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Tuesday 21 August 2007

Misheard

I have had a terribly informative week. I have finally learnt the words to “La Isla Bonita”. It led to quite a lot of mockery as I was singing what I thought were the correct words and found a car full of people staring at me. It turns out the words are “Last night I dreamt of San Pedro” not “Last night I slept with some waiter”. It’s also “A young girl with eyes like the desert” Not “young man with eyes like potato”. I am seeing the world through new eyes. However I was slightly aggrieved by being mocked for this by my flatmate. This is the girl who thought it was “Club Tropicana under the Sea”, “Don’t lift us up where we belong” and butchered Roy Orbinson’s tender love song by thinking the words were “I drove all night, crapped in your room”. Although to be fair if you’ve driven all night, needs must.

But most disturbing of all was my brother. Relaxing one Sunday afternoon he decided to sing a long with the radio, Summer of ’69 was playing. Sadly he’d never realised that it began “ I bought my first real six string”, instead he preferred the lyrics “I had my first real sex dream”. Ignoring the fact that this means he bought it at a five and dime, it also means that he “played it till his fingers bled” and stood on his Mama’s porch swearing he could last forever.

But although some of the time I am willing to admit I am in the wrong at others I am sure the singer is having a laugh. In the middle of “So Good” by Boyzone Ronan Keating clearly “sings” “I’m stroking his balls”, and in “my love is your love” Whitney Houston drives her point home somewhere in the second chorus my muttering “you dickhead”.

I also dislike it when songs are used in a ridiculous manner. Not that I’ve spent much time thinking about the marriage and divorce of America’s sweethearts Brad and Jen but I do remember reading that at their wedding they had “A whole Lotta Love”, played on a mandolin. How lovely. All your family and friends gathered round whilst some hippy twanging away on a mandolin sings about how they “want to give you my love, every inch of my love.”
Sadly some of the most amusing lyrics come from my old school song. These have not been misheard but included the gems “Teach us to look in all our ends, on thee for judge and not our friends.” We were also implored to take “delight in simple things and mirth that has no bitter springs.” I don’t know what is more worrying the fact that somebody wrote that crap or that I can still remember all five verses of it.

1 comment:

Shizue said...

seriously, your school song cannot compare with one of ours - the gem which is 'forty years on'.

Here's a taster:

'Forty years on, growing older and older,
Shorter in wind, as in memory long,
Feeble of foot, and rheumatic of shoulder,
What will it help you that once you were strong?'

lovely.