The Neighbours' Cat
The Arvon Foundation is a charity set up to promote creative writing, and often has well-known tutors on board to help develop talent. Leon and Frankie Armstrong became involved around 1990, and proposed an exercise for students, to write a song about the obviously trivial subject of a neighbours' cat. For fun, Leon himself decided to explore the idea too, coming up with this rapid-rhyme song, which if nothing else, entertains us with its wry humour.
"'The Neighbours' Cat' is about moral panic amongst the Daily Mail readers of Middle England. Or else, it's about the neighbours' cat. When I was tutoring a songwriting course for the Arvon Foundation with Frankie Armstrong, we decided the title would make an interesting first exercise. We wondered if anything significant could be made out of this lightweight subject matter. Having inflicted it on students, I thought it only fair to attempt the exercise myself." - LR (Turning Silence Into Song (songbook), p1)
Recordings
Version 1 (1991)