Idle prestidigitation for the recent wailing installment of RTH brought to mind a most curious phenomenon, one which left me  bamboozled for the last few years until I solved it a few weeks ago, came to mind.

I’d enter the kitchen without a thought of glam rock in my head and yet, by the time I’d tidied up, I’d be humming a specific T Rex song to myself and wondering where it came from. Again.

Finally, I realised it was the dishwasher. 

One press of the button and the motor comes on for a long, grinding beat, then silence  2,3,4, another blast on the motor, another imaginary count of 2,3,4 and off it goes again. Then it whirrs into action, just like the guitar on the introduction to 20th Century Boy.

In the days when my work office was open, a run of any more than a dozen page on the photocopier set up to replicate the rhythm of Money by Pink Floyd set me off down that rabbit hole

Surely, in such august company, I cannot be the only one to have experienced this? 

Which items of household or office machinery do you have which set off rhythmical earworms? And are they songs which, broadly speaking, you enjoy?

I don’t know what compelled me to look up a live version of my least favorite song in the world, Blood, Sweat & Tears’ version of Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die,” but I’m glad I did. This live version is even worse than the studio version.

Let’s be real: Nyro’s version is almost as terrible as the better-known cover. At its songwriting heart, it’s like an outtake from a thwarted musical version of Gone With the Wind. Or Birth of a Nation. Blood, Sweat & Tears, led by the self-satisfied David Clayton-Thomas, milk the the Plantation Party vibe for all its worth. Yuck!

Have you ever found a live version of a song you can’t stand that maximizes all you can’t stand about the studio version?

This is an excellent opportunity for me to restate that I believe the Charlie Watts Hoax is a Hoax! Put aside Jimmy Miller’s drumming on a few tracksssss on Let it Bleed and Exile. It plainly doesn’t matter if he was out to lunch during the Undercover-Dirty Work era. During the truly crucial years of the Rolling Stones (1964-1981, let’s say), Charlie Watts played drums on probably 98% of their recordings. PROVE ME WRONG!

Driving home after a wonderful anniversary dinner tonight, U2’s “New Year’s Day” came on the radio.

“There are enough U2 songs I like.” I said to my disinterested wife, “I wish this one would go away.”

She is expert in tuning me out when I go on such tangents, so I continued my conversation in my head.

“Why do you particularly dislike this song?” I asked.

“It’s nothing but the overly emotive crap that I can’t stand about Bono,” I said. Then I added, “And he ruins it right out of the gates with an unnecessary banshee wail.”

Bono has had more space to emote than any person in earth. He does a pleading banshee wail on every U2 song. Did he really need to start this one with a pleading banshee wail?

Then “we” (is, I and I) got to talking. Beside The Stooges’ “Loose,” does any song warrant opening with a banshee wail?

I don’t think Daltry, Lennon, Jim Morrison, or PJ Harvey, some of rock’s best wailers, opened a song with a banshee wail. I could be wrong.