After yesterday's track by Black Box Recorder, let's turn to a track by member Luke Haines, whose prolific output includes a wide variety of indie, new wave, and wistfully comedic songs. This particular track is possibly the best known by his indie band of the 1990s, from the 1994 album Now I'm A Cowboy. The Auteurs were about Britpop indie's big hitters alongside Blur and Pulp, but Haines accidentally broke both his ankles in what appears to be a drunken fall, and spend most of the next year in a wheelchair, stalling his career. Since then his career has brought out a wide variety of solo albums, often focusing on specific people or eras, such as 2014's New York in the '70s, including a song about Lou Reed, and 2011's 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early '80s, all about British wrestlers of the period, including Catweazle, Giant Haystacks and Kendo Nagasaki. This song, however is about the original and perhaps greatest controversial US stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, who died in 1966, but envisions him waking up in the body of another star who died young, the 1920s silent movie star and heartthrob Rudolph Valentino on the day of his funeral. A typically black-humoured idea in more ways than one.
There were mourners on the street of every shape and size
The motorcade came down from Redondo
Assasins on the corner tried to throw you a line
You dirty-mouth comic Rodolfo
And that's Lenny
Valentino reside
Valentino reside
Valentino reside
And the Pope renounced you as the real one
Lazarus decided to rise
The Twentieth Century had only begun
Ladies averted their eyes
And that's Lenny
Valentino reside
Valentino reside
Valentino reside
John Judnich in the bathroom reading the law
Kitty in the hall with your mother
The girls are sick and tired of your blah blah blah
Some beat-kid said there's no other
And that's Lenny
Valentino reside
Valentino reside
Valentino reside.
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