If you want to support me, making it more financially viable and easier to explain to people at parties, please back my patreon. Queen: An Exploded Diagram is me having big and little thoughts about every Queen song in chronological order. Also, if you watch the whole Jim Henson tribute and don’t cry a little, I don’t want to know you. *Actually also originally from the Snoopy Musical. And by training us to constantly shift up and down in beat and rhythm and mood and mode, the song even sits well in the record.Īnd you’re going to have it jammed in your head for months. Play for the audience, revel in the theatre. Tonally, it’s different to the rest of the album, but it’s still just an extension of the logic of Killer Queen and Stone Cold Crazy. 'This Magic Moment' written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman wa. (Could that be a motto for this project?)Ĭommit to the notion of a tribute to one guy, by singing about bringing back another, and doing it in the style of something even further else, and it all works. The Drifters were one of the best & most successful vocal groups of the late 1950s & early 1960s. It’s got a lot of highlights, basically, as long as you’re willing to give yourself over to the logic of it. It’s that or the old timey electioneering of ‘we want Leroy for president’. Everything slows, and the harmonies soften, only for the whole thing to storm back into near full charleston. My favourite moment is actually the breakdown. Everything is artificially aged except the energy, which actually feels parallel to barn stormer Stone Cold Crazy. Barbershop harmonies bounce off dixieland ukulele-banjo, double bass fills and jangle piano (which is a piano with drawing pins or equivalent in the hammers). I feel like only Freddie would toast a recently deceased hero with such a ludicrous vaudeville melodrama.Īpparently, Tin Pan Alley, is what it’s supposed to be calling back to. I tend to dabble with labelling, but only when I feel like the genre name is onomatopaeic enough (or the nearest equivaent) to make sense whether you know the strict meaning or not.Īnyway, it turns out that this isn’t a tribute to the music hall, it’s a tribute to Jim Croce. I’m a pretty unreliable narrator at the best of times, but particularly when it comes to genre definition. Which is basically to say, that my childhood was a mush of schmaltz and smeared semiotics that I still can’t really make any sense of. Songs from Snoopy, the Muppets*, Cole Porter and indeed, Jim Croce merged with what I saw as one particular part of musical theatre history. But this is how I first came into contact with a lot of what I think of as music hall type performances.Īctually, it’s a hodge podge of references. I still don’t know whether to be embarrassed by this part of my history (well, apart from the brief part as Commissioner Gordon, which I have repressed utterly). When Scouts and Guides got together and sang songs in a variety style. My first contact with bad bad was in Gang Show, see. ![]() Good luck finding the nog in August though.So, there I was, assuming this was a tribute to music hall vaudeville, and it actually turns out that that isn’t the origin of Bad, bad, Leroy Brown, and actually this is Freddie’s elegy to some guy I’d never heard of. ![]() And as a gift for you, we’ve assembled 65 Christmas songs so incredibly catchy, you just might want to listen all year round. But festive cheer has found its way into pop, hip-hop, R&B, metal, punk, indie… you name it. ![]() There is, of course, something of a Christmas canon: ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ and ‘Fairytale of New York’ are great songs… which is good, as inevitably you’re going to hear them about a million times this holidays. But even more cynical later generations of pop have produced plenty of gold. There are plenty of keepers from the ‘40s-‘70s heyday of the Christmas record as an art form. Love them, hate them, or just accept them as a sort of immutable fact of life, Christmas songs are a thing, and as December 25 gets inexorably closer and closer they’re a thing that becomes increasingly inescapable.Īnd although there’s been a fair amount of disposable novelty rubbish written over the years, the reality is that a lot of Christmas songs are bangers.
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