I was already familiar with some of Lehrer's songs on record when I went with my mother and a friend of hers to see him perform live in London. We had not heard The Vatican Rag before and it had us helpless with laughter.

I have on tape two verses of a song that AFAIK never made it onto any of the recordings, concerning the time when the NZ Rugby team was due to visit South Africa (in the Apartheid era), some people were arguing that no such visit should take place, and the NZ Prime Minister made a pronouncement that completely missed the point. That song might perhaps have seemed ephemeral, but a not-dissimilar situation arose much more recently, concerning the England cricket team's proposed visit to Zimbabwe, so I pulled out the Lehrer song at Sharp's Folk Club.

Richard