It seems that I’m to blame for setting the theme for this week’s Song Lyric Sunday challenge. This I did by dint of a throwaway reference to the BBC’s iconic ‘serious’ music show, the Old Grey Whistle Test, which was distinguished from others by avoiding ‘pop’ candyfloss and featuring live performances in a stripped-bare studio. As Jim aptly puts it, the emphasis was very much on album acts.

I had a brief exchange of emails with Jim about the honour he was bestowing on me and said that there was one performance in particular that had stuck in my mind, but that I’d nonetheless take a look through the OGWT archives to see if anything else cropped up that I might prefer. Well I did take a look and, indeed, featured an OGWT performance by David Bowie last week. Ultimately, though, I decided to stick with my first thought: Dr John Cooper Clarke.

Who, you may be asking (and almost certainly will be if you’re not from the UK), is Dr John Cooper Clarke? Let me explain, gentle reader.

The gentleman in question first appeared on the scene in the late seventies and was quickly dubbed the ‘Punk Poet Laureate’. To be fair, he’s much more a poet than a singer or musician and his work is typically about ordinary (for which read ‘working class’) people leading ordinary lives, delivering his lines in his trademark flat Manchester (Salfordian, if you’re splitting hairs) accent.

I’m pleased to say that he is still very much with us, looking pretty much the same, in his trademark Carrera sunglasses. He can be seen quite often on comedy panel shows (‘Would I Lie To You?’, ‘8 Out Of 10 Cats’), and is surely well on the way to becoming a National Treasure, which he certainly deserves to be.

This appearance on the OGWT dates from 1980. It’s a poem really, but since he’s accompanied by some backing musicians I’ve taken some, ahem, poetic license and called it a song.

Far from crazy pavements
The taste of silver spoons
A clinical arrangement
On a dirty afternoon
Where the fecal germs of Mr Freud
Are rendered obsolete
The legal term is “null and void”
In the case of Beasley Street

In the cheap seats where murder breeds
Somebody is out of breath
Sleep is a luxury they don’t need
A sneak preview of death
Belladonna is your flower
Manslaughter your meat
Spend a year in a couple of hours
On the edge of Beasley Street

Where the action isn’t
That’s where it is
State your position
Vacancies exist
In an X-certificate exercise
Ex-servicemen excrete
Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies
In a box on Beasley Street

From the boarding-houses and the bedsits
Full of accidents and fleas
Somebody gets it
Where the missing persons freeze
Wearing dead men’s overcoats
You can’t see their feet
A riff joint shuts, opens up
Right down on Beasley Street

Cars collide, colours clash
Disaster-movie stuff
For a man with a Fu Manchu moustache
Revenge is not enough
There’s a dead canary on a swivel seat
There’s a rainbow in the road
Meanwhile on Beasley Street
Silence is the code

Hot beneath the collar
An inspector calls
Where the perishing stink of squalor
Impregnates the walls
The rats have all got rickets
They spit through broken teeth
The name of the game is not cricket
Caught out on Beasley Street

The hipster and his hired hat
Drive a borrowed car
Yellow socks and a pink cravat
Nothing, la-dee-dah
OAP, mother-to-be
Watch the three-piece suite
When shit-stoppered drains
And crocodile skis
Are seen on Beasley Street

The kingdom of the blind
A one-eyed man is king
Beauty problems are redefined
The doorbells do not ring
A lightbulb bursts like a blister
The only form of heat
Here a fellow sells his sister
Down the river on Beasley Street

The boys are on the wagon
The girls are on the shelf
Their common problem is
That they’re not someone else
The dirt blows out
The dust blows in
You can’t keep it neat
It’s a fully furnished dustbin
Sixteen Beasley Street

Vince the ageing savage
Betrays no kind of life
But the smell of yesterday’s cabbage
And the ghost of last year’s wife
Through a constant haze
Of deodorant sprays
He says retreat
Alsations dog the dirty days
Down the middle of Beasley Street

People turn to poison
Quick as lager turns to piss
Sweethearts are physically sick
Every time they kiss
It’s a sociologist’s paradise
Each day repeats
On easy, cheesy, greasy, queasy
Beastly Beasley Street

Eyes dead as vicious fish
Look around for laughs
If I could have just one wish
I would be a photograph
On a permanent Monday morning
Get lost or fall asleep
When the yellow cats are yawning
Around the back of Beasley Street

Written by John Cooper Clarke

Song Lyric Sunday 22 December 2024