SOMEONE LEFT THE CAKE OUT IN THE RAIN – Making Sense of Sixties Songs by Chris Green
BUS STOP
The number 22 bus is late. As I stand there waiting, I find the song, Bus Stop by The Hollies running through my head. Call me anal but I now want to try to understand the song’s bizarre lyrics. It is one of those songs that is so catchy I can still remember them all.
It is a wet day and the fellow singing, Allan Clarke, I believe, is waiting at the bus stop. A pretty girl comes along, well let’s assume for the point of argument that she is pretty. Allan doesn’t want her to get wet and spoil her new hairdo so he offers to share his umbrella. It is presumably a standard black umbrella as the song came out in the mid sixties before golf umbrellas and the like were commonplace. He leads us to believe that his gesture is chivalrous. But, he soon forces himself upon her and makes her miss the bus. Perhaps he has her pinned up against the wall. If so, how is he managing to do this and still keep the umbrella aloft? Perhaps she is struggling to get free so she can catch the bus but he is preventing her. What if she now gets the sack for being late for work? He doesn’t seem to care.
Every morning he finds her waiting at the stop, we discover from the chorus, so I suppose that her employer must have overlooked her lateness and is giving her another chance. Also, she must have forgiven Allan’s predatory advances from that first rainy day. Perhaps deep down she feels flattered by the attention. He tells us that some mornings she has already been to the shops and she shows him what she has bought. This cannot be a new outfit as clothes shops, or boutiques as they were called back then, would not be open so early. So, what is it she is showing him? Her bits and pieces from the corner shop? Perhaps she has bought a Reveille magazine and some Basildon Bond stationery from the newsagents.
The sun comes out we are told and the ice is melting and they no longer have to shelter. Hang on! Where did the ice come from? In the song, we are led to believe that all through the summer they employ the umbrella and by August she is his. This unseasonal cold snap is a bolt out of the blue, a big leap in the narrative. I think that this deserves more of an explanation, Allan. Perhaps you could ask Graham who wrote the song. Graham Gouldman, later of 10cc.
But, to move on, the other people in the queue are now staring at the pair as if they are, to quote the singer, quite insane. We cannot be sure why this is. It is left entirely to our imagination. I imagine Allan is probably getting the girl to do a silly dance or something or perhaps he is showing her how to turn the umbrella inside out. But, he goes on to say that everything turns out well because his umbrella leads him to a vow. Maybe he promises to stop whatever embarrassing shenanigans it is that has been causing the others to stare at them. Perhaps he has been having a battle with the bottle and has vowed to give up drinking and start going to meetings. We just don’t know.
He goes on to tell us that someday his name and the girl’s are going to be the same. This, to me, is the most puzzling line in the song. Is she perhaps going to change her name to Allan or is the singer going to start calling himself Helen or whatever the girl’s name is? This is not made clear. It could even be that they are planning to join a cult that requires you take on a communal name.
The number 22 bus finally comes along and my thoughts turn to counting the number of empty seats there are and guessing how many stops it will take to fill them.
MATTHEW AND SON
The Earth tilts on its axis by 23.5 degrees. I wish this were a smaller number. It is this ridiculous wobble that causes it to still be dark at eight in the morning towards the end of October. The blackness in the morning makes it harder to get up. As a result, I miss the eight twenty three commuter train which is going to make me late for work.
While I’m waiting for the next train, the eight fifty seven and hoping that no-one at work has noticed that I’m not in, Cat Stevens’ Matthew and Son, starts going round and round in my head. Cat’s sad protagonist has to be up eight. He can’t be late because Matthew and Son, won’t wait. Because Cat refers to Matthew and Son in the singular, I am left to speculate whether it is Matthew or the son who won’t wait. Perhaps Matthew is semi-retired and the son takes care of the day to day running of the business. Or perhaps the son is a lazy loafer who spends all his time on the golf course. Or it could be that Matthew and his son are both retired or even dead and that the old established firm is now run by a tyrannical manager.
I can’t help wondering if it might be a good idea for Cat’s fellow to be up a little earlier than eight as he, along with the other workers, has to run down to platform one to catch the eight thirty train. Half an hour does not give him much time for his shower and ablutions and he almost certainly will have had to leave the house without having his cornflakes. And then he still has to get to the station. Who knows, this might be half a mile? Perhaps he should set the alarm for seven thirty or even seven. Then he would not have to run for the train. He would be able to saunter down to the station listening to a pirate radio station on his little Japanese transistor radio.
The work’s never done, there’s always something new, Cat tells us. Well, surely this is the nature of most jobs, Cat. If there weren’t something new to do then there would be no need for so many staff. Matthew would be able to lay workers off and then where would they be. There are perhaps not many openings for clerical workers locally. For some reason, that is not adequately explained, the workers have to take the files to bed. Back then, these would not have been Word or Excel documents that they could peruse on their laptops but great big lever arch files that they would have had to lug home on the train.
Now we come to the killer line of the song. The workers are only allowed a five minute break. Just five minutes to drink a cup of cold coffee and eat a piece of cake. Why is the coffee cold we are left wondering and what kind of cake is it? Fruitcake? Victoria sponge? Battenburg perhaps. And who supplies the cake? Is this an overlooked aspect of Matthew and Son’s generosity that Cat with his socialist principles does not want to mention? After all, things can’t be that bad because Cat says that M and S have people who’ve been working there for fifty years and this without a pay rise. If things really are bad then perhaps it is because the workers do not appear to have a union to represent them and are all too timid to challenge the poor pay that they get. While one wants to think the best, it is difficult to have sympathy with workers that are that so lily-livered, especially as Cat tells us that all of them have huge rent arrears. I can’t help thinking that his protagonist should try and find another line of work before it’s too late.
My eight fifty seven train arrives, a mere thirteen minutes late and I am able to concentrate instead on the music the ruffian on the adjacent seat is playing on his phone. Slipknot, I believe it is.
WALKING THE DOG
Everyone on the Esplanade seems to be out walking their dogs today. There are people from all walks of life in all shapes and sizes walking their German Shepherds, Poodles, Labradors, Labradoodles, Collies, Retrievers, Spaniels and Jack Russells. I seem to be the only one without a dog but since Kimble ran away last November, I haven’t been able to face the idea of getting another one.
As I’m making my way past the clock-tower feeling a little left out, the lyrics of Rufus Thomas’s Walking the Dog start to creep into my head. Baby’s back, dressed in black, silver buttons all down her back. What on earth is Rufus on about? Is Baby the name of his dog? Is she perhaps black with silver markings on her back? High, low, tippy toe, she broke a needle and she can’t sew. What’s this got to do with dogs or dog walking? What does he mean, she can’t sew? Of course she can’t sew, she’s a dog. Rufus seems to have completely lost the plot. In the chorus he tells us, he’ll show us how to walk the dog but if the truth be told, his mind seems elsewhere. He should be concentrating making Baby familiar with a few simple commands as he’s taking her through the streets of downtown Memphis, not coming out with a lot of mumbo-jumbo. The dog will need some dog leash training. I found Tom Golfer’s Dog Training for Idiots to be very helpful when I was starting out with Kimble. Kimble was quite a large dog and Tom’s excellent primer instructed me in just about everything from the system of rewards that I should apply to the effective use of a choke chain on a busy thoroughfare.
The song continues with more jive talking. Rufus’s pooch isn’t going to respond favourably to any of that nonsense. Utter gibberish to a dog. Baby, if that really is the dog’s name, will be looking to Rufus, as her pack leader, to give cool clear direction as to how he wants her to behave. He needs to reinforce the basics like sit and heel. All this stuff about jumping so high and touching the sky and not getting back till the fourth of July. It will only confuse the poor animal. Yet again Rufus choruses that if we don’t know how to do it, he’ll show us how to walk the dog. I’m thinking he must be out of his head on drugs. How else can you explain his nonsensical dog walking ideas?
I’m coming up to the entrance to Kimble’s favourite park. I have to walk through the park to get to the shops. Another old sixties song is trying to come through now. The one about the park melting in the dark and the sweet green icing flowing down because someone left the cake out in the rain.
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