As I read Jordan's last piece, erudite and informative, it got me a'thinking around the other taboo subject in popular song, seemingly equally common a subject matter as rumpy pumpy, namely drugs, the paths of blues and jazz as awash with as much reliance, if not more, upon uppers, downers and in-betweeners as more recent times. The censor was seldom enthusiastic about such, and remains still a little averse today, worried about the corruption of young and fertile minds. Thus the need to disguise in simile and metaphor. (Here I feel I should add, having delved deep into the subcultural yearnings put my way over 50 plus years of enjoying the devil's music, never have I felt it necessary to partake, give or take the odd jazz cigarette as a teen and young adult. Never did anything beyond make me cough, together with a need to poo (TMI), however many times I listened to Paul McCartney.)
The BBC were notoriously eagle-eared for references, frequently banning anything that could be possibly construed as smacking of, well, smack or, indeed, anything else. So as well as the ex-Beatle's paean to hot air ballooning, so too were songs by myriad other acts struck from air-play. So alongside anything overtly sexual, anything that contained the name of a commercial product, the list of presumed drug songs deemed unsuitable included other, earlier songs involving the very same perverter of the young, Paul McCartney*. None of these could really be classed double entendres, as, bizarrely, colour your reference in the imagery of food or, more commonly, candy, much as with sex, and you could take the arbiters of taste on quite a trip. Or references to literature, the classics being drug free zones, right?
Ice cream is frequently invoked as a euphemism for narcotics, and has been since forever. In part the idea of a special treat and part the network of delivery outlets. For, as well as being for sale in shops and restaurants, there is the time hallowed ice-cream man in his, or her, ice-cream van, bring his product to a curb side near you. I used to think this purely a British phenomenon, but John Carpenter and Jonathan Richman have taught me different. (Richman's Ice Cream Man, despite the lyrics, a give away in any other hands, is arguably one of the few where you can feel some confidence that it really is a Mr Whippy he sings about.)
Heroin has been a scourge of the central belt of Scotland for decades, the combination of grim concrete estates, with populations transplanted from slum squalor to out of town desolation, built with little thought of leisure and recreation factored in by town planners. Add the Scottish love of sweet things and, particularly of ice cream, no Scottish town without a family of Italian emigres, with cafes and ice-cream emporia, resident since the early part of the twentieth century, and any business brain can begin to see a hole in the market. For the hole in Daddy's arm every bit as much as the hole in his kids tummy. Even genuine ice-cream vans initially became subject to vicious turf wars, but it wasn't too long before the rinky dink tone of Greensleeves denoted that something else was there for the buying.
Mary Coughlan is a terrific singer, with a smoky voice at as much ease in folk and blues as she is in rock and jazz, ploughing her idiosyncratic fare for 35 years. I see I wrote about her in 2013. The featured song for this piece comes from her second album, Under the Influence, in 1987. That title too might be a broad hint, but my suspicions and her admissions point to towards her own poisons being largely booze. But there are two songs about ice-cream, two in a row, tracks two and three on side one. OK, the second is a brief instrumental, but the first, by Johnny Mulhearn, is sung through the eyes of a housewife, hooked on the scag brought to her and the other women on the street by the same van selling cones and wafers to her children. Based on a both a true story, one with a happy ending, in that the dealer was arrested and imprisoned, with a good deal of anecdata from The Glasgow ice-cream wars, as mentioned above. She mentions the song in this interview.
Still so keen on that 99?
*I know, literary extension...
