Pete Seeger: Guantanamero (or anyone’s version, really)ġ. Here they are, the songs I will never play, the tunes that drive me from stores or coffee shops within four bars, the numbers that could see the radio silenced, possibly permanently, against a wall.Ĥ. This led, in an act of research likely precipitate insanity in the coming 48 hours, to my considering my personal top five earworms. It turned out to be Queen’s We Will Rock You (go on, hum it, I dare you). So prevalent are they that two researchers (for whom I have a great deal of sympathy) endeavoured in 2012 to find the most common earworm in the UK. Some 98pc of us encounter them (and three quarters of our earworms are songs with lyrics – perhaps I should listen to more classical and jazz).Įdgar Allan Poe was writing about them back in 1845, their length is usually between 15 and 30 seconds, and two proven methods of stopping them are reading a good novel and completing a moderately-difficult anagram. So it is with earworms – otherwise know as stuck song syndrome (or, it you’re being clinical, ‘musical imagery repetition’).

How? By listening to the only other melody which burrows even deeper into my short term auditory memory, an infuriating Richard Thompson tune. This led to 48 or more hours of the chorus erupting every time my brain dropped into ‘stall’ mode: while eating, washing the dishes, tying my shoelaces, putting out the bin. Last week it popped up on shuffle and somehow caught me unawares. On the occasions that I listen to Blood and Chocolate, the album on which Battered Old Bird features, I rush to hit the skip button as soon as the song preceding it begins to wind down. The words are from a not-very-well-known Elvis Costello song, Battered Old Bird. If you keep taking those little pink pills…

Later that day, walking down a flight of stairs at work, it sprang up, maddeningly. Twenty four hours later it hit again, this time in the middle of a morning run.Īfter I returned from my jog it pestered me in the shower. Waking briefly in the middle of the night I lay in bed as it looped around my head.

Clancy brothers when the ship comes in