Pavlovian Lyrics – A Rant.

The other day while distractedly listening to the radio, I heard an old familiar tune that brought me way back to the heady days of my youth. And strangely enough, the song managed to conjure up exactly the same sensation as it did way back then. That sensation being the desire to call directory inquiries, find out where the composer lives, go round to his house and kick him repeatedly in the larynx while wearing a pair of hobnail boots.

The composer in question is Adrian Gurvitz and the song is ‘Got To Write a Classic’, may a pox be on them both. This shitty, vapid jingle annoys me so much that it can turn this otherwise docile specimen of disappointing manhood into a white-knuckled psychotic, ready to bludgeon his crooning nemesis into a blessedly silent pile of pulp.

It’s not actually the melody that pisses on my nerve endings so much. The tune is about as insipid as a lukewarm tub of cabbage water but I have to confess, it does get inside your head. Much in the same way the buzzing of an electrical pylon echoes in your inner ear long after you’ve moved a safe distance from it. But the slightly catchy nature of this perfidious melody just makes things worse because it brings to mind those God-awful lyrics.

A lobotomised, dyslexic seven-year old could have written better lyrics than these. Did Mr. Gurvitz actually write this guff down or did he just shout the words out spontaneously while suffering from a blood-sugar imbalance in a recording studio? Or was the rhyming scheme perchance randomly generated by his spanking new Commodore 64?

I mean why the fuck does he have to express his desire to write a song an attic for Christ sake? It’s like saying ‘I want to paint a watercolour landscape in my bicycle shed and then knock out a bit of pottery in the downstairs toilet’. No, no. Stupid concept. Should’ve left it out, Ade.

Especially considering that now your caught in a bind. You have to find a word to rhyme with ‘attic’ and the only one you can come out in your insulin-deprived mental state is, (yes you got it) ‘addict’. And now you’re thinking, ‘How in the sacred name of Peter Frampton, am I going to work ‘addict’ into a fluffy love song?’ Fortunately, headstrong artist that you are, you bravely sacrificed any chance of aesthetic credibility by distorting the whole verse to incorporate the image of someone shooting up in a loft.

Other fetid bits of penmanship from this sticky mess of musical candy floss:

‘I’ve been living my life, one day at a time’…Woohoo! Scraping the bottom of the cliché barrel. Move over Bryan Adams.

‘And it’s not what I mean, I mean it’s not what it seems’ …I mean like Duh, I mean like Totally, I mean like Hello? It’s sad and sorry situation when any random valley girl could quite legitimately sue your ass for plagiarism.

You know, I actually think that my bilious hatred for this song comes basically from a feeling of acute embarrassment for it.

So what song or lyrics do you most love to hate?
Deliver onto us the fruits of your commentry.....