1976, a song, Save Your Kisses For Me

I may as well state from the start: I don’t think Save Your Kisses For Me by Brotherhood of Man is a good song. In fact I think it would be relatively easy to make a case for it being a bad song. It is soppy, overly sentimental and over reliant on its chorus. [Sure, soppy and overly sentimental mean pretty much the same thing but I think it is a point worth making twice.] The last line of the song – “Won’t you save them for me, even though you’re only three” – is one of the worst in the history of pop music. Partly because Save Your Kisses For Me isn’t the sort of song that requires an M. Night Shyamalan-style twist ending, but mostly because asking a three-year-old to save their kisses for you sounds upsetting and creepy.

I don’t need to labour the point. The song is bad.

And yet…

The chorus is kind of fun, in a way. And they won Eurovision with it. You have to respect that, I think. One doesn’t just win Eurovision.

Also, it would be churlish not to admit that in my youth I co-wrote songs far far worse than Save Your Kisses For Me. Really bad songs. Songs that could never represent the UK at Eurovision. Terrible terrible terrible songs.

So… in conclusion… Save Your Kisses For Me is… good?

Not quite. But, it does fit into a group of songs that I suspect are bad but I can’t stay mad at. And those songs, those probably bad songs, are part of what defines me/us.

What’s the worst song you ever bought. I distinctly remember buying Today’s the Day by Sean Maguire on cassingle and the person who served me laughing in my face as I did so. It was in the HMV in the Merry Hill Centre. I was twenty years old.

And… I still think that song is a banger. It sounds like somebody pushed a really big Small Faces b-side into Abs from 5s nose and collected the stuff that came out of his ears, then made that stuff into music. Great music. Really great and quite silly music. I loved it then. I still love it now.

So can that count as the worst song I ever bought? Not really. It killed Sean Maguire’s music career, sure, but is it really worse than every Britpop single I bought in the 90s? I don’t think so.

I bought a lot of Britpop. If I was to rank all of it? With the benefit of hindsight? I’m quietly confident Today’s the Day would make the top half. But I also know that for every song I put beneath Sean in my rankings, there would be a furious group of people ready to call me an idiot for doing so. So who is right? Almost certainly not me.

I suppose all I’m really saying is, we shouldn’t take songs too seriously. Albums we should take seriously because they take an hour to listen to. But songs? Lighten up a bit. There’s room in our hearts for The Brotherhood of Man.