Tuesday 15 March 2011

Frustrated Crooner? Me?

Tonight we have been mostly rehearsing I Get A Kick Out of You. Yes, the Cole Porter song. Why not? Why shouldn’t a rock band reinterpret one of the all-time greats in their own unique fashion?  (Alternatively: three barely-musically-literate old gits take a Ramones drumtrack and shout somebody else's beautiful, timeless lyrics over the top while making up something approximating a tune).

Now, I’m known for my love of classic songs and of Great American Musicals. Why, just last week I was happily discussing ‘Hello Dolly!’ with an eighteen-year-old girl. As you'd imagine, I was more than cheered when Guitar John suggested we cover this ‘tune he’d heard in the pub at lunchtime’. So I found the chords, and the words to the seldom-performed opening verse, printed the buggers out and skipped off round to rehearsals.

What I can’t understand is this: IGAKOOY (Yay! Dopey acronym!) – seldom-performed opening verse aside, surely one of the best-known songs ever ever ever? Surely there’s not a man-jack in the English-speaking world who doesn’t have at least a passing acquaintance with Sinatra’s version, or at least with the guitar-and-strings-led Gary Shearston[1] cover that hit the big number 7 in the charts, pop-pickers, back in 1974?

Then why is it that my two fellow musical adventurers have no idea how the damn thing goes? I can accept most of our failings as a band; the need to excise ‘extraneous’ chordage, the increased speed that is part and parcel of what we do - everything full-pelt all of the time, even the sensitive ballad what I did write - but being unaware of ‘Kick’, being completely bereft of any clue as to how the bridge (‘I get a kick every time…. I see… You standing there…. Before me’) is constructed… I despair. Really I do.

But then I grew up on steady diet of old Frank Sinatra records thanks to my father, and every Sunday afternoon at our old family homestead was occupied with Benny Green’s Radio 2 show[2] which examined the Great American Songbook, playing great songs by great singers and great interpreters of those songs way before the phrase ‘Great American Songbook’ was usurped by the straggly likes of Rod Stewart[3].

And as a result, I can argue for hours about the relative merits of the Gershwins versus Rodgers and Hart[4], or whether Coward was a songwriter or not (he wasn’t: he was a playwright who, regardless of the number of musicals he wrote, only dabbled in music[5]). Man, being able to do that’s a real babe magnet in this day and age, I can tell you.

So: as it stands, we have a version of IGAKOOY with no seldom-performed opening verse (but by thunder it will be performed, and I know exactly how!), a (shall we say) up-tempo main section, and a bridge that bears no musical relation to Porter’s original whatsoever. But we’re getting there. Give it another fortnight and I think we’ll have cracked it. That, or it’ll join our cover of Chrissie Hynde’s ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’ in the vast, never-to-be-opened mausoleum marked Not Doing That One Again.

We shall see.




[1] I do so like these footnote wallahs. In 1990 the Tamworth Songwriters Association  awarded Shearston the award for ‘Bush Ballad of the Year’. Your guess is as good as mine. Shearston is now a priest in New South Wales.
[2] Radio 2 on Sunday afternoons is now nothing but Elaine Paige and her god-awful sycophancy, or Paul O’Grady and his god-awful ‘comedy’, or John F***ing Barrowman and his endless quest for the perfect curtains. 
[3] Five volumes? FIVE F***ING VOLUMES? Couldn’t someone have thrown a thirty-years-younger woman at him, if only to slow the bastard down?
[4] No contest. George and Ira every time.
[5] Seriously. Hum me something from ‘Cavalcade’. See? 

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