QUESTION: Which hit songs took the least time to write? Which took the longest?
Bob Dylan once asked Leonard Cohen how long it took to write Hallelujah. ‘Couple of years,’ Cohen lied. It had actually taken him seven. He then asked Dylan how long it took for him to write Just Like A Woman. Dylan said: ‘15 minutes’.
Dylan was known for his rapid songwriting — years earlier, one of his most famous songs had been penned in a similar time: ‘I wrote Blowin’ In The Wind in ten minutes. Just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records,’ he said.
He stated: ‘The best ones are written very quickly. The longer it takes to finish the song, the more difficult it is to pin it down and focus in on it and you lose your original intention. I’ve done that a few times. I sort of just let those songs go.’
Paul Weller took note, hammering out The Jam’s classic That’s Entertainment in short order: ‘I wrote it in ten minutes flat, while under the influence. I’d had a few but some songs just write themselves.’
Describing the writing of Photograph, Ed Sheeran confessed ‘the song just kinda fell out within about ten minutes’. Other songs written in a similar time-frame include Adele’s Skyfall and Supersonic, by Oasis.
In contrast, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, a fiendishly complex song, began life as a piano melody in Freddie Mercury’s head while he was studying at Ealing Art College in the late 1960s. It wasn’t completed until 1975, the year the album A Night At The Opera was released.
Mike Beddoes, Bath, Somerset Some years ago, my wife and I fell into conversation with a roadie for various pop groups that toured military stations in Germany. One of these was The Troggs, whose lead singer and songwriter was Reg Presley. He affirmed that Reg had written Love Is All Around, a Top Ten hit for The Troggs and a No 1 for Wet Wet Wet, in ten short minutes, while sitting on the loo!
David Branchett, Leyland, Lancashire
QUESTION: Which dictators studied at British universities?
Valentine Strasser, then aged 25, seized power in 1992 during the Sierra Leone Civil War in a coup d’etat. In doing so, he became the world’s youngest Head of State.
In 1996, he was himself overthrown by Julius Maada Bio. Following this, Strasser enrolled in a law course at Warwick University as part of a UN-brokered peace deal.
Far from the flamboyant African dictator figure he had once cut, fellow students found him quiet and reserved. However, persistent accusations of torture and extrajudicial killings by his regime saw him withdraw after 18 months. He was denied asylum in the UK and eventually returned to Sierra Leone.
Strasser was not the first dictator to study at Warwick. Yakubu Gowon was the military ruler of Nigeria from 1966 until 1975, when he was removed in a bloodless coup.
Subsequently, Gowon attended Warwick, where he acquired a PhD in political science. He served a term as churchwarden at St Mary the Virgin in Monken Hadley in Barnet before returning to Nigeria in the mid-1980s. His rule was generally viewed as benign and unifying.
Having gained a medical degree in the U.S. in 1937, Hastings Banda studied medicine in Edinburgh to enable him to work as a doctor in the British Empire, something he did after graduating in 1941. He became the first president of independent Malawi in 1966, cancelled all other political parties and ruled Malawi with an iron fist until 1994.
Question: Why is a ‘drag race’ so-called?
Michel Moy, Cleethorpes, Lincs
Question: Which is the oldest working whisky distillery?
Mrs P. E. Toole, Ipswich, Suffolk
Question: Who was the genius who first put wheels on suitcases?
William Thorne, Ilkley, West Yorks
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was a medic who studied first at the prestigious Damascus University. He did his postgraduate training at London’s Western Eye Hospital in the 1990s before going on to govern Syria as a totalitarian police state.
Tim Benn, Coventry
QUESTION: Was Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot based on an earlier fictional character?
The previous answer omitted the mysterious affair of Hercules Popeau. Marie Belloc Lowndes introduced this detective in a 1920 novel called The Lonely House. He was a Frenchman with a sidekick called Captain Angus Stuart.
Poirot, Christie’s Belgian detective, and his sidekick Captain Hastings, first appeared in The Mysterious Affair At Styles the same year.
Lowndes was furious and wrote to the Society of Authors: ‘It is exactly as if someone had taken “Sherlock Holmes”… and called him “Shernock Holme”, using all his mannerisms and making him the central character of a murder mystery.’
However, the case has never been proved. Christie’s supporters point to the fact that The Mysterious Affair At Styles was mostly written in 1916, during World War I, when Christie served as a Voluntary Aid Detachments nurse in a hospital pharmacy in Torquay.
Olivia Smith, London SE9