The Tears Of A Clown – A Classic That Nearly Never Was

"One Sunday afternoon last year, driving home from a gig the previous night in London, I was listening to the radio when ‘The Tears Of A Clown’ by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles came on. Taking into account that I’ve probably heard this track thousands of times in my life, I could never quite work out what the line in the middle eight was, directly before ‘I have to keep my sadness hid’. All of a sudden it was clear as day ‘just like Pagliacci did’! The same Pagliacci Alan Moore was referring to in the quote above from ‘Watchmen’. As any regular reader of the blog will know, Moore and ‘Watchmen’ have been the subject of a whole heap of pieces here, so Smokey wasn’t going to slip a ‘Pagliacci’ past me this time - Moore’s invocation of Pagliacci, whilst outlining the death of the book’s central character, The Comedian (narrated by the vigilante, Rorschach, who’s investigating the murder) is one of ‘Watchmen’s’ most powerful sequences."
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