Soul Music

103

Terry is a fan of a fairly obscure band (in Europe at least — in America they are a bit better known) called They Might Be Giants (he has mentioned on a.f.p. that their ‘Where your Eyes don’t Go’ is the scariest song he’s ever heard — not that scary is a word I’d normally associate with TMBG, mind you, but then I don’t know that particular song).

Anyway, ‘We’re Certainly Dwarfs’ appears to be the Discworld answer to this group, or at least to their name, and it may be amusing to know that the name was first suggested to Terry by a.f.p. reader Mike Berzonsky, during an early discussion about Discworld popular music. Mike wrote, way back in february 1993:

“Totally off the subject, this came to me last night. Terry’s covered tons of stuff, but other than metamorphizing tapes in Good Omens, little on Rock n Roll. Since he’s a fan of TMBG, maybe a dwarvish rock band, ‘No, We Really Are Dwarves’. Since rock is so central to dwarf life, it makes sense to me that they’d have a band, although I understand that rich dwarves hire trolls to bang on anvils, so maybe Detritus could be the percussion section. And Dibbler could be their manager. No, better, Gaspode the Wonder Dog. And finding the references to the last forty years of music could be a blast. Just an idea.”

Was this guy a prophet, or what? Terry replied:

“I’ve occasionally toyed with the Ankh music business. And I can promise you that if it ever happens, there’ll be a group called ‘We Really Are Dwarfs’ :-)”

The rest is history.

The song mentioned later on in the text, ‘Something’s gotten into my beard’ is not directly traceable to They Might Be Giants, or it would have to be to the track ‘Fingertips’ on Apollo 18, which features the line “Something grabbed a hold of my hand”. Most people figure it is simply a reference to an entirely different song: Gene Pitney’s ‘Something’s gotten hold of my Heart’.