Rugby Songs

Another day, another musical Odyssey.

Just a few days after my Billy Bragg epiphany I'm struck once more by a song! I'm walking around the aisles in the Co-Op and suddenly a bunch of words matching the musak tune I'm hearing pop into my head. They are very rude.

When I moved into Earnshaw Hall for my first year at Sheffield Uni in 1969 I found in my empty desk that I had inherited a discarded vinyl record of ...rugby songs. (It had to be vinyl, then. Cassette tapes were not available for music until the 1970s and 'digital' was something a doctor did to check the prostate glands of elderly men.)

We (I had a shared room in my first year, which was awful) played said record a few times, which is how I came to know the tunes and some words to several bawdy songs: Why Was he Born so Beautiful, Old King Cole, Dinah, The Good Ship Venus, Roll me Over, Funiculi Funicula (the other version) and many other vile, misogynistic classics. 

Back to today's experience. I knew the tune and the chorus to this ditty. It goes something like "Balls to your partner, arse against the wall. If you've never been had on a Saturday night you've never been had at all". Until today I had no idea that the tune belonged to an actual song! I still don't know what the song was, but it sounded like a 1930s American recording.

Even at 70 you can learn something new every day! And I can't wait to teach these songs to my grandkids when they're a bit older.

What happened to the record? In June 1970 I left it in the desk drawer for the next occupant. Subsequently, when trying to remember the words, I often regretted this act of altruism. 

(In fact this record may or may not have been how I first heard the 'Ballad of Eskimo Nell', which to my shame was the subject of my first ever internet search (probably on AltaVista) via a primitive PC at the Text Retrieval '96 conference exhibition in London! (For the record I did find the lyrics! They were already online!) On the other hand the Ballad of Eskimo Nell may well have come from my friend Chris (who was DEFINITELY responsible for passing on another classic: "We're off the See the Wild West Show").