We normally have the radio on in the morning, Radio 2 exclusively. A feature that Gary Davies1 runs is the Radio 2 Jukebox – listeners suggest three songs on a theme. Today the theme was ‘Clouds’2. Mrs S suggested ‘You’re So Vain’ by Carly Simon for the line ‘there were clouds in your coffee’.
I said to her the line was ‘there were grounds in your coffee’. During a dance routine by the Top of the Pops dancers, they mimed grinding coffee before sipping from cups. This is why I thought the line was ‘grounds in your coffee’, but I looked it up to check.
I was wrong, and told Mrs S as much.
What surprised us both, though, was the last line of the first verse. We both thought it was ‘You had one eye in the mirror/ As you watched yourself go by.’ It’s actually ‘As you watched yourself gavotte.’
So, apart from the fact that gavotte rhymes with yacht and apricot, what the hell is gavotting, and why was this man doing it at a party in 1972?
What’s a gavotte?
We both knew that a gavotte was a dance that was popular in the late 19th century. This knowledge came from the 1990 book Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. One of the main characters, the angel Aziraphale, learns to gavotte at a discreet gentleman’s club in the late 1880s. He was rather put out when it fell out of fashion.
Lucky for us, there is a wonderful scene in the the television series based on the book. This is intended to answer the philosophical question ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ The answer in “one, provided it’s a gavotte’. (Apologies for the quality of the video).
Is there a lot about the gavotte?
In You’re So Vain, gavotte is used to mean ‘walk around pretentiously‘, rather than all the people at the party doing an old-fashioned French folk dance. In the interview linked above, Simon squashed the idea that they might have been performing such a dance at her sister’s apartment.
You can use Google Ngrams to see how often a word has been used over the last 200 years. The graph below compares the frequency of ‘gavotte’, ‘waltz’ and ‘disco’ in books published from 1800 – 2022.
So, even at its most popular, gavotte didn’t make it into very much literature compared with the waltz. The big spike for “disco” in 1980 isn’t a surprise. Why it was a thing in the early 19th century is down to many dictionaries writing words such as “Disconsolate” as “Disco’nsolate”, which confuses the search engine.
The gavotte featured in Gilbert & Sullivan’s 1889 operetta The Gondoliers. This is the only work of theirs I have seen live3. There aren’t any well-known songs from this piece, though the patter song In Enterprise of Martial Kind is a challenge to sing and was likely very satirical at the time.
There is also a Chas & Dave number called Give It Gavotte on their album Job Lot. It was the B side to 1982’s Margate, and a departure from the Rockney style they were best known for.
- He’s sitting in for Sarah Cox. A steady pair of hands, is Gary. ↩︎
- The three selected were Get Off Of My Cloud (Rolling Stones), Little Fluffy Clouds (The Orb) and Cloudbusting (Kate Bush). ↩︎
- I had the chance to see The Mikado in 1979 when we were on holiday in London. I was nine and had no idea what this thing was about. So I spent the evening with my dad and little sister while mum took my older siblings. ↩︎
