30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Twenty-Four – Good Times
Good Times has been languishing in my unfinished songs folder for a long, long time. I really wanted to include it in this project – I think it’s one of my best tunes – so I bashed it into shape, re-writing the lyrics. One of things I’ve noticed from the videos I’ve filmed for this series, the songs miss a full arrangement. That doesn’t necessarily mean an array of other instruments, but playing a block of four bars of one chord as an introduction before I start singing doesn’t really cut it. To some extent, I’ve been keeping the intros simple because my faith in my guitar playing hasn’t been great. But I’m feeling a little bit more confident about being able to nail a phrase, now, after all this practice. So I’ve added the little guitar motif at the start and end of each phrase, which also allows me to catch my breathe before I move on with the next chorus or verse.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Twenty-Three – The Best Revenge
The light was fading. The evening was drawing in. With the last vestiges of the October sun, the lad from Yorkshire picked up his guitar and started to strum. The Best Revenge.
The line, “the best revenge is to live well”, was given to me by my pal, Jason Dunne. I don’t think Jason would claim the line as his own, (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, Jase) but it’s a great thought – if you dwell too long on the wrongs done to you, you’re the one to lose out. If you want revenge, then show you’re not affected by what happened. Move on. Leave the heartache behind.
There’s a version of this floating about on my hard drive which I recorded with Mike Mann in the High Sessions, which includes drum beat, backing vocals, electric guitar and organ. It’ll (eventually) appear on the album, Winner of the Fight, when I finally finish it.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Twenty-Two – Sincerely My Belief
Short but sweet, Sincerely My Belief. It’s nice to sneak the odd 12-bar in here. No One In This House (But Me) was an 8-bar. My favourite blues singer is Jimmy Reed. He took the 12-bar format and made pop songs out of it, such Baby What Do You Want Me To Do and Big Boss Man. Great hook lines, great melodies. Sincerely My Belief is as much a pop song as it is a 12-bar, (it’s in a major scale, for a start).
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Twenty-One – No One In This House (But Me)
The version of No One In This House (But Me) on Love Songs From The Feral Park is one of only two songs I know that feature wah-wah congas. The other example, and the one I nicked the idea off, is You Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate. What a great idea, wah-wah congas. In my case, they were played by ‘Seventies’ Mike Johnson, of Word Magazine fame, with Simon Trought, from Soup Studio, operating the wah-wah. I love the electric version of this song, but I prefer this acoustic version, I think.
I’m editing this on a different version of iMovie to previous songs. It seems to have picked up a bit of a hiss – can you let me know if it’s obtrusive or not, and I’ll see what I do about it. Thanks.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Twenty – Till The Fighting’s Done
I seem to remember writing Till the Fighting’s Done at Simon’s house the morning after a party while I waited for everyone else to get up. We had breakfast, I cycled over to my pal Lewis’ house, and together with his wife, Mandy, we drove over to Spike Island to see the Stone Roses. Not a bad day, I reckon.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Nineteen – My Best Friend
Hopefully people know me well enough to know that the lyrics of this song don’t actually reflect events that have happened in my life. For those who don’t know me, for the record, I have never strangled my best friend, or any friend for that matter, using a belt or indeed any sort of asphyxiative device. (I just thought I’d clear that one up). And I hope it’s a simple step to extrapolate out and realise that these songs of mine are not confessional poems. They’re all written as little playlets or short stories, exercises in storytelling and character study. Indeed, the observant among you will have noticed that the tale being told here is a twist on the great Tom Jones’ song, Delilah, (spoiler alert – Delilah gets stabbed). Delilah is a better song, especially the verse, but I like this one of mine, and I commend it to the house.
BTW I borrowed the picking for My Best Friend to use in Legendary, demonstrating very clearly how limited my guitar playing is. I’m OK with that – I’m making a virtue of a necessity and staking a claim for a picking style that henceforth will be known as Smithian!
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Eighteen – Legendary
Of all the songs I’m recording for this project, Legendary is the only one that was significantly co-written. If you know anything of the history of The Scaremongers, which is the band I formed with Simon Armitage when we were in our twenties and then revisited a few years ago, Legendary was one of the few we worked on together back in the first incarnation, and then finished and recorded once we re-formed. Simon’s lyrics are tremendous on this one, a joy to sing. Simon sings the original wonderfully well and the arrangement is superb, thanks to some lovely organ from Nick Watts, rock solid bass from Glen Smith and absolutely divine counterpoint vocal by Sue Armitage aka Speedy Sue.
I wanted to include at least one song from the Born in a Barn album because I’m very proud of it and I want people to know about it. Legendary is up with my favourite songs on the album. I really love it.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Seventeen – Upon Loneliness
God, I look knackered.
I did my third solo gig last night. The gigs have just been Open Mic Nights, so it’s not like I’m on the bill on merit, but it’s been really useful to play in front of an audience, to hear myself, to have one shot at any given song on any given night. I’d like to think the performances are getting better each time, aided by the fact that I’m practicing a lot, bashing away at each tune until it’s indelibly embedded in my memory, (well, kind of!). These videos have been a massive boon, too. I’m getting to know my voice better and and to understand what I can play and what I can’t. I’m a much better player when the mic or video is switched off, so I need to figure out a way of getting confident enough in my playing to play my best when I’m playing live.
I played three songs last night, Something On My Mind, Long White Wedding Dress and By The Time We Said Goodnight:
The gig was at the White Lion in Streatham and my performance was filmed on my mobile phone by my friend, Mike, (thanks, Mike – sorry I didn’t have a decent stand to support the camera on). I played my first solo gig at the White Lion a couple of weeks ago, when I played Upside Down and How To Build An Empire. My other gig was last Friday at the Pied Bull in Streatham, where I did three songs, Long White Wedding Dress, Mirrorball and Lights on Barkhouse.
So anyway, I was up late last night, which you can really see on my face. I look shattered. That’s the trouble with doing a song a day – you need to make the effort even if you don’t have the energy. Upon Loneliness is one of my favourite songs of mine, and I haven’t really done it justice, here.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Sixteen – Something On My Mind
Something On My Mind is an update of the Hendrix song, Red House.
The version on Bandcamp is the lead song from the album Love Songs From the Feral Park, where it benefited from the superb organ work of the Great Nick Watts and the Surprisingly Dextrous Greg Davies, (I’m teasing, Greg’s a very good keyboard player!) plus the miraculous vocal stylings of the outrageously talented Deborah Watkins.
I have a gig tonight where I’ll do Somethig On My Mind, plus By The Time We Said Goodnight.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Fifteen – The Face of Love
I’m halfway through. I’m kind of astounded that I’ve made it this far and I’m almost disappointed that the end is in sight.
The main thing I’ve learned is to deliver the song with confidence. And confidence comes from knowing your material. Practice, practice, practice. Bludgeon the lyrics into your head. Get the chords into muscle memory. At that point you can trust them when you’re playing. The same applies to recording and playing live. The better you know your material, the better it will be delivered.
The Face of Love is surprisingly tricky to sing. The lyric cuts across the beat, particularly in the 2nd and 3rd verses, and I found the first few times through that it threw my strumming off. I think I got away with it on this take – it’s better than any of the others, that’s for sure!
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Fourteen – Mirrorball
Mirrorball first appeared on the seminal album Pop Happenings Volume 4, possibly the greatest album in the history of popular music. (Well, maybe that’s a *slight* exagguration!) The version on Pop Happenings differed from the version here, (henceforth known as the Bathroom Tapes) because a) it has a drum track and b) I didn’t make a mistake in the final verse.
FYI, the drumming on the Bathroom version is actually Woody Woodmansey, the mighty drummer from the Spiders from Mars. I sampled the drum hits from the intro to Five Years, shoved them in a sampler and triggered them from Cubase. (I’m guessing this opens up the opportunity for Woody/Bowie/Mainman/Whoever to claim a percentage of the revenue from that version of Mirrorball – chaps, I have a cheque for £0.79 waiting for you).
There’s a forthcoming version of Mirrorball sung by Speedy Sue aka Sue Armitage, which will be part of an album we’re working on. Now that version will be magnificent. Sue has such a beautiful voice.
Normally, when I record my voice I always cut out some of the lower frequencies, apply a liberal amount of compression and copious quantities of reverb. It’s an interesting exercise hearing my voice as it comes out of my mouth. I must admit, it’s a relief to get into the bathroom to have a little natural reverb surround it.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Thirteen – The Damage Is Done
Day Thirteen and The Damage Is Done, wherein I’ve learned one or two lessons from the earlier videos. I don’t seem to be gawping as vacantly in this one as in previous songs, though the camera-staring is a little unnerving. I need to work out where to place my eyes. In an ideal world, I would have a 2nd camera recording the song from a different angle to break up with the stare-line, but I tried that on one of the first videos and it was a nightmare to edit with the technology that I have. Final Cut needed ten minutes to render the slight change in the sequence and in iMovie I can’t figure out how to sync video and audio for multiple cameras. iMovie has become my default editing software, just because it’s the simplest.
The whole process of recording these videos takes somewhere between 3 and 4 hours. Recording the song takes about an hour. Then I go through the various takes to work out which is least bad, trim the chosen footage, import it into iMovie, add the credits and transitions, sometimes I extract the audio and normalise it using Audacity, export the video, post it to YouTube, write the clattermonger.com blog post, Facebook it and Tweet it. There are ways I’ve speeded up the process, and there are times when I’m importing and exporting and uploading when I can get on with other things.
From my point of view, it’s definitely worth it. It’s a relief to get a song such as The Damage is Done, which has been sitting patiently in my pile of songs for anything up to 15 or 20 years, out into the world. In my mind, it needs to be sung by someone like Percy Sledge or even Willy Nelson. Here, obviously, it’s just me. Ah well, you can’t have everything!
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Twelve – By The Time We Said Goodnight
I drummed up the melody for By The Time We Said Goodnight when I was working with my dad in an industrial complex in Leeds where we were fitting huge buzzbars to a machine that made gynormous rolls of aluminium for the big printing companies. The lyrics didn’t come for a long time after that. It went through various iterations until it got where it is now. It still feels funny to sing a song from the point of view of a fourteen-year old when I’m, er, no longer a fourteen-year old. I always think of it as the stuff that’s really going through the protagonists’ head in the Arctic Monkeys’ Riot Van – they are hanging around outside the shops because the girls they fancy at school don’t know they exist. In many ways the song is a period piece – after all, who has a phonebook these days, except perhaps some skeumorphic variety within someone’s mobile phone!
I recorded a version of By The Time We Said Goodnight with the great Nick Watts on Wurlitzer piano which can be heard on Bandcamp, along with the rest of the songs on Love Songs From The Feral Park.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Eleven – Long White Wedding Dress
I’m a big fan of Long White Wedding Dress, though I say so myself! It’s one of the few songs I have written that was a writing exercise. I wanted to write a big, tragic, melodramatic torch song that Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley or even Shirley Bassey might sing. In my mind, I was thinking of something like Running Scared, Long Black Limousine or Long Black Veil. I wanted it to have a lot of minor and major changes. I wanted it to have a quiet verse and then a big chorus, but not in a Pixies quiet/loud stylee, more You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me.
I think it’s come out alright as a song. It’s a nice one to sing.
I’ve learned a few things from these videos, now I have a few under my belt:
- I need to stop grimacing in between lines
- I need to stop grimacing during the lines
- I need to stop my tongue from shoving my lip out between lines. I look like Gordon Brown
- Moving around while performing is a distraction. Stand still
- Moving around while performing while wearing a black t-shirt only confuses the light balance within the camera. Stand still so the camera knows what light it needs to deal with
- I need to get my haircut. That front bit looks like Phil Collins!
Except the haircut bit, these are all about learning to sing and play at the same time. I’m getting better at accompanying myself, I think, but that just means I’m raising the bar higher in what I want from a performance, which is a good thing. I’ve learned to keep the arrangements simple, that provided the vocal comes out right, adding complexity to the accompaniment doesn’t improve things vastly. The finger-ends on my left hand are hardening, which is what you want as a guitarist. It makes it easier to do more takes. And my muscle memory is improving, though it astounds me that I can play a wrong chord within a sequence when I previously played it correctly twenty times in a row.
One of the main things I’ve learned is how important practice is. The harder you work at something, the more confidently you can tackle it, the more nuance you can put into the performance. That’s a good thing to keep in mind.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Eight – Wupping
Day Eight. Into my second week. I’ve had a very pleasing response from my friends, who have been positive and encouraging. Thanks, everyone!
The title, Wupping, is a carry-over from the original chorus – “I took a Wupping, Game, Set and Match.” “Dress up warm on these cold winter’s nights” is a better hook-line, I think, but Wupping is a good word and makes for a good title.
There’s a version of Wupping on the album Pop Happening Volume 4. That version is 4/4, with beats and all sorts of instrumentation. Here it’s in 12/8 and the only instruments are the ones you can see. This is one of those songs that, if a guitar is going around at a party and we’re all taking a turn, is my go-to song. My party piece.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Seven – Love Song in C
Love Song in C is the song through which I realised a step ladder would make a good camera stand. No longer am I trying to balance my iPhone on the light switch or the mantlepiece. I can now roam the house in my pursuit of the perfect camera angle. I suddenly feel like Orson Wells.
Love Song in C, contrary to the misleading title, is in C minor. I love minor chords. And the occasional seventh. I have a dogmatic belief that you don’t need anything other than majors, minors and sevenths. Anything else is for the benefit of other songwriters, not the listening the public.
Pretty much everything I write starts off in C. With The Scaremongers, as far as I can recall, every song we have ever done in C, which is a key that suits Simon’s voice. But as the song says, “it doesn’t matter what key if it means as much to you as it does to me”.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Six – Beyond the Garden Path
Beyond the Garden Path, Day 6 in my 30 Songs in 30 Days project, is possibly my favourite song of mine. I recorded it for the Love Songs From The Feral Park album, a nicely recorded version you can hear on Bandcamp which is the best recording I’ve made in terms of arrangement, the balance of sounds etc. I got the nucleus of an idea for the song after a Thursday night out in Sunsets nightclub, which I mentioned in the song I Was With You. I was working as van driver for a Motor Factors, delivering car parts to garages around Huddersfield, and I was a bit hung-over and I didn’t have a guitar with me, so I had to memorise the melody and keep it in my head until I got home. But as the Boy McCartney says, if you can’t remember a song, how do you expect anyone else to! The tune sat in my back catalogue of songs, unfinished, for many years before I finally dusted it off and made it fit for public consumption.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Five – How To Build An Empire
About fifteen years ago, I took a week’s holiday just to make music. I was new to recording, so after working flat out for 6 or 7 days, everything I’d recorded was rubbish. I hadn’t figured out how to set the gain levels and mix tracks, so everything sounded horrible. I was pretty glum about it, and, come Sunday evening, when work was looming the following morning and I had a terrible sinking feeling that I’d blown a golden chance, I picked up the guitar and wrote How To Build An Empire:
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Four – Good-Hearted Man
If I’ve learned one thing from today’s episode of 30 Songs in 30 Days, it’s that house lighting might look fine under normal circumstances, but it makes it look you’ve run the video footage through a urine filter for that ‘just peed on the camera lens’ effect. Classy! I’ll try and stick to daylight recordings from now on.
Good-Hearted Man was previously recorded with a drum beat (and magnificent electric piano work from the great Nick Watts) for the Love Songs in the Feral Park album, (which I notice comes complete with lyrics, which is a surprise, as it’s me that must have put them up there and I can’t imagine that I would make the effort – oh well, good for my younger self!).
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Three – I Was With You
I Was With You is the third song in the 30 Songs in 30 Days project:
It contains a reference to a defunct Huddersfield night club called Sunset Boulevard, or Sunsets, as it was known. Sunsets was situated by the station, with a pub upstairs (Jetsets) and the club downstairs. It was the kind of place we used to go on a Friday or Saturday night after playing football or an evening traipsing round the pubs. We nearly got into a scrap with Huddersfield Young Casuals there one night – the bouncer snuck us out of the back door – but other than that, I never saw an ounce of trouble. I had some fun times there. As far as Huddersfield references go, it sits alongside the mention of Bostock Records in the Pack Horse that I bullied into Less Is More Part Two.
The ba-ba-ba-bas in the chorus need to be played by a laid-back brass section, I reckon. That’s how I hear them in my head, anyway. I think the whole song could stand a full band treatment, but regardless, this is one that has been in my back catalogue for a long time and I’m glad it has finally seen the light of day.
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day Two – Hurt Another Day
The second song in my 30 Songs in 30 Days project is Hurt Another Day:
I think I wrote Hurt Another Day when I was at Manchester Polytechnic in the 80’s but I forget exactly. Some of these songs were written so long ago I can’t remember writing them. I know I first recorded it about 14 years ago in a home studio in Streatham, because it’s part of an album of songs called Pop Happenings Volume 4 that I cobbled together from all the serviceable recordings I had at my disposal at that point. That version of Hurt Another Day, which you can hear here, comes complete with drums, bass, a bit of piano and tambourine, which keeps it moving along nicely, I think. (I’m normally rubbish at tambourine). It’s a fun song to sing, especially when it gets to the chorus. Not that you’d know it from this performance, where I was so preoccupied by keeping it together and maintaining the tempo without speeding up while at the same time remembering the lyrics and not fouling up on the chords that I forgot to enjoy myself. But that’s part of what this project is about – improving my ability until I can take a base level of competence for granted, so I can concentrate on the performance. That, I am assuring myself, is just a function of practicing. So that’s exactly what I’m going to go and do now!
30 Songs in 30 Days – Day One – Upside Down
We all have stuff we want to be recognised for. For me, I’d like to be remembered as a writer of songs, among other things. In fact, I’m not worried about being remembered, personally, but I’d love something I’ve written to be remembered.
I have a back catalogue of songs I’ve written over the years. If I was run over by a bus tomorrow, dozens of songs would die with me. I’m sure the world would keep revolving without hearing them, but I’d like to save them for posterity, if I can.
Several of my friends (me included) participated in the 30 Days of Music meme, where they blogged one song per day for 30 days, each day with a different theme, (A Song That You Wished You Heard On The Radio, A Song I Can Dance To, that sort of thing). And/or they have done 30 Days of X, such as Russell Davies’ 30 Daily Sketches.
So following a similar meme, I thought I’d do 30 Songs in 30 Days, a video recording of an acoustic version of one of my songs every day for the best part of a month.
There are loads of reasons to do this, but mainly it’s about getting the songs out to the wider world. Some of them have never been recorded before, even though they might have been written anything up to 20 years ago, (or even longer in some cases). Others have appeared on different albums I have put together, which have ostensibly been released to the general public, though they haven’t exactly made a splash. If nothing else, they’ll give my family something to play at my funeral should I get run over by the proverbial bus.
Additionally, I want to start gigging, solo stuff, so this pushes me to practice a little, to achieve some competence in accompanying myself as I sing. I’m hoping as the 30 Days progress, there will be a visible improvement in my guitar technique. And hopefully the videos will be something to point to whenever a pub or club booking agent asks for evidence that I’m able to stand up in front of a crowd without embarrassing myself.
I’ve already decided which songs I’m going to do, though I’m not going to list them until they’re online, in case I find I can’t do any given song because I’m not good enough to perform it in one complete take.
I’m going to post the videos on the Mr Clattermonger channel on YouTube, and I’ll blog about them here. I’ve set up a clattermonger Twitter feed, and I’ll tweet about it using the #30songs30days hashtag. So there’s a little exercise in social media here, too – I’m looking for work at the moment, and several of the jobs I am applying for expect a proven record of experience in social media. So this gives me something to point to as an example of projects I’ve worked on.
So this is Day One. The first song is Upside Down, (or Honey, What Is Wrong With Me, depending on what I’m calling it this week). It’s never seen the light of day before. It was written by be. That’s me singing. That’s me playing guitar. No one else is to blame. No one else can take the glory. It’s just me, in all my splendour!
My Favourite Song At This Time Last Year
My favourite song at this time last year was Rhiannon by Fleetwood Mac. This performance. Stevie Nicks is mesmerising, half-whispering incantations, half-screaming like Janis Joplin. Lyndsey Buckingham’s lead guitar is always magnificent. Christine McVie’s electric piano is perfect. A wonderful piece of music:
A Song From My Childhood
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Partridge Family.”
My sister was a big Partridge Family fan when she was about 8. Her love of All Things Cassidy may not in reality have lasted too long, but I was 5 at the time and as far as I was concerned she was the diviner of all pop knowledge. She read Mickey magazine (does anyone know anything about that worldly tome?) and she knew all the lyrics to all the songs. If she liked something, then it ill-behoved me not to like it, too.
Actually, is that true? Even though she went through an Osmonds phase, I knew Donny Osmond was wimpy even back when I was a little kid, (though obviously I loved Crazy Horses – if ever a song was created to appeal to 5-year olds, it’s Crazy Horses. I just tried it on my almost-4-year old – it still works!) so I must have some sense of some things she liked were quality while others weren’t as appealing to me. So I think I just knew that I Think I Love You was a good song.
I still love this song (as well as How I Can Be Sure?) I love that it’s a minor key masterpiece, and that it’s called Baroque Pop on wikipedia, giving it a certain gravity when it was probably scoffed at by the hipsters of the day. And I love that the backing is played by the Wrecking Crew, the team with the greatest track record of all session musicians. It’s a great piece of pop music and I commend it to the house.
A Song That Makes Me Feel Guilty
I don’t feel guilty about music as a rule so I was at a bit of a loss as to what I could come up with for this category when I went to Russell’s equivalent post. He mentions feeling guilty about not keeping in touch with a particular pal and that resonated with me.
I have dozens of friends I wish I had more time to keep up with, people from various parts of my life with whom I had a lovely time, one way or another, and yet as often happens, they went their way or I went mine, or more likely both, and we don’t stay in touch as we might.
The song that sums this up for me is Neil Young’s One of These Days:
One of these days,
I’m gonna sit down
and write a long letter
To all the good friends I’ve known
And I’m gonna try
And thank them all
for the good times together.
Though so apart we’ve grown.
A Song I Wish I Could Play
There are two songs that I have struggled to play ever since I was 14-years old.
Thin Lizzy: Emerald
The Shadows: Foot-tapper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1X_3d9e25o
I can play them both after a fashion, (I should be able to – I’ve been trying for over 30 years). I know the notes I need to play. But I can never master them. They never form the song they are supposed to form. Not by a mile. And I kind of like that!
BTW, I’d have loved to hear a 1970’s Stevie Wonder taking on Emerald. Couldn’t you just hear the brass section who play on Sir Duke or Masterblaster taking on those guitar licks!
A Song I Can Play On An Instrument
It doesn’t seem fair to include instruments that I play regularly, like the guitar or drums. I’ve played live so many times that there are millions of songs I can knock off without much thought. I think it’s the same with most musicians. There are patterns of playing that you can fall back on so you get through a song making a suitable sound.
The piano, though, is an instrument for which I have a limited facility. I know my major and minor chords reasonably well and I can play the odd blues lick that might sound OK if you’ve had a few drinks. But there’s only one song that I can properly accompany myself on, playing the bass, chords and vocal line all at the same time, and that’s Penny Lane.
I figured it out back when I lived at home from a music book that my mum had borrowed from school, the first and possibly the only time when I’ve had the diligence to systematically learn how to play something. It’s a clunky arrangement and it’s even more clunky in my hands, but it’s my go-to tune whenever I’m somewhere with a piano. I once played it on the piano at my friend Melanie’s house. She was very gracious about my performance, then, when it was her turn to sit and play, she ran off Fingal’s Cave or something like that, note perfect and with a fluency that was wonderful to hear.
There are lots of levels of ability when it comes to a skill like playing a musical instrument. I’m way down the rankings when it comes to serious musical chops. But you can’t let that stop you, can you! And as long as you’re aware that you can test people’s patience if you’re of limited ability and you play for too long, most people are appreciative of your efforts.
A Song That Makes Me Laugh
I have little sense of humour when it comes to music. I wish I had. I’m po-faced where music is concerned. I can’t get over the fact that it should be taken seriously.
So, songs that make me laugh are few and far between. The stuff that makes me chortle are those moments where the music itself is so delicious it causes you to burst out laughing. And the song that maybe does it for me more than any is The Shangri-las Give Him A Great Big Kiss:
Clattermonger 