“Istanbul (Live)” by They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants didn't write "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", but they own it now. Jimmy Kennedy supplied the words and Nat Simon the music back in 1953, on the 500th anniversary of Constantinople falling to the Ottomans, and the whole joke is the city's official change of name; the jazz historian Will Friedwald has pointed out that it answers an older song, Harry Carlton's "C-O-N-S-T-A-N-T-I-N-O-P-L-E", which Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra recorded in 1928.

Plenty of acts have covered it since, but the band's 1990 version is the one everybody knows, a Warner Bros. release produced by Clive Langer that followed "Birdhouse in Your Soul" into the world. This is the live recording of it, the old novelty turned loose in front of a crowd.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.