Am I the only one one who sang this little pastiche re school dinners about a month after the Eurovision conquest?

Good on ye girl

Dana had a run of UK hits in the mid-70s, one of which was accompanied by a rather fetching head-and-shoulders publicity photo which gave no hint of the strapless dress she was presumably wearing. The Record Mirror headline “Was Dana topless? - the truth” is one of the more surreal memories of the time.

There used to be a comedy show over on Radio 4 called “Look Back At The Nineties” which once did a spoof Irish Eurovision entry that consisted entirely of insults to other European nations. Over in the real world, the Irish solved the problem by sending a singer over to Norway on a scholarship so she won for them instead.

Hmm… three posts from me in this thread and nothing about the song? Draw your own conclusions.

(i put this link up last time as well wwolfe! do pay attention!)

it’s a nonsense song about a once well-known article which featured someone’s name on the bottle — given that the name was euphonious, people understandably made up stories about the person whose name it was, and a song as well

It’s mostly just a shock to consider this sitting alongside “Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” in that big aeroplane - a thing of the sky - maked “1970.”

Thank you–the visual image is stunning. One hopes the volume is so loud that “things of the ground” can hear Sly and the Family Stone as the aeroplane flies overhead. “Things of” seems to be part of the metaphorical structure upon which the whole song, um, sits or stands. The snippet I heard had something about the “snowflake or twooo-oooo” and “Dances, romances / Things of the night.” Personally, I can think of a lot of “things of the night” that would come to mind before dances and romances, but then I’ve been cynical from a very young age.

I think we’re coming up on an era of metaphor abuse. We’ve already had that “Silver Girl,” which is absurd but not quite as flat-footed as “things of the sky,” which suggests an inability to think what all that might entail (bats, zeppelins, locusts, bombs, meteorites, UFOs, or, in the next song, a great big spirit). You could substitute any of these things for the original lyric; they might make the imagery more perverse, but the result wouldn’t be all that different. But then the title in itself suggests a grab bag of ill-sorted objects in which all seem to have equal value. Anything will do.

Chuck Berry could have saved lots of effort by just writing, “Things about cars” for a lots of his lyrics.

“As I was motivatin’ over the hill / I saw things about cars . . . .” Indeed!

That’s an awful line - “Things of the sky”?? Why not just say, “I can’t think of anything else that flies to put here”? Chuck Berry could have saved lots of effort by just writing, “Things about cars” for a lots of his lyrics.

iTunes only has Foster and Allen’s version. If Dana’s is even more twee, it’s scary.

This reminds me of Tom T. Hall’s “I Love” from a few years later: a laubdry list of things that make the singer sentimental, and then he gets sentimental about getting sentimental. Still, this doesn’t make me fill with rage at its badness. It’s mostly just a shock to consider this sitting alongside “Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” in that big aeroplane - a thing of the sky - maked “1970.”

And earlier this week I said I was going to honor Ask a Stupid Question Day” (today) by asking a stupid question aboiut “Lily the Pink.” So: What does the title mean? What I mean is, are the three words supposed to be Noun/Article/Adjective, or Verb/Article/Noun? In other words, “Ivan the Terrible” or “Do the Strand”? It’s probably the former, but it could also be some English slang expression I don’t know.

So there’s my Stupid Question. My only defense is - it’s not as stupid as “Things of the sky” was as a lyric.

“On the Eurotrash programme Terry was shown claiming that if the lyrics to ‘All Kinds of Everything’ were copyrighted Leonard Cohen they would be seen as a work of genius, as opposed to being denigrated and overlooked due to the Eurovision connection.”