A few weeks ago, an old Top 40 countdown launched me into an easy-listening kick that resulted in my blog posts on "My Boy" - and will soon result in one on "Love Story (Where Do I Begin?)." Another song I ended up buying from iTunes during that period was Engelbert Humperdinck's "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize." Lovely waltzing melody, but I hadn't noticed how small the lyric is: it's existential yet inconsequential. The story: "This world is complicated. My dreams are not. Let's go ride bikes."Would that life could be so simple.
It's also worth noting that the title en francais is no sign of the King of Romance singing in the Language of Love: it merely comes from a British short film of the same name. Which I didn't know until researching for this post - I'd assumed the songwriters simply decided that the -cles syllable of bicycles fell too hard for that lilting melody to carry.
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EH was quite a dependable hitmaker during that period; it was always kinda funny to hear his housewife-friendly MOR back-to-back with, say, "Judy in Disguise" or "Whole Lotta Love". Sadly most of the otherwise-fine EH anthols (double-discs, mostly) end with his '76 "comeback", "After the Lovin'", forgetting his even-later resurgence in the '80s with a cover of Rupert Holmes' lovely "Last of the Romantics".
BTW, I always assumed the songwriters deliberately mispronounced "Belsize" to rhyme it with "skies" -- isn't it actually pronounced "bel-seez"?
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