I never paid any attention to the lyrics of Squeeze’s song “Cool for Cats,” mostly because except for the title phrase I never understand a single word.
But today I caught the song on television and decided to look it up. That’s… inscrutable. Some of the references have to be British, so I don’t mind not getting those. The rest, though… Steely Dan is Dr. Seuss by comparison.
Anybody with a translation from Squeezeish?
The first two verses seem to talk about movies – a western and a caper film. The third verse has the singer in a pub, and is pretty straightforward: he tries to go out and have a good time, but gets little out of it. The final verse tells how he meets up with a girl at a disco, takes her home, has sex with her (“give the dog a bone”), but finds it disappointing compared to the movies mentioned in the first two verses.
Yeah. The basic idea is scoring with women in tv/movies is different than real life.
The album named after this song is one of my all time favorites, and it’s fun to see it get a shoutout after all this time.
I always found ‘Cool for Cats’ to be a fairly straightforward muse on the dubious benefits of being cool, from the viewpoint of a young (London) Eastender. Verse 1 most likely concerns a Western movie viewed by the narrator, and his realization that the Cavalry weren’t necessarily the good guys in the flick. Verse 2 concerns a gang of crooks done up for some sort of theft at Heathrow and could either something the narrator saw on a TV show or involved someone the narrator knew; the ‘Sweeney’ refers to the police, and ‘Wandsworth’, IIRC, is a well-known prison. Verses 3 and 4 have to with the narrator realizing that although he’s gone to considerable effort to be a cool dude, it hasn’t really gotten him anywhere.
Some of the Britishism translated might make it make more sense.
Sweeney = cops, and I think it’s referencing a gritty cop show that aired in the 70s-80s.
Wandsworth = grotty British jail
Difford, it seems, is taking his macking cues from cowboy films and bad telly cop dramas, copies their look and chatting up styles, but it doesn’t work down the discos in Deptford.
I’m a big fan of the Difford-sung songs of Squeeze… Glenn Tilbrook, who wrote the music, typically sings Difford’s lyrics, but there’s an authenticity to Difford’s iterations…
I like most of Squeeze’s music, but the best I can say for “Cool For Cats” is that it’s…unusual. Or it was the first time. After that I just found it mildly obnoxious.
In regard to interpreting lyrics, you’d be largely correct in assuming that any given Squeeze song has something to do with a young wants-to-be-hip urban male who’s trying to make it with a babe or get out from under a relationship, but complications ensue.
Forgot to add that if you haven’t ever seen the video, you really should… the dancers/backup singers are so earnest yet dreadful (with the dancing, that is)…
Ohhhhkay. Slightly less strange.
How about the line “Who swear like hows your father”?
“hows your father” is obviously cockney rhyming slang, but I don’t get what it rhymes with.
“How’s Your Father” isn’t actually cockney rhyming slang, though it is associated with working-class cockney speech. It’s sometimes used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse and sometimes as an all-purpose fill-in phrase when you can’t think of the actual term you need. According to Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, it was popularised by a comedian of the 1930s called Harry Tate, who used it in the second sense.
The Sweeney (from Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad) was a 1970s London-set UK cop series, which had a very gritty style for its day. The same character actors occasionally popped up in different supporting roles as the series progressed, which is why the criminal-of-the-week’s wife sometimes “looked the bleedin’ same”.
The London setting meant the Sweeney’s dialogue featured many supposedly typical cockney phrases, and that’s the element of the show Squeeze are referencing with “How’s Your Father”. Squeeze came from Deptford, an unglamorous area of South London, which made The Sweeney’s world a good match for them. “Up The Junction”, which takes its title from a 1968 British film, is another Squeeze song set in much the same world.