Songs: Control Alt Delete

notes / gigs / releases

Control Alt and Delete
They're the only buttons that you need
If you get blue screen of death
Stretch your hands apart and press
Control Alt and Delete

It's a secret known to a small lucky few
For looking clever when you haven't got a clue
Say "I see your problem" then
Apply the Helpdesk's brand of ZEN
Control Alt Delete

If machines receive malign intelligence
We've one last way of mounting a defence
If they act like they're above us
And start acting silly buggers
Control Alt and Delete

Control Alt and Delete
They're the only buttons that you need
If your screen should ever freeze
The de-icer that you need is
Control Alt and Delete

Control Alt and Delete
They're the only buttons that you need
If you get blue screen of death
Stretch your hands apart and press
Control Alt and Delete

Published by Wipe Out Music Publishing

Here's what I originally said about the song, some time ago when first I wrote it:

A while ago I was talking to Rob From B3ta about writing some songs for a propose B3ta telly programme, the idea being that they'd be short 30 second or a minute long story sort of things. I had a good old think about this and eventually came up with the idea of doing a sort of Monkees style thing with The Validators, with us having tiny adventures in song. I mean, REALLY tiny adventures. One idea I'd had knocking around my head for a while was Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and what a handy thing it is, and part of my thinking was MAYBE we'd have The Validators having their own office or something. Obviously one of us would be the computer guy, so he'd need this sort of song to sing, and here it is! It was only whilst singing it on my way home on the tube that evening that I realised it has the same tune as Why Hasn't Your Email Come In?, but as hardly anybody's ever heard that one I don't suppose it really matters.

As far as i can remember this song has only had one live outing, on a UKELELE! An auspicious history indeed!

Since then again it's had a few outings, not least at a Retro-Gamers convention, which gave me the idea to dig it out again for recording, also because, as noted before, it's dead easy to play on ukelele.

However, at one stage it was REMOVED from the running order and NOT to be recorded, and instead the ALSO previously mentioned Why Hasn't Your Email Come In? stood in its place, ALBEIT with a totally different tune. I got Tim to play some drums to use on it, but when I tried putting it together I realised that the new tune wasn't very exciting. I tried speeding the drums up and - IRONICALLY, given their previous shared history - discovered that they would work perfectly well for this one.

The SOLO was quite a lot of fun to do, although it took AGES, and the bit of our cat MOOS purring at the end slotted in nicely with it - that came from when I was trying to record Emma's singing on Programming Is A Poetry For Our Time. Moos was asleep in the room at the time and, once woken, decided to come and see what was going on. It was lovely!