It's only 8 o'clock but you're already bored...

The strangest selection of songs inhabits my head. Who the hell needs an iPod when you’ve got an internal jukebox like that? Well, if you’re offering, I suppose I wouldn’t say no. The oddest thing is that certain songs recur at the same point in the daily routine.

In order to get to work in the morning I have to cross what was once described in a recent letter to the Huddersfield Daily Examiner as ‘a soulless civic desert’. That particular correspondent was not wrong, you know; quite the opposite. And as the early morning bluster disrupts my perfectly coiffed hair (!) the same snippet of the same song bounces through my head without fail:

"Little Judy's trying to watch Top of the Pops
But mum and dad are fighting don't they ever stop,
She takes off her coat and walks down to the street
It's cold on that road, but it's got that home beat
Deep down in her pockets she finds 50p...”

Yes, pop pickers; it’s Rat Trap by The Boomtown Rats. Personally I think it’s one of the most underrated songs of the late ‘70s. I seem to remember it spoke to me at the time.

Now, I'm not about to get all down with the kids and claim urban cred. I lived in a semi-detached house on a nice enough corner of a Lincolnshire town. But the song said something. I think it was the ridiculous overstating of the 50p line that had the most impact on me. When you were living such a shite, uneventful life that finding 50p felt like it needed block harmonies to underline its earth-shattering importance to you, well, yeah: the bleakness was all there.

There was something about the playfulness of The Rats that just worked too. Johnny Fingers' pajamas, that Travolta/Newton-John thing on TOTP (along with playing a candlestick) and the generally anti-bullshit air that they gave off set off resonant frequencies in me that probably account for the song still residing in my head when so many others have gone.

I fired up Rat Trap on iTunes a few minutes ago and y'know, it still doesn't suck. It has a Dun Laoghaire Springsteen feel to it that doesn't tie it too tightly to the time it was recorded in. The true triumph of the song is that it manages to be both utterly mundane and impossibly epic at the same time. Masterful. And if I hadn't have gone to work this week, it'd have stayed forgotten.