Today I heard a song on the radio called When We Were Young by Adele. It caught my attention because I recognised the lyrics in the chorus. Why did I recognise them? Because I’d written them, that’s why!

Have a listen to this bit of the song:

Now, way back in 2014, I started writing a song called Like A Song. Have a listen to that song:

Recognise the lyrics? Exactly! I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Ben, you have solid legal grounds to sue the hell out of Adele.” but I don’t think that’s true. Firstly, I’ve never played the song to anyone before now, so nobody had ever heard it before. Secondly, I hadn’t even finished writing the song and thirdly, I can’t afford to sue Adele. I might write to her though, tell her that I don’t mind that she stole my lyrics.

I’m not too fussed about it to be honest (he says while ranting about it in a blog!) because Adele’s song is probably much better than mine would have been. However, I did quite like the song and I hoped to finished it at some point, but I don’t think I’ll bother now. It was going to be an ‘a day in the life’ sort of thing. It would start off with a bit of a love story – girl meets boy, romantic story – and then slowly get more absurd, including things like dinosaurs and evil super villains; things that you would find in films, but not really together. But it’s too late now. If you don’t believe me about writing it years ago, here’s a screenshot of the garageband file to prove it:

So, now we’ve got that out of the way, but you’re probably still wondering what the Grumbleweeds have to do with anything. This leads me to recall a little story. Cast your mind back to 2007 and John Barrowman is starring in a production of Aladdin at the Birmingham Hippodrome. As you know, I’m a big Doctor Who fan and at the time I had a friend, Josh, who was also a whovian. So, we decided to go – with Mike – to see the pantomime. We were about 15 at the time, but we felt we were still young enough (and cool enough) to go to the pantomime. Also starring in the show were two aged comedy stars from the 1980s called The Grumbleweeds. Before the show, my two friends and I entertained each other by telling jokes that we’d come up with. I can’t remember any of the jokes now, but I told about four if memory serves. Later on, during the show, the Grumbleweeds came on stage and did their own little routine, which included a load of jokes. However, the strange thing was, three of the jokes they told were ones that I had told Mike and Josh before the show. Not only that, but they were almost word for word and in the same order! We all looked at each other in astonishment and swore that the Grumbleweeds must have heard us telling jokes before the show and written them down to use in their act.

Since then, whenever we’ve heard someone use a joke or a line that we’ve come up with, we always refer to them as a Grumbleweed in honour of that crazy moment at the theatre. So that, my friend, is why Adele is a Grumbleweed.