h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack,
Is it true what mummy said
You won't be back?
Oh no,no,noooh!"

The Keith West single from the "Excerpt from A Teenage Opera" has always needed some explanations.

Who was Grocer Jack?
Why did mummy say he won't come back?
Why did the kids go "No,no,no"?

Did he mix vegetable innuendo with inappropriate under-age remarks?

I know this is the place to find out.

I don't know which is saddest........ Me, for wanting to know or You for knowing the answer!!

The last time (about 5 years ago) I drove along it, there was a corner shop called Grocer Jack on Roman Road in Bethnal Green. It was somewhere between Globe Road and Cambridge Heath Road.

Not sure which came first - the song or the shop.

A. he was a grocer.
B. He moved
C. Because the kids liked him.

Oh god I've got this bloody song stuck in my head now!

me too, except I can only remember one verse, so it's going going 'round and 'round every 30secs or so

!!WARNING!!

superdogmonkeys first post obviously contains some sort of highly
contagious earworm virus thingy...

Do not read the posting unless you want the chorus zipping around your head, interrupting all your waking thoughts.





...incidentally, i always thought he was singing "...brother jack"
and it was about some older brother who wouldn't get a job...


...or some mendicant monk who came to stay...

alec.

ic

You can all blame me because I was the one suggested that SDM should post here.

The *really* funny thing is...I don't know trhe song so it bothers me not one jot!

WARNING II
DO NOT follow this link
http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/e/excerptfromateenageoperagrocerjack.html

Sorry
TSF

Fantastic .... I had no idea what the rest of the song was about until now!

It would seem that G.J. met an untimely death?

Sorry about the tune going around in your heads.

Can someone bring a copy to the london meet, so we can make Blues shark suffer as we are now?

You think any of us actually OWN a copy?!!

I'm saying nothing...

I detect a guilty party...

Natalie, if you do......??
What is on the b-side??

I might be wrong but wasn't it 'Theme From A Teenage Opera'? I also seem to remember that the B-Side to 'Seasons in the Sun' by Terry Jacks is 'Put the Bone In.'

OBVIOUSLY I own neither recording!

Natalie (loves a dramatic pop song)

Indeed the song would appear to be most dark and feeble in its underlaying tones of murder, children being prevented from hearing the full truth in a potective way so unknown and the loss to a small town of the one that till their untimely departure was not regarded so highly as he was in his abscence, there is a lesson for us all in such gloryiefing words, if only I could figure out what it was *stumbles off whistling tunelessly

Am I the only one who thinks "Put the Bone In" should be moderated?

*looks around*

Yes, probably.

I think this whole thread should be moderated! I bet half the country is humming that bloody awful song now - I can't get it out of my head! Aaarrgghh! What were you all thinking of - you could have someone's eye out with a thread like this!

*carries on humming 'They Harder They Come' in blissful ignorance*

*continues whistling moderatly less tunefully I still find the whole notion rather sad, to say the least, and it really begs the question, and I wish I knew the answer, for only through the answer, as we must surely and truely know can the answer be dtermined to give us the truth to the unanswered question in relation to the song of which we speak, sing, whistle and hum, and for the search to the answer to this quesiton must it be the right of all mankind, as well as an ocasional raccoon to divulge teh answer forth through searching far and wide for the recording that thus begs the question of us

Right - well that's cleared that up then.