Three poems about Led - Three

Since I've Been Loving You: is just a blues song about losing love.

I like Led Zeppelin. I like a lot of their songs, but these three are the ones that I personally find most resonant. The other thing that makes me like this band is that I can hear the excitement in them when they play. When you're playing right you disappear: you float free of yourself and of time, and when the song ends it is like suddenly waking from a dream and finding yourself in some place that is briefly strange and disorientating.


I think John Bonham got lost inside the music. I wonder why so many musicians turn into addicts, alcoholics and madmen? Is it because they're trying to extend the state they find when they're playing?

Who can explain this magic? Since I've Been Loving You is just a blues song about losing love, but...

But Jimmy Page plays one of the best guitar solos in rock in it. Listening to him playing here makes you realise what a load of absolute rubbish gets peddled as guitar solos in 99% of songs. It's not about flashiness. Neil Young does solos mostly involving about five notes that make me want to cry. It's about feeling and being true to yourself. There's a lot of flashiness in Pages' solo to be fair, but it comes out as a stream of consciousness rather than a guy trying to show off.








Since I've Been Loving You is just a blues song about losing love, but.... Robert Plant has sold the song to us along time ago. We have quietened down a bit in the final verse, knowing that the final onslaught is coming. He even warns us:

"Just one more, just one more..."

And then he let's go.

The whole band hits it's pained, heartaching note under his breaking moan in a roar and it raises the hair on your arms. How come certain combinations of notes rub us the right way and create a physical response?

Robert Plant makes me think that great singers are great actors. There must be a moment when they first record a song where the acting is intense and not forced; when they give their defining performance in the role. Later though, performing the song for the one thounsandth time it must all be about being a great actor.

Mind you, losing love is an easy thing to sing about. Every young man knows what that feels like.

Three poems about Led - Two

Dazed and Confused: imagine a fat man heavily plodding down stairs.... ba-bom, bom, bom, bom (breathe), ba-bom, bom, bom, bom. This is how the song starts, with this ominous descending bass line, and then the guitar comes in; following the same bass line but with more angst. Against this basic centre of the song comes the bashing rush of guitar chords and matched drums smashing it all up.

It's the long middle section that makes the song a rock masterpiece. I believe the middle section of this song is Led's finest moment. They play so well together. The bass doing it's quiet modulated riff, the bowed guitar mimicked by the singer's voice and the drummer keeping a steady beat, sometimes doing a call and response to the bass on the toms.

And then... oh lord, and then the drummer hits the hi-hat three times: t, t, t, and suddenly the madness expands out - the bass uncoiling in rapid swirls underneath the flailing cymbals, the guitar lifting out above, while the drums begin to gather so much fury they seem to be coming apart.

And the critics at Rolling Stone loved the debut album:

Here, as almost everywhere else on the album, it is Page's guitar that provides most of the excitement. "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" alternates between prissy Robert Plant's howled vocals fronting an acoustic guitar and driving choruses of the band running down a four-chord progression while John Bonham smashes his cymbals on every beat. The song is very dull in places (especially on the vocal passages), very redundant, and certainly not worth the six-and-a-half minutes the Zeppelin gives it.

In this album review Dazed and Confused is not even mentioned.

What is good writing about music? I think it involves listening to the music not to the other stuff. When I was in Japan I was cut off from critics and had to form my own opinions. At that time Radiohead released Kid A. having not read any of the hype about this album I just bought it and listened to it. I thought: man this is good.

Shortly afterwards I went back to New Zealand for a holiday and was told that Kid A was "the worst kind of art rock pretentiousness" (which is a pretty pretentious thing to say). Many reviews panned it and derided Thom Yorke and I wondered: how much do you really hear something properly and how much are you loaded against something by what other people say and surfaces? It was actually a defining moment for me in listening to music.

Even though Britney Spears is garbage Toxic is a decent pop song.

If you actually listen to it.

Three poems about Led - One

Immigrant Song: This is what rock music is supposed to sound like. A driving riff and a wailing howl. Listen to how the machine of the band drives forward together: how the bass switches to quick, brief upward runs and then back to the hammering main riff; how Bonham's cymbal crashes match the guitar's open shimmering chords, but the kick drum and the toms follow the bass and the main riff tightly. Listen to the end where the guitar drops in its dissonant open chords at unexpected places in the riff, signalling the end.

The lyrical match is perfect. Because it is a driving, relentless song the idea of the Vikings is ideal. It is certainly a song that moves forward, but it is also a dark song, and the Vikings were a dark scourge on the coastal villages of Europe when they came. Unsurprisingly it has been used to inspire college football teams in the USA and US miltary pilots in the Gulf War. It is a battering song, a sudden mob with bats, ugly and lost, a riot on the streets, a truck driver pulled from his cab in LA, a black man being batoned on a freeway.





I remember Kenneth Clarke talking about the Vikings in the first episode of his documentary Civilization. How the prows of those ships thrust up high on the horizon against the slate sky must have struck terror in the hearts of farmers and priests on the land. Those prows are a symbol of the West; with all it's beauty and brutality, bearing down on the vulnerable, filled up with an insatiable greed.

Of course it is a fashion to bash the West, but I've just been reading a lot of books about the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico and Peru. The Aztec and Incan empires were empires based on oppression. They dominated and controlled a patchwork of groups some of which allied themselves with the Spanish when they had the chance. It seems the lesson here is that all cultures that advance use their strength to crush those that have not.

How heartening.

Who is coming for us?

The 1990 Rockquest

Corran wanted to enter a band in the Rockquest. In 1990 the Rockquest was called the CocaCola Rockquest and it was in its third year. I'm not really sure why Corran believed it was possible for us to do this because about half the band had little to no experience of singing or playing their designated instrument. The other flaw in the plan was that Corran really could play his instrument and had very high expectations of us.

I can vividly remember the exact spot at Kapiti College where we came up with the breathtakingly silly name of our band. The others were wandering along playing with words that would go with touch when I suggested perverted. Someone else switched touch to thrust and the "magic" happened. They were the adjective and noun that had always wanted to be together. Perverted Thrust. The name was sealed when Corran performed a series of demonstrations of what a Perverted Thrust might look like. You have to remember that this was a time when The Young Ones was a popular comedy show. Oh, and we were a bunch of 17 year old guys.

Track Six - Welcome to the Jungle

ONE
My best friend from fifth form on was Corran McHugh. He taught me how to play my first song on the guitar: Highway to Hell. He was a very good guitarist. He listened to a lot of heavy metal: Iron Maiden, AC/DC, WASP, Man O' War... it's sort of an endless list of hair and guitar shredding. He was into the heavy metal where they didn't do sit down acoustic ballads and their hair was long but it was lank. Before Def Leppard were absurd they released quite a decent album called Pyromania. Before Guns 'n' Roses became an overnight sensation their album Appetite for Destruction spent years(?) building up a cult following. Corran introduced me to both. Hearing Welcome to Jungle for the first time introduced me to a new feeling with music: excitement and fear.


TWO
I was not bad at school. I did not smoke, I did not wag, I did my school work, was civil to my teachers and got good marks without making too much effort. There ain't much darkness in the first five tracks on this mix tape. It's a sound track of light and melody and bopping about. We're about to enter a dark musical period that's about hardness and anger. The other thing rock music does. Young men (or should that be old children?) are attracted to it for some reason.

Welcome to the Jungle is Guns 'n' Roses best song. A lot of their other songs are good but unoriginal. Sweet Child O' Mine is a cracking good rock ballad (where do we go now?) but it's just a rock ballad, and songs like Paradise City are stadium wank songs that are just silly. Guns 'n' Roses were best when they were fast and nasty. Most of Appetite for Destruction is fast and nasty. They had no class, and they were incredibly juvenile. Here's the last line from their liner notes:

..and all those who taught us hard lessons by attempted financial sodomy, the teachers, preachers, cops and elders who never believed...

Believed in what? A bunch of hairy alcoholics playing music about having sex and taking drugs? And before we move on... could there be a better guitar-as-penis-fantasy photo than this one of Slash? I could say all kinds of things about this photo, but I think the photo really says it all.

THREE
The problem with me being interested in the devil's music is that I looked like this. It was never going to fly in the end. The end, as it turned out was four years away, about the end of my first year at university.

This period is an interesting one because I never listen to any of this music anymore. The only band I can still tolerate is Bon Scott's AC/DC. They were pretty catchy and had a sense of humour. The rest of them were just dreadful.


Guns 'n' Roses

• "I'd just like to say that I have a personal disgust for small dogs, like poodles." (Axl)


• "I hate to take showers! Guitarists don't like showers 'cause we like the grease to build up on our fingers." (Izzy)


• "I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it." (Axl - Take me down to Paradise City, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty - Rose.)


• I don't have to go down to the Comedy Shop to qet a joke. I can find that here." (Slash)
  

Really, it was only a matter of time before Axl started wearing bicycle shorts and writing ten minute ballads about rain.

Dead Poets

One: I dislike being told something I like is dumb. I don't mind if people don't like what I like, or are prepared to argue about the merits of something, but I hate the snobby sneer of superiority: "Oh, you like that?" I have a very strong sense of myself so I know that if I like something then I REALLY like it, it hits some chord in me and makes it ring. It is impossible to have bad taste about things that mean a lot to you personally. To thine own self be true.

Two: Dead Poets Society. Love it. It was a big hit and then at some point everyone seems to have turned on it. People say its manipulative. I've never understood this criticism of a piece of art. Art is manipulative. (I've just noticed that the word manipulative sounds a little bit sexy if you drawl your way through the second half... maybe because the lips go into the shape of a kiss when you start out on the "pu" sound.)

Three: I think part of being a teacher is being inspiring. There are two scenes that inspire me to teach better in this movie. The first is when he has the students read out what the definition of good poetry is and then gets them to tear it out of their books. The second, and far more powerful, is the scene we are now supposed to sneer at: the carpe diem scene. I shamelessly ripped off part of this scene in my class the other day. "In 3,000 years when they clear the mud off Wellington what will they find of us?" My Year 9s looked back at me blankly. "Tyler's rugby cup? Emily's favourite book? We are food for worms..." There is a real power in that scene - it comes out of looking at those photos. How mighty and confident those young men look. How time cuts us down to size. Resist, laugh, sing, be different, be happy - sometimes I want to shake all of my students until they agree.

Four: And it captures the way that good teachers are often odd people. When we see the teacher alone in his room we realise that teaching really is his life, and he is a bit odd, and a lot of things have happened to him.

Five: And, finally, it gets the white heat of youth. That can lead to wonderful things and terrible things. The final twist of feeling sympathy for the father when he discovers the body... how awful, I can't imagine anything more awful than that, and you realise that the father loves, LOVES, his son more than anything. How perverse love can be. The great creater, and the great destroyer of things.

Mr. Cooke

I bought a best of Sam Cooke on Sunday. Quite a few years ago I heard a radio documentary about him on National. Actually, the first Sam Cooke song I heard was Chain gang but it was a cover by a New York reggae guy called Shinehead. I can remember seeing the video on Radio With Pictures and the chorus getting stuck in my head.

Probably my other favourite song by him is Cupid. I love singing that chorus to myself in the shower and imagining I have a voice as sweet as his (sweet, but with a little bit of rough in it).

The song I've been listening to over and over though is A Change is Gonna Come. Everything about the music in this song should make me hate it. Infact, when you hear the opening it almost sounds like Mantovani - all sugary strings and flourish - but it settles straight away to the steady pulse of the bass and the wonderful opening lines:

I was born by the river

In a little tent

Oh, and like the river

I've been running ever since

It's been a long time coming

But a change is gonna come, oh yes it will

And then the lyrics deepen. How hard it is to hear a man, a religious man, say these lines, and know that by the time the song was released he was already dead:

It's been too hard living

But I'm afraid to die

Cause I don't know what's out there

Beyond the sky

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17267529

I don't believe in God myself, but I do believe that people are capable of extraordinary things, and that they can be carried there by inspiration. Without inspiration I have no poetry and no songs, my tongue is dumb and my heart is dull - with it I can sing my little songs. Sam was filled up when he wrote this song; it may have been God, it may have been anger; it may have been love, but he was filled up. We may be food for worms my friends but we can pull beauty out of the wreckage.

We are having a short break

For the reasons stated below:

"I have of late--but
wherefore I know not--lost all
my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises;
and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me
than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving
how express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zEVZGuU3BU

Track Five - You Give Love a Bad Name

ONE

I bought my first guitar off Paul Brown. Paul Brown is such an amazingly dull name that we used to joke we would get T-shirts made saying: "I know Paul Brown".

I think Paul must have joined my class about halfway through fifth form. Suddenly there was a weedy alabaster Brit sitting next to me in Social Studies. He seemed friendly. He was always talking to me and laughing. For two weeks I honestly had absolutely no idea what he was saying. I took smile and nod to new levels. After a fortnight some part of my brain must have adjusted and I could miraculously understand him. We were great mates for the rest of secondary school. Every mufti day he would show up like he was dressed for a tennis match; all in white. I asked him why. He told me that it made him look tanned.

Paul Brown used to listen to a lot of Led Zeppelin and The Beatles. This means that he had taste. I was still labouring under the impression that bands like Bon Jovi were hard rock.

TWO

There was a very odd trend in the 80's for "hard rock" bands to become known for their solitary lovey-dovey acoustic ballad: Poison - Every Rose Has its Thorn, Extreme - More than Words, Mr. Big - To Be With You. I think it was Mr. Big that finally annoyed me sufficiently to break away from 80's hard rock hair bands and start listening to actual hard rock. I still have a soft spot for Bon Jovi though. I can remember singing You Give Love a Bad Name at the top of my lungs with two friends outside the gym at Kapiti College. I think the trick to Bon Jovi was that they didn't take themselves too seriously (this photo aside). Very important to have a sense of humour if you're going to dress like this.

THREE

Or this. Here I am all dressed up (?) to see Nureyev perform at the Wellington Festival of the Arts. There aren't going to be anymore hair shots in this genre so savour it. Out with the permed mullet, out with the snare drum, out with Bon Jovi - here come the bad boys of the 80s.

Bang bang

Why did I dress like a builder when I was thirteen?

I'm almost smiling in this photo. It's Christmas and I got a snare drum. I thought I was going to be a drummer. Turns out I was wrong.

We're about to enter a period of real men and rock'n'roll. It's pretty grim. Just to recap the playlist so far:

1. A-ha - Take On Me
2. Prince - Let's Go Crazy
3. Wham! - Club Tropicana
4. Frankie Goes to Hollywood - The Power of Love

There were a lot of other bands of course, but let's move on.

Follow the leader

Because my mother feared (correctly) that I would be savaged if I played rugby she got me into soccer at an early age. This was in the era in New Zealand when soccer was looked on as very suspect. If you were normal you played rugby, so if you weren't playing rugby there must be something wrong with you. I was a dogged, determined character on the soccer field, and as I previously mentioned I had a relentlessly determined quality. One day to my great surprise the coach of my team called up and told my mother that he wanted to make me the captain of the team. I was a little bit flattered, and very surprised. My mother advised me to accept, because if I didn't I would regret it. I declined. I suppose the fact that I am writing this now shows that I did come to regret it although it really made little difference to my life in the end.

When I was in Japan I became the Head Teacher in the South Osaka area. There were about 30 schools in that area probably employing about 200 teachers. I trained the new teachers, observed the established ones and gave them feedback, "managed" the naughty teachers, and ran the professional development programme (oh, and taught a full load of lessons... it was a very cheap company). It was extremely fulfilling. I even read books about professional development in my own time, for pleasure.

In the library today I saw that one of my Year 13 students was reading a book about how to become a leader. I think this is a bit like reading a book about how to be charismatic. Somehow I don't think this stuff comes out of a book. I think people have become a bit silly about leadership. I would say that you need to be charismatic and you need to lead (while you listen). A teacher is a leader. It's about what you make other people feel: valued, respected, inspired, loyal - that kind of stuff. When push came to shove the British Empire needed Winston Churchill. When Martin Luther King was shot, America needed Bobby Kennedy to tell them what it meant. They didn't want to break into groups and write things on pieces of paper and feedback to the sodding group.

Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin for a new fool
Don't follow leaders
Watch the parkin' meters

Track Four - The Power of Love

UNREQUITED LOVE - ONE

I didn't have a girlfriend at school. I was what is called painfully shy. The first girl I was crazy about was called Kara (middle row, second girl in from the teacher). She was in my fifth form class. I thought she was terrific. Of course I thought she was good looking, but what I really loved about her was her... sense of humour. We passed notes to each other in class. I still have those notes somewhere. They were long cherished tokens. They are absolute drivel, and looking back I may have been over-estimating her sense of humour, but then again I was only 14.

TWO

I was obsessed with this album. Probably my favourite song was Two Tribes, but I'm going to put The Power of Love on the mix tape because my theme is unrequited love. For a long time this is what I thought the lyrics of a love song should be. I can still sing the whole thing with all the inflections. As usual with these songs it was the bridge that I was hanging out for:

Envy will hurt itself / Let yourself be beautiful / Sparkling love, flowers / And pearls and pretty girls / Love is like an energy / Rushin' rushin' inside of me

Let yourself be beautiful. Swoon. "Pretty girls" is odd, but "love is like an energy, rushin', rushin' inside of me". That sounded right when I was 14 and thought it was love rushin' inside of me (now I know it was hormones - a worse lyric, but more accurate).

THREE

As for Kara. I met her last year at the end of year Telecom party. I did not expect her to look like a woman and work for Telecom. She did not expect me to look like a man and still be at school. When are you going to grow up?

Track Three - Club Tropicana

ONE
I have included this photo only because of the jersey. In 1986 in Kapiti this was cutting edge fashion (the shorts less so). I wanted to stand out. I had a friend that admired this jersey. He asked for the pattern. I got it from my grandmother. He gave it to his grandmother who promptly returned it. She refused to knit him the jersey because the model on the pattern packet was a woman. This jersey says many things but I don't think it says "GAY" particularly.

Mind you, it was a confusing time to be growing up for a young man. Most of the men in the bands that I admired had spent a lot of time on their hair and, perhaps more alarmingly, their make up.

TWO

There's no point in pretending I was cool or anything at school. I liked Wham! What's not to like? They wrote catchy songs that are still great to sing along to at parties.

Club Tropicana drinks are free...

All that's missing is the sea

But you can still sun tan

George Michael is a very good singer. One of those white British boys who love black r'n'b music. I love how he completely side-stepped everyone when he went solo and wrote a song so cool (Faith) that not even his biggest critics could whinge.

THREE

But if you grow up admiring bands and singers like this it can lead to decisions like the one on the right.

I can remember going to the hairdresser and getting this perm. It was on the second floor of Coastlands. Getting a perm takes a long time (not many guys know this), and is pretty expensive. You also have to do a lot of sitting around.

Funny thing is that when I walked around with this "do" on my head nobody mocked me (to my face), or laughed at me (to my face). Actually quite a few girls gave me compliments. I find this quite surprising. I'm pretty sure in stories like this one I'm supposed to get picked on.

Although I loved bands like Wham! and Duran and Duran I never wanted to be them. It was a different kind of thing I wanted.

Give us a smile champ

The Raumati Hearts Soccer Club really splashed out on this cup: Best Under 14 Player, 1986.

Keeping things in perspective our team came bottom of the bottom league. I was a defender. I had a lot to do. Our biggest losing margin was 15-0. I am very stubborn when I play sport. Even when we were down 15-o I refused to give up. I was the only player on our team still moving. The other ten were sidling to the sidelines and pretending to be spectators. I single-handedly saved us the margin 20-0.

So what? I don't know. Who cares what some 13 year old did one Saturday morning in 1986 on some muddy, claggy field at Queen Elizabeth Park? Nobody. Except me. I care. I'm still proud of myself. Stuff all the jerks who laughed us off the ground, and tossed mud at us, and kicked us in the shins.

There's some larger metaphor in here somewhere. I'll leave you to decide if it is comic or tragic.

Mix Tape: Volume Two

ONE

The only thing that a tape is still good for. Swapping mix tapes used to be a sign of love (generally unrequited) in the 80's. A guy could give another guy a mix tape, but it was bit, well, "funny".


I was thinking: what if you had to get all the music that mattered throughout your entire life onto one 60 minute mix tape. It would be like a 60 minute autobiography.


Unfortunately my ego is too big to get my short life on one sixty minute tape. This is Volume Two of my mix tape. Volume One must be 1973-1985. Volume Two is 1986-1997.


TWO
1986 starts here. I'm probably twelve in this photo. I went to Scots College for Primary and Intermediate (another story), and then we moved out to the coast and I started Secondary at Kapiti College. The first few days at a new school in a new place are friendless. The guy standing next to me in this photo was probably the first guy I talked to at this school. We didn't become friends as it turned out. He could perform simple songs by burping. It was impressive and repulsive. I wonder if he has hung onto this skill. Maybe his wife gets him to do it at parties.



I quite fancied the girl sitting in front of me. She was very good at art. I also took art but was... let's say "tolerated" by my art teacher. At either end of the back row are two people who would become friends (actually the guy on the back right is the bass player in our band).


Twenty-two years on.


THREE
Secondary school is where you begin to emerge out of the shadows of your parents and begin the messy business of trying to figure out who you are. This process doesn't really end I suspect. Funnily enough, for me anyway, once I'd spent twenty years trying to find out who I was I've ended up realising it might have something to do with my family and the place where I started.

There's a lot ahead of this twelve year old, and all the kids in this picture. The following pictures will prove that:

1. it can take a long time to find the right pair of glasses
2. some people do so many bad things with their hair that they deserve to have it taken off them
3. it's hard for an adolescent boy to smile or dress themselves

Four Things - Four

"He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them."

I remember this anger. It still comes on me sometimes. It comes on me in the middle of advertising on television, it comes on me in the classroom. But the anger turns into sitting on the couch, and a failure even to toss change to the poor.

In Vietnam a little boy followed me around offering to polish my shoes. He wanted money, but he disguised it as an offer to polish shoes. He wouldn't stop following me around. I hid in shops and he would wait for me to come out. I was shopping. He was begging.

He still follows me around.

Four Things - Three

They're waking up on Kenywn Terrace

Cigarettes and leopard print dressing gowns

We have no class, but

The rich are fucking assholes

Go to look at the trees on Saturday

They've lost all their leaves

But the flowers are as beautiful

As they seem

Four Things - Two

Duck, Death and the Tulip.

“Who are you? Why are you creeping along behind me?”

“Good. You’ve finally noticed me,” said Death.“I am Death.”

Duck was scared stiff. You could hardly blame her for that.

I read this picture book in the school library on Thursday. It's the best thing I've read in awhile. Very moving. A children's book about death. It's about 100x better than that sounds.

I was in the library because some of the year nines in my form class have been making a nuisance of themselves in the library. One of them saw me reading the book. He ran around the library telling everyone I was reading a picture book (before he was thrown out for running around the library).

Year nine boys (on the whole) have not yet noticed death.

Four Things - One

He writes well:

You used to get it in your fishnets / Now you only get it in your night dress / Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness / Landed in a very common crisis / Everything's in order in a black hole / Nothing seems as pretty as the past though / That Bloody Mary's lacking a Tabasco / Remember when he used to be a rascal?

No, I don't, but I remember when I used to want to be a rascal. Does that count?

Flicking through a little book of sex tips / Remember when the boys were all electric? / Now when she tells she's gonna get it / I'm guessing that she'd rather just forget it

He's tender and funny, and tends to see things from the woman's point of view. From the woman's point of view I think some men are charming and most men are laughable. It's the charming ones you have to look out for.

She walked away, her shoes were untied, / And the eyes were all red, / You could see that we've cried, and I watched and I waited, / 'Till she was inside, forcing a smile and waving goodbye. / Curiousity becomes a heavy load, / Too heavy to hold, too heavy to hold. / Will force you to be cold. / And do me a favour, and ask if you need some help! / She said, do me a favour and stop flattering yourself! / How to tear apart the ties that bind, perhaps fuck off, might be too kind, / Perhaps fuck off, might be too kind.

The British are unimpressed. They see through you. The good ones see through themselves as well.

I knew before the invitation that there was this ploy, / Oh but she carried on suggestin, a struggle to refuse, / She said "its the red wine this time, but that is no excuse"