Camping It Up

”K-K-K-KATIE, beautiful Katie/ You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore/ When the m-m-moon shines over the cowshed/ I’ll be waiting at your k-k-k-kitchen door.’

‘And I missed hanging around wearing a towel’

With songs like that we can only consider it an oversight that Pop Idol has never featured a campfire song week.

But chances come and chances go, and one man who seized his with both hands, lest he not find it again in the dark, is Peter Andre.

When it comes to campfire songs, Andre is the veritable Baden-Powell, a-gingin’ and a-ganglin’ and, if Jordan let him, a goolyin’ all over the shop.

But Andre is a one-off, an original, is he not? So when it came to camping it up he famously sat on a hammock and penned a tune of which Spinal Tap would have been proud.

But genius is only one part inspiration. Andre’s Insania is three parts constipation (remember those jungle lavs?), five parts perspiration and, with a nod to girlfriend Jordan’s fan-base, nine parts masturbation.

In among all those insane things about the world that make up Peter’s lyrical warning to the planet (cloning, losing our faith, taking two bottles into the shower), Peter might like to have added ‘kicking a born entertainer when he’s down’.

But let’s leave Michael Jackson for another time, and hear instead that the ‘only’ thing Peter missed when he was away from the limelight was ‘being in the industry and enjoying myself’.

Oh and the only thing he missed was ‘the stage and recording’. Oh, and ‘touring is the one thing that I have really missed’.

That’s three ‘onlys’ in one short gob of creative juice, which is itself suggestive of a kind of Insania within Peter.

But let’s not go on a low and instead play out with another campfire classic.

Take it away Peter: ‘I’m a little acorn round/ Lying on the cold cold ground/ Somebody came and stepped on me/ That is why I’m cracked you see/ I’m a nut (clap, clap) in a rut (clap, clap)/ I’m crazy…”

Posted: 19th, May 2004 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink