The Complete Flanders & Swann

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English folk singer-songwriter Frank Turner included a version of the song on his 2011 compilation album The Second Three Years. British singer-songwriter Frank Turner covered "The Armadillo" in his "Mittens" EP. [16] See also [ edit ] Flanders and Swann's songs are characterised by wit, gentle satire, complex rhyming schemes, and memorable choruses. Flanders commented during the recorded performance of At the Drop of Another Hat,

Selby and Goole were not threatened by Beeching, though the line ("from Selby to Goole") mentioned in the song was closed to passengers. The other line mentioned, "from St Erth to St Ives" in Cornwall stayed open. [note 1] Williams, Michael (3 April 2010). "So much pain in our love of the train". The Independent. London . Retrieved 6 July 2021. The strength of "Slow Train" is considered to lie in its list of "achingly bucolic" names of rural halts. The nostalgically poetic tone of Flanders's lyrics has been likened to Edward Thomas's 1914 poem " Adlestrop", which wistfully evokes a fleeting scene of Adlestrop railway station in Gloucestershire. [4]First and Second Law"—a jazzy setting of the first and second laws of thermodynamics. "Heat is work and work is heat..." "Heat won't pass from a cooler to a hotter / You can try it if you like but you far better notter / Cos the cold in the cooler will get hotter as a ruler..." "Heat is work and work's a curse / And all the heat in the universe / is gonna cool down / because it can't increase / so there'll be no more work / and there'll be perfect peace" / [Swann] "Really?" / [Flanders] "Yeah, that's entropy, man." Suggitt, Gordon. "Chapter 11: Around Selby". Lost Railways of North & East Yorkshire. Countryside Books. pp.124–126. A Transport of Delight"—with an increasing refrain about the "Big six-wheeler, scarlet-painted, London Transport, diesel-engined, ninety-seven–horse-power omnibus". (The bus was probably the AEC LT-type, which served London from 1929 until the 1950s, and had six wheels instead of the more normal four. [13]) Although most of the stations mentioned in Flanders's song were earmarked for closure under the Beeching cuts, a number of the stations were ultimately spared closure: Chester-le-Street, Formby, Ambergate, and Arram all remain open, and Gorton and Openshaw also survives, now called Gorton. Some stations referred to in the song have since been re-opened, notably Chorlton-cum-Hardy. It had closed in January 1967, but re-opened in July 2011 as Chorlton tram stop.

In 2004, Canadian classical quartet Quartetto Gelato released a themed album called Quartetto Gelato Travels the Orient Express, celebrating the original journey of Orient Express and featuring music from London to Istanbul. The album begins with a rendition of "Slow Train", with the final lines changed to reflect the route of the Orient Express. The Reluctant Cannibal"—an argument between father and son, on the topic of cannibalism. (Son: "Eating people is wrong", Father: "Must have been someone he ate"—"he used to be a regular anthropopha guy") The father says you might as well say "Don't fight people" and they agree: "Ridiculous!" (Swann had registered as a conscientious objector during World War II and served with the Friends' Ambulance Unit.) [12] Littleton and Badsey, Chittening Platform and Armley Moor are on lines still open. Chittening and Armley are in the Bristol and Leeds urban areas, and are proposed for re-opening. Have Some Madeira M'Dear"—an old roué sings to an ingénue about the merits of that wine, hinting that he has seduction in mind, with complex word-play, including three oft-quoted examples of syllepsis. Design for Living"—about contemporary furnishings of houses and gardens. "One day we're taking Liberty's in, the next we're down at Heal's".Kirby Muxloe is regularly proposed for re-opening with the freight-only Ivanhoe line remaining between Leicester and Burton; however, a scheme re-appraisal by Scott Wilson in 2009 suggested there was little likelihood of the line reopening to passengers. [11] Tried by the Centre Court"—a Wimbledon match between Miss L. Hammerfest and Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn, as told by an exasperated umpire. "They are bashing a ball with the gut of a cat". Michael Flanders' song treats Formby Four Crosses and Armley Moor Arram as station names, but in both cases he combined two consecutive names from an alphabetical list of stations. Leon Berger, archivist of the estate of Donald Swann, said that Flanders had taken his list from one published in The Guardian, which was the source of some of the discrepancies between the names in the songs and the historic names of the stations. [5] Other versions [ edit ]