"I met her in a club down in old Soho,
Where you drink champagne,
And it tastes just like cherry cola.
C-O-L-A
Cola."
Cola."
Every band
should do this. "What, spell out the name of popular carbonated beverages in their
opening verse?" No, that would just be stupid. Every band should use their songs
to pitch new product ideas and test the audience's reaction. "Oh, and that’s not
stupid at all?" Nope.
The
much-repeated story is that the BBC asked The Kinks to change the line from ‘Coca-Cola’
to something more generic – with Ray Davies flying from New York to London to
make the change mid-tour (these days he could probably just Skype it in). And so we got a wonderful promo for cherry cola a good
decade and a half before the big drinks companies finally put it on the shelves
of our local newsagents.
‘Lola’ is a
wonderful song in many, many ways. (Yes, it has greater over-arching themes beyond fizzy drinks. It’s a ‘mixed up, muddled up, shook up
world’ indeed). But every time I heard Annie Nightingale play it on her Sunday evening show, my imagination
would be smitten by the thought of cherry cola. What would it taste like? (Cherry.) What would it look like? (Er, Cola.) Granted, my imagination was hardly
running wild, but it stopped me thinking of ‘Star Wars’ for a few moments.
And then it
finally arrived. For the special introductory price of ten pence a can. And every
school lunch-time I’d become bloated on its sickly sweet acidic charms. Today,
I get stomach ache just looking at a can. But this song never loses its appeal.
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