Well
Well I saw you at the party in your long white dress.
You looked so pretty, and I looked such a mess.
All the others wore sophisticated double-breasted suits,
There was me in dusty jeans and a pair of crappy boots,
I felt an outcast, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Well I shuffled in beside you with my intellectual grin,
My beer the only splash of colour there amongst the gin,
So I splashed it here and splashed it there due to a shaky hand.
Some bloke there mentioned Europe and he asked “How do you stand?”
And I said “Upright.” He didn’t get it.
But you were the only one there to appreciate my quip.
The others just looked down on me, like I was giving lip.
But at last they got the message and they slowly slunk away
Leaving me to stare at you with sweet FA to say,
I started sweating. Hope I didn’t niff.
Well you lectured me on painting, music sculpture and the rest
While all the time I couldn’t take my mind off your right breast.
Then I saw your glass was empty so I offered you a drink,
And you said you’d have another just because it helped you think.
I thought Gaw blimey – she’s a pervert.
Well eventually I asked you if you’d like to take a walk,
My O level was looking sick beside this scholar’s talk.
So we strolled along the river and I pointed out the stars
Which started you off telling me the history of Mars.
I couldn’t care less. I’m not a Pisces.
When I kissed you you were halfway through a sonnet by John Donne.
You paused for breath and then you smiled and made some clever pun
Half in Latin half in Greek, or something else I didn’t know,
So thinking that I’d blown it, well, I sadly turned to go.
And then you grabbed me. Came as quite a shock.
Well you went back to the party leaving me in disarray.
Dusting off me crappy jeans I watched you walk away.
And you had a little grass stain on the back of your white dress
Which said more about you than a dozen games of chess.
I smoked a Woodbine, flicked the butt, and watched it fade.
1976
PS
This is another one that probably works better in performance than it does on the page. There’s nothing spectacular about it, but there’s a mood, there’s a story, and there’s an ending, of sorts. The tune of each verse never varies, but there is always that jumble of collapsing scansion in every fifth line, so maybe that’s why it used to get the happy reaction it did – the surprise of the unpredictable. Beyond that, I make no claims for it.
It’s certainly an early Oxford song. I certainly recognise myself in the fish-out-of-water narrator. In those early weeks the gorgeous old place seemed to be crammed tight with nothing but clever, flashy people, much more at ease with themselves and their opinions and their bodies than I ever was. But the rest is fantasy. There never was a pretty girl in a long white dress, there was no walk along the river, there was certainly no reciprocated kiss, and I was not a smoker at the time so the final line is there mainly so I can end on the long drawn-out verb fade. But I had recently learned how glorious a major 7th could sound, so I hungrily seized on it as the final chord for this. (How do you play a major 7th chord? You flatten the name of the chord. It’s that simple. And they say Wagner was a genius! Any further music questions? Yes, Herr Zimmer at the back?)
One friend complained that the line about the grass stain ‘saying more about the girl than a dozen games of chess’ didn’t mean anything. I suppose it was my narrator’s way of trying to regain some self-respect – the girl had got what she wanted then walked away, unconcerned, but despite all her wit and wisdom, and her glamour and sophistication, and anything you might have intuited about her intelligence and character based on playing a dozen games of chess with her, the grass stain showed she still wasn’t above rolling around on a college lawn with a bit of rough. But to explain all that would have taken another three verses and at the time I probably had an essay to finish. If you get it, you get it and if you don’t, it hardly matters. Just pardon me for trying to be poetic and allusive in my own damn song.
(And Jonathan Livingston Seagull! Fuck me. Hands up if that still means anything to anyone. I loved the Neil Diamond soundtrack album, and the first half of the movie was visually stunning. But the second half sent me to sleep. Did I ever read the book? Possibly. It might still be over there somewhere, next to Shardik, under Watership Down, beside Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance…