The Strictly Strangler...
QUESTION Golden Brown by the Stranglers is noted for its complex 13/8 time signature. What other pop songs have unusual metres?
One person who was caught out by the asymmetrical harpsichord riff in Golden Brown was BBC news presenter Bill Turnbull. He attempted to waltz to it in the 2005 series of Strictly Come Dancing — with disastrous results.
Stranglers bassist Jean- Jacques Burnel later told Turnbull that the alternating time signatures make it impossible to dance to this song.
The time signature is a convention in Western music used to specify how many beats (pulses) are in each measure (bar) and which note value is equivalent to one beat. Popular time signatures include 2/4, 4/4 (march), 3/4 (waltz) and 6/8.
The use of irregular time signatures was unheard of until the beginning of the 20th century when a new wave of classical composers began to explore different rhythms. A famous example is Gustav Holst’s Mars, The Bringer Of War from The Planets, which is in 5/4 time.
The most famous jazz exponent was Dave Brubeck. His signature tune Take Five is in 5/4 time while Blue Ronda A La Turk uses 9/8 time.
A classic piece of 5/4 is the Mission Impossible theme by Lalo Schfrin. In Say A Little Prayer, Burt Bacharach uses 10/4 for the verses and 11/4 for the chorus.
Pink Floyd used 7/4 for their song Money on the Dark Side Of The Moon album, though Dave Gilmour’s guitar solo was superimposed in 4/4.
Prog-rock groups are notorious for mixing up time signatures. Dance On A Volcano by Genesis is (mostly) in 7/8 time and Robbery, Assault And Battery has a 13/ 8 metre. Hey Ya by hip- hop duo Outkast opened in 11/4 time.
Bjork’s album Biophilia uses a bizarre 17/8 time signature in three songs, Hollow, Moon and Crystalline, inspired by the facets of a crystal — each face representing a different amount of beats.
Jim Delaney, Guildford, Surrey.
QUESTION Why does Crawley Town FC have a devil on its badge?
IT IS not clear when Crawley Town football players started to wear a crest as a permanent feature on their shirts.
However, badges were displayed regularly after the mid-eighties, when the West Sussex club’s colours were red shirts with a white trim and white shorts. They later changed to red shirts and shorts with black trim. As a result the supporters called their team the Red Devils. Manchester United’s nickname is also the Red Devils for the same reason. Tony Matthews, Football historian and statistician, Almeria, Spain.
QUESTION Growing up in the Forties and Fifties, I can’t remember anyone having nut, wheat or gluten allergies. When did they begin to manifest themselves?
In 1905, Austrian paediatrician Clemens von Pirquet recognised that though vaccination resulted in protection against infectious disease, some people suffered an extreme reaction.
A year later, he proposed the term ‘allergy’ for the effect induced by what he termed an ‘allergen’, a foreign substance.
Despite the fact it was not recognised medically until the 20th century, allergic reactions have been recorded in history.
The first description of coeliac disease (a reaction of the immune system to gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye) has been traced in the writings of the 1st century Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia.
The word coeliac came from the Greek word koiliakos and means ‘suffering in the bowels’. It has been used since the mid-17th century.
The connection between the symptoms and the cause was made by Professor Willem Dicke, a paediatrician. During the Dutch famine of World War II, he observed that the shortage of bread saw an improvement in a children’s ward of coeliac patients and that when bread was reintroduced, they relapsed.
In the Fifties, Dicke went on to pioneer the gluten-free diet.
Charles Richet was awarded the nobel Prize in 1913 for his work on anaphylaxis, a life-threatening allergic reaction.
Around the same time, researchers nicholas Arthus and Richard Otto showed it was possible to produce an anaphylactic reaction to proteins found in meat, milk, eggs and peanuts.
nut allergies were extremely rare at the time, so it is alarming that they now affect up to 5 per cent of children.
Mr J. Singh, Birmingham. I WAS diagnosed with coeliac disease in 1946 just a few years after the condition had been discovered.
There were very few of us at that time and we were recommended to have a low-fat diet, with extra meat and bananas. There were no fresh bananas in the years after the war, so dried bananas used to arrive in wooden crates. They smelled and tasted awful.
It was only after I become seriously ill after a holiday abroad in the Sixties that the connection with gluten was made.
Gluten-free bread came in tins and often used to disintegrate when you opened it.
When my daughter was diagnosed at the age of 40, only then did I discover that coeliac is an auto-immune disease — when your immune system is wrongly triggered into attacking the cells of the body.
Gill Townsend, Seaford, E. Sussex.
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