28-07-2025
I was told to be ladylike. Thanks to Tom Lehrer I rebelled
Five years ago, at 92, the great Tom Lehrer handed over to the public domain all copyright on his wicked lyrics, cementing even more deeply my long devotion. He was a childhood idol long before any rocker: my elder brother and I would creep towards the family turntable in whichever foreign post Dad had migrated to and sneak out his copy of the 1953 Songs by Tom Lehrer (the one with a devil's tail becoming a keyboard).
We revelled in his brutal unsentimentality, his elegantly scanned musical demolition of all romance and decorum. My mother, a Catholic and lover of real Irish ballads, winced at his cheerful family-killer admitting it because 'rickety-tickety-tin, she knew that to lie was a sin'. Not to mention the yearning romantic tunes and dastardly lyrics of the The Old Dope Peddler, about the man who gives the kids free samples 'because he knows full well/ That today's innocent young faces will be tomorrow's clientele'. As for the satirical Scout anthem Be Prepared, never underestimate the glee of under-ten siblings working out the meaning of 'don't solicit for your sister, it's not nice/ Unless you get a good percentage of her price'.
• Tom Lehrer obituary: devilish musical satirist
Maternal attempts to hide the album failed and we introduced our siblings to it in turn. Maybe the relief was particularly intense because of the setting we lived in as 1950s diplo-brats abroad, drilled in gentlemanly and ladylike behaviour. When you're handing out vol-au-vents at dull cocktail parties it helps to be humming a song to yourself about a skirt coming off in a Viennese waltz. Lehrer's leering tone here is brilliant as he sings of the wardrobe malfunction 'revealing for all of the people to see — just what it was that endeared you to me'.
The second album landed when we were in Johannesburg, to greater relief. We knew about the Bomb and radiation sickness the way kids now learn climate change. In March 1960 I had been personally patted on the head by Nikita Khrushchev on a walkabout in Lille when Dad sent us out to taste the crowds' attitude: a huge man in dungarees made me wave a paper tricolour with a hammer and sickle.
Two years later, while at boarding school in Krugersdorp, the Cuban missile crisis made the nuns keep us in chapel because of a weird rumour that South Africa would be attacked first. What could be more cheering than Lehrer's jolly rhyming of 'Te Deum' with 'ICBM' and 'misery' with 'rotisserie' in We Will All Go Together When We Go? We child Lehrerites were, I suppose, innocently prefiguring the merry defeatism of punk. Then, a few more nuns later, came his 1965 shocker, The Vatican Rag. Another kind of relief, even to a quite devout teenager. So thank you, Tom Lehrer, for everything.
For the sheer ingenuity (and science), as if rap had suddenly turned swotty and turned up in chem class.
For sheer disgracefulness and awful truth. The pleasure also lies, as often in Lehrer's work, in the parody of sentimental downhome ballads.
In the age of own-your-fetish it's hard to explain today how shocking this was. And how jolly it felt to sing it under your breath.
A reminder that people used to think and write post-nuclear dystopian books about mutually assured destruction.
The world will always need songs about plagiarism. And intellectual property theft.
Need I say why? His world was cleaner than ours is …
