Growing up in the seventies, 'Pretty Flamingo' was a particular favourite of mine and a song whose title and imagery always seemed to encapsulate an ideal of the sixties that appealed. Around the same timeframe I was a huge fan of The Banana Splits too, and though I didn't know it at the time, the theme to that show ('The Tra La La Song') and 'Pretty Flamingo' were both written by American Mark Barkan. Two different songs maybe, but looking at them through my 'grown up' eyes not that different; there's a childlike quality about 'Pretty Flamingo' that wouldn't have been out of place on that show (perhaps sung by the Sour Grapes messenger girls) that would explain its appeal to me 'then' but which leaves it looking threadbare 'now'.Being concerned with that age old issue of the desirable but unobtainable female, the central 'flamingo' metaphor is a shaky one. "On our block all of the guys call her flamingo. Cause her hair glows like the sun, and her eyes can light the sky"; there's an element of 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' psychedelia in its imagery (certainly when compared to Roy Orbison's similarly themed but far more direct "Pretty woman, walking down the street. Pretty woman, the kind I'd like to meet") but it's tethered to a dusty busker beat that's an earthbound plod and suggests the Manfred's were taking nothing stronger than tea at the time. Singer Paul Jones puts as much yearning into the song as the lyric allows ("Crimson dress that clings so tight, she's out of reach and out of sight") but he can't turn lead into gold and it leaves 'Pretty Flamingo' walking a precarious line between the heartfelt and the childlike that, while never falling squarely into the latter, never does quite enough to convince of the former. As of its time as The Banana Splits were.
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