Blog: Don't Starve A Girl Of A Palaver

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When one is an International Rock Star like what I am one spends a lot of time doing interviews. All right these are pretty much always IMAGINARY interviews in your head on the way to work, but still, one of the main questions asked is "What Are Your Influences?"

This is an excellent question to answer because it means you can acknowledge your debt AND show off a bit about how super eclectic you are e.g. in my case I usually say "Billy Bragg, John Otway and Half Man Half Biscuit, obviously, but also The Mahavishnu Orchestra and the traditional sounds of the nose flautists of Bolivia, do you know them at all?"

I have been saying this sort of things for years, but it was only yesterday that I realised that it is pretty much a FIB. Not the nose flautists - their experiments in alienation and reappraisal are seminal - but the rest of it misses out someone who, I now realise, I have based most of my songwriting on. That person is, of course, Victoria Wood.

There's been a lot of celebrity deaths this year, and some of them have effected me a lot - when David Bowie died there was suddenly this Bowie-free world that felt WRONG, for instance - but nothing has brought me as close to tears as finding out about Victoria Wood. I went to look at some videos of her, like I guess half the population of the UK, and was stunned by a) how brilliant it was and b) how I had pretty much ignored her for decades. Like most people my age, when I was growing up the whole family would sit and watch her on the telly at weekends. My Mum would LARF a LOT and maybe because of that I thought the shows were a bit naff (sorry Mum) and so never watched later stuff like Dinnerladies. I realise now that all those shows seeped into my BRANE to such an extent that I have, basically, been trying to rip her off for DECADES. This goes for THE WRITING (I've just been watching a video of my MONOLOGUE that was performed at our showcase last week and you can HEAR me straining for Victoria Wood-ness) but especially for my effors in ROCK. Pretty much everything I've written, it turns out, has been a half-arsed effort to rip her off!

For instance, everyone was tweeting about The Ballad Of Barry And Freda yesterday because, well, it's FANTASTIC, especially when you read the lyrics on their own. Every LINE is funny - not just the punchlines, but ALL of it. There's some incredible bits in there -"I'm on fire with desire, I could handle half the tenors in a male voice choir" for instance, or the the astoundingly brilliant couple of lines "Don't starve a girl of a palaver / Dangle from the wardrobe in your Balaclava." I love the way the first line has an INCREDIBLE internal rhyme which most people would consider the crowning achievement of their writing career but which turns out to just be the set-up for the second half, which as well as being hilarious AND rhyming AND having an avalanche of words that fit perfectly, it's also full of sympathy and enjoyment for the sort of life that ART traditionally sneers at or ignores. I love the bit where the bloke pleads "I must refuse to get undressed. I feel silly, it's too chilly". He's not being mocked, you can feel his TERROR yet it doesn't make you enjoy the woman's enthusiasm any the less. It's beautifully balanced and funny and tender and well observed and just bloody GRATE from start to finish.

And that, of course, is exactly what I've always been striving for - what we all should be striving for really, and the fact that we'll likely never get anywhere near what she achieved doesn't really matter. I'm only sad I never realised this properly while she was still about, but I will do my best from now on to put her first whenever that question comes up in an interview, even if it's only me asking!


posted 21/4/2016 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

You and Morrissey apparently... https://plainorpan.com/2013/01/06/victoria-wood-morrissey-did/
posted 21/4/2016 by Alex

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