, two million dollars worth of
Italian marble floors, and a floor-to-ceiling grey marble office with customised
marble niches for awards.
There was also a gold and black marble jacuzzi in the master bedroom
which had a dishwasher installed for the purpose of ‘cleaning up after a
midnight snack’. He leased a Boeing 727 and bought gold chains for his
four pet rottweilers. And then he got himself an entourage large enough to
successfully invade Monaco and put them on his payroll for a modest half a
million dollars a month.
Burrell had achieved superstardom with his second album, 1990’s Please
Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em, which included the smash single ‘U Can’t Touch This’,
endearing himself to the music-buying public with his Rick James samples,
neat dance work and trademark parachute pants.
192

But hip-hop was changing fast. By 1994 G-funk and gangsta rap were
ruling the airwaves. Though known for being one of the few rap artists who
didn’t use profanities and whose lyrics were not laced with sexual innuendo,
he changed his name to Hammer and took an ill-advised stab at re-establishing
his street cred on an album called The Funky Headhunter.
On ‘Pumps and a Bump’ he freestyled about his love of women with big
butts—‘you wiggity-wiggity wack if you ain’t got biggity back’—and managed to
get the accompanying video banned from MTV when he appeared wearing
just a banana hammock and sporting what appeared to be an impressive
erection.
It proved to be his last stand—well, on video anyway.
Questioned about whether he had a sock down his swimmers, he
famously responded, ‘That’s all Hammer, man.’ However, he did record
another video—with all Hammer all clothed, claiming that he didn’t want to
further the stereotype that all African-American males have large penises.
But it was too late for political correctness. The cat had been let out of
the banana hammock. By 1996 his career was in terminal tailspin. He gave up
chubby-chasing, found Jesus and filed for bankruptcy, thirteen million dollars
in the hole.
Pumps and a Bump? Take my advice—you can’t touch this.
193

Stairway to Heaven
(Rolf Harris)
Can you hear what it is yet?
Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, from the group’s fourth album, is the
most requested song on FM radio stations in the United States and often tops
radio lists of the all-time greatest rock songs.
It has been covered by hard rock luminaries like Tiny Tim, and in 1993
the Leningrad Cowboys collaborated with the Red Army Choir to perform a
cover. Pat Boone included it in his 1997 soft metal album In a Metal Mood.
But perhaps the most notorious version is Rolf Harris’s wobble board
interpretation, which also featured the inevitable didgeridoo solo. It was one
of twenty-five different versions of the song performed live by guest stars on
Andrew Denton’s early 1990s chat show The Money or the Gun.
Rolf Harris was born in a suburb of Perth but moved to the UK in
the fifties and has become an iconic British TV personality and had massive
hits with novelty songs like ‘Jake the Peg’ and ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’.
His career started with television appearances in which he would paint
pictures on large boards in an apparently slapdash manner, while singing
nonsense songs interspersed with the phrase ‘Can you see what is it yet?’
When he was finished he’d turn the painting on its side or upside down and
194

the apparent mish-mash would become instantly recognisable. I remember
watching him when I was a kid. He was great.
When Rolf was on a visit to Australia, Andrew Denton asked him to
perform a version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for a special instalment of his show.
Harris had never heard the song before, and had only seen the sheet music.
He was blissfully unaware that a wobble-board version of a rock classic might
offend some purists. Harris is even rumoured to have received death threats.
But others—including Robert Plant and Jimmy Page—were just amused. By
cementing Harris’s reputation for naffness, the song unexpectedly earned
him cult status and the single reached number seven on the UK pop charts. It
also led to a 1998 invitation to sing at the Glastonbury Festival.
‘I think they booked me as a joke,’ Harris said. ‘They put me on at ten on
Sunday morning, thinking everyone would still be asleep. Instead, more than
seventy thousand people turned up and sang along to every single word of my
songs. There were women holding banners saying “Rolf, will you didgeridoo
me?”’
He has now performed four times at Glastonbury, last year sharing the
main stage with rock heroes The Prodigy, and was invited by Kate Bush to
make a cameo appearance with his didgeridoo on her 2005 album Aerial. He’s
even performed the Divinyls’ ‘I Touch Myself’ accompanied only by his wobble
board for Denton’s Musical Challenge on the Triple M Breakfast Show.
Some people loathed Rolf’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and I have heard many
who have expressed a desire to insert his didgeridoo in the end opposite to
that of his singing voice.
Personally, I quite liked it.
195

ROCK’S 20 GREATEST ECCENTRICS
THE RUNNERS UP
All rock stars have a touch of the diva in them. It’s not healthy for anyone to
get that much fawning attention. Plus snorting too much womble dust can
send you loopy. While touring Germany in the seventies, Elton is rumoured
to have phoned his agent and demanded something be done about the
wind outside that was keeping him awake. But much of Elton’s antics were
for self-promotion. The following nominees had an unusual relationship
with what the rest of us call reality.
20 Peter Green
Fleetwood Mac’s founding member is reckoned to be one of the greatest blues
guitarists of all time. But you know, too much acid really can do bad things
to you, no matter how good you are. In 1970, after trying unsuccessfully to
persuade the other band members to donate all their earnings to charity, he
quit the band and grew his fingernails so long that he would never have to
play guitar again.
He was arrested by British police in 1977 after he was alleged to have
threatened manager Clifford Davis with a rifle when he tried to drop off a fifty-
thousand-dollar royalty cheque to his London home.
196

19 Serge Gainsbourg
Gainsbourg was the songwriter who talked Jane Birkin through an orgasm
in the 1971 megahit ‘Je T’aime . . . Mois Non Plus’, deemed obscene by the
Vatican and the BBC. Other works included a collection of Nazi drinking songs
he called Rock Around the Bunker, and ‘Lemon Incest’, a duet he recorded with
his fourteen-year-old daughter.
This song caused far less scandal in France than his reggae
cover of the French national anthem which brought death threats and a
newspaper editorial saying he should have his citizenship revoked.
After suffering his first heart attack in the seventies he was being
stretchered from his apartment when he demanded that paramedics fetch
a cashmere rug from his bedroom, as the regulation red and orange blanket
clashed and photographers might be outside.
Appearing on a French TV chat show with Whitney Houston, he told the
host ‘I want to fuck her’. The host turned to Houston and said: ‘He said he
wants to buy you flowers.’ Gainsbourg got annoyed: ‘Don’t translate for me.
I said I wanted to fuck her!’
This is when a girl needs a bodyguard. He described his life as a trilogy
of Gitanes, girls and booze, and kept drinking even after two-thirds of his liver
had been surgically removed. Hell, he still had a third left, and the liver’s a
big organ. But it was a massive heart attack that got him in the end. Sadly
missed.
197

18 Sid Vicious
The original spiky biker wore a trademark padlock-on-a-neckchain and
couldn’t play bass guitar, even though he was the Sex Pistols’ bass guitarist.
But he sure knew how to get publicity. He once carved ‘GIMME A FIX’ into his
chest onstage with a piece of broken glass. He was charged with murdering
his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. He died
from a heroin overdose while on bail at age twenty-two. He certainly did it His
Way. It was a short life, but an unhappy one.
17 Keith Moon
The Who once famously sang on ‘My Generation’: ‘Hope I die before I get old.’
Drummer Keith Moon stayed true to the spirit of that song.
He was the ultimate master of disaster. In his book, Moon, The Life and
Death of a Rock Legend, Tony Fletcher describes how Moon would detonate
toilets with fireworks for his own amusement. Breakfast consisted of a
bottle of champagne chased with a bottle of Courvoisier. It is also said
that in 1967 he got The Who banned in perpetuity from every Holiday Inn
in the world. He may, or may not, have driven a Rolls Royce into a
swimming pool.
One of the most enduring legends is that once, when the band were
headed to the airport on their way to the next concert, Moon shouted: ‘I forgot
something. We’ve got to go back!’ The limo turned around. Moon ran to his
hotel room, grabbed the television and threw it out the window and into the
swimming pool. He then jumped back into the limousine, sighing with relief:
‘I nearly forgot.’
198

On the 1973 Quadrophenia tour, Moon somehow ended up with a
massive amount of ketamine in his system—ketamine is a horse tranquilliser,
which is meant to be loaded into a gun and shot into a horse—and passed out
during ‘Magic Bus’. Townsend plaintively asked the audience: ‘Can anyone
here play drums?’
He is said to have once goose-stepped through a Jewish neighbourhood
of London dressed in a Nazi uniform, and started a food fight on an airliner
then grabbed the PA and started singing the Lone Ranger theme to the other
passengers. Another legend had him sitting down to dinner in a London
restaurant with six call-girls, and announcing to the other diners: ‘And
now, the astounding Moonio will perform his world-famous multiclitoral
stimulation!’
He died, not from an overdose of clitori, but even more ironically, from
an overdose of pills meant to help him beat addiction to alcohol.
16 Cynthia Plaster Caster

Born Cynthia Albritton in Chicago, she made hard-ons into icons and became
the Michelangelo of the Mongrel. In the sixties she achieved almost mythical
status by casting rock stars’ erections in plaster—including Jimi Hendrix’s
intimidating six-and-a-quarter-inch-circumference Fender bender, making it
the Pieta of Pop.
She claims that at first it was just a gimmick to distinguish herself from
the other groupies, but her increasingly professional art became something of a
legend in the post-Woodstock era and was the inspiration for the 1977 Kiss song
‘Plaster Caster’—written by Gene Simmons, whose schlong is nevertheless yet
to be immortalised, confirming what we have all long suspected.
199

Endearingly, Cynthia has never tried to claim profundity. Others have
tried to find social commentary inherent in her work. She herself says it was
just her way to get laid by rock stars. Back in 1966, as a socially awkward
nineteen-year-old art student and frustrated virgin, she was given a weekend
assignment to make a plaster cast of ‘something solid’. It gave her an idea:
she was looking for a dick schtick, her own stand-up routine, and this was
it. Could you help me with my homework please, mister sexy-as-hell-lead-
guitarist? She didn’t succeed in casting that first week, but she did lose her
cherry to the lead singer of Paul Revere & The Raiders, and the rest is art
history.
She experimented with wax, clay and aluminium foil—ouch!—before
perfecting her technique with dental alginates. After moulding Jimi’s Star
Spangled Wanger she got to meet rock legends from Keith Moon to Frank
Zappa. Finally she even changed her name legally to Plaster Caster.
Her technique requires three people: while Cynthia prepares the equipment,
her assistant goes into the bedroom to . . . prepare the equipment. When all is
ready he plunges his hard stuff into the soft stuff. She then pours plaster into
the mould and cleans up the mess while her subject and his new friend head
into the bedroom to make more.
Cynthia is still at work, though in this more liberated time her work does
not seem as shocking. A strange obsession? Perhaps. In a recent interview,
though, she insists she doesn’t know what strange is any more. She claims
one of her recent subjects, Jon Langford (of The Mekons and Waco Brothers),
could only get an erection when his girlfriend simulated the sound of sesame
seeds frying in a wok.
‘Is that strange?’ she asked.
200

15 Captain Beefheart
Born Donald Glen Vliet he was and is considered a controversial and influential
figure, said to have influenced everyone from Talking Heads to Tom Waits,
Happy Mondays to the White Stripes. It is said that while recording 1969’s
Trout Mask Replica, the sixties avant-garde blues man locked his Magic Band in
a house, only allowing one of them out each week to fetch food. Meanwhile,
they struggled to interpret the music he was ‘writing’ on the piano, an
instrument he couldn’t actually play.
When they were finally allowed out to perform, he gave them names
to match the costumes he’d made them wear. Mascara Snake, his clarinet
player, was the first to quit.
The album itself sounds like an elephant running amok in a music
shop, twenty-seven tracks before someone manages to find someone with a
tranquilliser gun to make it all blessedly stop.
14 Brian Wilson
Brian liked the beach but he didn’t like the sea. He had a grand piano placed
on a floor of sand so he could feel it beneath his feet while he was composing.
But it’s said he was so terrified of water he stopped bathing. He found an
alternative recreation to the beach—hash, LSD and amphetamines may feel
nice at the time but they’re really not that good for you. Meeting some kids
backstage at a concert, he introduced himself, saying, ‘Hi, I’m Brian.’
‘Yes, we know,’ one of them said, ‘we’re your children.’
Instead of picking up good vibrations, he started hearing voices and
201

feeling suicidal. He spent three years in bed eating steak and smoking
cigarettes and ballooned out to 140 kilos, convinced that Phil Spector was
coming to shoot him. Too much fun in the sun may be bad for your skin, but
too much fun with amphetamines is far worse. The gentle soul who wrote
‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ was seriously damaged.
If only Daddy—someone—had taken his speedball away.
Happily, in 2005 he went back on the road again, performing songs from
his new solo career as well as classic Beach Boys standards. He has a new
studio album coming out in 2008.
13 Jerry Lee Lewis

Jerry Lee Lewis was a frenetic piano-playing rock’n’roll singer from the fifties
who, by the time of his twenty-first birthday, had done time in the Big House,
committed bigamy, and been thrown out of Bible College—this last event
could not really have come as much of a shock. He then toured Europe and
took with him his new bride, who was thirteen years old and related. He once
accidentally shot his bass player. (Hell, it’s not like he was lead guitar!) He
once poured gasoline over his piano at the end of a set and put a match to it,
shouting at Chuck Berry: ‘Follow that!’ He lost one son to drowning, another
to a car wreck. In 1983 wife Shawn died of a methadone overdose. He was
finally bankrupted by the IRS. Great balls of fire, indeed.
202

12 Kevin Rowland
You probably remember him best as the frontman of the Dexys Midnight
Runners and creator of ‘Come on Eileen’, the glorious double entendre song
of the eighties.
Back then he insisted his band get up early in the morning to go jogging
with him, and he banned alcohol and drugs. A rock band with no booze and
pills? You’re right, it couldn’t last.
For those who knew him, Kev always had an edge. He once stole the
master tapes to Dexys’ debut album to try and get a better deal with the band’s
label, and as the legend goes, when the producer threw himself in front of the
getaway van, Rowland shouted, ‘Accelerate, and damn the consequences!’
Kev disappeared for a while to re-emerge in 1999 with a new image.
The new look first appeared on his album of covers, with another say-that-
again title: My Beauty. On it he’s wearing a dark blue velvet dress, pulled down
to expose his nipples. The dress is hitched up to reveal stockings and bikini
briefs. He said he wanted to show his soft, feminine side.
The album itself sounds like the opus of a man who has seen his dreams
fall apart and is trying to claw his way back to sanity, and missing by some
considerable distance. Some songs were not just covered but given a whole
new set of lyrics. It ends with ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. It speaks of courage
and honesty and transvestism, but was it music? The buying public, all but
five hundred of them, didn’t think so.
Still—nice dress.
203

11 Ozzy Osbourne
John Michael ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne is supposed to be the archetypal brain-fried
old rocker. Well, maybe. Not so brain fried that he hasn’t become one of the
richest men in England. The hype has it that he has overdosed on just about
every drug in the illegal pharmacopoeia, and survived to become the greatest
reality-TV star in history. In The Osbournes he starred as himself, a drug-fucked
zombie wandering round his LA home barely able to turn on a light.
Having helped invent heavy metal with Black Sabbath, Ozzy is the stuff of
legend. Once, on tour with Black Sabbath, somebody threw a live bat on stage.
He thought it was a toy and ate it, but he said he couldn’t remember what it
tasted like because he was pissed on cognac. The following year he bit the head
off a dove while signing a deal with Epic Records. This time he spat the head
out and was removed, with blood dripping from his lips, by a security guard.
While in Texas, he urinated on the Alamo. He was arrested by local police.
He married his manager, Sharon—‘Every other manager had fucked
me—the difference with this one is that she kissed me while she fucked me.’
But his twenty-three-year marriage hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Once in
Moscow, after a drinking binge, he tried to strangle her, saying, ‘We’ve decided
you’ve got to go.’
He supposedly checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic by walking in
and asking for directions to the bar. He also reportedly wanted to open his
Live Aid set with ‘Food, Glorious Food’ from Oliver.
He and Sharon are now one of the UK’s richest couples, worth a hundred
million pounds, he has had dinner in the White House and has played for the
Queen. Not bad for the dyslexic son of a factory worker.
‘Of all the things I’ve lost,’ he said once, ‘I miss my mind the most.’
204

The late
nineties
The decade that got a
bad rap
‘They can say I’m a fat old cunt, they can

say I’m an untalented bastard, they can
call me a poof, but they mustn’t tell lies
about me.’
Elton John

Macarena
(Los del Río)
A song that became a dance that became a curse
There was a time in the history of the world when you couldn’t walk into
a nightclub or a party without stumbling into a group of people doing a
ridiculous dance that looked like a bunch of boot scooters with jock itch.
The dance and the song, which disappeared as swiftly and mysteriously as it
appeared, like the Ebola virus, was called the Macarena.
The culprits for this abomination were called Los del Río, a Spanish music
duo comprised of musicians Antonio Romero Monge and Rafael Ruiz, who’ve
been performing since the early sixties but hit paydirt with ‘Macarena’, a song
that VH1 ranked as the greatest one-hit wonder of all time.
Los del Río specialised in Andalusian folk music, and for a number
of years they made a living singing at private ‘jet-set’ parties at Marbella.
However, in the summer of 1996, the duo watched in amazement as their
multi-platinum smash summer hit ‘Macarena’ sold eleven million copies
worldwide.
‘Macarena’ is a rather popular name in Andalusia, given its association
with the Virgin of the Macarena, the patroness of Seville’s barrio La Macarena.
The Virgin–Magdalene dichotomy may explain the rest of the lyrics: a song
about the girlfriend of a recent recruit to the Spanish Army named Victorino.
206

She celebrates his drafting by hooking up with two of his mates. She has
a weakness for men in uniform—what girl doesn’t?—and after making her
breakthrough with Victorino’s buddies she spends the summer in Marbella
and moves to New York City, where she gets herself a new boyfriend.
The song first became popular in Puerto Rico because of its use as an
unofficial election campaign theme song for then-governor Pedro Rosello. As
many cruise ships called in there, tourists heard the song during their stay on
the island. This perhaps explains how the song spread and become a smash
hit in cities with large Latino communities in the US, like Miami and New
York.
This success led to the song being remixed with English lyrics, and then
insanity took over. It spent fourteen weeks at number one on the US Billboard
Hot 100 singles chart, the longest-running number-one debut single in
American music history.
It was the dance that launched the song on its superstellar journey. One
Heineken commercial parodied it this way: a man hosting a party in his home
goes to the kitchen to get a beer. He cannot remember where he left the bottle
opener and proceeds to hold his hands out, check his shirt pockets, check his
back pockets, put his hands up to his head in frustration, and then turn to his
left to leave the room. His guests are watching his actions, which happen to
be in step with the background music, and interpret it as a new dance: the
Macarena.
Craig Ferguson, host of The Late Late Show on CBS, has claimed that
the Macarena was invented by Al-Qaida as a psychological weapon against
the West. If he’s right, it worked.
207

Wannabe
(Spice Girls)
Death by music
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.

Col, tell us what you want, what you really really want.
I really really want the Spice Girls to fall down a disused mineshaft and
never be seen or heard of again.
That’s what I want, what I really really really want.
In the early nineties, father-and-son management team Chris and Bob
Herbert had the idea of creating an all-female pop group, in the style of boy
bands like NKOTB and Take That, which were saturating the teen scene at the
time like cockroaches over a dead rat. As Chris said, ‘I felt if you could appeal
to the boys as well, you’d be laughing.’
They put an advertisement in The Stage trade magazine, looking for
wannabes: ‘R U 18–23 with the ability to sing/dance? R U streetwise,
ambitious, outgoing and dedicated?’ Hundreds of girls responded and the
five they chose were Victoria Adams (she didn’t become a footballer’s wife
until later), Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Geri Halliwell and Michelle
Stephenson. The first name they were given was Touch, and they were moved
into a house in Maidenhead, owned by the Herberts’ financier partner Chris
Murphy. They survived on unemployment benefits.
208

The girls set to work on demos and dance routines. Stephenson was
eventually replaced by Emma Bunton. But the girls were unhappy with Heart
Management—the Herberts and Murphy—and, in what their biographer
David Sinclair called an ‘incredibly self-serving and underhand’ ploy, they
stole the master recordings of their discography from the management
offices.
They started touring other management agencies with their catalogue
of demos and dance routines, and finally signed with Simon Fuller of 19
Management, who got them a deal with Virgin Records late in 1995.
What the girls wanted, what they really, really wanted, was a hit single,
and they got it, in the summer of 1996.
‘Wannabe’ was co-written by the Spice Girls with Richard Stannard and
Matt Rowe, who also produced it. ‘They made all these different bits up,’
Rowe said, ‘not thinking in terms of verse, chorus, bridge or what was going
to go where, just coming up with all these sections of chanting, rapping and
singing. And then we just sewed it together.’
It went gangbusters, hitting number one in no less than thirty-one
countries, becoming the biggest-selling single ever by an all-female group.
They debuted at eleven in the US, beating the previous record held by The
Beatles.
Their reception on the pop scene drew comparison to the Beatlemania
of the sixties. Their album Spice became the biggest-selling album of the year
in both Europe and the US.
In a poll conducted by Rolling Stone to identify the ten most annoying
songs, this song was ranked eighth. Sputnikmusic.com ranted: ‘this track is
built around an infectious keyboard riff, and is so profoundly annoying, you’ll
want to rip your toenails off just so it will stop.’
209

The group embraced merchandising like a horny sailor over a bar girl
after six months at sea. They became a regular feature of the British press.
No amount of exposure was too much. They signed more than twenty
sponsorship deals in total, but after the first rush of popularity, depression set
in, like coming down after a drug party. The girls drifted off to do other things.
Posh spent the next decade marrying footballers and shopping.
But on 28 June 2007, the group held a press conference in London,
formally announcing their intention to reunite. Ticket sales for the first
London date of ‘The Return of the Spice Girls’ World Tour sold out in thirty-
eight seconds.
(Sigh.)
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want . . .
210

Can I Touch
You There?
(Michael Bolton)
Otis Redding died for this?
He was born Michael Bolotin in 1953. For a while the future looked bright.
He received his first record label contract at the age of fifteen and his band,
Blackjack, once toured with heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne. He began
recording in 1983 after gaining his first major hit as a songwriter, co-writing
‘How Am I Supposed to Live Without You’ for Laura Branigan. But his first
major success as a singer came with his interpretation of the Otis Redding
classic ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’.
With his curly locks and toned abs, Bolton looked like the hero of a cheap
bodice-ripper, Heathcliff with a microphone. This carefully constructed
image earned him a fervent female audience for his over-the-top power
ballads. Unfortunately, his greatest desire was to sing R&B oldies, which he
went through like the German SS through Poland.
Nothing in the R&B catalogue was safe. But Michael’s greatest success
was with his own ballads, and his career reached its nadir, in this humble
author’s opinion, with the release of ‘Can I Touch You There?’
211

No, Michael, you definitely cannot touch me there. And if you come
near my sister, my daughter, my mother, my grandmother or my dog I shall
take this sledgehammer and beat you to a pulp, you over-emoting bad-hair
bastard.
I’d rather listen to Rupert Holmes eating Timmy.
212

The Only Thing
That Looks Good
On Me Is You
(Bryan Adams)
Ick factor ten
For years Bryan Adams had sounded like a balladeer for the Moral Majority,
and then he tried to change overnight into Prince. This was the guy who’d
said that when he was in high school he wasn’t interested in girls, only in
music. Up to this point in history we knew what Bryan did, even if we didn’t
like what Bryan did.
When Bryan tells the female protagonist in the song that ‘there is
only one thing that fits me like it should’, it was like one of those mo-
ments when you see your uncle pinch your niece on the bum. Was this
what he was thinking all along or is he doing it to try and regain his lost
youth? Hard to know. In fact, I don’t think I want to know the answer to
that one.
Did he really write ‘We stick like glue’? A three-year-old would think that
was a bit tired. Here, give me the CD—18 Til I Die, is that really what he called
213

it?—let me see if there’s anything else off this I might want to play instead.
Wait a minute, there’s a track here called ‘I Wanna Be Your Underwear’.
Bryan, sit down.
Do you know what a ‘try-hard’ is?
Can you understand it’s this sort of thing that gets you parodied on South
Park?
This is not to knock the guy himself. Adams was awarded the Order of
Canada and the Order of British Columbia for his philanthropic work. He is
a noted social activist; he was the first western artist to perform in Pakistan,
to raise money for underprivileged children; and in the mid nineties, he
successfully campaigned for the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
I know all this but . . . but . . . but Bryan—are you Al Gore or Gary Glitter?
For God’s sake make up your mind. Because if one of those whales hears
you singing ‘The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me is You’, you’re in big
trouble.
214

My Heart Will Go On
(Celine Dion)
The unsinkable Celine
Personally I don’t think this song is that bad, but it finds its way onto almost
any ‘worst of’ list you care to name, and the French-Canadian balladeer
herself is often the target for the kind of vitriol usually reserved for dictators
and mass murderers. Chill everyone. She’s only a singer.
Celine Dion was born in 1968, but there’s nothing anyone can do about
that now. She was the youngest of fourteen children. If Mum and Dad’s game
plan was to produce as many as possible, hoping that at least one of them
must make some money, then the ruse apparently worked.
When hubby-to-be René Angélil first heard her sing he was moved to
tears. He would not be the first, though not always for the same reason. He
became her manager and mortgaged his home to finance her first record, and
he backed a winner because she soon emerged as a teen star in the French-
speaking world.
Recognition came after she won the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest,
where she represented Switzerland, even though she was born in Canada.
Worldwide fame followed three years later when she duetted with the
ludicrously named Peabo Bryson on the title track to Walt Disney’s animated
blockbuster, Beauty and the Beast.
215

But the song for which she is both world famous and universally loathed
is the Titanic theme ‘My Heart Will Go On’. James Cameron’s film broke box-
office records around the world when it was released in 1997, and the love
theme from the movie topped the charts everywhere and became Dion’s
signature song. But, like the movie, it attracted its fair share of critics too.
‘If it had been played on the ship itself, it would surely have made
passengers leap to their doom long before the iceberg did its dastardly deed,’
one critic wrote.
The song contains the immortal line: ‘Love is when I loved you.’ Even this
single lyric is a bit like a Rubik’s cube; you keep twisting it and shaking it but
it just always stays that other side of fathomable. Even when it’s warbled by
a singing stick insect it still doesn’t come out quite right. The lyricist is either
into Zen or existentialism or acid. I still haven’t decided which.
216

What’s Beef
(The Notorious B.I.G.)
Where’s the r-e-s-p-e-c-t?
You can walk like you’re carrying two heavy suitcases in order to look
tougher. You can make a face at the camera like you’ve just woken up halfway
through your colonoscopy. You can carry more metal round your neck than a
battleship chain. You can punctuate every other lyric with ‘motherfucker’ and
‘pussy’ and drone on endlessly about your skills and proficiencies at fighting,
the frequency and diversity of your sexual conquests, and how much you hate
the New York and Los Angeles police departments, and all their employees.
But when you start writing lyrics about kidnapping and sodomising
children, then perhaps music has lost its way and is no longer a force for
rebellion or redemption but just a vehicle for gutterheads making fortunes
with a penchant to shock, rather than musical talent or lyrical ability.
Like this one from Notorious B.I.G. Another sorry case of the emperor’s
new clothes.
He was born Christopher George Latore Wallace in Brooklyn in 1972,
but is more popularly known as Biggie Smalls, Big Poppa or by his primary
stage name, The Notorious B.I.G. Abandoned by his father when he was two
years old, he was raised by his mother, who worked two jobs to support them.
He grew up during the peak years of the 1980s crack epidemic and started
217

dealing drugs at an early age. He’d already done jail time for dealing crack
cocaine when he released his debut album, prophetically titled Ready to Die.
Released at a time when West Coast hip-hop was prominent in the US charts,
he—according to Rolling Stone—‘almost single-handedly . . . shifted the focus
back to East Coast rap’.
Biggie’s themes included street tales (‘Niggas Bleed’), his drug-dealing
past (‘Ten Crack Commandments’), as well as showing off his soft, sensitive
side (‘Me & My Bitch’).
In ‘What’s Beef’ he boasts about his associates doing this to kidnapped
and underage victims:
‘Fuck ’em in the ass, throw ’em over the bridge.’
Whoa. Wait a minute there, Bigs. I don’t care about your flow or the
rolling basslines or the backbeat. Is this music? Bragging that your colleagues
and associates enjoy kidnapping children—even if it’s fiction, though with
Biggie’s connections, that was never absolutely clear—sodomising them and
disposing of their bodies by tossing them into a river?
Biggie’s other themes included cutting off various body parts then
mailing them back to their former owner.
Almost inevitably, our Renaissance Man became involved in a quarrel
between the East and West Coast hip-hop scenes and with Tupac, his former
associate. Tupac accused Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs and Biggie of having prior
awareness of a robbery that resulted in him being shot repeatedly and losing
thousands of dollars worth of jewellery. The following year he released ‘Hit ’Em
Up’, a diss song in which he explicitly claimed to have had coitus with Biggie’s
estranged wife, Faith Evans. Shakur was shot in a drive-by shooting in Las
Vegas, Nevada, soon afterwards. Rumours circulated of Biggie’s involvement
in the murder almost immediately. On 8 March 1997, he presented an award
218

to Toni Braxton at the 11th Annual Soul Train Music Awards in Los Angeles
and was booed by some of the audience. After the ceremony, he attended
an after-party hosted by Vibe magazine at the Peterson Automotive Museum;
guests included Evans, Combs and members of the Bloods and Crips gangs.
Later that evening he was killed by an unknown assailant in a drive-by
shooting. His double-disc set Life After Death, released fifteen days later, hit
number one on the US album charts. His murder remains unsolved.
219

I’ll Be Missing You
(Puff Daddy & Faith Evans)
But the royalties will sure make your absence

easier to bear
A little over three months after the murder of his best friend, The Notorious
B.I.G. (see above), Sean Combs—or Puff Daddy or P. Diddy or Diddy or
whatever the hell his name is—who was riding with him in the same car
when he was shot, got it all off his chest by releasing ‘I’ll Be Missing You’, a
stomach-turning cocktail of mawkish gloop that leaned heavily on someone
else’s much better song for its marketability. Mix hypocrisy with major larceny
in a tearstained mush and you have ‘I’ll be Missing You’.
The song sampled—read stole—the melody of The Police’s ‘Every Breath
You Take’ from 1983. In fact, forget sampling. The track was down before
permission was granted to use it. But Sting finally made a lot of money out of
this, which is fair enough because his melody is the only thing this has going
for it.
As well as ‘Every Breath You Take’, the single also borrows from the well-
known 1929 spiritual ‘I’ll Fly Away’. Combs was sued as a result and had to
settle with Albert Brumley and Sons, a gospel and country music publishing
220

company who owned rights to the song, which contains the line, ‘Some glad
morning when this life is over’, which Evans sings in the chorus.
In fact it’s alleged that the other words weren’t written by Combs at
all, but by Sauce Money (Todd Gaither), a rapper from the Marcy Projects
in Brooklyn who—naturally enough—got a Grammy for writing words that
rhymed to someone else’s song but five years later was in court suing Combs
for his share of the royalties.
Fusing two songs written by someone else, with words written by
someone else, in tribute to a guy who glorified violence and the criminal life?
Is this creativity? Is this art?
Tell me again—what is it about this song that’s to like?
221

Candle in the
Wind 1997
(Elton John)
The songwriter burned out before the legend did
Probably the most unusual song to find its way into a worst one hundred, as
it (the original version) is possibly also many people’s favourite song. And
that may be the problem. The 1997 version annoys many people but for a
long time it was politically incorrect to say so.
So what is it about this song that is so . . . disturbing? Well, possibly
because the lyrics have been written over the top of a song most of us already
knew really well. It sounds as if it should be a parody and comes off instead a
little like a snow job. Diana, like the original subject of the song, wasn’t that
angelic. That was part of her fascination and allure.
‘Candle in the Wind’ was originally released in 1973, with lyrics by
Bernie Taupin, a sympathetic portrayal of the life of the fifties sex icon Marilyn
Monroe. It did reasonably well. But the 1997 version, John’s personal tribute
to Princess Diana, went gangbusters and became the biggest-selling CD single
in music history. Yet it is the original version people remember most fondly.
There’s no doubting John’s sincerity. He had a close friendship with
222

Diana and wanted to pay tribute to her in some way. There wasn’t time for
him and Taupin to write a new song so they chose instead to rewrite the
lyrics to an old one. He sang ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ in public, for the
first and last time, at Diana’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on 6 September
1997. Elton vowed he’d never play it again and has been true to his word,
repeatedly turning down requests to perform it live. At concerts he only plays
the 1973 version.
But ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ became the fastest-selling single in the
UK, selling over one and a half million copies in its first week. In the States it
sold over eleven million copies. It’s estimated that at the peak of sales, almost
six copies of the single were sold across the world per second.
Elton’s participation in the funeral service was highly unusual, the
participation of a ‘commoner’ (sorry, Elton) from Watford at a state occasion
almost unheard of. He sat behind a grand piano to play the new tribute
version which was relayed on television and radio to countless millions
of people. Though meant only as a personal tribute, it was seized on by a
public desperate to voice its sense of loss and to express its disapproval at the
behaviour of the royal family, whose cool response to the death of the public’s
darling had alienated them from mainstream public opinion. It turned ‘Candle
1997’ from tribute song into protest song.
And it was a fine personal tribute. Neither John nor Taupin profited from
it in any way: both artist and composer royalties were donated to the Diana,
Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.
But you just can’t burn the same candle twice. Which is perhaps why the
song gets on my wick.
223

MMMBop
(Hanson)
Sing along if you can remember the words
‘MMMBop’ was one of the biggest debut singles of all time; it reached number
one in twenty-seven countries. The song originally appeared on the album
MMMBop as a ballad but was reworked as an upbeat pop track by hit producers
The Dust Brothers.
The song’s lyrics talk, apparently, about the transient and unpredictable
nature of friendship, referring to how friendships come and go in an ‘MMMBop’,
meaning a short period of time.
Fortunately, Hanson came and went in an MMMBop as well.
The group was formed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by brothers Isaac, Taylor
and Zac Hanson. They originally sang a cappella but then older brother
Isaac picked up a second-hand guitar, Zac borrowed an old set of drums, and
Taylor became the keyboard player of what then turned into a garage band.
‘MMMBop’ began its dizzying ride up the charts in 1997 when the boys were
sixteen, thirteen and eleven.
The song earned the brothers three Grammy nominations, and the day
of its release, 6 May 1997, was declared ‘Hanson Day’ in Tulsa by Oklahoma’s
then-governor Frank Keating.
But the boys turned into the archetypal one-hit wonders. They left their
224

record company due to a conflict with the producers, who felt their material
lacked marketability. They now work under their own independent label, 3 Car
Garage Records, named for the three-car garage in which they first practised
as a band.
Like many songs that achieve extreme popularity, and are overplayed
and over-hyped, ‘MMMBop’ has experienced something of a backlash. Delone
Catholic High School in McSherrystown, Pennsylvania, for example, held a
student fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina called ‘Stop the Bop’. The
school played the song over the school PA system before classes began in
the morning, and between each period. The playing of the song, the faculty
was told, would only be stopped when the school raised $3000 for hurricane
relief.
In a 1997 episode of Saturday Night Live, Hanson appeared in a sketch in
which Helen Hunt and Will Ferrell hijack an elevator at gunpoint and force
them to listen to ‘MMMBop’ as they slowly go insane.
I know how they feel.
225

It’s A Long Way
to the Top
(Pat Boone)
Head-banging for Jesus
I wasn’t going to include this, but God insisted. I know God didn’t like Pat
Boone’s version of metal icons Acker Dacker’s classic rock anthem, because
it said so in Foundation magazine, the organ of the Fundamental Evangelistic
Association.
The article was reporting on a two-hour telecast that Boone engaged in,
on Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Praise the Lord, defending In a Metal Mood,
an album he’d recently released in which he sang lounge lizard versions of
hard rock anthems by Judas Priest, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and of course that
song by AC/DC.
The album was something of a departure for Pat, who was at the time
host of a weekly cable television show, Gospel America, on which he often
preached about the moral bankruptcy of heavy metal. So Pat’s decision to
record the album was something like the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem recording
Nazi marching songs in Yiddish.
The grandfather of fifteen even appeared on the cover wearing a leather
vest and an earring. When he then swaggered up to the American Music
226

Awards in clip-on earrings, gold chains, rub-on tattoos and a dog collar, TBN
was deluged with furious calls from the Righteous and the channel was forced
to yank Pat’s weekly gospel show.
They then aired another program where Boone defended his decision
to make the album. Foundation magazine were alarmed that viewers might
have been tempted to feel they’d misjudged him. Apparently Boone and the
interviewer even found time to joke around, which, as everyone knows, is
an abomination before the Lord. ‘Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor
jesting which are not convenient, but rather giving of thanks’ (Eph. 5:4).
Why did Boone take the risk of alienating his traditional fan base for
the reward of winning absolutely no new fans at all? If we look at his history
it should come as no surprise. Forty years ago, when he was still just a
schoolteacher in Nashville, he made his name by sanitising early rock’n’roll
classics by Fats Domino and Little Richard, taking all the embarrassment out
of ‘Ain’t That a Shame’ and the Frutti out of Tutti. He slowed down the rhythm,
cleaned up the lyrics, made black songs white. It’s what he does best.
The controversy and curiosity engendered by In A Metal Mood worked to
Boone’s advantage, of course. It became the first Boone record to hit Billboard’s
pop charts in thirty-five years. His cover of ‘Crazy Train’ would later serve as
the theme song for Ozzy’s Osbourne’s reality show, The Osbournes.
So what’s next? Will Pat go hip-hop and sing ‘My Humps’ on the piano
accordion with soft lighting? Will he do rap, taking Mystikal’s masterwork
‘Pussy Crook’ (see later) and turning it into a man saving a woman’s soul
instead of tearing up her coochie lining?
If he does, I don’t think God would approve. I don’t think the editors of
Foundation would either.
He has since apparently gone into celebrity-golf-tournament exile. Amen
to that.
227

Barbie Girl
(Aqua)
Danish paedo-pop
Personally I don’t think the song is so bad. It is so downright wrong in so many

fundamental ways that I found it amusing and not at all irritating.
Not everyone thought the same way. The song featured at number thirty-
two on VH1’s ‘most awesomely bad songs’ countdown. It was founded on a
brilliant if twisted concept: take a best-selling child’s toy, morph it into some
questionable sexual fantasy—‘you can brush my hair, undress me everywhere’—
set it to the sort of synthetic bubblegum pop that would rot the tusks out of
an elephant, and peddle it to prepubescent girls like happy meals.
Even better, let’s get a bodilicious Norwegian chick with a voice like she’s
been sucking helium through a straw, and hook her up with a very dodgy
Danish rapper called René Dif who sounds like he should be Gary Glitter’s
cellmate, call them Aqua, and you have the most questionable song ever to
come out of Scandinavia, if not the whole of Europe. A sure-fire hit.
Barbie manufacturer Mattel sued, saying it violated the Barbie trademark
and that it had turned Barbie into a sex object. Barbie a sex object? Surely not.
They further alleged that the lyrics had tarnished the doll’s reputation and
impinged on their marketing plan. MCA Records rubbed their hands together
in delicious anticipation and countersued. The legal wrangling didn’t stop
228

‘Barbie Girl’ from going gangbusters. Quite the opposite, you’ll be surprised
to hear. The song topped the charts worldwide and stayed at number one in
the UK for three weeks.
The lawsuit was finally dismissed by the lower courts, and the ruling was
upheld in the US Supreme Court by Judge Alex Kozinski, who ruled the song
was protected as a parody under the First Amendment and also threw out the
defamation lawsuit Aqua’s record company had filed against Mattel.
Kozinski famously concluded his ruling by saying, ‘The parties are
advised to chill.’
Really, Barbie was just a bit of fun.
Can’t anyone take a joke?
229

Summer Girls
(LFO)
A brilliant new talent uncovered
LFO were three seriously good-looking boys named Brad, Devin and Rich.
You’d think they’d try to make a few bucks just using their looks and a few
dumbass songs to impress prepubescent girls. But not these guys. They let
their music do their talking for them. As their website was at pains to point
out: ‘In today’s world of prefabricated, media-driven, and often disposable
pop culture, it is surprising and reassuring to witness the evolution of great
and promising young talent right before one’s eyes.’ Such is the story of LFO.
They first made their mark as the three guys who brought us the 1999 chart-
topping smash ‘Summer Girls’. The song, penned by the group’s founder
Rich Cronin, blended his equally strong passion for both hip-hop and pop
music while waxing rhapsodic about young persons of the female persuasion
who wear clothes designed by Abercrombie & Fitch, originally an outfitter of
sporting and excursion goods.
LFO (Lyte Funky Ones) were one of the truly great bands of our time,
though their music was largely misunderstood. In ‘Summer Girls’, for
example, Cronin’s powerful use of symbolism and imagery, the multi-layering
of metaphors, has now led to calls for its introduction into school syllabuses,
particularly by kindergarten teachers.
230

The lyric thread starts with references to New Kids On The Block, which
takes us immediately back to the boy bands of the eighties, and aren’t we
all grateful that those days of hastily formed bands of well-groomed boys
performing crap songs are behind us!
The next line, which refers to the regurgitative qualities of oriental
cuisine, not only throws us off balance with the effortless narrative grace
of a Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer, but it also rhymes! The listener knows
immediately they can relax and leave their ears and emotions in the capable
hands of a master.
‘Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets.’ Some critics have been reminded
of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the way Cronin uses stream of consciousness to get us
inside the complex thoughts and emotions of an attention-deficient seventeen-
year-old whose passion for his lost love is constantly interrupted by thoughts of his
favourite clothing, movie stars, food preferences and brand names.
The love affair, its beginning and end are described in a single line of the
lyric. This illustrates the genius of Cronin’s minimalist style. In just one line
he tells us a story of passion, rejection and heartache, a poignant plea for
men and women to communicate with each other.
Like every great artist, Cronin has had to rely on luck to get where he is.
His name, Rich, rhymes with Fitch! But every artist needs one lucky break.
Later in the song, however, he reveals a darker side to his narrator’s
personality, showing his deep understanding of the nature of dualism. He
portrays himself as someone who likes girls only during one particular season
of the year, then tells his new friend that he will steal items from her pantry
as well as her bicycle. It seems that despite his despair over his girlfriend’s
rejection of him, he is aware that he has a shadow side to his personality
that eschews commitment and is not averse to petty larceny. Like Capote or
231

Bukowski, Cronin is not afraid of drawing criticism, and does not sacrifice
honesty for political correctness: his girlfriend is a native of a Georgia where,
in Cronin’s opinion, the sole economic activity consists of growing peaches
and making lemonade, and they talk with a characteristic cadence, the
implication being that they are all retards. He then segues effortlessly from
a short aside on American history into the articulation of deeply personal
emotion: he expresses his warm regard for the American patriot Paul Revere,
and then tells his girlfriend that he has much greater recourse to the plentiful
production of endorphins when she is near. Coincidentally, the way Cronin
does it, these lines rhyme.
Sometimes Cronin can be complex and even enigmatic: in telling us of
his love of nature he eschews the use of ‘copse’, ‘forest’ or ‘wood’ by instead
using the wildly innovative term: ‘a bunch of trees’. Some critics have suggested
that this is only because he needs it to rhyme with ‘cheese’ (as in macaroni
and), but scholars have rejected this as it would show his lyrics to be facile, in
direct contradiction to the rest of the Work.
Finally Cronin, with his usual sparse and economical style, almost in
the manner of Hemingway, comments on the ephemeral nature of love, the
poignancy of his own personal dilemma, and the contradictory nature of the
dramatic arts: he realises the futility of calling her on his cell phone, because
he likes Kevin Bacon but doesn’t like the 1984 musical that he starred in. As
LFO’s website so poignantly predicted: ‘LFO have grown from pop boys to
hot, cool young men and forces to be reckoned with in the world of popular
music.’ Sadly, it was not to be. The world was not yet ready.
Rich Cronin. Remember the name. One day, when historians reassess
the nineties he may well be rediscovered and remembered in the same breath
as Robert Frost or Lord Byron—who used to wear Abercrombie & Fitch.
232

ROCK’S 20 GREATEST ECCENTRICS
THE TOP 10
10 Axl Rose
According to legend, one of the low points of his childhood was his stepfather
hitting him for singing along to Barry Manilow’s ‘Mandy’. (I would have got
the strap for that!) He had an unhappy upbringing. Axl was arrested more
than twenty times in his Indiana hometown for public drunkenness and
assault before he was sixteen. After leaving home, he smoked cigarettes for
eight dollars an hour for a scientific study at UCLA in an attempt to earn
money.
Despite achieving global rock hegemony with Guns N’ Roses’ 1987
Appetite for Destruction, Rose’s appetite for self-destruction was undimmed. He
developed a reputation for arriving hours late at concerts, such as at Montreal
in 1992 when he sang for fifty minutes, then told the crowd ‘Thank you, your
money will be refunded’ and walked offstage. A riot ensued which spilled out
into the streets.
Axl Rose stories are legion; he has hit his own fans with glass bottles, told
Jon Bon Jovi to perform fellatio upon his own person, sensitively compared
Indianapolis residents to inmates of Auschwitz, and cancelled concerts
without warning. Critics have labelled him both racist and homophobic.
Yet in the eighties this bandana-clad bad boy was a breath of fresh air
in a rock scene all fogged up with hair spray rock and synthesisers. ‘Sweet
233

Child o’ Mine’, written for Erin Everly, daughter of Don Everly of the Everly
Brothers, became a rock classic.
These days he has become a virtual recluse in his Malibu mansion. The
unauthorised biography by Mick Wall calls him ‘a Howard Hughes figure,
bearded and sun-baked’. The New York Post says his long-awaited comeback
album, Chinese Democracy, which has been in production for fifteen years, may
never be released.
But when he does go out he still manages to live a normal quiet life; in
2006 MTV reported that he was arrested in Stockholm after an early-morning
altercation in his hotel lobby in which he apparently bit a security guard on
the leg.
There are rumours that he is soon to get his own reality-TV show. But
will he know reality when he sees it?
9 Sinead O’Connor
A voice like a choirboy, the face of an angel, the haircut of an SAS paratrooper,
and the demeanour of a paranoid schizophrenic being chased through a
minefield by aliens. As a child, her attitudes had been shaped by reform school
and violent nuns. That tear running down her cheek in her cover of Prince’s
‘Nothing Compares 2U’ earned her a brief period of stellar fame which was
punctuated by highly publicised outbursts in which she famously tore up a
picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. After declaring that the Roman
Catholic Church was the fount of all evil, she was ordained as a female priest
for the breakaway Latin Tridentine Church and became Mother Bernadette
Mary. God love her.
234

8 Courtney Love
Rolling Stone called her ‘the most controversial woman in the history of rock’.
The Guardian just said she looked as if someone had coloured her in and
strayed beyond the lines. I think her own self-appraisal is the most winning:
‘I found my inner bitch and ran with her.’
She’s won a Golden Globe nomination as an actress, and her Riot Grrrl
grunge band Hole earned worldwide acclaim. Their album, the aptly titled
Live Through This, was lauded as Album of the Year by some of the most
influential American music periodicals. Its successor, Celebrity Skin, was even
more triumphant.
Yet she remains in the eyes of the world just the drug-addled widow of
Kurt Cobain.
It probably hasn’t helped her cause that she has frequently been drug-
addled and that she is Kurt Cobain’s widow. Her life has been a catalogue of
rehab, assault charges, ill-fated affairs and custody battles, all played out in
front of the popping flashlights of the Hollywood paparazzi.
Courtney has always been unconventional. While in boarding school,
she joined a Bay City Rollers fan club. At twelve she applied to join the
Mickey Mouse Club, but was rejected because, unlike other luminaries such
as Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, she chose to
read Sylvia Plath at her audition. In one of her early bands she pioneered the
Kinderwhore look—babydoll dresses, plastic hair clips, ripped stockings and
overdone, smeared makeup—with Kat Bjelland.
She met Cobain in 1989 at an L7 concert when they were both fledgling
musicians with burgeoning drug addictions. Courtney said later that they
‘bonded over pharmaceuticals’. Three years later, Nirvana had become one
235

of the biggest bands in the world, and just three years after that Cobain was
dead. During the memorial service Love read from Cobain’s suicide note, on
tape, then asked everyone to join her in calling him an ‘asshole’, which some
of them did.
During what she calls her ‘Letterman period’ she got out of it and flashed
her nipples at the Saturday Night Live host; later the same night she was
arrested for tossing a microphone stand into a New York audience and was
subsequently charged with reckless endangerment and third-degree assault.
Her drug problem—she once famously described cocaine as ‘like, really evil
coffee’ but I think that’s understating the case—was so acute that her former
boyfriend and two of his associates got her to sign a power of attorney and
siphoned off a mere twenty million dollars from her accounts thinking she
wouldn’t miss it. During this period it is rumoured that Johnny Depp once
revived her with CPR in the Viper Room. In 2005, she spent a month in
lockdown rehab.
These days she claims she’s clean and is trying to get back into Hollywood.
Whether or not she succeeds, it’s unlikely they’ll ever find a story for her quite
as crazy as the real one.
7 John Frusciante
He was going to audition for Frank Zappa but discovered he prohibited drug
use. ‘I realised that I wanted to be a rock star,’ Frusciante said in Guitar Player
magazine, ‘do drugs and get girls, and that I wouldn’t be able to do that if I
was in Zappa’s band.’ The guitar prodigy instead joined the Red Hot Chili
Peppers, but left at the height of their success in 1992 because they’d become
too famous.
236

‘By the age of twenty,’ he told Rolling Stone, ‘I started doing it right
and looking at it as an artistic expression instead of a way of partying
and screwing a bunch of girls. To balance it out, I had to be extra-
humble, extra-anti-rock star.’ He decamped to the Hollywood Hills
and self-medicated on heroin to ease feelings of profound depression.
‘I was very sad, and I was always happy when I was on drugs; therefore, I
should be on drugs all the time. I was never guilty—I was always really proud
to be an addict,’ he said in an interview with Kate Sullivan in Spin.
He released his first solo album, Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt,
because he needed drug money. The fact that he was using them excessively
was already clear. One of the tracks is called ‘Your Pussy’s Glued to a Building
on Fire’.
He became, according to one journalist, ‘a skeleton covered in thin skin’,
and the walls of his house were badly damaged and covered in graffiti. In 1998,
he checked himself into rehab, was diagnosed with a lethal oral infection and
had to have all his teeth removed. He renounced sex and drugs and teeth
for vipassana yoga and complete sexual chastity. The Chilis, on the point
of splitting up, invited him back to the band, and they—and Frusciante—
enjoyed a triumphant return with Californication. He was ranked eighteen on
Rolling Stone’s list of ‘The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time’.
6 Ol’ Dirty Bastard (ODB)

Calling ODB a loose cannon is like calling Stalin mischievous. One of the
founding members of hip-hop stars Wu-Tang Clan, ODB (real name Russell
Tyrone Jones) had a bizarre but unique mic technique unlike anything before
or since. Unfortunately ODB’s personal style was just as eccentric.
237

He once picked up a welfare cheque in a limousine while being filmed
for an MTV special while his album was in the top ten charts. He rushed
the stage at the 1998 Grammys complaining that he’d just bought expensive
clothes in anticipation of winning the best rap album, in which he lost out
to Puff Daddy. He finished his rant by shouting ‘Wu-Tang is for the children!’
before being escorted offstage.
He was constantly in and out of jail for possession of crack cocaine, was
once shot in the stomach by another rapper, and was arrested for failure to
pay child support. In April 1998 he announced to the media he was changing
his name to Big Baby Jesus but then seemed to forget the idea. He was shot
again in a home invasion at his girlfriend’s house but the next day was well
enough to shoplift a pair of fifty-dollar shoes from a Foot Locker store even
though arresting officers found he had five hundred dollars in his pocket.
In 1999, he was the first person to be arrested in California for wearing
a bulletproof vest while driving. With this and many other drug-related cases
still pending he was then arrested for possession of twenty vials of crack
cocaine, which he asked the police to ‘make disappear’.
At trial he called the female district attorney a ‘sperm donor’, and then
endeared himself to the prosecution by taking a nap.
Critic Steve Huey said that ‘it was difficult for observers to tell whether
ODB’s wildly erratic behaviour was the result of serious drug problems or
genuine mental instability’. He died suddenly two days before his thirty-sixth
birthday. An autopsy found lethal amounts of tramadol and cocaine in his
blood.
We shall never see his like again.
238

5 Noel Gallagher
In the nineties, as the mouthier half of Britpop sensation Oasis, he told The
Observer that he hoped Damon Albarn and Alex James of rival group Blur
would ‘catch AIDS and die’. He later poured oil on troubled waters by saying
of Albarn: ‘I’ve got nothing against him . . . I just think his “bird” is ugly.’
Fame did not change Noel at all. He bought a number of expensive
cars and a swimming pool, despite the fact he can neither drive nor swim.
He named his house in London’s Belsize Park ‘Supernova Heights’, after his
hit song ‘Champagne Supernova’. But it was his spats with other celebrities
that attracted the most attention. He called Robbie Williams ‘the fat dancer
from Take That’. Williams responded by sending him a funeral wreath: ‘To
Noel Gallagher, RIP. Heard your latest album—with deepest sympathy,
Robbie Williams.’ In public, Williams dismisses him as a ‘mean-spirited
nasty little dwarf’.
But Noel really dislikes Phil Collins: ‘People fucking hate cunts like
Phil Collins, and if they don’t—they fucking should.’ Before the 2005 UK
general election he told the Daily Mirror: ‘Vote Labour. If you don’t and the
Tories get in, Phil is threatening to come back from Switzerland and live
here—and none of us want that.’ He has said he thought the Backstreet
Boys should be shot—fair call—and called Kylie Minogue a ‘demonic little
idiot’. Elton John has hit back: ‘Noel looks like Parker from Thunderbirds.’
Though naturally left-handed, Gallagher plays guitar right-handed,
which he claims is the only thing he can do with his weak hand.
Well, maybe.
239

4 Iggy Pop
James Newell Osterburg shouldn’t be alive today. A quarter-century ago he was
on his knees trying to snort the white lines out of a marble-patterned floor in
the Redondo Beach Motel. This is the man who invented the stage dive, who
used to roll in broken glass onstage, who raked drumsticks across his body
until he bled, onstage, regularly got little Iggy out and slapped him on a speaker
ONSTAGE . . . ‘He put his dick on the speaker,’ one fan recalled. ‘It was just
vibrating around’ . . . who legend has it got a blow job from a fan ONSTAGE.
He’s reported to have once panhandled in the ticket line to one of his
concerts for drug money, shot up offstage, walked on, introduced himself and
collapsed, waking up next day in the hospital.
The Iggman perhaps owes much of his physical and financial survival to
long-time friend and collaborator David Bowie. In the late seventies, Bowie
helped drag him out of the heroin addiction that should have killed him.
He supported him through rehab, and when Bowie’s cover of Iggy’s
‘China Girl’ became a worldwide hit, the royalties made Iggy financially
secure for the first time.
Iggy is best remembered in Australia for a legendary performance on the
nationwide pop show Countdown, when he tried to grab the teenage girls in
the audience during his act and then, while being interviewed by host Molly
Meldrum, jumped up and down on his chair repeatedly shouting ‘G’day mate’
in a mock Australian accent.
He’s one of the few rock musicians to have been published in an
established journal of classical scholarship: his article ‘Caesar Lives’ in the
second volume of Classics Ireland (1995) considers the applicability of Edward
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to the modern world.
240

Iggy (named after his high school band The Iguanas) is today the
grandfather of Punk, the World’s Forgotten Boy. He was ahead of his time
and at sixty-one he’s still performing because the rest of the world has finally
caught up.
Here is our quintessential rock god; that heady cocktail of passion,
rebellion, creativity, showmanship and hard drugs that takes one of us across
the Styx and back again.
His is probably not the life any of us would have chosen—but isn’t that
why we love his music?
3 Prince
(Or the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, or the Artist Formerly Known as an
Unpronounceable Symbol, or just plain Prince Rogers Nelson, his real name.)
A Jehovah’s Witness voted the world’s sexiest vegetarian, he has
positioned himself as a sort of blatant love god to women, with songs like
‘Cream’, ‘Do Me Baby’, ‘Head’, ‘Orgasm’ and ‘Soft and Wet’, while his eyeliner,
pencil-thin cocksucker moustache and bouffant hair made him look more like
a gay biker’s stay-at-home bitch.
He’s five foot two, has been known to wear ass-less pants and frilly
blouses, and once wrote a song called ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’. So, despite the
sex-hound posturing, his personal style is not always thought by mainstream
heterosexuals as appealing. Opening for The Stones at the LA Coliseum in
1981, he was pelted with garbage while wearing bikini briefs, leg-warmers,
high-heeled boots and a trench coat.
A perfectionist who produces, arranges and performs nearly all of the
songs on his albums, he catapulted to stardom on the back of his Minneapolis
241

sound. He’s also a brilliant composer—‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Raspberry Beret’—
and has earned millions in royalties and a legion of admirers.
In 1993, during a legal battle with Warner Bros over control of his output,
he appeared in public with the word ‘SLAVE’ written on his cheek. He then
changed his stage name to the Love Symbol, as a step towards his ‘ultimate
goal of emancipation from the chains’ that he said tied him to Warner Bros.
More recently, he’s threatened to sue his three biggest internet fansites
for breach of copyright. There’s another lawsuit pending after a mother from
Pennsylvania posted a clip of her baby playing while twenty-nine seconds of
Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ plays on a CD player in the background. The video is
a home movie shot by a mother in her rural Pennsylvania kitchen. Prince’s
lawyers demanded that YouTube take it down.
It’s hard to know if these are genuine eccentricities or a marketing ploy.
Perhaps he can be best summed up as the artist currently known as ?!@??.
2 Rick James
Just because he freebased seven thousand dollars of crack cocaine every week
for five years, wore lycra jumpsuits, and was convicted and jailed in 1994 for
stripping and torturing two female crack buddies with a hot hash pipe, they
called him crazy! Some people are so quick to judge.
According to court records, twenty-four-year-old Frances Alley alleged
that James also hit her in the face with a handgun and made her go south
on James’s girlfriend. If only his music was as sensational. Best known for
‘Super Freak’ and MC Hammer’s ‘U Can’t Touch This’, James died in 2004 of
an enlarged heart and pneumonia, caused by years of drug abuse.
242

AND THE WINNER IS . . .
1 Kevin Michael ‘GG’ Allin

One of the most notorious singers in punk music history, he routinely cut
himself with glass, defecated and urinated onstage—he took laxatives before
a performance—rolled in and sometimes ate his own excrement, stripped
naked and invited members of his audience to perform fellatio on him, and
frequently had violent fights with his own audience. Venues were often
trashed. His music? Few people have ever heard of him.
His father, Merle Allin Sr, told his wife an angel had visited him to tell
him their newborn son would be the next Messiah, and christened him Jesus
Christ Allin. His older brother was unable to pronounce ‘Jesus’ properly and
kept calling him ‘Jeje’, which became ‘GG’.
His mother later changed his legal name to Kevin Michael in order to
give Allin a chance at a normal life. It didn’t work.
He started off a standard punk rock frontman in the vein of Iggy Pop but
became increasingly uncontrollable and vicious. Note to the jury: the bands
he played in at various times were The Scumfucs, The Texas Nazis, The Fuckin
Shitbiscuits, Bloody Mess & the Skabs, and Afterbirth.
He became addicted to heroin and alcohol. He visited serial killer
John Wayne Gacy several times in jail. His concerts were regularly stopped
after only a few songs by police and he was banned from most clubs in
New England. He was constantly hospitalised for broken bones or blood
poisoning.
243

He was jailed over fifty times, his rap sheet including one charge of rape
and torture. He continually threatened to commit suicide on stage, thus
boosting audience numbers.
His last show was at The Gas Station in NYC in 1993. During a rendition
of ‘Look Into My Eyes and Hate Me’, the power went out, so he trashed the
place and walked the streets of New York naked, covered in blood and faeces,
surrounded by fans whom he openly embraced. He went to friend Johnny
Puke’s apartment and there overdosed on heroin. Party-goers posed for
photos with him, not realising that he was dead. He was thirty-six.
At his funeral his bloated, discoloured corpse was dressed in his black
leather jacket and trademark jockstrap. His last wishes specified that the
mortician was not to wash his corpse, which apparently stank. The funeral
became a wild party. Friends posed with the corpse, putting drugs and whisky
into its mouth.
The video of his funeral is widely available for purchase.
244

The early
noughties
The fallout from 9/11
continues
‘Osama bin Laden is the only one who

knows what I’m going through.’
R. Ke lly aro u se s sy mp at hy f or his predicament after being cited on child
pornography charges

Millennium Prayer
(Cliff Richard)
God help us
‘Millennium Prayer’ is a 1999 charity single by Sir Cliff Richard. Richard had
his first hit forty-two years before, with songs like ‘Summer Holiday’ and ‘The
Young Ones’ making him a teenage heartthrob in the late fifties. He has sold
more singles in the UK than any other music artist, ahead of The Beatles and
Elvis Presley.
By 2K most of his screaming fan base were on Zimmer frames—but they
still loved him anyway. And among the post-Blair, pre-Iraq new Christians,
Cliff had become the Justin Timberlake of God-bothering.
Okay, so he didn’t make any money out of this song, but just because he
didn’t record it for profit doesn’t mean we should let him off the hook. Good
people sometimes do very bad things.
The song features Richard singing the words of the Lord’s Prayer to the
tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The reasoning behind this bizarre concept is that
people would want to buy it because it was not only released in time for New
Year’s Eve, but the New Year’s Eve in question was 2000, the dawn of a new
millennium.
And you know what? He was right.
Success, however, was not achieved without a fight. Sir Cliff couldn’t
246

even persuade EMI, the record company he’d recorded with for more than
forty years, to release it. They rightfully concluded it was just too dreadful, in
idea and execution, even to foist upon a music-buying public who had over
the years been asked to endure ‘The Birdie Song’ and ‘Gimme Dat Ding’.
Undeterred, Richard did a deal with a small, independent music label
called Papillon Records. But even then, the four main pop radio stations in
Britain refused to play it, deeming it to be embarrassing and too slow. Good
call.
So Cliff decided to call in the big guns. He did, after all, have God on
his side, or the Church of England anyway. His record company plugged the
Millennium Prayer in the Christian Herald newspaper, and six hundred free
copies of the single were sent to churches around Britain so the song could
be played at Sunday services. A promotional campaign was also mounted on
the Internet. This bizarre coalition of cyberspace and vicars, together with a
fanbase high on loyalty and low on musical appreciation, meant the song
began to walk out of the shops anyway. It sold 120,000 copies in its first week
of release.
When it went to the top of the singles charts, Sir Cliff had achieved the
incredible feat of having a number one song in five separate decades. It was,
dare I say it, a miracle. Far be it from me to criticise Him, but it appears to me
that though He may be Love, He is also Stone Deaf.
247

Who Let the
Dogs Out
(The Baha Men)
Their bark was even worse than their sound byte
‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ was a song written and originally recorded by Anselm
Douglas for Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival of 1998. It was re-recorded by
The Baha Men, a pop group that played a modernised style of Bahamian folk
music called Junkanoo. It found its way into Rugrats in Paris: The Movie and
was then released as a single in 2000.
It reached number forty on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US and number
two on the UK Singles Chart. It was also a big hit in Australia, where it reached
number one.
The Baha Men thankfully faded back into obscurity soon after.
‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ lived on as a sports anthem played at stadiums
and arenas throughout the world.
In June of 2000, the Seattle Mariners were the first to torture their fans
with it at a major league baseball game. This truly dreadful song became the
Mariners’ team anthem, and even led to The Baha Men playing live at Safeco
Field during a Mariners game that season. I won’t be supporting them, then.
248

The New York Mets—they changed the chorus to ‘Who Let the Mets
Out’—claimed that they were the first to adopt the song. This seems to me
like two DJs arguing over who had been first to play Mariah Carey.
The virus—sorry, I mean song—even spread here to the NRL, Australia’s
premier Rugby League competition, where the Canterbury Bulldogs played
the song at home games.
It was also parodied in The Simpsons, in ‘Large Marge’ with ‘Who Let
Marge’s Jugs Out?’
So there we have it: The Baha Men, gone but not forgotten.
And there we were, thinking all black guys were cool.
249

Against All Odds
(Take a Look
at Me Now)
(Mariah Carey & Westlife)
How do you solve a problem like Mariah?
Any song by Mariah Carey would make most worst one hundreds, but let’s
go with this one because she eroded her material even more by singing it
with a boy band. A tune-butcher of the first rank, she made her recording
debut in 1990 under the guidance of Columbia Records CEO Tommy Mottola.
Following their marriage in 1993, a series of hit records established her
position as Columbia’s highest-selling act. According to Billboard, she was the
most successful artist of the 1990s in the US.
Carey has called the house she shared with Mottola ‘Sing Sing’, in
reference to both the infamous New York prison and the only activity her
husband ever wanted her to engage in. She says. He’s a music executive.
What did she expect? True love?
After their inevitable divorce, Mariah seemed to lose the plot, if not the
whole cast of characters as well.
250

In 2001 she tried to revive her flagging career with a movie and soundtrack
project called Glitter. On its release the world was utterly underwhelmed.
Halliwell’s Film Guide called it a ‘vapid star vehicle for a pop singer with no
visible acting ability’, and The Village Voice observed: ‘When she tries for an
emotion—any emotion—she looks as if she’s lost her car keys.’
And for mine this is the whole problem. The woman has a set of pipes
on her, no question. Perhaps close to six octaves. In certain quarters she is
known as the Range Rover for her ability to move effortlessly through alto
and soprano.
But being a great singer isn’t just a matter of hitting the notes. It has to
do with the ability of a singer to connect with the emotion behind the sounds,
and find layers of meaning in the lyric. Mariah treats lyrics like they’re spikes
and the song is a railroad.
With or without Westlife she comes across as a peddler of saccharine
garbage who thinks that emotion and warbling are interchangeable. She’s
justifiably earned the moniker ‘the Princess of Wails’. ‘My voice is my
instrument; it always has been,’ she once famously said.
Some would say she’s right—an instrument of torture, and we’ve all
suffered long enough.
251

She Bangs
(Ricky Martin)
He should be Hung
There is nothing bad about this song except the lyrics, the concept, the rhythm
and the melody.
It’s hard to love any song where the singer claims his heart is being hit
like a drum. Could the writer have thought of any lyric more threadbare than
this?
‘She looks like a flower, stings like a bee, like every girl in history.’
Sorry, Ricky, but you obviously haven’t been to Penrith Leagues Club,
because, all due respect, not every girl there looks like a flower.
Although a few of them do bang, that’s for sure.
Though even if she did bang like a dunny door, it’s unlikely that Ricky
would care. Still, that’s his business. But it does further erode the song’s
credibility, if such a thing is possible. ‘She Bangs’ was a follow-up to the
mother of all Ibiza nightclub tragedies, ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’. But ‘She Bangs’
manages somehow to be funny as well—even though it’s not meant to be.
The producers of this monumental fluffer nutter worked feverishly to
save this one, with the desperate efforts of men trapped in a mineshaft that’s
rapidly filling with water trying to claw their way out through granite with
their fingernails. There’s a horn section that sounds like every mariachi band
252

in Mexico had been hired for the day as back-up, a percussion section played
with the enthusiasm and expertise of three hundred preschoolers let loose
in a warehouse full of forty-gallon drums with wooden spoons, and a male
back-up chorus that sounds like a Serbian Gun Club Choir drinking tequila in
a Turkish brothel.
But to be fair, even that couldn’t save it.
Still, Ricky couldn’t care less. He’s sold almost forty-eight million albums
around the world and charted twenty-one top ten hits on the US Latin Charts.
And he’s not a bad person. He’s won many awards for his humanitarian
activities, as well as being nominated on several occasions as one of the 50
Most Beautiful People in the World by People magazine.
But Ricky Martin is not the real story of ‘She Bangs’. Because in 2004, a
contestant named William Hung, a UCLA student from Berkeley in California,
earned brief fame after performing this song completely off-key—how could
they tell?—on the third season of American Idol.
‘I want to make music my living,’ said Hung before he slid effortlessly
into a comically appalling performance. As judges Randy Jackson and Paula
Abdul tried not to leave puddles on the floor, judge Simon Cowell told Hung:
‘You can’t sing, you can’t dance, so what do you want me to say?’
Hung was gracious under this withering assault: ‘. . . you know, I have
no professional training of singing and dancing,’ eliciting mock surprise from
Cowell.
Hung was not aware that his American Idol audition would be broadcast
until it aired four months later. He was the final auditioner on an hour-long
episode of horror that showcased other would-be pop stars, all of them
conspicuously lacking in talent.
But Hung’s indefatigable enthusiasm and optimistic attitude disarmed
253

the watching audience and he rapidly gained a cult following. A William Hung
fansite recorded over four million hits within its first week. Hung subsequently
appeared on several television programs, including Entertainment Tonight and
The Late Show With David Letterman, and an online petition to get Hung back to
American Idol gathered more than one hundred thousand signatures.
He was offered a record deal from Koch Entertainment and dropped out
of university. His debut album, Inspiration, sold approximately two hundred
thousand copies. He has since appeared in TV commercials and even starred
in a 2004 low-budget Hong Kong period comedy called My Crazy Mother.
Hung has become more famous than many of the American Idol
contestants despite being arguably one of the worst singers to grace the
show. His innocent looks, endearingly positive attitude, and enthusiasm far
in excess of his natural gifts have won him many fans.
If only Britney could say the same!
254

Pussy Crook
(Mystikal)
Unravelling the mystery
This man shits poetry like Shakespeare scribbled sonnets.

Take ‘Pussy Crook’, for example, from the album Tarantula. The song
opens with a police officer calling all cars to be on the lookout for our anti-
hero who is notorious for dickin’ yo woman. Can the cops prevent him from
placing this exceptional organ into yet another female by song’s end?
He creates mood and tension in the opening lines by revealing that
he is a cuss word expert, a point he demonstrates by juxtaposing the
words ‘muthafuckin’ and ‘pussy’, which even Bono or Dylan never thought
to do.
However, despite his obvious charisma, his love interest is initially cool
to his advances and displays a certain amount of reticence about removing
her underwear and putting her legs in the air. Her tears and shyness seem
at odds with the fact that she charges by the hour. Mystikal reveals the
psychological motivation of our hero with an audience aside, reminiscent
of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, enlisting the listener’s sympathy for his
behaviour as he shouts, ‘Dick don’t fail me now.’ Does this imply the anti-hero
fears sexual impotence and that this is the reason for his empty posturing and
criminal record?
255

It is at this point he attempts to remove his love interest’s coochie lining.
His motivation for this is unclear, but it seems that women in Mystikal’s world
cannot get enough of having their vaginas abraided.
He whispers to her romantically: ‘Fuck you like I ate my vegetables’, which
shows that although he is perhaps oversexed, he’s a good boy at heart. In
an unexpected twist, he then manages to get his penis caught somewhere.
‘Again’ indicates that this is not the first time this has happened.
However when he discovers that his amour is at the peak of her menstrual
cycle, he decides instead to attempt some Funky Fire Boo Hole Pluggin,
which apparently—and here the plot loses a little credibility—the woman
claims she’s never before attempted. Deficiencies in the plot are more than
compensated for by Mystikal’s brilliant use of language—though, as one
literary critic pointed out, it is pertinent to ask how the heroine knew she had
never tried Funky Fire Boo Hole Pluggin when this was the first time all five
words had ever been used in one sentence.
This poignant tale ends with another APB; police officers are warned to
look out for a man armed with a penis and striking good looks. But as our
story fades out it appears that law enforcement is useless in this case, as they
will only ever apprehend his formidable appendage and not the rest of him.
Mystikal has drawn a rich and detailed portrait in this song. The
James Joyce of boo hole pluggin, his use of metaphor and symbolism are
unsurpassed. It appears he has a complex relationship with himself and
with women, keeping them at a distance emotionally, and is ultimately only
interested in destroying the very thing he craves.
Footnote: at time of writing, Mystikal is serving a six-year prison term
for sexual assault.
256

Courtesy of the Red,
White, & Blue
(The Angry American)
(Toby Keith)
A boot in your ass, it’s the American way
If the United States had a Middle Ages it would be about now. 9/11 succeeded
brilliantly because it transformed ignorance into blind hatred and turned
America’s lazy Right into Hamas with hayseeds in their ears. And Toby Keith
put the whole thing to music.
Enraged by the Twin Towers attacks, he wrote a song so spiked with
venom it made Mein Kampf sound like Peter Rabbit. Right-wing radio hosts
called him a hero. Attacked from some quarters for disseminating hate—
much like, erm, Osama bin Laden actually—Toby moaned, ‘It sucks ass that I
have to defend myself for being patriotic.’
Which is another way of saying that he thinks his country is best because
he was born in it.
Toby was already something of a C&W institution at the time of the Twin
Towers attack. His first hit, back in 1993, was a country classic, ‘Should Have
257

Been a Cowboy’, which was played more than any other song on country
radio during the 1990s.
He wrote ‘Red, White, & Blue’ to play for troops on USO tours. He says
he never intended to release the song on a CD, but then the Commandant
of the Marine Corps, James L. Jones himself, told him it was his dooty as an
American citizen to record the song. ‘It’s your job as an entertainer to lift the
morale of the troops. If you want to serve, that is what you can do.’
Well, Jeez, thank you, sir. It sure beats the hell outta getting your balls
shot off in Baghdad!
As the lead single from the album Unleashed, ‘Red, White, & Blue’ peaked
at number one on the country charts. But not everyone in the good ol’ US of
A was enthusiastic. The song led to a much-publicised feud with the Dixie
Chicks over both his song and the comments they had made about President
George W. Bush. The Chicks’ lead singer, Natalie Maines, said that the song
was ‘ignorant, and it makes country music sound ignorant’. Makes country
music sound ignorant? Whew. Them’s are harsh words.
Keith responded by displaying a backdrop at his concerts showing a
doctored photo of Maines with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Maines then wore a T-shirt with the letters FUTK on the front at the
Academy of Country Music Awards. While a spokesperson for the Chicks said
that the acronym stood for ‘Friends United in Truth and Kindness’, the rest of
us all knew what she meant.
Big Tobes endorsed the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2004
and performed at a Dallas rally on the night before the election. Whatever his
politics—he calls himself an embarrassed Democrat—his songs reflect the
thoughts and opinions of the blue-collar, pick-up-trucking, country-twanging,
hard-drinking, tough-talking American heartland. ‘As far extreme as I seem,
258

I’m probably catching the average Joe in the middle better than anybody,’ he
said in an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS.
He’s right, of course. If the song was just one crazy man’s rant, it probably
wouldn’t worry anyone. Why so many people—not just me—loathe the song
is that we know it’s real. George Dubya loves the guy. ‘Red, White, & Blue’ was
used as a battle cry by US armed services in Iraq. Bombs were branded with
it. So was one of the first tanks to roll into Baghdad.
What is scary about this song is that it’s not just a song: this is what the
majority of the world’s most powerful country thinks.
259

Your Body Is a
Wonderland
(John Mayer)
And you have breasts like the Gravitron
Yes, I know what you’re thinking, ladies: where have all the nice guys gone?
You know, those smooth-talking bastards who will compare your thighs to a
theme park, your tunnel of love to a shooting gallery? Well, meet John Mayer.
The song is from a young man to his girlfriend. He tells her about how
they will spend the afternoon in bed exploring her body, and compares it to
a wonderland.
Sure, if you look at the lyrics he sounds like that school caretaker who
used to hang around the girls’ lavatories at recess. But look at that sunny
smile, listen to that sunny acoustic guitar. How could anyone this cool and
this nice possibly be creepy?
Some people just love the song, others find it sick and strangely
disturbing. I fall into the latter category. And I love John Mayer. The man is
an awesomely talented guitarist with a honeyed voice and he writes some
great songs. This just isn’t one of them for mine.
But he won a Grammy for it so I must be wrong.
260

It was wrongly believed that this song was inspired by his ex-girlfriend,
the actress/singer Jennifer Love Hewitt, but he wrote the song in 2000, and
did not meet Hewitt until two years later. So it must be about some other ride
he went on.
261

Any track from Results
May Vary
(Limp Bizkit)
Yep, they’re all bad
Fred Durst apparently had the idea of naming his band after a game in which
a bunch of lonely white teenagers stand around in a circle jacking off in front
of a biscuit. The last guy to ejaculate has to eat it. They then intentionally
misspelled their name, because that’s phat with the kids.
Following on from the success of 2000’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog
Flavored Water (don’t ask), there was no stopping them.
Buoyed with success, Durst feuded with Britney Spears, Trent Reznor of
Nine Inch Nails, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist Zakk Wylde, came to blows with
Creed frontman Scott Stapp, and slugged it out verbally with Eminem. Then
a three-minute video appeared on the internet featuring Fred’s ample gut and
a woman’s chocolate starfish—proving that, though all evidence seeming to
point against it, Fred has had sex with a woman, once anyway.
At Woodstock 1999 Fred was accused of inciting the crowd to violence
during a performance of the band’s single ‘Break Stuff’. His remarks about
262

women were also alleged to have resulted in several sexual assaults in the
aftermath of the concert.
But the shit really hit the fans during the Big Day Out in Sydney in 2001.
Teenager Jessica Michalik suffered a heart attack when fans rushed the stage
in the moshpit. It was alleged that Fred again incited the crowd and that he
failed to attempt to calm the crowd after the accident.
The senior deputy coroner Ms Milledge described Durst’s actions as
reprehensible. He did not fly to Australia in order to appear in court for
the inquest claiming he was a ‘nervous flier’ and ‘couldn’t fit it into his
schedule’.
Segue to Chicago’s Hawthorn Racecourse and Metallica’s 2003 Summer
Sanitarium tour where Limp Bizkit were the support act. An on-air feud
between Durst and local shock jock Erich ‘Mancow’ Muller led to Durst being
pelted with garbage and coins. Fred calmed the situation by telling the crowd
that they could throw about as well as the local baseball team. At this moment
he was struck in the testicles by a lemon. Sweets for my sweet. Fred stormed
off but continued to harangue the crowd from the wings, telling them they’d
just blown their chance to see the greatest rock band in the world, until the
microphone was finally removed from his hands.
Allmusic.com called him the worst frontman in the history of rock.
Results May Vary, their fourth album, was considered a commercial flop.
Yahoo! labelled it ‘a frightening insight into the vacuous state of 21st century
culture’.
The results do not vary. It’s all crap.
Fred is now vice president at LA music label Interscope.
263

THE 10 GREATEST MUSIC QUOTES
1 ‘What will I be doing in twenty years’ time? I’ll be dead,

darling. Are you crazy?’
FREDDIE MERCURY
2 ‘So, where’s the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?’
CHRISTINA AGUILERA
3 ‘We’re in the dark ages if J-Lo can have a music career because
of her ass. And let’s face it, that’s it.’
JACK BLACK
4 ‘Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when

you have it you have it all over.’
ELVIS PRESLEY
5 ‘I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat but that’s OK—
the bat had to get Ozzy shots.’
OZZY OSBOURNE
264

6 ‘In rock stardom there’s an absolute economic upside to
self-destruction.’
COURTNEY LOVE
7 ‘It’s all right leaping about the stage when you’re 20 but when
you get to 25 it gets a bit embarrassing.’
BILL WYMAN, THE ROLLING STONES, 1967
8 ‘I don’t have a problem with drugs. I have a problem with the

police.’
KEITH RICHARDS
9 ‘I once told this journalist a story about how I met the guys in
an elevator and found out we all had the same last name, so we
decided to form a band.’
JOEY RAMONE OF THE RAMONES
10 ‘A typical day in the life of a heavy metal musician consists of a

round of golf and an AA meeting.’
BILLY JOEL
265

The late
double 0s
Hit me baby, one more
time
‘I get to go to lots of overseas places, like

Canada.’
US pop queen B ritney S pears

Hollaback Girl
(Gwen Stefani)
I love a girl who can spell banana
‘Hollaback Girl’ was written in response to a perceived slur by Courtney

Love, who, in an interview with Seventeen magazine, referred to Stefani as a
‘cheerleader’.
The song is what Stefani refers to as an ‘attitude song’, with Gwen as the
school cheerleader who’s the victim of some slanderous high school gossip.
Over the top of a jittery six-beat phrase carried by horns, Stefani raps out a
disjointed challenge to someone who has been trash-talking her. She and her
girls are now going to put down their pom-poms and do some serious bitch-
slapping instead.
What’s clear is that she’s the shit. And the song is about her shit. She
tells us this four times before she even starts singing.
But her shit is also bananas, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.
Does that mean you can peel Gwen’s BMs? Or that her shit is white? Or that it
smells like fruit? Whatever it means, Gwen can spell it. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Yep,
she got it right, I checked in the dictionary.
The song was one of the year’s most popular, and was nominated for
Best Female Vocal Pop Performance and Record of the Year at the Grammys.
Of course.
268

Mesmerize
(Ja-Rule [feat Ashanti])
Da dirty doofus
Most rappers can’t sing—it’s why they rap. But Jeffrey ‘Ja-Rule’ Atkins took it to
a new low with this one. To celebrate the new millennium, he metamorphosed
from a doof-doof da-cluhhhb growler who sang about women as if they were
disposable Kleenex to a tone-deaf yodeller who shed actual tears for his
woman in his music clips. It was about as much as this particular little black
duck could stand.
Enter Ashanti Shaquoya Douglas, a back-up singer who featured on
Vita’s hip-hop remake of Madonna’s ‘Justify My Love’. She and little Jeff
teamed up for ‘Mesmerise’, 2003’s massive chartbuster.
It was for this song that 50 Cent, typically letting bygones be bygones,
would mock our little hero for being soft and ‘not a true gangsta’. How many
people does he have to shoot to impress you, Fiddy?
The chorus of the song is truly a mesmerising laundry list of female body
parts, an anatomy check by a horny pilot making sure that everything’s there
before take-off. ‘Your lips, your smile, your hips, those thighs.’ In the video he looks
at Ashanti like an ostrich goggling at its own reflection in a brass doorknob.
Nobody minds you having a thing for wanting to do her with her skirt on, Jeff.
But isn’t there a classier, more imaginative, more musical way of saying it?
269

Making Memories
of Us
(Keith Urban)
Urban nightmare
Okay the guy is making nice with one of the most beautiful women in the world,
so he must have something going for him. But my guess is Nicole Kidman must
have been swayed, surely to God, by something other than his singing.
Consider, if you will:
‘I wanna honor your mother, and I wanna learn from your paw.’
He goes on to say he would like to steal her attention. How would you
do that, Keith? Well, like an outlaw, of course. A bad one. At first I thought it
was Bert and Ernie doing a send-up of Willie Nelson for Sesame Street. But no.
This is Keith Urban, and ‘Making Memories of Us’.
Jeez, Nic, what did your maw and paw think about your new husband
when they heard that? Is there nostalgia for Lenny Kravitz? Or even, hush ma
mouf, good old Tom.
And tell me this—why, oh why, oh why, oh why, do cowboys always
want to die in their girlfriend’s arms? Can’t they think of anything more
constructive to do there?
270

Look, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because he was born in New Zealand.
That can do strange things to you. Or maybe it was the Bolivian marching
powder which he discovered when he went to Nashville. It’s not that he’s not
talented. He’s well regarded as a guitarist and has been a session musician for
Garth Brooks, Charlie Daniels and The Dixie Chicks.
In June 2006, he married Nicole in Sydney. I guess he stole her attention
somehow. New Zealanders! Even when they’re good, they’re terrible.
271

My Humps
(The Black Eyed Peas)
Who put the c in rap?
While researching this book I came across a site on the internet that provided
translations for certain rap songs. This is how the author interpreted ‘My
Humps’ by The Black Eyed Peas.
‘You will feel drunk with love/ Looking at my buttocks/ At my buttocks/
My buttocks and my lovely little breasts/ Pay attention.’
Now I may be alone in this, but I think this extrapolation has a certain
poetic quality that the original lacks. ‘My Humps’ is the third single from The
Black Eyed Peas’ fourth album, Monkey Business. It samples a section of the
song ‘I Need a Freak’ by Sexual Harassment as well as the 1989 song ‘Wild
Thing’ by Tone Lo-c.
As a piece of music, it’s on a par with a Nokia default ringtone. The
lyrics are so inane they would bore a three-year-old. The ‘humps’ in question
belong to Fergie, who brandishes her ‘lovely lady lumps’ like a baseball bat
at a street fight. She boasts about how she uses her God-given gifts purely
for the purpose of extracting money from men, and does it to a backbeat that
sounds like a preschooler with his first toy drum.
It’s as subtle as a headbutt from a neo-Nazi, isolating portions of the
female anatomy with all the sexual allure of a post-mortem. Men have been
272

inventing names for women’s bits since Cro-Magnon Man, but the best the
writer of this song could come up with was humps and lumps. At least they
rhyme.
The lyrics—enough to make even Kevin Federline shudder—have
become an obvious target for satirists. Peaches parodied the song in 2006,
changing the title to ‘My Dumps’. A year later, Alanis Morissette did a cover,
apparently as an April Fools’ Day joke, in which she performed the song
slowly in the style of a Celine Dion ballad, with only a piano accompanying
the vocal. Allmusic.com described the song as ‘one of the most embarrassing
rap performances of the new millennium’. Another said it set feminism back
forty years.
Hua Hsu of Slate called it ‘a song so awful, it hurts the mind. It is one of
the most popular hit singles in history. It is also proof that a song can be so
bad as to veer toward evil.’ I don’t think he liked it.
A poll conducted by Rolling Stone ranked ‘My Humps’ as the most
annoying song of all time, pipping the Macarena, Baha Men and even Celine
Dion to first spot.
Fergie—pay attention!
273

PopoZão
(Kevin Federline)
It actually means ‘big ass’ in Portuguese
I have nothing against Kevin Federline personally. I’ve never met the man. One
reviewer said that he had the integrity of a walnut and the brain of a balloon.
It seems harsh to me. Walnuts have integrity, otherwise they wouldn’t be
walnuts. And give the man his due—while his ex-wife is in and out of rehab
he’s the one doing the babysitting on a more or less permanent basis.
Kev was a back-up dancer for a number of years for Michael Jackson,
Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani and even the dreaded LFO. But he is best
known for his two-year marriage to singer Britney Spears. The couple’s
divorce created a feeding frenzy for paparazzi and a custody battle for their
sons. Kev forever after became known as Fed-Ex. He has at times said hip-hop
is his first love and it’s obviously unrequited if his first album, Playing With
Fire, is any kind of benchmark. In it he tried to radically redefine the future
of hip-hop by introducing themes like money, power, drugs, fame and sex.
No one had ever thought of that before! Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Willman
called it a concept album about squandering Britney Spears’ fortune.
But back to ‘PopoZão’. Nothing can prepare you for how truly awful
this song is. In it, Kev—as master rapper, K-Fed—raps about hitting on a
Brazilian girl who may or may not be a skank. However, Kevin was married
274

for two years to Britney Spears, so draw your own conclusions. He asks her
(the Brazilian one) to dance, and implies, in a very direct way, that he’d like to
see her genitals and breasts. Maybe she hesitates, because he hits harder, as
guys do in this situation: he tells her that he’s flush with cash, because he’s
a famous rap star. He then asks her again to dance and show him her best
moves.
My best guess is that Kev wrote this song because he’d learned a new
word, possibly for the first time since he was five, and what’s more it was a
foreign word, that is, a word from a whole other language, which is why he
repeats it endlessly, and I mean endlessly, throughout the song.
A video of Kev, sitting in the sound studio, making strange hand
movements and overdubbed with a song called ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time’,
became something of a phenomenon on YouTube.
‘Do It To Me One More Time’ is not the worst thing La Brits did to music.
Kev is.
Playing With Fire became one of the worst-received albums in recent
musical history.
And ‘PopoZão’ wasn’t considered good enough to get a start on it.
I rest my case.
275

Chain Hang Low
(Jibbs)
Sesame Street is the shit, ya know what

I’m sayin’?
‘Chain Hang Low’ was the debut single from the then fifteen-year-old rapper
called Jibbs from St Louis in the US. His hit is built around a chorus reworked
from the children’s tune ‘Do Your Ears Hang Low?’
‘Does yo chain hang low / Do it wobble to an fro?’
Yes, it is funny watching a fifteen-year-old trying to look hard while singing
a nursery rhyme. The children’s rhyme is itself a variant on the minstrel show
song ‘Turkey in the Straw’, which was also known as ‘Zip Coon’. Jibbs claims
he didn’t know the origins of the song and was only sampling Sesame Street
and not deliberately making a complete idiot of himself by using a tune that
was once used to ridicule his ancestors.
The song went on to rack up more than twenty thousand ringtone
downloads in a span of two weeks. It reached number seven on the Billboard
100 despite a genuinely ridiculous video clip where Jibbs tries to look like a
gangsta while wondering if yo bling is platinum or gold, and if it hang low.
Jibbs is from the same St Louis rap community that gave us Nelly and
Chingy. Now we have Jibbsy. What next? A song about watermelons?
276

Sexy Ladies
(Justin Timberlake)
What a Mouseketeer thinks when he grows up
VERSE ONE:
It appears obvious to me that you would like an alcoholic beverage
you should have no further cause for anxiety
if you keep my own supply from getting warm
and take the tops off as soon as I walk in
these other men in here do not know if I am the first man or woman ever
created—or not
this is why they cannot prevent me from vocalizing a rhythmic yet
complex string of rhymes and fit them together in a logical and
seamless manner
And when the music stops you will go into cardiac arrest, and the
accompanying sensations will be experienced vertically
CHORUS:
If you understand what I am trying to tell you
let me watch you try and comprehend
that is what I am saying.
277

VERSE TWO:
I have beautiful women everywhere in this nightclub
you are conversing with one of the world’s great lovers
and I have done it once before
now I have returned with one of my most recent
I thought you should know this
I have beautiful women
so reverse a little further
and let me remove it.
CUT TO BRIDGE:
Sexually attractive, sexually attractive, sexually attractive
perambulate with your physical structure
communicate verbally with your physical structure
My profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person (grunts)
My profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person
Excuse me!
My profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person my love,
Excuse me!
I really like and admire the way you maintain that posture
the two fleshy parts or folds forming the margins of your mouth and that
assist you in speech look very attractive to me
similar to fairy floss
278

FINAL VERSE:
I would now like to make an improper suggestion
allow me to escort you into the rear of these premises and perform a
sexual act for which the male and female bodies were designed—
sweetie.
Then may I suggest that we go on a short excursion to a marshy outlet or
lake, usually stagnant, in the lower Mississippi Valley
I will allow you to be a police officer who investigates crimes
I am your person privately hired to do detective work, sweetie
Sweetie, pay attention, sweetie, pay attention
(FADE OUT)
279

London Bridge
(Fergie)
A bridge too far
‘London Bridge’ is a pop/hip-hop song co-written and performed by Fergie of

The Black Eyed Peas for her debut album, The Dutchess (2006). It was released
as the lead single from the album and was her first single as a solo artist.
In her native America, Fergie has been a familiar face since she was nine
years old; she was a member of the cast of Kids Incorporated, a show similar to
the Mickey Mouse Club. She then had a brief relationship with another former
child star, Justin Timberlake, and soon afterwards fell into depression, and
if you’ve seen or heard Justin, that may or may not surprise you. Fergie got
hooked on ecstasy and crystal meth. An American magazine reported that
she knew it was time to quit drugs after she spent eight hours talking to a
hamster.
Was that true? a reporter asked her. ‘It wasn’t a hamster,’ she answered.
‘It was a hamper.’
In 2002, after she’d given up drugs and was working as a backing singer,
she was invited to join an all-male hip-hop group called The Black Eyed Peas.
It was a turning point for her and the Peas. She helped take them from an
underground group to one of the biggest acts of the noughties. Their first
album, Elephunk, sold seven million copies and yielded ‘Where Is the Love?’,
280

the UK’s top-selling single of 2003. Fergie became the most recognisable
member of one of America’s biggest bands.
Although she is no Iggy or GG, Fergie once urinated on stage. The well-
reported incident happened in 2005 at San Diego’s Street Scene. She is quoted
by Scotland’s Daily Record newspaper as saying: ‘I had a few drinks before the
show, but I didn’t think to go to the bathroom before we went onstage. We
were jumping around—it was all very rock and roll—and my bladder just
started . . . you know.’
But when you have nice humps, you can get away with things like that.
Still, it’s all water under The London Bridge now.
And London Bridge isn’t about number ones. It’s about the shit, it has
to be because she says the word ‘shit’ thirty-two times in the song. On most
stations, a radio edit changes the ‘Oh shit!’ to ‘Oh, snap!’ to prevent bleeping
or blanking. This makes a stupid song sound even more stupid.
And, and and and, he says breathless, the bridge featured on the cover of
the single and in the video that accompanies it is not the London Bridge, but
the neighbouring Tower Bridge. This is probably because the actual current
London Bridge is of no particular significance, and an ordinary bridge that
doesn’t appear on postcards was perceived too hard for most Americans to
understand.
I like Fergie. It’s true she has nice lady lumps, but she also has a refreshing
honesty in interviews. She defended ‘My Humps’ in the face of all evidence
that it was a crappy song. She liked it. More power to her. And I like The Black
Eyed Peas. But I am sick of hearing how Fergie is the shit. The music just ends
up sounding exactly like that—shit. It typifies the downside of contemporary
music.
Can we get back to the upside again?
281

You Shook Me
(All Night Long)
(Celine Dion/Anastacia)
Death by Divas
Words fail me.

Give me a goddamned minute here. I think I just saw Celine Dion playing
air guitar.
This travesty appeared as a track on Divas Las Vegas 2002.
I love this song. I never ever thought it would appear on a list of worst
songs. But then I never imagined that I would ever hear, or see, Celine Dion
doing an Angus Young impersonation then shouting, ‘Come on Girlfriend!’
over the power chords of one of rock’s greatest anthems. And then . . . and
then . . .
Sorry. Needed to take a swig from the Jim Beam bottle.
And then . . . for the second verse on comes a woman in sunglasses and
platform boots wearing some sort of filmy midriff top thing and . . .
If you’ve ever accidentally swallowed Ratsak and you need to bring it up
fast, take a look for yourself on YouTube. Three minutes of this and I guarantee
nothing will stay in your stomach. Just try and hang on to the lining.
282

Crank That
(Soulja Boy)
Music that’ll stick to ya
The self-proclaimed Teen of Da Souf (real name deAndre Ramone Way),

Soulja Boy turned a monotonous steel-drum beat, a little marketing savvy
and a crap dance into ‘Crank That’, the music phenomenon of 2007. His lyrics
are facile, mindless and repetitive and almost impossible to understand,
unless they’re written down, when it becomes clear that they are sexually
offensive as well. And all by the time he’s seventeen years old. Well done
that lad.
Music has to be more than personalised sunglasses and oversized
Superman sweatshirts and a dumb dance. Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?? Or is he just
a black urban Donny Osmond? Maybe. This is bubblegum rap. This is David
Cassidy with chains and a ghetto roll.
Only, Donny wouldn’t have supermanned his ho. Well, probably not.
You don’t know what that means? Well, I’ll tell you and I’d rather you
heard this first from a friend. In the song, Soulja Boy’s girlfriend has refused
to have sex with him. Probably because of his stupid sunglasses. So he waits
until she’s fallen asleep, then, like the class act he is, masturbates until he
ejaculates on her back, and sticks the sheet to his semen so that when she
wakes in the morning—surprise! The sheet is stuck to her back like a cape.
283

She has been ‘supermanned’. You can probably now infer what super soaking
is, which comes later in the song from the smooth-talking Soulja Boy.
Maybe, just maybe, granddad was right and they don’t make songs
like they used to, not in this genre anyway. All that’s left are wankers in
sunglasses.
Across all genres and generations, twenty-one carat solid gold crap now
outsells quality every time. Perhaps, looking back through the book, it always
did.
Just the way the crap is sold is different. Soulja Boy’s rise is credited to
websites such as MySpace and YouTube. He is the future. And the future does
not look good; it is a teenage wasteland of repetitive loops, grunts, chants and
dances with beats that have the grinding inevitability of an armoured assault.
We are looking at a future time when ringtones replace music.
As the artist known as Soulja Boy has pointed out: ‘When I did my
album, I went into the studio thinking, I gotta have each song on here where
it will be good as a single. I believe I came out with an album full of singles,
so I’m good.’
What he means is an album full of ringtones.
This song was twenty-one on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Best Songs of
2007, which indicates that magazine’s fawning irrelevance these days. Many
other hip-hop fans find him insulting to a style of music once defined by skills,
not corny dances and thinking that coming over a woman who’s already
found you too offensive to sleep with is somehow supercool.
But who cares about the lyrics? They only want to sell you the ringtone
anyway.
Wank-wank. Wank-wank. Sorry. Gotta go. That’ll be the phone.
284

SO HERE THEY ARE . . . THE 10 WORST
SONGS IN HISTORY
1 ACHY BREAKY HEART—Billy Ray Cyrus

2 HONEY—Bobby Goldsboro
3 MY HUMPS—The Black Eyed Peas
4 CRANK THAT—Soulja Boy
5 THE GIRL IS MINE— Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney
6 MILLENNIUM PRAYER—Cliff Richard
7 DO YA THINK I’M SEXY—Rod Stewart
8 SOMETIMES WHEN WE TOUCH—Dan Hill
9 YOU SHOOK ME (ALL NIGHT LONG)—Celine Dion/Anastacia
10 DROP KICK ME, JESUS (THROUGH THE GOALPOSTS OF LIFE)
—Bobby Bare
285

INDEX TO SONGS
Achy Breaky Heart (Billy Ray Cyrus (Von Tress) Mercury 1992) 182
Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now) (Mariah Carey & Westlife (Collins)
Columbia/RCA 2000) 250
All For Love (Bryan Adams/Rod Stewart/Sting (Adams Lange Kamen) A&M Records
1993) 190
Alone Again (Naturally) (Gilbert O’Sullivan (O’Sullivan) MAM Records 1972) 52
Any track from Results May Vary (Limp Bizkit (Durst/Otto/Rivers/Smith/Ball/Barrier/DJ
Lethal/Snoop Dogg/Allen/Baker/Morales/Townshend/Ferrone/Griffin) Flip/Interscope
2003) 262
Barbie Girl (Aqua (Noren/Mosegaard/Dahlgaard/Nystrom/Dif/Rasted) MCA 1997) 228
Ben (Michael Jackson (Black/Sharf) Motown 1972) 54
Black Betty (Ram Jam (trad) Epic Records 1977) 105
Can I Touch You There? (Michael Bolton (Bolton/Lange) Columbia 1995) 211
Candle in the Wind 1997 (Elton John (John/Taupin) Rocket Records/ A&M (USA &
Canada) 1997) 222
Chain Hang Low (Jibbs (Jibbs) Geffen Records 2006) 276
Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep (Middle of the Road (Stott) Phillips 1971) 36
Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue (The Angry American) (Toby Keith (Keith)
DreamWorks Nashville 2002) 257
Crank That (Soulja Boy (Way) Collipark Music, Interscope, Stacks on deck Entertainment,
HHH 2007) 283
Dancing in the Street (David Bowie & Mick Jagger (Gaye/Stevenson/Hunter)
EMI 1985) 154
Disco Duck (Rick Dees & His Cast of Idiots (Dees) Fretone, RSO 1976) 95
287

Do Ya Think I’m Sexy (Rod Stewart (Stewart/Appice) Warner Bros 1978) 111
Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? (Culture Club (Culture Club) Virgin (UK) Epic (US)
1982) 132
Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah) (Gary Glitter (Glitter/Leander) Bell records
1973) 57
Don’t Worry, Be Happy (Bobby McFerrin (Baba/McFerrin) EMI 1988) 156
Drop Kick Me, Jesus (Through the Goalposts of Life) (Bobby Bare (Bare) RCA
1976) 97
Ebony and Ivory (Paul McCartney/Stevie Wonder (McCartney) Parlophone/ EMI (UK)
Columbia (US) 1982) 130
Feelings (Morris Albert (Albert) RCA 1975) 73
From a Distance (Bette Midler (Gold) Atlantic 1990) 172
Fuck Wit Dre Day (Dr Dre (Young/Broadus/Wolfe/Spradley/Shider/Clintin) Death Row
Records, Interscope 1993) 187
Hangin’ Tough (New Kids On The Block (Starr) Columbia 1989) 158
Having Fun with Elvis on Stage (Elvis Presley (spoken words) Box Car Records
1974) 69
Hollaback Girl (Gwen Stefani (Stefani/Williams) Interscope 2005) 268
Honey (Bobby Goldsboro (Bobby Russell) United Artists 1968) 21
Horse With No Name (America (Bunnell) Warner Brothers (1972)) 66
I Am Woman (Helen Reddy (Burton/Reddy) Capitol Records 1972) 47
I Wanna Sex You Up (Color Me Badd (Dr Freeze) Giant Records 1991) 180
I Will Always Love You (Whitney Houston (Parton) Arista 1993) 184
I Write the Songs (Barry Manilow (Johnston) Arista 1975) 82
I’ll Be Missing You (Puff Daddy & Faith Evans (Sting/Gaither/Evans) Bad Boy Records
1997) 220
I’ve Never Been to Me (Charlene Duncan (Miller) Motown Records 1977, 1982) 92
288

Ice Ice Baby (Vanilla Ice (Ice/Earthquake/Smooth) SBK 1990) 170
Illegal Alien (Genesis (Collins) Atlantic, Virgin, Vertigo 1984) 138
It’s A Long Way to the Top (Pat Boone (Young/Young/Scott) from In a Metal Mood,
Hip-O Records, 1997) 226
Kokomo (The Beach Boys (Phillips/McKenzie/Love/Melcher) Elektra 1988) 161
Little Willie (The Sweet (Chinn/Chapman) RCA 1972) 50
London Bridge (Fergie (Ferguson/Garrett/Harnett/Jones) A&M 2006) 280
Longer (Dan Fogelberg (Fogelberg) Full Moon/Epic 1979) 124
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (William Shatner (Lennon/McCartney) Decca 1968) 17
Macarena (Los del Río (Romero/Ruiz) RCA 1995) 206
Making Memories of Us (Keith Urban (Crowell) Capitol 2005) 270
Me and You and a Dog Named Boo (Lobo (LaVoie) Big Tree Records 1971) 43
Mesmerize (Ja-Rule (feat Ashanti) (Parker/Lorenzo/Atkins/Creed/Bell) Def Jam 2002) 269
Metal Machine Music (Lou Reed (Reed) RCA Records 1975) 77
Millennium Prayer (Cliff Richard (Arch, Deal, Field, Skates, Wright) Papillon Records
1999) 246
MMMBop (Hanson (Hanson/Hanson/Hanson) Mercury/Universal 1995) 224
Mull of Kintyre (Wings (McCartney/Laine) Capitol 1977) 99
Music from ‘The Elder’ (Kiss (Stanley, Ezrin, Powers, Simmons, Carr, Frehley, Figg, Reed)
Casablanca 1981) 128
My Heart Will Go On (Celine Dion (Warner/Jennings) Columbia, Epic 1998) 215
My Humps (The Black Eyed Peas (Payton/Adams) A&M Interscope) 272
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (Beatles (Lennon/McCartney) Apple 1968) 19
Physical (Olivia Newton-John (Kipner/Shaddick) MCA 1981) 126
PopoZão (Kevin Federline (Federline) Federline Records, 2006) 274
Pumps and a Bump (Hammer (Shider/Spradley/Hammer/Baillergeau/Clinton) Giant
Records 1994) 192
289

Puppy Love (Donny Osmond (Anka) MGM 1972) 45
Pussy Crook (Mystikal (Lawson/Thomas/Tyler) Jive 2001) 255
Queenie Wahine’s Papaya (Elvis Presley (Giant/Bauman/Kaye) Paradise Hawaiian
Style, 1965, Paramount Pictures) 11
Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town (Kenny Rogers & the First Edition (Tillis) Reprise
1969) 27
Run Joey Run (David Geddes (Geddes) Big Tree Records 1975) 80
Seasons in the Sun (Terry Jacks (Brel/McKuen) Bell Records 1974) 71
Sexy Ladies (Justin Timberlake (Timberlake/Hills/Mosley) Jive.Zomba 2006) 277
She Bangs (Ricky Martin (Child, Afanasieff, Rosa, Monroig, Sierra, Lopez) Sony 2000) 252
Shiny Happy People (R.E.M. (Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe) Warner 1991) 178
Some Girls (Racey (Chinn/Chapman) RAK Records 1979) 107
Sometimes When We Touch (Dan Hill (Hill) K-Tel 1977) 103
Stairway to Heaven (Rolf Harris (Page/Plant) Vertigo 1993) 194
Sugar, Sugar (The Archies (Kim/Barry) Calendar Records 1969) 29
Summer Girls (LFO (Young/Brain/Cronin) Arista 1999) 230
Sussudio (Phil Collins (Collins) Atlantic/Virgin/WEA 1984) 152
Sylvia’s Mother (Dr Hook and the Medicine Show (Silverstein) CBS 1972) 38
Tell Laura I Love Her (Ray Peterson (Barry/Raleigh) RCA Victor 1960) 13
The Candy Man (Sammy Davis Jr (Bricusse/Newley) MGM 1972) 40
The Girl Is Mine (Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney (Jackson) Epic 1982) 134
The Laughing Gnome (David Bowie (Bowie) Deram Records 1967) 15
The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You (Bryan Adams (Adams/Lange)
A&M Records 1996) 213
The Sounds of Silence (Simon & Garfunkel (Paul Simon) 1965 Columbia Records) 9
Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree (Dawn feat Tony Orlando (Levine/
Brown) Bell Records 1973) 55
290

Timothy (The Buoys (Holmes) Scepter Records 1971) 41
Torn Between Two Lovers (Mary MacGregor (Yarrow/Jarrell) Ariola America
1976) 109
Total Eclipse of the Heart (Bonnie Tyler (Steinman) Columbia 1983) 136
Two Little Boys (Rolf Harris (Morse/Madden) Columbia Records 1968) 25
Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (Wham! (Michael) Columbia (US)/ Epic 1984) 140
Walk Like a Man (Four Seasons (Crewe/Gaudio) 1963 Vee-Jay Records) 8
Wannabe (Spice Girls (Stannard/Rowe/Spice Girls) Virgin 1996) 208
We Built This City (Starship (Taupin, Page, Lambert, Wolf) Grunt/RCA, 1984) 142
What’s Beef (The Notorious B.I.G. (Bacharach, Broady, Wallace, David, Myrick, Combs)
Bad Boy Records 1997) 217
Who Let the Dogs Out (Baha Men (Douglas) Edel Records 2000) 248
Wiggle Wiggle (Bob Dylan (Dylan) Columbia 1990) 174
Wind Beneath My Wings (Bette Midler (Henley/Silbar) Epic 1990) 176
You Light Up My Life (Debbie Boone (Brooks) Curb 1977) 101
You Shook Me (All Night Long) (Celine Dion/Anastacia (Young/Young/Johnson) VH1
2002) 282
(You’re) Having My Baby (Paul Anka (Anka) United Artists 1974) 64
Your Body Is a Wonderland (John Mayer (Mayer) Columbia 2002) 260
Yummy Yummy Yummy (Ohio Express (Resnick/Levine) Buddah Records 1968) 23
291

ADDITIONAL SONGS QUOTED
‘C’mon and Love Me’ (Kiss (Stanley) Casablanca Records 1975) 128
‘Don’t Give a Dose to the One You Love Most’ (Shel Silverstein
(Silverstein) Columbia 1972) 38
‘Every day a little sadder…’, from ‘Still you turn me on’ ((Lake) Manticore
Records 1973) 167
‘Ghosts’ ((Fogelberg) Dan Fogelberg, Full Moon/Epic 1981) 125
‘I could go back to school and get my diploma’, from ‘Another
Love Song’ ((Mike E Clark/ICP) Insane Clown Posse, Island Records 1999) 85
‘I drop science like girls be dropping babies’, from ‘Unique Ason’
((featuring ODB and Zu Ninjaz) unreleased) 90
‘I want my baby back’ Jimmy Cross(Botkin/Garfield) Tollie Records 1964 14
‘I’m a hooligan, won’t go to school again’, from ‘Hooligan’ (Kiss (Stanley)
Casablanca Records 1977) 128
‘I’m So Happy When You’re Near’ ((Wiggin) Third World Records 1969) 168
‘My Generation’ ((Townsend) by The Who released on Brunswick (UK) /Decca
(US) 1965) 198
‘Ooh baby, wanna put my log in your fireplace’, from
‘Burn Bitch Burn’ (Kiss (Simmons) Mercury Records 1984) 128
‘The New Style’ ((Beastie Boys/Rubin) Def Jam/Columbia 1986) 147
293


AFTERWORD
I’d like to thank Jude McGee, my publisher, for seeing what might be really
good about what’s really bad. My heartfelt thanks also to Clara Finlay, my
editor, who had the insane job of juggling the requirements of Editorial and
Legal with the moods and prejudices of a temperamental author. I’d also
like to thank Michael Wall and Thom Marchbank who both copyedited the
manuscript and contributed their musical as well as editorial skills to the
finished book. Thanks, guys. But any errors are, of course, mine and mine
alone.
No animals were harmed in the making of this book. When I played
Mariah Carey and Hanson I wore earphones, so that my dog was not distressed
in any way.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. According to Zen
anyway.
Finally, a heartfelt plea to Nancy; forgive me sweetheart, for including
the Bay City Rollers. I tried to do the right thing but in the end my conscience
got the better of me.

I'Ve Been Flushed From The Bathroom of Your Heart

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

I'Ve Been Flushed From The Bathroom of Your Heart

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Colin Bowles has played lead air guitar in bands such as Led Zeppelin,

FLUSHED-Text.indd i 5/9/08 11:38:09 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd ii 5/9/08 11:38:10 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd iii 5/9/08 11:38:10 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd iv 5/9/08 11:38:10 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd v 5/9/08 11:38:10 AM

Copyright © Colin Bowles 2008

Arena Books, an imprint of

National Library of Australia

ISBN 978 1 74175 634 0 (pbk.)

Popular music—Analysis, appreciation—Humor.

Text design by Nada Backovic Designs

FLUSHED-Text.indd vi 5/9/08 11:38:20 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 1 5/9/08 11:38:20 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 2 5/9/08 11:38:21 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 3 5/9/08 11:38:21 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 4 5/9/08 11:38:21 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 5 5/9/08 11:38:21 AM

‘We don’t like their sound, and guitar

FLUSHED-Text.indd 7 5/9/08 11:38:21 AM

So why did he sing it like a girl?

FLUSHED-Text.indd 8 5/9/08 11:38:22 AM

The most pretentious lyric in musical history

FLUSHED-Text.indd 9 5/9/08 11:38:23 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 10 5/9/08 11:38:23 AM

Parker, Paramount Pictures and Presley Piss on

FLUSHED-Text.indd 11 5/9/08 11:38:23 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 12 5/9/08 11:38:23 AM

She’s only hot when she’s cold

FLUSHED-Text.indd 13 5/9/08 11:38:23 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 14 5/9/08 11:38:23 AM

We can’t be heroes all the time

FLUSHED-Text.indd 15 5/9/08 11:38:23 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 16 5/9/08 11:38:23 AM

Beam me up, Scottie

FLUSHED-Text.indd 17 5/9/08 11:38:24 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 18 5/9/08 11:38:24 AM

‘Paul’s granny shit’—John Lennon

‘You can’t have The Beatles in a worst songs list.’

FLUSHED-Text.indd 19 5/9/08 11:38:24 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 20 5/9/08 11:38:24 AM

‘See the tree how big it’s groan’

FLUSHED-Text.indd 21 5/9/08 11:38:24 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 22 5/9/08 11:38:24 AM

Love in your tummy? How about a

FLUSHED-Text.indd 23 5/9/08 11:38:24 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 24 5/9/08 11:38:25 AM

No, Michael, we don’t think it’s a

FLUSHED-Text.indd 25 5/9/08 11:38:25 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 26 5/9/08 11:38:25 AM

A toe-tapper about sluts tormenting paraplegics

FLUSHED-Text.indd 27 5/9/08 11:38:25 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 28 5/9/08 11:38:25 AM

Diabetes set to music

FLUSHED-Text.indd 29 5/9/08 11:38:25 AM

FLUSHED-Text.indd 30 5/9/08 11:38:25 AM

40 ‘I Hate Every Bone in Your Body Except Mine’ Jimmy Velvit

39 ‘I Still Miss You, Baby, But My Aim’s Gettin’ Better’

36 ‘There Ain’t Enough Whiskey in Tennessee to Drink the Ugly

35 ‘I Been Roped and Thrown by Jesus in the Holy Ghost Corral’

34 ‘I Don’t Know Whether to Kill Myself or Go Bowling’

FLUSHED-Text.indd 31 5/9/08 11:38:25 AM