Bill Bates music

I write funny and serious songs - here are are a few I did earlier...

Comedy Songs

Mars Bar Song

The Mars Bar song was written after I got invited to a house party. Everything was going fine until people started taking off their clothes. It was a bit of a shock and four hours I insisted on leaving. As soon as I got home I wrote The Mars Bar Party song.

Click PLAY to view the Mars Bar song

Caravan Song

This is a song written about my family's attempts to go on holiday in our little caravan. Unfortunately, every time we went on holiday it either poured down with rain, snowed or there was a hurricane directly over our campsite. I wrote this song one particularly wet Monday afternoon in a force-9 gale half way up a cliff in Devon.

Click to PLAY view the Caravan song

Recycle Song

"This song is about saving the planet, recycling, melting ice caps, penguins, CO2 emissions, solar power, the ozone layer and recycled love. I thought the subject would make a decent song, although it was really difficult to find a word to rhyme with biodegradable.”

Pull back the Covers

When I was 19 I worked as a waiter at the Butlins holiday camp, Minehead. This is a song about keeping my happy campers very happy!

Car Boot Song

This song came about after I was forced to sell my children's toys at a car boot sale. The interest rate had gone up to 15%, and times were hard! I was happily making enough money to pay the bills when Louise decided to turn up to see how I was getting on. This was fine, except she also decided to bring our 2 young children along to see "daddy in his shop". Matthew was very impressed that I had a new toy shop. Sarah was very sceptical. "I have a bunny like this at home" she said, "and it is very, very similar to this one!" Just as she was paying me £3 for the bunny (I gave her a discount!) it began to dawn on her that this bunny was the exact the same bunny that she had been playing with the previous evening. Sarah is 21 now and still occasionally brings this up in conversation at the dinner table.

Martha

I had a friend called Martha who, at the age of 59, was having some difficulty finding a boyfriend. In desperation, Martha registered on an online dating agency. The song is about her finding her true love on the internet.

Gypsy Rose Lee

I went to have my fortune told by a Gypsy and as soon as I got home I wrote a song about it. She tried to seduce me but I turned her down; I figured that if she was a decent fortune teller she would have known I would have turned her down and she wouldn't have bothered.

Serious songs

When England Calls
I wrote this anti war was song after meeting some army recruiting soldiers. It was a very colourful scene with the Union Jack flying and photographs of war heroes and local regiments throughout history. I must admit for a moment I was quite caught up in the patriotism on the occasion. An army recruiting Sergeant approached my family and began talking to my teenage son. I was horrified. Being patriotic is one thing, but having your own son go off and fight was something else. My nephew is a young soldier and I have every admiration for those who do their duty for Queen and country; but I despise the politicians who send them to fight.

Miner
My Granddad worked down the mines and he wanted my father to join him down the pit. There was a huge family argument because he refused to go underground. If my dad had been a miner then maybe I would have become a miner too.

Turning
I did something that would have made my dad turn in his grave if he knew.

Nancy
I was walking through thick snow one freezing winters evening when I bumped into an old friend from many years ago. We had a brief chat about old times but I couldn’t help noticing that she looked awful. I remember thinking that she looked as white as a ghost. After a short while we said our goodbyes and I walked way. It then dawned on me that the girl I had been speaking to had died a few years before. I even remember going to her funeral. Nancy is a ghost song that really happened.

Warwickshire Boys
I met an elderly man who claimed to be a former soldier in the Warwickshire Grammar School Boys Regiment. This regiment was formed in WWI and was made up of volunteers from Grammar Schools throughout Warwickshire, which in those days included parts of Birmingham. The Regiment totalled about a thousand young soldiers and was described as “The pride of the working class”. Their first action of the war was at the battle of the Somme. Out of approximately 1000 of these young men only 30 of them of them survived the first day of the battle, their bodies falling in straight lines on the battlefield because they was instructed by their officers not to run towards the enemy but to keep in orderly rows. The elderly man I spoke to explained how loosing so many bright young men had made a tremendous impression on the working class movement.

Never Cried Out
Never Cried Out is a song about bullying and revenge, a dish best served cold.