Another blast from the past today, as we pop back thirty years to when this song (in my opinion, one of Squeeze's finest singles) was riding high in the charts.
Labelled With Love just sums up a whole host of happy memories from one of my most fondly remembered years, 1981:
She unscrews the top of her new whisky bottle
And shuffles around in her candle-lit hovel
Like some kind of witch with blue fingers in mittens
She smells like the cat and the neighbours she sickens
The black and white T.V. has long seen a picture
The cross on the wall is a permanent fixture
The postman delivers the final reminders
She sells off the silver and poodles in china
Drinks to remember I, me and myself
Winds up the clock and knocks dust from the shelf
Home is a love that I miss very much
So the past has been bottled and labelled with love
During the wartime an American pilot
Made every air-raid a time of excitement
She moved to his prairie and married the Texan
She learnt from a distance how love was a lesson
He became drinker and she became mother
She knew that one day she’d be one or the other
He ate himself older and drank himself dizzy
Proud of her features she kept herself pretty
Drinks to remember I, me and myself
Winds up the clock and knocks dust from the shelf
Home is a love that I miss very much
So the past has been bottled and labelled with love
He like a cowboy died drunk in a slumber
Out on the porch in the middle of summer
She crossed the ocean back home to her family
But they had retired to roads that were sandy
She moved home alone without friends or relations
Lived in a world full of age reservations
On moth-eaten armchairs, she’d say that she’d sod-all
The friends who had left her to drink from the bottle
Drinks to remember I, me and myself
Winds up the clock and knocks dust from the shelf
Home is a love that I miss very much
So the past has been bottled and labelled with love
Drinks to remember I, me and myself
Winds up the clock and knocks dust from the shelf
Home is a love that I miss very much
So the past has been bottled and labelled with love
http://www.squeezeofficial.com/
I LOVE this song - I agree it's Squeeze's best in my opinion too.
ReplyDeleteBack in 1981 I was off school, poorly and my mum came back from shopping with one of those Top of the Pops albums - they were only about £1.99 instead of the £3.99 of regular albums because the songs of the day were covered by session artists …
There were so many great songs on that album - I wish I still had it.
How Bout Us, All Those Years Ago, Physical, and Labelled With Love - it was one of the first albums I had and I played it to death - happy memories.
x
Ah, memories of Top Of The Pops albums...
ReplyDeleteIn my blog back in 2009 I waxed lyrical about almost exactly the same happy memory, albeit almost a decade earlier...
Jx