Oh dear. When I suggested (Diary January 7th) that the National Children’s Choir had preserved all the original lyrics of The Boys Are Back in Town at a Phil Lynott tribute concert on Sunday, it seems I was mistaken.
The choir’s musical director, Anne Purcell, has been in touch to say that while she was “delighted with [my] positive review”, the NCC had in fact seen fit to change some of the words to make them more suitable for tender vocalists.
Perhaps by then I was suffering from hearing loss after the earlier bands, which had concentrated on the heavy metal end of the Thin Lizzy spectrum. Either that, or the rewrites were too subtle for me to pick up.
Also, in my defence, I may have been lulled into a false sense of senility by the opening verse, which was indeed unexpurgated.
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Thus, even in the NCC version, the boys had just got back today, as usual. And man, them “cats” were still “crazy”: so no change there either.
They were still asking if you were around, too, and not at all surprised to hear you were “livin’ downtown, driving all the old men crazy”.
But then came verse two, by which time I must have been singing along with the original lyrics, oblivious to the subtle revisions emanating from the choir of angels on stage.
In their version, I now know, that “chick” who danced a lot had become a “girl”. And rather than “shaking what she’d got”, she was now merely “showing” it.
Furthermore, where Lynott had declared the female dancer to be “steaming”, the NCC version lowered the temperature and declared her “dreamy” instead.
Perhaps the most radical rewrite concerned the controversial incident “that time over at Johnny’s place”. In the new version, the female protagonist did not slap Johnny’s face, she “kissed” it!
And this more Christian approach seems to have caused some confusion among Johnny’s macho pals, who still nevertheless “fell about the place”, as in the original, and drew a similar conclusion: “If that girl don’t’ wanna know, forget her”.
The message of peace and goodwill also extended to the final verse, where on “Friday night, dressed to kill”, the gang would be “down at Dino’s bar and grill”, also as usual.
But there would be no bloodshed on this occasion. “The drinks will flow and cups will fill” sang the choir, turning Lynott’s fight night into a tea party, where “if the boys wanna play, you’d better let ‘em”.
On a separate note, I’m sure some of the innocents who sang the song are still wondering why it featured cats – and talking cats at that. Even in 1976, that was a bit of a throwback to the hippie lingo of the late 1960s.
No doubt, there’s an odd two-legged cat still limping around Dublin today, in a worn-out kaftan.
But as a description of a certain kind of male, the term was already threatened with extinction then, alongside “mean old daddy” (copyright Joni Mitchell). Soon it had gone the same way as “groovy”, “far out” and “you dig?”.
Anyway, clearly, I need to wash my ears out before the next National Children’s Choir concert. In the meantime, I’m happy to correct the record.
[ This Album Changed My Life: Joni Mitchell – Blue (1971)Opens in new window ]
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Speaking of records and places of correction, I was reminded again the other night of a line by Lynott that, skilful a wordsmith as he was, is often included in worst ever lyric lists.
This is the one where he sings “Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak,” then predicts the event will happen: “somewhere in this town”.
Critics have responded with the advice: “Try the jail”. In response to which, of course, the escape could be by tunnel, which would emerge outside the prison walls, albeit probably in the same neighbourhood.
But after Sunday’s concert, I found myself looking up the world record distance for an escape tunnel. Which, it seems, was set in fairly recent times, by the Mexican drug lord El Chapo.
Now back behind bars for life, this time in the US, he broke out of a Mexican prison in 2015, via a tunnel that ran for 1.5km, or just under a mile.
A state-of-the-art construction, it was 1.7m high, with ventilation shafts and artificial lighting. And among the things found it in afterwards was a motorbike, thought to have been used in the escape. That’s exactly how Lynott’s jailbreakers would have come out too.
To put a 1.5km tunnel into perspective, in Dublin terms, an equivalent originating in Mountjoy could emerge in Stoneybatter or Drumcondra, or indeed in the middle of Croke Park (giving a whole new lease to the sporting cliche “they got out of jail there”). God help us, even Glasnevin might not be beyond reach.
So yet again, the late lamented Thin Lizzy lyricist was ahead of the posse here. Alas poor Phil, there were some things he couldn’t escape: the products of the same El Chapo and his likes chief among them.
