1. |
Seagull Albatross
00:30
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SEAGULL ALBATROSS
I knocked a seagull into the turbulent sea
It floats in the ship’s slipstream
And then in the wake
The seagull is an albatross
And it drowns with a curse
That takes effect
As and from now.
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2. |
Fake Samuel Pepys
03:42
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FAKE SAMUEL PEPYS
Fake Samuel Pepys
Keeps writing while he sleeps
Fake Samuel Pepys
Tired of life he leaps
Right off the page
To document his age
Fake Samuel Pepys
Tired of London, tired of life
Tired of his family, tired of his wife
Tired of Copperfield/Tired of Lear
The sputtering bulbs of Blackpool pier
Blind Milton bumps into Blind Pew
On the platform of a station called Crewe
Plastic spoon, fork and plastic flick-knife
It’s the time of your life
Fake Samuel Pepys
Herds words like he herds sheeps
Money lines that London dump in heaps
Fake Samuel Pepys
Job interviewers are all creeps
Once a joke he told,
The streets they are paved with gold
Your future will unfold
Awake one morning cold
From kitchen encased in mould
He set off on his adventure bold
Outside he did behold
A kerbside mound of gold
(Sung chorus)
All that glisters must be told
Those filthy streets were paved with gold
My blistered hand tried to grab hold
Of that absolute crock of gold
I’d really like to get rich now
But think I will just take a bow
And kick away these crocks of gold
And start instead late tomorrow
Fake Samuel Pepys
Tears of ink as he weeps
Out a stained-glass portrait of his time
Four Dublin boys
Sail across snot green slime
To push back against closing time
No national anthem plays, their discourse is cultured mime
They are counterfeit Samuel ‘Pepy’
Misprinted up and sold off cheap
A time capsule of detail
Unpublished memoir for future retail
(Sung chorus)
All that glisters must be told
Those filthy streets were paved with gold
My blistered hand tried to grab hold
Of that absolute crock of gold
I’d really like to get rich now
But think I will just take a bow
And kick away these crocks of gold
And start instead late tomorrow
Animate this fake sociological fresco
With funds diverted from Unesco
Into lager from Sainsbury and from Tesco
Strangling Samuel Pepys
In his bed as he sleeps
Behind his words he really weeps
The Mocking Boys we are lords we leap
And tread carelessly for we tread upon our dreams
It’s Channel 4, it’s the BBC’s beams
Deflected to sound like Ponzi schemes
For those who tire of London
Before they even arrive
You could have had a career
But you would have had to strive
Stuck in this generational fresco
Still embezzling those funds from Unesco
Gloss over your own history’s worth
With Valiant heroes of IPC comic cut mirth
Burn your one-way ticket in this hellish inferno
Write the diary of Janus Stark and the diary of Adam Eterno.
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3. |
Named After Bars
03:10
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NAMED AFTER BARS
We've been living our life
Way way way below par
Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary
Dragging our keys on the side of a car
Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary.
Each of us named after
A famed Dublin bar
We went away from that city
But not all that far
A conscience can be troubled by the occasional pang
But we formulated friendship in the shape of our gang
The Mocking Boys
Beware. Beware. Beware.
The Mocking Boys
Uneasy young men
We strike fear into only ourselves.
A mapped London lifestyle
We permanently marr
In bitumen toil and dole office fraud
Time turns lunch pints to inevitable tar
That we taste and spit out, see how far?
SEE HOW FAR?
Our sincerity is sketched in lie-detect graphs
We know what we do and we do it for laughs.
Time crawls past
So grindingly slow
We'll never get it back
Walthamstow, Walthamstow.
Our compass was cruelty
Ambition our cross
We deluded ourselves daily and laughed at our loss
The Thames was a river
The city forced to flow
We pissed on its ripples
All those years ago
The laps of its waters
The Victorian bridge
Tight confines of E17 quarters
A growling broken fridge
The dark of that river
Embankment lights that still glow
Our suitcases sinking
So slow, so slow
DHSS dispatches a jobseeker query
Our prompt reply: We're Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary.
Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary
We meet for a beer and see everything clearly
4am harshness, a 40-watt bulb
Blame a bad memory, this portrait is bleary.
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4. |
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DROWNING IS WHAT WATER DREAMS
Back to Holyhead
Walk out on the water
On the crest of a wave
Veer to the cradle but never the grave
No longer lonely are the gregarious brave
Walk on the water
From Holyhead
Kill your London life
And leave it dead
A dog-eared life
Too well-read
Dublin’s no metaphor
You can be there instead
Drowning is what water dreams
Mail boat lists on rotting beams
Rudderless cargo of migrant teams
Drowning is what water dreams
Mail boat lists on rotting beams
Rudderless cargo of migrant teams
Reversing the flow
You know where to go
Air seeks to suffocate in its schemes
Drain the colour from your face
Drag the black from your lungs
And bear down on you as night
Fire caresses you with violent flame
A Kings Cross cinder completely to blame
Crawl back to the suburbs
From whence you came
Lack of ambition has made you lame.
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5. |
The Now Now Express
03:33
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THE NOW NOW EXPRESS
There’s a missed boat
There’s a missed train
There’s your bag hand
And it’s blistered
That girl Mercedes?
Yeah: you ditched her
Some Christmas party in a vast Georgian room
It was shabby genteel
Functional footwear and occasional high heel
In the magic dark of a new year’s eve
You held her hand and tried to believe
But your other hand was a fist around the radiator pipe
And you imagine and know it’s tripe
But your ex is on some other floor
And she grips on to another radiator pipe
And you are reunited for evermore
Mercedes yes you ditched her
You ditched her
It’s all aboard
The Now Now Express
Wear every excuse
As casual dress
Tube-discarded copies of the Evening Standard
Equal the free press
Your identity is a gang. It’s the cult of friendship and you’re all depressed
The love in this city, you are a round-buying signal of distress
The Now Now Express
It’s a train and it runs
On tracks
Always one lap ahead of where you think you should be
At this stage of your life
Speeding off
Miles ahead
Across peaks and toughs
A life cycle
Out of sync with you and your life
The Now Now Express
It’s a train and it jumps
Its tracks
In a page-one pile-up
Its passengers zonked
And hog-tied
Across
The rails
As you travel through
The big conk-out of your early twenties
Through tunnels
Past platforms
On a train
Under a city whose dimensions were twisted by
Its distorted schematic map
Every day you lie down
To sleep
And dream
The Now
Now Express
Derailed
Every day you lie down
To sleep
And dream
The Now
Now Express
Derailed
For time is the rolling stock of routine
Time is the rolling stock of routine
Time is the rolling stock of routine
Your travel pass each day
Spews from a broken ticket machine.
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6. |
Figurehead
00:56
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FIGUREHEAD
I wrote a manifesto that targeted the class to which I belonged
And subsidised bread and circuses and the protest crowds which thronged
I rewarded blank indifference and punished those already wronged
And to control the pitchfork peasants my machinery of state was multi-pronged
And when they carve my statue
It won’t be to actual scale
My stone eyes stare to the horizon
Granite lips sneering at the frail
My foes all fled for shelter
My friends I simply jailed
I was hoisted up on a gleaming plinth
By the heaving masses I had failed.
It was London
It was Dublin
I had to wait til I was dead
It was London
It was Dublin
I was a figurehead.
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7. |
Kango Hammer
03:15
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KANGO HAMMER
Krakens wake
Krakens wake
London Bridge
London Bridge
Labourer toils to tear down the bridge
With Kango hammers
Kango hammer
Every so often one would break away
And plunge into the water and there it lay
Kango hammer… break away
Plunge down into the water and there it lay
The bridge was dismantled and shipped away
Shipped away, shipped away…
Purchased by a Yank and reassembled in a theme park in the USA
[Robotic voice from riverbed]:
But the kango hammers lurk on the Thames river bed
Rusting monsters
Rusting monsters
Slumber down there on the river bed
Building site tools pretend to be dead
Building site tools their blood rust-red
Bide their time on the river bed
Building site tools pretend to be dead
Building site tools pretend to be dead
Labourer’s life unfolds as he embraces business theory
Escapes building site ditch and focuses clearly
Against city economics he fights fire with fire
Employs pals in his family firm specialising in plant hire
Labourer gradually transforms his muscular life
Goes off and gets children and he gets a wife
Suffers decades of trouble and decades of strife
Insomnia cuts his sleep like a carving knife
The paint-chipped JCBs/The fork-lift trucks
The broken hods/The skips for crooks
The contracts signed/The meaty handshakes done
Budgets and schedules all overrun.
Insomnia cuts his sleep like a carving knife
Every night
Every night
And then the Kraken kango hammers come back to life
Crawl out of the water
To ruin his life
Kraken kango hammers come back to life
Crawl out of the water
To ruin his life
Rusty kango
Rusty kango
Flexes like tails they drag behind
Pogo across pavements to destroy what they find
Bulldoze London
Bulldoze London
Chisel every brick
Chisel every brick
Pogo kango hammers kill Christoper Wren
Tunnels and bridges of Isambard Brunel then
Building site ghosts cause mayhem and trouble
Reduce the built environment to dust and to rubble
Lifetimes of work are finally demolished
But the kraken kango hammers gleam newly oiled and polished.
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8. |
Brain Drain
04:21
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BRAIN DRAIN
“This is the night train crossing the border/Bringing the cheque and the postal order
Letters for the rich/Letters for the poor
The shop at the corner and the girl next door”
This is the mail boat forcing social order/Bringing diaspora to the coastal border
Fetters to be severed from every cute hoor
Duty free shop and we all want more
This is the mail boat forcing social order/Bringing diaspora to the coastal border
Brain drain
Cranium strain
Special 1980s pain
Biscuits were plain
Potholed lane
Rickety rust crane
Take the mail boat to the mail train
No one took the unaffordable plane
Prodigal son: Abel or Cane
You’re so vain
“Mainland?”
MAIN?
Gibbering elder
Frogspawn suit
Acquired from a yellow copy of Loot
Literacy level scored by Shoot
Ten cups of tea
And a decade of
The Rosary
The Now Now Express runs along the tracks
Between the wheel’s revolutionary clicks and clacks
We find time to stab ourselves in the backs
The mobile phone was a Filofax
Nation’s safety valve but no commemorative plaques
Shacking up in London in some sort of shacks
In between those seconds
There were cracks
Into which you crammed what you could
In between the seconds there are cracks
Inside these you live your life to the max
Investing yourself in passive attack
Against all the confidence that you lack
In between those seconds
There were cracks
Into which you fell
And never got out
Beasts of burden
Engaged in toil
Made of the suburbs more than soil
Diverting our minds from affairs of the state
We engaged as great thinkers in lively debate
A nation of poets and visionary seers
Stumble down gangplanks like duty-free King Lears
Sons of free state parliamentarians
Sons of butchers and sons of doctors
Daughters of barmen and of bankers
And daughters of drivers of diesel tractors
Failed film extras in crowd screens by flaky US directors
Sons of car salesmen
And quiz show presenters
Daughters of nurses
And teachers in schools
Holyhead lemmings
Statistics used by liars and fools
Forced out from diminishing national gene pools
Set to find loopholes in the Queensbury rules
The nurses, the navies, the paid by the word
The exodus snaking, obedient and absurd
We’d watched the 1970s sitcoms
And heard the glam-rock hits
They’d closed down the mines
And this was the pits
Immaculately coiffured or car-coat-begarbed
We’d strike out with insults both witty and barbed
Past Hamstead homes of the wealth rewarded
Fast forward into future retarded
Mail boat disgorges its laughing cargo
Newspapers story: imposed embargo
“This is the night train crossing the border/Bringing the cheque and the postal order
This is the mail boat forcing social order/Bringing diaspora to the coastal border
Fetters to be severed from every cute hoor
Duty free shop and Peig-scarred folklore
Brain drain
Cranium strain
Cardboard suitcase
Snapped Doctor Martin bootlace
It’s the national disgrace
Interview tie coiled like a banished snake
For job opportunities you would never take
Somebody wearing Farah slacks
Credit card maxed out to the max
The Atrix’s Wendy with a Brillo pad under her chin
Sips cold Mulligatawny soup out of a tin
The economy had bribed her hormones
With penal rates and unaffordable loans
Intriguing culture facet:
Our youth traded in as the State’s greatest asset.
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9. |
MiddleMarch17
03:44
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MIDDLEMARCH17
Festooned trucks from the factories preen
MiddleMarch17
Day the whole world turns shades of green
MiddleMarch17
Masters of brand and the whole charade
MiddleMarch17
Saintly man and the annual parade
MiddleMarch17
***
Patrick St Patrick
I’m no longer afraid
Patrick St Patrick
It’s the way that I’m made
Patrick St Patrick
The name that I took
From a hero wielding a crosier hook
The patron saint and perpetual myth
Benign icon for Ireland’s kin and its kith
St Patrick please bless our balance of trade
Gross domestic product – we export the home-made
St Patrick: avatar of the banished-snakes brigade
MiddleMarch17: Off to the parade
***
MiddleMarch17
Life stetches from the infinity of being young and keen
To the wastelands of the middle-aged demographic mean
MiddleMarch17
From plywood and formica gleams retro sheen
It’s MiddleMarch, it’s 17
Industry markets this well-oiled machine
Shades of green spill from cans of paint
Patrick now needs the patience of a saint
Parade kicks off from Parnell Square
Slither past the GPO, Eason’s and some assassin’s lair
Inside: Vengeful, nervous and overwrought
A migrant psycho needs just one clear shot
A bouncing bullet, a patsy and not to get caught
Some economic militia put a price on his head
The diaspora hires a hitman to do the job instead
Patrick will pass through the crosswire but never be dead
Postboxes are green, they’re not blood-red
A shot rings out
The mail boat sinks
National saint slumps forward
Another large round of drinks
Its Kilburn, Stockwell
The closed King Ludd
The Sir Alfred Hitchcock
They’re spilling pints like blood
A shot rings out around the world
The parade’s a damp squib, the bullet’s a dud.
MiddleMarch17
The national saint and his stolen identity
Sign on as him as a DHSS non-entity
But ahead of the serpent, ahead of the pack
St Patrick chose his moment: he knew when to come back.
[Fade/out]
In the middle of March from East 17
Set off at 11am and drink the slate clean
Stockwell Swan
Railway Tavern
Spice of Life
Intrepid Fox
George Robey
King Ludd
Sir Alfred Hitchcock
Three-leaf clover
Constrained by the crumbled cliffs of Dover
Shamrock pinned to a boy’s cable-stitch knitted pullover
Banished forever but it’s never over
N, S, E and W
Homing pigeon calms its troubled breast
And returns lest
It loses sight of its broken-twig nest.
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10. |
King of Hibernia
00:38
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KING OF HIBERNIA
By St Paul’s I rose in fictional rank
I was crowned the King of Hibernia
By the power vested in me
I would get to know my emigrant subjects
I would shoulder the diaspora burden
I was Patrick
The saint of the Irish psyche
The brain drain were my congregation
I could already hear their hymn
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The Prongs Dublin, Ireland
Ears tuned to the kaleidoscopic new wave, The Prongs are plugged in. Fleming’s words weave a memory net for years that never quite slipped by while Toner’s multi-instrumentalism mines eternal pop. It's a lyrical evocation of psycho-sociology and angry young manism aged into post-punk pop permanence. Dublin-based, The Prongs make literate catchy tunes fuelled by JF's lost novel The Now Now Express. ... more
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