Streets of Ealing

This time nothing as groanworthy as the Four Sturges, you’ll be pleased to know, but we’re still pretty much in the same territory, the same mangled and disreputable suburbs of language.

One of my Christmas presents this year was a CD called “Pressure Drop”, the best of Toots and the Maytals. I don’t know much about this Jamaican band, although I rather like them, and not long ago I watched a documentary about them. It’s my habit when listening to a record for the first time not to look at the titles, sleeve notes or anything extra-musically informative. I prefer to concentrate on the music; I like to be surprised and intrigued solely by what I hear. “Monkey Man” and “54-46 was my number” presented no surprises, and no intrigue, just pleasant and familiar songs. “Streets of Ealing” was more puzzling, however, so having listened to the whole CD, I checked the cover. Mm. No track called “Streets of Ealing”. Very strange, although in precisely that part of the disc where I thought I might find it, the tenth track, was a song titled “Spiritual Healing”. Ah ha ! The rare and fortuitous stumbling-upon of a so-called mondegreen, a creative mishearing. Well, that really made my day.

Songs are well known as potentially rich sources for mondegreens, a special type of wordplay, a subset of the pun, I suppose. The Japanese, who tend not to do things by halves, have raised the mishearing of song lyrics, and their substitution by ludicrous ones, into a whole art form called soramini. I have a lot of time for contemporary Japanese subcultures, but we don’t need to travel that far to indulge the habit, nor do we need to be so deliberate.

Accidental mondegreens are best, the unpredictable ones, although painfully contrived ones also have an appeal of sorts. Perhaps the most agonising specimen of the latter was that magnificently irritating song, originally recorded in the 1940s - which works best with an American accent and was still on the radio during my childhood - “Mairzy doats and dozy doats”. As in “and liddle lamzy divey”. I’m sure you know the one. For a long time I didn’t appreciate that it was a deliberate exploitation of the idea of the mondegreen because (a) I didn’t know that was the word for it (b) I didn’t realise that the song actually was such a thing. I simply heard it as a phonetic string of meaningless sounds. Fine, so it’s a song about mairzy doats, not sure what they are, but no matter, and not much more mysterious than “re turnasenda” or anything else that was bouncing over the Atlantic airwaves in those happy days when America was great and didn’t have to worry about being great again. In any case, pedantically, “Mairzy doats” isn’t a proper mondegreen, because the lyrics don’t make any alternative sense; they’re merely inappropriately chopped up and re-glued word fragments.

Be that as it may. Fast forward a few years to our own take on the English language, an entirely different kind of Mairzy sound, and one encounters the Beatles’ "a girl with colitis goes by", from 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'. Or more conventionally “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes”. Well, it makes about as much sense, but the whole point of a successful mondegreen is that it does have another discernible meaning, however improbable or peculiar. Presumably, sadly, there are girls with colitis and occasionally, well, they pass by. So it’s the real thing, then, a proper mondegreen.

Beatle-related ambiguities, being Beatle-related, have been much discussed (artichokes/arty jokes, armchair/arms yeah), though they’re not as puzzling as K T Tunstall’s apparently estuarial “So to Leigh-on-Sea” (more prosaically “Suddenly I see”), Herman’s Hermits’ “she’s a muscular boy” (“she’s a must to avoid”), Bowie’s inspired “on a merry cast orchard brow” (“on America’s tortured brow” – whatever that means – from ‘Life on Mars?’), or many of the incomprehensible consequences of Elton John’s unique vocal blending of Pinner and the Deep South. Several websites explore this sort of thing (or thang, as Sir Elton would no doubt say), although many of the examples they quote are only slightly erroneous variants on the original and thus not particularly funny or inventive. Former Roxy Music frontman Bryan – “let’s stick together” - Ferry had a singing technique which, appropriately enough, tended to fuse the end of one word with the start of the next. This could be a fruitful technique for artificially generating mondegreens.

We live in less carefree times. Given our ability to google anything, and to find anything, there are implications for the validity of knowledge, per se. If you can find absolute nonsense online, which you most certainly can (present company excepted, of course), with nothing to indicate that it is nonsense, then it’s mildly unsettling, to say the least. Can one perhaps find on the web an entire Borgesian music library of utter falsehood, a parallel lyrical universe of fiendish mondegreens; and how does one know that it is false? How can one tell which is which? For instance, the alternative cheese-fixated lyrics to the Eurythmics’ hit “Sweet Dreams”:

Sweet dreams are made of cheese

Who am I to diss a Brie?

I’ve travelled the world and the Cheddar cheese

Everybody’s looking for Stilton

 
Well … To be honest, the original version is better, if you will halloumi my opinion. If one can so badly misunderstand songs with perfectly sensible and innocent lyrics, what chance for more sensitive texts - religious or political pronouncements, for instance? What should we believe, who should we trust? Even in our irreligious times there persists the London Transport (or TfL) version of the Lord’s Prayer, one of the oldest contrived multiple mondegreens, a myth more suburban than urban, the one that begins “Our Father, which art in Hendon, Harrow Road be thy name, thy Kingston come, thy Wimbledon, in Erith as it is in Hendon” and goes on to plead  “Give us four bus passes” and “lead us not into Brent Station”. But at least it doesn’t try to tempt us into Ealing. For that we need Toots.