Swan Dive

Since it’ll be a while before Season 3 of That Mitchell & Webb Look makes it to the US on DVD, I’ve been enjoying it on YouTube. Here are the boys at their best:

Get Me Hennimore

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In older hotels, on the inside of a guest room door, you sometimes see “a note from the management.” In exceedingly dry terms, this note explains the hotel’s rules, regulations, liabilities and so forth. I can’t remember what hotel I was in, but I was reading one of these notes and thinking it might be funny to write a love song using the same kind of language. This song had a fairly long incubation period. Six months at least. I had the verses but couldn’t find the right chorus. Enter David Mead, who is one of the most fluently melodic writers I know. We finished it off in an afternoon. This is a song that I could hear Blossom Dearie singing. And Molly captures that coquettish spirit perfectly. Now if she could only memorize the thing so we could play it live. The songwriters didn’t make her job very easy. There’s always the TelePrompter . . .

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