Matthew Kelly
1001 Albums You Must Die Before You Hear
#88: Ladbaby – We Built This City On Sausage Rolls (2018)
Proceeds from this abomination went to a foodbank but, writes MATT KELLY, after hearing it the needy eaters would have barfed it back up.
I’m tired of people bullying Starship’s ‘We Built This City’. It’s a fun, well-composed piece of AOR with an intriguing lyric. Its popular reputation as The Worst Song Ever Made is completely undeserved.
Especially when this hellish take on it exists. God I loathe this. It’s so bad. British YouTube personality Mark “Ladbaby” Hoyle and his supernaturally unfunny wife Roxanne are here to spin your dad’s favourite misheard lyric joke (“It’s a long way to the shop if you want a sausage roll”) into an entire musical career.
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An idea The Wiggles would discard for being too moronic, Ladbaby spends the track shouting about sausage rolls in his tuneless voice with a *horrid* autotune effect pitching him up to notes he can’t hit. Roxanne is on hand at various intervals to bray some witticism putting you at risk of permanently forgetting how to laugh.
Meanwhile, there’s a backing track Michael Jackson would reject for being too plastic, and I’m surprised the engineers didn’t storm the vocal booth with pitchforks while the insufferably cheerful hook was being recorded.
I don’t know if I can ruin a song that’s already 0/10 but I’m about to anyway. Sporting a sense of humour that predates his own 1987 birth, Mark’s clunky dad-joke “ooh I’m a proper British bloke I am” lines about sausage rolls will only elicit groans. Yet passage, sung by both Mark and Roxanne, seems to slip by unnoticed by many listeners:
“It’s not just a meat snack
It’s a way of life!
Treating your friends and family
And even your hot wife
Order it on date night
Stay in an extra night
Have it with a Merlot
It’s time for the saus-age”
Jesus Christ Mark, I don’t want to hear about sausage time on you and your wife’s date night. Mind you, it does invite you to reinterpret the whole song with sausage being a euphemism, which is somehow more tasteful than its original intention, and certainly funnier given it was raising money for a Christian charity. Yes, proceeds from the song went to churchy food charity The Trussell Trust, yet this disregards the probability that after families in need consumed donated food, they would hear this song and vomit it back up.
AND THIS GOT TO NUMBER ONE. IT WAS THE UK CHRISTMAS NUMBER ONE. If ever The Sun had cause to run a front page about the decline of Britain, this was it. Nigel Farage could have become PM at the time if he’d campaigned on the state of Britain’s music charts.
What a chore this is to listen to. It’s 4:21 but feels like 421 minutes. Without exaggeration, there are entire albums on this list I find less painful than this single track.
