Incredible news, 7 Reasons readers: I’ve discovered the worst song of all time. Surprisingly it’s not Mull of Kintyre, We Didn’t Start The Fire or that turgid Whitney Houston one that I first heard in 1993 and for all I know is still playing in the room I ran screaming from. It’s a song called Don’t Have Any More Mrs Moore that was made famous by Lily Morris in the 1920s. I didn’t mean to discover it. It snuck up and pounced on me while I was watching a documentary about Pathe News. It’s embedded below. I recommend that you don’t listen to it. Here are seven reasons that it’s the worst song ever.
1. It’s…Aarrgghhhh! Okay, you may have ignored my recommendation and if you did, that’s probably something approximating the noise you made on listening to it. I know that my initial reaction to hearing the jaunty and rather creaking string introduction followed by the first few bars of Lily Morris warbling about Mrs Moore was to shriek obstreperously and try to jam a dining table, a map of Scotland and half finished packet of Foxes Glacier Fruits into my ears. Sadly, they did not completely muffle the ear-grating, fingernails-down-a-blackboard, mating-sounds-of-a-half-strangled-cat-in-a-biscuit-tin, out-of-tune-soprano-with-her-on-fire-hair-caught-in-a-blender sheer unremitting screeching bloody cacophony that is this song. Listening to it is the aural equivalent of putting your penis on a desk and having it repeatedly struck with a hammer by an addled and vengeful dandruff-specked minicab driver with halitosis and grey shoes; something that every right-minded person would choose to spend an entire Saturday doing when given the choice between that or hearing a fraction of a nanosecond of a bar of this song again. It may well have been the first recorded instance of a father waking his baby up by screaming in the middle of the night. It is popularly said of ugly celebrities that, “…he/she has a face for radio”. Similarly, Lily Morris has a voice for cinema. Silent cinema. A silent cinema buried deep under the ground. Under Peru. In fact, under a very noisy thing in Peru. Under a man having his penis repeatedly struck with a hammer by an addled and vengeful dandruff-specked minicab driver with halitosis and grey shoes in Peru. Between the airport and the pneumatic drill testing centre.
2. It Fails The Test Of Time. Cole Porter; George and Ira Gershwin; Ivor Novello; Hoagy Carmichael; Kurt Weil; Irving Berlin: Just a few of the talented songwriters working in the 1920s that had absolutely cock-all to do with this song. Sadly, while their work has aged well, this song has not. It is the Mickey Rourke of popular song. It clearly had some sort of popular appeal in its day because Lily Morris sang it many times and I can find no written accounts of pandemonium as masses of horrified music-lovers stampeded from music-halls. But there’s another possible explanation. Perhaps those that witnessed this horror were simply too traumatised to write about it; I wish I was. Perhaps people back then – who were able to vividly recount the sheer bloody horror of mechanised war and mass genocide – were far too disturbed by the ordeal of hearkening to this interminable and harrowing din to leave their descendants a warning from history. That seems eminently possible.
3. It’s Strange. In the song, Lily Morris is singing as a character, rather than as herself, addressing Mrs Moore. Not content with singing in her own character’s voice (and who would be content with that) for the whole of the song, Lily Morris inexplicably sings a verse of it as a Dutch vicar. From Namibia. I have no idea why she sings it as a Dutch vicar from Namibia, but I suppose if you’re going to pretend to be a vicar, you have to come from somewhere, even if it is Namibia. And you are Dutch.
4. It’s Ironic. The central theme of the song is a woman using drunkenness as a euphemism for wantonness or wantonness as a euphemism for drunkenness (I thought of checking, but I decided I’d rather have rusty razor blades stapled to my forehead instead) and cautioning another woman (Mrs Moore) against one or the other (or both). The irony is, however, that this is a song that positively no one could ever bear sober. This is a song that no sane person could experience (even partially) without having imbibed so much strong alcohol in one sitting that their liver would have a half-life of several millennia and would smell pungently of juniper berries for at least four and a half eternities.* The only way that anyone could possibly listen to this song without alcohol is if they were dead, and even then they would have to have been dead for at least a century and would need to have their wrists bound and the remains of their chest pinned to the floor by an anvil with Eamonn Holmes and the cast of Gandhi seated upon it, to ensure that they did not rise up and scamper from the room squealing in terror and urinating uncontrollably on the carpet.
5. It’s Historic. The discovery of this song has created a wholly astonishing and unforeseen development of historical proportions. A transpiration so unexpected that no one will ever have conceived of reading the words I’m about to write together in the same sentence. So momentous is this situation that, if I were to tell Nostradamus, Zephania, Philip the Evangelist and Derren Brown what I’m about to tell you, their reaction would be “Blimey! I didn’t see that one coming”. This song would be improved if covered by Jedward.
6. It’s Immortal. Once heard, this song cannot be killed. It’s an ear-worm that refuses to leave. Once it gets into your head (even if you only hear it once) this song becomes that bloody glittery vampire – the one that all sane people wish would just go away and die – that never goes away and dies. Of all the songs that you could ever get stuck in your head, this is the stickiest and most recalcitrant. It literally seems to bond itself to the inside of your brain somewhere between thoughts about tiramisu and thoughts about ducks. It is said that men think about sex every seven seconds. That is not true of men that have heard this song. Men that have heard this song think of this song every seven seconds (even when they’re asleep or flying an aeroplane). This song is no mere musical entertainment, it is a frightening disease of the mind.
7. It’s…Aaaaaarrrrrgghhh!!! Don’t Read This Reason! If you think about this song long enough – every seven seconds since last Friday night, for example – it spawns the song of Satan. Because sooner or later (in a variant of infinite monkey theorem known as infinite poor suffering bastard that heard Don’t Have Any More Mrs Moore once and is now hearing it internally and infinitely for infinity theorem) the song will mutate. As you think of – or hear – another song this song will begin to segue into it. And then, with a creeping sense of trepidation and mounting dread, you will one day hear something so abominable and ghastly that it might well prove to be one of the signs of the apocalypse. You will hear the chorus of this song segue into that of another. You will hear:
Don’t have any more Mrs Moore
When there’s room on my horse for two
And with that perfectly seamless transition you’ll discover that you have, in your head, a mutant Lily Morris/Rolf Harris hybrid creature (Rily Marris?) singing a mash-up of Don’t Have Any Moore Mrs Moore and Two Little Boys at you every seven seconds for the rest of time. See, I told you not to read it.
*And why the hell does the word eternity have a plural?!
