Gnomes in Song
I’m sure everybody has heard The Laughing Gnome – the extremely odd single by David Bowie - but not many people know its even odder history.
It was first released in 1967, when Bowie was trying to find a commercial breakthrough. The track, as we all know, is basically Bowie meeting the gnome and having a kind of conversation with it. The gnome’s high-pitched voice was a blend, provided by Bowie himself and his studio engineer – used to give out a really terrible set of puns on the word ‘gnome’.
Amazingly though, the song got nowhere – I wonder why? It wasn’t until 1973, when it was re-released, that it became a hit, and by then Bowie had already made his commercial breakthrough with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The Laughing Gnome, quirky and irritatingly unforgettable, reached number 6 in the UK charts, much to the amusement of the music press and Bowie’s then rival for Pop Prince status, Marc Bolan.
But the story goes on. In 1990 Bowie announced that the play list for his Greatest Hits ‘Sound + Vision Tour’ would be decided by telephone voting – immediately the New Musical Express invited all its readers to ring in and rig the voting so Bowie would have to perform ‘The Laughing Gnome ‘, but, faced with that terrible possibility, Bowie gave up on the voting system.
Another rather infamous gnome song occurs in the cartoon South Park. It features in the episode where Kenny does a project on the gnomes that live in his room and steal his underpants and contains the immortal Underpants Gnome song:
Time to go to work. Work all night.
Search for underpants, hey.
We won't stop until we have underpants.
Yum tum yummy tum tay!
Grumpy gnome photograph by Son of Groucho, used under a creative commons attribution licence
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