1998 – I hope the Smoking Man’s in this one

Barenaked Ladies, ‘One Week’

I’ve just closed down my previous Word doc on that Bran Van banger, which ended with me wondering what I actually listened to during these formative years, considering how many of them so far wouldn’t come into my life until a later date.

A recurring memory of my life around then immediately came back to me, and it’s helped me answer the question: what was I even listening to in 1998?

Apparently not the radio.

My dad worked in social care, driving back and forth from a seniors’ day centre. I have memories of spending school holidays with him at work; bringing books, pens and paper, and sitting in the centre’s kitchen with glasses of juice while he looked after his punters. I remember how the radio was always on in that kitchen; not a regular occurrence at home, for whatever reason.

I remember my dad quite often asking me if I’d heard any of these new songs he was hearing a lot at work. But because he’d only catch little bits of each song as he drifted in and out of the kitchen, he never knew the names of the songs, or the bands who played them.

So, he could only ask me if I’d heard the one about getting knocked down, but getting up again.

Or the one with the chickity china, the Chinese chicken.

But I can’t think of a single time when I said ‘oh yeah, I do know that one’. Probably just my memory failing me, but if not then I’m 12 or 13 years old, and my 42 or 43-year old dad is cooler than me.

Based on some of the other memories I have around my dad’s emotional responses to music, I think I can safely say that’s a load of tosh.

Like how any time the original Band Aid played in earshot, he’d repeatedly point out how the first voice on the record is Paul Young. I don’t even know if he liked Paul Young – though I do now remember there was a copy of No Parlez in his collection – but for some reason he always liked to palm that bit of trivia off on me, as if it were one vital answer away from winning a pub quiz.

Or how he never did the decent thing and just smirked to himself whenever he heard ‘Teenage Kicks’ or ‘Turning Japanese’ playing. No, he’d have to loudly announce to the room – which will almost certainly have contained a girlfriend of mine or my older brother’s – that this song was about wanking.

Good job he was never around whenever I played Side One of Dookie. I think I would have spontaneously combusted from the embarrassment.

***

For some reason, and this might seem like a bit of a major confession to make in the midst of a series about about my childhood around music, we never had Top of the Pops on in my house growing up. I don’t really remember watching the BBC at all on a regular basis, although the theme tune for Last of the Summer Wine does to this day give me the Sunday-night-school-tomorrow fear.

I did watch some other music stuff around this time – Ant and/or Dec on a Saturday, and something European chart-y on VH1 on Sundays – but without TOTP I wasn’t privy to these little beautiful bits of pop music that hooked my dad’s attention each day at work. I’m guessing the weekend countdowns and weekday radio shows were hitting different demographics.

(Maybe I’ve also blanked out the songs that he liked which I thought were rubbish. That’s highly likely.)

As we’ve established, I usually did very little to work out the meaning of the lyrics of the songs I liked. But in the case of ‘One Week’, they didn’t try very hard to make meaningful lyrics in the first place. The Canadian group settled instead for cramming in references to all the movies, music and TV shows they liked. In fact, seeing how much they’ve jammed in reminds me a little of The Bloodhound Gang’s ‘The Bad Touch’ except that Barenaked Ladies aren’t trying to make every single one of theirs into filth. (I’ve just realised they both contain The X-Files references, too.)

Between Ed Robertson’s rapped reference-laden lyrics, the varying choruses are teasing out the story details of a couple in mid-strop, sung with a rapid-fire delivery of inevitability and predictability by singer Stephen Page. It’s been one week, but it feels like it’s always that one week.

By the way, ‘the Robbie’ is apparently a football tournament held at the Birchmount Stadium in Toronto, an annual charity event to promote grassroots football. That’s the one reference I always wanted to know about.

‘One Week’ did quite well for itself, and I don’t think anyone would label Barenaked Ladies as a one-hit wonder. Especially because a few years later they’d create a song which according to Robertson, would provide for his family, and his grandchildren’s families, such was the pile of money it brought in through royalties.

Having a hit like ‘One Week’ continue to pay the bills would be nice. But when you’ve written the theme to a successful sitcom which will be repeated on E4 until the end of time, you’ll probably do alright.

And since you asked; yes, Barenaked Ladies does have a song about wanking.