(Warning: explicit lyrics)

Picking campaign theme songs — the music that's played at rallies to pump up the crowd as the party leader takes the stage — can be tricky business, as others have written.

Team Stephen Harper 2008 uses Better Now by the U.S. band Collective Soul, a fairly safe bet by most standards. (OK, it's not Canadian, but still.)

The key is finding something punchy but without inappropriate lyrics.

Case in point, the "it seemed like a good idea at the time" song used by Ontario Conservatives the first time Mike Harris campaigned to be premier 18 years ago — or at least the one used in the early days of that campaign: The Rolling Stones' Start Me Up.

A sample of the lyrics:

"You make a grown man cry"

Also:

"You rough it up,
If you like it up,
I can slide it up,
… slide it up
… slide it up."

And finally:

"You make a dead man come."

After Harris had bounded onto stage a few times smiling broadly to that imagery, someone pointed out that Mick Jagger wasn't exactly crooning about a Common Sense Revolution. And before you could say "parental guidance" the red-faced Harris people scrapped it.

(On election night, by the way, Harris came third in 1990, behind Liberal David Peterson and the surprise new Ontario premier Bob Rae, then an Ontario New Democrat.)

—Paul Hunter