The Birdie Song: An Act Of Audioterrorism Visited Upon The Self

[Gregory Torso]

Preamble, with drinks:

When was the last time you heard The Birdie Song? I mean, really HEARD The Birdie Song?

Consistently voted the shittiest most towering tower of shit bundle of hiss by boring gas holes who go absolutely tits mental for it when it comes on during one of their "cheese" nights out at whatever club night they're shattering absolutely slaying with their archers and smirnofs. Watch them go off like randy roman candles at weddings when it comes on, don't they, and the aunties do the dance, don't they?

The Birdie Song was a guaranteed school disco bumstormer in the 1980s, courtesy of "Lights Alive" in our little provincial market town. Lights Alive was just an itinerant nicotine 'n' liver failure-yellow septuagenarian cat in a cravat who had a turntable and his own lightbulbs. If you went up to him with a request for say, Yazz or Bros, he'd do a grin at you with his Brut-stained teeth fencing out of his mouth until you went away feeling that something had changed, horribly, within you, but you didn't know what. And he'd put on the Birdie Song. Or that Superman one. Not Laurie Anderson, you peens. The one with the shitty fake muscle walking dance.

I last heard The Birdie Song a couple of months ago in Singapore on the Duck Bus. The Duck Bus is a repurposed military vehicle that trundles tourists around the city and then turns into a boat and goes in the river and you say woo-hoo, but then the last ten minutes of it is just The Birdie Song.
See the tour guide doing the chicken wings with doom and death in her eyes, she says the word "fun" and it slops out of her like birthday cake out of an unresponsive grandpa's mouth.

Let's say she goes on the Duck Bus six times a day - it's about half an hour of tour, and then half an hour between tours, six seems about right - that's at least a full hour of The Birdie Song. Imagine that, knowing it's coming as the aquatic tour tank lumbers out of the river, you position your elbows and get ready to shake your tired ass arse to a cluster of slightly embarrassed, non-participating passengers. Yes there are worse jobs of course but you don't have to do the Birdie Song in them.

In 1987, I argued with Darren Banks for a week about whether it was "The Birdie Song" or "The Tweetie Song" (as he said). Idiot. Fat idiot. And I was never vindicated as the matter was forgotten when Andrew "Buttocks" Padleigh started a war with an old man who kept pigeons near the long-jump sandpit.

Turns out we were both wrong as it's supposedly an old Swiss drinking song known as the Chicken Song or Duck Dance.

And we shall never speak of Buttocks Andrew again.

In an act of self-loathing and spiritual masochism I am going to listen to The Birdie Song for an hour on a loop, because it seems the most logical course of action according to what I have just outlined above. Any act of self-torture can only help one to understand... how? ... why? What is it within us that allows and tolerates these things? That decries the poor quality of something and also celebrates it under the mouldy old umbrella of irony?

Can a piece of music have no merit, at all?

I will soon begin listening to the song I hate most in the world for an hour, once enough alcohol has been consumed to cushion me. Anyone who wants to board the Duck Bus with me is welcome.

[Gregory Torso]

According to this video I just found of a TOTP performance, The Birdie Song is 2 minutes and 28 seconds long. I can't decide if that's too long, or too short. According to my shit maths, that's 24 times I will need to listen to it. Doesn't seem like that much does it.

This video. Fuck me with a heron's beak. It looks grim.

Think of all the wonderful songs that are 2:28. Pie Faced Girls "Fuck You, I'm Pretty", Monster Truck Five's "My Love Is Your Shit Can", Chrome Cranks "Hot Blonde Cocktail", Unholy Swill's "Tapeworm In My Head". I could be listening to those babies over in happiness but no I have made my choice.

I need more beer.

[Crabwalk]

I hope you are still alive.

[Gregory Torso]

Prepping myself (drinking). Going live soon.

[daf]

In 1987, I argued with Darren Banks for a week about whether it was "The Birdie Song" or "The Tweetie Song"

Turns out we were both wrong as it's supposedly an old Swiss drinking song known as the Chicken Song or Duck Dance.

It's all over the shop :

UK :


Italy & US

[Better Midlands]

Let's say she goes on the Duck Bus six times a day - it's about half an hour of tour, and then half an hour between tours, six seems about right - that's at least a full hour of The Birdie Song. Imagine that, knowing it's coming as the aquatic tour tank lumbers out of the river, you position your elbows and get ready to shake your tired ass arse to a cluster of slightly embarrassed, non-participating passengers. Yes there are worse jobs of course but you don't have to do the Birdie Song in them.

Reminds me of this, from CYE

https://youtu.be/Duv7EGr8Nxo

[Gregory Torso]

Right. I'm doing this, on own.

I take the first tentative ear-hole steps towards the border of my happiness and sanity, turn and wave goodbye to a little effigy of me enjoying a Ginsters chicken and mushroom pasty. He waves back. I step into the void.

[Gregory Torso]

First listen. A blackface French Horn player, a bear punching a snare drum and something that looks like a fungal growth in a frilly smock pretending to play a keyboard. Fronted by a greaser tweetie pie that looks like its skin is falling off and a great mass shudders within, ready to blather forth and consume the studio audience.

It's shit, but it's short, and it ends.

[Gregory Torso]

Second listen. I can see the drinking origins of this song. Sort of see myself rolling in drink on the floor of Morrison's The Supermarket with this whirling through my brain as a nervous yet cherubic shelfstocker prods me with her shoe. Everyone must have been pissed in 1981 when this went number 2.

The horrible costumed thing (I am not yet ready to confront its creation) leading this mockery of song can't even clap in time.

[Gregory Torso]

Listen 3.
Getting locked in now. Lazy bear drummer piece of dungareed shit. After about 30 seconds a scowling man leaves the audience to block the fire exits in the studio probably. Not having any of this shit.

[Gregory Torso]

Listen 4.
Starting to recognise fake bird whistles, the only part of the song with any variance whatsoever. That tweetie prick pretending to play a cardboard double bass says bollocks and makes some poor work experience lass hold it. People are really dancing though, with joy in their heart and crinkles in their hair. Bug eyed birds heads streaked with dried semen and lightning scars stare wildly at a horseshoe of dancing girls.

[Spoon of Ploff]

dear gods. what have you done?

[Gregory Torso]

Fifth listen. Now it's becoming annoying. My only joy is the racist oompah al jolsen starling.
That fucking bear is playing the cymbal STAND with its drumstick, the doss cunt.
Drunk girls in the 80s.
What is that on the keyboard?

[the]

Competition idea: remix/cover The Birdie Song and make it good.

[Gregory Torso]

Sixth listen.
I've just realised the bear cunt is actually meant to be some kind of bird cunt.
It looks like a really nasty, really massive wanker, and I hate it.

[Gregory Torso]

Listen 7.

WHY AM I DOING THIS WHEN MY MARRIAGE IS HANGING BY A THREAD i should be tending to my wife making her noodles, listening to her stories, downloading "Come Dine With Me" for her to go dine upon. Not listenign to the Birdie Song in perpetuity, guzzling tear gas from the hose.
Alcohol doesn't clean wounds it just delivers more, to everyone within the shine of its scalpel.

[Gregory Torso]

Eigthth time.

Apologies are not needles that you can use to just keep sewing up wounds in a marriage that has started to split. Too many wounds gouged in drink, illness, panic, boredom, anger, and there is NOTHING on this song except a keyboard so why is there a blackbird minstrel foetal alcohol syndrome bride of frankestien looking box head bouncing up and down withha TUBA

[Gregory Torso]

Listen 9
COME ON YOU PUSSIES I CAN TAKE IT
DO IT

silently twirling beneath its bronze mouth piece the blackened abomination tries to blink its ping pong eye balls and croaks "god didn't make me" lost under relentless rubber squeeze synth

[Spoon of Ploff]

can't you compromise at this point. play it once, but slowed down enough to fill an hour?

[Gregory Torso]

10.
Ouroborous earworm eating and fucking itself in swiss infinity. an act of war  . The Wiggles were the final wave crashing against us. bristling polyester vermiform bodies heaving through claret=capped waves up the beaches of burgundy

Lead bird on this song is wearing a dead airman's scarf over his shoulder, mocking our brave boys who died in the skies. otherwise, he is naked apart from a leather jacket.

keyboard player looks like kevin keagn with small bald patch after 3 weeks on mortuary slab rolled in moss, rinsed through flaked scales in the gut bucket at eth fish market.

[the]

     

[Gregory Torso]

can't you compromise at this point. play it once, but slowed down enough to fill an hour?

NO. I AM LOCKED IN

[BlodwynPig]

Interesting that it started as a Swiss drinking song as it definitely sounds sub-Oompah. I don't know if they have Oompah in Switzerland, but I guess it was a drinking song that originated somewhere between the Bavarian and Swiss alps. Some cunt with an accordion and a flask of Gebirgsenzian.

[Gregory Torso]

Listen number 11

Pissed secretaries whirl on the dancefloor, definitely now is the time to get in there, do the Birdie Dance, despise yourself but maybe she'll go home with you, that's why this was so popular isnt it but why BUY IT? to play in the poodle hair weave rug lounge to your wife "Eh, remember this one? chicka-chicka-chica chick, chika-chicka-crickle-ick DIVORCE

[Gregory Torso]

Twelfth

Although I wish to die, the drummer holds my attention now. Moth egg addled fussy felch grizzly bird doesn't even understand how its one and only drum works, playing the FUCKING CYMBAL STAND>CUNT.

why is "cunt" the limit? we need a word stronger than cunt to describe this cunt. Just play your beat you absolute blight you plague pit you are the worst thing there has even been

[Gregory Torso]

Thirteenth

Getting easier. Starting to hear the oompahs now. Subtle. Well done, racist horn operator. Definite oompahs. Only one of the four pulling his weight. Go, you abominable cow. Never mind that the mouthpiece of your instrument is NOWHERE near your mouth NEVER MIND, those lampshade haircut girls are in your thrall

[Gregory Torso]

Fourteenth

Now it is a dull ache there, an errant tooth or disobedient nerve, painful, but part of the anatomical furniture. There. Like a novelty moneybox or a sympathy valentines card from your mum.
The blackbird is watching, its eye a scab tweezered from its face. This must be what ergot poisoning is like. St Vitus chicken dance. I can taste it between my teeth, horrible cheap synthetic spikes burrowing insiduously into the gum, tunneling upwards into the hypothalamus, laying their eggs

SOMEONE HELP ME

[Gregory Torso]

Fifteenth

Everyone is really laughing, having a balls out wonderful spunk filled testicles time and theres this bloke with a french horn coiled round him like a screaming python and he says wear this vest, its full of nails and fire abd it can put a full stop to this run on sentence

[Gregory Torso]

six  yeen

I am on this carousel now arms locked around the neck of a bellowing plaster horse that is carrying me down into the flames, I am damned. i am going round and round the island. I am driving the Duck Bus. I wave at a little shrivelled himonculous of me ina plastic stool wearing a bus drivers uniform.

Remember when you liked music? really liked it. It meant so much, each record you;d buy, long befor e net connect, staring at the sleeve, trying to decode the magic, bands names in the thank you list. photocopied ideas. mud clod john peel tapes in carrier bags and their songs forever rattlgin in ear.

and now


THIS

[daf]

Competition idea: remix/cover The Birdie Song and make it good.

Exotic!
Igor Presnyakov

Let's ROCK!
Heavy Metal

Let's RAVE!
DJ birdy

Aw, bless
Andrew Foy