> Peter Bellamy > Songs > A Chat with Your Mother

F-Word (A Chat with Your Mother)

[ Roud - ; Lou & Peter Berryman]

Peter Bellamy learned A Chat with Your Mother from the song’s authors, Lou and Peter Berryman. A live recording from the Bacca Pipes Folk Club in Keighley on 2 November 1984, was released on the very rare cassette 10, but it was also included on in 1999 on his 3CD anthology Wake the Vaulted Echoes. Strangely, on the CD track list it was listed as “bonus track”; you’d have to open the accompanying booklet to find the title. The book comments further:

This very rare recording captures Peter returning to his local club from a successful American tour and introducing a new song which went on to become his albatross. So often was this song requested that he eventually refused to perform it. None of that reluctance is evident here, as Peter revels in the novelty of the song’s humour with an audience of his friends. This version, the only usable copy of the song we could find, was recorded on 2 November 1984 at the Bacca Pipes Folk Club in Keighley by Jim Ellison. Peter’s enjoyment of this club was one of several factors which encouraged his move to the town. The speed with which the club’s regulars (singers all!) pick up on this chorus says a lot about why he liked it so much.

Jon Boden sang A Chat with Your Mother as the 10 November 2010 entry of his project A Folk Song a Day.

Lyrics

Peter Bellamy sings A Chat with Your Mother

Oh, the pirates in their fetid galleons, daggers in their skivvies,
With infected tattooed fingers on a blunderbuss or two;
Signs of scurvy in their eyes, only mermaids on their minds;
It’s from them I would expect to hear the F-word, not from you.

Chorus (repeated after each verse):
We sit down to have a chat,
It’s F-word this and F-word that.
I can’t control how you young people
Talk to one another,
But I don’t want to hear you use
That F-word with your mother.

There are lumberjacks from Kodiak vacationing in Anchorage,
Enchanted with their coal-tar soup and Caribou shampoo,
With seven months of back pay in their aromatic woolens;
It’s from them I would expect to hear the F-word, not from you.

There’s the militant survivalists in Gucci bandoleeros,
Taking tacky khaki walkie-talkies to the rendezvous;
Trading all the latest armour-piercing ammo information;
It’s from them I would expect to hear the F-word, not from you.

There are yobs who think that God himself is brawling in the grandstand,
In a cold November downpour with a nostril full of glue
Whose entire grasp of heaven has a lot to do with football;
It’s from them I would expect to hear the F-word, not from you.

There’s unsavoury musicians with their filthy pinko lyrics
Who destroy the social fabric and enjoy it when they do,
With their groupies and addictions and their poor heartbroken parents;
It’s from them I would expect to hear the F-word, not from you.