This Is Not A BLOG!

Date: 21/12/05

Ignorance Is Bliss?

Sometimes it's better not to know. Knowledge can bring disillusionment.

I've had just such an experience this week.

Listen to this. It's an excerpt from the track Swallow by My Bloody Valentine. It's been a favourite of mine from the first time I heard it on John Peel's show at the beginning of 1992, and it has been a permanent fixture in my Hundred Best Tunes selections ever since I started doing them.

Given the feel of the piece, and given the title, I'd always imagined pictures of birds (swallows, see?) in flight in a clear blue sky in a hot climate. Capistrano? Somewhere in that latitude, certainly.

Well, listening to the song the other night, I suddenly had the idea of finding out what the lyrics actually were, as they're very difficult to pick out. So, Google being my friend, I soon found them...

...Only to discover that the lyrics are:

"Sweetheart
I want
To know
Your (all)
Now I

"Swallow, swallow (love)
I close my mouth
Swallow, swallow (love)
Into my mouth

"Close
The door
I want
You more
You can
Crawl down

"Coming down."

(Words and music ©Kevin Shields)

Oh dear, I thought. There go all my fancy images of the summer sky over a sandy Mediterranean shore.

It's a song about cocksucking. All right, it's still a beautiful song about etc., but the nearest it gets to the Mediterranean is that some people think that Fellatio is an Italian resort.

I shall try to live with this, just as I had to live with what happened with another song which features in my all-time-faves list, Bobby Goldsboro's Summer (The First Time). Here, at least, the sexual theme is explicit, but I had that song ruined for me for a long time by the words of a friend.

Way back in about 1983, we were sitting in the bar of The Nag's Head in Wrexham on a Friday night ('we' being a group of ex-sixth form friends who would meet up there from time to time). Although we were sat right behind the fruit machine, the juke box was still quite audible.

Someone put on Summer (The First Time). For those of you who don't know, it's a song about a seventeen year old boy losing his cherry to an older woman on the sea shore. It's beautifully done (the song, that is, I can't speak for the participants in the storyline).

I recognised the song immediately, and said to my friend 'Bill' Hancocks, "Oh, I really love this song!".

He listened for a moment, and then recognition flashed in his eyes. "Oh!", he said, "Isn't this the one where they go for a bonk on the beach?".

I swear it was five or six years before I could hear that song again without immediately hearing Bill's words.

Oh, well. I'll just have to swallow this one as well.

File under: Music