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You can’t get this door open at all, you’ve got to keep it full of petrol or it shows empty. Bad enough all up and down the road, but just outside where I happen to live, 1a (of course it would be), it’s just like the great North face of Everest. If you want to use this door you can make a jump for it. Well now, that means you can only get this near-side door open a little bit, then the pavement stops it. If you try to park your car by the pavement, as people do from time to time, the car’s tilted, like that. That road has got the steepest camber on it - you know, the old slope - of any road in London.
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In the introduction (which I’ve omitted), Michael Flanders talks about the song’s inspiration, which involves being unable to park (or get out of his car) on the street where he lives: Fortunately, that was the majority of each record. In the U.S., borrowing the records from friends, my dad taped, on a reel-to-reel (the bulkier predecessor of the cassette recorder), At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat - though I later learned that he only taped the pieces that he liked. They even saw Flanders and Swann perform there.
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Though I grew up north of Boston Massachusetts, my parents lived in London during the latter half of the 1960s. You see, Flanders and Swann are the music of my childhood. This is still the reason I know anything about thermodynamics. Showing their range, Swann and Flanders explain thermodynamics via a jazzy scat number. (No, the song doesn’t use the expression “GALMI,” but that’s an acronym for “Get A Little Man In.” I’ve heard it on British sitcoms.) The GALMI method has its flaws, as this song points out. “Earth has not anything to show more fair” is from Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.” “Army lorry” puns on the Scots song “Annie Laurie,” which includes the line “And for bonnie Annie Laurie, / I’d lay me down and dee” (“dee” being a Scots pronunciation of “die”). The first was “The Hippopotamus Song” (above) so, moving to the second….Ī paean to the “monarch of the road,” that “Scarlet-painted London Transport, Diesel-engined, Ninety-seven horsepower Omnibus!” Swann takes on the role of driver, Flanders the conductor, and they sing heartily, with a mix of affection and mockery.Ī few allusions of note. Never heard of Flanders and Swann? Or care to be reacquainted? Well, here’s my (admittedly subjective) list of essential songs, complete with audio, commentary, and (when available) video. David Hyde-Pierce and John Lithgow are probably the duo’s best-known contemporary fans. George Martin (yes, the Beatles’ producer) produced their best-known albums. With wit, wordplay, and complex rhyme schemes, the duo wrote over a hundred songs, and between 19 gave hundreds of performances in the UK, Canada, and the US - plus, in 1964, a few in Australia and New Zealand. Flanders was the Gilbert, writing nearly all of the lyrics, and Swann the Sullivan, writing all of the music (and the occasional lyric). Though Lehrer famously set his “The Elements” to Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song,” the librettist and composer of The Pirates of Penzance had a much stronger influence on Flanders and Swann. As Flanders himself observes in At the Drop of Another Hat (1964), “The purpose of satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth - and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.” They are satirists, but (usually) lack the aggression of Lehrer, favoring instead satire’s sense of play and a kind of wry, bemused judgment - or, in the case of songs like “The Hippopotamus,” more whimsy than judgment. If you’re unfamiliar with this duo, you might think of Flanders (1922-1975) and Swann (1923-1994) as something of a British Tom Lehrer (b. (I haven’t seen the book, and so can’t vouch for how well or poorly the song has been adapted.) There’s even a children’s-book version of this, The Hippopotamus Song: A Muddy Love Story (1991), illustrated by Nadine Bernard Westcott. (In terms of Flanders-and-Swann awareness, Canadians seem somewhere in between - more than Americans, but less than Britons.) So, to acquaint or re-acquaint yourself with Flanders and Swann, let’s listen to “The Hippopotamus.” If you are American, well, that’s much less likely. I say that because, if you are English, you’re very likely to at least have heard of Flanders and Swann. Indeed, I suspect that even a few Americans know this one. Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. The duo’s best-known such number may be “The Hippopotamus,” with its cheerful, waltzing chorus of Michael Flanders, introduction to “The Gnu,” At the Drop of a Hat (1960)Īs Michael Flanders says, the animal songs made him and his partner Donald Swann famous.
#SONGS LIKE ANIMAL I HAVE BECOME SERIES#
Some of the songs that have made our names a household word - like “slop-bucket” - are the little series of animal songs that we’ve been writing.