Bibendum

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a Victorian exposition hall: crowds, a brass band, glassware)
Lyon. Eighteen ninety-four. A stack of tyres.

[Verse 1]
Two brothers at an exhibition, standing at their stall,
and Édouard says to André — look at that pile there,
if you gave it arms it would look rather like a man,
and that was it. That was the whole of the invention.
A heap of rubber rings with a face drawn on the top.
Four years later there's a poster and the poster made him real.

[Chorus]
BIBENDUM! They gave him Latin! Actual Latin!
"Nunc est bibendum" — now is the time to drink —
and they drew him raising a glass of broken glass and nails
to say: this tyre drinks the road's obstacles and lives!
Bibendum! A pile of tyres with a cigar!
The oldest trademark walking and he's made of nothing but himself!

[Verse 2]
He was thinner then. He was rangier, he was strange,
he wore pince-nez, he smoked, he was faintly menacing,
he looked like a gentleman assembled out of doughnuts
and he was in every French newspaper before the century turned.
They slimmed him. They de-smoked him. They made him wave.
A hundred and thirty years of quietly making him nicer.

[Chorus]

[Verse 3]
And they gave him a whole life, because a face demands one:
he golfed, he dined, he smoked, he was photographed at parties,
he was drawn to have opinions about roads and about weather,
he had a wife once, briefly, in a poster, in nineteen-oh-four.
A pile of tyres with a marriage. A stack of rings with a club.
They built a biography around a shape that had no body.

[Bridge]
And here's the part that I find genuinely marvellous:
he's not a person made into a brand, or a brand made to look human.
He is a product, drawn as a man, who then became a critic —
because the stars, the restaurant stars, are HIS. They're his stars.
A stack of tyres decides which kitchens in the world are great.
Nobody planned that. Nobody could have planned that.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the exposition hall, receding)
Now is the time to drink.
He's been saying it since eighteen ninety-eight.