Top 5 Opening Song Lines

I've probably said this before but I'm not the greatest observer of lyrics. The thing that grabs me about a song is the music and in many cases the words are just another element of that sound. However, if I am going to notice what's actually being sung it's usually an opening line, so often the lyric that sets the tone for the song or states the manifesto of the band.

1. Teardrop Explodes "Reward"

"Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news"

Despite my teenage years corresponding closely with the eighties I never really got on with the music of the day. My desire to escape the floppy fringed "girly" bands I detested from Top Of The Pops probably shaped my taste in music from then on. Oddly I now find myself more sentimental for the music I grew up hearing. Reward was always a bit of a cracker though and remains one of my favourite songs. The Trumpets help, in my book Brass can only be a good thing for a popular single.

2. Stiff Little Fingers "Inflammable Material"

“Inflammable material is planted in my head,
it’s a suspect device that’s left 2000 dead”

Other than a brief mention in the film of "High Fidelity", Stiff Little Fingers remain a largely under appreciated punk band. I think they were one of the best original UK punk bands, great live and with a song craft that many others of their era lacked. This is the first line of the first track on their first album. It pretty well defines everything SLF were about.

Dick: In my opinion there are two bands that influenced Green Day...
Anna: The Clash!
Dick: Er, right. The other one, I think, is Stiff Little Fingers. Listen...


*Dick puts on a Stiff Little Fingers song*


Shopper: Is this the new Green Day song?

3. The Sonics "Strychnine"

“Some folks like water, some folks like wine,
but I like the taste of straight Strychnine”

The Sonics helped lay the path for the Punk bands of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Along with their American North-West contempories they also helped create the environment that made the Grunge explosion of the Nineties possible. Released in 1965, "Strychnine" and the debut album from whence it came, were a warning tremor for the eruption of wild rock'n'roll that would follow.

4. The Stooges "Search & Destroy"

"I'm a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm,
I'm a runaway son of the nuclear a-bomb"

One of those direct descendants of The Sonics with lyrics that seem to describe the Stooges irrepressible front man. At 63 he's still capable of causing a stir as his recent appearance on American Idol showed.

5. Warren Zevon "Werewolves of London"

"Saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand,
walking through the streets of Soho in the rain,
he was looking for a place called Lee Ho Fook's,
going to get himself a big dish of beef chow mein"

This is kind of where I got started with this topic. Talking about the soundtrack for "American Werewolf in London" a few weeks back got me thinking about this song and its opening lyric.

Photo courtesy of Around the World Today

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Top 5 Very Bad Lyrics

I'm not someone who pays a great deal of attention to lyrics, it's the tune that gets my attention. When I do notice the words it's often because of a badly chosen rhyme or phrase and once I've spotted it, it becomes almost impossible to ignore. There's loads of bad lyrics out there but I'm only really bothered by the songs I'm likely to hear.

1. Razorlight "Somewhere Else"

"And I met a girl,
she asked me my name,
I told her what it was."

Razorlight really are rubbish though I have to own up to quite liking them early on. Their debut album had some decent indie-rock on it but that doesn't excuse the bland, generic, pap they served up on their second LP. What's worse is that, for no explicable reason, they started getting round the clock airplay based on these songs.

2. Snap! "Rhythm is a dancer"

"I'm as serious as cancer,
When I say rhythm is a dancer."

An exception made here, though this WAS back in the days when it was a lot harder to avoid the number one single. Bad as the song is overall, this couplet stands out as a shockingly desperate attempt to achieve a rhyme over good sense.

3. Marillion "Hard As Love"

"Well I hear you got my number and you want my name
I'm a stream of naughts and crosses in your R-A-M
But you know that love can be as hard as algebra
Baby nothing else has ever been as hard as love"

Ignoring the worryingly geeky premise of the verse (I mean come on guys - I was getting enough grief for liking Prog Rock already without the added humiliation of songs about binary code!) the analogy of algebra with love is a difficult one to swallow. I know a lot of people didn't enjoy maths at school but these guys must have had a seriously bad teacher if they think this is actually true.

4. Manic Street Preachers "Intravenous Agnostic"

"Into a vein exhibit the derelict
A secular mosaic distracted at birth
A Cubist abstraction let it live forever
Narcissism so lonely so live by the sea."

Whoa there Nicky, are you completely sure those words belong in the same sentence? The Manics have a habit of sounding like they just want to show off their impressive vocabulary but this song makes me wonder if Mr Wire was just trying to win a bet.

5. Culture Club "The War Song"

"War is stupid
And people are stupid"

As far as I'm concerned the only time you're allowed to get away with rhyming a word with itself is if you're Black Sabbath and you've just finished belting out one of the greatest intro riffs of all time before a nutter from Birmingham screams the phrase, "Generals gathered in their masses, Just like witches at black masses." In all other cases you have failed as a lyric writer. Using the same word is not a rhyme it's just repetition.