Shortly after I’d asked my mate Martin for a suggestion for last week’s post in this series, I came up with one which I decided to postpone until today.
When I was a youngster, the album this was the title track from was often played as the family droveover to visit the grandparents and great-grandparent every Saturday. I would sing along in the back, totally oblivious to what the song was about. It wasn’t til many years later that I actually listened to the words properly and realised that the main character is, to be perfectly blunt, an absolute shagger and a shit.
I had some form in this area, you won’t be surprised to learn. My Dad owned a couple of those Rugby Songs albums which were popular in the 70s, recordings of jock-strap wearing mountains of men singing bawdy songs in pubs, with the most offensive of words (usually) bleeped out to protect the tender ears of any young pup who may have strayed into hearing range.
But that hadn’t stopped me learning the words to an old-time music hall tune which featured on the record, and, as my teacher subsequently reported to my parents, I had been singing it in class…at lunch breaks…at any possible opportunity, basically.
This isn’t the Rugby Songs version, but you get the idea as to what so tickled kindergarden-aged me about it:
Derek Lamb – The Hole in the Elephant’s Bottom
But I digress.
Here’s the song I was originally talking about; it seems appropriate in a perverse kind of way to be posting a song about a devil on Easter Sunday:
Kris Kristofferson – The Silver Tongued Devil And I
More soon.
A History of Dubious Taste 