Doing The Lambeth Walk
Liz calls herself a reincarnated flapper and constantly amazes me with her knowledge of music from the 20s, 30s, and 40s. She knows the words and sings along with Limehouse Blues, a piece I had known only as an instrumental. When I got a George Formby CD from Past Perfect, she started singing I’m Leaning On A Lamppost before I’d even gotten it out of the jewel case.
So I kinda wish she were here right now to give me some of her insight on The Lambeth Walk. My discovery of it began with another Past Perfect CD set, The Songs & Music Of World War II. First lyric to connect with me was “I’ve got the deepest shelter in town,” which was Florence Desmond’s signature tune. I imagine if you’re living through The Blitz, a bit of suggestiveness seems harmless. In a real war, you’re probably more concerned about survival than, say, a few nanoseconds of a boob flash.
Sorry for the accidental editorial insertion, I really mean to keep on typing about The Lambeth Walk. As I listened to those CDs, often while blogging here, I began to sing along with The Two Leslies (wait not those two Leslies, these Two Leslies) singing “We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line.” I marched around the computer room when Sam Browne sang There’ll Always Be An England (the referenced site says that “lefties hate this song”). I cried as Marlene Dietrich sang Lili Marlene, a song whose own story tells the tragedy of war more deeply than any other – a song played over loudspeakers by opposing sides during breaks in the battle. Yes, we don’t hate you, we appreciate your sensitivities, we just need to kill you.
Meanwhile, while all these anthems, ballads, and comedy tunes (I haven’t mentioned Der Fuehrer’s Face by Spike Jones & His City Slickers, one of my favorite bands, a precursor to both Weird Al Yankovic and Frank Zappa) were bubbling in my mind like champagne, a silly counterpoint began to bubble like viscous lava from my admittedly insane subconscious: “He’ll get by without his rabbit pie, so run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run.”
After a week or two I was completely infected. It was like a virus in my mental Outlook Express, spamming me with idiotic lyrics that started to creep into my otherwise very professional work life. I’d be updating video drivers on a computer and would suddenly burst out with “He’ll get by without his rabbit pie” and my co-workers were simply not buying my “story” that I’d been listening to WW II tunes.
The virus replicated and began to dominate my conscious mind. Whenever I stopped doing, it started playing on my mental jukebox. If I had been spontaneously singing Green Acres or Speed Racer, that woulda been okay, everyone does that, but this Run, Rabbit, Run is just too fucking weird.
Don’t take this as a recommendation, au contraire – do not ever listen to this tune. I am your negative example! Imagine me on The 700 Club talking about how my life was ruined before I discovered Vitamin Christ, only this time it ain’t booze, drugs, or adultery that’s the salient manifestation of Satan – it is a song that possesses you. Stay away from it!
Like any addict whose entire existence becomes an obsession about a substance, I began to do research on Run, Rabbit, Run. On my CD, it was performed by Flanagan & Allen. Not a whole lot out there about them except that they changed the lyrics to “Run, Adolph, Run” as the war was winding down and people really liked that. A lot of their songs are about arches and umbrellas, kinda like a trademark, I suppose. They made some movies, but they’re all out of print now – you can’t even get them on VHS. Too bad, these guys were genuinely entertaining.
So I looked up the demon that actually created this musical poltergeist. The man behind those lyrics is Noel Gay. He was not only a talented composer and lyricist; he was an impresario who founded an agency that has threads running through British TV and music to contemporary times. Run, Rabbit, Run is not his most important contribution to the world of music.
He is most famous for a musical, Me and My Girl, that won 3 Tony awards in a Broadway “reproduction” in 1987. His real name was Reginald Armitage, but he used “Noel Gay” as a pseudonym because he thought that using his real name would taint his position in the church (Imagine today - yeah, I don’t want my Sunday School reputation tarnished, so I’ll call myself “Noel Gay”). The Lambeth Walk was a tune in Me and My Girl, though the dance itself was supposedly spontaneously created by Miss England in 1938, a year before the war broke out, but a year after Arthur Murray taught it in the US (the "fog of dance?"). The dance craze rapidly spread across the continent, even gaining a foothold in increasingly scary Nazi Germany. The Gestapo demanded that Noel Gay should sign an affidavit certifying that his lineage was pure, untainted by Jewish blood, to lend an air of legitimacy to the cultural phenomenon he had helped create.
He refused.
I always get uneasy when Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness Of Crowds infect the deep unconscious of the masses. It’s generally a sign that some really nasty big shit is coming down the pike pretty soon. We’re not quite having any of those symptoms right now, but it is my modest observation that all the psychic barometers (Janet & Michael Jackson, flash mobs, carbophobia, etc.) are dropping quickly.
7:03:57 PM 
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