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Laila

musicby Don Franks

I met her in a club with old Dot com
Where you drink champagne and it tastes like crap but viler
She walked up to me and asked me to enroll
I asked her why and she said “just for Laila”
Oh my Laila, lo lo lo lo Laila
Well, I’m not dumb but I can’t work out
Why she went from a union to work for a tout
Oh my Laila, lo lo lo lo Laila, lo lo lo lo Laila

dotcom champersWell, we drank champagne and got off our face
Up at the Dot com mansion place
She picked me up and put me on her knee
And said, “Little boy won’t you vote for me?”
Poor will be rich, and rich will be poor
It’s a mixed up world unless you know the score
like Laila. Lo lo lo lo Laila.

Well I left home just a week before
And I’ve never ever kissed an entrepreneur
But Laila smiled and said, “I bet,
little boy I can show you round the internet”,
Well that’s the way I’m going to stay
at least for the next maybe couple of days
And so is Laila,
Lo lo lo lo Laila. Lo lo lo lo Laila.

 

8 comments

  2. Hey Don, you should record this! I loved the Kinks’ original, and this is even better lyrically than Ray Davies.

    Phil

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  3. There are few better songsmiths than old Ray and I ain’t among them!

    I might stick a version of Laila on my radio programe next week..

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  4. Well, Ray’s lyrics were a product of that time and context (1970 I think), yours of a different time and context. Actually, my all-time favourite Kinks’ song is “Waterloo Sunset”. But “Lola” lends itself much more easily to other sets of lyrics, like political satire.
    Phil

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  5. Love “Waterloo sunset”. Jill and I spent ages learning it and first played it out at the Nae nae RSA to a wall of cigarette smoke and indiferent punters playing the pokies.
    I wouldn’t mess with those lyrics.

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  6. When I lived in London in the early-mid 1980s I worked for a while on a maintenance crew near Tower Bridge. But I sometimes used to walk down to Waterloo Bridge, just so I could cross it just because of that song. Crossing the river, I’d think of Terry and Julie.

    I mainly lived in south London and if I had to cross the Thames by foot, I’d usually try to cross over Waterloo bridge. Especially on Fridays after work.

    Not only is ‘Waterloo Sunset’ my favourite Kinks song, it’s one of my all-time favourite singles and absolutely classic British 60s pop. It’s just perfect in every way.

    Ray Davies had a way about him. He wrote perfect pop songs that were way more than pop songs, so wistful and evocative. “Waterloo Sunset”, “Days”, “Sunny Afternoon”, “See my friends”, “Lola” and more. Plus he could rock out: “You really got me” and “All Day and all of the Night” are fantastic songs.

    The only people who wrote like him were Lennon-McCartney in their more thoughtful songs about individual lives, like “Eleanor Rigby”. (And I say that as someone who didn’t much care for the Beatles, but preferred the Stones.) “Paint it Black”, my favourite Stones single from the 1960s, is a similar type of song.

    Phil

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