Saturday Snapshots #182: A Top Ten Wedding Songs

If anyone knows any reason these answers should not be revealed, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.

10. ET thanks Taylor.

ET, plus "ta"... and James Taylor.

Etta James - Stop The Wedding

9. Dedication! Or... half of it, at least.

Roy Castle was famous for his Dedication. 

Half of that would be...

Roy C - Shotgun Wedding

8. Irish priest on public transport.

Will you be going on the bus, Ted?

Busted - Crashed The Wedding

7. King's wife in hardback emergency room.

A Book in the ER?

With Priscilla (but not Presley).

Booker T & Priscilla - The Wedding Song

6. Musicians who will help you get around London.

An Oyster card will help you travel in the capital.

The Oysterband - Blood Wedding

5. Like a shadow and a divorcee.

Hank Marvin was a Shadow. Tammy Wynette was a divorcee.

Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell - Sad Wedding

4. Romans grasp my realism hour.

Romans grasp was one anagram... my realism hour was another.

Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris - $1000 Wedding

3. Decayed mongrel on the loose!

"Decayed mongrel" was an anagram.

Godley and Creme - Wedding Bells

That's the first time I've ever seen the video to that. I will have nightmares.

2. No longer southerners.

Dixie, no more.

The (Dixie) Chicks - White Trash Wedding

1. I'm feeling bodily ill.

Not much of an anagram. Not much of a picture. But the tune is a solid gold classic...

And that's how you do a video, Godley & Creme. You ride a motorbike through a stained glass window! It's the video with everything AND a kitchen sink. An exploding kitchen sink, naturally.

Do you take these Snapshots, to have and to hold, for richer or poorer, till death do you part?

If so, join me back here again next Saturday.

My Top Twenty of 2020: #16

 

I don’t want to talk anymore about the teenagers. We left them behind. I hope never to see them again, unless I have a baseball bat. But they weren’t the only reason we came to hate that house.

One of the big things that sold Louise on the property was the view from the back garden. Over the fence you could see for miles: all the way down to Huddersfield and beyond. When we moved in, she loved to sit in the back garden early in the morning with a cup of tea, watching the trees and the fields and the weather moving up the valley. At night, we stood out there and stared at the lights of the town.

Then, a couple of months in, the next door neighbour decided to erect a summer house with a felt-tar roof that raised itself a foot or so above the fence and cut off that much of our view. It wasn’t the end of the world, but looking back… it was a sign. The guy was a tinkerer too. The kind of self-made man, jack of all trades with a weird beard, who wanted to do it all himself. Usually late in the evening when he got home from work. Hammering. Drilling. Building his little empire. So he could sit out there in the late summer listening to his Maroon 5 albums. L’enfer c’est les autres.

This was the year they dropped the Dixie. I can see why they did it in the midst of Black Lives Matter, they’ve never been afraid of standing up for their beliefs, even at the risk of alienating their core fanbase. If for no other reason than that, The Chicks deserve a place in the year end countdown. 

Apparently they were going to release a covers album, until one of the Chicks was treated pretty badly by her other half… I don’t know the full details, but putting together the non-too-subtle lyrical clues, he had a party with another lady on the boat belonging to his Chick, and the other lady left a prominent item of underwear behind that tipped off said Chick… The result is this record. A bitter but funny ‘fuck you’ album that strays further from country into pure pop than the Chicks have ever ventured before. Losing the Dixie in more ways than one. It must have worked: it’s rare I see an album I’m listening to on the new CD shelf in Sainsbury’s.