The production of the Beatles' Lady Madonna owes a great deal to Humphrey Lyttleton's Bad Penny Blues. That much is beyond dispute.
What is less well known, however, is that "Bad Penny" was a character in the comic Smash!, created by Leo Baxendale and based on his own character Minnie the Minx in the Beano; Baxendale had left DC Thomson by the mid sixties so could no longer draw the anarchic tomboy he had created.
Go back a few decades, however, to an historic meeting between George Bernard Shaw, composer of My Fair Lady, and AA Milne, who had written a light comedy entitled Belinda. "Your Belinda was a minx, that's what she was - a minx!" Shaw exclaimed by way of greeting. (Spookily, he was to utter precisely the same sentence when they met again some years later.)
So what, you say? But Milne's son was known as Billy Moon - that is, B. Moon. From which it is but a step to C Moon, Paul McCartney reggae-style hit.
Yet Milne died in 1956. How could he have foreseen that Wings song? The answer will take us into some very dark recesses of the soul.
In the song Paul uses the phrase "L 7", meaning "square", the opposite of "C Moon." Macca has said that this was coined by Sam the Sham of Woolly Bully fame, associated, of course, with his backing group the Pharoahs.
In C Moon, Macca also talks of filling his head with glue - not, as has been assumed, a gesture of solidarity with the imminent explosion of punk rock but rather an oblique nod to the character played by Eric Portman in the film A Canterbury Tale who poured glue on girls' hair. (For Macca-based prescience punkwise, listen instead to Magneto and Titanium Man off of the Venus and Mars album where a spoken bridge sounds uncannily like Johnny Rotten.) But Macca observes he'll never get to heaven by applying adhesive to his own scalp, a suggestion that he intends to espouse any form of toupee ... oh, I can't be bothered.
No comments:
Post a Comment