Fan Fare, What's New, Pussycat?
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Tom Earns A New “Crown” As “King Of Murky Lyrics” With “Delilah” & “Green, Green Grass”
Sunday, July 15th, 2007In his column in the Monday, July 16th Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker takes a look at what he calls “murky” lyrics. That is, song lyrics that sound nice — even cheerful — but which, on closer inspection, are actually tasteless and ominous. He says at the top of his article “Let’s hear it for murky lyrics. Well, not out loud, of course, because they’re probably too obscene.” We must note that in the TJ lyrics he writes about, he says what we’ve said…..just kind of funny. Guess the magic is in the music, not the lyrics, when people adopt an anthem. He takes on Gary Puckett’s Young Girl, and Sting’s Every Breath You Take. We hope you’re not offended by the language and, further, must admit we never thought of Green Green Grass as a sequel to Delilah. Did you? Anyway, he writes:
“The absolute king of unexpectedly murky lyrics, however, is Tom Jones. Take Delilah: on the face of it, a rousing sing-along anthem; a cross between a hen party and the good-natured gusto of a beer hall. Yet its sentiments are black as pitch. It opens with the paranoid narrator strolling past Delilah’s house and spotting ‘the flickering shadows of love on her blind’ — a poetic way of describing a blow job viewed in silhouette. ‘She was my woman,’ he declares, adding that ‘as she deceived me I watched and went out of my mind’. There’s a very real chance, of course, that Delilah isn’t ‘his’ woman at all, just a random stranger.
“Thus deranged, the narrator stands outside her house until dawn, at which point the situation rapidly worsens. ‘At break of day, when that man drove away, I was waiting/I crossed the street to her house and she opened the door/She stood there laughing/ I felt the knife in my hand, and she laughed no more.’ As far as chilling economy of language goes, ‘I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more’ is up there with Edgar Allan Poe. And it gets nastier still. The psychotic murderer (played by Tom Jones, remember) sings the final lines to his victim’s corpse. ‘So before they come to break down the door/Forgive me Delilah/I just couldn’t take any more.’ Tom Jones is on his knees, sobbing over the body of a woman he has just stabbed to death — and blaming her for bringing it on herself. The Sun Has Got His Hat On it ain’t.
“The Green, Green Grass of Home functions as an unofficial sequel. To casual listeners, it is a nostalgic evocation of valley life, in which Tom visits his home town, meets his mum and dad, spots his childhood sweetheart, and smiles at an old oak tree he used to play on. And then in the final verse: whammo! Tom wakes up. It’s all been a dream. He’s actually in a prison cell on death row (‘four gray walls surround me’), and the padre’s just arrived to walk him to the electric chair. As for the ‘green, green grass of home’ — they’re going to bury him under it.
July 16th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Very funny!!! I never though of the two songs being related.
July 16th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Didn’t those songs come out in the wrong order to be prequel and sequel of each other?
July 16th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Yes, mharding, you are right as usual. Delilah was released in 1968 and Green Green Grass in 1967. Perhaps Delilah was his last-minute explanation, his deathbed confession, explaining why he did what he did. You know, what he wanted people to know before they laid him “neath the green green grass of home.”
July 16th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
I always found those two songs on the macabre side. Cool Water also.
“Make me explode although you know the route to go is to sex me slow”…nothing murky about that one!
July 20th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Well, we always knew what the words were, didn’t we???