‘Why, why, why, Delilah?’
THERE’S been a lot of publicity about whether Rule, Britannia! Britannia Rule The Waves! — please note correct punctuation and spelling, which gives it a subtly different meaning to Rule Britannia! Britannia Rules The Waves which its critics often misquote — should be included at the Last Night of the Proms.
I can’t remember the last time I watched the First Night of the Proms, the first time I watched the Last Night of the Proms, or in fact watched any night of the proms.
So I can sit up here on my fence quite comfortably.
‘Activists’ (previously known as busy bodies) with too much spare time on their hands, complain about the line “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!”
Rule, Britannia! has nothing to do with the abhorrent slave trade and wasn’t written as a triumphant ‘I Say, Chaps! Aren’t We British Superior!’ ditty.
It was written in defiance of the Spanish who, in 1740, started attacking British merchant vessels many years before the British Navy would dominate and protect the seas.
If I can fact check these things, why can’t people with much more time on their hands than me?
Rather than focus on the centuries-old Rule, Britannia!, they should make a fuss about some of today’s songs.
I’m not talking about the sexist, often obscene, lyrics in rap ‘music’, which always sounds to me like bad poems in search of decent tunes.
Take the song regularly played on Radio Wales about a man obsessed with the thought (and there’s no hard evidence to substantiate his suspicions) his girlfriend is having an affair.
So, he distracts her by telling her a very funny joke — “She stood there laughing” — and then does her in.
To add insult to (fatal) injury, as the poor girl’s expiring, he has the brass nerve to ask her why, with a rousing, ear-splitting chorus of “Why, why, why, Delilah?”
Every time a crowd cheerfully sings along to this song, they are basically condoning cold-blooded murder! Activists never complain about Delilah, but when it comes to patriotic songs, it’s not unusual . . .