Joining me in this episode is the comedy writer and performer Meryl O’Rourke. As well as being a mainstay on the stand-up circuit and writing for other performers (notably Frankie Boyle), Meryl has created and developed two one-woman shows, Bad Mother… (2011), and 2019’s Vanilla.

Vanilla is a very funny and thought-provoking show about sexuality – especially female sexuality – in the modern age, and is still available to live-stream at https://nextupcomedy.com/programs/meryl-orourke-vanilla

Meryl and I recently had an entertaining and wide-ranging chat about the defining music in her life. In addition to discussing her First/Last/Anything choices, she talked to me about music at funerals, why 80s pop could be even more politically charged than you thought, and the thorny issue of sexual representation and imagery in current mainstream music – which is a major theme of Vanilla.   

 

CW: The middle section of this conversation contains some discussion about sexual behaviour and representation, relating specifically to music videos and lyrical content, pressurisation and consent. We both realised that it was near-impossible to have this discussion without mentioning certain explicit sexual acts and terms, and so some of these appear. Like all the other conversations in this series, it has been edited with the co-operation of the guest, but this is mostly for reasons of length and not content. Please also note the second of the three YouTube links, for the Megan Thee Stallion clip, is NSFW.

 —-

MERYL O’ROURKE

I don’t think my house was musical at all when I was a child! Now you’ve asked… Hmm… My parents were both comedy and literature fans. With music my dad liked, I have zero idea. He died when I was seven, and he was very ill from when I was about four, too ill to properly play with me, he could just sit in his chair. So, yeah, the music I associate with him would be when I would dance to the theme tunes he liked. So, The Rockford Files, I mean, of course, that’s some damn funky music… and When the Boat Comes In. He wasn’t from Newcastle, he was Irish…well…he was from Brixton, but he was so ghettoised amongst Irish people that he had an Irish accent, despite not being born there. So he used ‘mammy’ rather than ‘mum’, so When the Boat Comes In reminded him of the Irish dialect: ‘Dance to your daddy/Sing to your mammy’. Whereas my mum didn’t listen to music for pleasure. I remember her liking novelty things like ‘Telephone Man’ [by Meri Wilson]. Comedy songs.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I know that before you ever became a professional comedian, you were – like me – a big fan of comedy in your teens. But unlike me, you were able to go to live recordings in London of various radio and TV comedy shows.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Yes! I have totally lived my life backwards. The last concert I went to was an 80s festival. But in the actual 80s, when all my friends were going to see Spandau Ballet, I was going to Radio 4 recordings like an old lady. The Paris Studio, off Piccadilly in London, where BBC radio comedy shows were recorded. My mum was a huge comedy fan, as I say, but while you couldn’t take a child to stand-up, you could go to the Paris at fourteen – and it was free! We got tickets for everything when I was 14, 15, but the big one was Radio Active.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I loved Radio Active too. For those who don’t know or don’t remember, it was this very funny pastiche on Radio 4, of a local radio station, starring Helen Atkinson Wood, Angus Deayton, Geoffrey Perkins, Phil Pope and Mike Fenton Stevens. Which had lots of spoof jingles, and parodies, and pop group pastiches, and which later became KYTV on BBC2 in the 1990s.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I fell desperately in love with Phil Pope, who did the music for Radio Active and Spitting Image, and who was also in Who Dares Wins, a late night Channel 4 TV comedy show. I know he was an unusual choice for a first love, but he would chat to me after recordings and, well, he’s no odder than Tony Hadley who, frankly, looked like someone shaved a bull and took it to Dorothy Perkins. So I guess, in the 80s I regarded the people in Radio Active, Who Dares Wins, Spitting Image, as if they were pop stars. I mean Phil and Mike had a number 1 with ‘The Chicken Song’ during that time, so I WAS hanging out with pop stars! Spandau weren’t getting any number one singles by ’86 – SO WHO’S THE WEIRD GIRL NOW, STEPHANIE?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

In the days before mass-produced video and DVD, there was a lot of merchandise for comedy: tie-in books, LPs… And all those shows did them. The HeeBeeGeeBees made albums! We should say the HeeBeeGeeBees were this group on Radio Active, involving Phil, Mike and Angus, who did parodies of all the big pop groups of the day – The Bee Gees, Status Quo, The Police, Duran Duran, etc – and Mike Fenton Stevens has mentioned that they got to tour Australia in the early 80s, and were practically treated like a real pop group, did loads of television, were playing rock venues. Especially as a lot of the real pop bands rarely toured extensively out there.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I think if you asked Phil Pope, ‘What are you?’, he would say, ‘A musician, who became an actor.’ I don’t think he’d even refer to himself as a comedian. He was a musician who was skilled at parody and became a comedy actor through that experience and association.

 

 

—-

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I always feel awkward when I’m asked about first album, because the first one I bought was Rattle and Hum, but that was because Mum was a librarian, and so she would just bring everything home. So it wasn’t the first thing I LIKED. The big thing Mum brought home was a Depeche Mode album, in fact it was a greatest hits cassette [The Singles 81–85]. It’s meant to be very non-muso to have greatest hits albums, isn’t it?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Greatest hits albums are fine! I’m a big defender of them. And anyway, in the case of Depeche Mode, lots of their singles weren’t on albums anyway.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

‘See You’ was the first time I heard a record that made my whole body react, that made me lie down on my bed and let it wave over me. Which Martin Gore had written when he was fifteen, I think. It’s Martin Gore’s ‘Careless Whisper’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

We’re talking about this not long after the very sad, sudden death of Andy Fletcher.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

When Fletch died, I kept returning to ‘Shake the Disease’ which is about feeling that you’re always saying the wrong thing, and hoping the person you’re with loves you enough to forgive you for being a bit of a twat. That still speaks massively to me! And Gore constantly returns to that theme. ‘Enjoy the Silence’ on Violator is exactly the same theme. It’s quite interesting for a professional lyricist to constantly return to ‘I say stupid stuff – therefore, can I just not speak?’ Martin is quite known for the odd embarrassing lyric: ‘A career, in Korea, being insince-ere’ …but I guess because he kept writing about hating words, we, in the fan base, forgave him.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

There’s an interesting distance in that Martin is the lyricist, but he usually isn’t the singer. That’s Dave Gahan’s job. Like when you hear an Elton John song, you half-forget Elton didn’t write the words – it’s usually Bernie Taupin doing that. And at some level you know that, but you don’t think about it when you hear the song.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I’m constantly trying to link Elton John’s songs to his homosexuality, completely forgetting that the lyricist wasn’t gay. But in Martin’s case it was because Dave was already the lead singer, when Vince Clarke formed the group – though I’m a Depeche purist, very much Anno Vince. And Dave is almost quite a stereotypical frontman. Depeche Mode sort of channel through him, in a way. Some frontmen get annoyed by the fact that they are just looked at, as in ‘you look good and you sound good’ and it’s forgotten often they do write and play, but Dave is a conduit. His deep voice contrasts so well with the binky bonky electronica. Dave was very sexual, his hips would rotate throughout every song. One reason I stopped going to see them live… I went to see the ‘Songs of Faith and Devotion’ tour in the 90s, when we didn’t know Dave was on heroin, and he spent the whole show lying on the floor! He just lay on the stage. For one thing, I thought, ‘I’m here for the hips mate’ and on a practical level, if you’re standing at a gig, you can’t see somebody who’s lying down! Dave was hunkier, but it was Martin I got the crush on because of his brain.

 

Martin did soundscapes, that really felt like they enveloped you. Whenever I hear ‘Enjoy the Silence’, I remember my mum shouting, ‘Surely a song called “Enjoy the Silence” shouldn’t be listened to so loud!?’ A lot of bands, you have to turn the volume up, but with them, it’s about being immersed in a soundscape. One of my favourites, ‘Stripped’, starts with the sound of a car engine being turned on and engine just ticking over, which becomes the percussion of the song. ‘Stripped’ is one of Martin Gore’s many allegorical songs, along with ‘Master and Servant’, where he’s singing about sex, but he’s actually singing about capitalist society.

 

Rediscovering and properly listening to 80s music, I’ve noticed that because Thatcher was so censorious, a lot of the bands did songs that you thought were about sex but were actually about capitalism, like Heaven 17’s ‘Temptation’, ‘Labour of Love’ by Hue and Cry etc. Apparently even ‘Land of Make Believe” by Bucks Fizz is about Thatcherism!. Martin Gore was obsessed with two things – sex and industrialisation – so ‘Stripped’ is partly about ‘let me see you take your clothes off’ but the whole lyric is ‘I don’t want you watching television’, ‘I don’t want you with your earphones in’, “I want to be in a forest’, ‘I don’t want any of this horrible noise.’ And a lot of that came from them living in this very urban landscape of Basildon. When Fletch died, Alison Moyet tweeted, ‘We lived on the same council estate from the age of ten.’ So they lived in these very crowded situations, which is why Depeche Mode became a keyboard band. They were rehearsing in each other’s houses, and they couldn’t use acoustic instruments because the neighbours would complain. They could put headphones on and not upset their mums and dads.

—

FIRST: U2: Rattle and Hum (Island Records, 1988)

Extract: ‘Desire’

MERYL O’ROURKE

I remember thinking, ‘I need to just stop taping things from the library’. I was at a garage or motorway service station – ‘I am older now, I have some money, and I should probably buy this.’ So the impact of finally buying an album for the first time didn’t feel as special as it might have been for other people. I even remember thinking, ‘I need a “first album”.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Were you a U2 fan anyway?

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

With ‘Desire’, I liked that sigh at the start. I like alliterative music, stuff that sounds like what it’s doing. It’s called ‘Desire’ so I’m going to sound desirous. I like a track to do what it says on the tin. You know that wave of sad songs that sound happy? They piss me off!

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

If you’re going to convey doom, use doom.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

With U2, you can hear the passion in the music. And like Depeche Mode, U2 are now not just unfashionable but derided. This trope of ‘how terrible it would be for U2 to do a surprise concert’.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Or drop a free album on to your iPod.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I often think the hatred of U2 comes not actually from the music but from how the band behaves. The things Bono says, etc.  My second boyfriend was a big muso, was at the Hacienda every weekend, and he hated U2, so I had to kind of keep it secret. But I don’t think anyone can deny the passion and popularity of the music.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

My main issue with them then, although this has largely dissipated now, many years ago, was that they were so ubiquitous. And in the sixth form, at school, they had this kind of image of ‘this is real music’. So I perhaps unfairly held them responsible for that.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Well, what’s ‘real music’? I liked both U2 and Depeche Mode, they both made noises that made my body react. If I’ve got my eyes shut, and the music’s making my body react, then I like it. What instruments you’re playing that on is less important to me. The Edge is hitting a guitar string or Martin’s hitting a shopping trolley – am I dancing? Yes.

 

—-

LAST: MEGAN THEE STALLION:

‘Thot Shit’ (1501 Certified/300 Records, 2021) (NSFW)

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

This was my last download because I played it as the audience walked in for Vanilla. I thought I’d hate it because the publicity was all her arse, but then I watched the video and it’s hilarious, it’s her saying, ‘We all have arses’, and the video is endless, haunting, relentless arse. Megan’s style of rapping is relentless and monotonous – it’s not melodic, it’s almost like percussion. ‘Thot Shit’ doesn’t go up or down or have a middle-eight, it’s just, ‘This is relentless, this is relentless, this is relentless’. I really like that. The problem is, the video has nothing to do with the lyrics, AS EVER.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

The style and content of contemporary music videos is a major theme of Vanilla, which people can now live-stream. I was trying to think of a way of summing up the show – shall I have a go? To me, it discusses the generation gap between your formative years as a growing sexual being, and now looking at the world through the eyes of your children about the same subjects. Are you okay with that?

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

That’s a theme in it, yes. As an overriding theme, it’s about whether female sexuality is liberating or oppressing. People tell us constantly that being very sexual is liberating, but our actual experience of that can be very oppressive, and it’s often used against us. I mean that’s what the ‘Thot Shit’ video is about: ‘accept it, get over it’. Vanilla is about the bullshit we’re told about sex, especially about female sexuality, and especially what young girls are told. So there’s a lot of stuff about music videos and lyrics that are just bullshit.

 

In the show, I talk about how now there’s some choreo where women put their hands round their necks because we’re meant to be into choking. Even if you are into choking, that’s the most dangerous method! With sex, there’s this really weird disconnect, there seems to be no desire to do things properly or safely. If you said, ‘I’m really into scuba diving’, that would imply that you were PADI-registered [laughter], that you’d had a few training sessions. But with ‘I’m really into choking’ – well, have you looked up how to do it safely, and which things not to do, because some things can kill you? Or have you just copied ‘WAP’?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

As Vanilla does reference music video and pop songs, you’ve had to keep revising and updating the show. I first saw it during the first lockdown, online, in about April 2020, which predated the song ‘WAP’.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

There’s no point still talking about Little Mix getting their bits out at the BRITS when it’s a year later – pop music moves by so fast, and I had to talk about ‘WAP’. And all this stuff about how they’re the first female rappers to rap about sex! No they’re not! Salt-N-Pepa made an entire career out of rapping about sex but it’s like they’ve been erased. Sometimes I think they must have upset Stalin. When you go through their lyrics, Salt-N-Pepa were pretty explicit: ‘He keeps me open like a seven-eleven’ [from ‘Whatta Man’].

 

In ‘WAP’ they talk about being choked, tied up, spat on – and at the same time, we’re saying to people, ‘This is liberating’. I understand the nuance of ‘It’s liberating to say I’m submissive’ but we’re not telling young people that. We’re telling them, ‘You are dominant when you’re submissive’. But there are never any dominant songs by women about tying up the men. When I was researching, I asked people if they could think of any songs where the man is tied up. And we literally had to go back to the fifties: Elvis Presley’s ‘Teddy Bear’. And could you believe I was so distant from Depeche Mode I’d forgotten about ‘Master and Servant’! Which is absolutely about Martin being submissive. He was very visibly submissive – he would wear bondage gear on stage. He’d cause shock wearing black nail varnish, and now Little Mix wear bottomless leather harnesses and we put them on little kids’ sticker sets?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

I also remember about three years ago, you were tweeting about Stormzy’s record ‘Vossi Bop’ and it being played at breakfast time on Radio 1.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Oh, you remember that! I phoned Radio 1, such a Karen.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

As someone who’s now unarguably middle-aged and clearly not the main target audience, I sometimes hear records like this and think, ‘What do I do with this?’ Whereas the fourteen-year-old me would have imagined me celebrating it as ‘the new “Relax”’ or whatever.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

But it’s horrible.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It is. And apparently there are two versions of ‘Vossi Bop’, an uncensored and a clean version, but even the clean version appears to have a line about ‘giving a facial’ in the chorus. I suppose that there’s an argument for saying that’s not swearing, but…

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I think being the mother of a teenager helps in these situations. When I phoned Radio 1, the woman I spoke to was also middle aged, and I said to her: ‘As middle-aged women, we might think Stormzy’s singing about putting on a mudpack and some cucumber over his eyes… but the teenagers know exactly what he’s talking about.’ People seem to feel that the most urgent issue with ‘…that’ is not questioning why as an act it’s become so mainstream, but giving it a name that means it can be discussed at breakfast. That seems to have been the main priority here.

 

But also, in the lyrics, he’s facialising this girl as a punishment, because she was ugly and she was somebody else’s girlfriend. The thing is, I didn’t want to be disappointed in Stormzy. I love Stormzy [agreement], he’s south London, and I’m south London. There’s a rap bit where he mentions a bus route that I use – it’s so exciting when he mentions things that I know about. And politically, too – the stuff he said after Grenfell. So I didn’t want to complain about him: ‘Hang on a minute, that is the chorus of your song, and it’s being played at breakfast time on Radio 1?’ But at what point can we say, ‘This is not okay’? Because every time we do say, ‘This is not okay’, we’re told we’re being oppressive.

 

There’s a bit in the show where I talk about J-Lo’s very explicit Superbowl show, and I have to make it very clear that I’m not slut shaming. She mooned the world’s children, and she knows that’s not okay, because if you did it out of the window of a school bus you would get detention. And we’re so obsessed now with looking after these adult women’s sexualities that we are completely forgetting about the children who are their fanbase.

 

I find Megan Thee Stallion difficult, because I am fifty-one and I’m surprised by how much I love her. But I was watching Ellen one day, and there was a bit where Megan visited a children’s hospital, and you think, ‘Mate! You rap about wanting someone to tie you up and fuck you. Don’t go to a children’s hospital!’ I really admire the artists like Rihanna and Miley Cyrus who have both said, ‘I am not here for your children. Do not bring your children to my concert.’ And then I see people like Megan Thee Stallion and Nicki Minaj who are very explicit – they’re welcoming kids to their concert. It makes me… uncomfortable. We don’t have that line anymore – and a lot of Vanilla is asking to have that line back. You know, 9pm. It’s impossible, so we have to find a new 9pm.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Watching that Megan Thee Stallion video, it occurred to me how rarely I actually watch music videos now. If I hear ‘Sledgehammer’ or ‘Take on Me’ or ‘Ashes to Ashes’, it’s impossible for me to hear those songs without picturing the videos. I am quite removed now. I may listen to lots of new music, but I don’t really watch new music. But it sounds like you do. Now, is that because you have children?

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

It’s because I was writing Vanilla. And I don’t write without researching. And if I’m going to write about what our children are experiencing, then I need to find out what it is.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

With ‘Thot Shit’, I’ll probably have to flag it with NSFW in the link.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Which by the way: if you watch it on YouTube, there is no way to stop your child from watching it.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

No age restriction! I know, I was surprised.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

A huge problem I have with female music videos is they pretend sex is political, to make it ‘okay’, but just by mushing it all together unnaturally – which I suppose is the essence of sex. Ha-ha. I talk about ‘God is a Woman’ where the video is quite deep and has a lot of feminist imagery – Ariana Grande with a huge hammer smashing a glass ceiling. But the song is just about shagging. The premise of the song is: She is so good in bed, you will forget the existence of a patriarchal god. I mean, she says she’s good in bed, she can’t even wrap her tongue round a consonant…

 

And then you go on to ‘Run the World (Girls)’ by Beyoncé. Which has very feminist lyrics, but the video is just Beyoncé rolling around in dirt, in her knickers. And people might say, ‘Well it’s feminist to do that’, but it’s naïve to think that’s not distracting people away from the lyrics. But to show you actually on your hands and knees in your pants, jerking about, whilst you’re singing about equal pay… You know very well that men are not watching that video thinking, Wow – I really must increase the wages of my female staff.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Yes, if there’s that many levels of irony to get to that point, the message hasn’t really succeeded.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

‘Run the World (Girls)’ is very clever, in its knowledge of what men and women are aroused by. So men, biologically respond to images, women to conversation. We might not like it, but it’s science. So Beyoncé is managing to excite both genders. The lyrics are having a conversation, bigging up women – ‘Look at what you’ve done, and you can do this and this and this’ – but the movements are saying to her male fans, ‘Look at how sexy I am.’ So both groups of fans are aroused, and both groups of fans enjoy the song but possibly whilst totally ignoring the other’s reasons. One of the things we forget about the music business is, it’s fucking clever. You are constantly being manipulated by every single successful pop group, including the ones you love.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

And the people behind them. That’s fascinating – the different messages different audiences are getting.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I think a lot of younger pop stars are groomed. They’re constantly told, ‘You want this.’ In the Jesy Nelson documentary, she has this dual thing in her head, wanting to be beautiful and being told, ‘In your underwear, you are powerful.’ But at the same time, she doesn’t feel powerful.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

So she’s been told what to do.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

There’s a bit in the making of one of the Little Mix videos, and Jesy Nelson’s being cinched into a corset, and she says, ‘I hope that the girls who watch this don’t think this is comfortable.’ But they do because the band spend a lot of time talking about how powerful their clothes make them feel. She was getting up at five in the morning to wash her hair and do her make-up so that her boyfriend never saw her without her hair done or her make-up done. It was heartbreaking. These levels of ‘want’ – ‘we want this’, well… do you want it ALL the time? I want to look beautiful now and then, for that day, but I don’t want to get up at 6am, so that I have to look like that all the time. A lot of younger pop stars are being told, ‘You are very powerful when you do this, when you wear as little clothing as possible.’ So they say to their fans, ‘This will make YOU powerful.’

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

It’s like they say, ‘We want to do this’, but really it’s ‘There are people who need me to do this.’

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

The trouble with publicising Vanilla is I can’t really talk on radio stations about the music videos my daughter was watching. Like just now, we were saying, for this interview, ‘Can we say “facialising”?’ Because us old people are still living in a nine o’clock watershed world. I’m sorry, but kids don’t live in that world. They’re on TikTok, on YouTube. We are adults but we’re not having the conversation that children are having. Children are accessing this stuff, so if we can’t implement physical censorship, we have to start prizing euphemisms, rapping like Salt-N-Pepa did.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

A revival of innuendo, perhaps?

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Yeah, it’s almost as if ‘Push It’ wasn’t about hill-starting a Morris Minor…

 

——-

ANYTHING: JOHNNY DRILLE FEATURING AYRA STARR: ‘In the Light’ (Mavin Records, 2021)

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

I am the kind of white, middle-class, handwringing liberal who is quite worried about how much I’m allowed to like Afrobeat.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Although it’s not as if it’s in the mainstream, is it, in this country?

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Johnny Drille is incredible. His music is beautiful, beautiful love songs. I always refer to him as the African Ed Sheeran. And his voice is almost too perfect. I think he won the Nigerian version of The Voice or something like that [Project Fame West Africa, in 2013]. There is literally no reason why he shouldn’t be played on Radio 2, let alone on 6Music that does world music. That he’s not world famous is a disgrace. He’s a balladeer. Though! On his new album, he’s got this song about the government in which he employed a death metal artist – it’s hilarious there’s suddenly this guy shouting ‘TTAAKKEE IITT BBAACCKKK’. His stuff is beautiful, beautiful though. And he released the new album by having a pyjama party, with a brass section on stage, with all his teenage fans wearing onesies, even his manager is wearing one. There’s something about his music that’s both passionate and sexual but also accessible. Your kids could listen to it. You don’t worry about those teen fans.

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

You’d think that, given the rise of K-pop and J-pop and lots of Latin music… that there’d be more global music superstars from Africa, but there haven’t been many.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

Fela Kuti, and he’s from… how long ago?

 

JUSTIN LEWIS

Youssou N’Dour – again, though, from years ago.

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

And the thing is, Afrobeats is a very specific part of African music. It’s a particular beat. Johnny Drille sings ballads. They’re not all actually Afrobeats. It’s like if you took every musician from Brooklyn, and called them a rapper because they’re from Brooklyn – even if they’re playing classical music. And it’s a whole continent, Africa – it’s like calling any music from Britain ‘Europop’.

 

I discovered Johnny Drille because he did a duet with Simi, who I’d already been listening to. She is quite interesting as an artist. She’s married to Adekunle Gold, who’s quite hard Afrobeats and playlisted on 1Xtra in this country. And she apparently produces most of his music. She, though, has a very cute voice, she has a song called ‘Gone for Good’, with these delightful little trills in her voice. And ‘Jamb Question’ about street harassment which is hilarious – she just makes fun of the guy who’s harassing her. ‘Jamb Question’ is slang for not just ‘stupid question’ but ‘the stupidest question’. He’s asking her things like ‘Did I go to school with your brother?’ and it’s sarcastic but still very sweet.

           

But recently she brought out a single, ‘Woman’, and it’s much harder and political. She swears on her new album.  A lot of her male fans have been like, ‘How have you written this angry song when you’re such a sweet girl?’ ‘Woman’ is literally about women being whatever they like and they’re telling you can’t change. Missed. The. Point. She’s very opinionated about the industry. As a personality, as a spokesperson, in terms of navigating herself through this industry, she’s very interesting.

 

——-

 

MERYL O’ROURKE

When my mum died in 1995, our rabbi was on holiday, the rabbi my mum had grown up with was too ill, and the rabbi I had grown up with, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, was on a book tour. My mum wasn’t religious but we started going back to synagogue when Julia was there, I think she was the first female rabbi to have her own congregation. So my mum started going back to synagogue as a feminist statement. But I didn’t want a stranger taking my mum’s funeral – that just seemed wrong, and I’d seen it go wrong before. So Julia just talked me through doing it on the phone, how to take a funeral. In 1995, that was very unusual. But it was nice – I can see why people do it now.

 

Mum not being a big music fan made choosing the music easier! I knew her favourite songs were ‘Can’t Take My Eyes off You’ by Andy Williams and ‘Somethin’ Stupid’ by Frank and Nancy Sinatra. For the service, I’d planned the music to just be ‘Somethin’ Stupid’, but the funeral director said to me, ‘It’s difficult to time exactly when we’re going to start… walking down the aisle? That sounds like a wedding! But… that…’

 

So at the service we just played the whole album – Nancy’s greatest hits – on a loop, for people as they come in. But because Lee Hazlewood’s music was really gothic, it was perfect! My mum was actually carried in to ‘Friday’s Child’, which is so depressing, so deeply miserable. It’s got the perfect beat, this really slow 1950s bluesy swing beat! ‘Hard luck is her brother, her sister’s misery’ – so it was a suitably dramatic gothic entrance. Nancy’s very chatty on Twitter and I did actually get to say to her, ‘Your greatest hits album was played at my mum’s funeral’, and she was like, ‘I’m …sorry??’  

 

—

 

Meryl O’Rourke’s Vanilla is still livestreaming at: https://nextupcomedy.com/programs/meryl-orourke-vanilla

Meryl continues to perform stand-up sets all over Britain. Check her social media or ents.24 for latest news.

In November 2024, the first reading took place of Meryl’s play Thrown by Giants, at the Arts Depot in North Finchley, London. The play was inspired by her mother and grandmother’s experiences of the internment camps on the Isle of Man in the 1940s. A further table read of this play will be taking place at The Glitch in London SE1 on Wednesday 16 July 2025. When tickets become available, I will add a link here.

You can follow Meryl on most social media platforms – just search for @MerylORourke, although on TikTok you can find her as @MerylOR.

 

FLA Playlist 3

Meryl O’Rourke

(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)

Track 1: Royal Northern Sinfonia/Alex Glasgow: Dance to Your Daddy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edl8b_efyNU

Track 2: Meri Wilson: Telephone Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuiDjROPR0s

Track 3: HeeBeeGeeBees: Meaningless Songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-gZKRKNy4w

Track 4: Depeche Mode: See You: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuWQitNlvf0

Track 5: Depeche Mode: Stripped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU8UfYdKHvs

Track 6: Depeche Mode: Master and Servant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsvfofcIE1Q

Track 7: U2: Desire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8rQ575DWD8

Track 8: Megan Thee Stallion: Thot Shit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KynkMn5Hv3Q (NSFW)

Track 9: Salt-N-Pepa, En Vogue: Whatta Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vgV_dVkXN4

Track 10: Beyoncé: Run the World (Girls): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBmMU_iwe6U

Track 11: Johnny Drille featuring Arya Starr: In the Light: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrPv3xoTnTU

Track 12: Johnny Drille: Lies (To Whom It May Concern): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX7Gwitq_kg

Track 13: Simi: Jamb Question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYDXuk4s5Mc

Track 14: Simi: Woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udnkr-pMRa8

Track 15: Nancy Sinatra: Friday’s Child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUpPOugzhos