It’s 10 Things You Never Knew... About Bells!

1 THE WORD ‘bell’ is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘bell’, meaning ‘bell’. 2 THERE have been countless hit songs about bells over the years, from LL COOL J’s Rock The Bells and METALLICA’s For Whom The Bell Tolls ,to AC/ DC’s Hell’s Bells and RADIOHEAD’s Morning Bell . In fact, so ubiquitous are bells as a subject in popular music that experts believe songwriters should leave them alone for a bit. “Bells have been done to fucking death,” says char tologist Paul Gambaccini. “There’s literally nothing more to say about them. Musicians should give it a rest with the whole bells thing because, honestly, we’re all getting sick of it.” 3 SOME musical acts - such as BELLE & SEBASTIAN and PATTI LABELLE love bells so much they have even chosen to name themselves after them. “Jesus fucking wept,” says Gambaccini. “What is wrong with these people? We get it, okay, you like bells.” 4 THE SMALLEST set of bells in recorded history belonged to the world’s smallest hunchback, Calvin Phillips. Phillips was employed as a deformed-yet-kind-hear ted bellringer inside a matchstick scale model of Notre-Dame Cathedral. His job was to ring the miniscule bells - each roughly the size of a large raspberry - every hour on the hour, whilst shrieking, “The minuscule bells! The minuscule bells!” over and over again. Phillips eventually went deaf and insane, and died of starvation beneath a gallows the size of a Subbuteo goal. 5 THE BICYCLE bell was invented by none other than Italian polymath LEONARDO DA VINCI back in October 1496. In his notebooks, the Renaissance genius wrote: “I have today fashioned an ingenious metallic tocsin that can be attached to a bicycle in order to alert other bicycle users to one’s presence.” However, in his excitement over his new gadget, da Vinci failed to remember... that the bicycle hadn’t been invented yet! As such, initial sales for the bell were poor, and it wasn’t until the invention of the penny farthing in the mid-1800s that his creation really began to take off. 6 WE ALL know that JAY KAY out of JAMIROQUAI loves big hats. But you probably didn’t know that the Space Cowboy acquired this taste for outsized millinery... by getting his head stuck in a bell! At age 12, the adolescent pop fave was visiting Tewkesbury Abbey with his parents, Cilla Black impersonator Karen Kay and her husband Mr Kay, when he trapped his noggin inside a prayer bell whilst examining the internal clapper. His bonce was stuck fast, but rather than cry out for help, the experience awoke something inside the youngster, and he began prancing around the church with the bell on his head, entertaining worshippers with improvised cod-funk warbling. The bell was later removed by doctors but young Jay was smitten. He went straight out to buy the most bell-resembling head accessory he could find... and the rest is acid jazz history! 7 THE PROUD owner of the world’s largest collection of bells is none other than iconic gangsta rap star P DIDDY. Harlem-born Diddy, real name Peapod Diddybridge, has amassed roughly 43,000 directly struck campanulate instruments of all shapes and sizes, which he keeps in a big padlocked warehouse in Carlisle. “I love bells - always have, always will,” Diddy told the Northampton Chronicle & Echo. “Honestly, when I hear those big metal muthafuckers chimin’ away, it just makes my heart soar.” 8 WHEN you ring a bell here in the UK, it goes ‘ding-dong’. But believe it or not, when you ring one in Australia, the sound it makes is ‘dong-ding’! That’s because the rotation of the ear th means that sound travels in a clockwise direction in the Northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern one. This is also the reason that everyone in Australia talks backwards, like in Twin Peaks. 9 MANY actors from the hit series Twin Peaks have spoken openly about their love of bells. Twin Peaks actors who adore bells include PEGGY LIPTON, who played Norma, SHERILYN FENN, who played Audrey, and FRANK SILVER, who played Killer Bob. 10 TWIN PEAKS actors who despise bells include JACK NANCE, who played Pete, KIMMY ROBERTSON, who played Lucy, and CATHERINE E. COULSON, who played the Log Lady.