Terry Prone: Remembering a 'once off' talent on a spring afternoon

To listen to one of Tom Lehrer's recordings from the 60s is to be enthralled by the uniqueness of writing and performance

Tom Lehrer at his home near Santa Cruz, California in 2000. He was a child prodigy, and not just just when it came to piano. He was a mathematician, too, graduating from high school at 15 and heading directly to Harvard on a scholarship. Picture: Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns

It may not have been the best Easter weekend, weather-wise, but it’s still springtime, which allows me to remind those who already know the least sentimental song devoted to this time of the year and introduce it to people who have never heard it up to now. Here’s how the opening verse goes:

All the world seems in tune

On a spring afternoon 

When we're poisoning pigeons in the park 

Ev'ry Sunday you'll see 

My sweetheart and me

As we poison the pigeons in the park.

If it’s new to you, you need to imagine it being sung by a striking man with great clarity and superb diction while accompanying himself on the piano. 

Its composer sang it first in 1959 and if it were a book, it would never have gone out of print in the ensuing decades: it has been constantly available for purchase and in quite respectable retail outlets such as Barnes & Noble, despite it being seriously weird for someone to write a song about killing off pigeons using strychnine. 

And in spite of the fact that nobody has seriously marketed, advertised, or promoted this man’s work in more than 50 years. He is a once-off phenomenon.

Tom Lehrer was studying classical piano in Manhattan when he was seven. That was before he persuaded his mother to find him a teacher who specialised in musical theatre melodies. 

He was a child prodigy, and not just just when it came to piano. He was a mathematician, too, graduating from high school at 15 and heading directly to Harvard on a scholarship. It was at Harvard that he wrote a bunch of songs that cried out to be performed — by him — and were incorporated into a review he performed for other students.

Just him, a piano and an audience. Well, someone, at some point, also brought along some recording technology, thereby generating most of the recordings that made him and kept him famous.

It may seem cruel to describe a composer not long for this world as suffering from a complete absence of good taste, but in this case, Lehrer himself has always taken enormous pride in scathing reviews that so described him, delightedly quoting them, often mid-performance.

In fairness, in addition to an absence of good taste, this performer has always lacked common decency to such an extent that one of his hits described the “neighbouring dope peddler” as “doing well while doing good.” If that sounds bad, consider this.

Bestiality got snuck into one of his hit songs. Actual, no-messing bestiality. The reference, in the middle of a song about colleagues in university, is one of those double-take jobs where, as revealed by the contemporary recording, a short pause happens before the audience bursts out in appreciative laughter. As far as we know, nobody ever walked out.

To listen to one of those recordings from the sixties is to be enthralled by the uniqueness of writing and performance. Lehrer never sets out to be liked. In theory, he should have been loathed by colleagues for his send-up of their college anthem, but therein lies the uniqueness. 

Tom Lehrer performing at the Hungry i nightclub in California, in 1965. Picture: Ted Streshinsky/Getty

Many comedians — indeed, most comedians — can make people laugh at other people or at the comedian himself. Few can make people laugh at themselves, although we all flatter ourselves that we do it. 

Even fewer can make an audience laugh at itself by using a particularly rancid form of disloyalty. Lehrer, at a time when loyalty to the United States was something of a social imperative, mocked the US army and nuclear research, no holds barred, and those in the auditorium adored it, linking arms with the performer in a benign conspiracy which leads to them being so ready for his next crack that at one stage he tells them, admiringly, “You’re way ahead of me.” 

Only Lehrer could have written and performed the graphic Masochism Tango, persuading people to laugh at lines like these:

I ache for the touch of your lips, dear 

But much more for the touch of your whips, dear 

You can raise welts like nobody else 

As we dance to the Masochism Tango

He also produced songs that weren’t filthy or perverse, taking, for example, the tune of The Major-General’s song from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance and making it serve as the basis for a song about the chemical elements. 

It’s so fast and complex and clever, you might think nobody other than Lehrer would tackle it, but a few years ago, actor Daniel Radcliffe, who calls Lehrer his hero, did a creditable job of it on the Graham Norton Show. 

According to an amused subsequent interview with Lehrer who was charmed to see his song competently performed perhaps 50 years after he wrote it, Radcliffe learned the difficult song when he was playing a corpse in a play, because, as a dead body, he was covered by a blanket and couldn’t be seen mouthing chemical element names to himself.

Tom Lehrer is currently 93 years old and a lesson to anybody who thinks you should quit at 65. Although, in fairness, he quit a lot earlier. 

His continuing presence and impact on someone as relatively young as Radcliffe, belies the fact that in his performing life, he performed just 109 times and that his output as a songwriter amounted to 37 songs. He wrote. He performed. He became famous.

Then he went back to university, teaching mathematics and musical theatre, breaking that continuity only to perform publicly once for a Democrat presidential candidate in the early 70s. (The candidate lost.) 

He never seems to have had a regret, either, although that serenity may have been contributed to by the satisfactory and effortless position his work held in the market, right up to and past the release of a boxed set of his CDs in 2000.

People who managed to reach him in his hard-won privacy wondered how he could have abandoned that starring role. He never, down all the decades, accepted the implicit invitation to take himself seriously.

“If an idea came to me, I’d write, and if it didn’t, I wouldn’t,” he said, adding that “gradually, the second option prevailed over the first." 

"Occasionally people ask ‘If you enjoyed it’ — and I did — ‘why don’t you do it again?’ I reply, ‘I enjoyed high school but I certainly wouldn’t want to do that again.”

Two years ago, he put all his works into the public domain, so anyone can use any of his songs without payment. He established a website to make those songs easier to find and appended a note to the announcement, referring to his age:

"This website will be shut down at some date in the not-too-distant future, so if you want to download anything, don't wait too long."

Pure Lehrer.