Songs of love and special things....

I cycled to work this morning listening to Barry Manilow.

We go back a long way, me and Barry. When I was five or six, I used to (and I'm relating this second-hand; I seem to have erased it from my memory but I’m sure a trained therapist could retrieve it) kiss the front cover of my mother’s Manilow Magic album*. The first album I ever bought was, embarrassingly, “I Wanna Do It With You” by the same Mr Manilow. I loved it. It was a bit racy, mind, particularly the title song with its frankly graphic lyric**:

“I wanna do it, do it with you
I wanna do it, do it with you
I wanna hold you all night long
Ooh baby, feel so strong
I wanna do it, do it with you
I wanna do it, do it with you
I want to love out my fantasies***
Come on baby please”

I don’t think I knew quite what Barry meant, but I knew I liked it. And, let’s face it, the man is a lyrical genius. Never one to miss a trick, he cleverly shoehorned the phrase “have a banana” into the middle section of that paean to lost love and the merengue, Copacabana. I mean, it was crying out for it. Not quite as satisfying as Abba rhyming “sensible” with “incomprehensible”, granted, but up there nonetheless. And who could forget the cheeky, towel-hopping calypso of “Bermuda Triangle” (Bermuda Triangle! It makes people disappear!), with its breathtaking marriage of “my angle” with “triangle”. Could you have come up with a rhyme for triangle? I don’t think so.

So there you have it. Barry Manilow. Genius. He truly does write the songs that make the whole world sing.

Fact.

*I was going to put “LP” instead of album, but 1) I couldn’t work out whether it should be “LP” or “lp”, and 2) it looked so archaic I wasn’t wholly convinced that I hadn’t dreamed it. So, album it is then. God, the days before CDs and MP3s were a wasteland, weren’t they?

** When I went online to check the lyrics**** it all got a bit weird. The site I used made suggestions of other artists that people checking Barry Manilow lyrics might be interested in. The list included, along with the perfectly acceptably-indexed Dido and Dire Straits, the rather more random inclusion of Placebo, Rage Against the Machine and Ludacris. Placebo and RATM I’m going to give them. After all, I love Barry so why wouldn’t other fans of guitar music? But Ludacris? I’d love to know the thinking behind that one.

*** I wonder how the sexual fantasies of Barry Manilow might shape up? I bet he’s a plushie.

**** Shut up.