An Irishman's Diary

The importance of music in people's lives is witnessed not only by the songs we love. The ones we hate are even more telling. Arguments about the worst song ever recorded provoke levels of passion that best-song polls can't match (although the same entries sometimes crop up in both). A desire to do violence to the performers responsible is a common feature of the debate.

Never mind that the worst songs are, by definition, those we have forgotten, or that we never heard in the first place, because nobody considered them worth playing. The songs we hate are ones that have bored their way into our consciousness and are forever playing in a private hell reserved only for us. Somebody must like them, somewhere, or they would not keep turning up on radio to torture us anew.

A special place is reserved in worst-ever-song polls for performers we know are capable of better. Paul McCartney, for example, who has recorded a whole series of atrocities "ever since his body was taken over by a pod person", as the US humorist Dave Barry put it. Maybe (Simply Having) a Wonderful Christmas Time and that thing he did with the "Frog Chorus" are not monumentally awful in themselves. It's the contrast with Hey Jude we find unforgivable.

Another common factor in songs we hate is that they express a sentiment that might have been acceptable between two people in a private, romantic situation - especially if there was drink involved - but should never have been shared with others, never mind committed to record. Dr Hook's If I said you had a beautiful body (would you hold it against me?) falls into this category, as does Michael Bolton's Can I Touch You There?, Paul Anka's You're Having my Baby, and of course Christ de Burgh's Lady in Red.

Songs that feature in both best and worst lists include Imagine, Bohemian Rhapsody and Stairway to Heaven. One the other hand, there are records that nobody I have ever met likes and that seem to exist only to annoy us. These include Agadoo, Yummy Yummy Yummy (I've got Love in My Tummy), and Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-dot Bikini.

But to get to my point, finally: someone who never seems to feature in worst-ever polls is Mrs Miller, the soprano-turned-pop singer who was born 100 years ago today. This is curious, because if singers can murder a song - as is commonly claimed - Mrs Miller's rap-sheet would have earned her the electric chair. For a period in the mid-1960s, she was the music industry equivalent of Hannibal Lecter.

Her approach to pop songs could be charitably described as "operatic", although the influence of the Protestant hymnal was also evident. During a short reign of terror, she inflicted her talents on a series of other people's hits, including A Hard Day's Night, Downtown, and Moon River. Yet her debut album sold 250,000 copies in three weeks, and at her height she appeared on the Johnny Carson show, as well as entertaining troops in Vietnam.

Her record company knew how bad the music was, and so did those who bought it. Only Mrs Miller was not in on the joke, at least initially. A life-long singing enthusiast, she had made vanity recordings with her husband's money before being "discovered" at 59. And although the promoters claimed they had been up-front from the start about her novelty-act status, the singer herself told Life magazine that the truth only dawned in the recording studio.

There, on the rare occasions she managed to sing in time with the music, the orchestra would speed up or slow down to lose her again. And when the record label chose the most off-key of multiple takes, she said, "I knew it was a gag". For a while, Mrs Miller seemed to have cracked the elusive "so bad it's good" musical genre. Then the public decided that, no, really, it was just bad. Following the difficult second album and an even more difficult third, artistic differences emerged and she was dropped by the label.

Around the same time that Bob Dylan was recovering from his broken neck, Mrs Miller too was undergoing a period of enforced reflection. She was determined to be taken seriously. But after an ill-advised fourth album, attacking the hippie lifestyle in song, she opted for a dignified retirement. Not even becoming a regular feature on Mike Murphy's old "Rotten Records" slot on RTÉ tempted her out if it, before she died in 1997.

Mrs Miller is now sometimes compared with William Shatner, Star Trek's original Captain Kirk, who in 1968 applied his unique acting talent to spoken cover versions of popular songs. Unlike Mrs Miller, however, Shatner's work has achieved lasting hatred.

His recording of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is frequently cited in worst-ever-song polls. Indeed, George Clooney nominated it as one of his desert island discs, on the grounds that it would help motivate an escape. Forced to listen to the song, Clooney said, he would hollow his own leg out and use it as a canoe.

Like Mrs Miller, Shatner eventually played along with the joke he had not intended to be and in recent years has won critical acclaim for his musical work. His 2004 cover of Jarvis Cocker's Common People is - in, my opinion anyway - better than the original. It's almost enough to make you wish that Mrs Miller had persisted. But not quite.

fmcnally@irish-times.ie