1. |
Enterprise
02:39
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I’ve got a phaser and I’m going in
Don’t try to stop me – I mean it, Jim
I’m a he-man, not a mannequin
I’ve beamed down from the Enterprise
I’ve got a phaser and it’s set to stun
Yes. I said a phaser. It’s a kind of gun. If you’ve
got a five-year mission and you want it done
Beam us down from the Enterprise
I’ve got a phaser and a nylon shirt
and you look grrreat (babe) in your mini-skirt
and we all come from the planet Eart
by way of the Enterprise
I’ve got a Vulcan and I’m not afraid
of the Klingons and the mess they’ve made
or the bits in chunky orange marmalade
‘coz I’m the Captain and I’ve got gold braid
Round the sleeves of my nylon shirt
Mr Scott is our engineer. He’s
a lifeform, Jim, but he’s not from round here.
You can tell ‘coz his accent is so mighty queer.
He’s beamed us down from the Enterprise
My phaser grasped tightly in my hand
I play tricorder in a folk-rock band
We boldly go but we have nothing planned
on the Enterprise tonight.
I’ve got a Vulcan and I’m not afraid
of the Klingons and the mess they’ve made
or the bits in chunky orange marmalade
‘coz I’m the Captain and I’ve got gold braid
and my name is James T Kirk
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2. |
Middle Man
01:53
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I grew up playing cricket in a Sussex county town
Bus ticket, straight wickets, money raining down
from the banks in the city to the borgers in the green belt;
Ranks of detached privilege in the hand that I was dealt
Yup, I’m from Middle England
My dad was middle class, middle aged, just like I am now
A middle grade degree - botany - how to study flowers
Marriage bower, ivory tower, spreading round the middle
Eying up lead violin, while playing second fiddle
Yes. He was a Middle Manager
Hairy toed and hobbit-like, with slowly spreading girth
A halfling in a half-way hole in a Shire of Middle Earth
And forty-five years later, my pater’s morphed to me
Middle-aged moaning Minnie, mitherin’ to be free
Just like (I dunno) Minnie the Minx
Complacent yet dissatisfied, you can’t believe it, can ya?
But check out Chekhov and you’ll see I’m just like Uncle Vanya
Afraid to take a shot of faith, yet the loaded gun entices
Critical, yet full-beguiled of a full-blown mid-life crisis.
I’m just a ...Middle man
It’s confusin’, ‘cos my wife Susan is both comfortable and balanced
Possessed o’ grace and fair o’ face and full o’ many talents
Middle class and middle aged and rather white of hue
And here I am - a prisoner - Stuck in the Middle with Sue.
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3. |
Danger Mouse
02:09
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Hey, man, you’re an alpha male, a bona fide Romeo
Casanova, Romanov, el duque of the barrio
You strut around this mortal stage, as if you alone was
the thrice-anointed Son of God, and your phone is
Always ringing. You keep up with the Joneses;
You’re Shiva the Destroyer, you are the bull’s cojones.
In fact, of all the Joneses, you must be the Jonesiest;
And of all of God’s loud megaphones, you must be the phoniest.
Recurring trope: your horoscope tells me you’re a Leo.
Oh, quel surprise! You shoot the breeze with panache and brio and
I hear Theo Paphitis gives you financial advice
and any way you cut the pie, you get the biggest slice.
Me? I’m just a rodent; a mouse ‘mongst many mice.
An impotent arousal. They call me Scaredy Spice.
I lurk behind your skirting board and scratch under your floor.
D’you ever wonder who it is that gnaws your throne to saw-
dust. Sleekit cowran’ tim’rous beastie –
Boys, I feed upon the crumbs
You flick down from your table. Then I turns and runs
and hides amongst the shadows, behind the half-closed doors.
But at open mic, on Thursday night - I AM THE MOUSE THAT ROARS
We know that lions are sometimes cowards
And that men of metal cry.
We know that spaceborne Clangers are just mice who’ve learned to fly.
And on a stage I’m flying. I’m up there, gazing down
on you – jumped up Alfa Romeo, stuck there on the ground.
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4. |
Rother Vale
04:30
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In the darkness on the edge of town
There’s a stillness as I lead you down
Beyond the Pale……Into the bowers
Down to Rother Vale…. To a place that’s ours.
We can walk hand-in-hand for hours, communing with the flowers
We can bare our knees and wade through glades of anemones
And the deed was done under a lazy sun, down in Rother Vale
In the afterglow we smoke our fags
Our gazes caught by the plastic bags -
Those gossamer veils - draped among the trees
Down in Rother Vale…. forging lovers’ memories
We can listen to the aerial music of a million small brown birds
And amongst the scent of the grass, the tang of freshly drying turds
For the dogs have their day, on this sweet bridleway, down in Rother Vale
From the hills of the Peak, from the west and south
From Cathole Lane, from Hob Hurst’s House
The tributaries gather and mate
From Boythorpe mine, from under B&Q
And the coking plant at Avenue
Limpid waters join and bifurcate
…and teenagers congregate…down in Rother Vale
Water soft and brown as mother’s eyes
Like a crown above your brow, a swarm of flies
Black diadems in full sail on the evening air
Down in Rother Vale…. did you ever look so fair?
We can listen to the sound of the atoms of the Universe fissioning
We can hum to the thrum of Arnold Laver’s air conditioning
Enjoy the cooling breeze, and the film of grease that covers Rother Vale
Oh, Ro…..ther Vale
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5. |
Bethlehem Steel
04:50
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They say that out there in the trenches of Hell
there’s a bullet that bears your name
but, in your case, it’s a four-inch shell and your name is ... Bethlehem.
Oh, little town of Bethlehem,
the quiet waters cry
from Appalachian ridge to field
- Monongahela to Lehigh
Your fame is spread round half the world
Your love is armour-plating-furled
Your fortune founded all on Steel - founded all on steel.
The Yankee cruiser’s iron plate
Boys sent mad from Vietnam
The girders of the Golden Gate. All forged in Bethlehem
Our future fuel - uranium
Chicago’s spinning Ferris wheel
The scythe to mow down Alleymen. All wrought at Bethlehem Steel
Your faery spires of smoke and black
Rapunzel’s Barad-Dûr
Howling trains screech round the track bound for New Jerusalem
Red-hot runs the molten steel
Flows and then congeals
is wrought and alloyed, shaped and rolled tempered and annealed
‘Swords to ploughshares!’, comes the cry
‘Tools, not to maim, but heal!’
‘Not to tear the world apart,
but forge a commonweal!’
But nor sword nor spade nor cannonade
in Bethl’em now is seen. Oh,
iron rusts, the factory’s bust
In its place...just a casino.
Oh, little town of Bethlehem, the quiet waters cry
from Appalachian ridge to field - Susquehanna to Lehigh
Your bullets sped round half the globe
Your armour clad each xenophobe
All that’s left is rust from steel – all that’s left is rust from steel.
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6. |
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If you look up to the heavens, one still, clear night
at the stars in the inky blackness, shining so bright,
and think on the small green planet we regard as our home,
how it’s one in a billion and we can’t possibly be alone.
There are far, far stranger worlds out there than we can ever know.
They must be home to someone....come, let me show you
Tiny Clanger sits alone and gazes into the sky.
Her face contorts with anger, and soon she starts to cry.
“This world is too small for my ambition.
I need a bigger challenge; a sense of mission”
But, of course, Tiny Clanger hasn’t started school yet
and thus she knows no English.
So the following is a close approximation of what she says.
Major Clanger pushes open the door from the Clangers’ burrow.
“The sodding thing is stuck again”: he must get it fixed tomorrow.
He sees that waster Tiny Clanger and his palms start a-itchin’
She just hangs around all day with that dopehead Iron Chicken.
(he’s a very bad influence)
But, although Major Clanger is one of the better educated Clangers, he also speaks no English. So this is what he would have said,
if a vacuum were able to convey acoustic waves.
Major Clanger tells his daughter to go and fetch the soup flagon
and to look lively and jump to it and go and visit the Soup Dragon.
And as she rides her trolley, Tiny Clanger spots a planet in the sky.
It’s azure and green and shrouded in cloud, like a piece of blue string pie. (Strange analogy, Tiny, but let’s just run with it...)
“I’ll bet the soup is greener up there on the other side.
Up there, they’ll have croutons, and sour cream and a sprinkling of chives.”
The Wise Old Soup Dragon emerges from the deep
She points to the earth in its velvet shroud.
She says “You might think life is better there.
But here you’re someone, there you’re just one in a crowd!”
“Here the soup springs fresh and warm directly from the ground.
Here the music grows on the trees.
Here the string is long and blue and just ripe for pudding pie.
Here you have your friends and your family.”
“There they just eat pot noodle and cup-a-soup all day
There the music’s been a joke since 1979.
And if you want some food, like as not you’ll have to pay,
and if you can’t, there’s a soup kitchen where you have to stand in line”
But the Soup Dragon, being an aquatic creature, has never evolved the vocal cords to enunciate this clearly. So, in reality, this is what she says.
Or what she would have said, had not this tale come to its natural end.
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7. |
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“But the boat swept on. Hours fleeted, and, at last, clear and full rose the blessed English shores; shores charmed by a mighty spell, - with one touch to dissolve every incantation of slavery…”
Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852
From the port of Sandusky, on the shores of Lake Erie
The wind blows from the south toward the Blessed English Shore
and the boat rides the water, like unto the River Jordan,
to the land where every man can stand free before the law.
Rode the underground railroad from the heart of old Kentucky,
across the wide Ohio, toward the Blessed English Shore
and the wind fills the sails and the Black Dove brings them branches
from the land where their chains cannot hold them any more.
They stole away in the night-time from the Mississippi delta
and they left Louisiana and the Lakes of Ponchartrain
and they left the Deep Deep South for the Blessed English Shoreline
for the green fields of Canada and the chilling northern rain.
From the port of Sandusky, on the shores of Lake Erie,
the wind blows from the south toward the Blessed English Shore
and the boat flies on wings to the green land of Canada
where a woman is a woman; not some overseer’s whore.
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8. |
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Look. Poetry ain’t beauty,
And poetry ain’t truth.
It’s the ringing of the iron fist;
the hoofprint from the hoof.
Poetry’s… austerity,
And poetry is… pain.
Like the desert sands in moonlight.
Like… Scunthorpe in the rain.
Poetry ain’t justice,
And poetry ain’t love.
It’s a cocksure, clucking pigeon,
Not a whitewashed wanky dove.
It’s Rimbaud, Tarantino;
It’s violence, it’s porn;
The first forty books o’ the Bible
Or sweet napalm in the morn.
Poetry ain’t beauty,
And poetry ain’t truth.
It’s the falling of the angry bombs,
The daylight through the roof.
And poetry is luxury,
And poetry is sex:
It’s grapes. It’s drapes of cloth of gold.
Or snogging in black turtlenecks.
Poetry ain’t “sense of place”,
And poetry ain’t time.
Poetry don’t always scan,
And it sure as hell don’t rhyme.
It’s a mad-eyed mangy mongrel,
It’s the cat who’s got the cream,
It’s Mona Lisa’s stifled belch,
It’s Munch’s eternal scream.
No. Poetry ain’t beauty,
And poetry ain’t truth.
It’s the thwack of ball on willow,
It’s the loosening of a tooth.
It’s the light that casts the shadow
in all our souls’ abodes.
It’s the background radiation
As the Universe explodes
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9. |
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I sing a hymn to the Prince of Darkness
I raise my hands to the Bearer of Light
Yield heart and soul to Beelzebub and
The service of the Kingdom of the Night
I praise the name of the Fallen Angel
Worship the Lord of Air and Skies
The Keys of Enoch will deliver us
To Apollyon – the Lord of the Flies.
You gave us fruit and the gift of knowledge
A moral sense to know wrong from right
You led us out from the Kindergarten;
Not crawling, but stretched up to full height
I see you daily in the pub and on the TV
A morning star, not some old geezer
on Mount Sinai God’s seraphim are just way too flashy
I prefer the spawn of Satan and his charming succubi.
You never shirked from your ambitions
You took the rap for what you’d done
You never raped any virgin children
Never crucified your own son.
You gave us love and all the best music
You give us sex and booze and rock’n’roll
You never asked me for any payment
Not even to hand over my immortal soul.
You gave us Lilith to be our soulmate;
Not some frigid subservient Eve
You taught us how to hide from Jehovah
To prevaricate and to deceive
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10. |
Infamy
04:12
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If only they’d pay me a little more, my life would be complete
If only they’d let me pass the test, I’d take the driving seat
If you could see my damaged soul, you’d overlook my wrongs
And if you were a better audience, I’m sure you’d like my songs
If only they’d give me a seventh chance, I would do my part
And if only you were beautiful, you’d surely win my heart
If you were a little more reasonable, I wouldn’t be so aggressive
If only I could own your heart, I wouldn’t be so possessive
See inside my damaged soul, and you’d overlook my wrongs
And if you were a better audience, I’m sure you’d like my songs
If you were a little more balanced, you could be my counterpart
And if only you were beautiful, you’d surely win my heart
If only (the bastards set me up)
If only (the bastards ground me down)
In for me, in for me, they’ve all got it in for me
In for me, in for me, they’ve all got it in for me
If only you wouldn’t see your friends, we could be alone
If only you could change your voice, it cuts me to the bone
See inside my damaged soul, and you’d overlook my wrongs
And if you were a better audience, I’m sure you’d like my songs
I could do so much better than you, by looking in Exchange and Mart
And if only you were beautiful, you’d surely win my heart.
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11. |
Miner's Track
03:23
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'82 was the summer of our discontent
but it had little to do with the Thatcher government.
The trouble with young love, my cynical friend,
is we were far too young to know what it meant.
The feel of your hair on the side of Crib Goch,
the fall of your tears down on the slate-grey rock.
Once you've lost the path, it's hard to find your way back
to that summer morning on the Miners' Track.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at flood, leads to kroner and yen.
Should I have missed the boat ?
Should we have stayed in the fold ?
Should I have listened to what my grandmother told ?
Hello to the silver; farewell to the gold.
The cast of a ball, the arc of a swing,
leather on willow; it's the real thing.
A day in a thousand, it won't come again.
That summer afternoon down in Compton's Lane.
The slide of a tackle, a bone-twisting crack,
Half laughing, half crying, we carried you back.
Your dad wasn't happy, but I remember the thrill
of Lee versus Best on the side of Denne Hill.
For lowliness is young ambition's ladder.
We climbed in the clouds, we all of us had our
soul mates to marry;
our societies to change;
our prophesies to prophesy; our flowers to arrange,
our socks to spin-dry and our stocks to exchange.
That summer, the fulcrum of life as we know it;
we were too much in love and too shy to show it.
We were just good friends, as good as they get,
but we were all building empires on which the sun would never set.
Love is a strolling player,
who struts and frets Act Two away, her
hopes all pinned on the chance
of a final curtain call;
a chance to show all the world her heart's tender encore,
but the curtain falls and she is heard. No more.
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12. |
Sunshine
03:28
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Sunshine…….Sunshine……Sunshine……….Sunshine
Sunshine makes me happy
A salt breeze makes me well
But all these questions make me sad
And sink my soul to hell
Retsina……..Retsina……Retsina……….Retsina
Retsina makes me happy
But retsina makes me ill
Your friendship is a complex thing
A strange and bitter pill
Seafood……..Seafood……Seafood……….Seafood
And seafood makes me happy
But it sometimes makes me sick
This anger is so ponderous
Full of tar and caloric
A businessman keeps all inside
His heart, his love, his hurt
And shows the world a toughened hide
And ice and new-pressed shirt
An artist, all compassion
Likes to show that she’s humane
She keeps her envy and her spite
Within her spleen and brain
Music…....Music……Music……….Music
Music makes me happy
Joni makes me blue
And poetry is fireworks.
What need have I of you?
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13. |
Hard Times Come Again
01:23
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There are hard times just around the corner.
There are vultures gliding o’er the lea.
There’ll be hard times,
poverty and
eating of the rich and
the hoody crows are eyeing up their tea.
There are hard times just around the corner.
Pray, tell me, stranger, where did all this start?
This decline and fall
This decadence
This slide from wealth and taste?
I’ll tell you in one word, friend. It was ART.
Those tousle-haired upstarts of the sixties
Those self-appointed keepers of the flame.
Those whining, whey-faced
minstrels, who want
to bare their souls
They’re the ones on whom to heap the blame.
ART’s an ill that comes of too much freedom.
But, Chekhov - there’s a man I could respect.
When cholera came
calling, he downed
his pen and ran.
Gave doctor’s healing, not a poet’s intellect.
There are hard times just around the corner.
We became too manicured to turn the sod.
We forgot to
cook our dinners and
to weld a tidy seam,
and started to believe that we were GOD.
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14. |
Music of the Hive
03:02
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The hive won’t tell me ‘bout the trees;
It just drones on about the birds and the bees
and education, additives and productivities
and about how all this crawling is good for our knees
and what no-one looks for, nobody sees.
Whispering Bob, don’t tell Louise, ‘cos Louise don’t need to know.
The hive won’t tell us how to fly.
It drains out all our honey and it leaves us dry;
feeds us burgers and guar gum and sugar pie,
steeped in a dressing of wormwood and lye.
It blames us for our sins, admits no alibi.
Whispering Bob, don’t tell Mariah, ‘cos she’s got better places to go.
The hive won’t teach us how to dance.
Finding our way home is all just left to chance;
fighting with the ghost of Darcy’s big romance
with Lizzie, till we’re out of step and off-balance
and nobody will give us even a second glance.
Whispering Bob, don’t tell Constance; she’s run off with the northern star.
The hive says it’s all about the queen.
Promenade princess at age seventeen;
Centre of the swarm in all the places to be seen;
She chases after colours behind the silver screen;
She smiles and talks and dazzles with the glow of amphetamine.
Whispering Bob, don’t tell Charlene, ‘cos she’s got mush behind her nose.
The hive tells us not to make a noise:
To be busy little girls and short-lived boys;
Just to buzz politely and to play with our toys.
But the buzzing and the buzzing: it’s the buzzing that destroys.
The buzzing of the TV and the buzzing of the Voice.
Whispering Bob, can’t you keep down the noise,
‘cos my head’s all full-up with free will and choice,
and the need to be different and the need to be the same
and the anger and the lust and the thought that it’s a game
that I’ll lose. I’ll be dead but I’m alive.
I want the Music of the Stars, but have the Music of the Hive.
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15. |
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William, William won’t you sit beside me
on the deck of the charabanc down by the sea
where the seagulls are laughing and there’s salt in my eye
There’s William, sweet William, my sister and I.
My sister, she has a new man friend called William
He’s a straight back and a blazer and a boater on his head
And he looks so gay with the wind about his hair
But Willy has eyes for my big sister Sally
and its at times like these that I wish she were dead
Or maybe that she wasn’t quite so fair.
At home he’s a uniform - makes him look dandy
but he’s off to fight Alleymen in khaki and dun
William, William won’t you sit beside me
on the deck of the omnibus, down by the sea
where arcades all jingle and candy floss flows
for William, sweet William, my sister and me.
Bill’s from Americay, stayed over to court Sally
And they’ve sat me all alone on the bench seat behind.
He’s given her silk stockings and packets of Lucky Strike
Bill has got the hots for my big sister Sally
They ought to look after me but they don’t seem to mind
And I wish to God my sister would go take a hike.
At home he’s a uniform and big bars of chocolate
and he’s off to fight the Commies in the Korean War.
William, William won’t you sit beside me
on the deck of the omnibus, down by the sea
where mods rule the pavement and scooters fly by
with William, sweet William, my sister and I.
My sister’s going out with a posh bloke called Wills
He’s got stacks of money and he smells of cologne.
A Captain of a city bank in finance unsurpassed
And I know Wills is shagging my big sister Sally
and I wonder if he’ll text me next time he’s alone
and I wish that Sally’s tits weren’t nearly so vast.
At home he’s a pinstripe and fancy red braces
and he’s off to sell shares on the Stock Exchange floor.
William, William won’t you sit beside me
on the deck of the omnibus, down by the sea
where there’s gay boys and yankees and bankers on spree
with William, sweet William, my sister and me.
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16. |
Abstinence Island
04:55
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36 degrees in the shade and I'm contemplating the mess I've made
Of my body and my family life
They're packed in like sardines, over at the old jardines
And I find it's better not to mention...
the concept of Abstention ... on Abstinence Island
Abstinence Island, Abstinence Island (I'm giving up the fags....ah ha)
Abstinence Island, Abstinence Island (the cerveza and the wine, ah ha) Abstinence Island, Polar opposite of Thailand
(not thinking about women or about...ah ha)
36 degrees and all of the flies are buzzing round my melons
and the smoke is rising from the ashtrays of my mind
Horseshit and hoofery are raining down
through the mailboxes in my brain in a deluge of afternoon haze
On Abstinence Island, Abstinence Island (I'm giving up the booze, ah ha)
Abstinence Island, Abstinence Island (And the cigarettes - me old china)
Abstinence Island, Just don't-ask-me-why land
(not thinking about women or about...ah ha)
Day 57 and I'm two stone lighter
And I'm spared 70 milligrams of tar
Keep up the good work - my abs are getting tighter
And on a fiver a day - I'll go far.
I'm a bronzed Adonis and my telephone is
silent as an Englishman in a Glasgow bar
36 degrees in the shade
and I'm meditating on the cavalcade
of conspiracy in my mind
Abstinence Island, this ain’t no pea-and-pie land
(not thinking about women or about...ah ha)
Abstinence Island, Permanently dry land
This ain't no slice of heaven. It's a boot camp!
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17. |
Samizdat
06:58
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Anna wrote me a letter back in 1939
She parcelled it up in meter, and wrapped it up in rhyme
and sent it off to the future to another, better time.
I received the letter much later, round about 1962
from a barely known acquaintance at the back of a butcher’s queue
One of my former students, who simply said, “This one’s for you”
It burned a hole in my breast as I walked home with my parcel of liver
A forbidden note - a gift from an excommunicant giver
A spark, a gem a letter of love from Anna Akhmatova
And you out west, with free love and free music and museums and paperbacks. Ain’t it strange that you never read and ain’t it strange that you think that poetry’s for losers? And you pick your songs by a random X. But beggars can’t be choosers
And where poetry’s treason and passed on at night
by a love letter a love letter a love letter Samizdat.
In fact, I met Anna once, many years ago. It was late afternoon, the room already dark. So - let me tell you how it was.
Close your eyes. Sit back, and imagine...
She takes a piece of course, lined paper from a solid wooden desk. All the furniture was heavy, brown and ugly in those days. She primes her pen and starts to write: the poem draws the nib across the page in elegant cursive script. Punctuating with a final stop, she hands the note to me: saying, “Take, eat”. I taste and read and her verse explodes in my mouth like a fine Georgian wine. A bouquet of anticipation, a robust body and a slightly bitter aftertaste. Or like the choicest Astrakhan caviar - each strophe rounded and full and ripe to burst its salty juice within my willing mind.
And then the time is gone.
Anna hands me an ashtray and a splintery red-tipped match. I set the flame to the paper and watch the brown, curling edge of combustion
eat up her words and convert them to cinders and to a single spark that hesitantly floats up to the ornate, heavily-plastered ceiling of her quarters,
to lodge itself deep under my hair and between my ears.
Ikra Iskra A spark of samizdat.
And now the letters keep coming from my modest web of friends
As fruits upon a vine of truth towards the sunlight tend
Grown from a mind of beauty, towards an unknown end
A letter last month from Marina and then one from Pasternak
From Venedikt Yerofeev and a voice from the distant gulag
Fragile paper fire bombs lit by the spark of samizdat.
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18. |
For Cordelia
02:08
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Ah, sweet Cordelia. I love you most of all.
I love you as my bond, for we are bound:
bound in temper; our humours hid ‘neath clay,
‘neath porc’llain cool from Burslem or Cathay.
No man shall force a blazoned bray of love
from ‘twixt our lips; nor call forth a well
of tears from ‘neath our buttoned bosom, bound with
gentle silks, pegged down with studs of ivory;
nor heave our hearts into our mouths, there
to wag and wave with wit not yet come of age.
No. Our natures shall not rage and burn,
nor flood nor ebb and flow like tides in
Fundy’s Bay. For we are constant as the Pole,
the Northern Star, in Scotus’ inky vault.
We are men of stones, of rock – dams like wise.
No blade shall make us speak, nor plough us rive,
nor delver shew our inmost favours to the skies.
We shall not scream as Barb’ry apes, we shall
not bruit it about this stage as actors do.
We shall observe. When ask’d, we shall speak ever true;
no banners raised, no pennants held aloft
to flag our virtue. We yield but by degree –
cordial, but true. I with a look, and she
with but a whisper.
Her voice was ever soft.
|
||||
Dave Banks Chesterfield, UK
Dave Banks is a songwriter and musician from Chesterfield, UK. He has also played in "The Sedatives". "Me and Mr Jones" and "Poke O'Swedgers"
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