I (Together)
Remember
Freight Elevator
Nomzamo
Negotiating With A Loaded Gun
Burn Again
Love Has Gone
The Night
Donovan's Doorway
The Men Below

Album Title | Album Credits

Someone tries to explain their love. 'I', incessantly 'I', together with everything that can happen 'I'. No egotistical references to self; that's the power that can grow out of love. Heaven, earth, hell. To want to be the river bed for the other person, with the stones, the course of the water, that one believes one can determine. To become an unending flowing stream, soft and clear. To be everything and yet to know that it remains an unfulfilled desire. The sunrise, the shining light, that determines the length of the shadow. You and I, we are everything, and yet each for themselves. A single, secret power, for which there really isn't an explanation, only the risk.
 

All shall come to the house of the Almighty, big and small, rich and poor - a memorial service for a soldier, who was killed far from home, maybe in the Falklands war. The priest says a sorrowful prayer and blesses the cause for which the soldier died. But would the veteran from the battle of Verdun (in World War One) speak of glory when he lays a wreath on Armistice Day? Would he offer himself up to defend the British Empire once again? And who thinks of the members of the International Brigade, who defended Madrid against the fascists during the Spanish civil war, while President Roosevelt preached about preserving the status quo and England stood idly by? Or of the Greek partisans, who held the Athens bridge, and who were betrayed by the English at the end of World War Two, who let the Monarchy back into power instead? Did Jesus die for priests in uniform, who bless the violence which we exert against smaller nations? 'Thou shalt not kill', so it says - except it seems, when the meek stand up and try and share power with those who have had it since birth. "Remember" is an anti-war song. It shows the dishonesty of religion, which gives war integrity by venerating privilege and patriotism, while turning a blind eye to the death and destruction it causes.

"Remember"written after going round Westminster Abbey and realising just how connected is religion and war: the British Army and its spiritual wing, the Anglican Church. On Remembrance Day we are asked to remember the dead, but what do we really remember when the church is always quick to bless the next adventure. I'm not a pacifist but the hypocrisy of our church is a little stunning. Steve Skaith
 

Up until after World War Two, black and white musicians in the USA could perform on stage together, but often weren't allowed to stay in the same hotel. This song tells a true story about the Jazz singer Billie Holiday, who appeared night after night in the Artie Shaw orchestra on 52nd Street, the centre of New York's nightlife. There she enchanted the public with her voice - like velvet stretched over barbed wire. The crowd is so big, that they've had to hire extra waiting staff. But Billie Holiday wasn't allowed to use the main elevator which the other guests and performers used. Instead the hotel management forced her to use the freight elevator at the back of the building - just because she was black! The freight elevator, crammed in between fresh sheets, a case of grapefruit juice in tins, and the shoes that a guest from Denver has left in front of his door. For the liftboy the freight elevator isn't such a bad workplace, he can ride up and down to his heart's content and bawl out the bellboy, who's under him, because he's dirtied the newspaper with the racing news.
 

This song is based on the book 'Part Of My Soul', a collection of essays by Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress, who was arrested in 1963 and sentenced to life in prison the following year. The full name of his wife is Nomzamo Winifred Mandela. She's one of nine children. The Xhosa people, to whom she belongs, fought nine big wars against the Boers, the white settlers, in the 18th and 19th century.

Nomzamo means 'test of faith', but even when one loves, how long can a person bear inhumanity and inequality? In 1960 she already became a victim of the laws, a word that is meant to give the police batons and slamming cell doors a veneer of respectability. In twenty years Winnie Mandela was convicted 19 times, had to leave her home and go into exile to Blandford.

Now all the processes against her have been struck down. She refuses to accept the message of the whips and the waving flags. Even the goal of separate development of blacks and whites, which some moderate reformers aspired to, is unacceptable. In the Apartheid regime only the gunfire of the police and the military didn't know the difference between skin colours. The solution applies: One people, one cause!
 

A bank robbery shortly before closing time, when the money is being counted. The robber negotiates with a loaded gun. He jumps over the counter and the bank employees read his life's story in his face. What now happens in the space of a few second is expressed like scenes from a movie: The spring board by a swimming pool quivers up and down, the water's turning red. The Roebucks are frightened like after a gunshot and run away. In a submarine under the Arctic ice the trace of an enemy ship appears on the radar as brightly as an exploding sun. The captain says, 'Don't think twice' and gives the order to fire. You have to make it between the echo of the gun and the ricochet (which is of course impossible). You have to wait until the chamber of the gun spins, in this game the dice are loaded and no one wins. None of us has a chance. I thought your I-Ging-Stones (an old Chinese oracle, in which the future is read out of the combination of six lines of different lengths) were all recast. I thought your entrance was only meant to stun us. There's no safety curtain that can protect us from the shock wave after the explosion.
 

Anastasio Somoza reigned over Nicaragua as if it was a family possession. The National Guard might just as well have worn the family crest of the Somozas. The country was a family business, economically dependant on the West, but those who overthrew Somoza wanted to end the serfdom and share the land with everyone. We should be ashamed that the West wants to undermine the newly won freedom. Must Nicaragua burn again, because the USA has the need to be born again? The USA itself started in a war of independence, when the word 'freedom' was written large in the constitution. But now the torch (of freedom) casts a giant shadow - when the Congress sends the Contras out to hunt the Nicaraguans in the hospitals and classrooms, in order to make a free election impossible. The USA plays with Central America as if it was a fruit machine. She takes the coffee beans and pays the bill with bullets and marines.
 

Idioms and pictures after the end of a relationship - all clichés: You're living in a world in which, like the proverb says, all the lambs are frisky. Private eyes hold hand guns that are hotter than the whiskey that they drink. The cops never miss a chance for a hand-out and nothing escapes them. Supergrasses sell you and want to get a good price.

(Directed at the former girlfriend:) You're sitting huddled up in your parka by the racing track, but your words are drowned out by the horse's hooves. You're wrapped in cling-film. Every sound you make is smothered, even if you scream it from the roofs. Love has gone. It rained, was the excuse. Love hasn't left a forwarding address. You're left sitting here like an uncollected package. All that remains is your own misery.

You played your girlfriend all your sickly crooners, where 'moon' and 'June' are rhymed. But those waxworks didn't get you very far. After all those Scorsese films you should have known: things never come that easy. Now you bitter tears are flowing in torrents. Love has left you in Manila, far from home. You have your Michael Jackson records, but the ticker tape and your bill, that's getting bigger every day, tell you what you can't escape: She's left you and you don't know what to say.
 

This song describes how the need for companionship can sometimes lead to relationships that later end badly.

This is the night of nights. But it's not her night, she's giving it to someone else and doesn't pretend that it's a love that will last. It passes so quickly, but she doesn't do anything against it. He talks over wine, and with big gestures, about his eventful life. To please him she turns the night into a lie, there's no evading it. The night's a fire, a crash this curve is leading to. She's black, she's broke, she's bleeding. The night's embrace won't change the fact, that I need you. The song rings out, but the singers are only pretending. What they've done, they would have been better off leaving be. Because they've destroyed the love in the process. Without a drop of blood hitting the ground one is left behind, internally dead.
 

A scene in Liverpool: A dog laps from a puddle, there's a tapping noise coming from a dancing school. It's the dancing teacher, who keeps the beat to the music, which is kept under the old piano stool. In the entrance to Donovan's shop (a small corner shop) stands a policeman with a big truncheon, bigger than is normal in other English cities. He's on the lookout for rioters, because on this wet evening there's a football game going on. The players all drive up in big limousines, the fans have to walk. We could walk on this road all night and talk about all sorts of things. But it doesn't look good for us, because it doesn't hang on the game that's on tonight, but about the situation in general, and that is bad: even the church has been converted into a hard-ware store. Everyone knows the score. But on poster with the slogan 'Help the poor', someone has drawn two hearts, and the names Mick and Caroline.
 

To record an album and then go on tour - that's what keeps a band together and lets them grow. A tour is the nourishment for them, like the egg white is for a chick, before it hatches. The work on stage is hard, but much harder is the lot of the men below, the miners. They dream of the life that musicians lead. And yet the miners have to plead and fight for their jobs - like in the big strike of 1984/85, when the police gave the few, who wanted to return to their work, a police convoy to protect them. In front of the gates the strikers stood with paving stones in their hands, knowing that force might be the only way that they could preserve their jobs. At the same time, the big newspaper proprietors were having bitter circulation wars. To that end, they all featured bingo games. But it seemed as if every gaudy ball had the number ten on it, like 10 Downing Street, official residence of Margaret Thatcher. Because all the big newspapers at the time supported the Government against the miners. There was a method in the virulent articles - who would want to do the miners such harm? And who knows, how much we all owe them?