What is your favourite opening line?

I have been a fan of music since a very early age, my parents were playing their records or radio stations all the time while I was growing up and I have always been able to have conversations with them about their music.  I guess this is where my love of Pink Floyd, The Beatles and other older musicians came from.  I have even managed to repay the favour and introduce them to a few bands or songs that they were unfamiliar with.

While music is important it is the words that I tend to focus on.  I remember having a conversation with one of my mate’s dads about lyrics when I started writing my own words, he told me that the opening line is the key and this has always stayed with me.  He used the example of an old rock and roll song with the opening line “It’s Friday night and I’ve just got paid”.  It may not win any awards for its command of the English language but they have instantly set up the story of the song. This technique is used in loads of different ways.   The Beatles used it in one of their songs to bring you straight into the middle of an argument in “We can work it out” while Gary Barlow spoke of his emotional state by telling us he thought it was time to give up on his relationship in the opening line of “Back for good”.  Something that Tori Amos also used in her opening line to Crucify, she explains her feeling of vulnerability by stating “Every finger in the room was pointing at me”.

One of my favourite openings for a song was done by The Kinks in Come Dancing. 

They put a parking lot
On a piece of land
Where the supermarket
Used to stand

Before that they
Put up a bowling alley
On the site that used
To be the local palais

They take you on a journey down memory lane to evoke fond memories of a building that is long gone by cleverly running through the history of a particular site. When Joni Mitchell wrote “Big yellow taxi” it was more than a much loved building that was destroyed.  Her portrayal of the development of Hawaii beach front told us that “They” had paved paradise so that we all had somewhere to park.

Whether it is Fleetwood Mac telling us that loving us isn’t the right thing to do, The Eagles driving down a dark desert highway with cool wind in their hair or AC/DC just wanting to tell us a story about a woman they know I never fail to be impressed by the way the first few seconds of a song can take you somewhere completely different.