Saturday 30 March 2013

I`m not scared

I'd like to go back now to 1988. I was about 17 years old at that time. I would walk a few miles to the shopping centre and buy my vinyl records. I had been working with my father for a couple of weeks  so that he accepted to pay for our HiFi player. I could play vinyl records and music audio tapes. It did not play CDs! It was a technology breakthrough though; I could make copies of my records and cassettes. We still keep both:  my records and my Hi-Fi records player.

At that time and very pretty and fair singer called my attention. The song sounded rather mysterious and exotic and they rhythm was very sticky. I headed for El Corte Inglés - I would walk a few miles from my house - and buy my 900 pesetas long play.

"I'm not scared" has been one of my favourite songs ever since. As I could read on Wikipedia, the song was orginally written and composed by Pet Shop Boys, who later recorded their own cover version. It contains a  couple of lines in French and in fact, the song became so popular in the rest of Europe that it has got its own version in French.

I wanted to use this song in class for these reasons: to begin with, becuase I like it a lot, the language it uses is rather simple and of course, it brings back memories of my past.

The vocabulary is easy. Grammar is a bit more difficult here: you have to bear in mind a couple of conditional tenses and structures. I like the use of the verb snap, which here means: "chase people trying to bite them".

I understand the song tells the story of a couple. The girl loves the guy but he is a liar. There is some hidden story behind the man: he is a spy or something. The girl does not know why he behaves this way, but she seems to accept anything except for the dogs trying to bite her.

Here are the video, the original song and the Pet Shop Boys´ version as well as a link to the its lyrics.