Put your hand on your heart…

Before I knew I was deaf and around about the age of 7, I discovered Kylie and one Christmas my mum and dad gave me her album and my grandparents bought me a shiny red walkman to play it on.

I was so excited and wore the first set of batteries down before Christmas Day was out – I wanted to be Kylie and my favourite song was Hand On Your Heart.

I vividly remember listening along and thinking that there were no real sentences and that pop stars just mumbled or inserted random words here and there that I could hear. To this day, song words have no meaning to me and I only like songs for the melody. Does this cleanse me of my Westlife-liking sins?

So, back to Kylie – I think it was because of her that I got my first inkling that all might not be well in my world of hearing. There I was, aged 7, stood on the rounders pitch at third post. With hindsight I realise now that because I couldn’t hear, I clearly had no clue what was going on and was very bored. So I started to sing Kylie, only with my words and it went something like this

Put your hands on your heart and shell me
You’re a clover
I won’t be in it til you
Put your hands on your heart and shell me
That you’re blue, oooh, waaa-aaa-aah-aah-aaah

At which point the nasty girls in my class fell about laughing.

*sniff

This trend carried on and to this day I still have no clue about the words to Summer Nights from Grease, although to be fair the words ‘Summer dreams drift out to sea’ are not a bad shot at the line ‘Summer dreams ripped at the seams’.

My ex-boyfriend/brilliant writer once wrote about lyrics he misheard and it was nice to know that someone else has a quirky take on things…
Perhaps the best one was Madonna’s Like a Virgin, which he thought went something like this, ‘Like a bird king, plucked for the very first time’.

If, for whatever random reason, I become a pop star, I will only concentrate on the melody, the words will be a rambling mix of whatever rhymes and goes with the rhythm and when the nasty girls from my class want to see me play at Wembley, I will turn them away!