She split the colours
And cut the sky
Mouth full of shredded paper
Flash once, flicker and fall away
Like loose change
It’s me in a hundred days
My hand in the rubble
My heart ready to take the strain
The evening wore a painted smile
That bled into a frown
Spare the rod and spoil the child
If you back down
At my back, there is an empty space
Yesterday is never
Am I ever to feel my own heartbeat?
Hurricane Jane’s a thief
A ghost in the making
She’s all ready to take my soul
You are
The waves are washing over me
They’re shrouding me in salt
Soon there’ll be no trace of me at all
A jaunty stomper about the futility of living. I’ve always loved mixing really sweet music with really bitter lyrics. We played the demo to a pop songwriter friend of Mark’s and he said it sounded like Take That. I take that as a huge compliment (although to my knowledge Gary Barlow hasn’t written too many songs about drowning himself). I wrote the music on a £12 ukelele in my front room. I added an extra chorus at the end because my two-year-old son used to lose interest at exactly the same time each time he listened to it, and asked to go back to the beginning. I might give him a songwriting credit. I wrote the words in a bar in London Bridge, on the same night I wrote Masquerade. They were an exercise to see how far I could take metaphor, imagery and free association while just about hanging on to a thread of a story. The lines about yesterday being never and being an empty space at my back were inspired by Steven Pinker’s book about language and human nature, The Stuff Of Thought. The recording is made for me by the brilliant string arrangement from Paul Frith. He conducted the quartet on the day (whilst wearing a knitted carrot on his lapel).
