TATAR #6: Andrea

by Victoria Wood (1997?)

Not sure exactly when this was first written and performed but it's available on the 1997 album Real Life, so we'll go with that.

Victoria Wood was a comedian who wrote songs, as opposed to a songwriter who did comedy. So what's really remarkable is how good the music is. That's often the case for comedy songs. After all, it's very hard to make people laugh with only music. You can make people smile with a jaunty tune or raise a giggle with something unexpected. But those big belly laughs are almost impossible to induce with music alone. 

Yet words are never enough for a really great comedy song. The music needs to make the words funnier. So in Victoria Wood's most famous comedy song about the domesticated sex lives of a rapacious wife and a reluctant hubby, "Barry and Freda" (aka "Let's do it!"), it's the triple rhymes that everyone remembers ("Not bleakly / Not meekly / Beat me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly"). But it's the music that makes it funnier. The quickening pace on the third line, the harmonies that are pushing on towards the end of the musical phrase, as well as the continuous modulations making it feel like the whole thing is getting more and more hysterical.

And for the song "Andrea", the music is again doing a lot of the work. It's not quite a comedy song. There are no big laughs. But it could easily be a great character song from a musical comedy.

And oh, 

I'm seventeen

And I live round here

And it's not so bad

These first four bars are brilliantly boring. The jumpy rhythm hints at some fire in the belly but the rest is dull and duller. Harmonically, it's basically one chord. Melodically, it's essentially the three most conventional notes of the scale - the fifth, the third and the tonic - dropping one by one in an entirely predictable way. 

Then repeat for extra boredom.

And oh,

My sister's left

So I'm just at home

With me Mum and Dad

Normally that would be the end of the first section. Instead we get a couple of extra bars.

(Well, he's not my Dad

But I call him Dad)

These musical afterthoughts are a feature of the song and do two things. One, it makes the song feel more spontaneous, as if these thoughts just popped into her head. And two, they capture the drama underlying the boring exterior. There are mini tragedies in these throwaway lines, like the one about her boyfriend who was involved in a car crash.

He looked the same

But he weren't the same

Has ever a couplet said so much by saying so little? And the slightly bored, commonplace way in which Andrea describes it makes it all the more tragic.

The other thing about this song is that it is unmistakably British. As British as Victoria sponge and Queen Victoria and, well, Victoria Wood. If this were the 'I want' song from a Broadway show then Andrea would be all super passion and deep desire, not to mention a few top notes held for slightly longer than is comfortable. But Andrea is British and so more subdued and ambivalent. She wants to get away but, then again, it's not so bad, she has some friends and, I don't know, I don't have any real plans or anything but it feels as if my life is dribbling away a bit, y'know?

She's trapped and she knows it. At least, she knows just enough to know that she's trapped but not enough to escape. Really it's kind of tragic. 

But also kind of funny.