Here’s a quick (and patchy) history lesson for you all:

Once upon a time, you could guarantee to get a song into the charts because it was in a TV commercial – usually one for jeans – and people hadn’t heard it in ages. Then you could guarantee to get a song into the charts because it was in a TV commercial and no-one had ever heard it before. Then there were a LOT of songs in TV commercials, so you couldn’t guarantee anything would get into the charts.

Then the charts started to become dominated by download sales over CD sales, which meant releasing songs from TV commercials was a lot easier to do. Then advertisers realised that interesting covers of classic old hits really fires up the public’s imagination (hello Glee!), and now some songs from TV commercials get into the charts and some do not.

This song is doing quite well. It is currently being used in a TV commercial.

(No video. You’ll never guess, it’s a TV commerical.)

I’ve always had a bit of trouble with the lyrics to this song. It’s not so much the lumping together of various characteristics and behaviours – some pleasant, some less so – and chucking a big sign on top saying “THIS IS WOMANHOOD, AS I SEE IT”, lovely as that is.

It’s more that, having described his composite girlfriend as being aloof, ditsy and manipulative, and of having a devastating effect on any poor sucker who is unlucky enough to fall for her and her tricks, Billy Joel (who wrote it) signs off each verse with that “she’s always a woman to me” line, as if to say “well, I knew the risks – she is female after all – but let’s face it, she looks smashing in a dress.”

He might as well sing “eh, whaddya gonna do, GURLS, EH?” and go back to crying in his beer.

Well I for one won’t stand it. YES it’s a tender, lilting ballad with a beautiful melody, straight off a production line of classic ’70s radio hits. YES it’s a reflective meditation from a man who has seen too much, on the ups and downs of his troubled love life. YES Fyfe Dangerfield out of the Guillemots has a name like he’s a spy, code-name double-oh banana – with a license to peel, and YES he makes a decent fist of it, without getting in the way of the original too much.

But at the end of the day, it’s still a guy moaning on about how evil women can be, and how men just have to put up with it because, well, they’re women. And this is a classic love song?

People are WEIRD.

Download: Out now
www.fyfedangerfield.com
BBC Music page

(Fraser McAlpine)

Twenty-Seven Views says: “The track sounds incredibly similar to the original but is just as endearing.”

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