Truth About John
Nothing Like Velvet
See Him
February 1990
Race Me Down
Toulouse | Dominion
Radio Africa
Snow Blind
The Colour Scheme
The Big Pool
It Makes My Heart Stop Speaking
The New Millionaires
Pyramid Label
The Men Below
America For Beginners

A journalist sits at his smeared desk, eats cheap beans from the can and writes the "Truth about John Lennon". His client is a national tabloid daily paper. Its source a young woman, who wants to cash in on a long forgotten affair. But she is unable to write her story alone and needs a ghost-writer, who's now killing Lennon for the second time.
 

About the traffic in hard drugs, which is controlled by organised crime in the UK as well. Many criminals are dealing in this domain. There wasn't the same connection with violence with Marihuana. But those who like to think they are 'hip' maintain that everyone should decided for themselves if they want to take drugs or not. And the Right likes to present horror stories, without looking at the social causes of the problem. Charlie Parker was an idol, but a bad example because of his heroin addiction.
 
Crack: A crack in the aeroplane, but also the drug crack that's being transported on it. Poppy: The basis for heroin is extracted from the seeds of the poppy. Colombian Leaf: Cocaine is made from the leaves of the coca bush - of which Colombia is the biggest producer. Velvet: Also a play on The Velvet Underground, a band that glorified heroin consumption in one song. Pound On Pound: A reference to the money that needs to be found to buy the drugs. Shooting up: Here refers to shooting up with guns as well as with needles. Charlie Parker: American jazz saxophonist - died in 1955.
 

Just look at him there, the typical successful person of today. He works through the night, is overtired and completely wound up. He's got glassy eyes and when he closes them he has nightmares. He believes that hard work will help you achieve your goal and is all for the privatisation of state companies, like Margaret Thatcher did. He never has enough of work.

Sucker for punishment: Phrase used in boxing. This man dun (done) get so tired etc.: From Afro-American slang, used often in blues songs. AM rock music: Unchallenging rock music without edges or corners, as played by American middlewave radio stations around the clock.
 

On 25 February 1990 elections took place in Nicaragua. They were conducted democratically and without any remarkable incidents. Against all predictions the opposition party UNO, which was strongly supported by the USA, emerged the victors and the Sandinistas lost power. In November 1989 in El Salvador, at the time receiving US aid of a million dollars a day, six priests were murdered because they had championed human rights against the dictatorship. Is this the democracy that American money paid for? The Sandinistas who, along with their allies, overthrew the dictator Somoza in 1979 are urged not to give up.

In February 1990 I went on a delegation of musicians and actors to observe the elections in Nicaragua. The defeat of the Sandinista government in that election was a great blow and I felt once again that American money and influence had corrupted the region. When I got back to London, the first thing I saw in my bedroom was a magazine article I'd been reading about the murder of four Jesuit priests in El Salvador, another Central American country in which the US was spending a lot of money in order to defeat a popular left wing movement. The song "February 1990" briefly expresses my feelings about those two very connected events. Steve Skaith
 

Felipe is a Mexican immigrant in Los Angeles. His hopes have been shattered; he couldn't make it out of the "Barrio", the Latino Ghetto. The population of the Barrios lead a wretched life: the windows of the shops have been smashed, but hardly anyone can afford the goods on display anyhow. Only the advertising slogans are free. The meat from the hamburgers you can buy there are full of bits of gristle that you have to spit out. Comfort can be had from relatively cheap drugs. Felipe's brother, who dealt in them, sits in jail. He couldn't afford to pay the protection money to keep up his business.

Felipe shows a curios white tourist the Barrio, but they stay there too long, until after sunset. It gets too dangerous in the streets then, especially for an outsider. There's a literal curfew in force. Now the two of them are forced to rely on each other, but nothing connects them.

Dust of angels, angel dust: A drug that induces feelings of being all-powerful. Originally developed as a sedative for animals. To crack in two: a wordplay with the drug crack.
 

It is a long way from the markets (bazaars) in North Africa, in which leather goods and Berber (member of Muslim group in North Africa) carpets are sold, to the car factories in which each movement is measured in units of time. One does not earn much here, but the work doesn't leave any visible scars. They give you the impression that France is like in the pictures of Monet and Braque. But they don't use the colours of the painters here. Every filter, which you insert, leaves an invisible crack in you. You came all the way to Toulouse, in order to lose (wordplay: Toulouse / to lose). As you clock in, he walks in right behind you and you both pick up your rivets; he thinks he's different because of the colour of his skin . You've already had their O.A.S., the French mercenary troop in the Algeria war and you've had the communist trade union federation C.G.T. If C N. C (computer-controlled robots) are introduced everyone will lose their jobs.
 

Out of greed for profits animals are hunted and exterminated wholesale. They are used as exotic delicacies and as exclusive fashion items. Some species, like the Lemur (a rare species of primate) and the rhinoceros are in danger of extinction. The felling of the tropical rainforests means that the habitat of those who survive the hunters is drastically reduced. The hunters aren't to blame - they need the work to survive - but rather the dealers and end consumers. Scientific studies remain without practical consequences.

Ramadan: The month of fasting in Islam. During Ramadan, a Muslim is forbidden to eat or drink from sunrise to sunset, therefore he can't work very hard. Man's dominion: Reference to the Biblical creation story: 1st book of Moses, Chapter 1, Verse 28. Belem: A city in Brazil, capital of the Amazon region whose rainforests have been systematically felled. Cheetah: The Indian leopard, the fastest animal on land. For those who don't know: A reference to Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing". Geelong: A small town near Melbourne, Australia. Raise to the power ten: A metaphor meaning that only a small portion of the animals that are killed by humans actually reach the consumers.
 

There's only bad news from Radio Africa. In 1985 South Africa was still governed by the monster apartheid. The West complains about the foreign aid, but in the trade with the industrial nations, it's the African countries who are at a disadvantage: They exchange cheap raw materials for expensive finished products. With the war in the Ogaden 1977/78 Moscow first supported the socialist government of Somalia, but then supplied weapons to the Ethiopian dictatorship. There is still hope for Mozambique and Zimbabwe, but for Tanzania progress has had to stop -- the oil imports devoured too much foreign exchange. " Exchange ", "Credit", " Interest ": technical terms that all add up to only one thing: Everything gets even harder. Independence is an expensive commodity when the finances lie in white hands.
 

The idea for this song came from a true story: An entrepreneur is subsidised by the government to develop a new type of car and to build the factory needed to mass produce it. But only a few of the cars are sold and the entrepreneur gets into financial difficulties. So he has the idea of to gain a new source of cash by smuggling cocaine. But the police lay a trap for him and the deal fails. After that the whole project died. The remaining cars are only of use as museum pieces. Everyone involved with the project had closed their eyes to its problems until it was too late: The workers, who didn't want to lose their jobs; the government, that didn't want to admit their wasted investment.

Verse one: The workers are being driven to the factory in buses on a cold morning. Their lunch is as monotonous as the work on the assembly line. Verse two: In the relevant Ministry. The curve of the sales prognosis is steeply uphill. After all, the entrepreneur has had great successes in the past. So one doesn't look at the plans for the new cars too closely. Verse three: Commercial catch phrases for the new car are strung together. In Bogota the cocaine connection is disturbed. Snow: Slang for cocaine. Snow blind: Here a symbol for the losses that the projects participants incurred. Henry Ford: Rationalised production and introduced the assembly line. Bogota: Capital of Colombia and the biggest cocaine producer.
 

About someone who claims to know what sort of person I am, just because he's seen how my home is decorated and knows where I take my holidays. But what does that testify to after all? Those are only externals. One needs a roof over ones head and you can't choose the colour of the wallpaper. A journey only consists of delays and missed connections after all, the route is a matter of chance. This person also claims to know my thoughts, but what is thinking? One furrows ones brow and stays awake with coffee and the time goes by uselessly. He also claims to know a formula to minimise my risks, but who wants to gamble anyhow? Even the safest gamble always fails. I don't have a choice anyhow and I have nothing to lose.

Angry reds: The extreme left. Dust bowl blues: A reference to the "dust bowl ballads" of Woodie Guthrie. In them he sings of the fate of the small farmers and labourers in Oklahoma, whose livelihood was destroyed by sandstorms in the 1930's, forcing them to leave their homes. To fall away: To fall away from the lead in a horse race.
 

This song tells the story of an occurrence during a holiday in Sabaúdia, on the coast of Italy south of Rome. The town was built in 1935 as a model for the "new era". A statue of the dictator Mussolini still stands there today. The first two verses tell of a real situation: On a beach of the Mediterranean lies a girl in a red shirt. She's reading a book a book with a lurid red mouth on the cover. Some young men walk past and the girl's mother gives them angry looks. She's dressed all in black, like many older women from the country. The two colours take on a symbolic meaning: Red, the colour of the socialists, and black, the colour of the Italian fascists.
The next two verses are a fantasy: Men in black meet in the town square and give each other the fascist salute. A group of young socialists draws near. Who will keep the upper hand in Italy? The red or the black? If it comes to a violent conflict, the holiday maker on the beach has no chance to flee, because the ocean is too wide. He has to decide on a colour, but doesn't want to.

Emilia-Romagna: Province in the north, traditionally stronghold of the of the left, here used as a contrast to Sabaúdia. The prime minister Aldo Moro was murdered by the radical Red Brigade in 1978.
 

A skeptical song about Latin Quarter themselves. With 'anthems for the people', the band wanted to contribute towards a fairer world. But their songs were ineffective. You can't buy food or clothes with a song. Instead, society seems to have moved in the opposite direction; selfishness and greed are more and more in first place, even at the cost of others. The underprivileged, on the other hand, are as badly off as before. Ideals and utopias are no longer called for. Reality is more complicated than the lyrics of a political song portray. But one shouldn't despair, but decide between the love of power and the power of love.

Underclass: Sociological term for that part of the population that has been locked out of the process of production and who don't represent an attractive target market of consumers: The long-term unemployed, people on social assistance and slum dwellers. Three little words: Play on "three little words means I love you".
 

The new millionaires are the unemployed. Every Thursday they cash the cheques they receive from the labour office, but the money mightn't even last until the next day. Sometimes the only quarters between you and a rainstorm are the quarters of the moon (wordplay: quarter = accommodation: quarter of the moon = quarter moon; 1 quarter = 25 cents). If a new situation arises, it only brings disaster - like Arbogast, the private detective in Alfred Hitchcocks "Psycho". He is stabbed by Anthony Perkins, as he's going up the stairs. "Enjoy your leisure time!" A member of the aristocracy said. If he had shared some of his wealth it would have sounded more convincing.
 

Many early reggae and rock-steady hits appeared on the Pyramid Label, amongst them "007 (Shanty Town)". "The Israelites" (number one in the singles chart in Britain in 1969) and "It Mek", all by Desmond Dekker. Many white teenagers at the time were into this music. For the Rastafarians (the 'Israelites') the biblical Israel was (and is) the land of redemption. In political reality however, it was actually the aggressor, which contradicted the vision of the Rastas.

Sphinx: Stands for Egypt. Golan Heights: In the Yom Kipper war in 1973, the Golan Heights in Syria was a much fought over territory.
 

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?
 

The election of Ronald Reagan to President of the USA and subsequent swing to the political right horrified many people. "Bed-Time for Bonzo": One of Reagan's last movies in which his co-star, a chimpanzee named Bonzo, was the better actor. Great Britain under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher became little more than just another State of America. The paranoia of the McCarthy era surfaced again with the administration's determination to rid the world of the red menace aboard. The origins of crack cocaine in California was traced back to the Contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua's Sandinista government during the 1980s. Payment were made to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department from funds authorised by the Congress for "humanitarian assistance" to the Contras. In some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies. These activities were carried out in connection with Contra activities in both Costa Rica and Honduras. Even the swingers of the permissive 60's are suddenly swerving to the right. At prime time the vigilantes are appearing in programmes about the "good fight", while the day begins with a triple "K". (The Klu Klux Klan.) There's no sponsored programme for the sinners, instead they're bringing back the electric chair. (The "hot seat".)