cockney

‘Fancy a pint of Chic Murray for dinner?’ – A Guide to Scottish rhyming slang

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Though most people will be familiar with Cockney rhyming slang, they perhaps won’t know that Scotland also has its own version.

Keeping up with Scots words, the accent and even regional dialects can be hard enough, but throw in Scotland’s love of word play and it can leave many without a Scooby (as in Doo – clue, get it?).

From asking someone if they are Corned Beef to going for a Chic Murray – here are some of our favourite Scottish rhyming slang phrases.

Chic Murray – Curry

Though many have started using another famous Scottish Murray for this one (Andy), it will always be the original and best for us.

Example: “Fancy a wee Chic Murray for dinner tonight? I canny be bothered cooking.”

Corned Beef – Deif/Deaf

This one sees corned beef rhymed with deif (the way Scots would pronounce deaf), and is usually aimed at someone who isn’t listening.

Example: “Listen pal, are you corned beef? I told you to beat it.”

Hauf Inch – Pinch

A good one for someone who is known to be on the light-fingered side.

Example: “Aye it’s a cracker eh? Wee Davey hauf inched it for us.”

Mick Jagger – Lager

If someone asks if you fancy a Mick Jagger, it’s usually an invite for a pint and not referring to the great man himself.

Example: “I’m guessing most us will be choking for a Mick Jagger when the restrictions are over and the pubs re-open.”

Hampden Roar – Score

Though you might think this would be used for football, it’s more likely to be used when asking for more details about something.

Example: “What’s the Hampden for later? Where are we going?”

Single fish/Lillian Gish – Going for a pish

There’s a few different versions of this one, but these two are the most popular, alternatively you can also be going for a Barry White.

Example: “I’m away for a Lillian Gish.”

Gregory Pecks – Specks/glasses

One of the most widely used expressions, Gregory Pecks refers to your glasses.

Example: “Where’s your Gregory’s? You’ll not be able to see what’s happening later withou them.”

Sky Rocket – Pocket

Another of those expressions that Scottish das are fond of.

Example: “Stick that in your sky rocket and save it for later.”

Pan Breid – Deid/Dead

Hugely popular in Scotland, the old pan loaf also doubles up as another way of saying dead.

Example: “I’m telling you, that budgie is pan breid.”

Hank Marvin – Starving

If someone in Scotland mentions Hank Marvin, it won’t be the guitarist of the Shadows that they are referring to. It usually means they are hungry.

Example: “Is there anything decent in the fridge? I’m Hank Marvin.”

Source: ‘Fancy a pint of Chic Murray for dinner?’ – A Guide to Scottish rhyming slang

On Cockney culture, clever Quincy Jones was the guv’nor

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When The Italian Job first came out, I saw it three times in one week. Barkingside ABC. Went with my dad, my grandad, my mates. We loved that film.So anyway, the genius of Quincy Jones: he scored it

By Martin Samuel

When The Italian Job first came out, I saw it three times in one week. Barkingside ABC. Went with my dad, my grandad, my mates. We loved that film.

So anyway, the genius of Quincy Jones: he scored it. He scored one of the most quintessentially English movies ever made. On Days Like These by Matt Monro is his song, as is “The Self-Preservation Society”, with its chorus so fluent in Cockney euphoria that if Quincy had turned out to be the alias of a young Chas and Dave nobody would be in the least surprised

It’s not actually called that, by the way. The real title is Getta Bloomin’ Move On!, because Jones composed it to accompany the daring bullion heist as the Minis made their escape from Turin and into the Alps. It’s such an iconic piece of music, so instantly recognisable and so very much ours that more than half a century later the Barmy Army’s trumpeter plays it at the cricket, as does the band that follows England’s football team. Yet its creator was born in Chicago, raised in Seattle, and descended from Cameroonian slaves.

Once you know it’s his, though, the influence of genius is obvious. The musical intricacies, the bass line, the marching drums. Long before it reaches that earworm chorus, Getta Bloomin’ Move On! is a masterpiece of scoring. So sublime is Jones’s arrangement that he gets kudos for saving the film from a mess of choppy edits in its final scenes.

The producers set him up in a flat in Marble Arch where he became immersed in East End culture, rhyming slang and songs like My Old Man’s a Dustman, pulling off a perfect appropriation of Sixties’ London culture, a tune that could accompany Noël Coward, as Mr Bridger, through a prison dining hall or be raucously sung by Michael Caine and his gang of gold thieves.

Then Jones packed up, went home and did Off The Wall and Thriller. How great is that?

The French connection

I once met someone who knew him. We were in France, covering an under-21 football tournament. I was playing table tennis against the bloke from the Daily Star when a passing spectator started offering tips. He said he had been the national champion at junior level. We got talking. He explained that his orchestra were performing at the local concert hall and then he was going down the coast to a jazz festival to play with his mate Quincy Jones and meet up with another good friend, Gérard Depardieu. We had him down as a spoofer, but then he picked up a paddle and wiped the floor with the pair of us.

Later, we went out to dinner. He was genuine. I’ve still got one of his CDs at home. It was a riotous night. We went to a restaurant in Toulon called Au Sourd, which means “for the deaf” because it’s next to the concert hall, their little joke. I remember asking him, as a Frenchman, what he thought of Australian wine. “As an Englishman,” he replied, “what do you think of Australian pop music?” Fair.

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“While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances to ‘The Lambeth Walk’

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East End girl dancing the “Lambeth Walk”, March 1939. Photo by Bill Brandt. Originally published in 1943 in the magazine Picture Post.

“The Lambeth Walk” is a song from the 1937 musical Me and My Girl, with book and lyrics by Douglas Furber and L. Arthur Rose and music by Noel Gay. The song takes its name from a local street, Lambeth Walk, once notable for its street market and working-class culture in Lambeth, an area of London. The tune gave its name to a Cockney dance made popular in 1937 by Lupino Lane.

The choreography from the musical, in which the song was a show-stopping Cockney-inspired extravaganza, inspired a popular walking dance, performed in a jaunty strutting style. Lane explained the origin of the dance as follows:

“I got the idea from my personal experience and from having worked among cockneys. I’m a cockney born and bred myself. The Lambeth Walk is just an exaggerated idea of how the cockney struts.”

When the stage show had been running for a few months, C. L. Heimann, managing director of the Locarno Dance Halls, got one of his dancing instructors, Adele England, to elaborate the walk into a dance.

“Oi!”

“Starting from the Locarno Dance Hall, Streatham, the dance-version of the Lambeth Walk swept the country.” The craze reached Buckingham Palace, with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth attending a performance and joining in the shouted “Oi” which ends the chorus.

Schicklgruber

In Germany, big band leader Adalbert Lutter made a German-language adaptation called Lambert’s Nachtlokal that quickly became popular in swing clubs. A member of the Nazi Party drew attention to it in 1939 by declaring The Lambeth Walk “Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping”, as part of a speech on how the “revolution of private life” was one of the next big tasks of National Socialism in Germany. However, the song continued to be popular with the German public and was even played on the radio, particularly during the war, as part of the vital task of maintaining public morale

“The Lambeth Walk” had the distinction of being the subject of a headline in The Times in October 1938: “While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances – to The Lambeth Walk.”

“While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances to ‘The Lambeth Walk’

by
East End girl dancing the “Lambeth Walk”, March 1939. Photo by Bill Brandt. Originally published in 1943 in the magazine Picture Post.

“The Lambeth Walk” is a song from the 1937 musical Me and My Girl, with book and lyrics by Douglas Furber and L. Arthur Rose and music by Noel Gay. The song takes its name from a local street, Lambeth Walk, once notable for its street market and working-class culture in Lambeth, an area of London. The tune gave its name to a Cockney dance made popular in 1937 by Lupino Lane.

The choreography from the musical, in which the song was a show-stopping Cockney-inspired extravaganza, inspired a popular walking dance, performed in a jaunty strutting style. Lane explained the origin of the dance as follows:

“I got the idea from my personal experience and from having worked among cockneys. I’m a cockney born and bred myself. The Lambeth Walk is just an exaggerated idea of how the cockney struts.”

When the stage show had been running for a few months, C. L. Heimann, managing director of the Locarno Dance Halls, got one of his dancing instructors, Adele England, to elaborate the walk into a dance.

“Oi!”

“Starting from the Locarno Dance Hall, Streatham, the dance-version of the Lambeth Walk swept the country.” The craze reached Buckingham Palace, with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth attending a performance and joining in the shouted “Oi” which ends the chorus.

Schicklgruber

In Germany, big band leader Adalbert Lutter made a German-language adaptation called Lambert’s Nachtlokal that quickly became popular in swing clubs. A member of the Nazi Party drew attention to it in 1939 by declaring The Lambeth Walk “Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping”, as part of a speech on how the “revolution of private life” was one of the next big tasks of National Socialism in Germany. However, the song continued to be popular with the German public and was even played on the radio, particularly during the war, as part of the vital task of maintaining public morale

“The Lambeth Walk” had the distinction of being the subject of a headline in The Times in October 1938: “While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances – to The Lambeth Walk.”