Latin Quarter
Bringing Rosa Home

Surprised
The Spearcarrier
Love Ain't What You Get
Come Down And Buy
Angel
Smoking Gun
Bride On The Bridge
Branded
Older
Help Is On Its Way
Bringing Rosa Home
Ocean Head

Reviews | Album Credit

"Surprised" is about all those people who enjoyed great social mobility under the British Conservative government - their reward for junking their principles and screwing people they had once supported was wealth and status.

A few years ago I used to attend Labour Party meetings in the small town in North Wales where I was then living. One party member would often refer to individuals who knew how to "work the system" - basically, people who would act in bad faith under any circumstances. This used to annoy me until it dawned on me that he was right, and that, in fact I knew such people - people who assess a situation not for the good of their firm, class, party, organisation, pop group or team but simply to discover how they might best advance themselves - at the expense of everyone around them.

The lyrics contain many British clichés - this is deliberate! Very often these cynical people will try to legitimise what they do by using stock phrases - as a way of implicating everyone in their practices.
 

"The Spearcarrier"....written 6 months later [see "Angel"] when that love affair abruptly and inexplicably stopped. I was so shocked to be so suddenly pushed out of her life and this image came to me: that one day we can be the leading man, the star in someone's life and the next day nothing. Like an extra, a bit part player, (in Shakespeare) a Spearcarrier. The song didn't mean to be cruel but it is ironic and a little pointed. Steve Skaith
 

"Love Ain't What You Get"....was the fourth attempt to write a lyric for this song, which was originally composed at the time of "Swimming Against the Stream". It is about a couple of friends of mine in London. Steve Skaith
 

This 3rd World Tourism song is quite cynical. I wrote it after a trip to Tunisia. I had never been anywhere so poor and I felt so many contradictions about my privileged Western background and just touring such a poor place. Being anti-imperialist but turning up in people's towns and villages because I derived my power from that same imperialism. I felt the same way when Latin Quarter went to East Germany as we did, twice.

Tunisia has been colonised for thousands of years, most of the references in the lyric are to the effects of colonialism. The idea that a photograph "steals the soul" of the person photographed derives from the 19th Century response of some native peoples to the tendency of Western explorers to want to record, as "colourful", the people whose countries they had conquered and whose way of life they had destroyed. Mike Jones
 

"Angel"....a rather simple love song, written in those breathless moments when you are on the verge of falling in love with someone. Steve Skaith
 

"Smoking Gun" is about the killings of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. I still can't believe how the USA survived those assassinations, and how its system survived the obvious suspicion that people with power organised those killings. But I also wanted to consider the gumnan, how he (if it was a 'he') would feel satisfaction from 'a job well done'.

"Abernathy" was one of the people with King when he was shot. The "Colt 45" was the main hand-gun of the American "Wild West". In those lawless times, the size and fighting ability of men was "equalised" by the "six gun". The USA is still a "gun culture" - this gun was also known as the "peacemaker"! Mike Jones
 

I read a news report of a recently married couple who had fallen into such debt that they decided on a suicide pact and who returned to the site of their honeymoon (where they had spent their happiest time together) to carry it out. I found this very moving. I think that many young people have crazy expectations of marriage - that somehow the ceremony will transform them and their lives. Even so, to want a brilliant future and to then see the possibility crushed by economic forces that have no feeling for individual human hopes and experience is a tragedy indeed.

"Gulls are her Mendelssohn" - his "Wedding March" is a popular favourite at church weddings. "Buy Brazil" - when I see footage of "stock brokers" it makes me want to puke - gaggles of (mainly) young men who spend each and every day gambling with the lives of working people. And these are gamblers who never lose!
   

"Branded"....another love song. This time when I felt I loved and wanted a woman more than she did me . This is great for desire but very bad for peace of mind. But then, maybe love is not about having peace of mind! Only after the song was recorded did I realise the obvious image in the middle 8: 'Comes like skin to fire', obvious given the song is called Branded, instead of the one I had sung 'like ice to fire'. So the booklet has 'skin' the actual singing 'ice'. Steve Skaith
 

"Older" is about me getting older and about aging in general. When you set out to write songs that you expect to change the world, you are clearly driven by a lot of youthful adrenalin. . . . Its been a hard, hard lesson which boils down to, 'if you're going to commit yourself totally you'd better know what the fuck it is you're getting into'. Getting older is hellish..... Mike Jones
 

This is the nearest I've written to psychotic lyric. The years from 1989 to 1996 were personally so demanding for me that they nearly drove me crazy - sometimes it gets so bad you can only laugh in this weird, detached kind of way - "help is on its way"? Oh, yeah!!
 

Rosa (after Rosa Luxemburg) is a pseudonym for Hilary Creek, a member of the British 'Angry Brigade' - a name the press gave to an unnamed Marxist terrorist cell in the early 1970's. They planted some bombs, fortunately didn't kill anyone, were arrested and imprisoned. One of the two women had a tough time in prison (it drove her crazy - maybe she's recovered now, I don't know). I'm completely sick of terrorism - there are no "good" or "just" bombs, there are only bombs. The fact that my generation decided that it held the moral high ground to such an extent that it was able to kill those it disagreed with seems murderously arrogant to me now. Even so, that the passion and commitment felt by so many should result in the near-destruction of the psyche of this woman seems also to be too high a price to pay for youthful idealism. There is a pathos in the way that young people find so much commitment inside themselves and work so hard for what they define as progress - yet nothing changes, that's my story as well. Mike Jones

Note: Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was an influential socialist campaigner in several European countries. In 1918 she was arrested and murdered for her beliefs.
 

Sometimes you meet someone who seems to have been locked away for years - emotionally rather than physically, and sometimes you hold the key that liberates them - but with that liberation comes a tremendous responsibility.....