Hold very tight please, ting ting! Hold very tight please, ting ting!

Cafe Society
1

My mom just lent me the complete Flanders and Swan. And I keep listening to the first CD, At the Drop of a Hat. Actually, I’ve been listening over and over again to “A Transport of Delight.”

If tickets cost a pound apiece,
Why should we make a fuss?
It’s worth it just to ride inside
That 30 foot long by 10 foot wide
Inside that monarch of the road
Observer of the highway code
That big 6-wheeler
Scarlet painted
London transport
Diesel engine
97-horsepower omnibus!

Now I have to go to London, just to ride one of the buses! (Then again, I also feel I have to ride a bus in Argentina, since I heard a song called “Candonga de los Colectiveros,” by Les Luthiers. Maybe I should do a mass transit world tour.)

I’m also quite a fan of “Misalliance.” The monologue beforehand is great, too.

And, of course, I’ve been listening quite happily to “The Reluctant Cannibal.” (Must’ve been someone 'e et!)

So, anyway–let this be the Flanders and Swan Appreciation Thread. Appreciate away!

2

Have some madeira, Scribble.

3

My appreciation comes from watching their TV special (probably “At the Drop of a Hat”) in the early 60s. I remember they were great (and a very odd-looking couple, one bespectacled and balding, the other bearded and sitting in a wheelchair), but don’t recall the songs – other that “Have some Medeira My Dear,” which automatically puts them in the pantheon of great comic songwriters.

4

Should I lower my standards by raising my glass, betenoir?

I’m a gah-noo, I’m a gah-noo.

I’m ganother gah-noo!

5

Mud, mud glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood

I hadn’t thought about that song in years. :slight_smile:

6

A ganother gnu
Call me bison or okapi and I’ll sue
O gnu gnu gnu
I’m a gnu

Have some madiera m’dear sounds pretty damn dodgy these days.

7

*I once had a whim and I had to obey it,
To buy a French Horn in a second-hand shop.
I polished it up and I started to play it
In spite of the neighbours, who begged me to stop. *

Ah, happy days…

8

None of them buses left in London, I’m afraid, except perhaps in the Transport Museum in Covent Garden.

Only sightseeing people like my relatives’ The Big Bus Company use six-wheelers and Transport for London is rapidly phasing out all the Routemasters (the ones with the open platform at the back).

Mr Flanders must be gyrating in his grave (wheelchair permitting…).

9

I grew up with that song!

From memory without looking at the lyrics, I present for you:

Inside the monarch of the road, observer of the highway code, the big six wheeler, diesel engine, ninety seven horsepower London bus!

How’d I do?

Oh well, nearly got it. That’s not bad considering the last time I heard the song was about 30 years ago.

10

'Twas on the Monday morning that the gasman came to call… Such clever lyrics. They don’t write them like that any more.

11

To sound that horn
I had to develop my embouchure
I found that horn
Was a bit of a devil to play.

So artfully wound
To give you a sound
A beautiful sound
So rich and round.

Oh! the hours I had to spend
Until I mastered it in the end.

12

Well once it’s been opened you know it won’t keep.

bete carves another notch on her gold-headed cane

13

In the ba-a-ath, in the Bath!

I can see the one salvation of the poor old human race
In the bath, in the bath!
Let the nations of the world all meet together face to face
In the ba-a-a-ath, in the bath!

I always sing along to that Mozart horn concerto. And to Eine Kleine Nachtmuzik (or however the hell you spell it). "Just a little music in the night/ Makes me want to hold my baby tight./ Mr. Mozart play that melody…

And every time anyone says “It’s irrelevant”, either Mr. Lissar or I respond, “It’s not irrelevant, it’s a hippopotamus!”

My mother has the records, and a good friend got her the complete cd compilation. I grew up listening to them. I think their verion of “Greensleeves” is fantastic, especially for all the historical in-jokes. “They were going to use Summer is Icumen In, but they decided the choir had been singing ‘cuckoo’ rather too lewdly”. Hahhaha!

14

One of their 60s specials was shown on PBS in 1999, I think. Wonderful to see.

And of course every true fan has The Songs of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann.

Just brilliant.

15

A few more of my favorite quotes:

No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street
We won’t be meeting again
On the slow train.
Examine the Irishman, Welshman or Scot
You’ll find he’s a stinker as likely as not
And the bottom simply bristles with unusual-looking thistles,
But we haven’t yet discovered what they are
Why, you might just as well go around saying “Don’t fight people!”
You mustn’t be surprised to meet a cactus on the stair…
…the drivers had instructions to keep the statistics favorable.
…and our purpose, as I see it, is to put it back again!
Toh petidari Tsiuuuu Tsiuuuuu!
And my loathing for my fellows rises steaming from my brain (in the bath, in the bath)
And condenseth to the milk of human kindness once again (in the bath, in the bath)

So, last time there was a F&S thread (and I think it says a lot about the SDMB that this is that this is the only place I’ve ever seen enough F&S fans gathered to have an actual discussion of them) I asked a question which no one could answer, so I suppose I’ll ask it again: In the First and Second Law, there’s an exchange that goes something like:
-I’m hot
-That’s because you’ve been working
-Ahhh, beetle’s nothing
(HUGE laugh from audience)
Can anyone explain what “beetle’s nothing” means?

Oh, and I saw a mysterious piece of information in a google cache that was no longer on the linked web page that said that “And the girl… in my arms… is Mabel Figworthy, and if she says ‘oh really’ once more I shall break her neck” was originally “And the girl… in my arms… is a boy”. Can anyone give us the straight dope on that?

16

YES! Let this be the Flander appreciation thread!!
…

Why is everyone so quiet? :wink:

17

Well, Max, I used to perform this song with my brother (he was the pianist), together with ‘There’s a Hole in My Budget’ (updated to 1975, with him as Denis Healey and me as Harold Wilson, then UK P.M.). Of course, we used to leave out the ‘Oh! Beatles nothing’ bit in ‘First and Second Law’, simply finishing in glorious harmony on ‘That’s the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics…yeah!’.

But given that the show (‘At the Drop of Another Hat’) opened in October 1963 - and was presumably recorded later that year or early the following year (the release date is 1964) - and given that the Beatles were at the height of their UK fame at the time, then I guess it was a reference to the Fab Four by Flanders.

As you will recall, a lot of the humour was generated by Flanders’ act of impatience with Swann - especially when the latter was being especially twee or making puny puns - and his mock exasperation at Swann’s pathetic association of Flanders’ actual physical discomfort at the end of a boisterous song with the Second Law pushed him over the edge into what I take to be a pseudo-profane exclamation, greedily gobbled up by the easily titillated middle class early 60s London audience.

Perhaps the association was with ‘Oh! Bloody Hell’ where he got as far as the ‘bloody’-substitute word but baled out on the ‘hell’ word. A modern British audience (accustomed to completely different censorship standards) probably wouldn’t find it so funny, but such was Flanders’ wit and sense of comic timing - and his ongoing ‘war’ with the tedious Swann - that he’d still get a laugh.

Any more context (i.e. song title) for the Mabel Figworthy line. Sounds as if it could be more dirty postcard style humour for which we Brits are sadly famous.

18

Well, I remember the words to that song.

“It’s a satellite moon.
It’s a plagiarised tune.
That duck on the lake’s a decoy”…

Dunno about the “Is a boy” bit.

I’ve always taken, “Beatles, nothing”, to be a Beatles reference. As I recall, they were generally making fun of pop music in that song.

La Kokoraki ki-rik-ki-kiki… something something something. I don’t speak Greek. I love that song. Actually I love all the Swann singing-in-foreign-languages songs. In The Desert is great.

I’m going to have “Wom-Pom, Wom-Pom, let your voices ring/ Wom-Pom, Wom-Pom/Universal King” stuck in my head all night.

19

“Dark November brings the fog
Should not do it to a dog
Freezing wet December then:
Bloody January again!”

20

Og, I love the SDMB!

I grew up with F&S, who were great favorites of my parents, and as a child I naturally took them completely for granted. It was only when I rediscovered them as an adult a few years ago, bought the complete CD set, and listened to them again, that I realized what amazing composers, writers, and performers they were.

Flanders’ lyrics are witty, erudite, and yet playful. Consider corresponding lines from the three verses of “Have Some Madiera, M’dear.”

*And he said as he hastened to put out the wine, the cat, his cigar, and the lamps
…
She lowered her standards by raising her glass, her spirits, her eyes, and his hopes
…
When he asked, “What in heaven?” she made no reply, up her mind, and a dash for the door. *

I challenge anyone to name another song that uses three examples of parallel construction like this. (Or the word “antepenultimate,” for that matter.)

Swann’s music mates with the lyrics perfectly, always helping to express the meaning of the words.

They were also exemplary, if somewhat unlikely, performers: a wheelchair-bound polio victim and a former language student. Swann’s piano playing is remarkably delicate and expressive, and Flanders’ lovely tenor voice keeps up with him at every turn. Flanders was also a wonderful raconteur and his anecdotes and patter between the songs were unfailingly amusing.

At its best, their music is civilized and sophisticated light entertainment. It’s not Wagner, but it’s a damn sight better than 99.9% of what passes for entertainment these days. At its worst, it is simply trivial, which is still better than 99.8% of today’s entertainment.

As a child, I found the songs Swann sang, like “In the Desert” and “To ko ko ri,” rather tedious, and even now, I don’t consider them among the pair’s best. But I do have a greater appreciation for the dry humor of the former, and the fact that the latter is actual Greek, and not just nonsense.

I also regret somewhat that F&S focused so heavily on animal songs, which IMO pegged them as children’s performers. But this is nitpicking.

Here’s to Michael Flanders and Donald Swann:

The English, the English, the English are best!
I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest!