Listen, the album
The Birmingham Song - about the track

Commissioned by Start The Week producer Ian Strachan.

This song, like The Wine Song, was also on a cassette called Shed so if you're one of the happy few who have both albums then we probably owe you a pint or something. The reasons for their inclusion here are (i) to get them in broadcastable C.D. form and (ii) to air the new 'gory skull of a southern Tory' line which I'm particularly proud of.

I'd also like to say that, in one way at least, the song actually works: my south-of-England friends (of whom of course I have many) now go out of their way to call me Grant-not-Grarnt.

But perhaps we might digress here by making a few comments on the recording of comic songs...

[And firstly, as a digression within a digression, we might ask: what are these songs called? George Eliot used 'comic song' as term of abuse, a thing on the learning of which a wastrel might fritter away his time. Arthur Sullivan (as opposed to his chum William Schwenk Gilbert who as far as we are concerned is the one who did all the serious work) used pejoratively to call them 'patter songs'.

In the era of the great musicals, they were 'comedy songs': but, again, the term has a hint of 'not very good or at least not very musical songs sung by the red-nosed guy in the second act of a show otherwise full of proper stuff.'

But now that Comic Relief has made the word fashionable I think it's probably safe to call these things 'comic songs' again, and nuts to George Eliot.]

Anyway, recording comic songs...

The first question is: studio or concert? You'd have thought concert every time, wouldn't you, and I tried to do my first album, Shed, that way. I booked a sound engineer, and, over a couple of hours, sang these side-splitting, sure fire comic songs to a hand-picked audience - the old Cut Above Club in Wolverley - who'd always found them funny and would be bound to laugh heartily at every joke and roar approval for those familiar first lines.

Well, no. Oh, they beamed and nodded helpfully enough, but the unfamiliar presence of microphones and the sense of occasion kept them strangely mute. Barely a titter came out on tape. It might have been me, of course, being too relaxed and presumptuous, but whatever the reasons, only a handful of tracks were useable.

And then I thought about Tom Lehrer. Back in 1953, he just booked an hour and a half at his local recording studio, sang fourteen songs, walked out with the master tape and over the next two years sold 100,000 copies of it by mail order before he'd even started to do concerts.

So I'd decided that the next album would definitely be a studio job. And then, everything at Glenfarg came right at once: the recording quality, the audience - perhaps their very lack of familiarity with some of the stuff giving it a bit more freshness - and, I have to say, a performance definitely sharpened by the fact that The Beeb were in. Anyway, it worked. Even then I delayed ages before getting on with it.

So, what's the best way to record comic songs? Search me.