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IN WHICH… AN ANOREXIC MANNEQUIN IS PROUDLY REGARDED

‘Good morning, Graham,’ said Duncan, as we met for our regular early morning stroll. My immediate response was to begin singing: ‘Good morning, Starshine…’ The lyrics had sprung into my head as soon as Duncan had spoken. I automatically sang the chorus and saw in my mind a green and black record label with a slight tear in it. Duncan chuckled. ‘I don’t know how you do that’, he said, ‘but you do it all the time. Singing a lyric from a record to match almost every occasion. Where do you keep them all stored in your brain?’ I had to tell Duncan I was aware of the phenomenon, but had no idea where it had come from and how it started. It is almost as bad as my near involuntary propensity to whistle whatever tune comes into my head, almost certainly untunefully and to the irritation of anyone and everyone within hearing distance. I can only blame my Dad, who was another frequent whistler – but usually only of songs by his favourite, Judy Garland. Duncan was right, though. Whatever the occasion I seem to be able immediately to call up a suitably titled track and sing a fragment of it.

By the way, should you not be familiar with the lyrics of ‘Good Morning Starshine’, the Top 10 hit for Oliver in 1969, here is a sample: ‘Glibby gloop gloopy, Nibby Nabby Noopy, La La La Lo Lo/ Sabba Sibby Sabba, Nooby abba Nabba Le Le Lo Lo/Tooby ooby walla, nooby abba nabba, Early mornin’ singin’ song.’ My memory of the green and black label is accurate. I checked, and it was on the Crewe label, which came in those colours. And those last four words, immediately prompt me to start mentally singing: ‘Woh, woh, woh, woh, my love she comes in colours, you can tell her from the clothes she wears…’ That, of course, is from Love’s wonderful, ‘She Comes in Colours’, a single in 1966 which also includes the great line: ‘Expressions tell everything, I see one on you…’

Everyone has favourite lyrics. Two of my particular favourites come from the heyday of Roxy Music’s eccentric genius. I’ve always delighted in hearing Ferry sing, ‘Rhodedendron is a nice flower’ in ‘Do the Strand’, while ‘Lumber up, limbo down’ gets me every time in ‘Love Is the Drug’. Also from the pen of Mr Ferry – in ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’, he writes of a sex doll: ‘I blew up your body/ But you blew my mind’. Probably my favourite lyric of all, and I have to admit that this can change from time to time, is by one of many forgotten-by-most 1960s acts who flared briefly and were soon gone. Back in the great days of pirate radio the Major Minor label used to promote its records via Radio Caroline, playing snippets of the tracks they wanted you to hear and rush out to buy. The tactic worked, and from the moment I first heard, ‘A tenement, a dirty street/Walked and worn by shoeless feet’, I was hooked. I just had to own a copy of 1967’s brilliant ‘Days of Pearly Spencer’ by David McWilliams. Staggeringly, it failed to chart in the UK, although it sold over a million copies in all and was a huge hit in France and Holland. The song was about a homeless man McWilliams, from Northern Ireland, had encountered, and featured a sweeping orchestral arrangement by Mike Leander and a chorus sung as if through a megaphone – this low-tech effect was achieved by recording the vocals from a phone box near the studio.

Incomprehensible examples also have their place in the pantheon of great lyrics. I’m not sure I quite understood him then, let alone now. But when I interviewed the late Robert Palmer about the title track of his LP, ‘Pride’, of which he was one of three songwriters, he did add the memorable quote: ‘My favourite line is “Anorexia Nervosa mannequin”.’ And why, of course, wouldn’t it be?

Just as my favourite record shop is Second Scene…