my advice is just
to ignore it.”
Ivor Cutler
Ivor Cutler was the Scottish equivalent of Spike Milligan. He was an eccentric poet, songwriter and humourist. His fans included The Beatles, John Peel, KT Tunstall, John Lydon, Neil Innes and Robert Wyatt. He was the driver of the Magical Mystery Tour bus. He doesn’t need a ticket to ride on the Crotchety Man blog.
Ivor Cutler’s life and work were distinctly (and quite deliberately) bonkers. Matthew Lenton, director of the play The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler, put it like this: “he didn’t live by the same rules as everybody else”. As my tribute to Ivor Cutler I give you one of his longer and more tuneful songs, Boo Boo Bird. In the video the song is introduced by Ivor himself; no further commentary is required here.
While constructing this post it occurred to me that the Boo Boo bird is rather like the creature described in the half-nonsense poem, What a Queer Bird the Frog Are, and curiosity took me to this delightful round on YouTube.
I’m sure Ivor Cutler would have appreciated both the poem and the music there. Oh, and if you’re wondering, you can tell the difference between a Boo Boo bird and a frog by their calls. The Boo Boo bird goes “boo, boo”; the frog goes “ribba, ribba”.
Crotchety Man 