Thanks, but no thanks.

I was wondering how I would start my ‘blog’, and whilst doing so I happened to be listening to Radio 2 when a chap called Brandon Flowers started singing about being caught in the middle of a crossfire, which I doubt very much.

Now, I am no writer of music or lyrics, as the SWRI will confirm, but a few points about this song forced themselves to my attention.

1)    ‘Let me inside, no cause for alarm/I promise tonight not to do no harm/Yeah I promise you babe, I won't do you no harm’

Would you, if you were by yourself at night in your house during a storm, let in a strange man saying ‘Let me inside, no cause for alarm’? I bloody well wouldn’t. Anyone saying that is probably armed with frying pan ready to knock you out and steal the family silver. This tends to be supported by the fact that he then says, ‘I promise tonight not to do no harm…I won’t do you no harm.’ I am a firm believer that punctuation saves lives (viz. ‘Let’s eat, Grandma’ vs ‘Let’s eat Grandma!’) and that the expulsion of double negatives and the correct word order could well be the key to saving the universe one day. This is a man blatantly telling you that he’s probably moved on from the frying pan and is clearly up to no good. Not doing no harm is his way of saying he’ll do you some harm. Just because this (un)grammatical construction might make him ‘down with the kids’ or popular in his street gang of miscreants, does not detract from the fact that he means harm and will have more than just the family silver if you are not prepared to grab the 20 bore from the gun safe, at which point, let’s just say that the beads being drawn are not limited to the Devil’s fiery arrows.

2)    ‘There's a still in the street outside your window…I forget all about the storm outside…’

First, let us assume that he is not talking about a fifty-gallon pot still, which would be a matter for the Customs & Excise enforcement division. Probably, he is referring to stillness.  Yet, it’s impossible to ignore the glaring contradiction that, when he knocked on your door to steal the silver, and commenced watching you undress, he was allegedly searching for shelter from a storm allegedly already in progress. This ruddy pervert cannot give you a straight answer about the weather even though you are both looking out the window. Poetry be blowed, this is lunacy.

3)   Fifteen times does this man say ‘Lay your body down’, before finishing off with ‘Next to mine’. If he meant for me to LIE MYSELF down he would, no doubt, have said so. The use of LAY leads us inescapably to assume that I am carrying a body, and am to place it next to his.  But next to his OWN body, or a fourth body that HE is carrying? Quite a party, isn’t it? By God, I would have called the police by now, not to say emptied my 20 bore into the blighter’s chest and called it self-defence. Not to mention that any usage of the word ‘body’ in a love song is simply disturbing and brings to mind any number of gruesome murder and auto-erotic asphyxiation stories where the ‘body’ was found face down on the bed with a ball-gag in its mouth…and that’s just what you hear around the Conservative party.

4)   ‘Watching you dress as you turn down the lights...’

I do not dress before going to bed, I undress, and what are you doing watching in the first place? Oh yes, that’s right, you’re a pervert.

5)   I now draw your attention to the chorus ‘We're caught up in the crossfire/Of heaven and hell/And we're searching for shelter…’. You’re already inside you daft man. This is probably why you’re having so much trouble figuring out what the weather is doing.

The net result, Mr Flowers, if that really is your name, is a song that seems not so much as written as blurted out. And the effect is rather creepy.