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We don’t have to take our clothes off to have a good time, oh no… if you just pull your knickers across a bit, I can pop my old fella through my fly and Bob’s your Uncle.
This song (not sure I’ve got all the lyrics right) came on the radio this lunchtime and apart from conjuring up this beautiful and romantic image (which I presume is what the singer was getting at), it reminded me of my obsession with cherry wine. Not that I’ve ever drunk it (I don’t think) - I didn’t even realise it was a real thing til today (assuming it was a poetic way of describing red wine - but whenever I am trying to talk my wife into a romantic night in I say we can kick back and drink some cherry wine (before having sex with slightly dislodged underwear). Cherry wine actually sounds more disgusting than the image I have conjured up…
Someone tweeted me with a picture of some cherry wine. It is a thing. Did I subconsciously know this? Perhaps, because cherry wine is often sparkling and I once wrote a song which had a line about sparkling cherry wine. And Jermaine Stewart’s cherry wine is not sparkling.
The song was written in 1987 for the sketch troupe I was in at University, in which I tried to parody the 1980s pop scene’s obsession with horrible cliches and mundane lyrics - let’s see if I can do it from memory
Once I had a little dog called Raymond
A cuddly friendly little chap was he
And though he occasionally got in a fight
His bark was worse than his bite
His bark was worse than his bite
But please let sleeping dogs lie
Too many cooks spoil the broth
A rolling stone gathers no moss
Little Raymond was a cheeky little chap
Whether eating from his bowl or sitting on his mat
He really used to like to chase cats
He was house-trained, thank goodness for that.
His bark was worse than his bite
Two wrongs don’t make a right (this is the only line I have invented now cos I can’t remember the real one)
Drinking of the sparkling cherry wine
Your heart beating next to mine
OK, it’s not very good. And what’s remarkable about me remembering nearly all of it, is that we never actually even performed it. I think the idea was a bit too esoteric - it was never going to be explained that we were going for cliche and I don’t think it’s obvious. But also the girls in the troupe were meant to be dressed as dogs and saying woof after every line of the chorus. And Emma and Jo refused to do that. Correctly obviously.
But when we came up with the name for the troupe we used the name of the dog (I think it happened this way round) and became the Seven Raymonds (again another oblique parody in which we imagined that like the Two Ronnies, seven people called Raymond had been put together in a comedy group, merely due to the coincidence of having the same name. In reality there were six of us and none of us were called Raymond. How funny we were 31 years ago.
Anyway that Raymond name stuck and for some reason the song has stuck in my head. But apart from that the cherry wine bit has stuck too. But it was only today that I realised where it had (probably) come from (though maybe there was a song with sparkling cherry wine in it -any ideas?)
Slow news day.
