Bonkers Crusade: Dear Mr. Pop Star

Do you ever listen to song lyrics and wonder if they make any sense at all? A couple of eccentric blokes are leading ‘bonkers crusade’ to challenge niggles in pop song lyrics.  I giggled at the concept for their book entitled Dear Mr. Pop star. ‘Dear Mr. Pop star’ consists of deliberately deranged and funny letters to iconic pop stars.  Enough.  I’ll let Derek Philpott explain in his own hilarious and unique style.  Here’s the letter I received from Mister Postman.

Dear All

For nearly 10 ten years, with the increasing help of my lad, David, I have been on what is viewed by many as a quite bonkers crusade – writing good old-fashioned letters to pop and rock stars about their songs and band names. The thing is, and I hate to break this to you – a lot of them don’t make any sense!

For example: ”I was born this way,” declares ‘Lady Gaga’, but I would be very surprised if the young lady had entered the world in a frock made of Kermit The Frogs with a telephone on her head

 

Similarly, Mr. Jagger states that he sees a red door and wants to paint it black however one would recommend at least two strong undercoats before commencing his D.I.Y. task. Failure to do so may lead to the intended black door actually turning out purple, owing to the strong primary colour that he is looking to supersede. 

David noticed a long time ago that I had an uncanny knack of interpreting The Hit Parade and popular ‘tunes’ in quite a left-field fashion, either pointing out blatant lyrical ambiguities or, very often, completely getting the wrong end of the stick. He’d say things like:

“…but dad, it’s AC/DC, you can’t say that a Highway to Hell is a near impossible to construct thoroughfare towards an ethereal epicentre for dead bad people! They’re legends!” To which I would retort “Listen son, I don’t know who it is and I don’t care who it is. It doesn’t make sense.”

We did try and get replies to these missives by sending them to the pop star’s record companies and managers and ‘official channels’, but we didn’t hear anything back. So we built a little website, put the letters up for all to see, and joined Facebook and continued our epistles there.

Then, as the popularity of the letters grew, the artists quite unexpectedly started to reply, pointing out exactly where the original communications went wrong … or right. So we published a book of the funniest letters and replies. That went swimmingly, so now we’re doing another called ”Dear Mr. Pop Star”, out later this year via Unbound with a Trade Edition through Penguin

Of course, it is not always possible to reach certain targets, hence many observations remain unanswered …

We hope you like our bizarre and silly world

Yours,

Derek Philpott

‘Dear Mr. Pop Star’ is out on 20^th September. Let us know if you have any queries about lyrics and I will pass this on to the crusaders.

About Dear Mr. Pop Star

For more than a decade, Derek Philpott and his son, Dave, have been writing to pop stars from the 1960s to the 90s to take issue with the lyrics of some of their best-known songs.

But then, to their great surprise, the pop stars started writing back…

Dear Mr Pop Star contains 100 of Derek and Dave’s greatest hits, including correspondence with Katrina and the Waves, Tears for Fears, Squeeze, The Housemartins, Suzi Quatro, Devo, Deep Purple, Nik Kershaw, T Pau, Human League, Eurythmics, Wang Chung, EMF, Mott the Hoople, Heaven 17, Jesus Jones, Johnny Hates Jazz, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Chesney Hawkes and many, many more.

About the Derek and Dave Philpott

Derek and Dave Philpott are the nom de plumes of two ordinary members of the public, working with help from a small family and, crucially, a worldwide social networking community. Neither they, or anybody assisting with the creative aspects of this project had any connections with the music, entertainment, media or publishing industries whatsoever at the time of its commencement. Despite these humble origins, however, they now find themselves in the bizarre but enviable position whereby many pop stars and people within these circles are their friends “in real life” (whatever that means!). Many artists consider “getting a Dereking” as a badge of honour, and, as one has participant succinctly put it-

“This is an ingenious and extremely inventive concept. You have given us a platform to answer questions that have been asked of us for years by our fans and respond on a public platform of immense fun. You’ve created a weird and wonderful world loved and admired by 1,000s of people worldwide, and you have your own army of loyal fans. That pretty much makes you part of ‘us lot’ now!”

 

Please see all my guests’ posts at Mail from the Creative Community and my website and blog at JessieCahalin.com.