Steve in black, Dave in blue.
Song Ping Pong Episode 5
19:08 (4:15) – For English Press 2 indeed – and other languages in this case. Greetings Xenophiles – This is Expat Life Song Ping Pong – The Polyglot Edition. Why? Because we couldn’t line up a guest this week so we bring in our usual guest co-host (if that makes sense) Dave Jordan – back on the line from his COVID-proof fortress in Pipera.
Some ‘banter’. It’s coming back to haunt us… By the way – if anyone recognises the slightly offended sounding lady earlier, answers on WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram to 0758 948 948. She’s well known among the expat community and you’ll hear her again later. This show is dedicated to my niece, Stephanie because it’s her birthday today, and last Saturday she got married – which is why last week’s show was on tape. It’s also dedicated to our friend Veselin who we lost to COVID earlier today. Veselin was fluent in 6 languages, so it makes sense to dedicate the Polyglot Edition to his memory.
It’s the Polyglot edition because Dave had this great idea to pick songs not in the language they are best known for.
We opened up with Claude Francois singing Comme D’habitude which has a melody everyone knows, but perhaps not those lyrics in French. A lot of people know that the song was given to Paul Anka who re-wrote the lyrics into ‘My Way’ before giving it to Frank Sinatra and the rest is history. What almost nobody knows is that before that, they gave it to David Bowie who wrote ‘Even A Fool Learns To Love’ and demo’d it for the record company. They liked it but they said that David Bowie wasn’t famous enough and they would prefer a bigger name on the songwriting credits. Like, for example, Paul Anka. Now, it’s not one of The Dame’s best works, and it would anyway be tedious to play the same melody twice in a row, so here’s just a small piece of it.
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Oh my, an easy one methinks. From David Bowie to David Jones to David Bowie. In 1971 he released the album Hunky Dory which features the masterpiece that is Life On Mars – which is not be confused with a high chocolate diet. Former potato peeler turned singer Brazilian Suu Jorji (phonetic) did a rework of it which David himself said ‘imbued it with a new level of beauty’. Not a common word even in English, imbued is a positive and means inspired or permeated.
If there are any aliens out there, we are now able to communicate in English and Portuguese. Here is Suu Jorji and Life On Mars.
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Nice mouth-based cellos there at the end. Bowie’s album Heroes featured The Thin White Duke, or The Dame (he had various nicknames among his fans) on the front with a specific hand pose based on two pieces by a German artist. Erich Heckel’s ‘Roquairol’ and ‘Young man’, both of which Bowie said were huge influences on him as a young painter. Who knew that Bowie was also a painter? That album pose was copied by one Julian Cope on the Teardrop Explodes album Wilder.
Julian Cope was not from Merseyside but from South Wales an only ended up in Liverpool to do teacher training. A lot of drugs later and he was a pop star. One of theTeardrop Explode’s hits was called Treason (it’s just a story). And they also did it in French – Traison (C’est just une histoire).
En anglais cette chanson eh bonne mais en français elle eh sensationnelle.
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19:20 – Commercials -> 19:23
Julian Cope, went solo and did a great album called Autogeddon – the title of a poem by Heathcote Williams. It was basically a rant against car culture, with inspiration coming from the poem and from an ‘incident featuring his pregnant wife and a £375,000 yellow Ferrari. I’m guessing he crashed it.
Like many, Teardrop Explodes were inspired by The Clash and this link will show what an international show EL has become. The next song is known to be a UK classic but the highest chart position it ever reached was 15 which surprised us both. It is quite a controversial song with some edgy lyrics as well as being a heck of a tune. The song was chosen by Armed Forces Radio to be the first song broadcast on Operation Desert Storm, which was a bit provocative, I think. So how about a version of Rock The Casbah sung in Arabic. Yes – Arabic. By Rachid Taha.
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Splendid.
Unlike a lot of alternative groups, The Beatles were not a large influence on The Clash who were well and truly part of a punk scene which was about much more than just the music — it was a way of living. On the Londoners’ epic thirty-six track triple album Sandinista! they couldn’t resist sharing a joke at The Beatles expense when they mimicked the somewhat self-indulgent effort ‘Revolution 9‘. Which we’re not going to play because it’s not in a different language. Instead, we’ll go for the very quirky Japanese band called Shang Shang Typhoon who do a very different version of Let It Be.
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19:36 Commercials -> 19:39
From the Beatles to the Stones. Not a hard wired connection apart from the old argument that everyone prefers one or the other and one group has more knighthoods.
It’s National Reptile day today….
In 1966 there was a film called Perdono. In that film, Caterina Caselli sang an Italian language version of the Rolling Stones’s Paint It Black. Let’s hear Tutto Nero.
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Now to something that has no connection to anything, but it just popped into my head. Think of German songs and you might come up with 99-er Luftbalons by Nena. British people know it in English but most of the rest of Europe probably knows the German version – so which one should we play?
Neither of them. Instead, we go with the other ‘first thing you think of regarding German pop music’ – Kraftwerk. We don’t often hear Kraftwerk singing in German, so let’s rectify that right now with Das Model.
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19:49 Commercials -> 19:51
A much better version. From The Model to Blondie – Makes sense to me. Debbie Harry used to love dropping acid, and French lines into her songs (starting with Denis Denis). Well how about a whole song in French? I bet you can guess which one it is. Sunday Girl.
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And we end (or not) with a song in 2 languages – it doesn’t quite fit the theme of the show but we both love it, and we almost never hear it on the radio, so it’s getting played.
In 1977, Roger François Jouret, who was born in Brussels to a French father and a Ukrainian mother, took on the persona of Plastic Bertrand and had a hit – well – I say he had a hit – he didn’t sing on it. The composer did. But Ca Plane Pour Moi was a glorious slice of almost a parody of a punk song. And linking back to The Clash, Joe Summer himself said:
“Plastic Bertrand compressed into that three minutes a bloody good record that will get any comatose person toe-tapping, you know what I mean? By purist rules, it’s not allowed to even mention Plastic Bertrand. Yet, this record was probably a lot better than a lot of so-called punk records.”
A band called Elton Motello released at exactly the same time, a song called Jet Boy Jet Girl which used the same backing track (exactly the same one) with different lyrics written in English and it’s absolute crap. The backing track is brilliantly sampled by Noel Gallagher in his song Holy Mountain though.
Ca Plane Pour Moi mixes English and French with such lines as “I am the king of the divan”. Glorious.
(if we end here – That’s it – it’s a wrap) – at 2:43 – This has been…
If we have time…
Talking about parody punk, the Sex Pistols eventually parodied themselves into oblivion. They released the album and film ‘The Great Rock & Roll Swindle’ in 1980 which was a ‘mockumentary’. Silly story wrapped around footage of the band and Johnny Rotten refused to have anything to do with it. It was fairly stupid and was indeed an attempt to milk as much cash out of the by now defunct Sex Pistols as possible.
It was followed up by an album called ‘Flogging A Dead Horse’, if I remember well.
It featured the Sid Viscious version of My Way – so we come full circle – but I won’t play that – I’ll play another track I like from the movie. Anarchy In The UK done in French like this:
That’s it – it’s a wrap.
Sign Off & Emergency