You’re the Top

You’re the top; you are J K Rowling
You’re the top; you’re Jim Laker’s bowling
You’re a Hello! bride, the formaldehyde of Hirst
You’re a Booker winner, a Delia dinner, a double first.
You’re the holes in spaghetti strainers
You’re the soles of new Nike trainers
I’m a C5 car, don’t go far ’fore I stop;
But if baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top.

You’re the top; you are both Schumachers
You’re the top; Mama Mia’s backers
You’re the closing bars, the la-la-las of Hey Jude
You’re Harold Pinter, an Olympic sprinter, you’re North Sea crude.
You’re the biz; you’re The Phantom Menace
You’re Les Miz; you’re the Williams’ tennis
I’m a Betamax, the poll tax, I’m de trop;
But if baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top.

You’re the shirt of Nelson Mandela
You’re the skirt of that Izzard fella
You’re the fade that Tiger played with perfect loft
You’re Kelsey Grammer, you’re Gareth’s stammer, you’re Microsoft.
You’re the cheers when United win big
You’re the tears at the Oscar shindig
I’m a dot.com stake about to take a drop;
But if baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top!

Glossary of terms

• Jim Laker is a cricketer who in the fifties took all but one of the wickets in a test match (an international) – something that no one has ever equalled. I won’t explain further than that. Just believe me – it was good.
• ‘Hello!’ is a showbiz gossip magazine that pays large sums of money to people who are already very rich if they’ll let the magazine cover their wedding. I don’t know if it has an American version.
• Damien Hirst is the enfant terrible of the British art world who is fond of cutting up dead animals and displaying them suspended in formaldehyde.
• The Booker prize is, very roughly, the British Pulitzer.
• Delia is Delia Smith, a TV cook who has made an absolute fortune with her cook-books, and whose first name is now in the Oxford English Dictionary as an adjective to describe a meal made to her recipes.
• A double-first is the best degree you can get from a British university.
• The C5 was a battery-driven car invented by Clive Sinclair, the man who produced the first personal computer on the market. But the car turned out to be Britain’s Ford Edsel.
• I know that Formula 1 motor racing isn’t all that big in the States, so you might have to be told that Michael Schumacher is the best driver since Juan Fangio, and that Ralph, his younger brother, is not doing too badly himself. If you don’t know who Juan Fangio is, you wouldn’t be interested if I told you.
• ‘Les Miz’ is shorthand for Les Miserables, which is still running in London.
• The poll tax was the more truthful name given to the ‘community charge’ ill-advisedly brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s government. The first time a government levied a poll tax in Britain was in England in 1381, and the people rioted, murdering the two men thought responsible for bringing in the tax. They rioted again in 1990, but drew the line at murder this time. The tax was replaced before the thought occurred to anyone.
• Betamax – did that happen elsewhere? – was the home video system that lost out to VHS.
• Eddie Izzard is a surreal and very funny stand-up comedian who likes to indulge in a bit of cross-dressing. When I saw him in London, he did a lovely routine about Pavlov’s cats – the disastrous experiments he carried out before he thought of using dogs. Among other things, when the bell rang, the cat would look up boredly and say ‘No thanks, I’ve already eaten.’
• Gareth is Gareth Gates, who came second in the British TV talent show ‘Pop Idol’ (which spawned ‘American Idol’), and was subsequently very successful. He is a pleasant, nice-looking young man with a good pop-singer’s voice, but speaking is a real trial for him because of his stammer. He is a genuine role-model for anyone with any sort of impediment, because he doesn’t let it stop him doing anything, including giving interviews.
• Lastly, ‘United’ is the suffix of choice for many British football clubs, as in Manchester United, Leeds United, etc. And by ‘football’, I mean Association football, the game revered in virtually every country in the world except the USA, where they use the British upper-class abbreviation of Association – ‘soccer’ – to distinguish it from what we call American football. Here, the word soccer was once used to distinguish it from ‘rugger’ – the British upper-class abbreviation of rugby football, a game with quite a lot in common with what the Americans call simply football. Got it? Good.

Words and music by Cole Porter

You're the top! You're the Coliseum,
You're the top! You're the Louvre Museum,
You're the melody from a symphony by Strauss,
You're a Bendel bonnet,
A Shakespeare Sonnet,
You're Mickey Mouse!

You're the Nile! You're the Tower of Pisa,
You're the smile on the Mona Lisa!
I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop!
But if baby I'm the bottom,
You're the top!

You're the top, you're Mahatma Gandhi,
You're the top! You're Napoleon brandy,
You're the purple light of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery, you're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane!

You're sublime, you're a turkey dinner,
You're the time of the Derby Winner,
I'm a toy balloon that's fated soon to pop;
But if baby I'm the bottom you're the top!

You're the top, you're a Waldorf salad
You're the top, you're a Berlin ballad
You're the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire
You're an O'Neal drama, you're Whistler's mama, you're camembert

You're a rose, you're Inferno's Dante
You're the nose on the great Durante
I'm a lazy lout who's just about to stop
But if baby I'm the bottom,
You're the top!

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