What do you do when you have a habit of keeping almost every scrap of paper that either someone wrote something on or drew a silly picture on? Eventually you have no choice but to sift through that paper and determine what stays and what goes.
As a parent, I was duty bound to keep a lot of Reuben’s pictures. Some were merely because they were cute and reminded me of simpler times, others were because they were downright weird and prompted referring to a psychiatrist for confirmation as to whether it was time to call the men in white coats. Shame you can’t call it a looney bin anymore because it’s not politically correct. It’s not a real bin full of loonies, how would anyone ever confuse a large building full of crazy people with a bin? Silly. I suppose looney building doesn’t have the same ring to it. “I’m going to put you in a looney office,”
Mixed in with some frightening scribbles of monsters ripping people in two and an invention of mine called the ‘Scuba Umbrella’, I found some hand-written lyrics for two of the Papples most played / most requested / best loved songs of all times: ‘Mincey Beef’ and ‘(Do it)’, the latter of which is a lot harder to type at 11pm at night.
Does it offer an insight into the collective minds at work? Does it share the rare genius hammering out the hits during a prolific time in their career? Not really. The top left-hand corner reveals what I think I was trying to crowbar into the song: mince, beef (obviously), nen tosh, Shergar (?), Aberdeen angus and no neddy beef. The rest is pretty much the lyrics of the song verbatim with the odd tweak here and there, no doubt as a result of hours of sweat and toil in the recording studio working out the best arrangement.
Let us not forget the immortal words: “Beef is back, meat attack.”
‘(Do it)’ is less interesting because there was only two strips of lyrics and nothing on the back. These were probably used as the starting blocks of the songs because they were transferred to somewhere more permanent, a larger piece of paper or a notebook, or maybe even a word document. It’s hard to remember the long ago times as we all know.
8 comments on “One from the Archives – “Lyrics””
This reminds me that Mincey Beef started out as quite a topical thing to do with the horsemeat scandal which was big news at the time but has been mostly forgotten now. Hence the notes at the top that mention Shergar.
We started off serious and ended up very, very silly. Isn’t that us through and through?
It absolutely is. In fact, I’m now going to go a step further and claim that all our songs started out with extremely serious intent. I am hoping not to have to answer any questions on this.
No. What you’ve said is enough for the biography and if they ask for any further information I can throw chilli on my trousers and run into the bathroom screaming, like a proper pop star.
If it worked for Jacko, it can work for you. Who can forget his sprint off the set of Parkinson after casually adjusting his jacket and “accidentally” depositing three kilograms of ground Habanero chillies on his crotch?
Exactly. We know all the tricks. This isn’t our first rodeo, am I right?
Exactly. We’ve been evading difficult questions about our pop careers for years. Remember when everyone was saying that all the songs on our first album had the same melody? We dodged that one beautifully.
Savages! They don’t understand how difficult writing and recording music is. We had a lot of pressure to deliver our debut album and I personally think we achieved instant classic.