From My Way to Life On Mars
QUESTION Why did David Bowie describe Life On Mars as his version of the song My Way?
IN 1967/1968, a young David Jones — the real name of David Bowie — had the chance to write English lyrics to the tune that would inspire My Way, but he blew it.
It was common in the Sixties for singer-songwriters to provide English lyrics to the tunes of popular foreign songs.
One famous example is Dusty Springfield’s hit, You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, based on Lo
Che Non Vivo (Senza Te) — I, Who Can’t Live (Without You) — which was a number one in Italy for Pino Donaggio. Bowie had already penned a few such songs, including Love Is Always and Pancho, which were hits in Belgium for the singer Dee-Dee. Claude Francois’s French hit
Comme D’Habitude was released in French in Britain, but Essex Music boss David Platz wanted it translated into English. He gave the task to Bowie, who came up with the Anthony Newley-esque Even A Fool Learns To Love.
By his own admission, it was dreadful. ‘God it’s so awful — really embarrassingly bad,’ he said. If you sing Bowie’s lyrics to the tune of My Way you get the idea:
Their funny man won’t let them
down No, he’d dance and prance and
be their clown That time, the laughing time When even a fool learns to love.
Shortly after, the Canadian artist Paul Anka heard Comme
D’Habitude on French TV and wrote new lyrics in English for it.
He pitched the song, which he renamed My Way, to Frank Sinatra, who had been threatening to quit the music scene. And, boy, did it revive Ol’ Blue Eyes’s career!
Bowie claimed he was angry for a year that his version had been discarded. As revenge, he set about writing a better song for his Hunky Dory album that used the same chord progression as My Way. It turned out to be Life On Mars, or My Way On Mars, as Bowie once called it.
Keith Sitwell, Durham.
QUESTION From where did we get the phrase ‘peter out’?
THE earliest examples of this phrase date from the late 19th century and come from mining.
There are two possible derivations. One is that it is derived from saltpetre, the colloquial name for potassium nitrate, a component of gunpowder (from the Greek petros meaning rock). If you run out of saltpetre, the charge peters out.
The other, more convincing, derivation is that it comes from the French péter, which means to pass wind.
British sappers in the Middle Ages used a device they dubbed a
petard (a fart) to destroy bridges or barricades. This was a bellshaped metal grenade filled with 6lb of gunpowder and set off by a fuse in a tunnel or trench. However, they were unreliable, often blowing up the sapper. From this came the idea of being hoisted by their own petard, a phrase coined by Shakespeare in Hamlet: ‘For ’tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard.’
Gordon Ellwood, Grimsby, Lincs.
QUESTION Where did Dublin’s Oxmantown area get its name?
THE Oxmantown area of Dublin, north of the River Liffey, owes both its name and its origin to the Vikings, or more correctly, the Hiberno-Norse.
Norse invaders first sailed up the River Liffey in AD 837, in a fleet of 60 longships. They returned to Dublin four years later, in AD 841, and started their settlement. It overlooked the Black Pool, where the River Poddle discharged into the River Liffey. The Irish for Black Pool, Dubh Linn, became anglicised to create the name of Dublin. Today, Dublin Castle occupies the site where the Norsemen created their settlement, the origins of the city of Dublin.
The Norse occupation of what became the first era of the city of Dublin was comparatively brief; by the end of the 10th century, Norse domination was slipping. After the Anglo-Norman invasion in the late 12th century, the new invaders pushed the old invaders, the Norsemen, out of the main area of Dublin, immediately south of the River Liffey.
They were banished to the northern banks of the River Liffey, an area that was then open country and completely undeveloped. There, they started to create a settlement called Ostmanstown. The Ostmen were the Norsemen and the name of the new settlement meant ‘town of the man from the East’.
The Ostmen were given this name because they came from Scandinavia, a land east of Ireland and England. In time, Ostmanstown became corrupted to Oxmantown and that’s the name that has stuck to this distinctive area of north Dublin.
When the Norsemen first made their settlement, it covered an area now occupied by Smithfield and such streets as Blackhall Street, parts of Church Street and the western half of North King Street. As the area expanded, it became that part of Dublin between the North Circular Road and Smithfield.
One of the Norse traditions that was replicated in their new settlement was the building of a spacious green, which became known as Oxmantown Green. By around 1660, many wealthy people had built houses for themselves around the Green. A major street was built in 1664, Queen Street, and that same year, the cattle market at Smithfield was established. When the Royal Barracks, now Collins Barracks and part of the National Museum of Ireland, was opened in 1774, it gave further impetus to the area. During the 18th century, the Oxmantown area thrived, with many shops, as well as markets and numerous traders. The area’s individuality had been helped because when the Norsemen first established their settlement, there were no bridges across the River Liffey to link this new part of Dublin with the established city on the southern side of the river. But even as bridges started to be built, the Oxmantown area retained its strong, individualistic character, something it has preserved to the present day.
The area has long had an oldfashioned feel to it, with many local shops and a strong community spirit and it’s only in recent years that new developments have begun to change the character of Oxmantown.
The names of streets and roads in the area remain testimony to Oxmantown’s Norse origins, with such names as Ivar Street, Norseman Place, Ostman Place, Oxmantown Lane, Oxmantown Road, Sitric Road and Viking Road.
One of the many other places they plundered was Birr, Co. Offaly, in AD 842, and when a major new thoroughfare was built in the town in the 1820s, it was named Oxmantown Mall.
The Norsemen may have long since vanished into history, but they left a strong heritage in the Oxmantown area of Dublin and many other parts of the country.
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