Back in 2011, I wrote a little blog post about a song I remembered from primary school. Nothing grand, nothing with a Wikipedia page, nothing anybody outside a generation of classrooms would ever have heard of. Just a strange little musical number from the mid-to-late 80s, sung by a bunch of children who almost certainly had no idea what they were performing.
The only lyrics I could recall were:
“The blackbird sings a tuneful song,
With turns and trills so fine,
Such skill has he, such majesty,
But it’s not as good as mine.”
And for years, that fragment has lived rent-free in my head — a dirge-like, slightly smug verse from a “fake song” written by a character inside a school musical. As best as I can remember, the plot involved a composer who knew he was being spied on, and so he deliberately wrote a terrible dirge to trick whoever was trying to copy him.
It was clever. It was funny. It was, in its own tiny way, art.
And yet… it seems to have vanished from the universe.
đź•ł A Song That Fell Through the Cracks
When I say vanished, I mean properly vanished.
You can usually find anything online these days — half-remembered TV jingles, obscure adventure game walk-throughs, the full lyrics to commercial jingles that aired once in 1984. But this? This little school musical? Nothing.
- No recordings.
- No sheet music.
- No mention in BBC Schools Radio archives.
- No teachers’ resource PDFs.
- No nostalgia forum threads.
- Not even a throwaway reference in a Reddit comment.
Just my 2011 blog post… and my own memory, which has been clinging to that blackbird verse like a last surviving witness.
It’s completely mad when you think about it. Someone, somewhere, sat down in the 1980s and wrote this musical. They composed melodies, crafted characters, wove a plot about artistic pride and deception. They sent the work out into classrooms, where children in school halls around the UK sang their hearts out to it.
And now, nearly forty years later, the only evidence it ever existed is a few lines stuck in my head and an old blog entry on a site best known these days for dormancy and a very occasional burst of random recollections.
🎨 The Quiet Tragedy (and Beauty) of Lost Creativity
There’s something strangely beautiful about that.
We tend to think art only “matters” if it becomes part of the cultural machine — if it’s recorded, archived, written about, remastered, reposted, commented on, placed onto a shelf somewhere.
But so much creative work — especially in schools — is ephemeral by design:
- Perform it once in assembly.
- Stick the poster on the corridor wall.
- Fold up the lyric sheets.
- Box up the cassette.
- Move on to the next term’s topic.
No cameras in every parent’s hand.
No YouTube to immortalise it.
No cloud storage full of forgotten MP3s.
Just a moment that existed briefly, fully, joyfully… and then dissolved.
And yet here I am, decades on, still humming “but it’s not as good as mine,” still wondering who wrote it, and still moved by the idea that I might be the last person on Earth who remembers it.
There’s something quietly touching in that — a reminder that even small, fleeting acts of creativity can lodge themselves somewhere deep.
🔍 So Here’s My Hope…
I’m posting this in the faint hope that someone, somewhere, might Google a lyric snippet, or remember doing that musical in the 80s:
- The one with the composer.
- The spy.
- The fake dirge.
- The hilariously pompous blackbird song.
If any of this rings a bell — even a faint one — please get in touch. I would love to give this little fragment its proper title, its composer, its context, and maybe even its full lyrics.
Because right now, this tiny piece of someone’s genuine creative work is balanced on one wobbly stool: my memory.
And I think it deserves at least a small place on the internet — somewhere safer than the inside of my brain.
Goddammit 
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