Tuesday 11 January 2011

I know in my heart he's dead.

This is one of my favourite songs from our mooted "Night of the Crabs" musical, if not one of my favourite lyrics, though it certainly works in context. The band this was written for was The Woods , myself and Douglas Steel, and I think it's probably some of the best music I have ever produced. The key to that is of course actually enjoying the process. There were times I was bent double, tears streaming down my legs, during the recording of these songs.

As for the concept, well it's a musical based on Guy N. Smith's 1976 novel (novella really. if you take all the pictures of crabs out of it it's less than a hundred pages long!) and the libretto is fairly congruous with the text. There are one or two slight innovations: Smith only hints at an interior life for the villain, King Crab, whereas he gets the opening monologue and two songs in our musical. Also a number of minor characters get songs that are rather too good for their humble page time. I think in total we completed 12 songs for this before the project, as projects are want to do, petered out...

This song is a lament for a drowned lover. Pat, the heroine of the book, stares forlornly out to sea as Cliff, the romantic lead, last seen trying to locate the crab's subaqueous base, entirely fails to return home...

The comedian Robin Ince does something simillar based on Smith's book. But it's shit.


I know in my heart he’s dead

While the sun dawns on a new day,
Still this shadow follows me,
Like the French lieutenant’s woman,
I’m still standing, staring out to sea,
One single night of passion,
Match-light snatched from the abyss,
Incandescent in the moment,
A pin-prick in the emptiness,

A single, nagging thought enters my head
And I know in my heart he’s dead
Those simple words that were left unsaid
For I know in my heart he’s dead

He was just a man,
Only corduroy and bone,
But he had a nemesis,
To face on his own,
When the others went running,
He still stood his ground,
He had guile and cunning,
But now it looks as if he’s drowned,

Chorus


Our very first date was at,
A pub named “Davy Jones’ Locker”
It seems grimly ironic,
Now that he has come a cropper,
Through his submarine death,
He’ll be sadly missed but,
It’s what he would have wanted,
As a marine biologist

A single, nagging thought enters my head
And I know in my heart he’s dead
Those simple words that were left unsaid
For I know in my heart he’s dead




http://www.myspace.com/nightofthecrabs

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