"I'll Be Spiderman, Dangerman, Bananaman"

As a songwriting friend called Murray Webster wrote "Don't get bitter, get better".

And that was kind of the theme of what I like to think of as my cult, ahem, classic, Potatoman, from which today's line is taken. I performed a part of it, only a part, at my first ever singer/songwriter gig at The Cruban bar in Carradale about 14 or 15 years ago. It wasn't called Potatoman at the time. It didn't have a name. But I went back and played another gig a couple of weeks later, and a fella said "play that Potatoman song". And I had to think for a minute because I didn't have any songs with potatoes in. Never mind songs about people who dressed up as super hero root vegetables. But the penny quickly dropped and my new song had it's very own title/jacket.

I got a decent recording of this song done with the Twisted Melons many years ago, but it's changed a little bit since then, and I would like to do it again. Maybe with the Melons once more. Who knows? But these days I've got songs coming out my ears, and lots of other things I have to do and it keeps getting put off. It will happen though.

Potatoman came at a time in my life when I suddenly, and scarily, could see a little bit of connection between myself and those folk you sometimes meet who seem to have had all the life and ability to laugh or smile, surgically removed. I had never sensed any possible connection between me and those people. But then I lived a little bit. And some of my plans, and imaginings, and dreams died a death. And I realised that things might not always, might never, turn out the way I had expected or hoped.

I began to suspect that people aren't in fact born with a bitter gene. Instead, bitterness is a combination of hard life experiences and a failure to dream new dreams when the old ones die. It's a protection against the cold, easterly winds of fortune. And I am as capable of coming down with it as the next human being because we all yearn for a bit of protection from hard reality sometimes. But I really didn't, I don't, want to become bitter...and so I wrote a song about it.  Remarkably, it didn't contain any potatoes.

...I'll be Spiderman, Dangerman, Bananaman, but please don't let me end up a bitter man.


Fee Comes Fourth