In this week’s music feature, we look at wealth, boredom, drugs, sex dolls, love and madness…
Human beings, as we know, are never happy, especially when they have everything. TS Eliot writes books for me; King Farouk’s on tenterhooks for me; Sherman Billingsley even cooks for me…Monotonous, monotonous. That’s Eartha Kitt in a song written for and partly about her not (as you might expect given the witty lyrics) by Cole Porter, but by June Carroll and Arthur Siegel for the Broadway Revue New Faces of 1952. On stage, Kitt wanted to perform it while writhing on six chaise longues, but was given three in compromise. Here she goes one better…
The solution to monotony, as humans of both sexes and across all cultures and times have found, is to take mind-altering substances. Mick Jagger knows a thing or two about those, and also about writing good opening lines. Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Sympathy for the Devil both boast corkers, but I don’t think he topped What a drag it is getting old… In this video some wag has used it as an excuse for some rare footage of the Rolling Stones dressed as women. The Beatles, you suspect, would have looked much prettier. I’ve seen some arguments on the internet about exactly which housewife’s choice of barbiturate Mother’s Little Helper is about, but Wikipedia reckons it’s Nembutal, trade name of pentobarbital…
That’s mummy. Now for the Daddy of all songs about the ennui of wealth turning into outright lunacy: In Every Dream Home a Heartache. Both hilarious and profoundly disturbing, this performance of Roxy Music’s finest song – one man’s love song to his blow-up sex doll – sees Bryan Ferry keeping his eyes unblinkingly open for an improbable length of time. Eerie…
But if sleeping pills and sex dolls fail to defeat a slow death by boredom, there’s always love to fall back on. Here’s some actual Cole Porter. Frank Sinatra sings I Get a Kick Out of You here in such a way as to let you know that he knows that you know that he knows the line “Some like the perfume in Spain” is a risible lawyerish substitution for Porter’s orginial “Some get a kick from cocaine“. In fact, that was the second alteration that had to be made to the lyric. Porter amended I get no kick in a plane, I shouldn’t care for those nights in the air/ That the fair Mrs. Lindbergh goes through to the better-known Flying too high with some girl/guy in the sky is my idea of nothing to do after the Lindbergh kidnapping.
Good wide ranging selection Brit, and very Ballardian, all that ennui…
I saw Roxy Music perform In Every Dream Home in that combination (and in those clothes) as a schoolboy in Sheffield City Hall. It was the single most exciting experience of my life to that point with girls and dancing in the aisles. They were in truth pretty terrible live: Brian Eno struggling to get his EMS synthesisers to make any noise at all; and real disharmony manifested in Mr Ferrys obvious fury that every time the half-bald non-musician got anywhere near the edge of the stage groups of maenads tried to drag him off like Orpheus, despite the complete silence pf his electronic solos, whilst the epitome of asexual suave (surely a special factor in this song) was reverently ignored. Mr Eno has subsequently let us all know that he was so bored with the whole business he was thinking of laundry lists (those feathers).
They were preceded by Leo Sayer dressed as Pierrot who was ignored then booed off stage to shouts of “poof” and “Pachabels” Canon which we all agreed (before our mums came to collects us) must have been composed by Eno – oh the 1970s.
Eartha Kitt was very special. And what great lyrics by Carroll and Siegel. Did they ever compose anything as good? I remember her glorious rendition of Marvin Fisher’s ‘Just an Old Fashioned Girl’. Again, great lyrics. I longed for it to come on the radio. It was simply mesmerising, to the extent I believed it when someone said she was half human, half cat. She was, wasn’t she?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeRSqekHh1g