Yes I am back, and thank you for all your concern. I have been undercover in the Internet trying to destroy Radiohead’s In Rainbows from the inside. Unfortunately whilst in there I ran foul of the Master Control Program and lets just say I take corners a lot sharper now on my motorbike. Anyway, as a way of breaking back into the new year, I thought I would revive the Lyric Watch, and what better track to start with than the Sugababes Ugly? Now I’m not going to follow the obvious line on this track. I went there with Xtina and her wrongheaded single Beautiful. Yes it is a horridly self-indulgent ballad from a band who can afford plenty of stylists and therefore should not be harping on about their own inner beauty when people can paint exterior beauty on them. Or if not beauty, feathers and plants (even I don’t understand what is going on in the Change video – except it reminds me a lot of the end of Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain where Hugh Jackman is killed by a tree growing out of his gut. I for one would like to see Heidi Sugababe with a Dutch Elm growing out of her midrift.)
No, my query is this opening self-pitying lyric from the song:
When I was 7
They said I was strange
I noticed that my eyes and hair weren’t the same
Now I looked in the mirror this morning and was happy with my general look and demeanour, and particularly happy that my hair and my eyes were quite different. I considered how odd, if not strange, I would look if our of my eye-holes there was an outgrowth of predominantly keratin based proteins. Or indeed how weird it might be if instead of my luscious locks, I had an excess of vitreous humour or hundreds of beady little goggle holes. Here, let’s compare and contrast the cover of said Ugly single.
The original.
What if their eyes were made of hair?
Now if their hair were made of eyes.
Two of these are considerably STRANGER than the others. Some may even say Ugly (though the eyes do just look a bit like a bubble perm on Mutya). Still since the track has eighteen writing credits they probably all did a word each and didn’t worry about the sense.