Okay, this is a specialised whinge I know. Every year the school down the road has a fundraising fete, and I think they borrow the PA system from Slayer or someone. What is it about perfectly ordinary people getting their hands on a mic? Even with the doors and windows closed I can hear the bizarreness of a sub-sub-sub Woganesque announcer talking about the stalls:) And I won't even get onto the music in between!

Last year they got a live band, whose main songwriting influence was that "I've got a combine harvester" group. A cavalcade of whimsy for the whole family!

You would of course be refering to the Wurzles, a band who I've had the pleasure of watching play live. And very good they are too. They do a mean version of 'Ace of Spades'...

By the way, where else did you think the expression 'Fete worse than death' came from?



Post Edited (06-07-03 13:42)

PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

I haven't heard the Wurzels play live, but do have (and enjoy listening to...) a CD of their works.

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"This was willed where what is willed... can get rather silly."



Post Edited (06-07-03 15:25)

I have nothing against the Wurzels personally, it's just that an hour of cod-Wurzels was quite painful :)

You've definitely got to the root of that saying PSD!

I think the fete organisers are going for a different vibe this year, anyone up for a twenty minute scratch remix of the Doctor Who theme tune? I kid you not.

I wrote a parody of the "Combine Harvester" song at the age of 11 or 12, and my twin sisters performed it, with much aplomb and apparently to great acclaim, in their school assembly (they were still in primary school, but I had moved up so I missed all the fun). How and why they got to do it I cannot remember for the life of me, and I've unfortunately lost the words, but I do recall that the first two lines went like this:

"I've got a second-hand County Council dustcart
And I'll collect your trash."



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

<groans>



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There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

It does make me idly curious as to how many parodies/loving hommages/rip offs and so forth that the Wurzles made possible. With such a memorable tune and lyric structure it does lend itself to multiple re-workings.

Gosh, there could be thousands out there!

If I remember correctly then the Combine-harvester song was itself a parody, of some sentimental slop (about somebody ofering somebody else the key to their heart?) that had been in the charts slightly earlier.

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"This was willed where what is willed... can get rather silly."



Post Edited (06-09-03 19:05)

Quite right. Simon. I think it was by someone called Melanie - I'll just go check my 15-years-out-of-date copy of the Guinness Book of British hit singles.

Yep, remembered correctly (hey, I can remember all sorts of rubbish, OK ?) The song 'Brand New Key', by Melanie (US vocalist) reached no 4 in 1972.
She also had hits with covers of 'Ruby Tuesday', and 'What Have They Done To my Song, Ma ?'

There, you are now all much better informed and no doubt suitably grateful.

Oh, yes. We can now all sleep at night. thanks sooooo much, Skiffle.

Thanks Skiffle! I love learning new bits of trivia, useful for quizzes and for amazing friends and family. Admittedly the amazement factor tends to be expressed as "Why on earth would you remember that!" but its still fun.

Another question though, the wonderfully titled 'What have they done to my song, Ma?' Never heard of it but who did the original?

And did I just spot a connection with one of your favourite ciders? :)

Interestingly, "What have they done to my song" has a line about going to live in a book and never coming out:

[members.aol.com]

[ynucc.yeungnam.ac.kr]

Don't worry belochka...in my family, I'm known as the one who has "a plethora of useless knowledge" and I'm always urged to go on gameshows.

Teri - Thanks for the lyric sites, I had no idea that the song was so downbeat! I thought it was going to be a rather syrupy experience, but it reads as quite a maudlin lament.

AAC - Bless them, I think my family knows my limitations at trivia. I'm okay at something like Trivial Pursuit, in fact none of my family will play that with me anymore, but a game show is a different proposition. Things like, "what is a covalent bond?" or "What atoms form a Benzine ring?" tend to floor me.
As do questions about sport :)

But chemistry is soooooooo much fun! I did the A-level, and we had to do a project for it. Everyone else picked food science because they thought it would be easy, so I picked metallurgy because I thought food science might be... well... too easy. I spent many a happy dinner hour alone in the lab wearing goggles and a pair of improbably heavy-duty bright blue rubber gloves, making little samples of cadmium/bismuth alloys in a fume cupboard (cadmium is pretty nasty, so you treat it with respect, and bismuth is not really a great deal more pleasant) and then grinding them down so I could examine the detailed crystalline structure under a microscope.

I think it was the only thing that being seventeen years old actually had going for it.



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

Chemistry used to be fun, before they invented health and safety . . .

Such happy memories of Dr Frykman (I still can't believe that was his real name) causing enormous purple explosions using potassium, and commenting, "Vets do that to infections in horses' hooves, you know. It not remotely disinfectant, but it looks the part."

Nowadays, apparently, they just get to watch people on video having fun with hazardous chemicals . . .



Jesus saves; Buddha does incremental backup.

It certainly was.

My brother managed to cause the science block to be evacuated by making phosgene gas, allegedly by mistake. As I typed up his project for him I can tell you that he must have strayed way off topic. None of the boys were too disappointed though as the ballet school next door had to be evacuated too. It was an all boys school, and they had to make their own entertainment.

Chemistry fun is not all killed by health and safety, my daughter's school building is less than a year old and the chemistry department have already managed to cause enough damage to two adjacent classrooms to have them put out of use until the builders have been in. Who did what has not been disclosed, but there have been mutterings about the inefficiency of the fume cupboards.

My friends at the girls' grammar managed to explode several pieces of glassware, in one case leaving a two-foot wide green stain on the ceiling.



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

We had a teacher in high school whose favourite experiement was making rotten egg gas. You could smell it as soon as you walked into the science block. 'Davo's at it again!' we'd say.

Our science teacher demonstrated that fun experiment to prove that custard powder is explosive, and can blow the lid of the tin as high as the lab ceiling