Right. I'm going to say something that's going to annoy a few of you, and I've made my peace with that.
The flea verse is not the hard one.
I know. I KNOW. I've spent twenty-odd years telling anyone who'll listen that the flea verse is the best verse, and I stand by that, the flea is the glory, the flea is the fireworks. But "best" and "hardest" are not the same word, lads, and people get this wrong constantly. The flea verse isn't hard. The flea verse is LOUD. There's a difference. By the time you reach the flea everyone in the room is already shouting, the speed's gone mad, nobody can hear if you've fumbled a word because forty people are roaring the same thing at once. The flea verse forgives you. It hides your mistakes under a wall of noise.
The egg verse does not forgive you.
The egg is where it falls apart. And here's the cruel bit — it falls apart QUIETLY. You don't notice. That's what makes it so dangerous.
Let me explain where the egg sits, because that's the whole problem. It's the seventh thing in the chain. Bog, tree, limb, branch, twig, nest, egg. (If you order it differently I have words for you, see the correct verse order, but that's a separate fight.) Seventh. Think about that. You're seven layers deep. You've been building the ladder up — every verse you add the bottom on, you reel back down through everything you've already sung, the egg on the nest on the twig on the branch on the limb on the tree in the bog down in the valley-o. And by verse seven that's a LOT of reeling. Your breath's getting tight. Your brain's juggling six previous things in order.
But the room isn't roaring yet. That's the trap.
Verse seven is the dead zone. The novelty of the opening verses has worn off — everyone was delighted at the bog, charmed by the nest, those land easy because they're early and fresh. And the flea-verse adrenaline hasn't kicked in either, that's still three verses away. So at the egg you've got a room that's working HARD, concentrating, a bit out of breath, and not yet carried by the big communal madness. It's the loneliest verse in the song. You're sort of on your own up there. And one fella mishears, sings "the egg on the BRANCH" instead of the nest, and because nobody's shouting yet, that wrong word travels. It infects the lad next to him. And now you've a little fault line running through your session and nobody's noticed because they're all too busy gulping air.
I've watched it happen more times than I can count. A session at Cruise's, years back — grand crowd, going beautifully — and we hit the egg and I FELT the room wobble. Just a tremor. Three or four people lost their footing at exactly the same moment and you could hear this little soggy patch of mumbling in the middle of the song where everyone hedged their bets and sang quieter so as not to be caught wrong. We pulled it back, we got to the flea, it was savage in the end. But that wobble was the egg. The egg always tells.
Here's a thing I genuinely believe. The egg is the only verse in the song that adds a thing that does NOTHING. Stay with me. The bog holds a tree. The tree holds a limb. The nest holds the egg — grand, that's a job, the nest is doing nest things. But the egg? The egg just sits there. It doesn't hold the next thing, not really, not the way the others do. There's a bird coming, sure, but the egg isn't actively gripping a bird the way a branch grips a twig. The egg is potential. It's the one passive object in a song made entirely of things-holding-other-things. And I think — I genuinely think — singers feel that wrongness on some level they can't name, and it throws their rhythm a fraction. The chain logic breaks at the egg. Just for a second. (I wrote more about this in the egg's own verse-by-verse if you want the full ramble.) Maybe I'm reading too much into it. Maybe it's just that seven syllables in a row is awkward. But I don't think so.
So what do you DO about it?
This is the bit that matters. You slow down at the egg. Not a lot. Just a hair. Everyone's instinct by verse seven is to RUSH, to race toward the flea, and that's exactly the wrong instinct, because rushing through the dead zone is how you scatter the room. Hold the egg. Plant your feet on it. Give it half a beat more weight than it deserves. If you're the one leading — and somebody always is, even if it's unofficial — make the egg DELIBERATE. Sing it like you mean it, sing it a touch louder than the lads, give them an anchor to find their place again. The egg is where a good session-leader earns their pint. Anyone can ride the flea. Carrying the room through the egg, quietly, when nobody even knows they're being carried — that's the real craft.
Try it the next time you're singing it through. Watch for the wobble. You'll start seeing it everywhere now that I've told you, and you'll never un-see it, sorry about that.
The flea gets all the love. The egg does all the work.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin was asleep on my keyboard for most of the writing of this, specifically on the egg verse paragraph, which I choose to take as a sign. He's grand. He just has opinions about where I should be sitting.