Lyrics and The Power of the Interweb.

This morning I arrived at The Hole Making Shop singing to myself.

The tune was the last one I heard on the radio before getting out of the car and clocking on.

It was Manfred Mann and the Earth Band with'Blinded by the Light'.

The problem was, the only bit of the lyric that has been comprehensible to me since I first heard the track sometime back in the early 13th century were the title words. The rest of the chorus has always been for me an audio mush that sounded something like "Blinded by the light, vanduptimidooshon larga gooner inder nye".

But it's so catchy I couldn't stop.

Twenty minutes in to the morning's Hole Making Session, my colleague Charlie ( 5' 10", lots of interesting tattoos, nice girl) was getting a bit fed up with it.

I had to admit that so was I.

Then in stepped Cheryl, one of The Grand Master Hole-makers on duty with us that shift.

She found the lyrics on Google and printed them off for me.

"Blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night"

A mystery solved! And one that had haunted me most of my adult life!

Finally!

I understood.

But we didn't stop there.

Readers of a certain vintage will remember The Skids "Into the Valley" from 1978 or '79.

Once again, only the title is comprehensible on the record. The rest is just very catchy and rhythmic wibble.

Not any more.

If you have ever wondered what on earth they were on about, Google it.

You will be as surprised as I was to find an anti-war song as beautiful and eloquent as Wilfred Owen.

Which brings me to the last of my unsolved mystery lyrics.

'Magnolia Simms' by the Monkees.

An utterly daft song with a manufactured scratch on it.

However, to my teenage ear (I owned a very battered LP with it on) the song had a real feeling of defiance, laced with something of anger and 'who cares what you think' about it.

(Other kids of my age were rocking out to AC/DC, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, which probably explains why I didn't have many friends....)

'Magnolia Simms' became my theme song, probably because I spent my teens being angry, defiant and not caring.....

I even named my first car, a 1956 Morris Minor split-screen "Magnolia Simms"....

My version:

"Talk to me, you blue island palms, oh , that sweet Magnolia......

Apple pie underneath the window still warm,

Stay with me, Magnolia!"

Sums up a South Seas idyll, doesn't it, with a duskily beautiful Magnolia Simms
ever at your side, and like the trusty Morris, never letting you down, taking the p*ss or being cruel.

Today, I found out I got it completely wrong.

The first line is:

"Love, to me, is blue eyed and blonde, oh, that sweet Magnolia......."

Even when objections to something which whiffs vaguely of crypto-fascism are put aside, I still vastly prefer my mis-heard version......

And, no, since you ask, I have NOT been at the cooking sherry again.............