Just One Letter, That's All It Took

Friday on The Late Late Show a woman (Camille O’ Sullivan?) sang Nick Cave’s The Ship Song. The song contains the line “come loose your dogs upon me”. It is a great line and a great example of the songwriting genius of Nick Cave, ye olde English deployment of the word loose as a verb effortlessly gives the whole song a rich tone and historical context.

But our friend on The Late Late Show didn’t like this line so she sang “come lose your dogs upon me”. Which is not wrong, it is spectacularly wrong. What happened here? Is this her own “interpretation”, did she think “lose” works better than “loose”, or did she mistakenly think Nick Cave sang “lose” on the original version? Giving her a large benefit of the doubt and presuming it was the latter was there nobody around during the rehearsal and preparation of the song to correct it, were the definitive lyrics not sourced to be consulted and checked?

Or are we looking at a possible third scenario too awful to contemplate; that the singer assumed that the audience would not understand the word “loose” in this context, that they would think it was a mistake and so it was decided to change the word to “lose” to make it more readily comprehensible to the audience. I wonder how Nick Cave would feel about having his work butchered and misrepresented in this way. To have a word so pivotal to the theme and impact of the song discarded in favour of a thoroughly meaningless one. The slippery slope indeed.

These things matter, the details matter. Ryan Tubridy in his intro or post performance summing up failed to make any mention of Nick Cave by the way. He has probably never heard of him. He could tell you everything there is to know about Michael Bublé though.

There ain’t no fuckin troika gonna save us now.