Rubber Ducky is a song of mine that proved to be so popular back in the early ’70s that it had a cult following, although I personally hated it. Rubber Ducky is a really silly song and not the sort of serious singer-songwriter material I wanted to be known for but audiences appreciated its quirkiness, eccentricity and surreal humour.
Rubber Ducky started life at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff at the Heresy Folk Club. A friend of mine called Simon Goss, who was a brilliant guitarist used to back me, and with his skills we were able to turn out new versions of my songs. So I could suggest we tried a blues version and Simon would play a bluesy backing. If I said I wanted to try it as rock ´n´roll or country, or any genre I could think of, he would sort it out. Basically though the song began with the idea I had had that latex could be extracted from a rubber ducky. The original title was Extracting The Latex From A Rubber Ducky.
I had a little blue rubber duck toy that I used to squeak. It was a crazy gimmick and people thought it was brilliant. It was a far cry from the sort of musical mentors I was hoping to follow though. You see I wanted to be another Bob Dylan or Neil Young but was getting known for doing a song about a toy duck!
I managed to hassle my way into getting a short set at the infamous Windsor Pop Festival in 1971, and was actually on after Hawkwind. I had a beat-up Spanish guitar and two friends helped me out with some kazoo playing and squeaking the Rubber Ducky. The thousands of hippies out there in the festival grounds went wild about it and I was given an encore. I should have been delighted but I wasn’t. I was an idealistic young man then and so wanted to be known as a poet or a gifted songwriter.
Months later, I was in London to see Van Morrison in concert at the Rainbow Theatre. I had gone in a backstreet pub for a beer before I made my way to the main venue in Finsbury Park, and as soon as I entered the place, some guy came up raving on about how he had seen me at Windsor. He had told all his friends about me and wanted me to meet some of them that were there in the pub. I should have been delighted but wasn’t!
Some weeks after that I decided to stop playing the song and came up with the final version for it – the Death of the Rubber Ducky – that would finish it for good! We made a coffin out of a shoe-box and after I had stamped on the toy duck I announced it was no more. The Rubber Ducky was now deceased. A friend played the Funeral March on a bamboo flute and it was a very theatrical in a silly way. There were even a couple of girls crying.
But even after all that people kept asking for the Resurrection of the Rubber Ducky at Easter and the Second Coming of the Rubber Ducky. Eventually people stopped going on about the song.
The years rolled by and it was now in the 1990s. I had by then changed my views about Rubber Ducky and a songwriter and performer’s role as an artist. I could see that the function of an entertainer was to entertain, and so if audiences enjoyed my song then it was a success whether I was happy with it as a piece of writing or not.
My good friend C.J. Stone, who had a column in The Guardian newspaper, wrote about my appearance at the Windsor Pop Festival all those years before and about my crazy song. He followed on from this by mentioning it too in his book The Last of the Hippies, published by Faber and Faber. With all this new publicity it was getting I decided to make a recording of the song so got together with some friends and did so. The song ended up being chosen to be part of a Various Artists compilation album entitled Take It To The Bridge Volume 3.
From there Rubber Ducky found its way into being used as part of the soundtrack for an episode from the Welsh TV drama series Y Ty (The House) on S4C.
So Rubber Ducky has had its fair share of media coverage and use. Not bad for a song that features a squeaking toy duck!
Right now Rubber Ducky is entered in the current heat of the YouBloom Music Awards, a song contest judged by Bob Geldof.
Please listen to and vote for Rubber Ducky here: http://www.youbloom.com/ybsc/entry/2647/
Voted for your new song Steve. It is quirky and fun.
Thank you for your vote and complimentary comments!
I was there when the song was being recorded, doing my high scool work experience 🙂