Wives should always be lovers too?

How a well-loved pop song from the 1960s became almost too tricky to sing

Next week I plan to write about two lovely post-War novels I have been reading, classics by Elizabeth Taylor and Josephine Tey, but until then, here’s a quick and very different piece about something that amused me greatly:

Hey, Little Girl,

Comb your hair, fix your makeup

Soon he will open the door

Don’t think because there’s a ring on your finger

You needn’t try anymore…

On Wednesday we went to the London Palladium to hear Tony Hadley singing from the Great American Songbook, accompanied by a fantastic 12-piece band.

It was the second time we had heard Hadley sing live, and both times we have enjoyed it enormously - it was truly wonderful. If anyone needs to be reminded of why a groundbreaking new wave band, Spandau Ballet, went from post-punk London’s underground dance scene, circa 1979, to the multi-national smooth rock hits of ‘Gold’ and ‘True’, you just need to close your eyes and listen to Hadley’s extraordinary range and tone, as he belts out hits by Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and Jack Jones.

Jack Jones, and I am showing my age here, was a bit of a crush of mine when I was a rather precocious little girl. Wikipedia tells me that this two-time Grammy Award winner is still going strong, and embarked on an 80th birthday celebration tour just a few years ago. It also tells me that he has been married six times. This seems a little ironic…

Day after day,

There are girls at the office

And men will always be men

Don’t send him off with your hair still in curlers

You may not see him again…

The song is a Burt Bacharach/Hal David classic, from 1963; in fact it is one of the songs that won Jones a Grammy in 1964, peaking at number 14 on the Hot 100. It’s also been recorded by Dionne Warwick, Andy Williams, Lena Horne, and in the version I have yet to find, Dick Van Dyke. Hopefully in his Mary Poppins accent. But strangely I noticed that in the recent tributes to the inimitable Bacharach, who died last year, it didn’t get much of a mention.

Hadley and his band certainly did it justice, it has a lovely melody. But Hadley himself had to admit ‘These lyrics wouldn’t get written today’, and he even gets the pianist to read out a ‘health warning’ before he starts, which includes phrases such as ‘the lyrical content of this song doesn not reflect the views of Tony Hadley or his band’. How we laughed.

The 1960s were a foreign country, and we see it now through the lenses of television and cinema that hardly credits what it is telling us. Madmen, Pleasantville, The Stepford Wives, all recent classic depictions of an era when women who spent all day doing housework and minding the children, were still expected to ‘Dim all the lights, pour the wine, start the music’ as they heard their husband turn the key in the door.

Pleasantville, 1998

Of course, Wives and Lovers is not the only song from the sixties with problematic lyrics. I am extremely uncomfortable every time a rugby crowd belts out the lyrics to Delilah, a 1968 Number One for Tom Jones. I was amused to read that the censors did try to get the lyrics changed when he sang it on the Ed Sullivan Show that year. Apparently they weren’t worried by the misogynistic murder, but wanted "At break of day when the man drove away" to be changed to "At break of day I was still 'cross the way", because violence against women was OK, but sex wasn’t.

Luckily the 1960s were also a time of revolution. While Bacharach and David were polishing these lyrics, Betty Friedan was writing The Feminine Mystique, and launching Second-wave Feminism. By 1970, Carly Simon was recording the single, ‘That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should be’, which launched her career. The lyrics are a chilling reminder of where so many of those 1960s marriages had landed:

My father sits at night with no lights on

His cigarette glows in the dark

The living room is still

I walk by, no remark.

I tiptoe past the master bedroom where

My mother reads her magazines…

Is she wondering why combing her hair and fixing her make-up, just wasn’t enough?