A trace of your scent still lingers on my pillow
And raises echoes in my memory
And I believe you’re missing me almost as much as I miss you
But I wish to God you could be here with me
The sun will surely rise on another soft blue morning
And lying in your arms is where I’ll be
With sweet dreams still in my eyes I’ll wake and kiss your hair
But it’s a long, cold night while you’re not here with me
This guitar once played for keeps, but since you changed my life
This guitar just plays for you, if that’s OK?
This guitar rang bells for losers, but there’ll be no more songs of losing
Though this guitar just plays the blues while you’re away
A farewell of sorts to my brief career as a full-time musician in the 1970s, which was even less glamorous than this song might suggest.
Backup:
Got a seat facing the engine
So I don’t have to face where I’ve been
Luggage on the rack, no reason to look back
At all my wrecked and reckless gypsy dreams
No more bright lights, no more white lines
Or crashing in the back of the van
No more hustling small-time gigs
I guess time has beaten the band
No more deadlines, no more breadlines
Mr 10%, you’re on your own
No more fine print, no more backstage blues
This rolling stone is rolling home
Got a ticket to take me to tomorrow
It can’t be worse than today
So driver, take me home and don’t spare the horsepower
I’m on a ten year holiday
No more missed chances and chickens*t advances
Cold chips in the back of the van
No more blown tires and fuses, no more broken promises
Time has beaten the band
No more deadlines, no more breadlines
Mr 10%, you’re on your own
No more fine print, no more backstage blues
This rolling stone is rolling home
No more spotlights, no more ups and downers
Absolutely no stage fright
No more superstar fantasies
From today I’m strictly 9-5
No more infighting, no more moonlighting
No more one-night stands
All along while the band was beating time
I guess time was beating the band
No more deadlines, no more breadlines
Mr 10%, you’re on your own
No more fine print, no more backstage blues
This rolling stone is rolling home
This was a rehearsal for a gig happening in July, to see if the song would sound OK on electric guitar instead of acoustic, to save me lugging multiple guitars. But I like the harp-like quality of the arpeggios so much I thought I’d try recording it that way. This was a Taylor T5Z using the under-fretboard humbucker and the body sensor (similar to but not the same as a transducer). My setting of a poem by William Butler Years. My tune has no resemblance to the reel of the same name.
Backup:
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
I thought I’d released this slide version, but apparently not. Anyway, I’ve done some tweaking in Audacity: I’ll think about a commercial release. He said, threateningly…
The song must be a good 25 years old, though I’ve tweaked the lyrics a bit since then. No iPads in those days – the original lyric said ‘Amstrad’!
When I woke up this morning
My laptop wouldn’t boot at all
I said I woke up this morning
And tossed my Tosh against the wall
My baby took the mains adapter
And the battery’s screwed beyond recall
Well she left me for some guy
With a 99GHz overclocked PC
And now she’s interfacing
With his RS232C (he’s a serial womanizer)
She said my hard disk was too small
To satisfy
Her new spreadsheet
I wouldn’t treat an iPad
The way that woman treated me
She fragmented my hard disk
And ran off with my Angry Birds DVD
Left me nothing but this boot sector virus
And a copy of Wordstar version 3.3
Dah-diddy-dah-diddy-dah-diddy-dah…
Revisiting this song for a book project, I suddenly realized the recorded version didn’t match the words. The ‘Cold Iron’ album has now been updated on Bandcamp, but here’s the MP3 version anyway.
(Backup)
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
Trade their vast profits for 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
Around the start of the 1980s I went through a very theatrical phase (perhaps influenced by an uncomfortable amount of drama in my personal life!)and even did most of the original music (and a few other things) for a revue directed by Margaret Ford: those songs are the core of the Hands of the Craftsman EP. While a couple of my best songs were written for that project, this one is less serious and probably not my best, but I quite like it anyway, so it’s finally crept into my repertoire.
In fact, it wasn’t written for the revue, but at the same time, which is no doubt why it sounds strangely theatrical.
Backup:
I can write the first line at 2.45
And finish the song by 5 to…
I can write an opera in an hour and a half
But what do I do about you?
I can play the Minute Waltz
In 35 seconds flat
But I can’t seem to get you out of my head
So what do I do about that?
Sometimes I fly gliders or water-ski
Before making breakfast for two
From my own recipes
(of course you’ve read my books?)
But what do I do about you?
I can make cocktails like you’ve never seen
Ask anyone – I can do
Things with an olive you’d never believe
– But what do I do about you?
I can build a cocktail with a sting like an asp
Pernod, tequila and lime
Crushed ice and soda – now it’s almost done
Buddy where’s the grenadine?
I can build furniture, drive racing cars
I’ve painted a mural or two
But I can’t seem to get you to remember my name
So what do I do about you?
What do I do about you?
This is about the paranoia of living in London in the 1980s. It’s not a literal historical account. It used to be called London 1983, but it turns out some streaming services don’t like song titles that include dates. Go figure.
I originally recorded it in the early 80s, but wanted to make some significant changes to the lyric. This version is really a demo, as I’m really not happy with the vocal, but it does at least represent the lyric the way I sing it now.
Backup:
There’s a heatwave in the city, and the day drags on forever
The tarmac burns through patent leather, clear through to the soul
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 – barelegged girls in summer dresses
Dodge the lechery of workmen laying cable through the day
But the night turns on the body to sheer 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, from 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 cops 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 streetcorners 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
Black and white scrawl their frustrations in blood across the charge sheets
And no one dares explain the chaos in their heads
The city burns at midnight, and the blood runs down the gutters
In the ghettos 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
Around the start of the 80s I wrote some dialogue and monologues and most of the original music for the ‘Nice (if you can get it)’ revue, directed by Margaret Ford. At the time it was put together and (briefly) toured, I was working by day for a company that built staircases (mostly). This song is based on my personal experience of working in the woodworking industry, though I was a wood machinist, not a carpenter.
In a recent conversation, I expressed some regret that I never got to do something like the radio ballads put together by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, Charles Parker et al, then realized that the revue was actually quite near to that concept.
Ian Campbell also wrote some songs in that idiom, including one called The Apprentice’s Song, but it’s about gas fitters. Mine is about an apprentice carpenter, and I’ve changed the title to avoid confusion with Ian’s song.
Originally a poem of sorts, but re-recorded as a song after a discussion about that harsh little joke in the third verse. I honestly can’t remember if it was used in the revue – it was written around that time, but maybe not soon enough to be included. Like ‘Long Stand‘, it touches on the uneasy relationship between the old hand and the apprentice – while hazing or snipe-hunting is a particularly unpleasant way of keeping the young ‘uns in their place, it’s not always considered the duty of the master to encourage the apprentice.
The tune is now mostly associated with ‘Tramps and Hawkers’, a song that seems to have been written by ‘Besom Jimmy’ in the late 19th century, though the tune is far older than that. (Ewan MacColl used the same tune for England’s Motorways, from the radio ballad ‘Song of a Road’, about the people who built the M1.)
Fetch the rolls: make the tea: then grab the end of that And sand it till your fingers bleed, if you think you’ve planed it flat.
Call yourself apprentice? Lad, I’d be ashamed
If I knew so little, to be called by such a name
Never mind the splinters: In a year or two
You’ll have quite forgotten that they ever bothered you.
Hands as hard as English oak, muscle, skill and guile:
That’s what makes a craftsman; but not you, for a while
Cut yourself, you silly sod? Take care, if you please,
And don’t bleed on the timber: do you think it grows on trees?
Call yourself a craftsman? No, lad, never you.
Though if you try your hardest, one day you might scrape through
So you’ve got your piece of paper? I hope I’ve taught you well,
And I won’t deny you’re willing: no doubt time will tell.
Call yourself a craftsman? That’s as may well be…
Another year, or five, or ten, and then perhaps we’ll see…
Wheal Alice Music 