Word Up

I do like it when pop music uses big words in amusing places. Julie London set the standard in 1955, when she rhymed "plebeian" with "through with me... and" on the song 'Cry Me A River'. And fair play to Sam Cooke, who slipped "trigonometry" into 'What A Wonderful World' without missing a beat. In this cool tradition, Edwin Collins enlivened 'A Girl Like You Before' with the plea, "I hope that I'm talking allegorically". Quite.

Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy fame is terribly good at this. In 'My Imaginary Friend', he intones that "he works peripatetically". That sounds like it was written for a bet. But the lyric that makes me chuckle most is something that Neil recently donated to a Duke Special project, 'The Silent World Of Hector Mann'.

'Wanda, Darling Of The Jockey Club' is a splendid story of a lowly waiter who is smitten by a female flyer. The setting is the Twenties Jazz Age, the style is ragtime and Hannon writes that she is an "aviatrix". Which as any Latin scholar will know, is a female aviator.

Anyway, the word tickled me. And the song itself is a delightful thing, a tale of bravado above the Rockys and love amongst the gin slings. The mood is pure F Scott Fitzgerald, a writer that Neil previously evoked on 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair' and which seems to fit with his more dapper demeanour.

When Duke Special performed the song last week at the Waterfront Studio in Belfast, the song was perfectly enlivened. The band were playing in the New Orleans vernacular and Ben Castle was a perfect wheeze on the clarinet, dancing the Charleston and celebrating the magnificent lady in her flying machine. Somewhere, Amelia Earhart is smiling.