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Drunk songs

 
  

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Lord Morgue
06:44 / 13.07.05
Can anyone come up with a better stumbling-down-the-street, everybody-holding-each-other-up, drunken warble than Ultravox's "Oh, Vienna", complete with synthy echo chops? Although I did bear witness to a brave rendition of "You Are My Sunshine" that, unfortunately, ended up in front of two stern, disapproving New South Wales policemen.

"Good afterbubble constanune!"
 
 
Brigade du jour
07:15 / 13.07.05
For me, since last year, it can only be 'White Lines'. Zombie moan optional.

Although now you come to mention it, I seem to recall ten or so years ago being really annoyed on a pub crawl in the wilds of Essex when my friends started singing 'Shy Guy' by Diana King.

Perhaps drunk songs work better when they're recent chart hits that have annoyed the fuck out of me, and therefore by singing them really badly I can undo their evil works. Yes, I think that might be it.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
07:31 / 13.07.05
Wichita Lineman.
My favourite karaoke piece, whether I'm in a karoake bar or NOT.

Come on. It's got that "didi-didi-didi-didi-didididi" bit. (And I can totally see whereher you're coming from with Vienna).
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
08:47 / 13.07.05
Every time I'm pissed and about to sing on the street, I remember Dell-boy Trotter in 'Only Fools and Horses': pished out of his devious little mind, happy and crooning outside the Nelson Mandela tower block where he lives with his familly:

"There's one voice singing in the darkness! Just one voice...."

It always makes me smile and chuckle.
 
 
Sjaak at the Shoe Shop
09:53 / 13.07.05
Many good candidates but for me Falco's 'Jeannie' has never been surpassed. Especially the lines in german and the newsreader really do it for me
Sorry
 
 
P. Horus Rhacoid
19:47 / 13.07.05
No experience quite matches singing all of 'Ice, Ice, Baby' at night in the middle of a campsite while sloshed.

I'm not sure what it says about me that I know all the lyrics to that song.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
10:29 / 14.07.05
I remember semi-stumbling along a street in Brighton with Flyboy looking for cigarettes, both tunefully bellowing (probably Marc Almond's version of) Jacques Brel's 'Jacky'...

"If I could be for only an hour
If I could be for an hour every day
If I could be for just one little hour
Cute in a stupid ass way!"


Fantastic.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
11:27 / 14.07.05
Nowadays I quite like:

a-bing-bing bing-bing BURR! BURR!
bing-bing bing-bing BURR! BURR!


And then collapsing into laughter.
 
 
matthew.
15:38 / 14.07.05
For some reason, whenever my friends are drunk, they sing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler. All seven minutes of the damn thing.
 
 
Red Cross Iodized Salt
21:24 / 14.07.05
One of the finest late night drinking sights I've seen in recent years was a bar in NYC's meatpacking district crammed full of ordinarily too hip to be seen to be having fun types un-ironically belting out "Total Eclipse of the Heart" while punching the air and hanging out of random strangers. It was about 5.30am, at the tail end of a lock in, and there was a look of ecstatic drunken nirvana on every face. It was such a perfect drunken moment that I started calling people who had left hours before to try and get them to come back out. Made me completely reappraise the utility of Bonnie Tyler and 80s rock-balladry in general.
 
 
Lord Morgue
01:45 / 15.07.05
Eat of my flesh.

Hurra Torpedo: Total Eclipse of the Heart
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
08:38 / 15.07.05
Yet again, we are forced to bow before the genius that is Jim Steinman.
 
 
lord nuneaton savage
09:59 / 15.07.05
And, indeed, a production of one of his songs that actually uses the proverbial kitchen sink.

I have to second "Jacky" as THE great drunk singalong and I would also add the nautical masterpiece that is "Show me the way to go home". It has a slightly maudlin edge suitable for when your bed is far away and you're stumbling blindly through the swaying night.
 
 
Axolotl
10:34 / 15.07.05
"Show Me the Way to Go Home" is indeed the ultimate in drunk songs. It can be sung in a maudlin way on your own, or (and this is my preference) if you get enough people going it can turn into a triumphal song which glories in your drunken state as you bellow it out like some nightmarish parody of a chorus line.
There's also the possibly too obvious joys of "Come on Eileen" by Dexy's Midnight Runners and if in Scotland "500 Miles" . The joy of these is really to do with audience participation rather than musical merit.
 
 
matthew.
15:14 / 15.07.05
Red Cross Iodized Salt: I think it's hilarious that you wrote "unironic", because I forgot to. Some of my friends are really into the eighties because A) it's really cool right now to like it and B) they get a cool ironic hit off the bad music. But with Bonnie Tyler, it's like this euphoric innocent naive love that transcends the current trends. When that song comes on, people become like little children, grinning and punching the air like primates.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:45 / 15.07.05
Dunno about anyone else, but my love of the eighties is entirely due to nostalgia for the days when I'd steal my older sister's records.

Anyhoo, much of my late teens can be soundtracked by Black Flag's "Six Pack" (largely the fault of Jaime Hernandez, but the sheer pleasure in just singing the first line and hearing ALL YOUR MATES yelling "SIX PACK!!!" at the top of their voices is still hard to top) and the Dead Kennedys's "California Uber Alles". Were you to hear these in the midst of Somerset in the last couple of years of the eighties, you'd know Stoatie and his drunk mates were crashing someone's party, and very probably being sick in their pond. (Although, strangely, I do have vague recollections of a night when "Onward Christian Soldiers" somehow managed to sneak its way onto our list of battlecries... it was a bit odd, to say the least).
 
 
Jack Vincennes
20:44 / 15.07.05
if in Scotland "500 Miles"

Ah. Yes. That's brought it all back. I've been sitting here thinking, "I don't think there ever was a song I and my friends habitually sung when drunk", but there was and is, and that song is Brown Eyed Girl. Or rather the first verse, up until the bit where we start groggily arguing about where the 'sha la la la la...'s come in and insisting that the others have been singing it wrong all this time, and anyway shouldn't we have got a taxi by now?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
21:44 / 15.07.05
I know I've said this before, and will no doubt say it again, but is it just me or is "Brown Eyed Girl" one of thie filthiest songs ever written?

It's just me, isn't it?

Oh well, I'm currently drunk and singing to myself in no discernible language. It'll catch on, though, I reckon.
 
 
Jack Vincennes
22:10 / 15.07.05
I think you might be right about that one, you know. It didn't occur to me to think about it until I realised it was cut for radio, probably because the way Van Morrison sings 'green' is too lewd for before the watershed. Obviously, we never got that far into the song...
 
 
Red Cross Iodized Salt
22:53 / 15.07.05
But with Bonnie Tyler, it's like this euphoric innocent naive love that transcends the current trends. When that song comes on, people become like little children

Heh, that's exactly what it was like.
 
 
VonKobra,Scuttling&Slithering
15:15 / 16.07.05
Well, ANY Misfits song...

but of the classics, REO Speedwagon has to be up there:
"when I said that I'd love you I meant that I'd love you FUHR - E - VAAAAAAAAAA"

And Boston's "More Than A Feeling"
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
19:09 / 16.07.05
Actually, this thread's beginning to frighten me, as it's reawakening bits of my memory I thought I'd buried forever... I now seem to remember parts of several occasions when myself and Punji Steak would get all drunkenly "whoah, livin' on a prayer" on everybody's ass.
And me and another guy embarrassingly defaulting to Nick Cave's "Straight To You" once a certain point in the evening was reached...
"gone... are the days of... rrrrrRAINBOWS!!!"
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
08:50 / 17.07.05
And how could I have forgotten Crass's "Do They Owe Us A Living?", which is tailor-made for such situations, having a classic call and response chiorus that is MEANT to be shouted...

Do they owe us a living?
Course they do, course they do
Owe us a living?
Course they do, course they do
Owe us a living?
COURSE THEY FUCKIN' DO!

(Although it's really difficult for some reason not to add an "OI!!!" at the end. I'm amazed Crass managed to resist the temptation themselves).
 
 
Alex's Grandma
09:31 / 17.07.05
It's just me, isn't it?

Oh I don't know... It's always seemed clear enough what Van Morrison was, erm, 'really trying to get at' when he wrote that song.
 
 
Baz Auckland
14:06 / 19.07.05
When drunk, the first song that always comes to mind to sing loudly (even when it isn't summer) is The Pogues 'A Pair of Brown Eyes'

One summer evening drunk to hell, I sat there nearly lifeless...

...and you know I've been looking for that Hurra Torpedo video for months! Just goes to show, 'eventually it'll be on Barbelith'...
 
 
Haus of Mystery
08:07 / 21.07.05
Who's Got the Crack? by The Moldy Peaches is an awesome drunken caterwaul.
Put your momma in a headlock baby...and do it RIGHT!
 
 
werwolf
07:27 / 22.07.05
what immediately comes to mind is fenriz' (alias 'herr nagell' on that record) performance on 'oppi fjellet' on STORM's 'nordavind' album.
jesus, he must've been dead drunk by the sound of it: "oppi fjeeelleeet, opppppi fjelleeeeeeugh..."
 
 
TeN
19:47 / 22.07.05
I advise you all to check out the giggly, girly, drunken cover of the Dead Kennedy's "Too Drunk to Fuck" by the bossa-nova-new-wave cover band Nouvelle Vague
 
 
Mirror
21:35 / 25.07.05

What's the use of drinking tea
Indulging in sobriety
and tee-total perversity?
It's healthier to booze!

What's the use of milk and water
These are things that never oughter
Be allowed in any quarter
Come on, lose your blues!

Mix yourself a shandy,
Drown yourself in brandy,
A sherry sweet, a whiskey neat,
Or any kind of liquor that is handy

There's no blinking sense in drinking
Anything that won't make you stinking
There's no happiness like sinking
Blotto to the floor!

Put an end to all frustration
Drinking may be your salvation
End it all in dessication,
Rotten to the core!

Abberations metabolic,
Ceilings that are hyperbolic
These are for the alcoholic
Lying on the floor

Vodka for the arty,
Gin to make you hearty,
Lemonade was only made
For drinking if your mother's at the party

And so stay clear of homemade beer
and anything else not labeled clear
There is nothing else to fear
So Bottom's Up, my boys!
 
 
Char Aina
21:39 / 25.07.05
i second the nouvelle kennedys cover.
 
 
Naked Flame
15:15 / 01.08.05
Magic Lemon Pie, by Lowbrow.

Hard to find, perhaps, but in=sane=.
 
 
Triplets
22:27 / 11.11.06
Recently went to a sit-off with the Roxanne drinking game.

Every time Roxannnnnneeeeeeee! gets sung you have to chug a lug. Of something strong, preferably.

It starts off slow but people are in for a suprise when it hits the first chorus and it just gets worse from there. Good times.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
22:32 / 11.11.06
Bet it's not as good as the Roxette drinking game.
 
 
Sniv
00:57 / 12.11.06
Is that where you drink till you can't hear it any more?
 
 
neutral
16:39 / 12.11.06
have to agree with 500 miles by the proclaimers, i also find it occurs outside of scotland also, well by scottish people in places outside of scotland.
 
  

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