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There’s Worms in Them There Ears

Another awesome music writing prompt

Nichola Scurry
5 min readJul 18, 2022
The back of a woman holding a guitar and standing on a cliff that overlooks a city at night.
Image by peter_pyw from Pixabay.

“Hums aren’t things which you get; they get you.” Winnie the Pooh

This writing prompt — a challenge to write about my favourite earworm songs — comes from Pierce McIntyre.

You can’t control the earworms that take up residence in your head and remain there, sometimes, forever.

I’ve had earworms that are songs I love, songs I can’t stand, television jingles, theme tunes and musical numbers. Together, they live in my head and are always ready to pop out and compel me to hum or sing them.

Beautiful Ones by Suede

Suede’s “Beautiful Ones” has been an earworm for me since the song’s release in 1996.

The guitar riff from “Beautiful Ones” is pretty catchy, but it was the opening lyrics about British clubbers that became my earworm. “High on diesel and gasoline, psycho for drum machine.”

Even early reviews of “Beautiful Ones” recognised that this tune was an earworm.

“The almost perfect pop of Trash made the first single from the album [Coming Up] a Top 3 hit and the follow-up [“Beautiful Ones”] hits similar heights with a rather fine catchy melody that is by no means instant…

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Nichola Scurry
Nichola Scurry

Written by Nichola Scurry

Not a data scientist. If you like my writing, I like coffee. ko-fi.com/nicscurry

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