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Indeed, for all the biting social satire of a song such as Kill the Poor – the band’s third single and a No 49 UK hit – Dead Kennedys’ best-known song is probably the single that followed it in May 1981: Too Drunk to Fuck. But if we’re being honest, a large part of the band’s enduring appeal to the average adolescent is that their songs can be incredibly rude.
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Part of that was down to the catchiness of their songs, which combine massive shout-along choruses with guitar riffs the milkman could whistle. They may never have had the volcanic cultural impact of the Sex Pistols or the Clash but Dead Kennedys remained a hugely important cult band in the decades after their demise.
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If you looked closely around British secondary schools in the 1980s and 90s, you’d be likely to find Dead Kennedys’ distinctive “DK” logo scratched somewhere. Point made, the band would never perform the song again, although the awards version would turn up on Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death, a 1987 compilation that rounded up their non-album songs. We’re not a punk rock band, we’re a new wave band.” Dead Kennedys then launched into Pull My Strings, a song written for the occasion, in which they rail against the music industry: “Is my cock big enough, / Is my brain small enough / For you to make me a star?”, ending with a pointed musical nod to the Knack’s new wave anthem My Sharona. Sure enough, Dead Kennedys started playing California Über Alles as expected, only for Biafra to stop the song 15 seconds in to proclaim: “We’ve gotta prove that we’re adults now. The idea, according to the event’s organisers – who probably hadn’t been playing sufficiently close attention to the band’s modus operandi – was to give the event some “new wave credibility”. Maybe Polydor should have known better: the group’s distinctive attitude towards the music industry was already in evidence in 1980, when they were invited to perform at the Bay Area music awards in San Francisco. The album version adds an ambient guitar intro for good measure, extending the running time to 4min 38sec.ĭead Kennedys made an almost instant commercial impact in the UK, and in 1981 a deal from Polydor was in the offing, only for Biafra to threaten to quit the band if they signed to a major. It’s like all of the good bits of most punk bands compressed into three and a half minutes. In the 3min 43sec single version the song includes two intros, two verses, two rousing choruses, an eerie bridge, a guitar solo, an escalating middle eight and a final chorus, each brilliantly tarred with an air of creeping menace. But what might be most striking about Holiday in Cambodia is how many ideas it packs into its brief running time.
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The lyrics, meanwhile, are among Biafra’s best, a vicious dissection of the stereotypical college student who has “been to school for a year or two and you know you’ve seen it all”. The opening 20 seconds of rattling bass and sparse, echoing guitar create a mood of musical paranoia that ratchets up several notches with the introduction of the drums, playing a frantic discoesque beat, and a guitar riff that brings to mind Dick Dale playing on as the Titanic slips under the water. Bruce Slesinger’s drums combines a bolero rhythm with militaristic rolls – guitarist East Bay Ray called the song “our Wagnerian piece with a bolero rhythm” – while the opening guitar lines have shades of the gothic surf-rock style that Ray brought to the group.Ĭalifornia Über Alles was followed a year later by Holiday in Cambodia, a masterclass in atmospherics. And yet other elements of California Über Alles shy away from the stereotypes of punk rock. Singer Jello Biafra’s lyrics – a blistering attack on the then governor of California, Jerry Brown (who returned to the post in 2011), which reference the now-unused first stanza of the German national anthem – and Klaus Flouride’s ominous bass riff are typical of the 1979 punk scene into which the song was released. Thiss debut single exemplifies their complicated musical relationship with punk. Is it a sound? An attitude? Sitting squarely across it are California’s Dead Kennedys, a band punk enough to feature in Rolling Stone’s 40 greatest punk albums but who employed elements of surf guitar, jazz, poetry and even bolero across four studio albums of biting wit, fury and pristine pop songs. The debate over what exactly constitutes “punk” is a long and thorny one.