A Son of the Rock

The good lady told me she caught Mike d’Abo (the former Manfred Mann frontman, successor to Paul Jones) on TV last week talking about one of the songs he wrote, Handbags And Gladrags. She got the impression it had been written for Rod Stewart but I said I was sure Chris Farlowe had recorded it first.

D’Abo apparently said he had to write a woodwind part for Stewart but since he doesn’t write music he had to have someone transcribe it.

Whatever, the song has since become more widely known as a result of The Stereophonics recording and the version which was used as the theme music for Ricky Gervais’s “The Office” TV series.

I dislike the Stewart and Stereophonics versions both. (I can’t remember “The Office” one clearly. I didn’t watch that show.)

In theirs the relevant lyric is rendered as:-
“the handbags and the gladrags that your grandad had to sweat to buy you,”
which is okay but implies a willing benevolence on the grandad’s part and is rather sweet.

However it means something completely different – and much less damning – compared to the original:-
“the handbags and the gladrags that your grandad had to sweat so you could buy,”
which is more redolent of the wastrel ways of an ungrateful grandchild.

This is Chris Farlowe’s version (from 1968):-

There is, by the way, a connection of sorts between Chris Farlowe and myself. But I don’t want to make too much of it as I have read he has become something of a right winger and BNP adherent. (If this is not the case I apologise to him.)

There are no prizes for getting the connection as it’s pretty obvious.