Denis Leary stole my joke

I have been asked on a few occasions how I became Mr Angry. It was not, as some of you surmised, a freak biochemical accident, and I wasn’t bitten by a radio active spider. Unfortunately, the truth is much more mundane than this. Isn’t it always?

Anyway, our story begins seven years ago….

1999 was a pretty dire year for music. The biggest ‘hits’ of that 12 month period included “Mambo #5″, “Livin la Vida Loca” and Britney’s video masterpiece “Hit Me Baby One More Time”.

Even Cliff Richard managed to secure a hit single by warbling a five hundred year old prayer. We had reached the bottom of the barrel and had started desperately clawing at the wooden casket with bloodied fingernails.

One of the unusually successful songs was Baz Luhrmann’s track, “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, which was essentially a piece of prose, written by American writer Mary Schmich for the Chicago Tribune, which purported to be a speech given at an MIT graduation ceremony (which it wasn’t). This ‘speech’ was set to music, and a hit number 1 single was born.

I was a fresh-faced Graduate Trainee back in 1999, and like most fresh-faced Graduate Trainees, I was extremely familiar with the intricacies of the countrys leading photocopier, and absolutely bored shitless at work. So, to alleviate the tedium one lunchtime, I wrote a parody of this ‘song’, called “Drink Alcohol”. I didn’t know what a blog was then, in fact I barely knew what the Internet was, so to ensure it was seen, I emailed it to some of my friends for a laugh.

Within 24 hours it had begun arriving back in my inbox from various sources and people I barely new. It began to spread virally, and I must have received it about a dozen times as part of different email distribution lists over the course of the week. Sometimes it was changed ever-so slightly, with people changing the odd line here or there (it had been quite specific to my University days when I wrote it), but it was clearly my work, and 90% of my lyrics remained intact.

I was proud.

The now defunct Sky Magazine reproduced part of my parody in it’s “Cool things this month” section (for clarification, and any passing commissioning editors, this has absolutely nothing to do with it being now defunct). Radio 1 even read part of it live on air (though I never heard it). I had become a successful author. Sort of. Enough to impress young ladies anyway. The only problem was that there were only five or six people who knew I was the true author, so whenever I claimed to have written it, no-one would believe me.

Then, about 6 months later, I was sat watching a comedy show on Channel 4, and on the television before me was Holstein Pils drinker Denis Leary, doing what he does best, bitching and moaning in a semi-amusing manner. After a few minutes his routine moved onto the subject of Baz Luhrmann, and how his song would be so much better if it was about drinking. Then, without so much as a nod in my direction, he quoted MY FUCKING PARODY!!

In an instant, Mr. Angry was born.

For those that remember the original song, I have Googled and found various versions of my original parody (it still lives on the Internet! Hooray for all computicators!). This is the most faithful, unedited version that I can find (and still refers to the “nude conga” which was a part of my football teams drunken celebrations at University – this was the most frequently edited out bit).

To think I believed 25 was old when I wrote that…