I’m not into modern music since
The Spyders came to town,
One of those painted-tainted groups
That you often see around,
But Anne-Marie was younger than me
And she went with every craze,
She called me a boring dinosaur
At the height of those Spyder days.

I’ve always been a conservative,
I don’t get carried away,
I know whatever is going down
It won’t be there next day,
The house was full of discarded things
That had lost their first allure,
The moment she saw the Next Big Thing
Come barrelling through the door.

The Spyder thing was over the top
I said to her more than twice,
‘They’ll be forgotten within a month,’
She replied, ‘That wasn’t nice!
Why do you always bring me down,
You’re turning into a grump!’
So I wasn’t allowed to criticise,
She put me under the pump.

She came back home from the hairdresser’s
With a bouffant type of style,
Sprayed and lacquered so it was hard,
She slept upright for a while.
She said that it was the Spyder look
That the girls all thought it great,
With hair like a spider’s legs each side,
Bobbing around her face.

I shook my head, but I held my tongue
There was nothing to be gained,
For anything that I said just then
Would bring me future pain.
The following day, she went away
And she came back home that night,
With a square of plaster on her neck
And I thought, ‘This isn’t right!’

She said that she’d got a small tattoo
And I nearly had a fit,
I said, ‘That’s going to be there for life,’
So she wouldn’t show me it.
She kept me waiting a week to see
The blue-black spider there,
Crawling up the nape of her neck
And heading into her hair.

‘How shall I ever kiss you there,’
I howled, while shaking my head,
‘That’s the end of our necking days,’
‘Oh don’t be soft,’ she said.
We barely spoke for a week back then
It was just the early Spring,
She spent her time round the roses with
Her bouffant, and that ‘thing’.

There’s always a lot of spiders webs
Outside, at that time of year,
And Anne-Marie must have brushed through them
And got them caught in her hair,
For days she said that she wasn’t well
That she must have had the flu,
But then one morning I woke in bed
To see that her lips were blue.

Her head fell back on the head rest, and
Disturbed the bouffant style,
And thousands of tiny spiders rushed
On out of her hair, meanwhile,
They swarmed on over her shoulders,
From the nest she had on her head,
But Anne-Marie was beyond it now
For Anne-Marie was dead!

I never listen to music now,
I turn off the radio,
Whenever the Spyder’s music’s played
On the Old-Time Late Late Show.
The band broke up a decade ago
And the lead is doing time,
He said that his skin began to crawl
With the tatts all down his spine.

David Lewis Paget