“How do you think horse ovaries taste?” Joe asked.
Stuart was well accustomed to random, frequently bizarre questions arising from his son’s browsing, but, even without hypothesising what such unlikely titbits may come served alongside, this one surely took the biscuit!
“Like a bit of a ‘mare I’d have thought,” Stuart replied, impressing himself with the equinal appropriateness of his response, “but why on earth do you want to know? Are they a weird delicacy somewhere in the world?”
“No, it’s not like eating guinea pigs in Ecuador,” Joe clarified, “I’m not sure exactly where this was, America probably, but a couple served them to the guests at their wedding. Look!”
The image Joe now thrust toward Stuart, on his phone, unarguably showed an authentic looking wedding day schedule.
“Theresa and Jason’s Ceremony,” had apparently been set for, “3.00pm, with a formal Dinner to follow at 5.30pm.” But to avoid their guests getting peckish in the interim the happy couple had thoughtfully arranged to lay on some mid-afternoon nibbles. And there they were, displayed in their full culinary glory; “3.30pm: Horse Ovaries.”
“I’d need to be hungry as a horse to eat those,” Joe laughed, “although I do like a nice plate of eggs! It’s hard to believe people can be that stupid isn’t it? If they’d just proofread their invitation they could’ve served hors d'oeuvres like everybody else!”
“Egg-xactly,” Stuart agreed, although realising this wouldn’t translate verbally, he tried again, “must have been fertile ground for their friends to take the piss though!”
Thankfully, Joe ignored Stuart’s overly hardboiled pun, too busy following a further weblink from his wedding story.
“I’m on another site now, with funny misspellings,” he continued, “there’re two great ones from McDonald’s, advertising jobs outside their restaurants.”
The next screenshot Joe passed over showed one restaurant had tried, “hiring smiling faces for afternoon shits,” while the final one, on a similar scatological theme, yet easily bettering the former, sought to entice new employees with, “now hiring, smiling faeces.”
“They don’t just serve crap it seems!” Joe concluded.
This whole discussion somehow managed to remind Stuart of a new word he had come across recently; relating to mishearings rather than misspellings, particularly those prompted by song lyrics. He had discovered that these could be referred to as mondegreens, a term first coined in 1954 by an American writer called Sylvia Wright.
As a girl, Sylvia’s mother (hopefully not the Dr Hook one!) had often read to her from ‘The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry’ by Thomas Percy, and her daughter had always misheard one of the lines, "layd him on the green," in an old Scottish ballad ‘The Bonny Earl of Murray’, misinterpreting it as ‘Lady Mondegreen’. Unable, subsequently, to find any existing English language word that defined such auditory misdirection, Sylvia simply claimed one for herself, and the term mondegreen stuck.
Given this had only recently been accepted as a dictionary definition though, its etymology seemed both obscure and outdated. There were far more famous examples of misheard pop lyrics, Stuart thought, you could easily use instead. Whether it was The Police’s ‘Sue Lawley’ chorus, Madonna’s ‘poppadom peach’, or Annie Lennox’s sweet dreams being ‘made of cheese’, these all seemed much better candidates.
Stuart’s personal favourite however had to be Kurt’s incomprehensible drawl from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, where listeners commonly misheard the end of the chorus by substituting a strange locational meaning, “here we are now, in containers.” That was the one that ought to get the lexicographic nod, Stuart decided; we should kick out those arcane ‘mondegreens’ and replace them with more populist ‘containers’.
Literature had long ago, of course, defined its own categorisations of misspoken or mispronounced words; from Shakespeare’s Dogberry’s, to Sheridan’s malapropisms, such unclear articulation often used as a plot device, particularly in Victorian farce.
There was a great modern twist on this tradition in Chris Brookmyre’s debut novel (which kick started Stuart’s obsession with his ‘Dan Starkey’ series). This book’s central, defining mystery all stems from its protagonist mishearing a girl’s dying words as, “divorce Jack,” when she was really saying “Dvořák,” which, admittedly, sounds remarkably similar. A whole clever saga flows from this one misunderstanding.
While conscious of the danger of embarking on another neurological mystery tour, Stuart couldn’t prevent these ‘misspoken’ reflections delivering him right back to a Sheffield pub in the early ‘80s; to a malapropic ‘container’ driven memory of his own.
With several Tetley’s under their collective belts, one of their group, in a strong Welsh accent (broadening by the pint), started to lead forth about “port-arker-bins”. It had taken the rest of them ages to clarify that Taffy (nicknames being more predictable, less politically correct, back then) was simply referring to temporary, modular buildings. Quite how he had managed to reach the ripe old age of twenty without realising these should properly be pronounced (as well as spelled) Porta-kabins amazed Stuart to this day.
He was still waiting for this to turn up in a Dan Starkey plot!
###
“Who’s this then Dad?” asked Joe, inadvertently rescuing Stuart from his rapidly deepening reverie.
“She Drew the Gun,” Stuart replied. “They’re a new group from The Wirral, on The Coral’s record label. It’s their second album, came out a few months ago. I went to see them in Nottingham, they’re even better live.” Stuart was eternally grateful that Joe, like Anne, didn’t just endure his musical mania but often showed a genuine interest.
“What’s this track then?” Joe continued, “that was a lot of clever rhyming; toxic, topic, myopic, and logic. I don’t normally like it when bands speak the words, like they’re trying to rap, but this one works,” appending a final, indisputable endorsement of the song with, “I might add it to my playlist.”
“It’s called ‘Revolution of Mind’,” Stuart advised, “the singer’s Louisa Roach, she writes all the songs. You’re right, she’s great with words. If you like this, I should play you ‘Poem’ from their first album.”
And, while he had Joe fully engaged, before he had time to become re-lost to his iPhone, Stuart did exactly that, pointing out his favourite words and phrases from the song as they came along. “That’s the best line,” he claimed, “about people being caged birds, caught by the beak, given, “just enough to eat, enough to sleep, enough to tweet.” I love the way that line talks about Twitter as a sop to the masses.”
In Stuart’s opinion, Louisa Roach was one of the cleverest new lyricists he had heard in a long time. Enough to qualify her as a genuine latter-day maverick.
Yet this admiration did come tinged with a degree of discomfort, a problem he now decided to share with Joe as ‘Poem’ continued. “There are bits I find naïve though,” he explained, “too Corbynista. Take these next lines. I know she’s exaggerating, to make a point about greed and profit, but talk of using tanks, to protect banks, is over the top, and that sarcastic comment about, “all our friends have shares,” just sounds simplistic and vindictive. Brilliantly articulated but a bit too ideologically pure, don’t you think?”
“What do you mean?” Joe enquired, now with genuine interest. He seemed lately to have taken a real interest in their familial political debates, becoming more frequent now as the divisiveness of Brexit kicked in.
“I understand where she’s coming from, I know people are still angry about Banks being bailed out,” Stuart continued, with a smidgeon of survivor guilt, “but surely wild ideas about using tanks against people that disagree just undermine her argument?”
“It’s only a song Dad,” Joe countered, “you might be taking it all a bit too literally,” though a conciliatory tone suggested he was open to Stuart expanding the debate.
“That’s a fair point,” Stuart conceded, “and it has always been the right, the duty probably, of young singers and poets to be angry with the establishment. She’s following a fine tradition; from Blake, to Dylan, to Bragg. But my real problem comes because I agree with her aims. I’m still a socialist, but I worry holding out for some perfect nirvana means we end up, yet again, with nothing changing.”
Joe had now put down his phone, his ultimate compliment, to fully engage with this discussion. “Don’t you think,” he suggested, “Louisa might argue you represent the exact, well-off middle classes she’s moaning about. It’s like that phrase you always use, ‘he would say that wouldn’t he!’ While you’re getting richer, with all your shares, the people she’s worried about keep getting poorer and hungrier. Lots of my friends would argue the same, they think Jeremy Corbyn’s the Messiah.”
“And there’s the nub of the matter,” Stuart responded, warming to his theme, “all the while idealists crave some socialist Messiah, who will miraculously make everything equal, everywhere, whatever it costs, they end up putting off the silent majority. Those who would happily support a political demi-God, even a mere mortal, who just aimed to make things better. It’s the ultimate irony; puritan ideology, blindly championing some false God, keeps delivering more anti-Christs.”
Joe laughed, which wasn’t exactly the reaction Stuart had hoped for, but his explanation was more encouraging. “Well-argued Dad. Ever considered a career as a politician? I can see you on Newsnight. I agree with lots of what you said, but you did lose me a bit at the end, that’s why I laughed.”
“What do you mean?” asked Stuart, who had quietly been quite proud of the articulacy of his rant.
“Well, whatever else you might think of Teresa May, she’s way too dull to be an anti-Christ.” This was an astute piece of political commentary, hard to argue with.
Stuart felt relieved to have unburdened himself of these concerns. Yet, as he had suggested earlier, it had surely always, rightly, been rock’n’roll’s job to rail against the status quo. That was never going to be a duty properly served by preaching the politics of moderation.
Dylan’s disarmament call in ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, cleverly framed in terms of a ban on cannonballs, simply wouldn’t have worked if he had tried to advocate multilateral arms reduction treaties; any more than Billy Bragg’s commitment to the, “power in a Union,” could (or should) ever settle for greater employee representation at board level!
No, the fault here, Stuart now accepted, didn’t lie with She Drew the Gun who, a little lyrical discomfort notwithstanding, he would happily place at the top of any ‘new band’ rundown. The root of this problem instead lay squarely with him.
He had been young and angry once, could still remember making naïve, pacifist arguments of his own. Stuart just needed to accept that another of the things that arrived with age, as surely as greying hair, was an inevitable erosion of your radical conviction. If he wanted young bands to show passion and belief, to drive their music, then he needed to accept his arguments in favour of a more moderate, effective socialism would likely, in their eyes, mark him out as a reactionary old fart.
At least, Stuart comforted himself, he had managed to retain a degree of left leaning credibility, even if its angle was less acute these days. His principles may have taken on a lighter hue, but had not yet suffered a full Braggian transition, “from red to blue.”
“You two sound like you’re having fun,” Anne now joined in, “it reminded me of ‘Mrs Merton’. Let’s have a heated debate!” her ‘90s comedy reference clearly lost completely on Joe. “I’ve just got to pop out,” she continued, “ but I’ll be back for the big logon at nine o’clock. Are you dialling the guys in again?”
“Yeah, Joe’s sorting all the logistics this month though, so I don’t need to worry,” Stuart responded, “but don’t be late.”
With Joe taking Anne’s departure as his cue to suspend political discourse, and catch up with some messaging, Stuart decided to fill the remaining pre- ‘Challenge’ time, in honour of Louisa, by updating his regularly changing list of favourite new bands, with ‘anybody that has released a debut album since 2016’ as his qualification criterium:
5) Pale Waves – Manchester art-school goth, with sweeping Delores-like vocals (and attitude) and a strong collection of poppy tales, themed by personal politics, such as ‘There’s A Honey’ and ‘Reds’.
4) QTY – Stuart’s latest preferred purveyors of effortless NY cool, with a staggering debut album, its standout tracks ‘Rodeo’ and ‘Dress/Undress’ coming stacked full of understated meaning.
3) Big Thief – Brooklyn indie-folk with an intriguing, enigmatic female singer and songwriter, her trademark ‘depth’ delightfully balanced by the utter shallowness of ‘Shark Smile’s, “woo baby,” chorus.
2) Rolling Blackouts, Coastal Fever – The continent’s wide-open spaces always seemed to deliver a hypnotic Australiana sound, primarily found here on ‘Talking Straight’, complete with a healthy dose of McComb-like lyrical mystery.
1) She Drew the Gun – It’s good to be challenged, and there was simply no denying Louisa’s extraordinary lyrical/poetic talent. Evidence ‘Something for the Pain’s, “glitch in the system of conventional wisdom,” or indeed ‘Poem’ in its intense entirety.
Except for QTY (who if they had toured the UK he had missed) Stuart had seen all of these bands live in the last year. While most of his maverick roster, even those still actively gigging, would now need to perform under a nostalgia banner it was always the newer bands that Stuart looked forward to seeing most.
There was a rawness, a boundless energy, artists could only bring to their songs when appearing live was still a fresh experience. You could never get this from established acts, however much you loved hearing their hits. The Cure might still put on a great show, with Robert Smith resolutely clinging on to ‘that’ haircut, but could never now match the excitement Stuart felt hearing ‘Killing an Arab’ played live in Sheffield in 1980.
An inevitable consequence of Stuart’s continued commitment to new music though, retaining his hope (like Connor Oberst’s) that it, “held some kind of truth,” was that he now had to accept being an ‘elder statesman’ in the audience at concerts. Like some new, previously uncategorised, stage of ‘the ages of man’, Stuart realised he had now become the ‘old bloke’; just like the one they had regularly commented upon at gigs back in Sheffield. Though with hindsight, he now suspected, that ‘antiquarian’ had probably only been in his mid-thirties at the time.
God knows what the teens at a Pale Waves concert must make of Stuart these days. At least they wouldn’t be able to detect, from looks alone, that his politics had simultaneously descended to the level of Attila the Hun!
Managing to force himself back to more pressing matters, Stuart finally speculated what Louisa might make of five people (including four old farts) gathering together on a corporate like conference call, to do battle with a set of like-minded individuals, in some capitalist conspiracy to win themselves an unspecified prize ‘with no likeness’?
At the risk of sounding a bit Daily Mail, he suspected committed Corbynistas would likely regard this, much like school sports days, as an affront to egalitarian equality. There was no time to worry about that now though; as an on-schedule Anne returned home, and Joe set about dialling in Ed and Charlie, it was time to do the monthly deed:
###
(To be continued, at 9am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 60’ in the meantime? If you think you have an answer, then please reply direct to this email post to help keep the ‘challenge’ open for other readers.)