Speaking from a North Carolina hotel room, the Feeling’s Dan Gillespie Sells
is mounting a defence of Toto’s Africa so stirring that even he
seems surprised by it. “Is it a bad lyric?” he ponders, before singing a
snatch of it. “‘I know that I must do what’s right/ Sure as Kilimanjaro
rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.’
“Perhaps it is, but I like the conviction of his delivery. To me, a truly bad
lyric is more forgettable than that. It’s that generic ‘Baby you’re so fine/
Make you mine’-type stuff.”
As far as the BBC 6 Music DJ Marc Riley is concerned: “You know when you’ve
heard a rubbish lyric. It’s like a bad gear change. Everything jars
momentarily.”
It might be a subject on which unanimity is hard to establish, yet next week
that’s exactly what Riley will be trying to do with a special poll, the
result of which is to be aired on his Friday Brain Surgery programme.
Riley says he would be surprised if a few well-known pop donkeys didn’t end
up in the Top Ten, but predicting an overall winner would be, to quote Duran
Duran, about as easy as a nuclear war.
Furthermore, he doesn’t want to compromise his impartiality by nominating his
favourites. Fine. We can do it for him. And what better place to start than
Oasis’s Champagne Supernova , an unwitting paean to the effects
of Chris Morris’s time-slowing “made-up drug”, Cake: “Slowly walking down
the hall/ Faster than a cannonball.”
With it still fresh in the communal memory, surely we can also expect a
strong showing from America , Razorlight’s inadvertent argument for
the return of national service: “What a drag it is/ The shape I’m in/ Well I
go out somewhere/ Then I come home again.”
Squeeze’s Chris Difford knows a thing or two about separating good lyrics
from bad. Revered by Lily Allen and Jamie T for Up the Junction and Pulling
Mussels (From the Shell) , Difford has also hosted a string of
songwriting get-togethers that have attracted the likes of Cathy Dennis and
Suggs. “There’s a difference between choosing a bad lyric and a bad melody,”
Difford argues. “I think most of us would agree what constitutes a poor tune
and, as a result, they tend not to stick in the mind too long. But a lot of
good tunes with bad lyrics end up becoming successful.”
Difford couldn’t possibly be pushed to name examples. Oh, all right then,
just a couple. He endeavours to keep a straight face when a couple of Sting
clunkers are thrown his way, in particular the Police’s Don’t Stand
so Close to Me : “He starts to shake and cough/ Just like the old man
in/ That book by Nabokov.”
“Well, it’s very Sting, isn’t it?” smiles Difford. “He’s not always the
greatest lyricist — although, in fairness, you can’t knock a song like
Message in a Bottle .”
Taking a shot in the dark, I suggest to Difford that it can’t have been much
fun being in a band in the Eighties and watching Spandau Ballet spend a
month at No 1 with True , with Gary Kemp’s lethal lines: “I bought a
ticket to the Moon/ But now I’ve come back again/ Why do I find it hard to
write the next line?”
“That’s not a lyric,” Difford exclaims. “I don’t know what that is — a
fashion statement, perhaps?”
Gillespie Sells is more yielding, although he doesn’t know why. “That one I
don’t mind, but as a rule I struggle with songs that refer to the process of
songwriting. It’s the equivalent of seeing a microphone boom or camera in
shot. For me, Robbie Williams’s Strong , where he sings: ‘And
that’s a good line to take it to the bridge’ . . . I find that a little
uncomfortable.”
Still, at least Gary and Robbie tried to write the next line, unlike Haircut
100’s Nick Heyward, who, as the recording deadline approached, contented
himself with: “Where do we go from here/ Is it down to the lake I fear?/
Ayaya-yayayah/ Ayayayayayayayah” on Love Plus One .
Riley, Difford and Gillespie Sells all agree that there are no hard and fast
rules when it comes to songwriting, whether good or bad. Act as though there
are and you run the risk of seeming like Nicky Horne, the presenter of the
early Nineties “adult” rock show Rock Steady . So
outraged was Horne by the uplifting nonsense of the Italo-House genre that,
on screening the video to the 49ers’ Touch Me , he added
subtitles, presumably with the intent of shaming the band: “I think it’s
hi-igh time, yes, time/ My soul gets burned, uh-huh/ Just give me one look,
hey, (oh yeah).”
Bad lyric? Being a smug, bearded fool with no historical perspective on these
things, Horne made an elementary mistake. In its early years, almost any
mainstream subgenre of pop thrives on silly, meaningless lyrics. If you
start disparaging words by Italo-House pioneers, you may as well throw in
Little Richard for yelling “Awop-bopaloobopalopbamboom”.
Similarly, some of the cheesiest lyrics in pop were written in the early
years of hip-hop. There’s a cornball charm to early Run DMC cuts such as
You Be Illin’ that smacks of mates having fun with a new
invention: “One day when I was chillin’ in Kentucky Fried Chicken/ Just
mindin’ my business, eat-in’ food and finger lickin’/ This dude walked in
lookin’ strange and kind of funny/ Went up to the front with a menu and his
money/ He didn’t walk straight, kind of side to side/ He asked this old
lady, ‘Yo, yo . . . is this Kentucky Fried?’/ The lady said, ‘Yeah’, smiled
and he smiled back/ He gave a quarter and his order, small fries, Big Mac!/
You be illin’.”
As with Bobby Gillespie when he gratingly sang about “one man’s freedom
fighter is another’s terrorist” ( Star ), both Riley and
Difford concur that that context is a significant determinant here. “A young
songwriter can get away with something that someone ten years older wouldn’t
think to write,” says Difford. “Lily Allen’s LDN is
a good example, especially the ‘alfresco’/‘Tesco’ rhyme. In a way, that
should be a bad lyric, but her personality turns it into a brilliant one.”
Context again, you see. “If someone came out with early Beatles songs like
Please Please Me in 2007,” says Riley, “those lyrics would probably
be regarded as suspect. But it goes back to that thing of a genre in its
infancy. These songs weren’t meant to be analysed. They were written in 20
minutes, and lyrical content was no more than an afterthought.”
If it’s a truism in pop that the best songs take 20 minutes to write, it’s no
less true that some of the worst ones also took about that long.
Well-intentioned but hastily penned odes to wider events deserve a category
all of their own. The Human League, for example, sounded far more convincing
singing about waitresses in cocktail bars than they did singing about the
Lebanon.
Reacting with lightning speed to the news of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the
Brit-soul hope Lena Fiagbe picked up her guitar and channeled the spirit of
Phoebe from Friends in her tribute song, Sorry Mr Cobain :
“You made it to the top of the ladder in such a short while/ You had
everyone wanting to be you/ Yeah, you sure had style.”
Imagining Diana, Princess of Wales as an angel fluttering over England’s
“greenest fields” as only a true expat could, Bernie Taupin turned in his
worst ever lyric for Candle in the Wind 97 . But maybe he got away
with it. After all, only an estimated global audience of almost a billion
was paying attention.
Within days of 9/11, Paul McCartney channelled his feelings of outrage into Freedom
, an incoherent saucepan-banging polemic that had Macca vowing that, “Anyone
[who] tried to take it away/ Will have to answer.”
Riley chooses his words carefully when the song is mentioned. “I’m probably
not the best person to ask,” he concedes a touch sheepishly, “because Mark
Radcliffe and I played on a version of it when Paul came into the studio.
What can I say? If nothing else, it was sincere.”
As often as not though, sincerity is the problem. Take, for instance, Cow
, the song that resulted when Linda McCartney got together with fellow celeb
veggie Carla Lane to highlight the plight of the farmyard cow: “You will go
with quiet dignity/ Across the yard/ Up the ramp.”
Refusing to learn from the mistakes of her previous “world affairs” songs,
Zombie and Bosnia , in 2002 Dolores O’Riordan of the
Cranberries also took 9/11 as her muse: “New New York skyline,” she
bellowed, “Wounds that will heal in time.”
The more serious the artist’s intentions, the greater the potential for
school assembly-style sniggering. Some of rock’s greatest crimes against
language have been poker-faced acts of rock hubris by pampered jessies keen
to use their platform to “represent” the little people.
Step forward the Rolling Stones, who raised their tankards through the
narcotic fug to toast the working man on Salt of the Earth (1968):
“Let’s drink to the hard-working people/ Let’s think of the lowly of birth/
Spare a thought for the rag taggy people.” On Crosby Stills Nash &
Young’s Four and Twenty , Steven Stills equates his own
situation with the struggles of his father: “He was tired of being poor and
he wasn’t into selling door to door/ And he worked like the devil to be
more/ A different kind of poverty now upsets me so/ Night after sleepless
night, I walk the floor and I want to know — why am I so alone?”
Add and subtract, but as a matter of fact (thanks, ABC), perhaps it doesn’t
much matter what you write. At times, it’s a thought that has crossed Björn
Ulvaeus’s mind. When I interviewed Abba’s words man a few years ago, he
admitted that, to start with, writing lyrics “wasn’t really a job I enjoyed”.
Referring to Dum Dum Diddle , the album track on which Agnetha bemoans
playing second fiddle to someone who is “only smilin’/ When you play your
violin”, he explained his predicament. “I’d been working all night trying to
come up with a decent lyric. And I thought: ‘Well, I’d better take in
something to prove that I’ve been working.’
“I showed them this song, thinking they’d say: ‘Oh, no, we can’t do that.’
But actually, they didn’t care.”
Echoing Ulvaeus’s words, Marc Riley encourages a little perspective on a
debate that really just amounts to a bit of fun. “For the most part, the
people to whom lyrics matter the most are those who have the job of writing
them and, perhaps, the odd music journalist. But most pop music was never
meant to be scrutinised like poetry. And a lot of the records that will
score high in next week’s poll will have been bought by millions.”
As sure as Kilimanjaro rises up above the Serengeti, the man has a point.
Marc Riley’s Brain Surgery, BBC 6 Music, 7pm. Essential
Squeeze is released by Universal on April 30
