WOM 620

Pop will eat itself

Fischerspooner's Amuse Bouche is the first musical tribute to molecular gastronomy. Which track gets your vote for the best song about food ... ever?
Fischerspooner. Photograph: PR
Fischerspooner: Amuse Bouche Link to this audio

I'm sure you'll agree that - as a movement - the one thing molecular gastronomy has lacked, so far, is an anthem: a musical manifesto celebrating the joys of spherification, savoury ice-creams and marshmallows made of parmesan. Well, relax. On their forthcoming album, Entertainment, New York electro duo, Fischerspooner, have seized, if not the day, then certainly a long spoon containing a tiny sea urchin mousse, with the track Amuse Bouche. It opens thus:

"It's the taste of the unexpected
surprise flavours that enhance your perspective
a lovely tease of what's to come
something that you've never known"

"It may be strange and a little bit frightening, an acquired taste but very enlightening," continues Casey Spooner, in what is a very creditable attempt to recreate, musically, the sense of anticipation which surrounds the first, tiny tastes of the world's most adventurous tasting menus. It sounds like Fischerspooner know what it is to sit, excitedly, in El Bulli, sipping a cocktail of ham consommé and melon caviar.

Musicians, of course, have long had a creative relationship with food. Few go as far as electronica producer, Matthew Herbert - whose Plat Du Jour, a concept album about industrial food production, contains samples recorded at the Fat Duck, with Heston Blumenthal - but food has been a lyrical reference point for musicians back to the earliest days of the blues.

What makes Fischerspooner's Amuse Bouche stand-out, however, is how much it is, well, actually about food. Traditionally, food has been a handy metaphorical device for lyricists. From Bessie Smith's I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl to 50 Cent's Candy Shop (which definitely isn't a lament for a lost world of Sherbert Lemons and Kola Kubes) musicians have consistently used food, symbolically, to infer something else. Shagging, mainly.

Running parallel to that, is a sub-genre of food-related novelty songs from Lonnie Donegan's Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour? (you can find the answer here) to Fast Food Rockers' beyond wrong, Fast Food Song.

Amuse Bouche, though, celebrates the pleasure of taste, texture and olfactory arousal with a seriousness that few other songs do. File it alongside Parker Paul's Lemongrass (which includes the line "they say you're a weed, you are my need, my creed"); the Divine Comedy's A Seafood Song - a typically rambunctious tribute to intrepid fishermen and their hauls, which ideally Richard Corrigan would sing at the end of every service at Bentley's - and Toddla T's very funny Fill Up Mi Portion.

The classic pop-on-food moment, however, must surely be Streetband's Toast. Dismissed at the time as novelty fluff - how else do you treat a song which features toast being scraped as percussion? - it now sounds every bit as evocative of late 1970's Britain as Red Riding. There is something very limited, very British and quietly brilliant about writing a song in celebration of something as, at once, humble and majestic, as toast. Lyrically, meanwhile, - expensive steaks are a waste; you're a bit of a weirdo if you eat Nutella - Toast sums up a British ambivalence to good food (and/ or any of that foreign muck) that persists to this day. A song about toast would have not made number 18 in France, Italy or Spain.

But what about you? What are your favourite songs about food? And, no, I don't just mean songs about eating per se, but about wider food culture, too. Does Jonathan Richman's Ice Cream Man transport you back to long summers of 99s and Juicy Lucys? Did Morrissey convince you that meat is murder? Is Aidan Smith's Song To Delia Smith the only (mildly erotic) ode to a celebrity chef out there? Altogether now: "Delia, I'd like to feel ya / hands upon my chopping board tonight."

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