Day 6: A song from an Artist you discovered from a TV show

“Ça Plane Pour Moi” — Plastic Bertrand

Have you ever had your significant other say to you “You’ve got to see this!” and you get a little worried? That happens to me a lot, because I never know if it’s going to be a good thing or a bad thing that I’m about to see.

The details are a bit fuzzy on how we got on the topic, but suffice to say, one day my girlfriend (now wife) Laura out of the blue says “Oh! You gotta see this. It woke me up out of a dead sleep.” I’m thinking explosions or gore or something. So she flips on the TiVo and goes to The Late Late Show listing. Now I’m curious, because I’m not sure what Colin Ferguson could have done to elicit such excitement.

The recording starts and the picture is filled with Christina Perri singing her ballad “Home.” Nice, but not exactly earth-shattering. I give Laura a look that obviously says “You’re out of your gourd.”

“No, no!,” she says. “That was the end of Letterman.” The credits roll, and The Late Show is done.

So now the screen is filled with… Well. I can’t explain it. So I’ve included the video below. But before you watch it, see if your thought timeline matches mine:

0:00 – 0:06: “WTF?”
0:07 – 0:16: “Okay, this is weird.”
0:17 – 0:26: “This is weird but funny.”
0:27 – 0:29: “I am now laughing so hard and loud that I can’t hear… oh crap, I peed my pants…”
0:30 – 0:45: “This is really weird but really funny.”
0:46 – 0:47: “There they are again! This is hilarious! Oh crap, again? I’m too young for Depends…”

At this point I vaguely remember Laura saying she loved the song, me responding that I’d never heard it before, and continuing to watch with some combination of the “WTF?” and “This is hilarious!” modes noted above.

All right, I’ll let you watch it now so you figure out what the hell I’m talking about:

The “performance” bears repeated views because there’s just a lot going on. Some of my favorite things are the rabbit and crocodile (as you may have guessed), the menacing punk-rocker face Colin Ferguson makes during the “guitar solo” from 1:09 to 1:26, and the general chaos ( and Ferguson’s dancing) from 1:43 to about the 2 minute mark.

After we decided we were never ever deleting that from the TiVo (we still have it some 30 months later) she told me how she remembered it growing up. However, I do not remember it at all. I honestly don’t think I’d ever heard it before that moment. But I love it. And I don’t know if it’s the fact that the skit just cracks me up so much or the pseudo-punk catchiness of the song or something else, but it’s now among my favorites. I can’t help but smile when I think of it. In fact, I’ve been looking forward to writing this post because it’s just so much damn fun. I hope you like it, too.

Interesting aside: “Plastic Bertrand” did not actually sing the vocal. It was actually an uncredited “Milli Vanilli” moment by the record’s producer. So there you have it.

I am the king of the divan!