Snapshots #269: A Top Ten Growing Up Songs

I'm too excited by the new Indiana Jones trailer to write a proper introduction this morning.

Some of us will never grow up...

10. A Spider, sounds like he’s got a Death Wish.

A Spider from Mars, who sounds a bit like (Charles) Bronson.

Mick Ronson - Growing Up And I'm Fine

9. Dylan is an Idol in towns with a rose between them.

Billy Idol and Bob Dylan; a rose between two thorns...

Billy Bob Thornton - I Gotta Grow Up

8. Sick nun.

Twisted Sister - I'll Never Grow Up

7. Good ol' boys.

Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson - Mammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys

6. Exciting to a Monster Muppet.

Cookie Monster!

The Cookies ~ Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys

5. The jets are down.

The Blue Aeroplanes - Growing Up, Growing Down

4. What a waste!

Garbage - When I Grow Up

3. Found floating off Brighton, Bondi and Miami.

Bouys floating in the sea off three famous beaches.

The Beach Boys - When I Grow Up To Be A Man

2. Cram one sugarcube inside.

Cram one sugarcube inside.

The Ramones - I Don't Wanna Grow Up

1.  2 Bs become 1.

The above picture might look like Harry Styles... but it's actually a computerised merging of the two photos below...

Because here's a song they both recorded. Written by Bruce, recorded not long after by Bowie... though his version wasn't released until the 90s.

If you promise not to grow up between now and next Saturday, Snapshots will return...

Saturday Snapshots #50 - The Answers

Welcome, creeps and weirdoes, to the answers to yesterday's Saturday Snapshots. Oh, don't be such a Paranoid Android - I wasn't talking about you!

Thank you all for playing along, and for your nice comments about Saturday Snapshots. Alyson returned to take the victory with some excellent detective work this week. 

Here are the answers. No surprises here...

20. Vigorous bloke wins lottery.

Vigour is verve.

A lucky man would win the lottery.

The Verve - Lucky Man

19. Exciting experiences with no adverts! Slow down.

Exciting experiences would be adventures, minus the ads.

The Ventures - Walk Don't Run

18. Vocal coaches for everyone! We've just started looking.

The New Seekers - I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing

(Yes, I went there.)

17. Would you rather study the early days of the Hebrides... or see an Olivia Newton-John movie?

The Mull Historical Society - Watching Xanadu

16. Are you fond of my curves?

The Contours - Do You Love Me?

15. That baked helianthus is as old as Taylor Swift.

A helianthus is a sunflower.

Baked beans.

Taylor Swift sang about being 22.

Sunflower Bean - Twentytwo

14. WWI soldier discovers ska punk and gets the number for one of Brandon Flowers' friends.

WWI soldiers were Tommies.

Ska-punk was Two-Tone.

The Killers (Brandon Flowers) sang Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine.

Tommy Tutone - 867-5309 / Jenny

13. Grisly ghouls from every tomb get canonised with paracetamol.

Vincent Price famously rapped about "grisly ghouls from every tomb" in Thriller.

Saints get canonised.

Paracetamol are pills.

St. Vincent - Pills

12. Bloody cheek - coming over here, desperately needing the loo!

Bloody foreigners!

Foreigner - Urgent

11. Peter Wyngarde tries to find the Vapour Rub at work.

Peter Wyngarde was Jason King who worked for Department S.

Vicks make Vapour Rub.

Department S - Is Vic There?

10. Smash a window with a big piece of chicken.

Superchunk - Break The Glass

9. White walrus attacks blokes saying hi on a Rio beach.

Barry White was The Walrus of Love.

Blokes saying hi would be Man-ello!

A beach in Rio is the Copacabana.

Barry Manilow - Copacabana

8. Lad from London tries to remember his pincode. May an early year of rock 'n' roll help?

A lad from London would be a City Boy.

An early year of rock n roll = 57. May = 05.

City Boy - 5705

7. Chubby Checker's relative refuses to put up with all that dancing anymore.

Chubby Checker's dance was The Twist.

His relative is his sister.

If she refuses to put up with it...

Twisted Sister - We're Not Gonna Take It

6. 12 years of hard labour brightens up the capital.

12 years a slave.

The Slaves - Cheer Up, London!

(It's a toss up for Video of the Week between this and Twisted Sister.)

5. Lee Harvey Oswald gets chivalrous all across the States.

Lee Harvey Oswald claimed he was a patsy.

Chivalrous = gallant.

Patsy Gallant - From New York To LA

4. Stomach ache caused by a late encounter with Jerry Dammers.

Stomach ache would feel like a lead belly.

Jerry Dammers was in the Specials.

Leadbelly - The Midnight Special

3. A bunch of converted apostles get surrounded by water.

The Brady Bunch.

Paul was a converted apostle.

Islands are surrounded by water.

Paul Brady - The Island

2. Emergency treatment for cloudy optimists.

First Aid Kit - My Silver Lining

1. Redial Tim - he's all confused by the lack of action.

Redial Tim is an anagram.



More next week... Karma Police permitting.

My Top Ten Wrath Songs (Seven Deadly Sins #5)

The fifth deadly sin is the one that gets us all pissed off...

Special mentions to Billy Fury, Rage Against The Machine, The Temper Trap, The Furious 5 and... erm, Angry Anderson.


10. Morrissey - Sorrow Will Come In The End

It's hard to think of a Morrissey solo album that doesn't contain a fair few angry songs, though this oddity is perhaps his most direct. Only released on the US version of the Maladjusted album, it's a spoken word rant-poem aimed at his former bandmates in The Smiths (well, Mike and Andy) and the judge who sided with them in the infamous court case over royalties. You know, the judge who decided Joyce and Rourke were thoroughly decent chaps while Mozzer was "devious, truculent and unreliable"... well, you can see why he was miffed.

All that said, Sorrow Will Come In The End isn't one of the Mozfather's finest works... though it does redeem itself by going suitably mental with a fairground organ about halfway through (following on nicely from my last two Top Tens). It remains one of the strangest records I've ever heard, and that's saying something.

9. Laura Marling - All My Rage

I love the humorous opening to this folky blast of weary resignation... 

Stole my children, left my son
Of all of them, he's the only one who did not mean that much to me
I tip my cap to the raging sea

8. Ben Folds Five - One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces

 When he was a little kid, Ben got beat up a lot. This was his revenge... kiss my ass!

7. Twisted Sister - We're Not Gonna Take It

Top comedy video!

6. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Rage Hard

Rage! Rage! Rage! Rage!
Rage Hard!

If you say so, Holly. 

5. Elvis Costello - All The Rage

Costello was very much considered the "angry young man" when he first hit the punk pop scene in the late 70s... though the only song he sang about anger back then was called I'm Not Angry (it wasn't a particularly honest title). This, on the other hand, comes from later in his career... when he was supposed to have mellowed.

Alone with your tweezers and your handkerchief
You murder time and truth, love, laughter and belief
So don't try to touch my heart, it's darker than you think
And don't try to read my mind because it's full of disappearing ink

4. Billy Joel - Angry Young Man

 How angry is Billy? So angry, it takes him two minutes to start singing. Blinding intro though!

3. Catatonia - Road Rage

 I sympathise with Cerys; little else gets my bloody boiling quite like bad driving.

2. The King Blues - We Are Fucking Angry

Written in support of the UK student protests of 2011 against the cuts to tuition fees - one of the angriest songs you'll ever hear.

1. The Dixie Chicks - Not Ready To Make Nice

The Dixie Chicks made a stand against George W. Bush and took a kicking in the conservative midwest as a result. They refused to apologise - this was their angry repost.

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad, sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over?

So - which omission incurred your wrath?

My Top Ten MF Songs (Warning - Contains Language That Some Readers May Find Offensive)

I don't approve of bad language... unless it's used creatively... in which case, I'm all for it.



10. Kid Rock - You Never Met A Mother Fucker Quite Like Me

Kid Rock wipes his bottom with Radiohead toilet paper. (See the edited-for-language, sorry, video.) For that reason alone, he squeezes into the Top Ten.

9. Girls - Big Bad Mean Mother Fucker

 Sounds like it comes from an X-rated version of the Grease soundtrack.

But come on, don't call your band "Girls" is you want to have any hope of anybody ever finding you on the internet.

8. Julian Cope -  All the Blowing-Themselves-Up Motherfuckers (Will Realise The Minute They Die That They Were Suckers)

And this is why Julian Cope was canonised.

Great harmonica too.

7. Twisted Sister - S.M.F.

Thanks again to Rob for this one. Actually, SMF doesn't stand for what you think it does. Well, the M does (with an -ing on the end). The S and F stand for Sick and Friends, disrespectfully.

6. Prince - Sexy MF

Amazed to find this on youtube... not because of the naughty word, but because Prince hates youtube. The full length video does take about three weeks to get going though.

5. Eels - It's A Motherfucker

A touching ballad about loneliness and regret.

Really.

4. Frank Turner - Heartless Bastard Mother Fucker

Dripping bile from every note. 

If you're easily amused by foul language (as I am), you'll want to play this right to the end.

3. John Grant - GMF

From his new album, Pale Green Ghosts, already a contender for the best record I've heard this year. Besides this, one of the other tracks is called Ernest Borgnine... WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?

Half of the time I think I'm in some movie,
I play the underdog, of course.
I wonder who they'll get to play me?
Maybe they could dig up Richard Burton's corpse.

Buy this record and... you could be laughing 65% more of the time.

2. The Bloodhound Gang - Fire Water Burn

Sadly, the video version replaces all the naughty words with donkey sfx. Thankfully, someone's uploaded a version that doesn't...

Yeah I'm hung like planet Pluto, hard to see with the naked eye
But if I crashed into Uranus I would stick it where the sun don't shine
Cause I'm kind of like Han Solo, always stroking my own wookie
I'm the root of all that's evil, yeah, but you can call me cookie

The very definition of "juvenile". Glorious.

1. Martha Wainwright - Bloody Mother Fucking Arsehole

Martha's heartbreaking tribute to her dad, Loudon Wainwright III is the best thing she ever recorded... Loudon should be proud.

I will not pretend, I will not put on a smile
I will not say I'm all right for you
When all I wanted was to be good
To do everythin' in truth
To do everythin' in truth

You may (not) be surprised to learn I could easily have filled another ten... although some of them would have been so loud, they'd have made Twisted Sister sound like Sister Sledge.

Still, which is your Mighty Favourite?