Sealclubbing lifts the title and the bit at the end from the poptastic David Essex’s 1982 Me And My Girl (Night-Clubbing). Of course in this day and age the term makes more headlines for (not) being an iPhone app. Thanks to Martin, Nigel and Sarah
See lyrics to Sealclubbing
Two Fat Feet
‘me pension’ rather than ‘my pension?’
19 July 2010
Chris The Siteowner
Ah, now we get into trying to spell an interviewee’s laugh. I’m never sure what the policy should be here, and I certainly won’t claim the site is consistent on this topic. OK… ‘me’ it is.
19 July 2010
Colin
Not a comment or correction but an observation: the line “you can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead mate” comes from a classic Laurel and Hardy episode. But which one?
19 July 2010
Ricardo
Brats. Notable for being one of only two Laurel and Hardy films without any other actors, this is the only version I could find online. It’s one of those colour restoration jobs – and from about two minutes in, the picture freezes, so the sound runs about thirty seconds ahead of the action for the rest of the film. Anyway, Stan Laurel can be heard speaking the relevant line from about 7.20 in.
Another quote the line always reminds me of is one of Dorothy Parker’s:
“You can lead a horse to water
But you can’t make him drink.
You can lead a horticulture
But you can’t make her think.”
19 July 2010
Third rate Les
I think it’s “sir”, written without a capital.
19 July 2010
Two Fat Feet
Now that’s just being picky, Les.
19 July 2010
Third rate Les
Thank you!
20 July 2010
Mr Larrington
I’d always heard it as “do you be indigestion”, but then I’m a cloth-eared git.
20 July 2010
Poolio
I’ve always heard / sung it as:
That’s the third biro that you’ve broken all day, I can not wait…
And (final line)
Oh paradise…
21 July 2010
Matt Lee
It’s “That’s the third biro that you’ve broke and all day I cannot wait”
23 July 2010
Mr Galbraith
The last line – possibly ‘me and my girl – ooh paradise’? Combination of muddy production and my age-related mutton-ness could well make me wrong…
24 July 2010
dagenham dave
I agree with Mr Galbraith regarding the ‘ooh paradise’ line
25 July 2010
Chief Exec
That’s the third biro that you’ve broken; all day I can not wait
In my opinion.
26 August 2010
dave trebble
Is the last line not “in paradise”
4 May 2011
MIKE IN COV
Not a straight lift from David Essex, but from Chaotic Dischord (1984). Peel never had them in for a session, but surely he must have played this.
25 July 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
(Bastard slip of a sub for MIKE IN COV.)
Dotting i’s, crossing t’s, kissing r’s, listening on cans, always thought so but checking again, it’s definitely “me pension” and “ooh paradise”.
Department of the Bleedin’ Obvious if you ask me, but no-one seems to have pointed it out before: yippee-i-ay comes from either from Vaughn Monro or from Frankie Vaughan; I’d guess the latter.
And whether or not you found that bleedin’ obvious, do you now respect my argument elsewhere that everyone should post previously unrecorded bleedin’ obvious references onto this site because they might not be bleedin’ obvious to everybody?
26 July 2012
Exxo
Much respect indeed, Acidic. I wonder if you misunderstood the conclusion of my post 10 in ‘Dickie Davies Eyes’, which was that I guess we ought to embrace statements of the bleedin’ obvious, annoying though they can be (though why this is, psychologically, I’m not really sure), ‘cos what’s obvious to one reader will perhaps be new to another – I always quote my embarrassed ignorance of who the (really rather famous) Steve Malkmus was until I’d been listening to ‘Saucy Haulage Ballads’ for several months.
My ‘Dickie Davies’ post seems to have had the opposite effect of annoying you, and now you’ve got lots more things to say and all night in which to say them.
But Mike, I’m in the not-bleedin’-obvious camp for this one anyway, since there are loads of Western genre songs with the phrases Yippee-i-ay and/or Yippee-i-oh, e.g. Roy Rogers had a big hit with one in 1948. So it’s doing a bit of a Jeff Dreadnought (see his stated policy in the lists thread) to assume the best known is the one quoted by NB57 – that may or may not be the case as the tune is different here.
27 July 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
@Exxo – me? get annoyed? pah! And the people in the queue building up behind me are all personal friends.
Agreed, yippee-i-ay/oh is a cowboy staple. I cited Frankie Vaughan as the best known song to me, and Vaughn Monro because (a) I prefer it and (b) because it was #1 in the Billboard chart when I was born. With your age being so close to NB’s, you’re surely in a better position than I am to identify the most likely source.
27 July 2012
Exxo
Loath to play the ‘local/contemporary’ cards unless I have a really strong instinct or irrefutable fact to impart. In this case I don’t see a particular need for a most likely source – it may most probably be just a generic ‘yippee-i-oh’, a hat-tip to a genre. If it was “yippee-i-ay, yippee-i-oh” to the same tune, that’d obviously be a different matter
(as a contrasting example, the ‘Country Pratice’ yodel reference isn’t generic – it’s defo Jimmie Rodgers, same tune, cleverly changing just a few consonants, and so has to be treated as a specific reference).
But it seems to me that so many of the parodies and hat-tips are generic, and we can and inevitably do try too hard to find specifics. On the last album, for example two generic folk song types are parodied, one of which also parodies generic Victorian melodramas, sports tournament anthems in general are parodied, metal lyrics in general are parodied, etc etc, (and sometimes, when specific metal lyrics are mentioned as ‘references’ on certain other websites, NB57 denies that he’s ever heard or is referring to them – likewise specific bands from Leigh-on-Sea, likewise specific tattooed lads who may have sung about ‘Revelations’, etc).
27 July 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
@Charles, I think it’s always worth searching for specific references. If the consensus is not likely, or not close enough, or if NB says wha’? – then fine, it’s generic, and we know more than we did before. I think this yippee-i-ay is a case in point: you’ve supplied strong evidence against my suggestion. Hypothesis proposed, not found convincing, discarded unless new facts turn up.
I agree that The Coroner’s Footnote, for example, sounds like a generic parody; but I haven’t yet tried to find an original, and it wouldn’t be an easy search. But you never know unless you look.
27 July 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
@Charles, an afterthought. I don’t think you should be loth to deploy subjective impressions derived from your regional and temporal background. They’re very relevant. Having grown up at a different place and time, my cultural references are different to yours. So if I or anyone else suggests something, and you say that that’s not how you remember it, you’re almost certainly right. Taking the preceding discussion as an example, the Frankie Vaughan record clearly made a big impression on me when I was young, but not on you – so your opinion was decisive.
27 July 2012
Exxo
…not such a big impression that you remember it was Frankie _Laine_, though* (and like you say Vaughan Monro, and dozens of others via Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Elvis through to the Shadows, Sesame Street and the likes of REO Speedwagon).
So yes, it is probably the best-known song featuring “Yippee-i-oh”, and although the big hit versions were before my time, who knows which one may have been in NB57′s dad’s record collection, or whether he might have been a Roy Rogers fan, or whether his art teacher said he understood and enjoyed playing that other song, feck knows who it was by or where it was from, about having the “coyote on my tail (yippee-i-oh)” on the banjo …. there have previously been allegations on here of überfan posturing, Mike, so no, there’s no point in expressing an opinion when I haven’t got a Barney McGrew.
*I know “Frankie Vaughan” was only a slip of your vitual tongue, but that was an open goal and in the game of pedantry I’m an awful goal-hanger. Sorry.
28 July 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
Feck indeed Exxo, damned if I can find “coyote on my tail”. A preliminary whole-phrase googling threw up a sufficently various selection of results to suggest that it had stuck in other’s memories also. Some people seem to think it’s Wile E Coyote, but I’m sure it isn’t. Mudcat and several other lyrics sites yielded up precisely SFA.
*There must be a word for the kind of association-slip which led me to write Vaughan for Laine, and (equalising immediately from the restart) you to put an extra ‘a’ in Vaughn Monro.
29 July 2012
John Burscough
I’d like to think that the Haliborange overdose is a reference to the scene in ‘The Odd Couple” where Felix has just announced that he’s taken an OD:
Murray: A whole bottle of pills! My God, get an ambulance!
Oscar: Wait a minute, will ya? We don’t even know what kind!
Murray: What difference does it make? He took a whole bottle!
Oscar: Well, maybe they were vitamins! He could be the healthiest one in the room!
29 July 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
@John, if you’re right … 90 Bisodol also.
29 July 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
Does anyone else think that the opening chords parody those of Hendrix’s Purple Haze? The resemblance is perhaps more marked in this clip from the recent Oxford gig.
16 August 2012
Exxo
Definitely. I’ve noticed before that NB occasionally briefly plays the original chords that may have inspired certain early songs, before he goes into the actual HMHB number.
16 August 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
Any other examples, @Exxo? Mine only just occurred to me, and I’ve been listening to the song since 198-what. This isn’t an everything-has-to-be-based-on-something-else theory, but rather a matter of identifying influences. If I had to put money on it, I’d bet that the Hendrix reference was originally unconscious, only stressed (with private amusement) by the band after they’d noticed it was there.
16 August 2012
Exxo
When asked for specifics I recoil slightly and wish I hadn’t said anything, because of the way alcohol affects the memory of gigs. But it may well be for example that the basic chords of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ have been playfully strummed before ’1966 and All That’ and that a good chunk of a Velvets track has actually been played by the whole band before segue-ing into that same track.
Like you say, the linkage is playful, and may just be a way of tuning into the right sort of chords rather than a hint of influence.
I wish I hadn’t said anything now ‘cos I can’t think of other examples.
16 August 2012
ACIDIC REGULATOR
I should have said something like “the reference was originally unconscious or non-existent” of course.
I can think of a parallel in classical music. In the Diabelli Variations, Beethoven spotted the relationship between Diabelli’s trite waltz and Leporello’s song which opens Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and obviously found amusement in pointing it out.
17 August 2012