50. 10 David Songs

Woohoo, i make the half-century and I'm almost halfway there. In honour of this remarkable happening, I celebrate me! or rather my own name - I'm pretty surprised to have got to 10 songs on this one, but I have had to sink pretty low ...

Remember David - A Flock of Seagulls
Who Killed Davey Moore? - Bob Dylan
David - Nellie McKay
Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley
Once in Royal David's City - Sufjan Stevens
Who's David - Busted
Can't Help Thinking About Me - David Bowie
David Watts - The Jam
Jonathan David - Belle and Sebastian
Argument with David Rawlings about Morrissey - Ryan Adams

A pretty shoddy collection, the last one's not even a song, it is really just an argument, but it does lead into the splendid To be Young is to be sad is to be high, and also Ryan Adams' first name is actually David, so i guess it's ok.
The Bowie song is hilarious, it's from his pre-fame mid-60s, and is on because it contains the line "My girl calls my name 'hi Dave',
drop in, see around, come back
if you're this way again"
which i once heard him saying was the worst lyric he'd ever written. Awesome.
Hallelujah is of course about King David - I once began an actual compilation tape with the start of the song, then cut it at "but you don't really care for music, do you?" ha ha which was pretty clever in the days of stopping and rewinding and cutting and pasting.
In fact, come to think about it, three of the songs refer to King David. I quite like Jonathan David, though it's a bit uneven. When I was a 5/6 year old kid, there were three Davids in my class, and i tried to change my name to John, my middle name, but everyone just called me David John, which wasn't the point at all - rather like when I finally made clear that I was 100% David and not Dave, and various people would call me Dave ... sorry ... id or say things like When did you change your name to David? These were morons.
Anyway, it's a pretty good name, it was everywhere when i was growing up. Cricket was, as already mentioned, my favourite thing, so the fact that the England captain was left-handed and called David meant I had a readymade hero. And what a solid broadcaster he's become ...
Anyway, this is about the prevalence of the name - don't worry too much about it

DAVIDS
This blessed name gave a fine pair of heroes
protecting me in and out the school gate.
In white, on left, England's captain drove me
on and picked me up or sent Willis instead ...
In black dress, with wit and gentle teachings,
Father, friend and noble headmaster, you
told us to be wary of the strange men
in dark cars with no place at the Abbey.

Forty thousand pounds, I hear, was enough
to buy a few years' silence from some frightened
Catholic boy's own greedy shameful family,
Father David, failing to buck bitter
cliches, lazy jokes about everything about you -
you just had to go and make them come true.