Wiktionary
phr. 1 (context idiomatic English) An exclamation made before commit suicide, or in a suicide note. 2 (context figuratively English) A call said before taking a stiff drink, especially a shot of vodka.
Wikipedia
"Goodbye Cruel World" is a song by Pink Floyd. It appears on their 1979 double album, The Wall.
Goodbye Cruel World may refer to:
- Goodbye Cruel World (Elvis Costello album), an album by Elvis Costello and the Attractions
- Goodbye Cruel World (Custard album), an album by Custard
- Goodbye Cruel World (James Darren song), a song by James Darren
- Goodbye Cruel World (Pink Floyd song), a song by Pink Floyd
- Goodbye Cruel World (Shakespears Sister song), a song by Shakespears Sister
- Goodbye Cruel World (miniseries), a 1992 British miniseries starring Sue Johnston and Alum Armstrong
Goodbye Cruel World was Elvis Costello's ninth album overall and the eighth with his backing band the Attractions. It was released in 1984 by F-Beat Records in the UK and Columbia in the US.
Tensions within the band—notably between Costello and bassist Bruce Thomas—were beginning to tell, and Costello announced his retirement and the break-up of the group shortly before they were to record Goodbye Cruel World. Costello later said that in making it, they had "got it as wrong as you can in terms of the execution".
Costello wrote at his official website: "I think the first time we ever got really attacked for a new release apart from when we first started was Goodbye Cruel World, and to be honest I knew it wasn't a good record by the time...It was the only one I was tempted to...I was committed to it. I'd spent too much money on it to not release it and I thought on balance the good things that I'd got wrong in the studio that were in the song writing probably outweighed the bad things that I'd allow to happen in the production, which is not distracting anything from the effort that Clive Langer made to do the best. I mean, I announced to them that it was the last record I was ever going to make before we went in the studio. I decided to quit for all kinds of weird personal reasons...I was really down about lots of other things and I really just decided I wanted to do this one record, and I was asking them to make a record they weren't really set up to do, which was essentially a 'live-in-the-studio' record. And then we had a loss of nerve about that and started to edge it back towards the kind of production they did anyway. But the damage had been done, we'd started out to record a folk-rock record, which is what it originally sounded like, which you can hear in some of the more soulful songs, like Home Truth, which is an unbelievably painful, true song. I made Clive Langer's life impossible, and I take full responsibility for the failure of the production, 'cause I was asking them one time to do one thing and the next to do another, and changing my mind every 15 minutes and driving everybody in the band mad. And really just getting it as wrong as you can in terms of the execution of what are basically a bunch of really good songs."
"Goodbye Cruel World" is a song written by Gloria Shayne Baker, who also wrote the well-known Christmas carol, " Do You Hear What I Hear?" and several songs for singer Lesley Gore. The most famous recording of this song is by James Darren. With its release as a single in 1961, Darren scored his first top ten hit on the Billboard Hot 100, at number three. It would prove the biggest hit of his career on this chart, as well as on the UK Singles Chart (no. 28).
Darren, playing pop idol "Kip Dennis", performed the song on a late 1961 episode of The Donna Reed Show. (He had previously played a different character in a 1959 episode of the sitcom). The song's lyrics were changed to "join the Service" instead of "join the circus" to reflect his character's reason to exit the show as Shelley Fabare's "love interest" ala Elvis' zeitgeist Army stint. The song was also used in a film on Pop Art directed by Ken Russell for the BBC TV series Monitor which was aired in March 1962; its context here was the escape from the dying culture of the British Empire.
According to disc jockeys at the time the song was released, the calliope-like riff used in the song based on the " Entrance of the Gladiators" theme, was a synthesized recording of a woman's voice rather than a musical instrument.
The song is about a man whose heart was broken by a "mean fickle woman", and his plan to join the circus as a brokenhearted clown. He does not mind being shot out of a cannon, and plans to tell the world that this she "made a crying clown" out of him.
"Goodbye Cruel World" is a song by the British pop act Shakespears Sister, released in 1991 as the lead single from their second album Hormonally Yours. Initially, the song had little commercial impact, reaching #59 on the UK Singles Chart. Following the success of the album, the song was re-released as a single in July 1992, slightly remixed, this time reaching #32.
Goodbye Cruel World is a 1992 British miniseries starring Sue Johnston, Alun Armstrong and Brenda Bruce. The three-part series was aired on BBC Two during January 1992 and was aired again in summer 1993. Johnston played the character of Barbara Grade, a woman who is diagnosed with a terminal degenerative illness, and the series focused on how Barbara and her family and friends deal with her worsening condition. It was written by Tony Marchant and directed by Adrian Shergold and was nominated for Best Drama at the 1993 British Academy Television Awards.
Goodbye Cruel World: The Best Of Custard is a best of compilation of Custard, spanning from their first single (Rockfish Anna) to their last album of the 1990s (Loverama).