Petit allegro Susie Cooper – Flat foot floogie with the floy, floy

This is day 19 in my Dance Inspirations Advent Calendar (II)

Some tunes I collect because I hope someone will recognise them one day, and others are just things which I like, and don’t expect anyone to know in a million years. But people and their musical experiences are unpredictable, and so I was amazed when Susie Cooper laughed and said to me one day “You’ve got some pretty weird pieces in your repertoire. I mean you play We’ll all go riding on a rainbow ” and The flat foot floogie with the floy, floy !”.

Flat Foot Floogie is yet another song from And the bands played on (see earlier entry, and I like it for many of the reasons that I like If I only had wings – it’s too fast, it’s a bit silly, and it’s fun to play.

You have to negotiate the last bit of the middle eight like taking a corner too quickly in 3rd gear, which is one of the things that lends the tune it’s zaniness. It’s also a reason why I prefer real tunes to improvisation in class – you can’t sound fast if you’re making it up as you go along because you have to play safe, and you can’t compose your way out of complex melodic or harmonic corners at speed.

Even though Flat Foot Floogie is about as far removed from Susie’s preferred musical diet as you could get, there’s something very Susie about it, something excitable, zany and overclocked. Like me she relishes verbal humour and silly words, and you can’t get much sillier than the words to Flat Foot Floogie (although according to some sources, it means ‘the prostitute with venereal disease’ which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it).