Some of the finest pieces in popular music (speaking purely musically) have unfortunately been based around someone cheating and I was dismayed to find three of my all time faves, with three of the best singers going, almost labours of love, were excusing, even pushing, that unacceptable lifestyle.
So I decided not to post these after all in expanded form:
I researched them and that was even more dismaying. The first, with Linda, I knew was about wrong, so when I said to Ay, having split with Aa, one of many times as it turned out … let’s reconstruct it, actually do it, meet at the dark end of a street I know well, easy enough for both to get to, and she’d heard the song … we met, not as a cheating tryst but as an opening one for a new beginning.
Who was I kidding? She had someone as it turns out and Aa heard and came back to “reclaim her property”. And so to the second, with Merrilee, which was not only about cheating was a double entredre on a different Angel of the Morning … the chief fallen sngel himself. I used it in my book with a character, Julia, in a tryst with the very man she’d betray next morning, in a hail of gunfire.
The last was Bono’s song for Roy the Boy … a bit different in that it is her leaving him on a jet airliner for a rich man. The dark joke was that the actress in the clip was actually Bono’s wife of the time.
In one sense, all very exotic and chic … but in another … just tawdry, the whole thing. What sort of person actually embraces those things as a lifestyle? So, in that mood, I cast around for a more up tempo, happier song … guess which one appeared?
Again … fabulous singer, very good instrumentation, esp. with Dave Swarbrick, a trad storytelling from the C17th revamped by an English 60s/70s folk/rock band. And again, in the subject matter … tawdry.
