22. 10 Songs about the Circus and Clowns

Send in the Clowns - Frank Sinatra
Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite - The Beatles
Trapeze Swinger - Iron & Wine
Tears of a Clown - Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
Acrobat - Maximo Park
Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan
Cathy's Clown - The Everly Brothers
Walking on a Wire (or The Great Valerio) - Richard and Linda Thompson
Clowns - Goldfrapp
My Wandering Days are Over - Belle and Sebastian (or The Circus is Leaving Town - Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan)

Perhaps Mr Frith might hope for Circus by Erasure, but, you know, I listened to it and I didn't like it like i remember liking it when i was a kid. And Emmy the Great has a song called Secret Circus, but it's just about my least favourite song of hers.

My favourite song for years was Like a Rolling Stone, and my favourite bit in it was 'You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you, You never understood that it ain't no good, you shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you' as my school yearbook page attests. I was just rather dazzled by the wordplay. It's not really a song about clowns. Also on Bob Dylan, he once described Smokey Robinson as America's Greatest Living Poet, something I don't really see. Tears of a Clown contains the line 'Just like Pagliacci did, I try to keep my surface hid', Pagliacci being a famous opera about clowns, or a famous real clown, or something. That gets called a great line, but I think it's a wee bit forced.

Clowns as something sinister, or sad, in films is quite a hackneyed device, from Brassed Off to Octopussy, and I suppose it is in songs too, though Sufjan Stevens' 'John Wayne Gacy' still maintains the capacity to shock with the line "he dressed up like a clown for them". That's a great song. Also a great song is 'Send in the Clowns'. That's on the original 100 list which kicked off this godforsaken blog, isn't it?

Here is a brief thing called

THE HOLY FOOL

Face not fitting shoes,
it's not so easy being
crazy for Jesus.

I've actually seen this Holy Fool, an ordained minister who goes round doing clown shows with an allegorical bent. I saw it when I was a teenager. It was rather a beautiful thing.
You got to be crazy to be for Jesus these days, eh ...