Calling all Kate Bush fans.
The mother of all tribute bands is coming to town.
Cloudbusting: The Music of Kate Bush has featured some of the great artist’s original collaborators and comes highly recommended by Ireland’s foremost Kate Bush expert Sean Twomey who can be heard here interviewing lead singer Mandy Watson on a podcast for his authoritive fan website .
I have 2 FREE tickets to see Cloudbusting in the Button Factory, Dublin 2, on Thursday September 19.
In light of Kate being inspired by Emily Brontë and James Joyce, what is your favourite song which references a literary figure?
The winner will be chosen by my Siamese twin.
Lines MUST close at 2.45pm EXTENDED until 5.15pm MIDNIGHT!
Nick says: Good luck!
Cloudbusting: The Music of Kate Bush (The Button Factory)
Thanks to Michael Mayell and Sean Twomey.
Definitely Ramble On by Led Zepplin! Perfect fusion of Tolkien and the finest rock known to Man or Númenor.
Oh yes, loads of LOTR-inspired songs out there (brilliantly done by Led Zeppelin), plus Homer’s Odyssey – inspired toons.
A great one is Sex Crime by the Eurythmics – based on George Orwell’s 1984 and part of the film’s soundtrack.
And bowie’s 1984:
“they’ll split your pretty cranium and fill it full of air, and tell that your eighty. but, brother, you won’t care, beware the savage jaw of 1984”
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a favourite Iron Maiden track, of the same name, of mine when I was a teen :)
Do long poems count :)
….I wouldn’t be able to make this event, so good luck to whomever wins! …should be a good one :)
Regina Spektor – Samson
Delilah telling tales of love and haircuts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p62rfWxs6a8
As she reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance
Her heart, heart’s like crazy paving
Upside down and back to front
She says ooh, it’s so hard to love
When love was your great disappointment
Lloyd Cole – Rattlesnakes
ha! he’s such a name dropper is lloyd cole.
four flights:
You can drive them back to town in a beat-up grace kelly car
Looking like a friend of truman capote, looking exactly like you are
Keeping the context in the Kate Bush area how about the late great Clifford T Ward and his song Home Thoughts from Abroad?… “‘I’ve been reading Browning, Keats and William Wordsworth” from the album “Gaye and other stories”. A great song and a great album.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akKVtGUsbbY
So many choices with Lou Reed
Here’s
Sword of Damocles from Magic and Loss
That mix of morphine and dexedrine, we use it on the street
It kills the pain and keeps you up, your very soul to keep
But this guessing game has its own rules, the good don’t always win
And might makes right
The Sword of Damocles is hanging above your headA
…
Some other world that we don’t know about
I know you hate that mystic shit
It’s just another way of seeing
The Sword of Damocles above your head
Another Lou Reed one
From Dirty Boulevard …
And back at the Wilshire, Pedro sits there dreaming
He’s found a book on Magic in a garbage can
He looks at the pictures
And stares up at the cracked ceiling
“At the count of 3,” he says,
“I hope I can disappear.”
I was thinking of the live album by ,Motorhead, “What’s wordsworth” which ends with an exhortation from Lemmy to “Read plenty of Wordsworth”.
in another incarnation, i once interviewed robert smith and asked him about this – specifically Killing An Arab (a pretty much straight retelling of albert camus’ the outsider). [aside: the cure were touring again and were getting a lot of grief about it in, especially, america – and he was bothered about right-wing nuts deliberately misinterpreting the song, taking as an anthem calling for some kind of reverse-jihad]. he said that this was one of his main techniques when writing a song – make a song out of a poem or a novel (or another song). my own favourite cure song – how beautiful you are – is a pretty much direct retelling of baudelaire’s ‘les yeux des pauvres’. he hardly even changed the words, but I’d never noticed up to then. there are a few other cure songs bases on the gormenghast.
the winner has to be ‘ain’t half been some clever bastards’ by the late ian dury. you can take your fukn pick of literary namedrops here:
Noel Coward was a charmer.
As a writer he was brahma.
Velvet jackets and pyjamas,
“The Gay Divorcee” and other dramas.
There ain’t half been some clever bastards
(Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
There ain’t half been some clever bas-tards.
Van Gogh did some eyeball pleasers.
He must have been a pencil squeezer.
He didn’t do the Mona Lisa,
That was an Italian geezer.
There ain’t half been some clever bastards
(Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
There ain’t half been some clever bas-tards.
Einstein can’t be classed as witless.
He claimed atoms were the littlest.
When you did a bit of splitting-em-ness
Frighten everybody shitless
There ain’t half been some clever bastards.
Probably got help from their mum
(who had help from her mum).
There ain’t half been some clever bastards.
Now that we’ve had some,
Let’s hope that there’s lots more to come.
There ain’t half been some clever bastards
(Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
There ain’t half been some clever bas-tards.
Okey-dokey!
Oh!
Segovia.
Da-laa la-laa da-daa da-lee
De dump di dump de dump-dump-diddle li-lee.
There ain’t half been some clever bastards
(Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
There ain’t half been some clever bastards
(Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
There ain’t half been some clever bastards
(Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
There ain’t half been some clever……..
…………………………….bastards.
now that is a good entry …
And in “hit me with your rhythm stick”
In the dock of Tiger Bay
On the road to Mandalay
From Bombay to Santa Fe
Over hills and far away
Cemetry gates by the Smiths.
Keats and Yeats are on your side, while Wilde is on mine.
Also has a quotation from Shakespeare’s Richard III.
I also love the intentional misspelling as a nod to the Dublin pronunciation of cemetery
The Cranberries also recorded ‘Yeats’ which was very ethereal at the time.
Because of the previous Behan post, I’m reminded of Phil Chevron’s fantastic ‘Thousands are Sailing’ (and which he sings better than MacGowan imo);
‘And in Brendan Behan’s footsteps
I danced up and down the street’
And they did Yeats Grave on the Now and in Time to Be album – that had some great stuff on it, especially the Stolen Child by the Waterboys and an Irish Airmen Foresees his Death by MacGowan
Mr MacGowan also,
“Last night as I slept
I dreamt I met with Behan
I shook him by the hand and we passed the time of day..”
Ah now steady on re the singing
Great voice , great choice
His version is great
Romeo and Juliet by one of the finest bands the world has ever seen. What I love is even thirty odd years on, Mark Knopfler still keeps it fresh and plays it slightly differently every time he performs it. The Radio 2 piano room version on Youtube is particularly good.
+1 from me
It’s one of my faves
Open G tuning with a capo on the 4th fret, if you’re ever tempted to learn it.
Funny I heard it on the radio the other day. And was just wondering how in fupp did he do that
It’s a great song –
Musically – But he murders it. He’s a terrible singer
libertines’ gunga din:
“you’ve been beaten and flayed, probably betrayed, you’re a better man than i”
from kipling’s
“though I’ve belted you and flayed you, by the livin’ gawd that made you, you’re a better man than i am, gunga din”
Dexys Midnight Runnners incendiary Dance Stance (aka Burn it Down) skewers British ignorance beautifully. As apt now as it was when released nearly 40 years ago.
“Never heard about Oscar Wilde
Don’t know about Brendan Behan
Know anything about Sean O’Casey
Or care about George Bernard Shaw
Or Samuel Beckett
Won’t talk about Eugene O’Neill
He won’t talk about Edna O’Brien
Or know anything about Lawrence Stern…”
Surely these cheery lines by upstart haircuts-with-guitars Garfunkel & Simon merit consideration?…
“And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we’ve lost
Like a poem poorly written
We are verses out of rhythm
Couplets out of rhyme
In syncopated time
And the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs
Are the borders of our lives”
The Dangling Conversation, 1966
Endless Art, “A House”
All art is quite useless according to Oscar Wilde
Turner 1775 to 1851
Toulouse-Lautrec 1864 to 1901
Andy Warhol 1928 to 1987 RIP
Ernest Hemingway 1899 to 1961
George Orwell, Jimi Hendrix, William Butler Yates, Jack B. Yeats
Richard Redgrave 1804 to 1888
Henry Moore 1896 to 1986
Henry Miller, Sid Vicious only 21
Brian Jones
Otis Redding 1941 to 1967 RIP
All dead, yet still alive
In endless time, endless art
Masters of their arts
Claude Monet 1840 to 1926
Beethoven, Bach, Brahms
Elvis Presley 1935 to ’77
Man Ray, Johnny Ray
John Donne 1573 to 1631
Alfred Lord Tennyson 1809 to ’92
Degeneration art, Joan Miro, RIP
Divine Comedy’s The Book Lovers has a similar bent:
He lists off authors names, and after each they say a few words:
James Joyce: Hello there!
Virginia Woolf: I’m losing my mind!
Marcel Proust: Je me’en souviens plus
F Scott Fitzgerald: baa bababa baa
Ernest Hemingway: I forgot the…
Hermann Hesse: Oh es ist alle so häßlich
Evelyn Waugh: Whoooaarr!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPzS91gGzLM
Therapy? Potato Junkie
“I’m bitter, I’m twisted
James Joyce is 4uking my sister”
Notable mention for Nirvana and Pennyroyal Tea
“Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld
So I can sigh eternally…”
you took out my ian dury entry – shame on ye.
That’s awful
Adam and Eve-Nas and The Dream
https://youtu.be/h-vI2mRGkAM
Tender by Blur.
The song is a gorgeous ode to a relationship failing but the title and lyric “tender is the night” is a reference to the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Keats. 2 literary references for the price of 1!
“I wish I had a Sylvia Plath
Busted tooth and a smile
And cigarette ashes in her drink
The kind that goes out and then sleeps for a week
The kind that goes out on her own
To give me a reason, for well, I dunno…”
Sylvia Plath by the wayward Ryan Adams
I’ve always had a real love for Mark Knopfler’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s one I like to listen to with a nice glass of wine as I cook dinner in the evening.
the Police with dont stand so close to me (i prefer the 86 version)
“It’s no use
He sees her
He starts to shake he starts to cough
Just like the old man in
That famous book by Nabakov”
brilliant by gordon
Hey Jack Kerouac – 10,000 Maniacs. A classic.
Similarly…
The House that Jack Kerouac Built by the Go-Betweens. Bonus points for the lines:
“Shake off your despondency, and your country girl act.
You are reading me poetry, that’s Irish, and so black.”
Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot, fighting in the Captain’s Tower
This will get ye humming
Mrs Robinson. (The Graduate by Charles Webb)
https://youtu.be/9C1BCAgu2I8
Van Morrison’s Rave on John Donne namechecks the eponymous poet as well as Walt Whitman, Omar Khayyam, Khalil Ghibran and Mr Yeats before its fitting last line:
‘Rave on words on printed page’
“White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane is the one that comes to mind
An ode to the psychedelic experience and 60s counter-culture, every line references “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carol
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall..
..Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your head
+ a hookah smoking caterpillar.
Got to be Ghetto Defendant by The Clash. vocals by Joe Strummer & Alan Ginsberg. deals with Jean Arthur Rimbaud & the Paris Commune. Classic Clash Reggae vibe
Surely, McCloudbusting, no?
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and-property/investors-in-kevin-mccloud-s-projects-told-they-face-huge-losses-1.3995106
A House: Endless Art. Loads of (male references):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDo6Lgylsjg
Why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhW_5z4yuTY
Who won this one?