Going back to a post of a few months ago where I was idly speculating on what the second line of the song 'Miss Grace' was, my friend Bonita's just kindly posted the whole lyric as a comment - and I'm amused to see that even the bit I thought I knew for sure was in fact wrong, wrong, wrong! It's actually 'Oo - oo - oo Miss Grace, Satin and perfume and lace...' - not 'Satnav of the human race' at all! I realised that it probably wasn't anything to do with satnavs, (a) because that's not an American term, and (b) because they weren't invented back then, but I was positive the line ended with 'the human race'. Just goes to show how different American pronunciation really is - Americans put the emphasis on the second syllable of perfume, unlike us Brits, and in the song that completely threw me. Although, having said that, I've just realised that one of my own songs, 'The Why Factor', written with Nashville firmly in mind, has 'perfume' in it, and without even thinking about it, I wrote it in such a way that it's naturally pronounced the American way. There's clever! :)

New year, new blog - definitely time for one, as I've just seen that my last posting was back in October... :( Anyway, I'm just back from playing at Catweazle, a very cool open mic that takes place every Thursday in Oxford. It's always packed to the rafters with the most appreciative listening audience a performer could hope for - in general, quite a youthful audience too, a lot of students and former students (graduates - that's the word!), with very few other than my good self who have a clue about the origins of the name 'Catweazle' - and I'm not about to go showing off my great age by revealing that I used to watch that trampish old wizard on TV as a child and can even remember that he was played by Geoffrey Bayldon...

But I digress. What I wanted to say was that, despite being more known for my heartbreaking songs to slit your wrists by, this is the third time since Saturday that the song of mine that's gone down a storm has been none other than 'The Sausage Dog Hotel'! I was planning on singing my new salsa-rhythmed song 'Hangin' on a String' tonight (Catweazle is such a popular evening that performers generally only get to do one song each), but (a) I wasn't overly confident about being able to come in on the right note, which I seem to have a bit of a mental block about, and the more I thought about it, the more doubt-ridden I became, and (b) I got chatting in the interval, before I'd played, to a couple who'd just lost their aged dachshund that morning, and who sounded quite excited when I mentioned that I'd got a song about sausage dogs - so what else could I then do but sing it for them? For the first time ever, the entire audience gamely joined in on the rather wordy chorus, bless them! And they even got most of the words right! A great evening :)

Not so great is the fact that my Wags Lyrical website (which, incidentally, includes a version of 'The Sausage Dog Hotel') seems to have been hijacked by Russian spies. I noticed that the viewing stats had shot up over the past few days, which was very cheering until I looked at the referring sites - all with rather shady-sounding names and Russian and Ukrainian suffixes. Somehow I don't think this means I'm about to be bombarded with requests to write songs about dearly loved Siberian huskies in exchange for vast amounts of roubles. I'd be happy to, of course - just that I don't think that's what these increased viewing stats mean...

And now, with strains of 'The Sausage Dog Hotel' competing in my head with the theme from Doctor Zhivago, I'm off to bed... Спокойной ночи!