Ban Delilah? Why, why, why?
Our inherited culture cannot be censored and that's why the attempt to ban Tom Jones's hit Delilah as the Welsh rugby anthem was deeply flawed
By Ivan Hewett, Music Critic
2:35PM GMT 15 Dec 2014
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/11294301/Ban-Delilah-Why-why-why.html
How did Tom Jones’s song about a man killing a woman in a fit of blind rage come to be a Welsh rugby anthem? Whatever the reason, it’s just too shocking for one of the self-appointed gate-keepers of our collective cultural life.Dafydd Iwan, a folk singer and past president of Plaid Cymru, has said it really won’t do. “It is a song about murder and it does tend to trivialise the idea of murdering a woman and it's a pity these words now have been elevated to the status of a secondary national anthem,” he declares. “I think we should rummage around for another song instead of Delilah.”
It’s interesting to speculate exactly what form this “rummaging around” would take. The fans surely can't be trusted to do it, because they're the ones who chose Delilah. Presumably the Welsh Rugby Union would have to appoint a committee, representing “all sections of the rugby audience”, with at least one woman, one person from an ethnic minority, one disabled person, one Welsh speaker, one non-Welsh speaker, one bilingual person, one gay person, one trans-gender person etc, etc. This committee would then sift through all the possible candidates for a nice, clean rugby anthem.
The first sifting would be easy. All those dreadful sexist rugby songs would go straight into the bin. Throwing out the folk and pop songs that rejoice in booze, fags, high-fat foods and sex would also be quite easy. After that the job would get harder. These songs were created by people who definitely did not share our enlightened view of the world. The trouble is they had a very annoying way of using poetic language, often strangely moving, and often laced with humour and innuendo. So weeding out the ones that might possibly contain sexist, nationalist, superstitious, racist, homophobic or sectarian feelings would take a lot longer.
Once the winning song was chosen, there’d be the even more difficult job of forcing the fans to like it. There would have to be compulsory sing-along sessions at the Millennium Stadium, led by a fresh-faced young “animateur” appointed by the Arts Council of Wales, to teach the fans the new inclusive, culturally-aware, low-fat, anthem.
Thank God this horror, plausible though it is, won’t actually happen. Dafydd Iwan seems to have climbed down, saying he doesn’t want to actually ban Delilah, which won the 1968 Ivor Novello award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically and was performed by Jones at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Concert.
Perhaps he’s now realised the song is so loved because the fans can feel the strong emotion coursing through it. Far from “glorifying domestic violence”, it actually mourns the effects of one crazed moment. Perhaps he then thought a bit more, and realised our inherited culture cannot be censored, always and everywhere, without destroying our collective memory. Or it could be more straightforward. Perhaps he woke up in a sweat one morning and realised that unless he backed down the fans might just make up a brand-new rugby song of their own, about what they’d like to do to Dafydd Iwan.