Well, I'm rumblin' in this JCB...
One of the best, quirkiest, most imaginative and innovative number one singles (and animations) in recent times was "The JCB Song" by Nizlopi, about a young lad's memories while sitting in the cab of his dad's JCB.
And - miracle of Christmas miracles - it managed to keep Westlife and an X Factor "star" off the top slot (and that fecker Crazy Frog with Jingle Bells/U Can't Touch This).
You might have come across some of the acoustic duo's Irish connections, what with the song involving JCBs and that line early on about the father and son singing the Christy Moore song "Don't forget your shovel if you want to go to work" as they rumbled along.
The Nizlopi duo, Luke Concannon and John Parker, hail from Leamington Spa in England and are indeed very much "of Irish extraction", as they say. John's ma comes from Dublin and Luke's grandparents are Irish too - and his da plays in a ceili band.
“I grew up with a very Irish-orientated family where everyone did their bit of performing at family parties. So from a young age I was singing to family and friends,” Luke explained to IrishAbroad.com.
And (as they say in those TV infomercials) there's more ("this pen cuts through tins!"). Irish instruments such as bodhrans and uilleann pipes pop up in several of their songs, and according to Eamon Fitzgerald's blog, "The JCB song" was written and recorded during the annual Willie Clancy Summer School down in Miltown Malbay in Co Clare.
Eamon - who happens to have been a classmate of mine many moons ago and used to present that brilliant radio show The Long Note on RTE Radio 1 even more moons ago, goes even further: "Just listen to those lovely uilleann pipes' drones that cut in during the chorus and round out the track. Could they belong to Mikie Smyth, whose bass drone sounds a fourth above the tonic? A bit arcane that, but piping knowledge is arcane, just as drones are distinctive."
Indeed. Mind you, one Coventry website tracked down Kieron Concannon, the JCB driving dad of the song, and found that he did the pipes on the track.
Songs about JCBs have a rich heritage, believe it or not. In 1958, Lenny Green recorded "JCB And Me", while the country-folk singer Seamus Moore, who hails from Kilkenny but is mostly based in London as far as I know, calls himself "The JCB Man". His repertoire includes such numbers as Take Me Back To Castlebar, The Transit Van, and a ballad called... The JCB Song.
Meanwhile if you go to buy Nizlopi's "JCB Song" on a well-known sales website, it tells you that: "Customers interested in this title may also be interested in... Supralift (special offers for Over 10,000 Used Forklift Trucks)".
Oh, and if you're wondering why with all those Irish connections they have such a funny and "foreign" sounding name, the band's name is in homage to Nina Nizlopi, a Hungarian girl Luke had a crush on at school.
Posted by mick cunningham at January 10, 2006 10:10 PM | Email a friend this entry
