FUNNY YOU SHOULD SING THAT…The Songs of Jeremy Nicholas (pub. Novello) (for cover, by Clive Francis, click here 15 kb).
Open Wide
I Can’t Quite Remember Your Name
Camping Out
Dad Got All His Medals Out Today
Presidential Precedents
Valentine Card
Pub Crawl
Tongue Twister
SARAH’S ENCORES (pub. Novello)
Place Settings (with alternative lyrics entitled Musical Chairs)
Usherette’s Blues
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Place Settings and Usherette’s Blues have been recorded by Sarah Walker and Roger Vignoles on their album Blah, Blah, Blah (Hyperion CDA66289)
Musical Chairs, Usherette’s Blues, Pretty Plain (unpublished) and Maternity (unpublished) have been recorded by Jody Applebaum and Marc-André Hamelin on their album Serious Fun (Albany TROY744)
‘The noted writer, commentator and Leopold Godowsky biographer Jeremy Nicholas [has] penned Musical Chairs, a classical music “A-list” invitation litany replete with wicked asides, plus three other charmers included here. (Classics Today)
‘Jeremy Nicholas’s “Usherette’s Blues” [is] a clever lament from a theatre usher who never gets to see the final reel, and “Musical Chairs” (Nicholas again), a catty cataloguing of the “glitterati” on classical music’s celebrity list that is guaranteed to have any ARG enthusiast giggling from start to finish.’ (American Record Guide)
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CLASSICAL MUSIC, MAY 1993
Jeremy Nicholas's songs have been delighting audiences for years - the singers look for a good encore. Andrew Stewart reports on a new collection.
Being funny, as any comedian will tell you, is a serious business. When Jeremy Nicholas was faced with the unenviable task of providing a topical comic song for Stop the Week, the popular BBC Radio show which ran from the mid-1970s to 1992, he was only informed of the subjects to be discussed on the programme 48 hours in advance. Coming up with any sort of rhyme at such short notice would tax most people but producing one that can raise a laugh and then setting it to music takes real skill.
Funny You Should Sing That..., a collection of eight songs from Stop the Week, published by Novello, reveals the essence of Nicholas's humour - a typically British mix of scatology, suggestion, wit and irony. In the preface, Nicholas tells how parodies and alternative lyrics appealed to him from a tender age, quoting the following ditty as a source of early inspiration: 'Puff the Magic Dragon lived on the Shelf. / He didn't have no playmates, so / Puff played with himself'. 'I don't know what it is that appeals to people,' he says, 'but there's something there. You expect one thing, and you get the other. It's all done with rhyme and rhythm.'
Nicholas began writing lyrics while still at junior school, clearly enjoying the experience of making his fellow pupils laugh. 'I've always been accused of corrupting and subverting things. At prep school, I remember the headmaster coming into the dorm one night and accusing my brother and myself of upsetting the normal rules of behaviour of the house. It was true; I'd always enjoyed being naughty and sending things up. The scatological thing was very prominant, with anything to do with willies and breasts being right up my street.'
He also admits to the influence of limerics, of which he has a pretty formidable repertoire. Needless to say, the limerics that most appeal are those which succeed in being both risqué and technically fluent, such as the irresistable: A mathematician named Hall, / Had a hexahedronical ball. / The cube of its weight, / times his pecker plus eight, / Was his phone number / - give him a call. 'To write a good limeric,' says Nicholas, 'by God, you've got to be clever; to get a laugh at the end of it, you have to be a genius. Despite themselves, people love limerics and they've definitely had an effect on my songwriting. They have to be grammatical, the story has to be told economically, with no loose words anywhere, and then you have to get that twist at the end.'
The process of writing comic lyrics, he explains, is like inventing and solving your own crossword puzzles. Sloppy rhymes like 'laugh' / 'bath' are strictly forbidden, along with certain words of Anglo-Saxon or Old Dutch provenance. 'I believe it takes skill and experience to write a good lyric. You have to churn out a lot of crap before you begin to understand what works and what doesn't. They have to be truthful: you can't afford to be dishonest when it comes to creating rhymes. The whole thing, in the end, becomes a tremendously challenging technical task; but if the technique shows, then you've failed.'
A typical Nicholas couplet runs something like, 'Have you ever managed putting up a tent / In a howling gale when all the guys were bent?', part of the scouting chorus from Camping Out. Marked to be performed 'gaily' and complete with references to keeping your woggle in your hand, some might not judge such a song to be politically correct. 'If my songs are anythin, I hope they're not politically correct,' responds a vehement Nicholas. 'Bollocks to all that, frankly! I do get angry that we've got so many restrictions now on the subjects we can make jokes about. There is a place for Bernard Manning and a place for the comedian who's politically correct; there's also a place for real geniuses, like Victor Borge.'
Where does Nicholas see the place for his own particular brand of humour? 'I hope my songs are in the tradition of Gilbert and Sullivan, definitely of Coward, Flanders and Swan, Tom Lehrer and all those people. All those songs are written with such joie de vivre and exuberance, which really appeals to me. There are some audiences before which my songs would not get the reaction I would hope for. The audience I feel most comfortable with, I guess, is the literate, educated, fun-loving middle classes. I would not go to Batley Working Men's Club and do these songs, because I'd probably get thrown off stage; whereas I'd have them eating out of my hand in the Shires.'
It's all well and good creating razor-sharp lyrics but if the music they're attached to is clumsy or even too 'arty', one suspects that the songwriter has failed his task. 'There are a number of guidelines in writing music for humerous songs. You want something catchy and hummable; if the music is too sophisticated, though, then it detracts from the main business, being the rhythm of the words and the telling of the story.'
'In a way, my songs are very old-fashioned. Musically, they're not exactly advanced, although I hope there are signs of a brief musical education in some. If the music becomes too clever, then it begins to fall outside the genre, but I do like to have a few tricky moments or quotations in there somewhere. The main thing is that the music has to be limited, rhythmically and harmonically, if the song is going to be immediately accessible. You can't laugh at two things at once: the primary focus must be the words.'
Classical Music 22nd May 1993, page 11