Fact #163639
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Chris Difford (Squeeze) : Glenn (Tilbrook of Squeeze) had a backing track that we’d recorded in a studio in London but we didn’t have a lyric for it. It was the only song on the album that was unfinished. So I took the track back home that evening to work on ideas, and happened to be watching Benny Hill on tv. He was doing his normal stuff and his usual couple of songs, whichI always thought were quite ridiculous. However, I was listening to the meter of one of his songs and thought it might fit in with what would become Cool For Cats, and that’s how it was written, sitting at the kitchen table in Greenwich.
Like the Benny Hill numbers, each verse is really a little vignette about different situations. It was all to do with television of the time, mentioning things like the Indians, The Sweeney and discos. It was all relevant for the seventies. In a kind of way, it’s almost like a rap thing of its day, but for South London as opposed to South Harlem.
The next day I went into the studio, we stuck a mike up and I just sang it. Glenn came up with the idea of having the backing vocals singing ‘cool for cats’ but because we couldn’t afford expensive backing singers we got our girlfriends in to sing the line and in many ways they sold the song.
(Source : not known)
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Like the Benny Hill numbers, each verse is really a little vignette about different situations. It was all to do with television of the time, mentioning things like the Indians, The Sweeney and discos. It was all relevant for the seventies. In a kind of way, it’s almost like a rap thing of its day, but for South London as opposed to South Harlem.
The next day I went into the studio, we stuck a mike up and I just sang it. Glenn came up with the idea of having the backing vocals singing ‘cool for cats’ but because we couldn’t afford expensive backing singers we got our girlfriends in to sing the line and in many ways they sold the song.
(Source : not known)