Midnight Town, Daybreak City - Roy Hamilton

"I was born in Midnight town / she was born in Daaaaybreak City" croons the great Roy Hamilton.

Think love on the other side of the tracks. Think Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare's. Then think Mark Knopfler's.

Then think Through the Barricades, then try and forget it.

She was of good stock: petite, preferred petticoats, carried a parasol and lived in a brownstone building among the nobs up north in Daybreak City.

He hung around pool halls in the slums to the south in Midnight Town. He buckled his knickerbockers below the knee, smoked Sweet Caporal cigarettes and palled around with libertine men, scarlet women, shady out-of-town Jaspers and the Irish; jigging to shameless ragtime music in a pinch-back seersucker suit.

Everyone said the affair was doomed. He'd never be deemed worthy of her dowry. She'd find out about his carousing and run back to that brownstone; no one would touch her then - an old maid at 23

As it happened, the courtship was a breeze and they settled somewhere between Midnight Town and Daybreak City; a small suburb - zone 2 on the superb new transit system - in a much sought-after school catchment area.

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When We Get Married - 1910 Fruitgum Company

Here's a bombastic 4 minute minor epic about marriage from the 1910 Fruitgum Company, a band from an era when long-winded band names were de rigueur...

These anachronistic yet psychedelic band names brought to mind the kind of long-forgotten brands you'd see printed on reproduction tin tea trays sold in seaside shell shops.

"And that was Professor Willoughby Puffnaker's Terrific Time Machine with a song from the soundtrack to Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?

Next up is Dr. Hook and His Travelling Mediocre Show."

Sadly When We Get Married didn't proved popular as a wedding anthem; never scaling the heights of Chapel of Love, the ever-popular Wedding March or that one from Glen Medeiros.

I was trying to think of some marriage 'shtick', but no one makes jokes about marriage anymore. The stereotype of the unhappy husband and exasperated wife sticking-it-out until death do they part seems to have died out with the 3 camera sitcom.

Well, I for one still laugh at the word 'nuptials'.

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Manifesto & Book News

If it's ever been on K-Tel or Ronco, it's in. If it features hand claps, cow bells, syrupy orchestration, walls of sound, wrecking crews, sha-la-las, toothy teen idols, candy-based metaphors for carnal acts or lyrics about hugging, squeezing and rocking all night long, it's in.

And her torso even moreso



> Martin Lampen (latest book news, contact details and other stuff)

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