Humorous intent

Elderly pop tunes, as we all know, have a tendency to remind you of things you may not wish to remember. Wings’ ‘Band on the Run’, for example, gives me the taste of cold beef, chips and beans in the Nag’s Head in Oxford circa 1978. It was on the jukebox there, I was an undergraduate and just about managing not to starve to death.

On Radio 2 the other day, Ken Bruce played ‘Life’s Been Good’ by Joe Walsh, and I could suddenly feel the bitter cold of my tiny student room with its two-bar electric heater and the mould slowly creeping along the walls towards my bed, where it would surely engulf me. But hang on, didn’t I buy the single? I had a look and there it was. No song you bought on 7-inch vinyl ever entirely leaves you, even if you no longer have a working record player to play it on, and for the rest of the week I had the tune pulsating through my mind: a true earworm.

As so often in the past, I found myself drawn towards amazon.co.uk and the song’s parent album But Seriously Folks…Walsh played with the Eagles in those days and, indeed, still does, but in between he also released a string of easy-going solo albums. This was one and it’s perfectly pleasant, in an expensively recorded, beery country-rock kind of way. But ‘Life’s Been Good’, which on the album is eight and a half minutes long, is quite something. A satirical portrait of a hopelessly indulged 1970s rock star, it’s as droll and pertinent today as it ever was. (‘I go to parties, sometimes until four. It’s hard to leave when you can’t find the door.’)