Much outraged commentary on the decision by Welsh Rugby to ban a choir from singing Delilah before the Six Nations game against Ireland this weekend – most of it in the "political correctness gone mad" vein. Roland White in the Times this morning is typical:
Fans will be allowed to sing Tom Jones’s 1968 hit, as they have done since the early 1970s, but officials would clearly prefer they didn’t. “We are respectfully aware that it is problematic and upsetting to some supporters because of its subject matter,” says the WRU.
Yes, Delilah is about a spurned lover who stabs his girlfriend in a jealous rage, but it’s essentially a story of justice and retribution. The killer is pleading pathetically for forgiveness as he awaits his certain fate: “So, before they come to break down the door, forgive me Delilah.”
Not that most rugby fans — or supporters of Stoke City, who have also adopted the song — will have given more than a passing thought to the message of the lyrics. Delilah is above all a powerful melody, and the best-known song of a popular Welsh entertainer. They should sing it tomorrow at the tops of their voices.
Creative art can help us confront the darker side of life. If we start banning work that deals with unsettling subjects, where do we stop? Bohemian Rhapsody, that favourite anthem of drunken karaoke nights, is a particularly frank confession of murder: “Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger now he’s dead.” I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats was written in response to a school shooting in 1970s California.
Follow the WRU policy to its logical conclusion and there’ll be no more Othello, no more Agatha Christie, no more Happy Valley, with its diet of suicide, kidnap, rape and murder.
And once Delilah has gone, another traditional feature of Welsh rugby is left looking very vulnerable. Because isn’t the national anthem an example of institutional sexism and historical injustice? Land of My Fathers indeed. What a monstrous snub to Welsh mothers.
Yes I get it – and it's an easy target for the Welsh Rugby Union, trying to counter accusations of sexism: at last they can be seen to be actually doing something.
But the lyrics are nasty:
A classic "look what you made me do you bitch" self-pitying whine.
But though I can resist the Tom Jones version, this, by the Leningrad Cowboys & The Red Army Choir and Orchestra, is wonderful:
[The Leningrad Cowboys are a Finnish band. I believe this is from a 1993 concert in Helsinki]
Mick Hartley 
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