I was always hopeless at hearing song lyrics correctly, and listening back to some of those old numbers again recently, I realised that I’m not alone. Take, for example, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band version of Blinded By The Light. A classic song, but what is the line after Blinded By The Light?
I figured the Internet would tell me, and it did, sort of. It’s actually ‘revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night’ according to this authoritative-sounding website. Or ‘Wrapped up like a deuce, another runner in the night’, depending on whether you’re talking about the Bruce Springsteen original or the MMEB cover. So there you go. The Internet solves another mystery.
Well, not quite. I always thought the line was ‘wrap up like a bloosher’, without ever really getting around to find out what a bloosher was (something to do with the Battle of Waterloo, I reckoned). But the Internet reveals that everyone had their own intepretation. There’s a list here of what they did think it was — I counted about 70 different interpretations. Here are my favourites:
- held up like a loofer by the foreman of the night;
- rabbit in a lot of juice, like a donut in the night;
- wrapped up like a douche, a bad odor in the night
Etc… The human ear and brain combo is a fascinating instrument. Check out the rest of Kiss This Guy. It’s not new, but it’s updated, and it’s hilarious.
