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Eight love songs by artists who were talking out of their arse

FOR some reason we think pop stars are experts on love, when almost none of them have a background in psychology or academic research. Here are some embarrassingly incorrect hits.

Love is a Stranger, Eurythmics

The stranger will ‘tempt you in and drive you far away’, which is inconvenient at best (you might have to get the train back from, say, Aberdeen) or at worst, an abduction scenario. And can you genuinely be in love with a total stranger? They might be into weird shit like collecting SS daggers.

I Will Always Love You, Whitney Houston 

Whitney failed to do even the most basic fact-checking. With 103,592 divorces in England and Wales in 2020, her claim that ‘I will always love you’ has been thoroughly debunked. The song should really go: ‘A significant minority of married partners will emphatically NOT always love you.’ Much better.

Love is the Drug, Roxy Music

Let’s get this straight, Bryan Ferry and others, love is nothing like a drug. You can’t just stick some love up your nose and feel great, you need to do a load of dating stuff first. And being stuck in a car with a sulky partner after a row is a lot less fun than E. On the upside, love doesn’t cause annoying pinhole burns in your favourite shirt.

You’re Beautiful, James Blunt

Almost no one realises this is about failing to go out with someone, certainly not the billion trillion couples who decided it was ‘our song’. The problem is that clearly it’s not just beautiful people who fall in love. Ugly people do too. It’s revolting, but mankind must breed and not let the cockroaches win.

I Want to Know What Love is, Foreigner

Do you, Foreigner, do you? It’s easy enough to look up, and the answer is: the release of high levels of dopamine and the hormone norepinephrine by the human brain. Foreigner should get help from an evolutionary biologist, maybe Richard Dawkins, when writing love songs.

The Love Cats, The Cure 

Some Cure fans claim this is based on the obscure novel The Vivisectors. Non-Cure fans claim it is some nonsense about a couple who compare themselves to cats. However if you’ve seen cats shagging, with the male’s neck-biting and painfully spiked penis, ‘love’ doesn’t really come into it.

I Swear, All-4-One

You won’t remember All-4-One, but by God you won’t have forgotten this whiny, mega-selling r’n’b ballad from 1994. The general gist is ‘I swear, I’ll be there, till death do us part’ and ‘when there’s silver in your hair’. This is a rash claim from any romantic partner, even worse by 20-year-old pop stars. ‘I’ll be there for about four shags’ seems like a better estimate.

You Give Love a Bad Name, Bon Jovi

It’s highly unlikely that one woman significantly affected the popularity of romantic love. Last year Valentine’s Day generated revenues of £926 million in the UK alone. Sorry, Mr Bon Jovi, this lyric just makes you a pathetically self-important drama queen.

Things no man can keep secret

IT’S said that women make the best spies because they don’t have a compulsion to blurt out information like men do. They certainly struggle with these topics…

Gifts

Having purchased a gift for his partner a man’s willpower will be stretched to the limit trying to contain the information. If the gift was bought at a bargain price – he thinks he’s incredibly shrewd for noticing a ‘reduced’ sticker – anyone on social media will know about it before he leaves the store.

Anyone they’ve shagged

Knowing they’ve shagged someone tries to get out of a man’s brain like xenomorph blood burning a hole in the Nostromo. The shaggee doesn’t matter, an entirely predictable bunk-up with a colleague who clearly always fancied him will be related with the same pride as bedding Scarlett Johansson, the young Brigitte Bardot and Helen of Troy simultaneously.

Plot twists

Various options exist. There’s the relatively subtle ‘I’m not spoiling anything, but pay attention to this next scene’. Or there’s the comprehensive film-ruiner ‘Ben Affleck didn’t do all that stuff to his wife, she’s a psycho’. If your male partner was a spy, the enemy could save time by not torturing him for information and just asking him not to give anything away.

Somebody else’s secret

Being entrusted with someone else’s secret will turn a man into him into an incontinent blabbermouth, saying things like: ‘I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but…’ and ‘Strictly between you, me and the bedpost, did you know…’ He will then have the nerve to claim women are terrible gossips. 

Events in his bowels

Certain men feel a sense of triumph at creating a particularly noxious fart, and this achievement should be shared throughout the land. As should birthing a very large turd, which basically just means you’ve eaten too much. Expect excessive detail it will be very hard to forget, eg. ‘The tip was poking out of the water like a plesiosaur!’

His opinion

A man’s opinion is something that should never be kept secret, in his opinion. Given his in-depth knowledge of everything from military tactics to what’s in a pork pie via cold fusion and the career of Clare Grogan, it’s frankly amazing he hasn’t been elected President of Planet Earth.

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