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1. |
London 1983
06:28
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There’s a heatwave in the city and the day drags on forever
The tarmac burns through patent leather clear through to the sole
Ice tumbles through glass as the temperature soars
And the dayshift leaves the nightshift to take over for a while
The city sings at midnight to the well-fed and the civilized
While waiters mop their faces in the kitchen, out of sight
Small change pours in torrents over counters in the bistros
And the moon hangs red and sullen in the dustbowl of the sky
The city is on heat, bare-legged girls in summer dresses
Dodge the lechery of workmen laying cable through the day
But the night turns on the body to sweet pornography
Passions feed on darkness and the body mutes the mind
The city squeals at midnight in its pain and ecstasy
The life-force surges through the veins and soaks the sheets
The couples claw and couple and feed upon each other
And still the hunger rages through the streets
I saw a refugee from Galway with a faceful of stubble
Singing sentimental songs in the underground today
He’s going back to Mother Ireland and the Mountains of Mourne
And he only needs a bob or two to help him on his way
The city whimpers at midnight in its apathy and squalor
From a bench on the Embankment, from a derry in Barnes
From a squat in Deptford, from the winos and the junkies
From the homeless and the helpless, the hopeless and the lost
A refugee from Calvary is preaching anarchy and anger
Through his multi-Megawatt PA
And when the concert’s over he packs his guitars and prophecies
And goes back to his hotel to drink the night into the day
But out there in the streets the word is out all over
The heat are out for action in New Cross and Ladbroke Grove
The temperature is dropping but the tempers are at flashpoint
And no-one lingers on street corners if they’re walking home alone
The city screams at midnight in the agony of anger
The rocksteady revolution pays its homage to its dead
Where dreadlocks meet deadlock the shock tears up the flagstones
And on their righteous anger the riot squads are fed
The Klan charts fiery crosses cloistered in an upstairs room
The architects of reaction spin their bitter webs
Entangling and exploiting the kids with skinhead hairstyles
And no-one dares explain the chaos in their heads
The city burns at midnight and the blood runs down the sewers
In the ghettoes and the side-streets where the patriots have been
Squad cars and an ambulance cut through the aftermath
And tomorrow’s front pages unfurl to set the scene
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2. |
They Hang The Man
01:43
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They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common'
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
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3. |
Song of Chivalry II
03:58
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When M’Lord returned / To his sheets of silk
And his gentle lady / Of musk and milk
The minstrels sang / In the gallery
Their songs of slaughter / And chivalry
The rafters roared / With laughter and boasting
Goblets were raised and drained / In toasting
The heroes of Crécy / And Azincourt
Or the madness / Of some holy war
The hawk is at rest / On the gauntlet once more
Savage of eye / And bloody of claw
Famine and fever / Are all the yield
Of the burnt-out barns / And wasted fields
The sun grins coldly / Through the trees
The children shiver / The widows grieve
And beg their bread / At the monastery door
Tell me then / Who won the war?
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4. |
Nowhere To Nowhere
02:11
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Birds made homeless today
The tree fellers came to take their prey
Diggers ripping up the earth
Concrete laid down for what it’s worth
From nowhere to nowhere
Green belt turned grey – why should they care?
Tainted money buys land laid bare
Shifting soil, uprooting pines
Laying down more railway lines
From nowhere to nowhere
Villages and fields torn in two
Holes in the hearts of me and you
Earth and rubble shifted load by load
Traffic chaos on the roads
From nowhere to nowhere
Meadows buried under bricks and dust
Lost to the profiteers and money lust
No more time to have our say
No time to see what went astray
From somewhere to nowhere
Nowhere to nowhere
Nowhere to nowhere
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5. |
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A thousand years of rape lie easy on my body
a thousand years of blood and fear
a million miles of marching feet and refugees
Soldier you come you go
bring wampum, cookies beads and rings
Soldier you come you go
trade pretty things for my pretty thing
Cropped hair and death-in-life hero eyes
how long before you spread your epaulettes and fly?
(smoke your Luckies / drink your words
eat your candy / suck you dry)
Soldier you come you go
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6. |
Long Stand
03:00
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The day I started work, the foreman said to me
"I’ve another job for you when you’ve finished brewing tea:
Go down to the stores and when you find old Stan
Tell him Harry sent you for a long stand.”
I got a long stand all right: I stood an hour or more
Till Stan got tired of the joke and sent me back to the shop floor.
Well I didn’t think it funny, but I laughed and held my peace,
Even when they sent me back for a tin of elbow grease.
Still I did my bit, till I was pensioned off in ’69
From apprentice to foreman, all down the production line.
Many’s the lad I’ve sent myself when things were getting dull
For a can of striped paint or a pound of rubber nails.
But the joke they’re playing now, I just don’t think it’s fair
Even when you get your ticket, the work just isn’t there.
The safest job in England is handing out the dole:
For every man that gets a job they turn away a hundred more.
For now the work is scarce, again, the queues are building up.
The streets are full of lads and lasses looking out for jobs;
But when you’ve just left school, you hardly stand a chance
They’re sending every lad in England for a long stand.
They say that if you’ve got the gumption you can do just as you please.
They say you’ll do all right with a bit of elbow grease;
But with a hundred out for every job, it’s few that stand a chance
They’re sending every lad in England for a long stand
They’re sending every lass in England for a long, long stand
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7. |
Orpheus with his Loot
02:27
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I used to push pens in the City
Being paid to milk someone's cash cow
I once served my time at a dollar a line
But that's not the job I do now
A seducer wants words for a lady
A sonnet to melt her cold heart
Though he orders a charm that will open her arms
Cupid's quiver is empty of darts
The clown wants some words to divert you
And asks me to build him some jests
A wink and a nudge, to distract a harsh judge
But that's not the job I do best
The emperor assumes that I love him
This bully, this man without shame
He commands me to praise all the lies he portrays
From his seat on the gravy train
Friends of the Fancy, nose to the trough
Take profit from all of your pain
I can buy with sweet notes my way onto the lifeboat
If I comfort these grandsons of Cain
The rats have abandoned this Ship of Fools
The saints have forgotten to pray
Orpheus counts loot that he earned licking boots
But his tongue is silent today
And this is my text for today
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8. |
For Phil Ochs
05:35
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Groping through the wavebands for a time-check
On a local music station I caught the tail end of the news
Of a singer in New York who’d committed suicide
Too late to catch the name, still I knew that it was you
The way that bad news comes as no surprise
Though till you hear it, you can’t think what could be wrong
In fact I thought of you just the week before
For the first time in years when someone asked me for a song I’d learned from you
I don’t know how to define what you mean to me now /
I never met you, of course, and I don’t sing your songs
Though I did long ago and even now, in a way
There are things I learned from you in songs of my own
I first heard your songs second-hand – the sweeter ones, of course
and bought an album on spec that raised blisters on my soul
In an era where ‘protest’ meant ‘hey man, it’s all wrong’
You were raising real issues and aiming at real goals
And I heard that you’d dried up, or did you just let it pass?
Did you find songs weren’t the weapon we were told that they could be?
No doubt someone has some answers but I’ll never really know
If you just decided snapshots don’t alter history
I’ve been thinking for hours there should be better songs to write
But thinking just makes circles in my head
There’s just a vague ache where my conscience ought to be
And a sour conviction that something true is dead
Only time will tell if I’m repeating your mistakes
Perhaps you’d have survived turning redneck like your peers
The romantics seem to be the real cynics after all:
Could it be the escapists really have the right idea?
And did you just decide living was a bind?
Slops for the body and musak for the mind?
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9. |
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Have you seen a man choke on another man’s dream
And humanity dying of shame?
Have you seen a man drunk on another man’s blood
And a scapegoat called Christ get the blame?
And God knows I’m no angel
But then I wouldn’t claim to be
Nor the gambler who lost
On a hill called Calvary
Have you walked in fear of another man’s lust
In the heat of a holy war
That slashed the throats of the innocent
The guilty and the bored?
And maybe we’re all guilty
But I wouldn’t want to be
The gambler who lost
On a hill called Calvary
Have you seen the soldiers of fortune
Fighting for names?
Have you seen the fallen angels
Play their whisky games?
And each one thinking
He has the right to be
A stand-in for the dealer
Who OD’d on Calvary
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10. |
Paper City
05:25
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I woke up with my mind’s eye facing your direction:
I looked hard and I saw you needed help.
You’re choking on paper and tape and legislation,
But you can’t produce one thing to help yourself.
Paper city at the heart of a paper empire:
You’ve got strings to pull, you’ve got wires all over the earth.
Sky-climbing parasite, concrete and paper jungle,
You’ve got money to burn, but I know you’d rather freeze to death.
You’ve got stacks of stocks and shares and bonds:
You’ve got telephone and telex,databank and dateline too.
But you can’t produce as much as one lead pencil,
Or a bar of soap, or a rubber band to pull you through.
The media twitch at the flash of a freemason’s handshake:
Speeches are made and the punters gather round;
Paper politicians and faceless company men,
Taking the pulse of an ailing paper pound.
I bet you know just what you’re worth on paper:
When the market crumbles, what will that do to you?
A lot of cold people don’t own the earth they lie in:
Will you be all right in your green-lined paper tomb?
Paper city at the heart of a bankrupt empire:
Your towers get higher as your assets hit new lows.
Nose-diving parasite, I wouldn’t mind you dying,
But you’ll take so many with you when you go.
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11. |
Hands of the Craftsman
05:35
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Minutes ago as God measures time
Something manlike emerged from primordial slime:
Ever since, Mother Nature has been on the run
From a hand with four fingers and opposable thumb.
That hand learned to grip, then it learned to shape
Flint into a weapon, then a tool to shape,
To build and to kill, and around then it learned
To strike sparks to bring fire and lighten man’s world.
The hands of the craftsman have moulded our world
From the first stone axe to the first steam drill
To the harvester, laser, and silicon chip,
But the hands of the craftsman are losing their grip.
The years roll on swift with the birth of the wheel:
Man learned to work bronze, then iron and steel:
The bow drill, the pole lathe, the compass, the lock;
The lens, the sextant, the lantern, the clock,
Castings and mouldings, extrusions and pressings,
The bandsaw, the dropforge, the milling machine.
The tools and the skills have changed through the centuries,
The crafts and the knowledge, but seldom the dreams.
The builder could turn his hand to most trades:
Masonry, joinery, plumbing and all.
The engineer trained on a score of machines:
Now it’s often just one – he’s in luck if it’s more.
Modularization's the name of the game:
It means that they put you on just one machine,
One or two operations on just the one part –
It’s efficient, but de-skilling’s what it means.
One day we’re skilled men, the next, operators,
The next, no-one knows if we’ll be there at all.
The art passes into the programmer’s hands:
Tomorrow, machines will service themselves…
The glazier, the bellfounder, printers and knappers,
Dyers and weavers, some are already lost:
Prefabrication will see out the tiler
As the thatcher before him learned to his cost.
The paviour, the saddler, the cooper, the wheelwright,
Fitters and grinders and turners and smiths,
We all take our turn in the pattern of process
And one by one, we’re taking our leave…
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12. |
Jerry Jingalo
01:06
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Breach the barrel, drain the cask
Scrambled wits behind the mask
And drink awhile with Jerry Jingalo
Sell your soul and pay the fee
The price of immortality
You pay to Jerry Jingalo
The master sings, the jester dances
Round and round the room he prances
Dancing to the tune of Jingalo
Round and round the room they go
The tears, the tears they trickle slow
Down the cheeks of Jerry Jingalo
And as he spins such fine romances
Disciples quarrel for the chance
To gather at the feet of Jingalo
The devil scans with eyes like coals
The broken dreams and stolen souls
Betrayed by Jerry Jingalo
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13. |
Circle
08:14
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Sleep well old man, and don’t look down from some heavenly aerie
To see the edifice we’ve built on your philosophy
The sacrificial fires below bear the devil’s mark
But it was hands a lot like yours that struck the first spark
Sleep well old man, while history gathers dust
Logicians shake their heads and accountants check the cost
The shattered bones and bombed out lives are yesterday’s stale news
But it was hands a lot like yours that cut and primed the fuse
Rest in peace, old soldier: time has obscured the words
Carved in granite long ago on behalf of a grateful world
An alien soil feeds on the bones that deserved a better bed
Than the shit and slime of the shell-torn trench where your body splintered and bled
Square up to the judge and fear no grudge of the old men left behind
Who grasped the glory with greedy hands, irreversibly blind
To the faces behind the statistics, the bones beneath the clay
Who robbed you of your humanity and threw your life away
And for all they stole from you, they gained less than nothing and yet
They travel the same barren road, savagely, immutably deaf
Though they heard over and over the pacifist logic, the widow’s curse
And though our team of backroom boys sweated blood for ten thousand years
To find a way out of the spider’s reach, but they don’t even see the web
Nothing was gained, no lesson was learned, only new ways of dealing death
And so you died, trying to play fair, but who formulated the rules?
The implacable logic of history, generations of wise old fools
Sleep on, unborn child: don’t try the door
They’ll call you a war baby, but Christ only knows which war
Best to opt out with your faith still intact and your innocence undefiled
Before they become sublimation, a dustbin for wasted ideals
Prophets will offer causality, idealists will offer you dreams
Holy men offer you brimstone and visions, opportunists ways and means
But would you let one marry your daughter? Sell you a second-hand fire?
Trade you a soul for a rope and a gun, and drag your corpse through the mire?
Rest in peace old soldier, secure from the lure of the drums
Safe with your secrets in heaven or hell, your sanity is restored
And I’ll stand by your grave, a soldier of sorts – different army, same old war
You with a rifle, me with these words, both prey to causality’s laws
We fight the same battle on different sides – but there are no sides
Caught in the same vicious circle, unable to stem the tide
And still we contend with the same spider’s web
And ask the same questions, but who can resolve the riddle of the rain?
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14. |
Diane (Going Out)
05:19
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So much of her life she’s spent on wards like this
With panic locked behind her eyes and dressings on her wrists.
But last time I saw Diane, she was beating a long, long drop:
I like to think it’s not only the scum that makes it to the top.
They feed her love in millivolts, and faith in plastic spoons
Sometimes it all washes out, and she has to rush out of the room
Sometimes she hits out; mostly, she turns on herself
And in rage and desperation she seeks out the razor’s edge
But last time I saw Diane, she was beating a long, long drop:
I like to think it’s not only the scum that makes it to the top.
There’s an old man in her mirror with his own tale to tell
He has words like “communicate” and “socialize” to sell
He’s promised her that she’s learning how to crawl out of her shell
She says “He’ll get my head together, on the next cool day in hell…”
Salvation comes expensive, by the litre or the gramme
But she holds on to her anger, if that’s all that comes to hand
It’s a sword that has two edges, but she’s learning to survive
And when she’s closest to dying, anger tells her that she’s alive
But last time I saw Diane, she was beating a long, long drop:
I like to think it’s not only the scum that makes it to the top.
Now she’s going out again, to meet her life head on
Hanging with the world, as it might be by her thumbs
Most of what I’d like to say sounds trite, sounds absurd
But we’ve been lovers and we’ve been friends, and we’ve never needed those words
Next time I see Diane, she’ll still be beating the drop
I wish I could be half the person she is, if only I had half the guts
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15. |
Paper Tiger
02:37
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Oh, you paper tiger,
Now see what you've done
You made your stand on shifting sand
And now begins the fun
Your bluff's been called at last
So what do you do now?
Now someone got the drop on you
And finally faced you down
Oh, you paper tiger… (x2)
Oh, you paper tiger
Now see what you've done
Every chamber emptied
And nowhere left to run
How could you forget
The only code that you lived by
To move so fast and talk so soft
And keep your powder dry?
Oh, you paper tiger… (x2)
Oh, you paper tiger
Now see what they've done
They've picked you clean and strung you up
To dry out in the sun
Oh, you bigshot bankrupt
You flamed-out flat-lined fake
They'll bake you in the ashes
Of your latest last mistake
Oh, you paper tiger … (x2)
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David A. Harley England, UK
David Harley is a former professional musician, administrator, IT security editor, author and researcher, and former much else that is even less impressive. He now lives in Cornwall. More info at whealalice.com
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