While I was stuck in the customary Sukhumvit gridlock last week, a song came on the taxi radio which I vaguely recognised — well, the lyrics anyway. The words "daylight come and me wanna go home" were being repeated against a background of electronic noise. I was being subjected to a hip-hop version of Harry Belafonte's 1957 <i>Banana Boat Song</i>, sometimes called the "Day-O" song.
Being a certified Old Fart, it will come as no surprise that I preferred the original version, although it did give me palpitations when I discovered it was first released 60 years ago. I recall Belafonte singing it on television with a backdrop of people dancing in the studio around fake banana trees.
It is an iconic song and the refrain is still chanted by fans at American baseball games when they go into extra innings and it drags on into the night. The weary fans remind the players that "daylight come and me wanna go home". Many people not as wrinkly as myself will associate the song with a memorable scene in Michael Keaton's bizarre film Beetlejuice.
"Day-O" is indeed a great sing-along number and if you are sitting at the breakfast table this morning trying to brush off the cobwebs, there's no better way to start your day than a quick burst of day-o, day-o. It might scare the kids though.
Exotic tastes
The banana, of course, is abundant in Thailand and I've even eaten some from my own small Bangkok garden. If back in the 1960s someone had told me that one day I would be eating bananas from my own backyard, I would have thought they were…well, bananas. When I was a kid the banana was still regarded as an exotic fruit because you could not grow them in England. Despite this, they were in plentiful supply in the markets and not particularly expensive.
Bananas first became popular in England at the turn of the 20th century thanks to a vigorous campaign by the chief importers, Elders and Fyffes. The phrase "have a banana" became a household favourite. One of the most popular songs in that era was Let's All Go Down The Strand and for some reason at the end of the first line people would sing "have a banana", even though it wasn't in the lyrics. Elders and Fyffes encouraged the playing of the song as it was basically a free advertisement for their product.
The company was also delighted when the song, Yes We Have No Bananas, was released in the early 1920s and became a big hit. Fyffes latched onto it by sticking up posters at fruit shops announcing "Yes! We Have No Bananas! On Sale Here".
Songs with a peel
For reasons that don't need explaining, the banana can have saucy overtones and the 1926 song I Have Never Seen A Straight Banana became very popular among British music hall audiences and helped boost sales of the fruit.
For the musically inclined, the lyrics include:
I have never, never, never, never seen a straight banana
I guess I must admit
That I have searched quite a bit
They are even curved when they are served in my banana split.
Then there was Louis Prima's big hit, Please Don't Squeeze Da Banana, but we had better not go into those lyrics.
During my schooldays in the 1960s, there was also a popular advertisement featuring a large banana half-peeled with the cheeky slogan "unzip a banana", which some regarded as a bit naughty.
Benny gives them the slip
We often see "banana-skin" mentioned when people, whether it be a sports team or a government official, face a potentially awkward situation. But do folk these days actually physically slip up on banana skins?
Apparently 300 people a year in Britain suffer injuries caused by stepping on a banana skin. So it's no joke, although witnessing someone slip up on a skin invariably evokes guffaws.
I was in a Thai restaurant a few years ago when an old Benny Hill sketch came on the TV. It was the familiar sight of Benny being chased by half-naked maidens over hills, down dales, across streets and through parks until he eventually hides behind a tree.
All the girls race past and Hill emerges from the tree very pleased at having given them the slip. He then strides off only to immediately fall on his backside after stepping on a banana skin. The whole restaurant collapsed in laughter.
It was encouraging to see the old banana skin joke is still appreciated in Thailand.
Mellow Yellow
In 1967, bananas received considerable attention among hippies when an article in the American student newspaper Berkeley Barb reported you could get high on smoking banana skins, owing to the presence of "bananadine" in the skins. The whole thing was a hoax, but smoking banana peels became very trendy among the "cool" dudes.
It was heightened by the release about the same time of the Donovan song, Mellow Yellow, which became a big hit. Mellow Yellow was even adopted as the name for Amsterdam's first marijuana coffee-house which opened in 1972 but has since closed.
Donovan denied his song was a reference to smoking banana peels and explained the "electrical banana" in the lyrics was in fact a reference to a vibrator. And after that high note all I can say is, "Day-o".
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