more sticky songs

I’ve no doubt that when I’m old and senile I’ll spend my days spinning out lyrics from songs (and tv ads) that I heard when I was seven…

Today in the course of my work I saw a place on a map called ‘Shard End’. Immediately I started humming to myself a song from the deepest memory banks:

‘London, Hamburg, Paris, Rome
Rio, Hong Kong, Tokyo
LA, New York, Amsterdam
Monte Carlo, Shard End and… All over the wo-o-orld…’

So all my life I’ve been wondering, where is this exotic Shard End place in the ELO song (off the Xanadu soundtrack as I recall)? Well, it’s an outer suburb of Birmingham, where Jeff Lynne apparently comes from.

The cheeky bugger was having a laff. And he had me fooled for about 25 years.