FEELING EUROPEAN

Feeling European by The Winter Olympics

Girl you know I’d love you like a holiday.
I’m packing the essentials and I’ve got my money changed.
I’ve been thumbing through the guide books,
I’ve been studying the map
To find your points of local interest
And take you off the beaten track.

SHA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NAAAA

Well it wasn’t quite the holiday that you had planned,
You said I couldn’t find the campsite and my sleeping bag was damp.
But I bought a brand new phrase book
And baby by tonight,
I’ll have learnt a million ways to say
That I can blow your mind.

SHA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NAAAA

When we go to sleep this evening we’ll be feeling European,
We’ll be steeped in history and swimming in warm beer,
I’ll be staring at your architecture and staggered by your art,
But worried that the politics will tear us both apart.

I’ve got to get away, on holiday, on an aeroplane.

Kolle alaaf you. Kolle alaaf you.

Back in 2003   (you remember 2003, right? David Sneddon, t.A.T.u and Fatman Scoop were all massive) The Winter Olympics took refuge in Cologne in Germany. The band had such a good time (getting played in local clubs, losing at electronic darts to the local big gay truckers, predominantly drinking beer and eating a lot of meat) that they wrote a song about it.

The phrase “Kolle, alaaf you!” from the song’s chorus was the closing line from a speech given by the visiting John F Kennedy in June 1963. It wasn’t quite German, but the 350,000 strong Cologne crowd he drew took the compliment to their hearts. Too right, as well, it’s a great place.

When they returned to the UK the band decamped to a studio in the middle of Wales (where My Bloody Valentine recorded Isn’t Anything) and attempted to put the song down on tape with the bass player out of Hawkwind. A week later they returned with ten minutes of barely listenable man disco and this picture of Martin riding a pig. Thoroughly embarrassed, the band disowned the song for the next five years until their new producer Paul Hollingsworth talked them into jamming out a version beneath the Bedford Park pub in an attempt to, “get a level”. He got a little more than he bargained for as he and the band birthed a bold new blueprint for a brave new European…

The song featured on the ‘Now Hear This’ CD mounted on the November 2010 issue of Word Magazine. The one with Frank Zappa on the cover.

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