Peter Cook: Bedazzled (1968)

Although best seen in the context of the hilarious Bedazzled film -- where poor Dudley Moore is granted wishes by the Devil (the smarmy and petty Peter Cook) -- this song still resonates for its emotional coolness and distance.

Some context then?

Moore plays a nervous cook in a cheap London diner who is smitten with the beautiful waitress Eleanor Bron. He meets the Devil (in the guise of George Spiggot) who grants him wishes, but every one of them goes wrong because of some lack of clarification. For example when Moore wishes he and Bron could be together in perfect harmony etc he fails to clarify that he would be a man (they are both nuns) or married to her (he is the lover).

At one point he decides everyone loves pop stars so he wishes to be a pop singer and on a television show sings the desperate Love Me while Bron and other girls scream their adulation. But just after he finishes on comes Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations (Cook) with this gloom-laden song . . . which stops the girls dead.

Foiled again.

Feel free to think just what acts Cook has modelled this on, or who in subsequent decades knew the way to a woman's heart was by being an aloof, remote, morose and unavailable gloomy bastard.

It's a long list. 

Goth-gloom/bedsit-student-cum-existentialist/needy Eighties synth-pop-rock began here? 

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