Time & Perspective Quote by Harry Nilsson

Nilsson sketches London the way a songwriter sketches a scene: a few clean details that do all the heavy lifting. The opener, "just a typical London flat", is a shrug that signals humility and normalcy, then immediately gets undercut by a neighborhood so choice it borders on ridiculous. That bait-and-switch is the point. He’s playing with the gap between "typical" life and the glamorous, slightly tawdry spectacle you can rent if your windows face the right direction.

The punchline lives in the two balconies. One frames Big Ben, the official postcard of British seriousness: time, tradition, order. The other frames the Playboy Club, a private theater of leisure where the "bunnies" become human elevator music, literally going "up and down". Nilsson’s wit is in how casually he holds those worlds together, as if civic grandeur and commercial sex appeal are just two angles on the same view. It’s not moralizing; it’s observational, with the bemused tone of someone who recognizes that the 60s and 70s city sold both dignity and decadence, sometimes on the same block.

There’s subtext about celebrity, too. Nilsson was a pop insider with an outsider’s voice; he knew how quickly "cool" turns into choreography. The line reads like a travel anecdote, but it’s also a sly self-portrait: the artist living between the clock and the club, measuring life in minutes on one side and in spectacle on the other.