By The Landlord
“You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope.” – Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
"You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow." - Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart, To Have And Have Not
“The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.” – James Joyce, Ulysses
"You need kissing badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed often, and by someone who knows how.” – Clark Gable, Gone with the Wind
“I ask you to pass through life at my side – to be my second self, and best earthly companion.” – Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
"I used to live like Robinson Crusoe; I mean, shipwrecked among 8 million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand, and there you were." – Jack Lemmon, The Apartment
“Hey, you’re like a hip-hop song, you know?/ Bonita Applebum, you gotta put me on.” – A Tribe Called Quest
“Why'd you come in here lookin' like that / When you could stop traffic in a gunney sack?” - Dolly Parton
“I have crossed oceans of time to find you.” – Count Dracula (Bram Stoker's Dracula)
"I am a moth who just wants to share your light." – Radiohead
"You want to see my spaceship?" – Zaphod Beeblebrox, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
It's a fine pencil line, isn't it, or a great fat clumsy permanent marker pen, or even a yawning chasm of inky, bludgeoning blackness, between a casually charming, sexily seductive chat-up, a half-funny, but cheesy, unwanted approach, or a blunt, overbearing, indecent, inappropriate, drunken, tasteless, intimidating assault on personal and psychological space. Times and tastes change, and what seemed acceptable, for example in the 1970s, would not be now, but then again, when there’s sexual chemistry, any ice-breaker might make it, but also blow it.
We’ve all spoken them, and received them, made hugely embarrassing errors or perhaps by skill, or accident, said just the right thing. But where indeed does that line run between subjective and acceptable flirtiness, or indeed a misunderstood signal? That of course all depends on the individual, mood and circumstances. The best lines, whether it’s to ask someone out, or even to propose marriage, are always original, preferably fresh and in context, and never ones you’d use on anyone else.
The strangest “chat-up line” I ever heard, made by a old, eccentric friend of mine to a woman in a bar, was one he claimed would be guaranteed to work because it was loaded with pathos and tragedy, and would pull on the heart-strings of the lady in question:
“You know, I’d love to go on a date with you tonight, but I have to go home soon to wash down my parents.”
So then, this week it’s time to dust off, and wash off some of the chat-ups lines, or marriage proposals that appear in the lyrics or tenets of songs. This topic is not simply love songs of course, they must be ones about making that approach, declaring attraction or love with the most immediate or longer term intentions.
Things are really hotting up in the Bar tonight. There must be something in the drinks as there’s a seductive atmosphere of pickup attempts going around, some of which even have musical themes. It seems that some of our patrons have come straight from some orchestral performance, the air all a-hum with musical metaphors. “I bet we’d get into some serious Treble together,” said one, and “I think we’d make the perfect interval” (one for those who like fourths and fifths there). Some though are breathing harder to the downright dirty: “Your French horn is giving me a woodwind,” says another, and then there’s this blow from an oboeist: “This reed isn’t the only thing I can get wet.” Ooh, er, missus.
Song lyrics are awash with the cheesy and the cliched, but although the strange, and it’s the most original or entertaining pickups and proposals that will attract us the most this week. It might be tempting to go for a certain Bellamy Brothers line about a beautiful body, and surely, once upon a time, that joke was funny the first time, but when repeated over and over in a chorus, it could conceivably kill the effect, couldn’t it? Or am I unfairly holding something against it? You decide. But first, lots of inspiration …
Similarly some might find George Michael’s declaration that “I will be your father figure / Put your tiny hand in mine. I will be your preacher teacher. Anything you have in mind, baby,” easily misconstrued.
Robyn is also in the Bar, and she has no inhibitions about approaching a patron to, “Call your girlfriend. It’s time you had the talk. Give your reasons. Say it's not her fault. But you just met somebody new.” No messing from her then.
Meanwhile Alicia Keys is working behind our bar tonight, counting the hours until she, er, gets off, but she’s also spotted someone appealing. (Could that be you, magicman?) “I know girls don’t usually do this, but I was wondering if maybe we could together outside the restaurant one day, ’cause I do look a lot different outside my work clothes.”
So we’re looking for lines not just from the men, but also from women, and in any combination, from any gender to any other gender.
One person’s harmless romantic approach is another persons puke-inducing astonishment, but I particularly enjoy those where values and tastes clash to amusing effect. Harking back to the early 80s, here’s a scene from Auf Wiedersehen Pet, where those lovable, somewhat unreconstructed brickies Wayne and Barry, part of the gang seeking work in Europe when Thatcher’s Britain was high in unemployment and recession (sounds familiar eh?), live on the building site, and go out on the pull in Düsseldorf, each with rather different approaches. Wait to the end to hear Barry’s classic line:
Meanwhile, awkward angry teenager Napoleon Dynamite, played by Jon Heder, also makes this wonderful attempt to chat up fellow and highly embarrassed high school pupil Deb:
"I see you're drinking 1%. Is that 'cause you think you're fat? 'Cause you're not. You could be drinking whole if you wanted to.”
And in the first series of Flight of the Conchords, it’s hard to beat the kebab and part-time model compliments by Brett:
Chat-up lines are funniest when the speaker uses their own modus operandi terms to express feelings. In No Strings Attached, Natalie Portman, who plays a doctor in this romcom, declares an attraction with “"You give me premature ventricular contractions. You make my heart skip a beat."
But if you want proper geekiness, Russell Crowe’s mathematical genius John Nash Jr makes this statistically matter-of-fact approach:
"I find you attractive. Your aggressive moves toward me... indicate that you feel the same way. But still, ritual requires that we continue with a number of platonic activities...before we have sex. I am proceeding with these activities, but in point of actual fact, all I really want to do is have intercourse with you as soon as possible.”
Pick-ups can lead to proposals, and here at the Bar I like to intertwine film and fiction with real people. So perhaps winning the prize for super-nerdy sexiness, there are surely none more astonishing than this proposal made in binary code by a romantic dressed as robot Bender from the cartoon series Futurama, reading out the code for his girlfriend to eventually decipher. After some time, up to an hour, she discovered that it read: “Rachel, you are awesome. Will you marry me?” So, zero doubts, you’re the 1 that I want? Not what I’d call foreplay, but strangely mesmeric:
Bizarre too, on a different level is this video of chat show host Ellen Degeneres, possibly before she declared her sexuality, with guest Ice Cube, competing the best pickup lines in a pretend bar of the own:
“Are you from Memphis? Because you're the only Ten I See,” is possibly from a song itself.
Now the air is thick with them as the Bar is full of potential couples. Check out some of these lines, from the clever to the cheesy with a variety of themes:
Geeky, analytical pickup lines seem to be all the rage. Prepare to cringe:
“Are you wi-fi? Cause I'm totally feeling a connection.”
“You look so familiar. Didn't we take a class together? I could've sworn we had chemistry.”
“I’ve learned many important dates in history. Want to make another?
“How much does a polar bear weigh? I don't know either but it breaks the ice.”
“Let's play a video game. Winner dates loser.”
“If I could rearrange the alphabet, I’d put ‘U’ and ‘I’ together.”
“Hey, my name's Microsoft. Can I crash at your place tonight?”
There are also others inspired, just as romantically, by money and the banking system:
“Are you a bank loan? Because you got my interest.”
“If I had a nickel for every time I saw someone as beautiful as you, I'd have five cents.”
Or how about travel themes?
“Do you have a map? I keep getting lost in your eyes.”
”Are you French? Because Eiffel for you.”
And food is another constant metaphor in the chat-up world:
“If you were a vegetable, you would be a cute-cumber!”
“You must be made of cheese. Because you're looking Gouda tonight!”
Though I can’t imagine this indigestible one ever worked:
“My love for you is like diarrhoea, I just can't hold it in.”
And yet some lines and gestures clearly are successful, particularly when it comes to ambitiously grand marriage proposals. There are many examples of going down on one knee in front of crowds at big events, or dramatic signs held up flown by aeroplanes seen from below, or giant crop circle declarations seen from an aircraft above, hired divers holding up a sign inside a aquarium, or hiring bands or mass crowds. The most bizarre of these includes China’s Pang Kun who in Qingdao, on Chinese equivalent of Valentine's Day, who got 48 friends to dress as giant carrots shouting “Marry him! Marry him!” to girlfriend Zhang Xinyu.
Want to sweep them off their feet? Alexander Loucopoulos, for example, booked special zero-gravity flight for him and his other half to make the proposal.
Would you die for your true love. Some take it even further and come back to life again. Russian Alexey Bykov, hired a film director and stuntman to help him fake his death in a car crash before he rose again to pop the question to his heartbroken other half.
But let’s close this launch piece with two musical proposals.
Humour is the key to many hearts, and mixing the cheesy with some excellent camera work and no shortage of irony, radio presenter Pete Simson made this video lipsyching Daniel Bedingfield’s tacky If You’re Not The One and even hired out an entire cinema to show it to his girlfriend. Nice underpants, and great moves.
Finally, proposals usually come with a ring, and Luke Jerram's had a ring of truth about it. He collaborated with a jeweller and a vinyl record maker to etch a 20-second sound recording into the surface of the ring, with the loving proposal message played back by a miniature record player. Ingenious, if a little inaudible:
So then, what grand or otherwise musical gestures might you make when suggesting songs that contain pick-up lines or proposals or scenarios? This week’s king of romance is the top-of-the-pops terrific tincanman! Deadline for lines and proposals is this coming Monday at 11pm UK time, for playlists published next week. Lookin’ good, sounding even better.
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