I wanna be your toothbrush, baby

I wrote this song back in 1977. I remember I had been talking about the subject matter of songs with a friend one evening and he had argued that you could write about absolutely anything. Next morning I was at the bathroom sink cleaning my teeth and I thought about our conversation; a toothbrush seemed to present a challenge.

The problem was how to approach the topic. I vaguely remembered a song about pink and blue toothbrushes that I think Max Bygraves once sung and I knew I didn't want to go down that path. I had also been feeling fed up with the way sexual desire seemed to be handled in pop music, generally. I could never take seriously the pelvic thrusts of lead singers. I decided to write a song that would gently extract the urine. It so happened that I had been reading some Freud around that time, in connection with my work, and so I decided to lace the lyrics with some excessive Freudian symbolism. This produced a chorus as follows:

In, out, up and down, down and up and round and round
I wanna be your toothbrush, baby
In, out, up and down, down and up and round and round
I wanna help you fight decay
Squeeze the tube, and hold me tight
Bite the bristle, it's gonna be alright

I don't think I have ever called a woman 'baby' in my entire life but it seems to go with the spirit of the song. I had a good laugh playing it in pubs when I was younger, especially later on in the evening when the audience had had a few beers. Now, I seldom sing it. Occasionally I yield to pressure if asked when I play at acoustic music nights in some of my local pubs. It gets quite revolting as the song moves along. One of the middle verses starts:

Me, you, you and me, I know that I wanna be
Submerged by a sea of your saliva
Spit, gums, teeth and phlegm, how I wanna be with them
Brushing up your central incisor
Hold me tight between your teeth
And I'll dig out those bits of meat and gravy

Strangely, I've written another song about teeth only this year (2003) and that is a song about a dentist.

One last technical point. When I recorded this on my 1982 album 'Just for the record', I re-arranged the verse and the chorus to modulate between the keys of E and F. On the album, my friend Patrick Vercambre put down a lead acoustic guitar over mine and I think that was a bit awkward for him. It was awkward for me, too, and I have never sung it as a chorus song as on the record since. When I play live, I just finish the song with a repeat of the first verse and do the whole thing in E major

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