Clowns Hysterectomy, Jokers to the right… (the joy of getting the song lyrics wrong)

All of us have, at some point, seen things that we can’t unsee, however hard we try.

I’ve found over the years that it’s almost as impossible to un-hear something. The worst offenders for things that get stuck in your head (after earworm) are misheard song lyrics. A short time ago, a friend of mine shared the meme below, which brought back some memories:

I first heard this as “Sandal in the bin’, and even once I’d read the entire set of lyrics on the CD single insert, I couldn’t get my brain to accept the true version of the song. It was as if the wrongness had imprinted itself in my mind and nothing could overwrite it.

I had similar problems with Rod Stewart’s “Fart Like a Tiger”.

Madonna was shocking for poor diction. I suppose it didn’t help that I was really young when ‘La Isla Bonita’ was released, and therefore not really au fait with currencies around the world, but once I’d heard “young girl with eyes like potatoes”, I couldn’t make “pesetas” work. And as for “Like a Virgin”, I was convinced she’d been touched for the thirty-first time… which struck me as less than virginal, even at the tender age of about nine. It was all very possible, of course. If said virgin was applying the ‘suck it and see’ approach to dating, then it’s perfectly possible that she’d clocked up 31+ fumbles before doing the deed. Just not particularly likely.

It wasn’t always my weird imagination at work. You listen to “Me Israelite” and tell me you don’t hear “me ears ‘re alight.” I was always convinced that Fats Domino found his drill on Blueberry Hill (he wasn’t a fan of pronouncing his ‘th’, that man), and that the Beatles sung “I wanna hold your gland.”

It’s not me honest, guv – it’s all these people who can’t enunciate their consonants.

Now that I can’t hear music much at all anymore, I’m rather vulnerable to dastardly friends fitting new lyrics to well-known songs, and over-writing my memory of how the song sounds. I was at work once when my colleagues were bickering about opera and how dreadful/wonderful it is with equal force. Opera’s advocate, Cookie, said you can put anything in an opera and it will sound good. Challenged to sing operatically about curry, he launched into “Nessun Korma**”, and that is now the version I have stuck in my memory bank. Thanks Cookie!

I need to point accusingly at Tony J Fyler, too, for re-penning that Pink Floyd Classic “Another Prick with a Wall” to the extent that I can’t hear the original version in my head anymore. Cheers Tony!

So… which song lyrics haunt you? I think most people have heard Bon Jovi belting out “It doesn’t matter if we’re naked or not” during Livin’ on a Prayer, so that doesn’t count. C’mon… hit me with your misheard lyrics 🙂

Tig xxxx

Nessun Korma
Nessun Korma
Nihili Naan bread
fuck-all pakora….