Reconnez
Cherie
1978 Stiff Records single
On
a convenient seat by the lavatories |
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The
Zodiac was a Ford Zodiac. My dad's boss's wife drove a Ford Zodiac
- it was about the nearest thing you could get to a Cadillac in England
in the sixties. It was also a nod to an Ian Dury song, The Upminster
Kid which he did when he was in Kilburn & The
High Roads - I used to roam around in a two-tone Zephyr with a
mean and nasty grin... The Ford Zephyr was a companion car to
the Zodiac. There was also the Ford Consul but that wasn't such a cool
car because the man across the road, a builder called Alan Sinden,
drove one and he was boring. Even to me at the age of ten. I put Pac-a-Mac in because it rhymed with Zodiac and also because of my grandmother who you can read about in my autobiography, A Dysfunctional Success. For anyone who doesn't know, a Pac-a-Mac was a thin semi-tranparent raincoat that you could roll up and pop in your shopping bag. My grandmother wore one as a dressing gown when she came to stay. I thought it was the kind of passion-killing article that a teenage girl might put on in a moment of ill-judgment. Gay Paris wasn't gay as in homosexual - back in 1976 when I wrote the song the word gay wasn't used in that context. Later on some people thought that I was gay because of that, and when I suddenly disappeared from view around 1981 I heard a rumour that I'd been killed in a motorcycle accident in New York with my boyfriend. I wasn't and I still don't have a boyfriend. I loved images of bedsitland - I was thinking of part of The Wasteland by T S Elliot: |
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The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays. On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. I Tiresias, old man with wrinkles dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest - I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired. Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on the same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronising kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit... |
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That
might seem unnecessary and beside the point but I like T S Elliot.
I borrowed the spotty clerk motif later on for a Captains Of Industry
number called The Lucky Ones. I think The Members hijacked the bedsit idea from me for The Sound Of The Suburbs though I'm sure they'd hotly deny it. I thought their singer borrowed rather a lot from me but that's by the way. I put the painting stuff into make it more bohemian. The Tricolor is the French flag, I was thinking of Jim Dine's paintings of the stars and stripes. Musically Reconnez Cherie is a cross between Save The Last Dance For Me and Ten Guitars both of which were firm favourites on the Hull pub and club circuit. Ten Guitars was the B side of Release Me by Englebert Humperdink. On the odd occasion I've been known to throw caution to the wind and play Ten Guitars at one of my gigs. I've also done That Old Feeling by Kathy Kirby and There's A Kind of Hush by just about everybody including The Carpenters. That's also by the way by the way. On the record Reconnez Cherie should be in the key of E but on some pressings it's in F because they speeded it up to make it sound more peppy and poppy or something. It just makes me sound like I'm on helium and it loses the groove. Davey Payne played the alto sax solo. He nicked part of it from a TV programme called The Water Margin. His brother Barry Payne played the bass and I think that's the best thing about the record. He was only sixteen at the time. |
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| And finally, people keep asking me for the chords, so here they are: | |
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