Greenhorn
At half past seven last night I put on my flashy jeans,
And some of that cologne that’s almost just like Barry Sheene’s.
I went down to the cinema to wait for my friend Joan.
There was no one there and so I started queuing on me own.
I waited there for half an hour but still she did not come.
So I walked around the block to stop me toes from growing numb.
Then when it rained the doorman watched me get soaked to the skin,
I asked politely but the bleeder wouldn’t let me in.
By twenty-five past ten I thought it best that I should phone.
My shoes were letting in and I was frozen to the bone.
I listened to the ringing tone a dozen times or more,
Then I let it ring another eighty-nine to just make sure.
I wondered if perhaps she’d maybe got lost on the way
Thus making her return home thereby causing this delay.
Or maybe she’d been stolen for a ransom by some crook.
So I left the box and toddled round her place to have a look.
Her house was still and quiet and no movement could I see.
So I hid behind the privet hedge of number eighty-three.
And even though I know her younger brother’s only four
I recognised his motorbike propped up outside the door.
And as I watched and waited in the wet and windy night
My vigil was rewarded by a flash of bedroom light.
I saw two people enter and I heard a low remark,
And then the light went out and I was left there in the dark.
I came to the conclusion my friend Joan was indisposed,
Perhaps a migraine had necessitated this repose.
So, making plans to sympathise next morning on the phone
I crossed the road and kicked her brother’s bike and then went home.
1975
PS
Truth be told, I’ve always had a bad conscience about this one, mainly because it’s a blatant rip-off of one of my favourite singer-songwriters, Pete Atkin. I went to a concert he gave at the Oxford Union in my first year at university, and an audience member even more familiar with Pete’s oeuvre than I was requested “that talking blues about a date that goes wrong”. It was the first time I’d heard Pete’s Ballad of an Upstairs Window (from the Live Libel album, 1975), one of the early ones for which he wrote both words and music before he met Clive James at Cambridge (yes, that Clive James). Thereafter Clive started providing lyrics which Pete would invariably set to melodies of a rare and delicate beauty. Six albums and seven CDS followed and still no one much has heard of them. A scandal.
Anyway, that night after Pete’s concert I sat up late in my rooms writing my own version of the song, and always scored a big hit with it every time I played it thereafter including, eg, A Room With a Revue, St Catherine’s College, summer term 1975, my very first, but far from last, revue.
Pete’s first verse (so I learnt much later) goes like this:
I was going to the pictures with my girl at seven thirty,
Got there first and started queuing on my own.
By nine fifteen she still had not arrived and so I walked around the block
And then I thought I’d telephone.
You can tell immediately why he’s the professional. He gets on with it quicker. It takes me the whole verse just to get to the cinema; Pete’s already waited a while, been round the block, and is now halfway to the telephone box – but not before I’d managed to steal from him that lovely image of his hapless narrator ‘queueing on his own’.
Unlike Mozart, who could listen to a concerto and then rewrite the whole thing note-perfect from memory afterwards, I could only recall certain elements of Pete’s wryly whimsical original – like the bustling rhythm, and a single little high note which pops up like a schoolboy’s quiff at the end of each verse. I kept as many of the jokes as I could remember, though my rhythm and scansion were different, while the reference to professional motorcyclist Barry Sheene’s cologne (Brut, in fact; 1970s sportsmen like Henry Cooper and Keven Keegan used to have us believe they would splash it all over) anchors it irrevocably to its time. But this is probably why the thing still affects me like Proust’s madeleine; one quick chorus and the years melt away, and I’m back on those folk club stages of my happiest and hairiest years, shamelessly soaking up the credit for another man’s work. In 1980, for instance, I even entered a talent competition at the Bath and West Show singing Pete and Clive’s Western spoof Stranger in Town (from that same Live Libel album) wearing a big foam cowboy hat. Won £50.
I might feel less guilty about it if someone had once called me out on it, but throughout all my years of performing, no one ever did, which, if anything, only goes to show how tragically under-appreciated the work of Pete Atkin and Clive James is. I even managed to fool the BBC, as this was the other song I recorded together with The Bleeding Hearts Computer for their Radio 4 programme Pen to Paper in 1982. Forty-two years and counting. Surely the knock on the door from the Music Royalties Association must come soon?
Meanwhile I urge you to seek out Pete and Clive’s oeuvre at peteatkin.com where, I promise, wonders await.
PS
I’ll tell you something else that’s wrong with it an’ all, and this is something I’ve literally only just noticed for the first time nearly fifty years after writing the damn thing. And it’s this: misplaced stress. Look again at that first line. It’s an iambic heptameter (assuming there is such a thing), which goes de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum. This means the word last falls on a stressed beat, but that’s hardly natural and it isn’t how you would say it if you were simply reading the line out. What I should have written was ‘Last night at half past seven I put on my flashy jeans’, which would have been equally correct grammatically but without fouling any rhythmic rules. Such an easy, rookie mistake to make. But it grates on me now.
Not that many people notice this sort of thing in songs, or if they do, they don’t care: “Oo, it must be hard enough fitting all those words to the music,” they say. “Not surprising some of them don’t sit right.” On the contrary, there should be a special circle in hell reserved for lyricists who crams things in willy-nilly without a thought for the logic or sense of the thing, especially when it’s a major talent who should know better. When even one of the greatest pop songs of the 1960s flourishes a brazen example of misplaced stress in its opening two lines, you know it’s an issue: “Dirty old river, must you keep rolling, Flowing into the night?” Into? INTO?? See you in hell, Ray.