Teach your children well

"You're this week's number one girl
But one girl will never do"

That’s part of the chorus to ‘This Week's Number One’, a song started but never quite finished in the 1980s by teenaged songwriter Mark Bridge. Yes, me. I’ll be honest, the title was a cynical attempt to increase potential sales. I imagined hordes of my pop-loving contemporaries walking into their local record shops and being given a copy of my single after saying “I'd like this week's number one, please”.

There are three points to be made here. Firstly, although it may have seemed unlikely at the time, I have subsequently become a professional writer and – thanks to this very column – can now describe myself as a published songwriter, too. (So ‘yah boo sucks’ to the kid who laughed at me back then, just in case he’s moved to Lewes.) And secondly, my younger self clearly didn't have a clue about real life, did he?

At this stage I’d like to cite Elton John's Part-Time Love and Stevie Wonder's Part-Time Lover to emphasise my third point. I have clearly been influenced by the songs of my youth. Educated by them, you might say. And I'm sure I'm not the only person with such influences. As I’ve grown older – and smarter, I hope – I’ve treated my entertainment as entertainment, not as a behavioural guide. Just as well, really, when you consider that I grew up with Benny Hill on prime-time television. Fortunately I preferred the work of Frank Sinatra, whose apparently effortless style involved him hitting each note a millisecond before it was too late, and Buddy Greco, a man who chuckled to himself like a naughty schoolboy during the introduction of almost every song. While my school friends adopted role models like surgeon Christiaan Barnard, a remarkable man who transplanted an extra ‘a’ into his first name to keep it working longer, I was endeavouring to model myself after musicians who didn’t take themselves seriously.

This irreverence has stayed with me. Fast-forward to the first time I heard Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP. I laughed out loud. As far as I'm concerned, the song Who Knew had the same shock-value humour as Julian Clary's ‘Norman Lamont’ line or Stan Boardman and the Fokke joke. (If I’ve lost you here, you’ll find the answers on YouTube. Please don’t look if you’re at work or before the children have gone to bed.)

However, amongst all the comedy and the deliberately offensive material there’s also important stuff to be learned from song lyrics. Take Anita Bell’s 1979 locally-inspired chart-topping song of female empowerment, for example. Backed by an electronic drum and the sound of chimes she repeats her upbeat message: You Can, Ringmer Belle.

First published in Viva Lewes magazine issue 120 September 2016