Chameleon Circuit

“I’ll sing you to your sleep.”

Doctor Who

OK, this is kind of embarrassing, because it’s amazingly nerdy. (Even more nerdy than knowing all the words to “Lord of the Rings in 99 Seconds”.) Chameleon Circuit is the band that invented Trock, or, in English, Time Lord Rock. (Yes, really.) They sing songs about Doctor Who. I discovered it on one of my procrastination trips around Youtube. (Youtube, as I and the University Gang have decided, is the single most detrimental thing to happen to academia since Wikipedia.) Anyway, the first song I listened to of theirs is a reasonably famous one (well, 300,000 hits on Youtube) called “The Doctor Is Dying“. At first, I thought it was, frankly, awful. Mainly because the person in it can’t sing. Very well.

But it’s one of those songs that worms its way into your brain. It’s been in my head all day, including when I was supposed to be working:

The Time Lords returning

The Earth will be burning,

The last white-point star is a trap for the Master,

The Doctor is dying,

The Doctor is dying, etc.

 

Imagine that going round your head, endlessly, over and over again. So, of course, I had to go back and listen to it once more. And then twice more. And then thrice…well, you get the idea. It turns out that it grows on you. In the name of procrastination, I had a look at a couple of their other songs as well, and there are some quite good ones. I particularly like “Type 40”, which is about the TARDIS and has a cool video as well.

Some of the songs are terrible. Don’t, for example, listen to “Big Bang 2” which is a (barely) musical retelling of the episode of the same name, with a terrible chorus and some seriously inane lyrics. (“Oh my God, he’s wearing a fez” FOUR TIMES! We understood the first time, thank you very much.)

Despite the fact that Chameleon Circuit have the musical abilities of the average boy band, there is a genuine love of Doctor Who that makes the songs worth listening to, for the average Whovian. Plus, and this is the good bit, they’re all out there on the internet FOR FREE!!! So there’s nothing to lose. Apart from, possibly, your mind.