I have a folder on my desktop called "BOG WEIRD" and it is getting out of hand.
It started innocent. Aoife would send me the odd link, I'd save it, grand. But word got round that I collect these things and now I get emails from strangers in Finland going "Seamus, you HAVE to see this one." And I do have to. That's the trouble. I have to see all of them. So I've spent the last while sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold beside me, working through the strangest covers of our song that the internet has coughed up, and I'm reporting back. For science. For the craic. Because somebody has to.
Let me start with the death metal one, because it's the one people send me most.
There's a band — I won't name them because I genuinely can't pronounce it, it's all umlauts and a logo you can't read — who do a four-minute version of The Rattlin' Bog that is, and I want to be fair here, COMPLETELY terrifying. The chorus is screamed. Not sung. SCREAMED. "And the green grass grew all around, all around" delivered like a man being dragged into a peat bog against his will, which, when you think about it, is maybe not the worst reading of the lyrics? The flea verse hits at about the three-minute mark and the drummer does this thing where every "the flea on the feather" gets a double-kick blast and honestly? Honestly. It works. I didn't want it to work. It works. I've listened to it more times than I'll admit to my wife.
Then there's the jazz trio.
Some fellas in a basement club in Chicago, by the look of the bricks behind them, doing a smoky late-night lounge arrangement. Upright bass, brushes on the snare, a piano that wanders all over the place. The singer does the verses in this low velvet croon, like he's seducing the bog rather than describing it. He clicks his fingers between verses. There's a saxophone solo over the egg verse that lasts longer than the actual egg verse. It's pretentious as anything and I love it dearly. Somebody in the comments wrote "this is what plays in the elevator in heaven" and I think about that a lot.
The man on the theremin I'm not sure I can fully describe.
A theremin, for them that don't know, is the instrument you wave your hands near and it goes WOOoooOOOoo like a ghost in an old film. Yer man — middle-aged, cardigan, very serious face — plays the entire melody of The Rattlin' Bog on one, no singing, just the wavering ghost-noise, in a room that looks like a converted garage. There's a cat asleep on the amp the whole time, completely unbothered. It is six minutes long. It is hypnotic. By the end I felt like I'd had a religious experience or possibly a small stroke. (My own cat, Rattlin, watched it with me and left the room halfway through, which I think is a review in itself.)
A few more from the folder, quick-fire, because I could go on all day and my tea is properly cold now.
There's a ukulele version by a girl who can't be more than eight, in what's clearly her bedroom, and she gets the whole song right except she calls the flea a "little bug" and I have decided that's the correct version now. There's a sea shanty crew — actual rope-pulling stomping shanty men — who've reworked it so the "rare bog" becomes "rare SHIP" and it's so committed I nearly believe it predates the original (it does not, lads, settle down). There's a fella who does it entirely in beatbox, mouth-drumming the rhythm of the cumulative verses, and it's genuinely impressive and also slightly stressful to watch because you keep thinking he's going to pass out. And there's one — I've watched it forty times — of a brass band in what I'm fairly sure is Brazil, full marching arrangement, tuba carrying the bassline, and the crowd around them losing the absolute plot. No idea how it got there. The bog travels. I've written before about how this all went viral and I still don't fully understand it.
But I have to crown a favourite, and I've thought hard about this.
It's not the death metal, much as it haunts me. It's not the jazz, slick as it is. It's the theremin man. It's the cardigan and the serious face and the sleeping cat and the six full minutes of ghost-noise played with total, unwavering sincerity. He wasn't doing it for views — the video had eleven views when I found it and most of them are probably me. He just loved the tune and owned a theremin and saw no reason not to put the two together. That's the whole spirit of this place, isn't it. A man alone in a garage, taking something old and daft and turning it into something only he could make. I'd shake his hand if I knew where the garage was.
Send me more. The folder has room. The bog contains multitudes and apparently so does my hard drive.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — If you want to hear the song done plainly, the way it's meant to go before the umlauts and the saxophones get at it, it's all there in the songbook. Start there, THEN ruin your brain with the death metal one. In that order. Trust me.