Its like this...

There I was minding my own business, when a woman who keeps a blue plastic dinosaur on top of her computer sent me this*

This is Pat Boone's version of Stairway to Heaven, and if there is anything, anywhere in this dismal world of ours which is more cheesey, thenI, for one, do not want to know about it!

Now lets face it. Stairway To Heaven was a trifle on theripe and pungent side even as it left the pens of Messrs Plant and Page all those years ago. It's the archetypal "sensitive ballad" as performed by bands whose usual method of aural titilation involves the systematic removal of their listener's high, low, and medium-frequency hearing It's what all those large, unwashed gentlemen wearing large, unwashed denim and/or leather jackets embroidered with the legend "Munsters of Rock" on the back play when they want to convince themselves that they are undiscovered , sensitive intellectual giants. It is, as we all know, the last word in pretentious hippy crap.

It also, curiously enough, enjoys a wide reputation as The Best Rock Song Of All Time, and in the hope that some of it's kudos will wear off, many, many singers of widely varying expertise and credibility have committed their own versions to plastic. They might have done better to recall that fine old truism.. "Mud Sticks.."

Now don't get me wrong. I've tried, God knows I've tried, to love this song. Ever since the first time I heard it - at a party in Edinburgh, as I recall, in 1977, which I'd gatecrashed in the company of a law student I'd had my eye on at the Student's Union earlier. We'd spent a profitable half hour or so surreptitiously drinking someone else's whisky, and emboldened thus, we indulged in a bit of general shaking of the head and doing a fair imitation of two people having simultaneous epileptic fits as the preceding racket of Led Zep 4 shook the foundations of this fine, Edinburgh tenement building.

And then it happened. (cue "do do do do dooooooo intro to SWTH)... Bereft of our fix of Loud, Fast Stuff, we stood and looked at each other.

"What's this then?" I grumbled suspiciously

"What? You've never heard this? I can't believe you've never heard this! It's brilliant!"

Since I hadn't, he couldn't, and it patently wasn't, and since the sort of unco-ordinated twitching we had previously been enjoying now seemed out of the question, we looked at each other in some embarassment for a moment, then went for The Clinch.

He had bad breath.

Since then, the song has grown on me not one whit. It is not a masterpiece. It is meaningless tosh set to a largely unsingable melody, the original version surviving only by the skin of it's teeth due to the happy chance of its marriage to Mr Plant's vocals, which are to unsingable melodies what Big Macs are to medium fries. It does not survive the ministrations of Mr Boone's larynx, nor any of the other "artistes" who have decided to attempt to make this particular canine sit up and beg. (Do the words "Rolf" and "Harris" mean anything to you lot?")

It is an awful song, and this is the definitive Bad Version of it. I can only stand gasping in awe.





If you are feeling decidedly queasy by now, go back to Mudshark Towers for some Andrews Liver Salts