For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday, as he tells us in his post Hickory Dickory Dock, Jim is inviting us to play tunes about rodents, which was suggested by me in a moment of madness – he tells how it came about. I had one obvious one in mind – the one I mentioned to Jim that prompted this theme –  but I played that six months ago for an SLS based on live albums, so I couldn’t really play it again, could I? Or maybe I could…

My first stop was to consult Wikipedia about what actually counts as a rodent, and I found to my dismay that animals I thought would be acceptable weren’t – so much for playing Richard and Linda Thompson’s Mole In A Hole, then. I could work with mice, rats and squirrels, but does anyone know any songs about hamsters or guinea pigs? Jim says that he has found more than forty songs which fit the bill for today, but I was less successful! So I did what any self-respecting music lover would do, and went for the repeat. Last time it was the live album version, this time I’m playing the original album release from one of my favourite bands:

And the lyrics:

For this record, Ian Anderson was inspired by daily life at his recently purchased country estate in Buckinghamshire, saying that “I was living in the same house in the same place, and getting a bit more involved in farming and other rural stuff… so the horse-hoeing husbandry of the original Jethro Tull era was in the back of my mind.” Several of the album’s songs were directly inspired by his personal life at the estate: this track, …And the Mouse Police Never Sleeps, was partially inspired by his cat Mistletoe, for example: the ‘mouse police,’ who was ‘licensed to mutilate,’ as the song says!

Never one to shy away from the obvious, I thought I’d also give you a rat song today. This is the one which I think may be played by others today, but there could really only be one, couldn’t there:

The Boomtown Rats, of course, with Rat Trap. This was their first of two UK #1s, the other being I Don’t Like Mondays, and took over at the top from John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. When the band performed the song on Top of the Pops (which is also mentioned in it) the band members began by tearing up pictures of Travolta and Newton-John to emphasise the fact that the pair – who had spent a total of 16 weeks out of the preceding 22 at the top of the charts – had been deposed. There were many, myself included, who were grateful for that relief!

As you saw in the video, Bob Geldof mimed the saxophone part on a candelabra, which he explained in his autobiography Is That It?: “The Musicians’ Union had forbidden me to play saxophone on the video, as obviously I hadn’t done so on the record. But I saw a candelabra on the piano at the shoot and I put a mouthpiece in the central candle holder and played it. The impact of the video came home when during the next few British gigs kids pulled out candelabras from nowhere and began playing them during the sax solo in Rat Trap.” I rather like that story! The single was released in October 1978 but I already had it by then, as it had also been a track on their second album, A Tonic For The Troops, which had come out the previous June. it made #8 in the UK, and went Platinum for 300,000 sales. Two of its other tracks had already been UK hits: She’s So Modern (#12) and Like Clockwork (#6). It’s a great album, which I played a lot.

I usually like to find songs for SLS that are unlikely to be duplicated, but as I said I suspect that I won’t be alone today in choosing that last one of these. That’s what happens when some idiot suggests a theme with limited choices, I guess. But I thank Jim for going with this, and am hoping that you enjoyed these, and that others will have found something different to play!

See you again for Tuesday Tunes – the first of a two part set of New Year songs. Stay safe and warm 👍